Absolutely outstanding. A common sense explanation of relatively complex economics.
The Republican Party knows this. They hide it by diverting our attention to transgender people, immigrants and the so called “woke” ideology, while they pick the pockets of the least able to pay. The democrats have played along with their adoption of neoliberalism. Bill Clinton played the game. So did Obama. Both were funded by Wall Street. It was no accident that Eric Holder never prosecuted even one banker after the 2008 financial crisis even though the financial misconduct of Wall Street was obvious.
Now the money gods are the scumbag tech oligarchs. The Republican play book is to give these bums a tax break by taking healthcare away from children and the poor, and by the destruction of the very agencies designed to rein them in. What is happening in front of us is the greatest heist in the history of the US. The robbers are Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg. Trump, Vance and Rubio are driving the getaway car.
Thanks for this piece. I feel like the big question I have is WHO are these rich people who understand this concept of taxation as a way of controlling money supply and what makes them believe this is good or right? Or put another way, is just how awful are those 10,000 centi billionaires and just how awful are the thousands of politicians and other uber-wealthy that they don't care about democracy and this country as a whole? Because I'm not one of those people, it feels like either they don't really get this concept or they are truly amoral with no internal compass beyond greed and selfishness. ? It's just hard to fathom that so many of those people would understand the concept you laid out and then actively create hell for the rest of us. Do they all lack empathy and imagination?
No. I don’t think so. Everyone plays the game the way the rules are structured. It’s just that the the rules are such that the vast majority gets hosed.
I would t say it’s amorality in the individual case. Collectively maybe.
You might want to read John Rawls… that might help on this one and the idea of the veil of ignorance.
In any case, what’s needed here is a desire by the 90% to restore some balance other than by revolution and violence. Which is what’s going to happen otherwise.
“. . . stop pretending it’s normal for the bottom half of America—165 million people—to hold just 1.5% of all wealth, while a few hundred billionaires control 4% on their own.”
It is so abnormal that sooner or later it’s going to destroy our country. Probably sooner. Maybe now. But the rich don’t care. They’ve got theirs.
As an economist, it took me some time to appreciate it all. On its face, the income inequality doesn't seem so dire. Roughly 47% of this country's population controls about 60% of its wealth.
Sounds legit right?
Things go funhouse bananas tho as you drill down.
When I did the analysis and realized that roughly 813 people have concentrated about 4% of the entire wealth of the United States?
I was like... fuck.... me.
I mean, I always knew it at some level. But I never really *KNEW* it until I did the analysis.
When you start factoring the centi-millionaires... it gets even more ugly. You basically have about 10,000 people in the us controlling about 7 trillion dollars in assets. That's equivalent to the entire US federal budget in a year. That's a third of the GDP of the United States. That's their wealth holdings. That's .003% of the population controlling the equivalent of a third of the US GDP.
That has never happened in our history. Ever. Not even Rockefeller was like that. Yeah, he is still the richest guy ever (Sorry Elon.) But he was ONE guy. The class of wealthy we have now makes the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Guggenheims... look like amateurs.
It's truly off the hook when you look at it all. I know I keep banging the drum on this... and in my post about the Billionaires I took them to town...
But my God... I almost snapped tonight listening to MSNBC and this nonsense about the budget... and taxes.... and DOGE...
People need to wake the hell up and understand how the government functions.
I just catching on to your substack/newsletter....and this one is ON FIRE and I LOVE It, Mr. PolicyMan! Anyway.....I'm thinking of printing them out.....and scattering them about. Old School habits! Thank you.
“813 billionaires in this country. 9,730 people in America have over $100 million. They're not just prosperous—they’re centi-millionaires. And they’re untouched.”
Does this seem right to you? How long can this go on?
This was a truly excellent article, well done and thank you. I was aware of much of this but not all of it. The fact that tax is literally destroyed and simply a device to restrict the spending power and quality of life of the masses in favour of a handful of rich was a game changer.
I've been noodling this topic from the UK for some time myself, from a number of different perspectives, and trying to work out what a better 'system' might look like. (I'll be sharing that work over the next few weeks. I'd love to engage with you on it when I do if you fancy subscribing 😊)
The fact that it's all just a man made idea that only works if we trust the promise and collectively give it value is key. The fact money is just a promisory note that is no longer backed by anything of physical value is also key.
What are your thoughts on the fact that our governments are actually corporations, and corporate law/legislation is maritime law (piracy essentially). It's an administrative system of legal fictions and dead entities. Corporation literally means the oration of corpses, dead people speaking.
The key here is that it requires our consent as living beings, which we are tricked into giving without realising as our names plus Mr, Mrs etc are the legal fiction that gives them jurisdiction over us, by 'acquiescing' or 'giving joinder' we consent to stand under them and maritime law.
Our entire system is built on uninformed consent, trickery and usery. You might want to check out c'est que vie trusts and birth certificates if you're not familiar with that piece of the puzzle. It all links together.
The point is, we Do have the right to not consent to this usery and bull shit. The system will resist it of course and try to bully and scare us into complying, but many in the UK are succeeding in removing their consent to pay fraudulent taxes by simply refusing to play in their maritime law game.
Judges and magistrates are all complicit in upholding this deceit. They absolutely know we have a 2 tier system in place. It's why we never see governments and Corporations being held criminally accountable for the harm they cause, which is most of the harm we see in the world today.
It was interesting to me that when the guy who runs your Justice dept (I think) was being challenged about the 'legality' of his position and was being called to step down, his response was very clearly, 'it is not permitted under the law'. A subtle but important use of language. He absolutely knows the difference between living law and maritime legislation.
This is all relevant to assets and ownership too. There is not a living being that actually owns anything. It is all legal fictions and dead entities that 'owns' things. I think that's where the phrase 'possession is 9/10ths of the law' comes from, but I could be wrong.
If you check out Blacks law dictionary, you'll see humans are defined as sea monsters, it's an entirely different language that the system understands and we don't. We need to get back to dry land and Natural Law!
It has got to the point where personally, I believe it is not only our right to remove our consent but our responsibility. Governments work FOR US, not the other way around, and as they appear to have forgotten that since about 1980, it's time to remove their mandate and step out of all of this nonsense.
But, we DO need to come together to do it peacefully. There is power in our numbers if we choose to be sovereign and express our rights as living beings. If we ALL stopped acquiescing, stopped paying taxes, stopped spending money with and working for governments and global corporations (they're the same thing) and invested our time, energy, money and skills locally instead, it would all fall over pretty quickly.
Most importantly, it would disintermediate them from their power base and the control system and put it back in our hands, locally. They live and profit off OUR time, energy and skills. The whole thing is subjugating and parasitic in its design.
I'm not suggesting total anarchy and chaos, we need to organise the transition and work out what we move to instead - which I also have proposals for, if you're interested 😊
Great work, thanks again, more and more of us are seeing through the veil of deceit and control. I believe exciting times of positive, peaceful change are ahead, if we can relearn how to collaborate locally together.
PS another thought occurred to me... you might be interested in Gary Stevens work re the UK economy and Richard Vobes' work on law / legislation & challenging unlawful tax in the UK. The three of you together could probably crack this nut wide open in its entirety 😊
Every taxpayer in America and in fact, everyone who can read should be educated of the facts you laid out in this excellent article explaining how our economy works and what taxation actually means.
I find this point particularly poignant:
"We could fully fund universal healthcare, tuition-free college, and child care tomorrow—if we chose to.
The reason we don’t? Because the people in charge decided that maintaining extreme wealth inequality is more important than ensuring basic economic dignity for most Americans."
To me, the income inequality in the U.S. is unconscionable. I don't care if the immorality is individual or collective. I just know that it is wrong. Having laws that make it possible to amass unlimited wealth surely makes it easy for the top 1%. But I believe that individuals have moral agency and so the decision to amass unlimited wealth starts from the individual. Perhaps I've been struggling economically most of my life, so I really have a hard time understanding the mentality of people who desire so much wealth that they will never be able to spend it in their life time, while watching billions of people around the world starving and sick. To me, these people lack basic human decency and empathy.
And don't get me started with Elon Musk with the chainsaw--it just grosses and enrages me to no end.
I admit that I feel sick to the stomach every time I tune into the news these days.
The faux concern of the American traitors party over the budget deficit has always puzzled me. The deficit could be erased with a keystroke. The danger would be inflation.
Inflation would occur if the previous holders of the extinguished debt spent the proceeds on goods and services. An outcome that seems highly unlikely. My assumption is that the funds would find their way into investments. Unless Trump totally destroys the US economy, a real possibility, those funds would find their way back to the US or other nations. Inflation doesn’t seem likely. Is my thinking on this erroneous?
What makes me crazy is that in America, such life-enhancing information is viewed as radical affirming that money has never been seriously invested in education.
This is so good. A true master class! Thank you for channeling your angst into this analysis, and I do hope writing it kept you from bursting.
It helped. lol.
Absolutely outstanding. A common sense explanation of relatively complex economics.
The Republican Party knows this. They hide it by diverting our attention to transgender people, immigrants and the so called “woke” ideology, while they pick the pockets of the least able to pay. The democrats have played along with their adoption of neoliberalism. Bill Clinton played the game. So did Obama. Both were funded by Wall Street. It was no accident that Eric Holder never prosecuted even one banker after the 2008 financial crisis even though the financial misconduct of Wall Street was obvious.
Now the money gods are the scumbag tech oligarchs. The Republican play book is to give these bums a tax break by taking healthcare away from children and the poor, and by the destruction of the very agencies designed to rein them in. What is happening in front of us is the greatest heist in the history of the US. The robbers are Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg. Trump, Vance and Rubio are driving the getaway car.
Another brilliant article that I will keep referring to for years to come. Thank you very much for educating me.
Bravo! This needs to be circulated far and wide! Excellent explanation and analysis. Thank you so much.
I totally agree!
Thanks for this piece. I feel like the big question I have is WHO are these rich people who understand this concept of taxation as a way of controlling money supply and what makes them believe this is good or right? Or put another way, is just how awful are those 10,000 centi billionaires and just how awful are the thousands of politicians and other uber-wealthy that they don't care about democracy and this country as a whole? Because I'm not one of those people, it feels like either they don't really get this concept or they are truly amoral with no internal compass beyond greed and selfishness. ? It's just hard to fathom that so many of those people would understand the concept you laid out and then actively create hell for the rest of us. Do they all lack empathy and imagination?
No. I don’t think so. Everyone plays the game the way the rules are structured. It’s just that the the rules are such that the vast majority gets hosed.
I would t say it’s amorality in the individual case. Collectively maybe.
You might want to read John Rawls… that might help on this one and the idea of the veil of ignorance.
In any case, what’s needed here is a desire by the 90% to restore some balance other than by revolution and violence. Which is what’s going to happen otherwise.
WOW! This blew my mind! Everything I suspected now explained in details! Thank you!!!
“. . . stop pretending it’s normal for the bottom half of America—165 million people—to hold just 1.5% of all wealth, while a few hundred billionaires control 4% on their own.”
It is so abnormal that sooner or later it’s going to destroy our country. Probably sooner. Maybe now. But the rich don’t care. They’ve got theirs.
As an economist, it took me some time to appreciate it all. On its face, the income inequality doesn't seem so dire. Roughly 47% of this country's population controls about 60% of its wealth.
Sounds legit right?
Things go funhouse bananas tho as you drill down.
When I did the analysis and realized that roughly 813 people have concentrated about 4% of the entire wealth of the United States?
I was like... fuck.... me.
I mean, I always knew it at some level. But I never really *KNEW* it until I did the analysis.
When you start factoring the centi-millionaires... it gets even more ugly. You basically have about 10,000 people in the us controlling about 7 trillion dollars in assets. That's equivalent to the entire US federal budget in a year. That's a third of the GDP of the United States. That's their wealth holdings. That's .003% of the population controlling the equivalent of a third of the US GDP.
That has never happened in our history. Ever. Not even Rockefeller was like that. Yeah, he is still the richest guy ever (Sorry Elon.) But he was ONE guy. The class of wealthy we have now makes the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Guggenheims... look like amateurs.
It's truly off the hook when you look at it all. I know I keep banging the drum on this... and in my post about the Billionaires I took them to town...
But my God... I almost snapped tonight listening to MSNBC and this nonsense about the budget... and taxes.... and DOGE...
People need to wake the hell up and understand how the government functions.
Knowledge is power. (SMH)
I really appreciate the clarity and passion of your post. I’ve read it over and over. To say that it struck a chord would be a gross understatement.
I just catching on to your substack/newsletter....and this one is ON FIRE and I LOVE It, Mr. PolicyMan! Anyway.....I'm thinking of printing them out.....and scattering them about. Old School habits! Thank you.
“813 billionaires in this country. 9,730 people in America have over $100 million. They're not just prosperous—they’re centi-millionaires. And they’re untouched.”
Does this seem right to you? How long can this go on?
Excellent analysis. Thank you. I wish everybody, and I mean everybody, would read this!
This was a truly excellent article, well done and thank you. I was aware of much of this but not all of it. The fact that tax is literally destroyed and simply a device to restrict the spending power and quality of life of the masses in favour of a handful of rich was a game changer.
I've been noodling this topic from the UK for some time myself, from a number of different perspectives, and trying to work out what a better 'system' might look like. (I'll be sharing that work over the next few weeks. I'd love to engage with you on it when I do if you fancy subscribing 😊)
The fact that it's all just a man made idea that only works if we trust the promise and collectively give it value is key. The fact money is just a promisory note that is no longer backed by anything of physical value is also key.
What are your thoughts on the fact that our governments are actually corporations, and corporate law/legislation is maritime law (piracy essentially). It's an administrative system of legal fictions and dead entities. Corporation literally means the oration of corpses, dead people speaking.
The key here is that it requires our consent as living beings, which we are tricked into giving without realising as our names plus Mr, Mrs etc are the legal fiction that gives them jurisdiction over us, by 'acquiescing' or 'giving joinder' we consent to stand under them and maritime law.
Our entire system is built on uninformed consent, trickery and usery. You might want to check out c'est que vie trusts and birth certificates if you're not familiar with that piece of the puzzle. It all links together.
The point is, we Do have the right to not consent to this usery and bull shit. The system will resist it of course and try to bully and scare us into complying, but many in the UK are succeeding in removing their consent to pay fraudulent taxes by simply refusing to play in their maritime law game.
Judges and magistrates are all complicit in upholding this deceit. They absolutely know we have a 2 tier system in place. It's why we never see governments and Corporations being held criminally accountable for the harm they cause, which is most of the harm we see in the world today.
It was interesting to me that when the guy who runs your Justice dept (I think) was being challenged about the 'legality' of his position and was being called to step down, his response was very clearly, 'it is not permitted under the law'. A subtle but important use of language. He absolutely knows the difference between living law and maritime legislation.
This is all relevant to assets and ownership too. There is not a living being that actually owns anything. It is all legal fictions and dead entities that 'owns' things. I think that's where the phrase 'possession is 9/10ths of the law' comes from, but I could be wrong.
If you check out Blacks law dictionary, you'll see humans are defined as sea monsters, it's an entirely different language that the system understands and we don't. We need to get back to dry land and Natural Law!
It has got to the point where personally, I believe it is not only our right to remove our consent but our responsibility. Governments work FOR US, not the other way around, and as they appear to have forgotten that since about 1980, it's time to remove their mandate and step out of all of this nonsense.
But, we DO need to come together to do it peacefully. There is power in our numbers if we choose to be sovereign and express our rights as living beings. If we ALL stopped acquiescing, stopped paying taxes, stopped spending money with and working for governments and global corporations (they're the same thing) and invested our time, energy, money and skills locally instead, it would all fall over pretty quickly.
Most importantly, it would disintermediate them from their power base and the control system and put it back in our hands, locally. They live and profit off OUR time, energy and skills. The whole thing is subjugating and parasitic in its design.
I'm not suggesting total anarchy and chaos, we need to organise the transition and work out what we move to instead - which I also have proposals for, if you're interested 😊
Great work, thanks again, more and more of us are seeing through the veil of deceit and control. I believe exciting times of positive, peaceful change are ahead, if we can relearn how to collaborate locally together.
PS another thought occurred to me... you might be interested in Gary Stevens work re the UK economy and Richard Vobes' work on law / legislation & challenging unlawful tax in the UK. The three of you together could probably crack this nut wide open in its entirety 😊
Every taxpayer in America and in fact, everyone who can read should be educated of the facts you laid out in this excellent article explaining how our economy works and what taxation actually means.
I find this point particularly poignant:
"We could fully fund universal healthcare, tuition-free college, and child care tomorrow—if we chose to.
The reason we don’t? Because the people in charge decided that maintaining extreme wealth inequality is more important than ensuring basic economic dignity for most Americans."
To me, the income inequality in the U.S. is unconscionable. I don't care if the immorality is individual or collective. I just know that it is wrong. Having laws that make it possible to amass unlimited wealth surely makes it easy for the top 1%. But I believe that individuals have moral agency and so the decision to amass unlimited wealth starts from the individual. Perhaps I've been struggling economically most of my life, so I really have a hard time understanding the mentality of people who desire so much wealth that they will never be able to spend it in their life time, while watching billions of people around the world starving and sick. To me, these people lack basic human decency and empathy.
And don't get me started with Elon Musk with the chainsaw--it just grosses and enrages me to no end.
I admit that I feel sick to the stomach every time I tune into the news these days.
The faux concern of the American traitors party over the budget deficit has always puzzled me. The deficit could be erased with a keystroke. The danger would be inflation.
Inflation would occur if the previous holders of the extinguished debt spent the proceeds on goods and services. An outcome that seems highly unlikely. My assumption is that the funds would find their way into investments. Unless Trump totally destroys the US economy, a real possibility, those funds would find their way back to the US or other nations. Inflation doesn’t seem likely. Is my thinking on this erroneous?
What makes me crazy is that in America, such life-enhancing information is viewed as radical affirming that money has never been seriously invested in education.
Such a good explanation thanks!
This is brilliantly explained. Thank you!