Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Thursday, February 21st, 2019

Trump offers socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else

Author:     Robert Reich
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Mon 11 Feb 2019 06.00 EST Last modified on Mon 11 Feb 2019 12.51 EST
 Link: Trump offers socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else
Stephan:   Neoliberalism has a corollary, socialism for the rich. This essay by Robert Reich spells out the form of that socialism. Always remember that when you hear a politician say, we can't afford socialism that what they are really saying is, I am a creature of the rich who fund my campaigns, and I support only one social priority, profit for my sponsors. What is the proof? The Theorem of Wellbeing shows without exception that social programs that foster wellbeing are more efficient, more productive, easier to implement, more pleasant to live under, and much, much cheaper. Just consider healthcare. We spend orders of magnitude more per capita than any other developed nation and yet we get dreadful social outcomes, while obscenely enriching everyone in the illness profit system, except the doctors and nurses.

“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21bn saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4bn. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

 

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards

Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve […]

Read the Full Article

1 Comment

  1. John Gabriel Otvos on Thursday, February 21, 2019 at 3:45 am

    To rid humanity of our ‘barbaric economic system’, as longtime CDN labour activist Ed Finn writes today, we must first understand how it works and realize it’s last stage cancer diagnosis, while it may persist a while longer, cannot live on the host indefinitely. Profit over wellness, Stephan, is well served in this following analysis.
    http://www.rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/views-expressed/2019/02/capitalism-worst-possible-economic-system-planet-ravaged