America Chose Wealth Over Well-Being: How Billionaires Rewrote the American Dream

While other nations offer universal benefits, we double down on serving billionaires’ interests…

Yesterday, Congress certified the electoral vote count making a billionaire president again, starting after he’s sworn in on January 20th.

Yes, we chose a billionaire. Again. After other billionaires spent billions to convince us to make that choice.

As you’re reading these words, billionaires from America and around the world are making pilgrimages to his shabby golf motel to kiss our upcoming billionaire president’s ass and hand him envelopes with $1 million checks that represent a few hours (at most) of income for most of them or their companies.

Meanwhile, our billionaire president-in-waiting is packing his cabinet — the heads of all of the most important federal agencies — with even more billionaires. This is all being celebrated over on billionaire-owned Fox “News” and on billionaire-owned hate radio networks, as well as in the billionaire-owned Washington Post, LA Times, and the roughly half of American local newspapers owned by billionaire hedge funds.

Other countries enjoy benefits like free healthcare and college; modern mass transit; and affordable housing, food, and drugs.

They also have inexpensive internet and phone service without companies listening in and selling their information, schools that don’t even need to mention school shooters, and streets and parks filled with pedestrians and children instead of tents for the homeless.

Additionally, they benefit from renewable electricity that gets cheaper every year while cleaning their environment.

We, on the other hand, have the world‘s largest collection of billionaires.

Most Americans probably didn’t realize this was the choice they were making in the election of 1980 when Reagan and Bush promised “Morning In America.”

We’d been battered by that generation’s version of the Covid shock: when Arab nations got together to punish us for taking Israel’s side and cut off our oil supply in 1973, it threw us into a decade-long period of “stagflation” (high unemployment and inflation).

Nixon couldn’t handle it; odd/even days at the gas pumps merely infuriated drivers.

Jerry Ford couldn’t handle it; his “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) buttons were a sad joke that guaranteed he’d become a one-term president.

Jimmy Carter made some good progress — particularly with his plan for a “national solar bank” that would provide 20% of the country’s energy by 2000 — but Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with Iran to hold the American hostages until after the 1980 election, ending Jimmy’s hopes for a second term.

By the time Reagan ran for office in 1980, inflation was still a problem; it was an echo of the 1973 oil embargo, amplified by a second oil shock resulting from the 1979 Iranian revolution, again exploding American gasoline prices and cutting economic growth.

By that time, as I detail in The Hidden History of the American Dream, we were desperate.

Reagan — an even more talented actor than Trump (who NBC spent millions training to act for TV cameras) — convinced us he had it all figured out. At first, his promises were vague; something about supply-side economics, “trickle down,” and Laffer Curves that nobody really understood (and George HW Bush initially called “Voodoo Economics”).

Once he took office, America watched with hope and some trepidation as Reagan turned our economy inside-out, massively cut taxes on the country’s thirteen billionaires, repeatedly raised taxes on millions of working-class people, cut and taxed Social Security, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, gutted federal funds for education, killed off two-thirds of the country’s unions, and, negotiating the GATT and NAFTA agreements, beginning the process of offshoring over 60,000 factories.

Reagan never got inflation below 4 percent and he almost tripled the national debt (from $800 billion to roughly $2.2 trillion), but throwing around those trillions in borrowed money made it seem like the economy was getting better even as wages were frozen by monopolists and a lack of union representation.

And that’s how we got the billionaires.

Back in 1980, nobody in America was rich enough to shoot himself into space on a penis-shaped rocket, and superyachts were a fantasy. The nation’s richest man was shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig, whose net worth — at just a bit below $2 billion — wouldn’t even qualify him for today’s Forbes 500 list; he lived a low-key life and, like most wealthy men of that era, didn’t much involve himself in politics (there were laws back then against rich people subsidizing federal judges or politicians).

But Reagan’s changes in the tax code and destruction of unions led to a 50,000 billion dollar ($50 trillion) transfer of wealth from the pensions, homes, incomes, and bank accounts of middle class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich between 1981 and today.

We had only 13 billionaires from 1980 to 1986 but — with Reagan’s final tax cut which took the rate on multimillion-dollar incomes from over 70% down to 28% — that number began to explode. By 1990, there were 99 billionaires in America; today there are over 800 of them, representing a more-than-50-fold increase in just four decades.

Not content with simply grabbing much of America’s wealth for themselves, a handful of our billionaires next reached out for control of our government.

They created media empires, think tanks, and policy centers, both writing and then pushing their own legislation that was dutifully carried into law by politicians they’d bought off. They outright purchased the entire GOP, along with a large handful of elected “problem solver” Democrats.

They set up institutions to seize control of our independent judiciary; five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court returned the favor by fully legalizing billionaires buying elections with their Citizens United decision in 2010.

Total spending on federal elections — for president, the House, and the Senate combined — was $92 million in 1980, $103 million in 1984, and $324 million in 1988. How quaint!

Just one billionaire — Elon Musk — spent over a quarter billion dollars putting Trump into office this past fall. Other billionaires jumped in, pushing total 2024 spending over $7 billion (and that doesn’t count dark money, which is almost certainly billions more).

Saudi billionaires jumped in to help billionaire Musk purchase Twitter for $44 billion, turning it, along with an alleged army of Russian-billionaire-funded trolls pretending to be Americans, into a massive megaphone to elect billionaire-friendly Republicans including billionaire Trump.

They’re now building “conservative” colleges and primary schools, funded with state tax money thanks to bought-off politicians, that will educate the generation coming up that billionaires are a necessary and benevolent force in the world.

And we don’t talk about our nation’s billionaire problem because billionaires own or control so many of the nation’s channels of news and discussion from social media to television networks to newspapers.

Even simple, traditional political endorsements get censored; G-d forbid somebody (who won a Pulitzer!) should draw a cartoon showing media billionaires bowing down to our new billionaire president. Or speak out on billionaire-owned social media.

Maybe one day America will join the other 37 OECD “rich” nations in offering to our average- and low-income people nearly-free college and healthcare, removing guns from our streets and schools, housing the homeless, and building modern mass transit.

Maybe our middle class will again become socially and economically mobile, we’ll rid ourselves of over $2 trillion in student debt, and we’ll never again be the only developed country in the world where people lose everything to bankruptcy because somebody in the family got sick.

For at least the next four years, however, we must content ourselves with the proud knowledge that we have more billionaires than any other country in the world. That they now run out government, with their top 1 percent owning fully 40.5 percent of our nation’s entire wealth ($43.45 trillion). As the Forbes “Capitalist Tool” headline gloats: “The 3 Richest Americans Hold More Wealth Than Bottom 50% Of The Country.”

Yep, sure enough: We’re number one! And Trump and the GOP promise to do everything they can to keep it that way.

My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here.