It is hard to believe the level of disinformation Trump spews endlessly to what can only be assumed is an American audience he perceives to be stupid. Now, to be fair to him, it has been said that the US has a problem with stupidity. It is undoubtedly true to say that, according to the National Literacy Institute:
On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.
34% of adults lacking literacy proficiency were born outside the US.
Massachusetts was the state with the highest rate of child literacy.
New Mexico was the state with the lowest child literacy rate.
New Hampshire was the state with the highest percentage of adults considered literate.
The state with the lowest adult literacy rate was California.
America is ranked 39th in the global index.
If we work on the assumption in their opening statement:
The capacity to read and write, commonly known as literacy, stands out as a pivotal determinant in shaping an individual's career trajectory. Individuals with literacy skills have access to a broad spectrum of career possibilities, including highly skilled and well-paying positions. Conversely, those lacking literacy face severely restricted options, with even entry-level, low-skilled jobs posing challenges to secure.
Unquestionably, the alleged wealthiest nation on earth is, by definition, poorly educated in comparison to its major economic competitors. Republicans frequently discuss the national debt (which we will address in isolation later in the article), but at a foundational level, statistics suggest that poor literacy is costing the economy around $2.2 trillion a year. This is just another example of short-sighted investment in education. The problem Republicans have is that unless it turns a profit, it has no value in their world. They believe social investment is socialism, and nobody wants socialism. To those foolish enough to believe this, just call it something else, like maybe, ‘investing in the future’? Instead, they prefer to promote school voucher schemes, cloaked in the guise of parental choice, to shift yet more money from the bottom to the top.
The sole purpose of this administration is to facilitate the siphoning of public funds contributed by the blood, sweat, and tears of hard-working Americans into the pockets of corporations owned by the very wealthy—everything from student loans to education to private prisons is now a profit centre.
Let’s begin our journey today with a look at American household incomes. Take a look at this graph
44 %, that’s nearly half of US households, earn less than $50,000 per year. It’s certainly not a great advert for Trump’s America, even before he started to burn the economy to the ground. The significant takeaway is that the majority of Americans are not living the American dream. According to the 2023 census, 36.8 million people were living in poverty, with 13.7 million of them being children. Under the Biden administration, child poverty was halved, only to jump back up when Republicans failed to extend the child tax credit, so much for the Republican pro-life agenda. It seems that once a child is a living, breathing person consuming resources, the pro-cruelty agenda kicks in. How odd that they have no such problem extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.
The harsh reality is that up to 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and yet we are told that welfare spending is bankrupting the country. Might I be so bold as to suggest that low wages are the culprit here, not the in-work benefits people are forced to rely on to survive? Republicans are right, welfare is a big problem, CORPORATE WELFARE. My friends, as Shakespeare put it, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark". Even with half of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, the US debt-to-GDP is currently running at 123%. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a new dynamic report, which suggests that Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will add at least $2.7 to $3 trillion to the US deficit. It is economic madness, and anyone telling you anything different is lying to you.
Republicans spend every waking hour obsessing over waste, fraud, and abuse fantasies that are only matched by their obsession with election fraud. DOGE has proved beyond question that this was essentially just another red herring, while at the same time destroying the livelihoods of over a hundred thousand federal workers just out of spite. It is, however, very telling that the Department of Defence was never a real target for savings, despite having failed its last seven audits. Instead, it has had its budget increased by 13%, as Republican lawmakers dive into defence stocks. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Democrat lawmakers have done the same.
Always, the target of Republicans are the recipients of welfare, despite many of them working. Yet, tax avoidance is accommodated as IRS budgets are slashed, and those guilty of tax offences can purchase a pardon if they deposit bitcoin into Trump’s racketeering account. My original research estimated that at least half a trillion dollars in taxes are uncollected every year. Detecting tax evasion has always been a time-consuming process because it’s labour-intensive. In any event, it has never been a focus of Republican administrations. When Democrats have tackled it, it appears to have never been a high priority, but to be fair, Biden did take up the challenge. The truth is that over a ten-year cycle, it could return approaching $5 trillion.
It’s well worth taking a look at the Stanford Report from April 14th 2025, if you would like some insight into the world of tax compliance, which features an interesting video from Associate Professor Rebecca Lester. To quote her:
“Our research implies that giving tax collectors more resources will recover much more money for the country,” Lester says. “It pays for itself and then some.”
It’s estimated that for every dollar invested in auditing complex partnerships, a return of $20 is achieved. But hey, in these times of fraud and waste, why bother chasing half a trillion dollars a year? You really can’t make this stuff up, you really can’t. Not only do these people receive tax cuts, but they also take a cut for themselves pre-tax.
For a more depressing picture, look no further than a report in The New York Times, published on April 13, 2021, and updated on May 5, 2025. The piece notes:
The so-called tax gap has surged in the last decade. The last official estimate from the I.R.S. was that an average of $441 billion per year went unpaid from 2011 to 2013. Most of the unpaid taxes are the result of evasion by the wealthy and large corporations, Mr. Rettig said.
As you can see, this lines up with the numbers from Stanford, but this data may refer to the last official IRS estimate from 2013. In the last decade, though, it is estimated that the tax gap has surged to around $1 trillion. Charles Rettig, the former Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who left the IRS in November 2024, stated during a Senate Finance Committee hearing that the agency lacked the necessary resources to pursue tax cheats. This was being addressed by the Biden Administration, which awarded $80 billion over the next 10 years to go after tax cheats and modernise the agency.
The report goes on:
Mr. Rettig attributed the growing tax gap to the rise of the $2 trillion cryptocurrency sector, which remains lightly regulated and has been an avenue for tax avoidance. He also pointed to foreign-source income and the abuse of pass-through provisions in the tax code by companies.
Needless to say, Trump has put a stop to that, sending a clear signal to tax cheats that it’s OK to cheat on your taxes. Unfortunately, teachers, firefighters, police officers, etc, who have tax deducted at source don’t get that chance.
The key point I’m trying to make here is that businesses are taking their own tax cut of a trillion dollars a year, and I suspect it’s even more than that. Why do they need the government to borrow money to give them even more? I’m afraid the Big Beautiful Bill is a crime scene involving the theft of critical services from the American people, while giving the stolen cash to a small group of individuals who appear to be common criminals, as evidenced by their acts of tax evasion. Surely, if you automatically become a criminal for overstaying a visa or having the wrong skin colour. You must be a criminal if you are stealing the hard-earned tax dollars of Americans. Can someone make it make sense?
America doesn’t have a social funding problem; it has a state embezzlement problem. It is that simple. To put this into context, Tax avoidance in 2025 could eradicate homelessness (estimated at $20 billion, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development) and child poverty (estimated at $220 billion extrapolated from Brookings Institute who put the cost of cutting child poverty in half at a top number of $110 billion), leaving $760 billion in change. That almost covers the Medicaid bill without breaking a sweat.
Look, it’s never going to happen because the rich are treated as a protected species by the legislators they buy. There is no point dressing it up as anything else. Unfortunately, we have reached a situation where legislative agendas are up for auction to the highest bidder, and those in the middle and at the bottom can’t afford to join the game.
According to a report by the centre-right Tax Foundation, updated on June 13, 2025, extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) will decrease federal tax revenue by $4.5 trillion from 2025 through 2034. You do not have to be an economist to understand that if you deliberately reduce government revenue, then the government is unable to fund programs it previously could. Now, before anyone jumps in here to claim tax cuts generate more tax revenue, don’t bother. We’ll deal with that nonsense claim in a moment.
I’d begin by saying the 2017 tax cuts delivered neither the promised growth nor the promised jobs. If they were viewed as an investment, they returned a loss for which nobody was held accountable. Yet, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, is selling the new tax cuts once again as a package aimed at boosting GDP growth and job creation, despite there being no evidence that it will deliver on either of these claims. I want to be VERY CLEAR, and I have provided evidence for this in previous posts. In the last half century, tax cuts for the rich have NEVER and I really do mean NEVER delivered on increased growth and job creation.
You have to look no further than the transfer of wealth over that same period to the top 0.1% to deduce that it is an act of systematic theft by the state from lower and middle-income earners, in return for nothing more than a wash, rinse and repeat exercise. They don’t even have the decency to provide tax cuts that reflect the economy's performance; instead, they use money they don’t have to provide tax cuts to those who don’t need them.
The new Billionaire Welfare Act, as I prefer to call it, makes permanent the corporation tax cut, which was reduced from 35% to 21% after the 2017 tax cuts. In a Guardian report by Lauren Aratani dated 24th May 2025, notes:
A cut to the corporate tax rate has cost the federal government billions of dollars in lost revenue. From 2018 to 2021, the top corporations in the US saved a combined $240bn in taxes after the cuts, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Lauren goes on to note:
Wage growth slowed in 2019, two years after the cuts were passed, and only modestly grew because of inflation and high demand for workers immediately after the pandemic.
The important thing to understand here is that there is half a century of data showing Republicans trying the same thing over and over again. They are either expecting a different result or they know exactly what they are doing. Regardless, the outcome never changes. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It’s either the definition of madness or the definition of state-sponsored theft. I’ll let you be the judge of which it is.
The key to understanding our current position is to examine the history of the wealth gap's growth. After the Second World War, as one would expect, there was significant growth as the US benefited from reconstruction efforts across Europe, which brought the US substantial profits. Up until the 1970s, wealth distribution was what we might term fair, some may argue, but as stated by the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted in an article from a report on 11th December 2024:
The gap between incomes high up the ladder and incomes in the middle and lower rungs — while substantial — did not change much during this period
Things, however, changed in the early 70s. Economic growth slowed, and we began to see the first signs of the widening wealth gap. Lower and middle incomes almost ground to a halt. However, in contrast, as the report puts it:
The concentration of annual income at the very top of the distribution rose to levels last seen nearly a century ago, during the “Roaring Twenties.”
If you examine the chart below, you will see an inflexion point in the early 1980s. This coincides with the election of Ronald Reagan.
This was our introduction to the voodoo economics of the Laffer Curve and the fairytale of trickle-down economics, where tax cuts equal prosperity. While the statement may be literally true, they do lead to prosperity, but only for the rich at the expense of middle- and lower-income earners. One thing worth noting is that the gap between the middle and the bottom has remained mainly on the same trajectory, but has widened slightly. At the same time, the top 5% has accelerated at an unprecedented level. The reason the above graph is essential is that it visualises that despite changes in the party of government, the wealth gap accelerated and continued at the same pace.
There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from this consistent acceleration of the wealth gap: it must be due to corporate influence. Democratic governance has had little impact on the central tenet of social responsibility, which has been overshadowed by a tsunami of corporate welfare, facilitated by failed policies and regulations. Of course, you could point to the likes of Obamacare, gay marriage, etc. Still, the economic policies and infrastructure investments emerged from a crisis, rather than being part of a standard policy agenda outside the scope of a typical term in office. Of course, I am willing to concede that Democrats would say it’s not for the want of trying to effect change, Republicans blocked legislation at every twist and turn. Then we are back to a failure to present a proposition to the American people to secure a significant enough majority to legislate for change.
The 2008 crash was a direct result of the wealthy devising a scheme to transfer more wealth from those at the bottom of the economic ladder, using the cruel false hope of homeownership. It was an indication that every moral guideline had been removed.
As a bonus, banks had put themselves in a position where taxpayers had no choice but to bail them out. Aside from the fact that hardly anyone was held accountable for what were crimes against the American people, NOTHING has changed as we have seen that far from the rich paying a price for their abhorrent behaviour, they have been allowed to vastly profit from despair, as demonstrated in the COVID crisis.
Be in no doubt, this is a failure of BOTH parties, which brings us back to parties not winning elections, but rather parties losing elections. The expansion of registered independents is yet another indication of a breakdown in trust. Trump is the product of decades of failed policy. Republicans have now been allowed to take Americans hostage because Democrats have failed to make the case for a more equitable society, and they have to own that. I understand the argument of ‘we warned them, but they didn’t listen’. In that case, you didn’t make a compelling enough case, and I know that to be true because it was a whole campaign based on ‘Don’t vote for the other guy because he’s a fascist’, oh and ‘We’ll let you get an abortion’
There’s no point reexamining all the points of failure in the campaign; it changes nothing. However, one point I would make is that, aside from a tiny group of Democratic lawmakers, Democrats have had little impact on a government hellbent on changing America into a theocratic autocracy. AOC and Bernie are the only ones who have taken the fight to them on an apolitical message that this is not a fight with the Republicans, it’s a fight against the rich, those for whom the government is now a proxy for their agenda. The only coordinated effort to fight back has come from Democratic activist groups, who are attempting to build a coalition that gives a home to every American prepared to say, ‘Enough is enough. ’
What deeply concerns me is that Democratic leadership even wanted to initially distance themselves from the No Kings protests for fear that the protests would go wrong and they might be labelled as supporting violence. Can you imagine John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. taking that position? Because I can’t. Too many Democrats are trying to fix a fractured system with their own broken system of Republican Lite, and I think polling indicates the American public is clearly stating, ‘That’s not good enough’
Look, I don’t propose to have all the answers, but what I do know is that insider stock trading and allegiance to ‘different’ dark money simply say, ‘Vote for us because we are not quite as corrupt as the other party’. My biggest fear here is that any new proposition to the American people should have been prepared during the transition and launched on the day Trump took office. Nothing good can come out of ‘reactive’ politics. You must present a cohesive, well-structured policy agenda that delivers a vision in these times of despair and hope, amidst tyranny. Instead, we have this disperate half assed uncoordinated jabs at an administration dominating the narrative. It’s sadly a no-win solution.
To be very clear, I am NOT pointing the finger at the activist community. They are stepping up like never before with the sense of urgency this moment demands. This is, I fear, a case of lions being led by donkeys, and I worry that if someone at the top doesn’t take responsibility for what needs to be done, the activist community will have to go it alone. That’s how serious this situation is right now. This fight is not going to get easier; it’s going to get much harder.
It gives me no pleasure to say that, as things stand, the only thing that can beat Trump is Trump himself, and that should terrify every American. When the only guy who can stop the tyranny is the guy causing it, you have a serious problem. Until Democrats come up with a messaging pipeline that can capture the narrative, they are going to be forced to wait for Trump to do a political face plant.
What puzzles me is that Trump is failing on so many levels, yet it appears almost impossible to lay a glove on him and make it stick. It’s mainly because he controls the narrative, so Democrats need to start by employing the best comms team on the planet, because they are going to need them. Forget the ‘jobs for the boys’ mentality and go out and find the very best. It would be the best money they ever spent. I firmly believe that a crack messaging team working with the extraordinary political talent the Democrats have, CAN capture the narrative, and that’s just the first step. I’ll wait…….
Oh, this is an excellent piece, neatly summarising the economic truth. And not just for the US… thank you.
Is not the message very simple: « Tax the Rich »? I was pleased to see that on many of the signs on No Kings….
I think you're so right about the narrative. I like the Billionaires Welfare Bill as a narrative. Musk is a giant recipient of corporate welfare and needs to be hammered on that every day. Especially since his product is crappy. How much welfare is he getting for blowing up rocket ships? As far as the literacy goes. When my daughter was young we didn't have much money but she always had books. When those little book buys came around in her elementary classes I would have to limit her to 3 to 5 little books. Then I discovered that she would read any book with an animal in it. So in 2nd to 5th grade she was not just reading The Red Pony and Where The Red Fern Grows (a real tear jerker, my son & I read it aloud together & I could barely get through my part of the reading, I was crying so hard) but I was getting her Stephen King's Cujo and Pet Cemetery. She had an 11th grade reading comprehension level in 5th grade. Find what your kid likes to read and encourage it (I know that's not easy in this time of computers, social media and gaming, etc.)