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Komlos, John
Working Paper
The Economic Roots of the Rise of Trumpism
CESifo Working Paper, No. 6868
Provided in Cooperation with:
Ifo Institute – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of
Munich
Suggested Citation: Komlos, John (2018) : The Economic Roots of the Rise of Trumpism,
CESifo Working Paper, No. 6868, Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo),
Munich
This Version is available at:
http://hdl.handle.net/10419/174991
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6868
2018
January 2018
The Economic Roots of the
Rise of Trumpism
John Komlos
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CESifo Working Paper No. 6868
Category 6: Fiscal Policy, Macroeconomics and Growth
The Economic Roots of the Rise of Trumpism
Abstract
Donald Trump won the election in 2016 largely because enough voters in three states, all in the
Rustbelt, who had voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, switched their vote from
Democratic to Republican. Economic dislocations played a crucial role in these swing states or
democratic strongholds to persuade many voters to take the dramatic step to vote for an antiestablishment
candidate even if that meant a leap of faith into the unknown. The sources of the
dislocation were the development of a dual economy characterized at one end by low and
stagnating wages, increasing debt, downward social mobility, declining relative incomes, and
the hopelessness accompanying them while at the other end of the income distribution the
economy was simply booming. This was longer than a three-decade process that started with
Reaganomics and its tax cuts that privileged the rich and conferred immense wealth, and its
concomitant, political power, on them. Reaganomics also accelerated the decline in the power of
unions which had supported the middle class. The process continued under Bill Clinton’s
administration and its continuing both financial deregulation and of hyper-globalization. George
Bush continued to pamper the superrich with his tax policies. The process culminated with
Barack Obama’s bailing out the superrich and his benign neglect of Mainstreet. Five
administration’s disinterest in the social group Hillary Clinton referred to flippantly as “the
deplorables” culminated in the revolt of the masses in favor of an incompetent strongman by
overthrowing the establishment captured by such chants at Trump rallies as “Lock her up!”,
“USA!”, “Build the wall”, or “Drain the swamp” (i.e., in Washington D.C.)
JEL-Codes: A100.
Keywords: political economy of populism.
John Komlos
University of Munich / Germany
john.komlos@gmx.de
The rise of Trumpism has many sources. Some people always support Republicans.
This support is made up of a coalition of Christian evangelicals, military hawks, southern
racists, social and fiscal conservatives, government haters, gun enthusiasts, freedom fanatics,
market fundamentalists, wealthy who crave for lower taxes, and those backward-looking who
yearn for the time when America was younger, more confident, prouder of itself and is afraid
that its stature is declining. This group is united in their unwavering belief in the minimalist
state, rugged individualism, American exceptionalism, the American Dream, and most of all,
in the firm conviction that if you do not make it in this land of freedom and opportunity it
must be your fault and you do not deserve the dole, never mind if you were born on the
wrong side of the tracks, into a dysfunctional family, in a dysfunctional neighborhood with
third-world schooling opportunities and no legitimate role models to speak of. This group
makes up the majority in the West (except for the salt-water states), most of the Great Plains,
and the Confederacy—from Idaho through Texas and then on to South Carolina, a vast
stretch of contiguous land mass that covers most of the country. Yet, the population in these
states does not suffice for a majority of the Electoral College. To reach 270 votes,
Republicans need the support of some swing states or they need to flip some of the
democratic strongholds.1
This is precisely what happened. Wins in just three of these states,
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio put Donald Trump over the top. Pennsylvania and
Michigan have not voted for a Republican president since 1988. They all chose Barack
Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Thus, one needs to understand why these three states swung
into the Republican column this time. A change of just 251,000 votes from Trump to Hillary
Clinton in these states would have clinched it for her. That would have meant a change in
votes of 0.7% in Pennsylvania, 0.2% in Michigan, and 7.9% in Ohio.
These states are obviously in the heart of the Rust Belt that was devastated by the
relentless decline in manufacturing and the benign neglect by administration after
administration for decades. The goal of this essay is to outline the economic forces that
fanned the flames of frustration of those white men—and they were mostly white men--who
1
An analysis of the electorate across the whole country is not likely to pick up the crucial factors because some
people always vote Republican no matter what. Nonetheless, one such analysis found that Trump support was
more likely in “racially isolated communities with worse health outcomes, lower social mobility, less social
capital, greater reliance on social security income and less reliance on capital income.” Jonathan Rothwell and
Pablo Diego-Rosell, “Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump,”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2822059 August 15, 2016, accessed January 31, 2018.
lost trust all hope in the establishment’s willingness and ability to help them.2
So their
frustration grew to the boiling point until they were willing to cast their lot for someone who
the well-known moderate republican New York Times columnist David Brooks describes as a
“narcissistic sexual harasser and a routine liar”.3
In more normal times he would have been
considered a laughingstock or, as president Obama appropriately referred to him in 2011, as a
“carnival barker.”4
Other words used to describe his personality include “abusive”,
“aggressive”, “angry”, “authoritarian”, “bombastic”, “buffoon”, “bully”, “chaotic”,
“catastrophic”, „childish“, “con artist”, “crackpot”, “crude”, “dangerous”, “demagogue”,
“dishonest”, “erratic,” “fraud”, “goofball”, “habitual liar,” “idiot”, “impulsive”,
“incompetent”, “insane”, “irrational”, “menacing”, “phony”, “strongman,” “terrifying,” to
use some of the politer ones.5
A score of psychiatrists abandoned standard practice and
declared him mentally unfit for the office of President.6
In the colloquial most people simply
refer to him routinely as crazy, even if he often brags about his intelligence even adding that
he is “really smart” and a “very stable genius”.7
Thus, the election of 2016 was nothing less than revolutionary.8
As all such turning
points, it overthrew much of the elite and as all historical revolt of the masses, this, too, is
built on deep discontent.9
This essay argues that the discontent grew out of the socioeconomic
forces unleashed by the failure of economic policies to provide inclusive growth.
2
“Donald Trump’s astonishing victory… has made one thing abundantly clear: too many
Americans—particularly white male Americans—feel left behind.” Joseph Stiglitz, Project
Syndicate, November. 13, 2016
3
“The G.O.P. Is Rotting,” The New York Times, December 7, 2017.
4
Russell Berman, “The ‘Carnival Barker’ Joins the 2016 Circus,” The Atlantic, June 16,
2015.
5
Note that no one outside of his inner circle ever used any of the following descriptives when
talking about Trump’s personality: affectionate, benevolent compassionate, considerate,
contemplative, empathic, good-natured, good-tempered, introspective, loving, a real mensch,
nice, sensitive, systematic, thoughtful, tolerant, well-disposed, or anything similar.
6
Bandy X. Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health
Experts Assess a President (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). “History will not be
kind to a profession [psychiatrists]that aided the rise of an American Hitler through its
silence.” Carlos Lozada, “Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America? Psychiatrists weigh in,” The
Washington Post, September 22, 2017.
7
“15 times Trump bragged about his intelligence,” CNN,
http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/10/10/times-trump-bragged-about-intelligenceorig-alee.cnn
accessed December 9, 2017.
8
Richard Wolffe, “Donald Trump’s victory is nothing short of a revolution,” The Guardian,
November 9, 2016.
9
Editorial Board, “Donald Trump’s revolution: Voters rebuke America’s political
establishment,” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 2016.
The process, starting with Reaganomics, was fueled by globalization and the IT revolution,
and finished off with the Financial Crisis of 2008. These grievances spanned three decades
and generated enough anger, frustration, and discontent that they were willing, instead of
“storming the Bastille” to “drain the swamp” whatever may follow.10
Evidence of Frustration in the Society
Evidence of discontent abounds. It manifests itself in the abandoned factories,
dilapidated homes, and dysfunctional neighborhoods of the Rust Belt. It affects the anxietyridden
underclass, who are stuck spatially and economically and see no way out of their
hopeless predicament and far too often turn to acts of desperation. That is one reason why the
homicide rate in the U.S. is 3 to 8 times that of the welfare states of Western and Northern
Europe, where the state-provided safety net reduces anxiety considerably.11
The high mass
murder rate is also a function of the inadequate availability of mental health services.12
There
were 384 mass shooting incidents in 2016. Assassination of police officers or shooting at the
Republican baseball practice in D.C. similarly indicate the amount of venom that has
accumulated in people.13
Real median household income in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan is still $5,900,
$6,000, and $9,300 below its level at the end of the 20th century.14
In Pennsylvania alone
among these states has median income increased by $122 per annum. This unprecedented
decline in incomes is amazing. No wonder that deaths of despair have risen. The opioid
epidemic hit the Rust Belt with a vengance. All three states experienced a higher overdose
death rate than the national average in 2015.15
Pennsylvania had 3,500 overdose deaths
reaching a rate of 26 per 100,000.16
Ohio’s overdose deaths increased from under 1,000 in
10
Conor Friedersdorf, “Trump Has Filled, Not Drained, the Swamp,” The Atlantic,
September 21, 2017.
11
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Statistics, https://data.unodc.org/ accessed
July 7, 2017.
12
John Komlos, “How raising taxes on the rich could prevent mass shootings,” PBS
Newshour, September 2, 2015; http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/face-massmurders-case-universal-mental-health-insurance/
accessed July 12, 2017.
13
“HuffPost Graphics, “There have been 153 mass shootings in 2017,”
https://twitter.com/HuffPostGraphic/status/875019850061664258 Accessed July 12, 2017.
14
Other neighboring states where real median household income is still below its late-20
th
-century level
include Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia.
15
Holly Hedegaard, Margaret Warner, Arialdi M. Minino, “Drug Overdose Deaths in the
United States, 1999-2015,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NCHS Data Brief
No. 273, February 2017.
16
PA. Gov, “Treating and Preventing Opioid Addiction” https://www.pa.gov/guides/opioidepidemic/
accessed December 8, 2017.
2004 to 4,000 by 2016 reaching a rate of 30 per 100,000.17
Michigan had a rate of 20. These
compare unfavorably to the national average of 16, which is bad enough. Per capita drug use
in U.S. is more than three times as high as in Western Europe,18
and drug related deaths are
eight times as high.
“Deaths of despair” have risen markedly in the U.S. Drug overdose deaths were about
6,000 in 1980 while by 2015 they rose to 52,000, i.e., an increase by an amazing factor of
8+.19
Other deaths of hopelessness include alcohol poisonings, suicides, and chronic liver
diseases from excessive alcohol consumption. The upshot is a “shocking increase in midlife
mortality” among white Americans. This has never happened before in a developed country
in peacetime in the absence of a disease epidemic. The U.S. is the only rich country to
experience increase in mortality in recent times. Most affected are white men with a high
school education or less. Their mortality rates have been increasing since the turn of the 21st
century while those with a college education are immune from this trend.20
Blacks and
Hispanics were also largely unaffected: they did not experience the shock of downward
mobility as did whites.
The incarceration rate is also a sign that people are unable to find their place in
society. There were no fewer than 6.7 million people (2.7% of the adult population)
“supervised” in the U.S. in 2015; this includes people on parole or probation as well as 2.2
million incarcerated people.21
This is the highest rate of incarceration anywhere in the world:
with 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has 23% of its prisoners.22
The number of bankruptcies shows the difficulties people have to meet their financial
obligations.23
There were 0.9 million bankruptcies in 2014—up from 0.3 million in 1980,
17
Julia Lurie, “Ohio’s New Overdose Rates Are Truly Insane,” Mother Jones, August 31,
2017.
18
7.4 per thousand vs. 2.2 per thousand.
19
Josh Katz, “Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever,” The New York Times,
June 5, 2017.
20
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st
century,” Brookings
Papers on Economic Activity, March 23-24, 2017;
21
Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Correctional Populations in the United States,”
https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5870 accessed July 8, 2017
22
Christopher Hartney, “US Rates of Incarceration: A Global Perspective,”
http://www.nccdglobal.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/factsheet-us-incarceration.pdf
accessed July 8, 2017. In many states, ex-felons are denied the right to vote.
23
Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York:
Harper Perennial, 1999).
doubling on a per capita basis.24
We might also consider that 9.3 million homeowners who
lost their home between 2006 and 2014 must have some bitterness that predisposed them to
want to smite the system that let them down.25
Persistent and endemic poverty indicates that the market economy leaves millions
struggling. In 2017, a two-person household was considered poor if its total income was
below $17,000 per annum.26
That meant that 45 million people were living in poverty, 15%
of the population, as high a rate as in 1966, one year after Medicare began under the Johnso
administration.27
A further 15 million people live slightly above the poverty, defined as 100-
125% of the poverty threshold.28
The poverty rate among U.S. children—19.6%—is about twice the mean rate
prevailing in rich countries and seven times as high as in Denmark.29
One reason for the high
rate of poverty among children is that the divorce rate has doubled,30
and the share of
families with children headed by a female quadrupled since 1950.31
In 2016 one-third of all
children lived in single-parent household.
24
BankruptcyAction.com. “Business and Non-Business Filings,”
http://www.bankruptcyaction.com/USbankstats.htm accessed July 8, 2017; Al Krulick,
“Bankruptcy Statistics,” https://www.debt.org/bankruptcy/statistics/ accessed July 8, 2017.
25
This number includes those who went through a foreclosure, surrendered their home to a
lender, or sold their home via a distress sale according to the National Association of
Realtors. Laura Kusisto, “Many Who Lost Homes to Foreclosure in Last Decade Won’t
Return – NAR,” Wall Street Journal April 20, 2015.
http://www.realtytrac.com/mapsearch/foreclosures as well as on the website of U.S. Courts
http://www.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/data_tables/bf_f_0331.2017.pdf accessed July 8,
2017.
26
U.S. Census Bureau, “Poverty Thresholds,”
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-256.html accessed July 8, 2017.
27
U.S. Census Bureau, “Figure 4. Number in Poverty and Poverty Rate,”
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/visualizations/p60/256/figure4.pdf
accessed July 8, 2017.
28
U.S. Census “Living in Near Poverty in the United States: 1966-2012,”
https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p60-248.pdf accessed July 8, 2017;
https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=CF
accessed January 30, 2018 .
29
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Growing Unequal?
Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries (Paris: OECD, 2008); OECD, Divided
We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising (Paris: OECD, 2011).
30
National Center for Health Statistics, “Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1988,”
Monthly Vital Statistics Report 39 (1991) 12, suppl. 2.
31
U.S. Census Bureau, Data, Historical Families Tables, Table FM-1, “Families by Presence
of Own Children under 18: 1950 to Present,” https://www.census.gov/data/tables/timeseries/demo/families/families.html
accessed July 15, 2017.
The UNICEF rated the welfare of U.S. children in the 26th
place compared to those of
European countries and even below those of middle-income countries such as Hungary,
Poland, Slovakia, and Estonia.32
Six million children are reported for maltreatment to U.S.
agencies annually,33
and five children die daily due to abuse or neglect.34
U.S. pre-term birth
rates are closer to those prevailing in Africa than in Europe.35
A teenager in Mississippi is 15
times more likely to give birth than her counterpart in Switzerland.36
These social problems
are rooted in the nature of the economic system that yields few opportunities for advancement
for a large number of children and their families.
Consider, furthermore, that in July 2017 in the country with aspirations to be the
greatest in the world, 40% of the population considered themselves struggling financially and
another 3% was suffering.37
That adds up to no less than 140 million people. The Affordable
Car Act has reduced the number without health insurance from 16% in 2010 to 8.6 % of the
population in 2016 but that still left 28 million people without the security of insurance and
its repeal is on the political agenda of the Republican Party.38
Among those below the age of
65 the uninsured rate was 13% even in 2016 and is also much higher among some groups:
among the poor it is as high as 26% and among Hispanics it is 28%.39
Obviously, all the above-mentioned social developments effect anxiety and mental
health of the population. The number of people seeking outpatient care for depression in the
U.S. has increased from 0.7 percent of the population in 1987 to 2.3 percent in 1997 and then
32
UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Child well-being in rich countries. A comparative
overview (Florence, Italy: The United Nations Children’s Fund, 2013), Report Card 11.
33
Childhelp, “National Child Abuse Statistics & Facts,” https://www.childhelp.org/childabuse-statistics/
accessed July 15, 2017.
34
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention,”
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childmaltreatment/index.html accessed July 15,
2017.
35
Christopher P. Howson, Mary V. Kinney, and Joy E. Lawn, eds., Born Too Soon: The
Global Action Report on Preterm Birth (Geneva: WHO, 2012).
36
Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, “Why Is the Teen Birth Rate in the United States
So High and Why Does It Matter?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 26 (2012) 2: 141–166.
37
Gallup, “U.S. Life Evaluation (Weekly),” http://www.gallup.com/poll/151157/lifeevaluation-weekly.aspx
accessed July 8, 2017.
38
Kelsay Avery, Kenneth Finegold, and Amelia Whitman, “Affordable Care Act Has
Led to Historic, Widespread Increase in Health Insurance Coverage,” Issue Brief, Department
of Health & Human Services, September 2016;
https://aspe.hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/207951/ChartpackACAHistoricIncreaseCoverage.pdf
accessed July 13, 2017.
39
Ibid.,
to 2.9 percent by 2007.40
The use of medication among these patients increased from 37
percent to 75 percent in the same time span. In 2014 16 million adults (6.7%) experienced at
least one major episode of depression.41
This is the underbelly of the society that was rife for
Trump’s message of making America great again, to bring back jobs, and to blame
immigrants and Moslems for their ills. Scapegoating is standard practice among strongman.
In short, there is a myriad of symptoms of the suffering among the American
underclass, the ones Hillary Clinton ungenerously christened the “deplorables”. Instead,
Donald Trump hit a home run with the declaration, “I love the poorly educated”.42
Hopelessness, frustration, and inequality are mighty political forces and Trump was able to
capture its torrents and harvest the anger of the have-nots, those who stumbled in their
attempt to reach the American Dream. It was the benign neglect of this social strata by five
administrations that enabled Donald Trump to capture the three Rust-Belt states that led to
this historical conjuncture.
The Principles of Reaganomics
Ronald Reagan’ Presidency was a watershed. Many of our problems delineated above
began or were greatly exacerbated under his tenure. He embraced a policy of trickle-down
economics, also known as supply-side economics or Reaganomics for short. The claim was
that cutting the taxes of the deserving rich and super-rich would provide incentives to
increase investments and thereby create jobs and subsequently “trickle down” to the masses
so they will benefit from it from due course. In addition, lower taxes meant an the increase in
disposable income and that would provide an incentive for people to work harder and for
entrepreneurs to take more risks, thereby creating economic growth and boosting incomes.
But that was all theory. While it worked very well on the blackboard, it was based on too
many unwarranted assumptions without empirical support.
However, there were plenty of counterarguments as well. People who were working
full time would not likely increase their work hours. And new investments will not be
undertaken, unless there are opportunities offering a decent return and those were limited, at
40
Mark Olfson et al., “National Trends in the Outpatient Treatment of Depression,” Journal
of the American Medical Association 287 (2002): 203–209; Steven C. Marcus and Mark
Olfson, “National Trends in the Treatment for Depression from 1998 to 2007,” Archives of
General Psychiatry 67 (2010): 1265–1273.
41
Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Depression,”
https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/depression accessed July 16, 2017.
42
Josh Hafner, „Donald Trump loves the ‚poorly educated‘ and they love him,“ USA Today,
February 24, 2016.
least domestically. And what if the rich spent their additional income on conspicuous
consumption buying foreign luxuries or traveling abroad, the trickling down effect would be
elsewhere in the world. And what if they bought government bonds foreign or domestic
instead of investing in physical capital? So there were plenty of open questions if anyone
cared to dig a bit deeper. The main point is that the road from tax cuts to investment or
economic growth in general is hardly a straightforward one.
One might have argued just as well, that one could increase the purchasing power of
the lower classes which, in turn, would increase aggregate demand thereby trickling up to the
corporations as profits increased which would provide an incentive for them to invest. The
poor and the lower-middle class had much more pent-up demand than the people at the top
who already owned just about everything. And if one was serious about boosting the
economy why not make sure that investments actually do happen, and jobs are actually
created by attaching conditions to the tax cuts that would have insured that those intentions
are actually realized? One could tie the tax cuts to the number of new jobs created. Or one
could improve human capital formation by bolstering the school system? In other words,
there were myriad of direct ways to foster economic growth with inclusive prosperity if the
elite were serious about it.
The Failure of Reaganomics as the Foundations for Inclusive Growth
As it turned out, the stimulating effects of the tax cuts had the viscosity of molasses as
nothing trickled down to the middle- or lower classes. Nobel Prize winning economist,
Joseph Stiglitz pointed out that “President Ronald Reagan began hollowing out the middle
class and skewing the benefits of growth to those at the top…“43
As the rich gained more
power their share of the tax cuts increased. The Nicon tax cut of 1971 was still spread pretty
evenly across the population.While Jimmy Carter’s tax cut of 1977 was skewed mostly
toward the poor and lower-middle class. His Revenue Act of 1978 was the first time that the
upper-classes received a substantial cut in taxes. Reagan‘s tax cuts were also skewed heavily
towards the top as was that of Bush. Reagan cut the marginal tax rate for the rich in half. The
Republicans gave negligible amounts to the poor or lower-middle class while the rich became
superrich. The 2003 tax cut was the most regressive as most of it went to millionaires. The
Obama administration then made the Bush tax cuts permanent in 2010 and 2013. Great
43
Joseph Stiglitz, „What America’s Economy Needs from Trump,“ Project Syndicate,
November. 13, 2016.
windfall for millionaires. Similarly, the Trump tax cut will be captured mostly by those
earning more than $500,000.44
To be sure, average citizens can be manipulated by hot-button cultural issues and by
informing them that their take-home pay will increase.45
Everybody benefits. This is a true
statement but not the whole truth. What is kept hushed up is that for Everyman on Main
Street the tax cuts meant a tiny increase in disposable income with which they could go to the
movies or perhaps take a trip to Disneyland. But it meant absolutely nothing for the
improvement of their long-term prospects. However, for the rich the Reagan tax cuts were a
genuine game changer.46
They brought a tremendous windfall which they used strategically
to further their economic power.47
Consider the millionaires who had been paying, say,
$700,000 in taxes and whose taxes were cut to $350,000. What were they going to do with
their $350,000 windfall? Sure, some spent part of it on conspicuous consumption or buy
government bonds. However, the smart money invested a substantial portion of it into
strengthening their power position by supporting think tanks that hired economists to support
and further their ideology.48
These think thanks were instrumental in expanding the freemarket
ethos that argued vehemently and persistently for small government, free markets,
free trade, and deregulation across the board that included the financial sector.49
This was an
extremely successful strategy, because it convinced the citizenry through cognitive capture
and established firmly a dominant ideology (ala Gramsci) that was based on their tenets.
Everyman on Main Street was no longer capable of discerning their own self-interest and
came to support that of the superrich. By the 1990s the free-market ideology became so
deeply ingrained in the fabric of society that Democrat Bill Clinton’s economic policies
began to resemble those of the moderate wing of the Republican Party.
44
Andrew Van Dam, “Is the GOP tax plan an unprecedented windfall for the wealthy? We
look at 50 years of data to find out,” The Washington Post, December 4, 2017.
45
Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Thomas
Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2004).
46
James Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and
Why Liberals Should Too (The Free Press, 2008).
47
Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy. The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2nd
edition (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2016);
48
They also invested heavily in academia, Diane Ravitch, „Big Money Rules,“ The New York
Review of Books, December 7, 2017.
49
For the damage done by the war on government see, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson,
American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led US to Forget What Made America
Prosper, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).
The millions of dollars of windfall were used not only to subsidize think tanks but
there was enough money left to support politicians of their ilk. Thus, the incentive structure
was in place to enact further legislation that increased the power of the superrich.50
So the
windfall created feedback effects that led to further political power and further domination of
the public’s worldview that led to further profits and additional power. This vicious circle of
wealth and power accumulation was the most pernicious aspect of the tax cuts: not only were
they unfair, not only did they fail to trickle down, not only did they fail to spur economic
growth, but most importantly they tipped the scales of power permanently in favor of the rich
and superrich thereby undermining the basic precondition of a democratic political system,
namely the dispersion of power. So plutocracy came into being not with a bang but with a
whimper.51
Arthur Laffer had argued that cutting taxes would increase growth and thereby
increase government revenue, a convenient argument in support of the Republican ideology.
The same argument was repeated in the debate leading up to the enactment of the Trump tax
cuts even though there is no evidential basis for it. Paul Krugman calls it voodoo economics.
He is right. The tax cuts were not effective in improving the economy in the past and they
will not be effective in the future either. Instead, the Reagan – Bush presidencies left us with
nothing but debt which doubled from 30% to 60% of GDP. That was an immense mistake,
because we have become accustomed to an endemic budget deficit and the interest burden on
the federal budget keeps on expanding. Moreover, it is impossible to reverse. Each generation
will want to pass on the burden to the subsequent generations. So, reversing this process is
unlikely and sooner or later we will reach a breaking point when the Chinese and Japanese
will no longer want to finance our government and then interest rates on the debt will rise and
we’ll have difficulties meeting our obligations. Not a comfortable scenario with which to
tempt faith.
In addition to the tax cuts favoring the rich and the endemic budget deficits, the third
aspect of Reagan’s hallowing-out of the middle class was his vicious suppression of the strike
of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. The union ceased to exist, and
50
Jeff Faux. The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite is Sending the Middle Class
(New York: Wiley 2012).
51
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Publishing,
2018); David Cay Johnston, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump
Administration Is Doing to America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).
11,000 employees were fired, signaling the end of the influence of big labor.52
Intimidated,
the number of strikes involving at least 1,000 workers declined thereafter from 235 in 1979 to
just 17 by 1999,53
and the share of the labor force in unions, still 26% throughout the Carter
presidency, fell precipitously by fully 1/3rd
, and reached 17%, by the end of Reagan’s second
term.54
So union power was a thing of the past.55
Unions had been the backbone of the middle class. They ensured that a share of the
profits went also to the workers and not only to the executives and shareholders. Collectively
workers could threaten to strike, therby exercising sufficient countervailing power to obtain
for themselves a living wage. Without that countervailing power those workers who had no
special skills—those with a high school education or those who had dropped out—were left
to fend for themselves.56
The results were devestating to this segment of the middle class.
United, workers had some bargaining power, divided they had none. The result was that
workers lost out and productivity grew 2.3 times as fast as wages (Figure 1). The difference
accrued to profits which grew exponentially.
52
“The PATCO strike signalled a profound decline in organized labor’s power in the
late twentieth-century United States.” Joseph McCartin, “Professional Air Traffic Controllers
Strike (1981),” in Eric Arnesen, Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-class History,
Volume 1 (Taylor and Francis, 2007), p. 1126.
53
Ibid.
54
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table 1. Union affiliation of employed wage and salary
workers,” https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab1.htm accessed September 17, 2017.
55
Lawrence Mishel, “Unions, inequality, and faltering middle-class wages,” Economic
Policy Institute Report, August 29, 2012.
56
Josh Bivens, et al., “Raising America’s Pay. Why It’s Our Central Economic Policy
Challenge,” Economic Policy Institute, June 4, 2014.
100
150
200
250
300
350
400
450
1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Figure 1. The Productivity-Compensation Gap
Real Hourly Compensation
Labor Productivity
Source: Susan Fleck, John Glaser, and Shawn Sprague, “The compensation-productivity gap:
a visual essay,” Monthly Labor Review, January 2011: 57-69. Data for 2012-2016 was kindly
provided by Shawn Sprague of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The early 1980s was the real turning point. Until Reagan’s presidency the gap
between productivity growth and wages growth was negligible and under Carter the gap
remained steady at 18 percentage points; it did not increase at all (Table 1). However, under
Reagan the gap resumed its upward climb. The floodgates were opened and thereafter the gap
widened continuously, although each successive democratic administration tried to slow the
rate at which the gap was increasing (Figure 2). So, under Clinton the gap increased at a
slower rate than under Bush Sr. and similarly under Obama it again grew slower than it did
under Bush Jr. By the presidency of Bush Jr., it was growing at a rate of 6 percentage points
per annum. At the beginning of 2017 the gap had reached 150 percentage points. That is to
say compensation increased by 288% since 1947 but productivity had increased by 438%.
Without the countervailing power of unions, workers were at a distinct disadvantage.
Source: See Figure 1.
Source: See Figure 1.
The next stop on the way to Trumpism: Bill Clinton and the Tsunami of Globalization
Reagan was followed by George Bush Sr. who initiated the North Atlantic Free Trade
Association (NAFTA), eventually signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994. He promised that
it will “promote more growth, more equality,… and create 200,000 jobs in this country by
1995 alone.”57
Of course, he failed to mention how many jobs will be destroyed by imports—
one estimate put it at 880,000 by 2002. His economic team was led by Bob Rubin, CEO of
investment mega-bank Goldman Sachs.58
Globalization was said to be good for America, but
no one ever said that it would be good for everyone.
Then in 2000 China entered the World Trade Organization giving it easy access to the
U.S. market. The gale winds of globalization became a tsunami.59
The manufacturing sector
was devastated and the middle class with it, jobs were exported, and the trade deficit
accumulated. Before Reagan trade was balanced. We imported about as much as we
exported. Since then the accumulated deficit reached $13 trillion and is growing at a rate of
nearly $500 billion per annum. Again, millions of workers were disadvantaged by the influx
of imports and benign neglect was the fallback policy. Today, manufacturing employs merely
57
William J. Clinton, “Remarks on Signing the North American Free Trade Agreement
Implementation Act,” December 8, 1993.
58
Goldman Sachs is well represented in DC. It also sent Hank Paulson to help out the Bush
Jr. administration and several others to serve the Trump administration.
59
Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Brendan Price, “Import
Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s,” Journal of Labor Economics,
34 (2016), 51: S141-198; Justin Pierce and Peter Schott, “The Surprisingly Swift Decline of
US Manufacturing Employment,” American Economic Review 106 (2016) 7: 1632-1662 .
PresidentBeginning End Total Per Annum
Johnson 0.2 4.9 4.7 0.9
Nixon 4.9 12.2 7.3 1.5
Ford 12.2 18.3 6.1 2.0
Carter 18.3 18.5 0.2 0.0
Reagan 18.5 32.6 14.1 1.8
Bush 32.6 46.1 13.5 3.4
Clinton 46.1 67.8 21.7 2.7
Bush 67.8 117.9 50.1 6.3
Obama 117.9 144.6 26.7 3.3
Table 1. Productivity -- Compensation Gap, Index numbers, 1947=100
Size of the Gap Difference
8.5% of the labor force. Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ were swelling in number and the Democratic
Party turned its back on the white working class.60
It is well known among economists that free trade has winners and losers. Yet, they
sang the praises of free trade in unison without emphasizing the need to think about the wellbeing
of the losers as well. Joseph Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik were exceptions.61
Rodrik warned
that “in the absence of a concerted government response, too much globalization would
deepen societal cleavages, exacerbate distributional problems, [and] undermine domestic
social bargains.”62
His warnings were not taken seriously. In retrospect he blames his
economist colleagues: “It has long been an unspoken rule of public engagement for
economists that they should champion trade and not dwell too much on the fine print…. The
standard models of trade… typically yield sharp distributional effects: income losses by
certain groups are the flip side of the “gains from trade.” “And economists have long known
that market failures – including poorly functioning labor markets, credit market
imperfections,– can interfere with reaping those gains.” “Nonetheless, economists can be
counted on to parrot the wonders of comparative advantage and free trade whenever trade
agreements come up. They have consistently minimized distributional concerns, even though
it is now clear that the distributional impact of NAFTA or China’s entry into the World Trade
Organization were significant for the most directly affected communities in the United
States.” “They have overstated the magnitude of gains from trade deals, though such gains
have been relatively small since at least the 1990s.“63
So the deep penetration of the U.S.
market by Chinese products made a big difference to political developments. A recent
analysis found that, „Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina would have
elected the Democrat instead of the Republican candidate if, ceteris paribus, the growth in
Chinese import penetration had been 50 percent lower than the actual growth during the
60
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2016).
61
Dani Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” NBER Working Paper No.
23559, July 2017. Rising import competition contributed to the polarization of U.S. politics.
“Adverse economic conditions… [lead to] nativist or extreme politicians.” David Autor,
David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi, “Importing Political Polarization? The
Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure,” NBER Working Paper no 22637,
December 2017.
62
Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (1997)
63
Dani Rodrik, “Are economists partly responsible for Donald Trump’s shocking victory in
the US presidential election?,” Project Syndicate, Nov 15, 2016.
period of analysis. The Democrat candidate would also have obtained a majority in the
electoral college in this counterfactual scenario.“64
Thus, the deleterious effects of globalization on the well-being of those at the losing
end of the policy was not given serious consideration as Clinton embraced the Republican
ideology of free trade.65
The Reagan-Bush deregulation agenda was also coopted, so Clinton
moved the democratic agenda toward the Republican ideology, thereby abandoning the
working class and fueling the fires of discontent. The lack of regulation of the financial sector
became a tsunami of destruction a decade later. And when his appointment to the
Commodities Future Commission, Brooksley Born, tried heroically, but in vain, to regulate
derivatives he failed to lift a finger to come to her aid. So the phalanx made up of Alan
Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Christopher Cox made mincemeat out of her.
Instead, Clinston signed the law that forbade the Commission from regulating derivatives.
Period.
On the Road to Trump with George W. Bush
Bush Jr.’s continued Reaganomics with the ideology of deregulation, lower taxes that
benefited the top 1%, and closed his eyes to the brewing financial crisis. When the Meltdown
came in 2008 his administration lavished favors and billions on the big banks, its CEOs, and
shareholders without any strings attached. There was nothing left over for Everyman on Main
Street. Again, it had to fend for itself. They joined the unemployed, were evicted, or had to
take low-paying jobs in the gig economy. This is what Stiglitz called socialism for the rich,
capitalism for the poor.
Barack Obama gave the final touches
Then came Barack Obama in the middle of the greatest financial crisis since the Great
Depression. On the campaign trail he had made impressive promises of change that appealed
to the growing number of discontented but once in office he allied himself unabashedly with
the establishment, essentially continuing the economic policies of his predecessors. As Bush
64
David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, Kaveh Majlesi, “A Note on the Effect of Rising
Trade Exposure on the 2016 Presidential Election,” November 16, 2016,
https://economics.mit.edu/files/12418 accessed January 31, 2018.
65
David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, „The China Shock: Learning from Labor
Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade,” Annual Review of Economics, 8 (2016):
205-240; Justin Pierce and Peter Schott, “Trade Liberalization and Mortality: Evidence from
U.S. Counties,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 22849,
November 2016.
Jr., he continued to prop up the too-big-to-fail banks, saving them from bankruptcy.66
Moreover, and just as problematically, few new faces appeared among his more important
appointments for economic positions. Timothy Geithner, a Bush Jr. appointee to the New
York Federal Reserve and a crony of ex-Goldman-Sachs CEO (and Bill Clinton cabinet
member) Robert Rubin, was his biggest and ultimately fatal mistake. Would one trust a
Republican appointee at the crucial post of treasury secretary if one really wanted real
change? This is particularly so in Geithner’s case for he did absolutely nothing to prevent the
coming of the financial crisis, and as a consequence, also shares responsibility for it. By the
way, Geithner now earns an estimated $10 million salary on Wall Street. So he did very well
for himself. Yet again, the lower- and middle classes were left further behind. To be sure,
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase continued to collect his compensation of some $17
million for 2009 at tax payers’ largesse.67
Conclusion: The Election of 2016 Was the Culmination of a 36-year Process that Drove
Too Many People to Despair
People who Hillary called deplorables, the uneducated, those who experienced the
alienation of downward social and economic mobility, or the disappointment of wage
stagnation for decades while others were living the lifestyle of the rich and famous, those
who were clobbered by the tsunami of globalization, or by the hollowing out of the middle
class, and those whose homes were foreclosed while those who caused the financial crisis
were being pampered, and those who thought that neglecting the 99% was the most unfair
policy of modern times all finally rebelled and upended the establishment whose benign
neglect of their plight they could no longer bear. Enough of the humiliation! There were far
too many promises of change that were not kept, and they believed that only a strongman can
change the course of the ship of state. Hillary Clinton represented the incumbent
establishment and would deliver the same status quo as her five predecessors and that was not
a particularly inviting prospect.
The graphs below show vividly the outcome of the above policies: stagnating wages
of men since 1979 (employed year-around full time) and of women since 2000 (Figure 3). Of
course, this graph leaves out the millions who dropped out of the labor-force entirely.
66
Noam Scheiber, The Escape Artists: How Obama‘s Team Fumbled the Recovery (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
67
David Ellise, „JPMorgan's Dimon scores $16M bonus,“ CNN, February 5, 2010.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic
Supplements. http://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-series/historical-
income-people/p36w.xls
While the typical worker experienced wage stagnation, the income of the rich and
superrich skyrocketed. This led to great discrepancies in income and what in the colloquial is
referred to as the “hollowing out of the middle class” (Figure 4). The incomes of three
middle-class quintiles fell far behind those of the rich and ultra-rich. Each bar on the left side
of the graph represents the post-tax (inflation adjusted) income of 1/5th
(quintile) of the 124
million U.S. households. The income includes the value of such transfers as food stamps and
unemployment checks. Thus, each bar represents 24 million households (roughly 64 million
people). However, the top quintile is not shown on the left. Instead, it is further subdivided
into four groups. The graph shows vividly that the top quintile experienced the largest and
only meaningful increase in income in this time span. A tiny bit did trickle down to the 4th
quintile.68
This is the upper-middle class but an annual income growth of 0.5% is hardly
laudable. It amounted to a gain of some $300 per annum: not enough to experience a
substantial increase in life-satisfaction.
68
The 4th
quintile includes those whose income was above 72 million families but lower than
the 96th million if they are arranged in ascending order.
20.000
25.000
30.000
35.000
40.000
45.000
50.000
55.000
1955 1965 1975 1985 1995 2005 2015
Men Women
Figure 3. Median Income by Gender in 2016 dollars
Source: John Komlos, “Growth of income and welfare in the U.S., 1979-2011,” NBER
working paper no. 22211, 2016.
The poorest 20% of households (the first bar) did continue to receive food stamps and
other benefits so they were not allowed to perish, because that could have led to a dangerous
social instability but with an average annual income of $18,000 they could barely keep body
and soul together. No wonder they were discontented. Obviously, the two middle-class
groups between the 21st
and 60th
percentage of the population fared the worst: their income
growth rate is hardly distinguishable from zero. In fact, the middle class (41-60%; the third
bar) gained but $32 per annum in the 32 years under consideration.
While the hollowing-out of the middle class is evident on the left side of the graph,
the right side makes it clear that the top 1% was the primary beneficiary of economic growth.
To be sure, some of the growth did trickle down but only to the rest of the top quintile. The
trickling had the viscosity of molasses right about the 80th
percentile.
However, the anxiety that fuels Trump’s political base runs far deeper than this
diagram implies. The reason is that Figure 4 is in terms of income, but the level of income
does not equate to well-being. As far as one’s subjective evaluation of one’s welfare is
concerned, it is relative income that really matters. It is one thing not to be able to afford an
Iphone if no one else has one but an entirely different feeling if the wealthy flaunt their latest
model on the talk shows.
The income distribution in the U.S., based on tax returns, shows how unequally
income is distributed. People in the bottom 60% of the income distribution earn just 20% of
0,0
0,5
1,0
1,5
2,0
2,5
3,0
3,5
0-20% 21-40% 41-60% 61-80% 81-90% 91-95% 96-99% Top 1%
Percentperannum
Quintiles Percentiles
Figure 4. Growth of Income, 1979-2011
Upper
Middle
Class
Lower
Middle
Class
Middle
Class
Poor
Rich &
Super-Rich
total (after tax) income generated in the economy, which is as much as the earnings of the top
1%. They also earn c. 20% of total income. In other words, 1.2 million taxpayers earn as
much as the bottom 60 million taxpayers. The U.S. has the most unequally distributed income
in the developed world. Little wonder that it is also the most plutocratic.
Note: top 20% is reference; Source: See Figure 4.
Hence, the Figure 5 is a more accurate reflection of the welfare of the five income
groups. Psychologists have shown that how we feel about our life--our life satisfaction--is
reference dependent: relative deprivation matters a lot as we compare our welfare to that of
others. Figure 5 assumes that people use the fifth quintile as the reference and compare their
own income to that of the top group.69
This graph provides the real clue to Trump‘s success:
the growth rate of welfare is negative for all groups except the superrich. The rest of the
society was left behind for more than a generation. The immense inequality weighs heavily
on the society.
In sum, we have had a long string of attractive promises by five administrations from
Reagan to Obama. Tax cuts, trickle-down economics, deregulation, globalization, and
NAFTA were all portrayed as great strides forward. All were supposed to make us richer.
Instead, they conferred most of the financial benefits on only one social strata: the ultra-rich,
but led to the “hollowing out” of the middle class. So wealth and its concomitant, political
power, became as concentrated as it was during the era of the Robber Barons at the turn of
69
For the 5th quintile they are their own reference. So the relative income does not play a role
in their living standard.
-1,0
-0,5
0,0
0,5
1,0
1,5
2,0
0-20% 21-40% 41-60% 61-80% 81-100%
Figure 5. Growth rates in welfare (%), 1979-2011
the 20th
century. The establishment was good at making big promises but in the end cared
only for itself.
No wonder that so many people switched allegiance and voted for a “narcissistic
sexual harasser and a routine liar”, a strongman with an unstable personality and dangerous
ideas who is deceiving his populist base more brazenly than any of his predecessors. They
trusted a billionaire who brought other billionaires into the cabinet along with a handful of
generals. Although Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex has morphed into the militarybillionaire
complex, it nonetheless signified that the plutocracy solidified its control over the
political system.70
That is the culmination of political dysfunction that led to the rise of
Trumpism.
70
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest
Groups, and Average Citizens, Perspectives on Politics, 12, 2014: 3: 564-581; Ronald
Formisano, Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class
and Exploits the Poor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Kay Lehman
Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political
Voice and the broken Promise of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2012).