Thom's blog
It’s Time To Repudiate Socialism For The Rich
You need to know this... Donald Trump is setting up a cabinet of plutocrats.
As Quartz reports - the 17 people he's chosen for cabinet level positions so far have "...well over $9.5 billion in combined wealth... greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined - over one third of the 126 million households total in the US."
This shouldn't surprise anyone - no matter how populist Trump sounded on the campaign trail.
Billionaires and millionaires are flocking to the Trump administration for one very simple reason: his policies are going to make them a whole lot richer.
For example - according to a report from the Center for Tax Justice that came out just before the election - the top 1 percent of Americans would take a full 44 percent of the tax cuts proposed in Trump's tax plan.
The bottom 20 percent - on the other hand - would see just 2 percent of the cuts.
This is socialism for the rich, or, as it's more popularly known as, Reaganomics -- and it's been the major driver of income inequality in America for the past 30 plus years.
If you compare historical top income tax rate over the course of twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you'll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich - the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations - was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.
You'll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.
Even more striking, in the 35 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.
This situation is only going to get worse under Donald Trump and his cabinet of plutocrats.
The new Gilded Age is upon us.
Unless we repudiate Reaganomics and put back in place the progressive tax system that worked so well between Roosevelt and Reagan, the rich will only get richer.
-Thom
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