You can't bake a cake without breaking some eggs

The political class has long since banished political representation as a vocation. For far too many, it has become an opportunity for personal gain rather than public service.

This is PART TWO of a series of pieces on finding a path to a better tomorrow in the midst of a tsunami of deceit. If you want to read the introduction before reading this, please click here

Corruption in politics is as old as society itself, and it has long been baked into everyday living. It’s a trade-off people have reluctantly accepted as a fact of life. In the corporate world, losses from theft and deception are built into the business model. As a species, we are opportunists. Instinctively, we are always in search of maximum benefit from minimal input; it’s the fuel that drives our modern way of thinking.

Over the years, we have become inherently lazy, which is where our gambling addiction comes from, along with our finely tuned sense of opportunism. It is this inherent laziness that politicians have seized upon so effectively. Why walk when you can drive? Why cook when you can dine out or order in? Why read a book when you can listen to it being read to you? In a world where there is an app for everything, why exercise your mind when you can be spoon-fed information? Critical thinking and asking questions are becoming skills that evolution will eventually erase, as we are fed a diet of curated knowledge that we all too readily accept as truth.

We are by nature inquisitive, and it’s our thirst for knowledge that has led to the discoveries and innovations that have created the society in which we live. We have been fortunate to have some of the greatest minds in history. Minds that have driven a technological revolution that has enhanced the transformational industrial revolution, offering the potential to provide a better life for EVERYONE, regardless of background or wealth.

The American dream is built on the illusion that, regardless of your background, ANYONE can become a millionaire and eventually breathe the rarified air of the top 1%. With few exceptions, it’s built on the fantasy that everyone is competing on a level playing field, which is frankly absurd. It is estimated that 36% of billionaire wealth is inherited; for the top 1%, the figure rises to 41%. In 1916, John D. Rockefeller became the first US billionaire. Seventy-four years later, in 1990, the number of billionaires had grown to 66. It seems no coincidence to me that Reagan served 8 years until 1989, and since then, the top 1% have never looked back.

By 2000, this number had increased from 66 to 198, and by 2010, it stood at 412. In 2025, there are 902 billionaires in the US, the highest number of any country in the world. According to Forbes, ‘The 400 richest people in the U.S. are worth a record $6.6 trillion after getting $1.2 trillion richer over the past year’. At the same time, the wealth gap has grown exponentially, and 36.8 million people are now living in poverty.

Why am I taking this approach in explaining how the US can find a path to a better tomorrow? Bear with me for a little while, because fixing this goes way beyond dragging a madman, kicking and screaming, out of the White House. This is a structural problem centred around a decades-long systemic criminal theft of wealth from the American people. The prosperity the top 10% of Americans have enjoyed since the 1990s is illusory for most of the bottom 90% of the population. For decades, the US has had the luxury of spending money it doesn’t have like a drunken sailor. The sole purpose of this appears to have been to incubate the obscene wealth held by just 1.3 million households (1.8 million individuals), representing just 0.5% of the population. Many might call it the perfect crime. I can think of one crime boss sitting in the Oval Office who would agree.

At a foundational level, the wealth enjoyed by the 1% has been created by the labour of those who performed the physical work that generated it. Those who mined the resources and made the steel to build the cities, from where factories make the products that saw American manufacturing dominate the world. As noted by Investment Monitor :

By 1945, more steel was produced in the state of Pennsylvania alone than in Germany and Japan combined. This belle epoch, the glory days of ‘Made in America’, ran well into the Cold War era

The report goes on to note:

By the turn of the millennium, the US’s global domination in mass-scale industrial production, technology and efficiency was lost. Long-standing issues culminated between 2000 and 2010, when the US lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs. “This was a very tough decade, a very dramatic shift,” explains Bonvillian. “Millions of jobs just disappeared.”

Once again, the magic year 2000 and the decade that followed appear. This is where it gets interesting. In 2000, the Clinton administration promoted Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, thereby facilitating China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The idea was that this would open up the Chinese market to US companies and create more jobs for Americans. WRONG, corporate America had a much better idea: Clinton had unwittingly opened the floodgates, enabling large US manufacturers to throw their American workers under the bus and outsource manufacturing to China to boost their bottom lines. There was no rhetoric about saving American jobs at the time. It’s the classic example of unintended consequences. Let’s not be too quick to knock it, though. Clinton was the last president to run a budget surplus from 1998 to 2001.

It’s worth noting, however, that the top U.S. federal corporate tax rate was 35% at the time, and the combined federal and state average was approximately 39.4%. Income tax had six marginal tax brackets: 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and 39.6%. This meant that the average tax rate was 15.4%, the highest since 1981, so I suppose you could say the rich paid closer to their fair share.

Initial Outsourcing is estimated to have cost nearly a million jobs and caused the societal damage that such a tectonic economic shock can produce. Not only did this deal a catastrophic blow to the manufacturing workforce, but it also marked the beginning of China's rise to global manufacturing dominance and accelerated economic growth. There is absolutely no question that the unintended consequences of Clinton's genuine attempt to create more jobs lit the blue touchpaper under the subsequent explosion of the wealth gap. The US secured an economic advantage but failed to adapt its economy to counter the financial threat posed by China.

What I want you to do is indulge me here for a moment, because to see where I’m going with this, you have to be willing to abandon decades of indoctrination that tells you you live in a meritocracy and that your wealth and success are related to your work ethic. How many times do you hear, ‘I’m a self-made millionaire’? When the state educates the people who work for you, the cost of transport to your business is paid for by those you employ and the roads on which they travel are maintained by the state, not to mention the loans you took out to finance your business are other people’s money. Wealth creation is a collective effort. However, business owners have the flexibility to decide how to reward their workforce, and that’s where employment becomes a lottery.

Over the last 25 years, the top 1% have inherited 41% of their wealth; the next generation will likely inherit it all. One thing is for sure: money does NOT buy you intellect, imagination, or the vision to develop the next big thing. While wealth can buy you a better education, a well-educated idiot is still an idiot. It provides little incentive to earn income when wealth beneficiaries already have more money than they can spend in a lifetime. Which is the bigger pool in which to go fishing for the next genius, the entitled children of the top 1%, or the children of the bottom 340 million? You don’t have to be a major in maths to calculate this one.

In my view, it’s why the US will ultimately lose the technological race and, with it, diminish as an economy. While the United States appears content with 54% of its population achieving a literacy rate of 6th grade or below, China is producing tens of millions of tech-savvy, highly educated, at minimum, bilingual, work-ready candidates, educated to align with a 20-year economic plan. Projecting yourself as the world bully only works against those countries that are frightened of you, and China is no longer fearful of the US, primarily because of the idiocy of Trump. They are the only nation on Earth with the level of rare-earth processing capacity required to advance Western economic growth.

The US can play catch-up all day long. But it will take years to match even a fraction of Chinese output, and that’s before we consider energy generation and infrastructure, not just domestically but across the world through the Belt and Road Initiative. It’s not for nothing that Trump is looking to build an alliance with China, Russia, India and Japan at the expense of Europe (although the administration denies this). He can see the writing on the wall, but he’s just missing the small matter that Putin and Xi will eat him for lunch.

So how does this help us? I hear you say. Before you can build a framework for a better tomorrow, you need to understand what you are up against. Above all, you need to recognise that having the alleged most powerful military on earth is not enough to deliver global economic dominance, especially when you are carrying around $38 trillion of debt. In the ‘good ole days’ that Trump fantasises about, the US didn’t need a highly educated workforce; it needed skilled manual muscle to drive a manufacturing economy. In 2025, US manufacturing accounts for just 10% of GDP, so it’s hardly surprising that it often runs trade deficits, given that the economy has evolved into a services exporter, in which it has a healthy trade surplus. Tariffs have historically been a targeted tool to protect essential sectors of the manufacturing base, but that’s not what Trump is using them for; he’s using them as an extortion tool to bully trading partners. They’ve simply become an economy juicer, funded by US taxpayers.

As for the other Trump fantasy of AI dominance, we’ll deal with this as part of this series, but be very clear, the rise of the US tech industry has primarily been built on the skills of HB-1 visa holders who have often paid money to attend US Ivy League universities, or have not been educated in the US at all. American growth is NOT being driven by majority homegrown talent; it’s being fueled by immigrants who are now facing abduction from American streets for being caught in possession of a black or brown face or asian features. Where do you anticipate the new tech talent will be in 2025? Europe and China are rolling out the red carpet.

The problems the US faces, aside from having an imbecile in the White House, is that an urgent rebalancing of the economy is required. It’s blighted by short-term ‘sugar-rush’ economics, which does nothing other than make the rich richer and the poor poorer. In the week ahead, we'll explore how rebalancing can help reduce the wealth gap and deliver greater growth in a more equitable society without affecting GDP. You asked if I would offer solutions, so let me give it a try.

There is no question in my mind that Trump will set himself on fire in 2026. The big challenge comes when trying to navigate the economic wasteland he’s about to leave behind. It’s indisputable that in the short term, Democrats are the only game in town, but right now, it’s a party not fit for purpose. Yes, it’s a criticism, but more importantly, it’s a FACT. There is no question that, in a consumer-driven economy, people hold the power to determine the direction of travel, but only if they recognise the need to act collectively to effect change. This is technically so easy that it doesn’t involve setting a single foot on the street with a protest banner.

Alas, unity is the last thing on people’s minds, and believe me when I say that’s by political design. In the next part of this series, we examine the power the Democratic base holds to change everything if it is prepared to use it, and the importance of the 90 million Americans who sat out the 2024 election.

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