When justifying the Republicans' December 2017 $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan claimed that it would result, in 2018, in wage gains for American workers ranging from $4,000 to $9,000 each. But nothing like that materialized. In fact, the real wages of American workers (that is, wages after adjusting for inflation) declined. By contrast, the average wealth of the 400 richest Americans soared--from $6.7 billion to $7.2 billion each, and the wealth of the ten richest Americans grew by nearly 20 percent.
Published Articles by Lawrence Wittner
Although a first-rate higher education should be available to all Americans, it isn't. The soaring tuition and other costs, the replacement of liberal arts education with narrow vocational training, the elimination of tenured and tenure-line faculty, and the substitution of massive online courses for the classroom experience have deeply eroded educational opportunity. These developments are most advanced at America's for-profit colleges and universities.
Since the advent of the Trump administration, American progressives have been aghast at its narrow, nationalist approach to world affairs. But many of them are also uneasy at the American establishment's defense of its more traditional foreign policy, which was characterized by U.S.-dominated military alliances, soaring Pentagon budgets, and numerous wars. A more satisfying alternative involves strengthening global governance, which has enormous potential for addressing current world problems.
The progressive income tax has existed since 1861 in the United States, and is designed to ensure that the richest Americans pay their fair share of the cost of maintaining their country's public programs. But the wealthy deeply resented paying a portion of their income to benefit other people. As a result, since the early 1960s they have succeeded in having their taxes dramatically reduced. Even so, large majorities of Americans favor raising taxes on the rich -- a policy that would shift the tax burden back to the wealthy and, also, improve the overall economy.
The recent victory of 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- an obscure, upfront democratic socialist from the Bronx -- in a Democratic primary against one of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives should not be a total surprise. In recent years, democratic socialism has been making a remarkable comeback in American life and, as the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign illustrated, has begun to play a significant role in Democratic party politics.
Buried far below the mass media coverage of the U.S.-North Korea summit spectacle, Donald Trump -- assisted by his military and civilian advisors -- is busy getting the United States ready for nuclear war. A massive nuclear weapons buildup now underway (at a potential cost of $2 trillion), new nuclear policy guidelines widening the scope for the use of nuclear weapons, and a high level of mental instability, impulsiveness, and vindictiveness on the part of the U.S. commander-in-chief combine to create a giant step toward catastrophe.
Although the U.S. mass media are awash with stories about America's "booming economy," the benefits are distributed very unequally, when they are distributed at all. Soaring wealth and incomes for the few do not automatically translate into better lives for the many.
Although Daniel Ellsberg is best known for revealing the Pentagon Papers to the American people, he spent much of his 13-year career as a military analyst at the highest levels of the U.S. national security apparatus, grappling with the life and death issues posed by nuclear weapons. Therefore, when an insider like this tells us how preparations for nuclear war have been proceeding, it's well worth sitting up and taking notice.
A 2018 study of the opinions of people living in 156 nations found that none of the "great" powers -- all of which have portrayed themselves as models for the world -- ranked within the top ten. In fact, the United States placed 18th, Russia 59th, and China 86th. The factors that appear to have contributed most to national happiness were advanced social welfare institutions and a relatively low level of violence.
In February 2018, the GOP-controlled Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed legislation that increased U.S. military spending by $165 billion over the next two years. Remarkably, though, a Gallup poll, conducted only days before, found that only 33 percent of Americans favored increasing military spending, while 65 percent opposed it. Even more remarkable for a nation where military spending has grown substantially over the decades, in only one of the past 49 years when Gallup polled Americans about military spending did a majority of Americans favor increasing it.