These bailouts and bonuses and other
protections were not only infuriating
because bankers were rich. They divorced
socially destructive activity from
political accountability. You could
enrich yourself by destroying entire
communities ― you could even break the
law to do it ― and face no meaningful
consequences. Members of a democracy, it
seemed to many people, ought to be able
to protect themselves from such abuses.
And yet
studies
by respected academics from Princeton,
Northwestern University and the
University of Connecticut
concluded
that the concerns of the wealthy
dominate the congressional agenda. Some
reporters
on Capitol Hill
noticed the same trend.
But the idea has generally been
dismissed by Washington officialdom,
which prides itself on interpreting the
mathematical codes and metaphors that
show why simple problems of power are in
fact very thorny economic matters.
Paul Ryan, in particular,
hypnotized
D.C.
journalists
in the days before he became House
speaker with pronouncements about debt
and deficits. Ryan’s story conveniently
excluded credit default swaps,
proprietary trading and other high-risk
activity on Wall Street. He warned of an
inevitable “debt crisis” just around the
corner if America didn’t cut its
spending ― particularly on social
programs for the poor and elderly.
This wasn’t because he hated the
indigent, mind you ― he merely
recognized that we now had too many
“takers” and not enough “makers” and
were nearing a “tipping point.” He even
found the magic number: If America’s
public debt reached 90 percent of its
gross domestic product, we were headed
for another 2008, only worse. The
figure, based on research from two
prominent conservative economists, was
eventually
discredited
by a lowly graduate student who
discovered it was the result of a very
simple Microsoft Excel error.
Today, as Trump proposes massive tax
benefits for the super-rich, the deficit
hawks and austerity mongers have fallen
strangely silent. The profound ratios
and disequilibria that once threatened
to dissolve society itself have
disappeared now that they are being
fueled by tax cuts rather than spending
programs.
We
can have a political system that
respects its citizens as political
equals, or we can have a society
dominated by the arbitrary interests of
unaccountable wealth. Trump, like Obama
before him, has chosen the latter. In
the not-so-distant past, polities ruled
by unaccountable wealth have
demonstrated a marked tendency to
generate less accountability and an
astonishing capacity for statistical
deception and logical absurdity.
In
1929, the global economy was in terrible
shape. There was a tremendous amount of
work to be done ― highways to be built,
telephone lines to be wired, electrical
grids to be constructed ― yet millions
of people were out of work. The British
economist John Maynard Keynes
co-authored a political pamphlet with a
simple solution: The government could
hire the unemployed people to do the
work. Financiers in the city of London
were aghast at the idea, and told the
public that it was all much more
complicated than Keynes suggested. If
the government hired people, after all,
it would deprive future generations of
the chance to get a job. All of the work
would already have been done. Keynes
knew he wasn’t proposing anything
particularly clever, just trying to
knock down silly ideas that people only
took seriously because they were
delivered by very prestigious people.
“Our main task,” he
wrote, “will be to confirm the reader’s
instinct that what
seems
sensible
is
sensible, and what
seems
nonsense
is
nonsense.
No
one in power listened to him then, and
there will probably be plenty of
Democrats and Republicans in Congress
who shrug off critics of the Trump tax
plan now. Our government, like those of
the Gilded Age, likes to give the
wealthy what they want. At least with
Trump, we will not mistake a simple act
of political domination for the music of
the spheres.
