[This is an updated and rewritten version of the original article I posted in January 2017.]
The centerpiece of Trump’s economic plan — after cleaving the federal government into dysfunctional pieces — is to once again try the Republican experiment of cutting taxes. Now, I know it is hard to argue against cutting taxes, but Democrats have really dropped the ball by not pointing out the amazing historical fact that every single time the Republicans have cut taxes, a financial crash and economic depression followed within a few years.
In 2017, Trump wanted a trillion dollar increase in spending on infrastructure. This time, Trump and Musk are terminating billions in dollars of government spending, and are going after Medicaid and Social Security as well — contrary to Trump’s campaign lies to “not touch” those programs. Trump’s and Musk’s cutting are going to accelerate the microeconomic factors which cumulatively cause Republican tax cuts to create macroeconomic disasters.
There have been three grand multi-year national experiments with Republican / conservative tax cutting over the past century. All three experiments resulted in the average American becoming poorer, the real (industrial) economy in tatters, and spectacular financial crashes. [There is also the fourth experiment of the 2017 Trump tax cuts which, as I will discuss below, also resulted in the beginnings of a financial crash in autumn 2019. The first visible signs of this 2019 financial crisis began in September of that year, but was rapidly swallowed in the economic collapse caused by the COVID pandemic three months later, in December.]
Tax Cut Experiment Number 1
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding proposed ending the wartime excess profits tax which had been imposed during World War I. When Harding died during a speaking tour in California in August 1923, Calvin Coolidge became President, so it was Coolidge who actually signed into law the Revenue Act of 1924, which lowered personal income tax rates on the highest incomes from 73 percent to 46 percent.
Two years later, the Revenue Act of 1926 law further reduced inheritance and personal income taxes; eliminated many excise imposts (luxury or nuisance taxes). The tax rate on the highest incomes was reduced to 25 percent.
The result was a speculative frenzy in the stock markets, especially the application of structured leverage in what were called at the time "investment trusts." In September 1929, this edifice of false prosperity began to wobble, and finally crashed spectacularly in October 1929.
Coolidge did not seek re-nomination in 1928. Faced with a wildly gyrating stock market, a worsening collapse in farm incomes, steeply declining industrial activity, and the disastrous surge in unemployment, the new Republican President, Herbert Hoover, responded with more tax cuts. Personal income tax on incomes under $4,000 was cut by two thirds; personal income tax on income over $4,000 was cut in half. The tax rate on corporations was cut by a full percentage point.
How did the economy respond to these tax cuts? It sunk further and faster into the First Great Depression.
Tax Cut Experiment Number 2
In 1981, Ronald Reagan reduced the top marginal income tax rate, which affects the very wealthy, from 70% to 50%. In 1986, Reagan convinced Congress to reduce the top tax rate yet again, to 28%. Contrary to the Reagan / Republican / conservative argument that the tax cuts would pay for themselves by boosting economic activity, the budget deficit and federal debt exploded. Federal government debt grew from 33.3% of GDP in 1980 to 51.9% at the end of 1988.
Reagan's tax cuts failed to revive American industry, which was also being hammered by the Reagan / Republican / conservative blind faith in free trade. A number of American industries actually disappeared: by the end of Reagan’s presidency, the American textile, apparel, and footwear making industries had been reduced to less than one tenth the size and sales they had just two decades earlier. During Reagan’s tenure, the also it U.S. lost its trade surplus in consumer electronics, industrial electronics, and electric power generating equipment.
The most important industry of all, the machine tool industry—which is needed to make all other production equipment—slipped into a death spiral from which it has never really recovered. At the beginning of the 1980s, the ten largest machine tool makers in the world were all American. By 1997, only one of the top ten was, and it was ranked seventh by sales. In 2009, China became the world’s largest producer of machine tools.
Today, the United States no longer produces large electric transformers, all the large American machine tool builders of the 1940s-1980s have ceased to exist, Intel and AMD have lost the technological lead in chip making,.
In industry after industry, under Reagan, the U.S. lost its world lead: steel, auto, printing equipment, construction equipment, farm equipment, power generating equipment. Only the aerospace industry, the key component of the American empire’s military-industrial complex, managed to maintain its world lead. But today, Boeing can no longer build safe passenger jets. And China has deployed a 6th generation combat aircraft, years ahead of the U.S.
Meanwhile, the average American family began working more hours to maintain its standard of living. The phenomena of latch-key kids took hold as mothers sought jobs to help keep their family afloat. Wikipedia notes that the number of Americans below the poverty level increased from 29.272 million in 1980 to 31.745 million in 1988, increasingly slightly as a percentage of total population, from 12.95% in 1980 to 13.0% in 1988. The number of people in poverty under the age of 18 increased from 11.543 million in 1980 (18.3% of all child population) to 12.455 (19.5%) in 1988.
Oh, and the banking and financial sector? On October 17, 1987, the worst stock market crash since the First Great Depression shook Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average crumbling 22.6% in one frantic day of panicked trading.
Tax Cut Experiment Number 3
Republicans and conservatives of course contend that the two Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 created the economic boom of 2002-2006. But they prefer we not remember the financial crash of 2007-2008. As discussed below, the financial crash is actually the inevitable result of cutting taxes the way Republicans do.
But first I want to expose the “economic boom of 2002-2006” for what it was: a frenzy of borrowing based on the rise in home value that was largely speculative, which led inevitably to the financial crash of 1008-2009. The amount Americans borrowed against their homes more than doubled from $627 billion in 2001 to $1.428 trillion in 2005. From 2001 to 2005, the cumulative amount of home equity extraction totaled just under $5 trillion. This was more than double the total $2.3 trillion growth of GDP in this same 2001-2005 period.
Economist Paul Krugman wrote in December 2008: "The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks."
Meanwhile, U.S. industries continued to weaken and falter. Even the semiconductor and computer industries—the crown jewels of the American industrial economy in the late 1980s—collapsed under Bush, fleeing offshore. As the late Andy Grove, one of the founders and former chairman of semiconductor pioneer Intel wrote in July 2010 (How to Make an American Job Before It's Too Late):
Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers -- factory employees, engineers and managers.
The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp.
Most important to note, wages and earnings for all but the richest Americans continued to stagnate. For the bottom quintile of wage earners, the inflation adjusted amount they took home actually declined.
And, in late 2006, the sub-prime mortgage crisis began to unravel the very fabric of the world financial system, leading to the crashes of April and September 2008.
The failure of our national debate on tax cuts
Most discouraging about this entire national debate on taxes, has been the complete failure of Democratic Party leaders to point to these clear facts, and ask the obvious question:
Why do Republican tax cuts lead, counter-intuitively, to industrial decline, stagnant wages, and finally financial collapse?
The fact is that high marginal tax rates strongly correlate with economic growth. In December 2010 at the AngryBear blog, Mike Kimel examined the effects of cutting the top marginal tax rate:
The positive relationship between the top [higher] marginal tax rate and the growth in real GDP is very nearly bullet-proof. For instance, it extends all the way back to 1929, the first year for which the government computed GDP data. Additionally, higher marginal tax rates are not only correlated with faster increases in real GDP from one year to the next, but also with increases in real GDP over the subsequent two, three, or four years. This is as true going back to 1929 as it is for the period since Reagan became president. In fact, since the Reagan Revolution took hold, similar relationships have existed between the top marginal rate and several other important variables, like real median income, real private investment, consumer sentiment, the value of the dollar relative to other major currencies, and the S&P 500. Lower tax rates in any given year are associated with slower growth rates for each of these variables, whether those growth rates are measured over periods of one, two, three or four years.
If you ignore banking, finance, and real estate and look under the hood of the industrial economy you can see why there is this counter-intuitive relationship between tax rates and economic growth. With high taxes, the only way to retain the bulk of the wealth created by a business is by reinvesting it in the business -- in plants, equipment, staff, research and development, new products and all the rest.
But if tax rates are low, then there is more incentive to pull the wealth out, by declaring it as profits — profits that are taxed at what turns out to be too low a rate. In other words, low taxes create an incentive for profit taking, not for business expansion and capital investment.
This in turn creates an incentive for short-term horizons in business planning. If you’re going to be taking all the profits out of a company, and take home a few million a year, why bother to reinvest anything in the business? You’re going to be rich, and never have to work again, even if the business goes bust. Or gets packed on a boat and shipped to China. Or goes "virtual" and lets all the hard work, like, you know, actually making something, be done by the lowest bidder. Employees? Don’t need them.
But employees are also customers. If enough businesses "take profits," after some length of time, the former employees also become former customers. Meaning, they stop buying. As economists phrase it, the economy's aggregate demand generation is crippled. From examining the effects of the three Republican tax cut experiments this past century, it appears the length of time for this to happen is five to seven years. [The 2017 Trump tax cuts are examined below].
If tax rates are high enough to discourage profit taking, the best way for investors and owners to keep the profits created by a business, is to invest those profits back into the business: buying new plant and equipment that will be used for many years, and hiring and training new employees. This in turn pushes managers and owners toward longer-term planning, beginning to counteract the infamous quarter-to-quarter short term fixation of Wall Street. And you do not get the absurd situation of companies posting record breaking profits, but not buying new equipment, nor hiring new employees.
Low tax rates encourage taking wealth out of industrial companies; the wealth taken out must then be "put to work." That means more money chasing "investment" opportunities (instead of real investment in capital goods and employees), leading to price increases in financial capital or real estate or some other “asset.” In other words, an asset bubble. The rise in prices of an asset bubble has nothing to do with the creation of real wealth. It all looks like prosperity—until the asset bubble bursts.
The virtuous economic cycle that was destroyed by Reagan
The central economic assumption of Reagan’s economics is the same as that of neoliberalism: the people in the private sector who have become rich by profitably “investing” do a much better job allocating society’s financial resources than the federal government. Reagan flatly asserted that "government is the problem." Bill Clinton signaled his acceptance of this assumption by declaring that the “era of big government is over.” Bush Jr. of course imitated Reagan by cutting taxes. And Barack Obama declared “I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."
Reagan, the Republican Party, and American conservatives in general have developed a simple-minded faith in tax cuts, especially in reducing taxes on the highest incomes. The rich, according to their assumption, can supposedly increase society’s wealth much better than the government can do by planning. Given this assumption in their economic thinking, it should be no surprise that their major goal is to get as much of society’s financial resources into the hands of the rich.
The reality, as shown by the three Republican experiments in the past century, is much different. Tax cuts only work to build bubbles that enrich mostly the financial sector. Tax cuts do nothing to help the real, industrial economy. Judged from the perspective of long-term national interests, the rich have proven that they are not very good at investing: they prefer credit default swaps over investing in sustainable energy start-ups.
The major political-economic challenge of the past three decades has been to create a new economy that is not dependent on burning fossil fuels so as to halt climate change. Measured against this challenge, the Reagan / Republican / conservative / neoliberal theory that the rich are best at allocating our society's financial resources has been a disastrous failure. Scientists working on climate change have concluded that we have passed the tipping point, so it is more accurate to write “catastrophic failure” than “disastrous failure.” We have wasted forty years testing the Reagan / Republican / conservative / neoliberal theory. We are about to waste another four years under Trump.
Another reason tax cuts do not create economic growth has to do with the distribution of income in the economy. The Republican / conservative religious belief that "tax cuts create jobs" has become so shallow and so insipid, that they don’t even understand the actual process of job creation contained in their own lousy theory. Tax cuts do NOT create jobs. It is the response of business to growth of aggregate demand in the economy that creates jobs.
In March 2013, Dave Johnson explained this crucial flaw in the economic assumptions behind the deal Obama made with Republicans and conservatives that made over 80 percent of the Bush tax cuts permanent:
Tax Cuts Are Theft
The American Social Contract is supposed to work like this: A beneficial cycle:We invest in infrastructure and public structures that create the conditions for enterprise to form and prosper. We prepare the ground for business to thrive. When enterprise prospers we share the bounty, with good wages and benefits for the people who work in the businesses and taxes that provide for the general welfare and for reinvestment in the infrastructure and public structures that keep the system going.
We fought hard to develop this system and it worked for us. We, the People fought and built our government to empower and protect us providing social services for the general welfare. We, through our government built up infrastructure and public structures like courts, laws, schools, roads, bridges. That investment creates the conditions that enable commerce to prosper – the bounty of democracy. In return we ask those who benefit most from the enterprise we enabled to share the return on our investment with all of us – through good wages, benefits and taxes. But the "Reagan Revolution" broke the contract. Since Reagan the system is working like this:
But the “Reagan Revolution” broke the contract. Since Reagan the system is working like this:
Since the Reagan Revolution with its tax cuts for the rich, its anti-government policies, and its deregulation of the big corporations our democracy is increasingly defunded (and that was the plan), infrastructure is crumbling, our schools are falling behind, factories and supply chains are being dismantled, those still at work are working longer hours for fewer benefits and falling wages, our pensions are gone, wealth and income are increasing concentrating at the very top, our country is declining.
This is the Reagan Revolution home to roost: the social contract is broken. Instead of providing good wages and benefits and paying taxes to provide for the general welfare and reinvestment in infrastructure and public structures, the bounty of our democracy is being diverted to a wealthy few.
The great failure of the Democratic Party is that it has done what its rich donors wanted: defended this status quo, But this allowed Trump to become the vehicle through which an enraged population expresses its discontent and demands change.
What about Tax Cut Experiment Number 4: Trump’s 2017 Cuts?
Contrary to Trump’s boasting, the U.S. economy from 2016 to 2019 basically bumped along, with the exception of unemployment, which declined from 4.9 percent in February 2016 to 3.6 percent in December 2019. But the process of financial weakening discussed above did indeed take place.
Fittingly, the first signs of trouble originated with a bank had made massive loans to Trump and his family — Deutsche Bank of Germany. On May 19, 2019, The New York Times reported that a team of five whistleblowers at Deutsche Bank had been prevented from filing suspicious activity reports with the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network FinCEN) regarding bank accounts held by Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. In June 2016, the IMF had released a report identifying Deutsche Bank as holding the largest portfolio of dangerously unstable financial derivative connections to Wall Street TBTF banks.
It is not known exactly how the suspicious Trump accounts impacted the financial position of Deutsche Bank. A month after the New York Times report, Deutsche Bank announced it was firing 18,000 employees — and creating a separately chartered “bad bank” into which it shoveled $83 billion in financial derivatives and other toxic assets. (See The Repo Loan Crisis, Dead Bankers, and Deutsche Bank: Timeline of Events, by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, September 30, 2019, Wall Street on Parade.)
Again, it is not known exactly how the problems at Deutsche Bank impacted its counterparties on Wall Street. What is known is that in August 2019, the U.S. Treasury yield curve inverted, meaning short-term interest rates moved higher than long-term rates. Historically, an inverted yield curve is an economic warning: when it costs more to borrow short term than long term a recession soon occurs.
On September 17, the overnight inter-bank lending rate on repurchase agreements (repos) increased five-fold, from 2 percent range to 10 percent. This was an even more serious warning that there were very dangerous and immediate problems in the TBTF banks, hedge funds and money market funds.
The Federal Reserve did not wait for these problems to spread from Wall Street to the rest of the economy, and began pouring tens of billions of dollars of loans every day into the system. By October 24, 2019, the amount the Fed assistance to Wall Street had reached $690 billion each week.
Remember the explanation that low tax rates cause companies and “investors” to take money out of companies, instead of reinvesting in equipment and employees?
According to the filings that JPMorgan Chase makes annually with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), since 2013 JPMorgan Chase has spent $77 billion buying back its own stock. That includes the whopping $17.01 billion it has spent in just the first nine months of this year buying back its stock…. Had JPMorgan Chase not spent $77 billion propping up its share price with stock buybacks, it would have $77 billion more in cash to loan to businesses and consumers – the actual job of its commercial bank. Add in the tens of billions of dollars that other mega banks on Wall Street have used to buy back their own stock and it’s clear why there is a liquidity crisis on Wall Street that is forcing the Federal Reserve to hurl hundreds of billions of dollars a week at the problem.
— Pam Martens and Russ Martens, October 28, 2019, Wall Street on Parade
All the other TBTF banks were apparently doing the same thing. In July 2017, then Vice Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Thomas Hoenig, sent a letter to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, stating:
“[If] the 10 largest U.S. Bank Holding Companies [BHCs] were to retain a greater share of their earnings earmarked for dividends and share buybacks in 2017 they would be able to increase loans by more than $1 trillion, which is greater than 5 percent of annual U.S. GDP.
“Four of the 10 BHCs will distribute more than 100 percent of their current year’s earnings, which alone could support approximately $537 billion in new loans to Main Street.
“If share buybacks of $83 billion, representing 72 percent of total payouts for these 10 BHCs in 2017, were instead retained, they could, under current capital rules, increase small business loans by three quarters of a trillion dollars or mortgage loans by almost one and a half trillion dollars.”
It turns out that the TBTF banks were not only backing away from lending to the rest of the economy, (then to themselves beginning in September 2019), they were also failing to meet the reserve requirements for the amount of readily liquid assets they kept on hand.
By the middle of November 2019, the Fed’s emergency support for the repo market had reached $3 trillion, and at least two TBTF banks, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs had begun working out the kinks to borrow even more through the Fed’s discount window. This is a mechanism by which the banks can borrow money short term directly from the Fed to meet “temporary shortages of liquidity.” Short term means longer than overnight (as in the repo market) but probably for a month or two.
On December 12, 2019, the New York Fed announced that it would give an additional $2.93 trillion in short-term loans over the next month to the TBTF banks that were the Fed’s primary dealers on Wall Street. As Pam Martens and Russ Martens explained on Wall Street on Parade at the time, Trump and the Stock Market Are the Winners in the Fed’s Repo Loan Binge.
December 2019 was also the time that the COVID pandemic began, forcing much of the economy to shut down. To which Congress responded by passing a series of relief packages, including the massive $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act (March 27, 2020).
So, yes, the Trump 2017 tax cuts led to a financial unravelling at the end of 2019, but it was nipped in the bud by over $8 trillion in emergency lending by the Fed to TBTF banks, hedge funds and money market funds, and over $3 trillion in emergency COVID relief spending by Congress.
Tax cuts cause deficits
In a March 2023 report, the Center for American Progress showed that Tax Cuts Are Primarily Responsible for the Increasing Debt Ratio.
...the true cause of rising debt: Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. In fact, relative to earlier projections, spending is down, not up. But revenues are down significantly more. If not for the Bush tax cuts and their extensions—as well as the Trump tax cuts—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded.
Despite these facts, precious few commentators and pundits ever tell Republicans: if you really want to end government deficits, then stop your tax cuts. It’s not a spending problem, it’s a revenue problem, caused by handing tax cuts to the rich. Imagine if the deficit issue were framed this way every time a Republican appeared on a Sunday morning news show, or every time a Democratic representative or Senator stood to address the issue.
Tax cuts create oligarchy
The most dangerous problem with tax cuts is that they have created a new plutocratic oligarchy able to buy enough political influence that they basically monopolize political power. This is pretty much obvious at this point.
But what Musk and his DOGEbags are doing now goes beyond even that. They are intentionally destroying the ability of government to function for the common good. Why? The stock answer is that Republicans and conservatives want to cripple government so that they can then turn around and say, “See, government doesn’t work.”
In August 2010, Sara Robinson, who used to post some brilliant material at Orcinus in the early years of the blogosphere, expanded on Dave Johnson’s explantion of how Reagan’s tax cuts had destroyed the virtuous circle of the national economy.
Tax Cuts Are Theft: An Amplification
by Sara Robinson | Aug 10, 2010
Dave points to the practical effects of a piece of conservative theology that deserves a bit of deeper drilling. It's this: Conservatives believe that only private individuals should hold wealth. They do not believe in commonly-held public wealth of any kind. And that's why they feel perfectly free to raid the vast legacy that our ancestors have accumulated and stewarded for us over the past 230 years….
...What they've stolen from us and arbitraged away isn't just our own money; it's the vast accumulation of civilizational wealth that was bought with the blood, sweat, tears, endless sacrifice, earnest planning, and bold dreaming of a dozen generations of American ancestors, and then bequeathed to us to ensure our own futures. Each of those generations received it in trust from the one that came before, added its own unique contributions to it, and then passed it on as an endowment to the next. As time compounded the gift, the legacy got richer; and our sense of who was entitled to share in the bounty got broader....
It's only when you think about our common wealth the way the world's richest families do -- as a bequest from a long line of distinguished ancestors, as a vast common resource base that provides us with extraordinary material comfort today, and as a sacred trust that we must manage and multiply on behalf of generations yet to come -- that you can really begin to understand the sheer magnitude of everything they took from us.
The thieves didn't just steal our houses, our retirement funds, our careers, or our tax money. It went far beyond that. They also stole the family jewels -- the vast infrastructure that's been built up for centuries by generations of foresighted Americans, now collapsing into uselessness. They defunded the great universities, crowded our kids into classrooms like factory farmed chickens, and are shutting down the magnificent state and national parks. And they're also stealing our future, committing us to endless debt, sucking the marrow out of our international standing, foreclosing our opportunties, making it impossible to solve looming problems, and forcing us to hand off to our children a far more meager legacy than the one we received….
Here's the irony: the people who did this to us did it precisely because they also understand wealth in these generational terms…. So, if they understand this, where's the disconnect? Why couldn't they respect the public's need to manage our common wealth the same way they manage their own private wealth?
The disconnect is this: In the conservative worldview, it's right and legitimate for private families and corporations to accrue generational wealth, and build great dynasties. But it's absolutely wrong for the democratic masses to accumulate wealth that way; or to collaborate, via the government, to ensure that all of their children will have a birthright sufficient to open the doors to their dreams.
Maggie Thatcher told us outright: "There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families, and their interests." And if there's no such thing as society, then society has no right to accumulate wealth -- via taxes, investment, or any other means. Viewed this way, a conservative might even think it's a virtuous thing to defund and defraud the public out of any capital it does manage to acquire….
Democrats have to oppose Trump from the left
On tariffs and economics generally, if Trump actually manages to force companies to return production to USA, the Democratic Party is dead meat if it continues to respond as it has. It is very troubling that the news media analysts and Democratic Party leaders appear incapable of doing anything other than regurgitate some “free trade” drivel from the Koch-funded, market fundamentalist American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute. If Democrats are going to oppose Trump by allying with market fundamentalists to defend the “free trade” tenets of conservative / neoliberal economics, then they will be useless in opposition and voters will treat them accordingly. The only way Democrats can successfully oppose Trump is from the left: by pushing single payer health care; a tax on Wall Street speculation; and a massive $100 trillion world-wide program New Green Deal to stop climate change by building new energy, transportation, and industrial systems that do not use fossil fuels.
Besides a tax on Wall Street, Democrats should counter Republican proposals to “reform” the social safety net by introducing and pushing for expansions of existing programs. A few weeks ago, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, and Democratic Representatives Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Val Hoyle of Oregon introduced a bill to increase Social Security payments by $2,400 per year, and to ensure the system is fully fund for the next 75 years by removing the tax exemption on all income above $250,000. Then there is the issue of the national minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009 — while the wealth of billionaires like Musk and Bezos has increased over ten-fold.
Instead of sucking up to their rich donors, Democrats need to begin fighting the economic inequities that Americans are rightly enraged about.
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