Let’s start with current events: the U.S. Congress recently passed, and Donald Trump signed into law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations, and cuts food stamps and health care for poor people. It also includes work requirements for some food stamp and Medicaid recipients.
Furthermore, the bill phases out clean energy investment credits and promotes fossil fuels over renewable energy. The bill also gives the Defense Department $150 billion more, and gives the exact same amount of $150 billion toward border enforcement and deportations.
The excessive amount given for border enforcement and deportations means that things like farm labor, which is generally performed by immigrants, will have to find domestic replacements, as much of the farm labor could be subject to deportation.
But don’t worry: Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture has said of the need for new farm labor, “No amnesty. Mass deportations continue. We’ll replace immigrant labor with machines and force the poor on Medicaid to pick up the slack.”
Yes, I can see those poor Medicaid recipients working the farms, pushing their wheelchairs through the dirt, dragging along their oxygen tanks, and wheeling their IVs filled with chemo drugs as they work the fields.
I mean, you don’t hear people say, “Boy, I don’t have to get a job because I get Medicaid and $6 a day in food stamps.”
Yet at the same time, corporations making record profits are paying wages so low their workers need food stamps and Medicaid.
All I can say in summation to all this is: What a country!
And I can also say, “Why can’t we have nice things, instead of all this cruelty?
The rationale for why we can’t have nice things is that it would increase the national debt. Although this bill adds at least $3.5 to $6 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, the argument that having nice things increases the national debt flies out the window for this bill, in order that the wealthy can have their tax breaks, and immigrants can be snatched off the streets and deported or imprisoned.
It’s a fact that when money is needed for war, or to give tax breaks to the wealthy, or to increase the budget 265% for immigration and customs enforcement, the money is always there. But to help out the poor, working class, or even middle class, then the money isn’t there, because of the…deficit and debt.
It’s truly abundance for the wealth class, and scarcity and austerity for everyone else.
But here’s the thing: we can have nice things—it’s a certain mindset that stops it from happening.
You see, the first Treasury Secretary of the U.S., Alexander Hamilton, recognized the power of public debt and called it a “national blessing.” Hamilton understood that debt was the engine that allowed a country to grow; ultimately, public debt is what enabled the U.S. to become the richest nation in the history of the planet.
Hamilton convinced Congress to set up a central bank, the Bank of the United States, and the bank took on debt through its issuance of Treasury notes and currency; by expanding the money supply and taking on public debt through these mechanisms, the U.S. was able to finance its expansion as it established infrastructure and developed and innovated new manufacturing techniques and inventions.
Through Hamilton’s foresight, America began its progression into the rich and prosperous nation it is today. But the progression wasn’t a linear trajectory straight up, as all along the way there were many bumps in the road.
The first of the impediments was something that has occurred time and again throughout history—wealthy elites feeling their assets threatened and flexing their muscle to halt the encroachment.
In this case, it was the wealthy land and slave owners of the south who saw Hamilton’s bank as an intrusion and peril on their slave-based agricultural industry and the wealth it endowed them with.
It took a few decades for the southerners to achieve their aim, but once Andrew Jackson, a son of the south, became president in 1829, Hamilton’s bank was dead, and with it, economic stability in the U.S. went south also. For the next 30 years, the U.S. went through boom and bust cycles, due to the fact that banks throughout the U.S. were free to issue their own currencies, creating a Wild West of economic precariousness and unreliability.
By one count, there were over 8,000 different currencies circulating throughout the nation during this time.
The opposition Alexander Hamilton faced from the wealthy elite because of his creation of a central bank was the first of many demonstrations of obstruction and subversion by the rich of any sort of public policy that threatened their power and wealth.
From the slaveowners of the south during the early to mid-19th century; to the robber barons of the late 19th century, the wealthy banking interests of the 1930s who tried to stop FDR’s New Deal, to our current times when Wall Street and the billionaire right-wing dark money oligarchs are doing the most harm, it’s always been the same old story: Laws are passed to protect the interests of the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else. Not only does the general public suffer, but so does democracy itself.
And the oligarchs know, if you give people more democracy and more nice things, they will vote for the politicians who want the people to have nice things. And these politicians will do their best to block the oligarchs from garnering all the nice things only for themselves.
In the 1930s, once Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office as president, things changed radically for the better. FDR wrested control of monetary policy away from Wall Street and enacted policies that allowed for shared prosperity for all.
Roosevelt saw the misery that the unregulated financial industry had sowed on the public with the financial crash of 1929. At the time, he was governor of New York, and from his vantage point he observed the wreckage that ensued: 5,000 bank failures, 100,000 jobs per week gone, 25 percent of the workforce unemployed. That is why, in his inaugural speech as president, Roosevelt promised to expel the “money changers” from the political system, saying, “They knew only the rules of self-seekers and had no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”
FDR knew what needed to be done, and had the leadership skills and courage to do so. He forced bankers to relinquish control of the monetary system, and in the process, for the first time in U.S. history, a true economic democracy was established.
With those steps he was able to address the plight of the millions of desperate Americans who were jobless and struggling to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Austerity policies were over; the U.S. used public spending to institute a New Deal for all. Over FDR’s presidency, government spending was close to 40 percent of GDP, an unheard of amount at that time. This is what allowed the economy to begin its recovery.
FDR’s policies were so popular that for the next four decades, through Democratic and Republican administrations, the country continued to embrace public spending as the means to keep the nation prosperous. And for this reason, these four decades were the most buoyant and equitable period in American history.
In 1936, the legendary American writer Carl Sandburg published a book-length poem to celebrate the accomplishments of the New Deal and the America people, called The People, Yes.
The People, Yes celebrated the diversity, resilience, and spirit of the American people, while also shedding light on the struggles and injustices they faced. The poem captured the essence of American identity and explored the themes of democracy, equality, and social consciousness.
The essence of Sandburg’s book is that when you give ordinary people nice things, they flourish, and what ensues from there is a social cohesion that bonds people together.
This social cohesion was evident in the election of 1936, when Roosevelt won reelection by one of the greatest landslides in American presidential history—FDR garnered 523 electoral votes to his opponents eight.
We can have nice things: the impediment is that the wealth class prefers that people are divided, in order to block the social cohesion that ensues from people having nice things. The wealth class knows that the people divided ensures that democratic values and the will of the people won’t occur.
A recent study came out that said that 60% of Americans can’t afford a decent standard of living. That is, 60% of Americans can’t afford things like basic leisure activities. This is unacceptable, and yet another example of our not being able to have nice things.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist who recently won the Democratic Party’s primary for mayor of New York City by a large margin, won by virtue of understanding how difficult life is for so many people, and by offering solutions to this.
His victory is giving Wall Street agita, and they are looking to stop him from being electing: Wall Street has raised at least $25 million to fund his opponents, who include the current mayor, Eric Adams, and the former NY governor, Andrew Cuomo.
Wall Street knows that if Mamdani wins, he will give people nice things, and if this happens, they may exercise their democratic rights and try and create equality for all, as opposed to having a society that focuses on the needs of the wealthy.
One day, we will learn (and hopefully not the hard way—meaning by way of a violent revolution) the lessons that have come before us: when we give people nice things they have the ability to socially cohere, and by this taking place, not only people, but democracy itself, can flourish.