It’s… not a happy time in the United States.
There are very few left who pretend that the current leadership has any idea what it’s doing. Trump is obviously a massive problem. There are no doubt many more outrages, horrors and absurdities to come over the next 27 months, but Trump is already seen as a lame duck at this point, no matter how the mid-term elections go on November 3rd. The idea that the Trump revolution was going to bring any constructive change is dead.
With this Democratic party, it’s kind of hard to be hopeful though.
The Democrats already had the chance to take power after Trump made a humiliating shambles of the world, and their answer was Joe Biden. Biden was a guy who promised not to fix the conditions that gave us Trump, but to restore those conditions. And he didn’t even manage that.
Today’s podcast episode is on the conditions that brought us Trump. He’s the culmination, not of a couple years of failure, but of decades. Ruairi and I talk about an Australian professor’s masterful summing up in Aeon Magazine of the damage the Reagan Revolution did to the United States. It’s a great article, and I think Ruairi and I make a good podcast out of our discussion of it. But I don’t think we went far enough in discussing how easy so many of these problems are to fix. You can listen to our conversation below, and read on to hear me talk about how the US has all the power it needs to restore our financial position, and even (with a couple decades work) our international prestige.
All Our Problems Are Self-Created
The main lesson of Donald Trump’s presidency is the fact that the United States has zero external threats, and is way, way more powerful than anybody other than myself wants to acknowledge. I’ve been beating this drum for over a decade now…
The Trump administration has made it clear that the United States is even more powerful than I had imagined. Trump is disgusting. He’s a vile, stupid bully, who has spent the past two years violating every alliance, and at least attempting to bully everyone on the planet, stripping away every public good the US used to provide, from safe sea lanes to US AID.
Now what hasn’t happened? China hasn’t taken Taiwan. Among our allies, Nobody other than Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has made a peep. And even he followed up the big roll-out of his “little power coalition” at Davos in January with an endorsement of Trump’s war in Iran. BRICS? Remember that coalition of rising countries that’s supposedly been waiting in the wings to steal our thunder? Well Trump is probably the weakest and dumbest president in my lifetime, he’s blown up the world economy, and BRICS is nowhere to be found.
Much has been made of the “Bond Vigilantes” and the recent plummet in the value of US debt securities. How is this only happening in September of 2026? How did it take a full seven months into Trump’s insane Iran war, and 17 months after he took a massive dump on the international trade system with his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April of 2025? If anything, the bond market’s treatment of Trump has demonstrated how egregious US misbehavior has to be before we see any consequences at all.
The United States remains central to the functioning of the world, even when there’s a complete psychopath in charge. We have no external threats, and we have the time and resources necessary to fix things.
It’s not limitless time! It’s not limitless resources!
The Bond Vigilantes, like the rest of Wall Street, are all Republicans, and won’t give the next Democratic president anywhere near as much rope to hang all of us.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’ll need to raise taxes.
And we should.
Taxes Aren’t That Hard
A lot of breath is being spent on the newish idea of wealth taxes. I am not super opposed to the idea. The main objection to US wealth taxes, that capital will go elsewhere, has always struck me as farcical. That may be a problem for California, but it isn’t for the United States of America. We’re not France, the country whose “wealth tax” experience is claimed by some to have led to some capital flight. The United States has all the levers it needs to stop that sort of thing.
A wealth tax is complicated in other ways though. I don’t think it will be as easy to deal with the unrealized gains issue as people think. Sure, some billionaires have the kinds of resources that can easily be shunted around to pay a 3-10% tax on their raw amount of wealth every year. But those are exactly the types of people who have teams of accountants and lawyers to make sure their wealth is hard to measure, find and tax.
To make a wealth tax work for more than a year, we’d need to have teams of well paid lawyers and accountants working for the federal government to race against the billionaire tax avoidance. One of the first things we did in the Reagan era was fire all of those guys. We need to rebuild that expertise but it will take time. We can’t re-hire them. That was 50 years ago. They’re all dead.
But we can do much simpler things around Tax. We can just repeal the tax cuts.
Low Hanging Fruit
Both Bush and Trump did two massive rounds of tax cuts. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel with a wealth tax, there’s tons of low-hanging fruit available in corporate, capital gains, estate and dividend taxes.
It’s not as simple as just reversing all of these laws. The 2001 Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, the 2003 Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act of 2017, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, are all typical modern bills. They are hundreds to thousands of pages long, and filled with complex stuff with implications far beyond the tax code.
The numbers aren’t complicated though. We know that before all of those bills, the United States worked just fine, arguably a lot better, with higher rates of taxation.
None of this is that complicated. We don’t need to raise income taxes on anybody ( though we should do that too ) to dramatically increase the health of the US government’s finances.
There are a wide range of bullshit excuses here, that are designed to protect people who don’t need protecting. We should jack the corporate tax of 21% (before a staggering range of deductions and loopholes) back up to 35% (before a staggering range of deductions and loopholes) the way it was before 2017. We should also close some of those loopholes, but whether or not we did that, we would see a dramatic increase in US government revenue from this change alone.
The fear here is that if we stopped handing all this money over to corporations, then maybe the stock market wouldn’t increase by 10-20% every year, the way it has been recently.
Good.
We’ve been looking after the rich too much for too long. It’s time to look after the rest of the country, and its basic finances. None of this stuff is that hard. It’s only special interests and Wall Street that try to make it look hard.
If you want to hear more in this vein, the first thing you should do is read Les Coleman’s article in Aeon Magazine that inspired all of this musing. Then you can either listen to our podcast on Spotify, or watch it on YouTube below.
Its not easy to fix. The US is strangled by oligarchs, military contractors, zionists and swindlers. No populace that would vote a thing like Trump into power once, much less twice, after his coup attempt, has the intelligence or self respect to pull the nation out of idiocracy and despotism.
China didnt take Taiwan because they are smart and will wait for the US to fall. Operations Ukraine and Iran are both dismal failures. Its only by a quirk of history and changing economics that US debt hasn't crippled the US- yet.