There are many underlying reasons for why we can’t have nice things in the U.S., including racism, misogyny and xenophobia. But the current shit-sandwich of a bill in Congress right now has a direct cause too. It’s what happens when you have government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy. So, wealthy Republicans are transferring funds from the poor and middle class TO the wealthy. Of course they are.
Will folks who don’t pay attention to politics because both parties are the same catch on when Meemaw gets kicked out of her nursing home and dumped on their lawn? When hospitals shut down? When Big Balls redirects Social Security funds to a crypto scam? When a hurricane blows their house away, but oops! we spent all the FEMA money on building concentration camps for immigrants in the Everglades?
I don’t know, but it occurred to me the optics were interesting this weekend when the Republican reconciliation bill drama played out while Jeff Bezos was marrying an AI-generated hologram in Italy. Hilariously, Newsweek had this to say about the obscene cost of the wedding:
Jeff Bezos’ Venice Wedding Was Relatively Cheap
The cost of the nuptials on Friday was estimated between $47 million and $56 million, according to Reuters, citing Luca Zaia, president of the Veneto region where the Italian city of canals is based. And while this sum may appear lavish to any ordinary American, it amounted to just 0.0193-0.0230 percent of the Amazon founder’s estimated $244 billion net worth, as recorded by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The average and median net worth of an American family is $1,063,700 and $192,900 respectively, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Federal Reserve. This means Bezos’ wedding was financially similar to an average American spending less than $250 on their wedding—about the cost of a family dinner or a new pair of sneakers.
Wow, okay, relatively. Without trying to, I stumbled across several photos from that grotesquely wasteful shindig online, including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in fancy dress boarding a boat, plus assorted Kardashians. It was kind of jarring to see all that conspicuous consumption juxtaposed with stories about hardships to come when the Republican bill passes.
The optics, man. Not good! It adds to other New Gilded Age images that have been seared onto our eyeballs since Trump 2.0, like the billionaires lined up at Trump’s inauguration.
If there’s a Reign of Terror in our future, some as-yet-unidentified revolutionary might decide the guest list for the Bezos wedding is a logical place to start. Just saying.
Open thread.
rachel
Performance of Propaganda of the Deed was pretty common back in the first Gilded Age for reasons. I feel like we’re getting closer to those days all the time.
pat
Looked at the video. My God. Those boobs!
Baud
That’s like the inverse of the Window’s Offering story.
Karen
I’ve learned over the years that Republican constituents only care about race, religion, and sexuality. The fact that this bill will starve them and make it impossible to have healthcare are things they don’t care about. As long as they get their way on the big three nothing else matters. So all this talk about how the Big Beautiful Bill will hurt the GOP is a pipe dream.
Baud
@pat:
Nominated!
Hildebrand
At least the first Gilded Age wankers built stuff for the hoi polloi to use out of the smidgen of conscience they had.
Our oligarchs have completely obliterated that part of whatever is left of their humanity.
H.E.Wolf
By which I presume you mean the wedding celebrants and guests.
bjacques
@pat: In the end, Kubrick opted for “Oh My God! It’s full of stars!”
Albatrossity
If optics can save us, that would be great. Sadly, the current maladministration, and their remoras in Congress, seem to be immune to the effect of optics that would have toppled previous regimes…
Chetan Murthy
I’ve mentioned this Baffler interview of Melinda Cooper ( https://thebaffler.com/latest/extravagances-of-neoliberalism-kunkel ) and her related new book _Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance_ before. They go into -detail- (the book is half footnotes – she brings -all- the receipts) for -how- that massive transfer of wealth to the rich was engineered. I’m going to paraphrase just a little taste — the interview itself is amazing, and I’ve re-read it something like four times over the c ouple of months since it came out. Just amazing.
Cooper explains that deficit spending is wont to generate inflation, b/c it increases the money supply. So where did the money go? Where is the inflation? Why, it’s in -assets-: real estate, financial instruments! And this was -engineered- to be the case! When you give somebody’s plant a tax abatement for 20yr, you’ve given them an -asset- that they can then go to the bank and get a loan upon; you’ve goosed the value of that plant! When you accelerate depreciation on real estate, that increases the value of the real estate! And all of this had the -predictable- (and predicted) effect of reducing investment in manufacturing. [This was the eye-opening part] If you’re a manufacturer, or anybody else in the real economy, the cost of -land- (of offices, etc) is a -cost of production-. Land is an -input-. So rising land prices means more costs. They -engineered- this, and it caused manufacturing to flee, not to stay here. The same thing happens when you lower corporate income (or capital gains) taxes: suddenly it becomes more profitable than before to declare income, instead of to reinvest. And guess what happened when they did that? Reinvestment plummeted and instead buybacks increased.
There’s a ton more, and she has all the receipts. Just amazing work. I read it, thinking to myself: my mainland Europe friends need to read this before it’s too late (it already -is- too late in the UK).
HopefullyNotcassandra
At least America will not have a shortage of Botox injectors and filler pumping dermatologists.
Betty Cracker
@Karen: Trump cultists are impervious to facts, and some areas are so saturated with them it’s probably correct to predict that there will be no political blowback for Trumpy Republicans harming their own constituents. But while Trump cultists are a distressingly large plurality nationwide and a majority in some areas, they are not a majority nationwide, and the margins in some states are thin. So yeah, public opinion still matters as long as elections are a thing.
Cathie from Canada
Nice to know that $50 million for a stupid wedding only “appears lavish” to us peasants but isn’t really. That makes us all feel really petty for daring to critique our betters
Sorry, I’ll try to appreciate the beautiful moment…
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Chetan Murthy: thanks, this is great.
Here in NYC, the most recent democratic primary was a referendum of did we want another mayor who thinks that the landlords should get whatever rent they want, the rich should have more parking in a city not built for cars, and the white people shouldn’t have to see a homeless person, or did we want someone who seems to care about something other than asset values?
As long as elections can be held, I think people will be wiling to try to take back our government and save our democracy. However, the only place where people can see the rich are living wholly different, much more comfortable lives are in cities like NY, which are big enough to still have poor people. I’m not sure what can save the red states.
rikyrah
I did not search for, but my TikTok feed was full of videos this weekend, skewering the lack of taste of the bride.
satby
@Chetan Murthy: Krugman has been writing about that for years. Including the series he’s been doing about rising financial inequality in his last several long form columns.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
I don’t see this as a Second gilded Age, but more as an “Electroplated Age. The coating is much thinner, and the base metal is thicker..
There’s an ad cover of “People” magazine showing the Kardashians/Jenners in all their plastic “glory”. It makes me wonder if any of them have souls, and, when they finally die, do they get buried or recycled?
NotMax
I can’t begrudge the expense. I can begrudge being able to spend so much without giving a second thought to the pinch to their wallet.
rikyrah
@Karen:
maybe it won’t, but it will make it all the more satisfying, when they have to go pick up Grandma and Grandpa from the Nursing Home that just closed. I honestly can’t wait to see the mental gymnastics they’ll go through in order to not accept the blame that their votes for the GOP caused this.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
That doesn’t sound right. It’s blaming Reagan and tax cuts instead of Clinton and NAFTA for manufacturing woes.
Rachel Bakes
First i heard of the Bezos bash was in a chatty radio piece Thursday that highlighted their sourcing all of the food and drink as well as glass and linens from Venice and the surrounding area. Not ordered paper from Amazon then? Was my first thought. The 2nd: I bloody well hope they did!
Josie
@Betty Cracker:
I hope that the powers that be in the Democratic party are studying ways to ensure that we continue to have free and fair elections. The elections are the only way to dig our way out of this, so I’m sure the opposition is working on plans of their own.
Terraformer
When people see and experience the impacts of this bill, I fully expect MAGA to blame Dems for it, somehow, and, aided by a largely captured press and media, no small percentage will believe it
Steve LaBonne
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): I keep saying that Carnegie was an utter bastard but compared to Elon Skum he was a public benefactor and damn near a saint. I think this is the Gold-Tone Plastic Age.
They Call Me Noni
Meanwhile the groom’s ex has been giving billions to charities for the past several years. What a juxtaposition.
Steve LaBonne
@Terraformer: Only a fairly modest proportion need to understand what happened to seriously damage Republican electoral prospects.
Captain C
@rikyrah: Today’s equivalent of Rush Limbaugh or whatever their YouTube or TikTok algorithm will tell them it’s all the Democrats’ fault, in particular, Biden, Obama, or Harris, and they’ll believe it.
If there were a button that could inflict the suffering exclusively on FFOTUS voters, I would press it in a heartbeat.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chetan Murthy:
Good companion, long form, pieces to Cooper’s interview (which informs a lot of shitty policy pushes on both sides of the aisle):
https://bpr.studentorg.berkeley.edu/2017/03/28/donalds-manufacturing-myth/
https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-political-economy-of-the-urban-rural-divide/
ArchTeryx
It’s 2017 all over again, with the Senate on the cusp of passing ACA repeal, no matter what sneaky or fawning name they call the bill. Will a McCain step up and sink it this time? That’s what we’re down to. I am of the firm belief the cake is baked, unless Thom Tillis decides to play John McCain this time around.
If he doesn’t, then our goose is cooked and so is the medical system of the U.S. That I depend on to stay alive. I no longer depend on Medicaid for my medical care, but my job depends on it. Losing my job and then promptly being rejected for Medicaid would have the same effect as losing Medicaid in 2017: My death. Just 8 years later.
And they got a lot smarter in those 8 years. There were no keggers celebrating THIS bill’s passage in the House. Nothing that could make the rounds all over the news media. They passed it in the wee hours so nobody was watching. And no doubt Thune is on the alert for ANY sign of a McCain in his caucus.
I’ve already been through multiple suicidal crises. Only my fiancee and best friend are the reason I am still alive at this point. Because it seems no matter what happens, my goose is cooked.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
@Steve LaBonne: I like your take on both.
It’s sort of amusing/ironic that Carnegie and Samuel Gompers are buried within 100 yards of each other. Wonder if they’ve met?
Jeffro
many people are saying ;)
brendancalling
@Terraformer: Don’t forget the part where Dems don’t defend themselves, and those that do get attacked by leadership!
JoyceH
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): Funny thing – the vibe I’m getting is Ancien Regime. When the peasants’ rage finally overthrew that group of gilded wasters, their symbol was the guillotine. And they didn’t just go after the adults, they whacked their kids too. I wonder if the parents of deported cancer patients will pity them then?
Jeffro
In a world full of Jeffs…be a MacKenzie!
Bill Arnold
A Red Wedding, with delayed redness, and different motivations.
Jay
https://bsky.app/profile/gregsargent.bsky.social/post/3lstfem36ss2e
bbleh
@Karen: @Betty Cracker: yeah I think the hard-core MAGAts are beyond hope — no matter how bad things get, THEIR team is WINNING by hating on the right people, and that’s pretty much the whole ball game. But as noted, there are a lotta low-information normies, who may LEAN Republican and vote that way when they do vote, but they’re much more about vibes and “egg prices” and whatever else drifted across their screens recently, and having a leopard chew on their faces a bit might wake them up *IF* the Democrats scream loudly about who let the leopards loose.
There seems to be a tendency to assume that voters just are how they are and won’t budge, which certainly is true for SOME of them but not all. I got no patience for “keep your powder dry” Dem politicians; they should clear out and let someone take their place who will, y’know, DO POLITICS
@Terraformer: @Steve LaBonne: this also, too.
Seonachan
“This means Bezos’ wedding was financially similar to an average American spending less than $250 on their wedding—about the cost of a family dinner or a new pair of sneakers.”
Is that at all accurate? That’s way more than what I pay for either of those things.
Sister Golden Bear
The Clerical Six don’t want us trans people to exist.
SCOTUS orders judges to revisit decisions on transgender health plans, birth certificates in wake of blockbuster ruling
The fact they did this on the last day of Pride Month isn’t an accident.
Chetan Murthy
@satby: Yes, Krugman -indeed- has. And I really like his writing. Honestly, Krugman is a better writer than Cooper. So why read Cooper? B/c she lays out all the -detalis-. She brings you a tick-tok of events from the late 70s, all the players in the massive theft, all the details of how it happened.
Also, haha, in the book she uses the career of one Donald John Trump as a thru-line, illustrating how he profited from and later helped to increase the tax treatments that produced this inequality. In the book we learn -why- he could become rich off the back of businesses that were intrinsically unprofitable: because of favorable tax treatment (again and again). And when some of that was undone in 1986, he went to teetering on the edge of bankruptcy (haha!)
I’ve read people saying that Piketty did much the same in his book Capital in the 21st Century: put in basically -all- the details, all the answers to counter-arguments, in order to make the book irrefutable. That’s what I sort of feel like Cooper is doing here.
Again, not the same as what Krugman does in his public-facing columns; maybe more what he does when he writes papers intended for other economists.
Also, I should add that her “Conclusions” chapter (wherein she tries to sketch out what we can do about all this) is ….. unconvincing. It left me feeling that we were doomed. But that doesn’t change that the majority of her book is a -diagnosis- and as a diagnosis was really, really eye-opening.
Another tidbit: the rich were absolutely -against- deficit spending that benefited the masses, that increased consumption. Why? Because that would and could cause inflation in the prices of goods and services. And -that- would effectively deflate the value of their assets. [if my trust fund doesn’t increase in value, but cars cost more, then I’m effectively taking a hit!] Whereas asset inflation with price stability in goods&services is the same as -deflation-. And then I remembered that The Owners love, love, love deflation!
Peke Daddy
If the media defines elite deviance down any lower, it’ll hit the earth’s core.
Shalimar
The thing is, $47 to $56 million is relatively cheap. It’s pocket change for Bezos. If you increased his taxes 100 times that much, he wouldn’t even notice it missing.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Chetan Murthy: why do they call this neo-liberalism when there is not anyone remotely resembling a liberal involved?
The interviewee says Bill Clinton. Yet, he and the democratically controlled Congress actually raised taxes, including on capital gains. This was a straight up Keynesian move.
Milton Friedman is to liberalism what heat is to a carton of ice cream.
How is a policy by and for folks akin to Montgomery Burns labeled as neoliberal? Is this plain old doublespeak? Why do we continue using this Luntz-like language?
Ronald Reagan introduced the supply side voodoo economics. This is a con project. No doubt, there have been democratic joiners. None of those can be accurately defined as any kind of “liberal”, neo or otherwise.
If this reverse Robinhood is “neo” anything, it is simply in the labeling.
I do wish folks purportedly on the side of what actually works to make an economy thrive would stop accepting the gop-false framing. Otherwise, this is a truly excellent link. This book looks to be well worth the read.
Peke Daddy
@Seonachan: That’s how much they would pay for those things. Couldn’t bother to do the math for the Great majority.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: A problem can have multiple sources. It’s definitely true that NAFTA (and the “China shock”) both did a number on manufacturing. But for instance, notice that part of what made manufacturing cheaper in China, was that so many of the inputs were cheaper there — including land. And well-situated factories in the US could be converted to fancy “loft apartments” and such, earning the developer a pretty penny.
rusty
SCOTUS announced they are taking up a major campaign finance case, how much the parties can finance candidates. Given this court, those rules are doomed, as are any that limit outside contributions. Add that directly paying a politician after the fact is a “mere gratuity”, and the practical necessity of a written contract to prove bribery, the ownership of our government by the wealthy is only going to get worse.
Deputinize America
I like your ideas and wonder if you have a newsletter available for subscription….
JiveTurkin
Jeff Bezos’ greatest contribution to the world was his divorce to his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has donated $19.3 billion to charity. Other than that, he sounds like just another Trump toadie.
ArchTeryx
@Sister Golden Bear: They don’t want my folks or I to exist either. Believe me, that’s why I am an ally: I’m on the firing line too.
JiveTurkin
President Donald Trump gushed over the “beautiful” White House reporter Hariana Veras, despite his Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt advising him against making such comments.
Hariana Veras wasn’t originally in the camera’s view when the signing had begun, but Trump invited her to come behind the desk next to him so “they can see you,” which is contradictory to the usual press protocol.
What a revolting pig. Trump’s the sort of guy who catcalls women and thinks its a compliment.
Deputinize America
I mean, the people of Venice were disgusted with the Bezos wedding even before it was started. They didn’t need it – they have enough tourist money coming in now and didn’t want the disruptions of hyperwealth.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
A shitton of people with (D) after their names endorse this shit lock, stock and barrel:
https://archive.ph/Bj8Ac
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-06-16-real-democratic-civil-war/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Progressive%20unity%20in%20New%20York&utm_campaign=20250616%20Kuttner%20on%20TAP
Aspects of it have been been peddled in here for years.
AKA The Man
@pat: And that’s just Bezos and the guests!!
E.
Horror, sickness, dread. That’s most of what I feel anymore. Everything you need to know to diagnose us is in that Newsweek link.
satby
@Chetan Murthy: well, I’ve followed Krugman and read his books as well as his columns for years, so none of that seems revelatory. But for less geeky people than me (IOW, almost everyone) it sounds worthwhile. BTW, my favorite Krugman book is Arguing With Zombies, you might enjoy it.
dc
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Liberal means to liberate. Neoliberals want to liberate capital from any government restrictions, government’s job is to keep the non rich obedient, protect the rich and line their pockets.
PaulWartenberg
Still #TeamOrca
Ohio Mom
@ArchTeryx: You know what Voltaire said, “Doubt is uncomfortable but certainty is ridiculous.”
Hang in there.
Old School
Probably not. “The Democrats didn’t stop them! They’re just as bad.” “Why haven’t the Democrats fixed it?!?” “The cause of it is bad Democrat policies in the <whatever level of government applies at the time>.”
Hopefully there’s enough people who survive that vote Democratic.
Chetan Murthy
I think it’s using the European meaning of “liberal”. If you google your question, you’ll find answers relating neoliberalism to “classical liberalism”, and as we well know (haha) that ain’t liberal in any way, shape, or form.
Re: RaYgUn, she is unremitting in her excoriation of the man and all who rode in him. Justly so.
re: Clinton, I’ll just paste the one bit I remember from the book; perhaps there are other bits [I confess that of the 50% that is not footnotes, I read about half — so, 25% of the book; in the end, I just couldn’t hold all the details]
Professor Bigfoot
@Deputinize America: I’d pay a subscription fee for BC’s podcast.
A hefty one, at that.
satby
@JiveTurkin: And she intends to give away more. Bezos really downgraded in his latest marriage. Mackenzie is prettier too.
Ksmiami
The Dems need to go hard or go home
Betty Cracker
@bbleh: Yep. I think an electoral house cleaning is coming on the Dem side too, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Josh Marshall (gift link):
I think he’s right. The media is confused about who the Democratic Party is. It’s us, the voters.
Ohio Mom
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): Proof that we are all equal in death (admittedly, the run up to death is another matter).
cmorenc
@pat:
The very finest bolt-ons money can buy.
(“Bolt-ons is a wonderfully apt, if crude metaphorical description of surgically enhanced boobs).
Professor Bigfoot
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Yeah, we all know he’s talking about the WHITE working class (yes, the rest of us fucking WORK, bub!) and as every single prescription from white men goes, it’s the same– suck up to white men and ditch everyone else if you want to have a voice at the table.
What a load of absolute zebra shit.
Chetan Murthy
@satby: *grin* OK, so: I actually think it’s the other way around: Cooper’s book (and to some extent that interview) will appeal to the geekiest, who want as much of the detail as they can stand. Krugman (rightly, correctly) writes to appear to the less-geeky, b/c he understands his role as a public intellectual. A public intellectual must meet the public where they are.
Cooper isn’t that: she is writing as close to an academic treatise as one might imagine, and while sure she probably thinks she’s writing as a public intellectual, she really isn’t. The book is to densely argued, too densely packed with information, to be suitable reading for most laypeople.
The reason I found it illuminating is that I’ve been marinating in the writings of Krugman et al for years and years, and Cooper goes the next step, fills in the next step in the argument.
TL;DR for people who haven’t already read a bunch of Krugman, the most useful step is to do just that: read a bunch of Krugman.
rikyrah
This Isn’t a Budget. It’s a Betrayal.
The “pro-life” party my ass.
JoJoFromJerz
Jun 30, 2025
There was a time in my life when I didn’t know how I was going to feed my kids.
I was a paraprofessional in a public school classroom, working with autistic preschoolers—tiny, luminous souls who hadn’t yet found their voices. I was there for their first words, their first real smiles, their first trembling moments of safety in a world that so often meets them with confusion or cruelty. That work wasn’t just a job—it was sacred. I gave it every ounce of patience, love, and hope I had.
But I was barely surviving. My paycheck was a cruel joke—nowhere near a living wage.
My friends became lifelines, quietly tucking bags of groceries into my back seat while I pretended not to notice, their kindness wrapped in dignity instead of pity. I sobbed on the phone with the oil company, my voice shaking as I begged for one more extension, promising I’d find a way, somehow. Every day was a gauntlet of impossible choices: groceries or hot water, gas for the car or dinner on the table. I stood in the checkout line, hands trembling, doing frantic math in my head, praying I wouldn’t have to put anything back, praying no one would see how close I was to breaking.
https://jojofromjerz.substack.com/p/this-isnt-a-budget-its-a-betrayal
Omnes Omnibus
Aside from the expense, this wedding was vulgar AF. It remind me of the food choice and social class quiz that was floating around Bluesky this weekend.*. One of the items that I presume was meant to be upper class was an ice cream cone coated in 24 ct gold foil. It may be expensive, but it was tacky as all get out imo.
*I got upper middle class as my food choice preference.
Old School
Wow – how cheap is Bezos to not splurge on his wedding?
Wow – how cheap am I when I buy sneakers or family dinners?
ArchTeryx
@Ohio Mom: I truly appreciate the encouragement. At least SOMEONE noticed my post, albeit I don’t post very often.
Things have been horrible for me for 2 months, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the Big Ugly Nihilism Bill. I’ve been hit from every direction at once. Hanging on by my fingernails is all I got left.
Chetan Murthy
@pat: There was a Guardian article about “gravity-defying boobs” recently, prompted by all this Lauren Sanchez bullshit. I will confess that I didn’t read it, b/c just don’t care. All I care about is when we start taxing the fuck out of these monsters.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/28/a-marker-of-luxury-and-arrogance-why-gravity-defying-boobs-are-back-and-what-they-say-about-the-state-of-the-world
ArchTeryx
@Omnes Omnibus: Edible gold foil is, IMHO, just plain disgusting. It provides zero nutrition or taste to any part of the human body and enough of it will screw up the water treatment (just as New York City about that). It exists for no other reason than touristy kitsch and conspicuous consumption. Gold is valuable for far, far more reasons than that, and wasting it on edible gold foil is criminal.
Jay
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
snip
Professor Bigfoot
@JoyceH: I am reminded of the Haitian Revolution.
Professor Bigfoot
@Seonachan: I assumed an extended family dinner (like for a wedding) and a pair of Jordans (can’t get married in a pair Walmart sneakers for goodness sake).
MattF
Noticed right away in BC’s post that average American family income ($1,063,700) is several times higher than median income ($192,900). Which is (obviously) due to the excessively long tail of high-income parasites. So… here we are.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: Bezos seems the classic one who forgot where he came from; and won’t dance with the one who brung ’em.
Like all those men who file for divorce when their wives get a cancer diagnosis (may every one of those men wake with hives every day and in the worst possible places).
cmorenc
@Chetan Murthy:
By the end of Clinton’s term, the US was actually on a trajectory to pay the federal debt down to zero by around 2012. And then, even before 9/11 and the immensely exhorbitant Mesopotanian wars came along, George W. Bush pushed through huge tax cuts that put us back on the track to progressively increasing indebtedness, exacerbated by Trump’s huge 2017 tax cuts. The long-term goal of the GOP conservatives isn’t putting government on sound, affordable financial footing but to create a perpetual state of crippling indebtedness that of itself will gradually crush safety net and other public spending, leaving only enough for the military and minimal core federal government institutions (Treasury, etc).
Josie
@rikyrah:
I just clicked over and read the entire post. So true and so well written. She really nails it. I hope it gets circulated widely.
Chetan Murthy
@cmorenc: OK, so yes to all of that. But -also-, it is to transfer wealth to the rich, in order to impoverish the rest of us. As I related Cooper’s observation, when you inflate the price of financial assets, you’re effectively deflating the value of goods&services. When you hold wages down and inflate the price of real estate, again you’re deflating the value of wages.
This was by design.
Kayla Rudbek
@Omnes Omnibus: in my opinion, that food test was very skewed towards the Northeast/mid-Atlantic as being automatically upper class. A better test would be “where do you do most of your grocery/food shopping?” With regional adjustments for stores, of course.
And I don’t eat caviar or foie gras because of how they’re sourced/made, it has nothing to do with money.
Chetan Murthy
@cmorenc: Cooper also has a significant discussion (really, a thru-line in the book) about minorities, women, and LGBTQ demanding equal rights, and how the wealthy simply didn’t want to give in on that. Their reaction was to enshrine the role of the -family- (and the sole breadwinner of the family — the male) as the chief entity thru which social support would be delivered. This allowed them to bring onside blue-collar male workers against those other groups I mentioned above.
She’s originally a sociologist, and so she goes into some detail for how so much of what transpired was a war on minorities, women, and LGBTQ. Again, eye-opening.
Jay
@MattF:
It’s the old saying, there are 10 guys in a bar, all barely getting by.
Bill Gates walks in and the average person in the bar is a billionaire,
The Median person in the bar is one paycheck away from being homeless.
satby
@rikyrah: I feel that excerpt so hard because that was my life too for the first 10 years after my marriage ended. Bill lottery, alternating which utility bill could wait another month and occasionally gambling wrong and having service cut off, trying to feed kids decently with no money (never got food stamps). You don’t forget that. Neither do your kids.
Maccheerful
The problem with relative comparisons like that is it pretends we’re all about in the same position, just at different levels of largeness.
Nope. 50 million gets you things that 250 never will and never could. The ability of wealth to smooth out all the inconveniences of life, apart from annoying political protests, is something the average income American will never experience.
It’s a stupid comparison as it pretends that lives are equal and it’s only a trivial question how many digits your income is.
MattF
@Chetan Murthy: Interesting. I’ve often noted that record-breaking market indexes aren’t inflationary, although it means prices of shares are going up. I’ll have to read that interview.
rikyrah
@ArchTeryx:
I remember 2017
I am beyond enraged that we are here again.
Please hang in there.
Chetan Murthy
@MattF: Yes! She discusses this — that nobody measures inflation in the capital stock of a nation, only in goods&services, and -wages-. It’s -designed- to privilege capital/wealth, and put the boot on the neck of workers.
Ohio Mom
@ArchTeryx: Yes, we are having a spring/early summer like that in Ohio Family. Lots of setbacks. Watching Ohio Son’s social safety net get shredded is just the cherry on top. But still, it’s one foot in front of the other. Because there really isn’t any other choice.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: and the usurious “reparations” that the Kingdom of France forced Haiti to pay. Which prevented that nation from ever being able to build and invest in education and other public good. They paid from 1825 until 1947!
IMO, France needs to pay them back.
JWR
God I hate these people. From NBC:
Oh go f*ck yourself, Pammy.
eclare
@Omnes Omnibus:
I just took the test and got lower middle class. Makes sense, that’s how I was raised. Plus I have a weakness for any form of potatoes or mac and cheese.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@MattF: Yeah, I thought about that too. I used to have to teach the difference between average and median to English grad students, and I did it by saying that if Bill Gates walked into the room, the median would probably not change, but on average, we’d all be millionaires. That’s what you see there.
ETA: Jay at 85 said it better.
Ohio Mom
@MattF: Nit pick: don’t confuse income and wealth. As for the average and median wealth numbers, I’m thinking some of that wealth must include house equity. Nice to have but not exactly liquid.
divF
@Chetan Murthy: The following quote
raises my suspicions, if not my hackles. Clinton attempted to put over universal health insurance, and was slapped down by the republicans. If the author is so egregiously wrong on this, it causes me to wonder whether she is grinding axes elsewhere.
ArchTeryx
@rikyrah: Yeah. I’m hardly alone in this. Every single person on Medicaid in New York State, and everyone that works in the Office of Health Insurance Programs at the NYS Department of Health, has been watching this bill very, very nervously. You can tell the panic here is starting to rise in earnest as the bill gets closer to passage.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Agreed. But you wouldn’t know that from political rhetoric.
Bokonon
They are really mansplaining to us, aren’t they? Telling us not to be offended, and to re-consider this wedding to be something appropriate and terrific. It’s a bargain even! We should all nod along and focus on the trickle down economic effects!
One really has to wonder at the perverse reasons Newsweek’s editors chose to take this angle … it seems unnatural. Were they reading off a publicity sheet handed over by Bezos?
eclare
@Jay:
The average income for UNC grads in geography is astronomically high because that was Michael Jordan’s major.
Loquacious Scribble, PhD
Interestingly, to this historian anyway, the first Gilded Age had an analogous even called the Bradley-Martin Ball at the Waldorf in NYC in 1897.
Chetan Murthy
@divF: She mentioned universal health care in that passage. Also several more times; here’s a pull-quote:
Remember also that the end of Glass-Steagall came on Clinton’s watch, and that was an -enormous- gift to the wealthy.
I think it’s indisputable that Clinton tried to hold back the worst of the GOP’s depredations. But let’s not forget that Bob Rubin was his Treasury secretary and Larry Summers worked for him.
satby
@eclare: 😂😂 that IS funny!
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: From the book:
RaflW
Javanka attending Bozos’s wedding tells us plenty about how Jeff & company travel in the orbit of Trump, and why the Post is not even fit for fishwrap these days.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Bush negotiated NAFTA IIRC, Clinton campaigned on it, and it passed Congress with Republican votes. I don’t care if people don’t like it, but it’s odd that it somehow became just a Democratic thing.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: She has a significant discussion about how the wealthy turned part of organized labor against the rest: blue-collar trades against public sector and services unions.
Splitting Image
@JoyceH:
It’s worth reading up on the French Flour War and the role of Turgot in creating the crisis.
Up until 1774, French grain was severely regulated so that the crown could easily move grain from anywhere with good harvests to anywhere with poor harvests. This was one of the most popular things the crown did.
One of Louis XVI’s first hires was the economist Turgot, who immediately advocated for deregulating the grain industry. There was a very poor harvest the following winter (1774-5), and instead of getting relief from the crown, they got crisis pricing by aristocrats who hoarded grain and sold it at a profit. By the following spring there were riots. Louis’ image never recovered.
What was that quote about people never remembering who gave them something but sure as hell remembering who took it away?
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@pat:
The best money can buy.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Also too, the Republican wave election of 1994.
Baud
@Splitting Image:
I have a feeling we’re going to test that theory.
WTFGhost
@Albatrossity: It’s kind of the point of the Big Lie; as long as Republicans think that Democrats are going to seize your children, turn 38% of them trans, turn another 22% of them gay, and another 42% of them liberal, while raping and murdering all the rest (-2%), they’ll support anything Republicans announce as triumphally destroying those evil Democrats.
If a large bloc of Republicans were willing to speak out, optics might help, but, as long as Fox News and other rightwing liars insist everything is fine, it looks like only the liberal media is complaining, and since the liberal media is part of the destruction of a full 102% of our children, they need to be destroyed too.
@Cathie from Canada: Meh. It was a numeracy article, and not very well written. There are two points to them. One is perspective. Once, I saw a sports writer say he’d lost more to gambling than Michael Jordan (who was the victim of a golf shark), because he lost a few thousand over the years, which, compared to his annual income, was a much higher percentage than what Jordan lost. “So while Jordan sounds like he has a gambling problem, what he’s lost is comparatively small compared to his assets.”
The other, of course, is a sort of numerical pun, where you try to pretend the numbers are small, and then surprise the reader with the ratio of spent-dollars to net worth, “so even 56 million is actually tiny.”
It can be done well, but it’s not easy to do well, since so few people like math.
@rikyrah: They’ll just blame the Democrats for mismanaging Medicaid.
@Baud: Reagan does bear a lot of blame for our current situation. If the top tax rate is 70%, you’re more interested in a business that will keep doing business, and earning you money, indefinitely. You don’t want to sell, and lose 70% of the sale value.
When the top tax rate is 35%, you get over twice as much from a sale. The same issue is why, e.g., pensions now receive little employer support – a pension donation costs a lot more, when the tax rates are low.
At 70% tax, you’re only spending 30 cents on the dollar for a pension donation, and you often can rig things so 30 cents per dollar, or more, are going to you and your top rated employees, not the worker bees, so you actually get more than you pay.
I won’t say that tax policy caused the loss of manufacturing, I’m just ready to believe it. I’m equally ready to believe NAFTA was a bad idea, and caused the majority of the damage, but, since I know how to lie with statistics, I’m wary of letting an economist lie to me thereby… I can defend myself on the statistical plane, but not the economic.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: Baud, we can celebrate Obama’s ACA, while still decrying the way he bailed-out bankers and not homeowners. We can celebrate that Clinton held back the tide of Republican destruction, while still decrying that he ended “welfare as we know it” and nuked Glass-Steagall, setting us up for the Financial Crisis.
[Cooper has a section about the S&L crisis and how it was engineered by RaYgUn’s tax expenditures]
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Most of the bailout was during Bush, although Obama voted for it as Senator.
No kidding. And we can be honest about all of these things without ignoring the political environment in which people were operating or ignoring Republican contributions to the problem.
I’m glad we’ve gotten that straightened out
SN in CO
Possibly the best phasing I have seen in a long time: “Jeff Bezos was marrying an AI-generated hologram.” It captures the current era so well. . . . And the phrase “the gilded age” was also originally satire because the age was not truly golden, but merely gilded
I will say that in listening to the endless debates in Balloon Juice comments, there is still a strong sense that things will never change – that the Trump shills will never wake up, and the Republican game, as played from Reagan to the present will never change. . . . But as a thought experiment, as yourself – what if that isn’t the case? What if the juxtaposition of the obscene wedding spending with the Big Beautiful Bill actually does sink into the national non-political consciousness. . . . Perhaps change might actually be coming. . . . Just consider that possibility.
Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
And turned Unions, mostly Service Unions against themselves, with wages, benefits and pensions for the “old” members and minimal wages, benefits and 401K’s for new members.
Chetan Murthy
@WTFGhost:
It was either Dean Baker or Mark A.R. Kleiman [rest in peace] who pointed out that this applied in spades to executive compensation. When paying out massively to your C-suite, if they’re gonna have to cough up 70% to the IRS, that doesn’t sound so great; being able to reinvest all of it sounds pretty good. But when you can arrange that they pay 20% [capital gains, b/c stock buybacks] it sure looks good!
Hence, these tax cuts for capital had the (haha) “perverse effect” of causing more cash-outs, buybacks, and -less- investment in businesses.
Chetan Murthy
She’s an Australian sociologist writing -economic history-, not a politican scientist. And why should she care about the political alignments of various actors? Why should she care that Larry Summers was hired by two different Dem administrations? What matters about him is that he had power, and he was a neoliberal.
From where she sits, what matters is that the neoliberals colonized both parties (and sure, their -base- was the GOP). If you were French, would you be arguing that we cannot criticize Macron b/c he was a Socialist ?
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Fair enough. I didn’t look into her background. Some of the excerpts you posted made it seem like she was talking about more than economics.
Belafon
@They Call Me Noni: I need her to buy a couple of media outlets.
Ramona
@Chetan Murthy: Thanks for this! It’s very clarifying!
eclare
@rikyrah:
Great essay, thanks.
They Call Me Noni
@Belafon: I hear Tic Tok is for sale
Omnes Omnibus
@Chetan Murthy: Why should it matter? Because governing decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen in the political context of their time. As a result, the political context matters a fuck load.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chetan Murthy:
+1
WTFGhost
@Seonachan: A dinner for four at a nice restaurant can run to $250 easily, but we can assume he’s thinking in-laws, to make eight, which is more reasonable for a less pricy restaurant. Sneakers – I can only assume these are the basketball shoes that get people shot.
@Omnes Omnibus: Gold foil around the cone strikes me as something Donald Trump would design, only, he’d keep the gold foil and find a gold colored paint (if it’s edible, he’ll consider that a bonus, not a necessity) to use instead.
@ArchTeryx: I noticed, but in my current depressed, pained, state, couldn’t think of much to add that wouldn’t be too… ordinary. But I saw, I noticed, and I understood, insofar as I can with different circumstances. I feel much like you do – as far as Republicans are concerned, I’m “waste, fraud, and abuse,” because I haven’t been officially designated disabled but it’s literally impossible for me to work.
@MattF: Nitpick: those are net worth values. The median family owns a house, hence >100k; the average family owns a lot more.
@Kayla Rudbek: I’ve heard stories of ethical foie gras farms, where the ducks and geese are treated as gently as possible, because that made it easiest to harvest the best foie gras. I can’t say whether they were ethical or not – I’m not an avian vet! But it did sound closer to actual farming, where you care for the animals, so they’re healthy for harvest, vs factory farming.
@satby: France needs to have their top political leaders live the lives of slaves for ten days, and then be told they can stay, or France can pay the ransom.
Betty Cracker
@SN in CO:
I fully understand the hopelessness and feel it myself often enough, but amen to that.
zhena gogolia
@SN in CO: I also loved Betty’s phrase! So apt.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: France should.
Haiti is one of two Francophone countries in the western hemisphere; and honestly, the two of them should band together to support moving Haiti into the modern world.
Instead Haiti and Haitians remain the scapegoats of the world (why, they’re eating the dogs! they’re eating the cats!) 🤬
Edited because, well, it was somewhat incoherent. Now it’s just pissed off.
TEL
@Betty Cracker: Yeah, I think it’s more accurate to say that things don’t change until they do. And its often unexpected in the way that comes about (at least to me).
Glory b
@Chetan Murthy: Public sector & service unions = black people.
MattF
@Ohio Mom:
@WTFGhost:
You’re right. I’d have sworn the OP said ‘income’ and not ‘wealth’— and actually thought I checked for that. Goes to show you can think you’re being careful and still get it wrong.
Westyny
@bjacques: “Oh my god, it’s full of boobs!”
Professor Bigfoot
There has to be a reason why German manufacturing remains pretty strong despite the availability of high quality Chinese stuff; and the fact that the unions have positions on corporate boards is I believe part of it.
hitchhiker
@MattF: Thank you. That discrepancy is the most interesting thing about our current mess.
I know this thread is dead, but just in case anybody is still listening, when you look at household wealth and the median (couple hundred thousand) and the average (a million) are so far apart, it’s bad.
The median is the number in the middle. If you put all the household wealth numbers in a row, lowest to highest, one of them would be the middle. Half the households would have more than this much wealth, and half would have less.
The average is what you get if you take that row of numbers, add them all up, and then divide by how many there were. The fact that this number is 5 times higher than the median means that a shit ton of the population’s money is very concentrated at the high end of the scale.
And, for the record, it’s absolutely a crisis right now that half the households in the USA are worth less than $200,000. That might not be true in places with functioning safety nets, but here — where even a small medical emergency can bankrupt you — it’s fucking terrifying.
glc
(In short: a day ending in y.)
Professor Bigfoot
@hitchhiker: I just started getting the bills from my hospital stay in April, and sweet baby Jesus. And they’ve only just begun!
LAC
@divF: well, we still got the tired “(white) working class male anger” angle still being hyped by our media punditry, as if their anger focused on the wrong people and issues is foremost and justifiable after all this time. Why would the realities of a president working with the type of Congress WE voted for stop them from making a point?
satby
@Baud: Actually, the pull quotes have convinced me not to bother with the book. Her axe is showing.
LAC
@Professor Bigfoot: ugh!! How many pages?
catclub
Sneakers? I have no idea. I agree that is a pretty steep family dinner. Unless 10 people.
On the third hand, I am pretty sure they switched average and median wealth. So their numerical credibility is falling.
frosty
@Omnes Omnibus: Here’s my food choice:
Your food choices could not be tied to any one social class.
They’re simple though. Don’t expect me to eat anything raw, or shellfish. Especially raw shellfish. Oysters, Blecchh!
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub: Depends on the type of restaurant, the location and the number of people. So it’s meaningless.
@frosty: I’ll take your share then.
lowtechcyclist
@pat:
Should be the caption of a picture of the Senate GOP Caucus.
lowtechcyclist
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Neo-ligarchy?
Steve Paradis
All that money and Lauren can only afford Joker brand cosmetics.
https://youtu.be/cROY4m4Ftiw?si=Xj-PQoq0dR4mcWvw
Citizen Alan
@Omnes Omnibus: Apparently, I have Lower Middle Class tastes. I guess you can take the boy out of Mississippi, but you can’t quite get the Mississippi out of the boy. (Though it probably didn’t help that the pictures were frequently very unappetizing pics of foods that I like in the abstract.)
SteveinPHX
@Chetan Murthy: Thanks. I found the citation, printed a copy for later reading/digestion.
All the best,
S.