America has a billionaire problem because the morbidly rich billionaires own or control so many of the nation’s channels of news and discussion, from social media to television networks to newspapers, and they are close to owning the whole of our government.
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TRANSCRIPT
Thom: America—it’s titled America Chose Wealth Over Well-being. Billionaires rewrote the American Dream. While other nations offer universal benefits, we doubled down on having billionaires.
Yesterday, Congress certified the Electoral College vote, making a billionaire president again. Starting January 20th, after he’s sworn in, we’ll have chosen a billionaire again—after other billionaires spent billions convincing us to make that choice.
Right now, as you listen to my voice, billionaires from America and around the world are making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage. They’re bringing envelopes stuffed with million-dollar checks, which for most of them represent just minutes or hours of income for their companies.
Meanwhile, our billionaire president is packing his cabinet with billionaires—the most in history. This has been celebrated on billionaire-owned Fox News, billionaire-owned hate radio networks, and in billionaire-owned publications like The Washington Post, The LA Times, and the many American local newspapers owned by billionaire hedge funds.
Here’s the bottom line: other developed countries enjoy benefits like free healthcare and college, modern mass transit, affordable housing, and safe food and drugs. They have inexpensive internet and phone services without companies spying on them and selling their data. Their schools don’t need to prepare for school shooters, and their streets and parks are filled with children, not tents for the homeless.
They also benefit from renewable electricity, which gets cheaper every year while cleaning their environment. But here in America, our distinction is having the world’s largest collection of billionaires. That’s what we chose in 1980.
There’s history here. In 1973, near the end of Nixon’s administration, we took Israel’s side in the Yom Kippur War, and Arab nations punished us with an oil embargo. This triggered inflation, an economic crash, and 15 years of “stagflation”—high inflation and unemployment.
Nixon’s odd-even gas rationing days didn’t work and angered people. Ford’s “WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) buttons were a joke, ensuring he’d be a one-term president. Jimmy Carter made progress, cutting inflation substantially, creating the National Solar Bank, and putting solar panels on the White House.
But Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with Iran’s Ayatollah to hold the hostages, sinking Carter’s presidency. When Reagan took office in 1981, inflation was still a problem. The 1979 Iranian Revolution caused another oil shock, further hurting Carter.
By 1980, after nearly two decades of stagflation caused by oil shocks, Reagan promised a solution. In truth, time would have resolved it, as we see with today’s economic shocks. But Reagan claimed supply-side economics, the Laffer Curve, and “trickle-down” would fix everything.
George H.W. Bush called it “voodoo economics” before becoming Reagan’s VP and a convert. Reagan’s tax cuts for 13 billionaires and tax hikes for working-class Americans began dismantling the New Deal. He cut Social Security, stopped enforcing antitrust laws, gutted education funding, and destroyed unions.
Reagan also negotiated GATT and NAFTA, offshoring 60,000 factories and millions of jobs. He tripled the national debt from $800 billion to $2.2 trillion, borrowing money to make the economy look good.
Before Reagan, America had 13 billionaires. Today, there are over 800—a 50-fold increase in four decades. These billionaires, not content with being rich, took over our politics.
