How Does the Wealth Pump Work to Transfer Billions from the Middle Class to the 10%?

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The last few weeks have been tough for the country and for me personally, but not all of the news has been bad for me or the country. That’s the problem when you’re a part-time blogger and a full-time citizen. You’ve got worries galore, but only a limited amount of time to blog in. Choices can be tough, especially with our news cycle is so overloaded with important stories.

Recently, we’ve been learning about Cliodynamics or using big data to study history by constructing databases of significant and consistent variables about various countries, nations, empires, cultures, and society and analyzing the patterns that result. It turns out, that works purty good.

Among the factors that portent doom for a society is the flow of wealth from the 90% to the 10%. Wealth moves upward by way of a mythical wealth pump. When that sucker’s moving full out, and all them dollars is being hoovered up by the 10%, things get bad, real bad, for the rest of us.

It buggar’s the question, how does wealth move from the 90% to the 10%? It turns out, the answer has been in the news these past few weeks. We’ll run through a couple of examples both helpful and hurtful:

Vivek Ramaswamy and his Alzheimer’s Grift took from the middle class

Before Ramaswamy became his super-hero alter- ego, Ramasmarmy, he was pharma-bro. But, instead of becoming a smirking convicted felon living on a paltry $2,500.00 a month in Queens, he became a smirking smarmy “wrapping” pres candidate, yo! Somehow Ramasmarmy dodged any kind of accountability for a little con he ran on America’s retirement funds, you know, the kind of accounts that Republicans want to turn your Social Security into?

Way back in ancient history times, like 2014, Ramasmarmy had the bright idea that he would buy the patents of failed but spectacular and consequential drugs from big pharma, hype them up, so the shares in his company would sky-rocket in anticipation of FDA approval for a miracle cure, and then sell his shares just before the bad news was released by the FDA. What in the nomenclature of illegal bad trading is called a pump and dump.

Smarmy buys the worthless patent for an Alzheimer drug, intepirdine, from GlaxoSmithKline for dirt cheap. It had already failed its FDA trials so badly that it was sent to remedial school and failed there, too. It failed so badly, it was forced to join the school-to-prison pipeline, but for drugs instead of Black people.

Smarmy’s company, Axovant, with all of eight employees including his mother and brother, publicized the stuffing out of the miracle drug that would revolutionize the treatment of dementia. The stock price soared all the way up to $200.00. After the sale of his shares and the revelation that the drug was a failure, the stock plunged to $0.40, taking millions in investments with it, including those of mom-and-pop investors and pension funds.

And that’s how it is done, brothers and sisters. That’s how the a child of upper middle class professional parents, vaults into the 10% by sucking cash out of the middle class. It also makes Smarmy one of the those overproduced elites, too.

Fossil Fuel subsidies Taking from the poor and giving to the Rich

Remember climate change? That bugabear that was going to scorch our forests and towns, worsen and enfrequenten our hurricanes, and produce heat domes to roast us in our cities? Whatever happened to that, right? The US gub’ment has been promising to lower subsidies for fossil fuels that are supposedly creating all of these mythical climate disasters just to placate the libel climate crybabies who hate us for our freedoms.

Turns out, it was all a lie. The gubment has been INCREASING fossil fuels subsidies — Thanks Sen. Manchin (D-Dirty Coal) — by impressive proportions. According to the IMF — like they can be believed because, you know, they hate us for our freedoms — we were subsidizing the oil and coal industry to the tune of a measly $500 billion dollars in 2020, and it only rose to a paltry $1.3 trillion in 2022. Like that’s going to make a difference to anyone. Freaking whiners. Oil company profits are in the 100’s of trillions of dollars, you think 1.3 trillion is gonna make a difference?

Of course, the IMF also reports the costs of not taxing consumption or making companies pay to clean up their environmental messes. Like any of that can be assessed. Seriously. These are job producers. They want to cripple our economy because they hate our freedoms. But, just to show how pathetic their arguments are, the IMF “claims” that in 2020 the US subsidized Manchin et al. to the tune of $5 trillion and that went up to $7 trillion in 2022.

That sound you’re hearing? My eyes rolling so far back in my head they might get stuck in my ass.

According to Peter Turchin all those trillions that we’re using to subsidize oil, gas, and coal companies with came from tax payers’ pockets through taxes. In other words, from the middle class. And, instead of spending it on things that would help us in some form or fashion, it gets spent on bloated CEO and upper management salaries.

Of course, these are just two of the ways in which the spigot overfilling the fat cats’ cups are open full tilt and their water is just spilling out of it while the rest of us wade around in water up to our knees as we wait for our turn — that will never come no matter what the Republicans promise — at the faucet.

Now, for the good news: the spigot can be opened completely, but it can also be closed, and we’ve seen that in the news recently, too.

Medicare negotiates drug prices slows the wealth pump

The much ballyhooed benefits of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was in itself a pared down version of his Build Back Better Act that he ran on, have started to be seen and felt by the middle class. In one of the many benefits for the average citizen, Medicare will now begin negotiating the price for ten — count ’em ten! — drugs like we are some kind of common socialized-medicine-having country.

They’re going after the ten drugs that together make up about 20% of all of Medicare Part D spending. You’ll remember that Part D pays for are self-administered, so the things you take everyday without assistance from a medical provider as opposed to Part B, which only covers the medications you get while seeing a medical type person. That 20% ain’t nothing to sneeze at neither. I mean it ain’t no $7 trillion dollars that Manchin and company are hoovering up, but it is $50 billion dollars put BACK in the pockets of average citizens and not flowing into the coffers of the 10%.

Of course, Big Pharma ain’t letting go of its billions in subsidies easily. They are suing the government claiming that while they can give Canada and Mexico and other countries negotiated low prices, it would be bad for US patients to do the same. If they can’t sell to you and me for $500.00 a month what they sell to a Canadian for $100.00, how are they ever going to be able to afford to fly Clarence Thomas around on private planes and luxury yachts to all expense paid exotic resort vacations? Hunh? Ever think of Clarence Thomas and his needs? What about McConnell? Just when he needs his Pharma Bros the most, you’re pulling the rug out from under HIM! You’ll leave him standing stiffly and silently at the podium for seconds at a time, when for just a small multi-billion dollar fee year-in-and-year-out, they might could cure it ten years after he died. What about that? Hunh?

So many of the provisions in the IRA will return money to the pockets of middle class Americans, slowing the wealth pump, and narrowing the wealth gap. The overproduced elites who are scrounging for grift are not going to sit still for it, though. They will fight this attempt to preserve our country as we know it tooth and nail even if it means transforming us into a single-party pseudo-democratic fascist oligarchy. They will make that sacrifice if it means some of them have a chance of becoming a 500 billionaire before the climate goes completely down the drain rendering all of their billions worthless.

Image Attribution

“His Cup Runneth Over” by dd-indy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.