A Swamp Bestiary for Trump's Gilded Age

At The Daily Economy, Stefan Bartl of the American Institute of Economic Research rebukes Donald Trump for moving America closer to a centrally-planned economy, accusing him at one point of being more likely to usher in a Gilded Age than a Golden.

Such unintended generosity aside, the piece is most useful as a catalog of government abuses, both longstanding and new under Trump -- and a reality check for anyone somehow still under the delusion that the President is a capitalist in any way.

The following is a good sample of how Trump's gravy train is continuing and compounding past abuses, rather than lifting so much as a finger to stop them:

As time unfolds, the US federal government's tentacles burrow ever-deeper into the economy. In the 2008 crisis, banks deemed "too big to fail" received a government bailout. The following year, automobile firms GM and Chrysler were saved from bankruptcy. When the Treasury exited GM in 2013, taxpayers were left with a loss of more than $10 billion. Ten years later, the federal government forbade Nippon Steel to acquire US Steel, in a merger they both desired. Instead, the government settled for Nippon Steel to invest in US Steel alongside its own direct ownership of the firm via a "golden share." Just this past week, the US federal government announced its 10 percent stake in Intel, the struggling US semiconductor giant. On top of the $7 billion Intel had already received from the 2024 CHIPS Act, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called Intel "America's champion semiconductor company." [links removed]

The earlier bailouts were bad enough, but at least the government eventually relinquished control.

Among many other things, the piece rightly uses the Trump Party's own leftist anthem against it ahead of ticking off a list of congressmen profiteering off government interference with the economy:

Once upon a time, Donald Trump was voted to drain the swamp and cast out corruption. Transplanting swamp creatures from Washington into corporate boardrooms does not end corruption, but it entrenches it. Acting on privileged information, the so-called "Rich Men North of Richmond," our elected politicians, are growing richer by the year.

"More than 20 members made almost double the S&P 500 average gain of 24.9 percent last year," The Independent reported. "The top five performers -- Rep. David Rouzer (R-NC), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Roger Williams (R-TX), Morgan McGarvey (D-KY) -- increased the value of their portfolio ... by more than 100 percent."

If this is how politicians trade when they only regulate, imagine what happens when Commerce officials hand politicians access to shareholders' meetings... [bold added, links removed]

I'm old enough to remember when Republicans used to moot the idea of Congressmen at least not trading stock in the companies they regulate. Now, they show that bipartisanship thrives at the government trough, and that political unity exists at the expense of our freedom and prosperity.

Did Trump destroy the GOP -- or did he merely unmask it incidentally for the longstanding fraud it already was?

-- CAV