America is being hollowed out by an extractive financial system.
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Donald Trump indicators the One, Huge Stunning Invoice Act into legislation throughout an Independence Day navy household picnic on the South Garden of the White Home on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Samuel Corum / Getty Pictures)
Trump’s “Huge Stunning Invoice” simply handed each chambers of Congress. It slashes over $1 trillion from Medicaid and cuts anti-hunger packages by $295 billionall whereas delivering tax breaks the place 72 % of all advantages go to the highest 20 % of earners. At the very least 16 million Individuals are projected to lose healthcare protection.
In the meantime, the invoice allocates $170 billion for immigration enforcement—making ICE’s finances balloon from $10 billion to over $100 billion. That’s greater than twice what Israel spends on its total navy throughout wartime. We’re spending extra on chasing gardeners and dishwashers than most nations spend defending their total nations.
But on this total trillion-dollar reshuffling—all these cuts to healthcare, all this cash for deportations, all these tax breaks for the rich—there’s not a dime for constructing something actual. No infrastructure. No manufacturing capability. No investments within the productive financial system that really creates good jobs. Trump bought himself to working folks because the builder, the man who’d convey again factories and repair the bridges. As a substitute, he’s working the identical extraction rip-off as each Wall Road hack earlier than him: take from the underside, give to the highest, construct nothing. All reaping, no sowing.
Have a look at America’s personal sample. Our GDP has skyrocketed over many years, and what can we get? Ross Perot working because the billionaire populist. Obama working because the transformational candidate. Bernie’s revolution. And Trump—nominated thrice, elected twice. When the institution fails to ship actual prosperity, Individuals flip to whoever guarantees to explode the system. When liberals fail, we flip to strongmen.
The sample repeats globally. Poland recorded the EU’s quickest GDP progress in 2024. Overseas corporations used their low-cost labor, extracted income, despatched them house. Polish staff received jobs the place you make another person wealthy whilst you keep poor. So the Poles reelect the authoritarian Legislation and Justice Celebrationaccused of undermining democracy. Similar in Hungary with Orbán. GDP metrics rise; democracy turns into shakier.
We construct financial programs which can be essentially extractive. They generate spectacular GDP numbers by hollowing out the precise productive capability that makes folks’s lives higher. Extraction means cities promoting water programs, states auctioning toll roads, counties privatizing ambulance companies—GDP counts all of it as progress. We’re liquidating group infrastructure constructed over generations, promoting it to entities with no stake within the public good.
Present Difficulty
Simon Kuznets, who invented GDP in 1934, explicitly warned in opposition to this—“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of nationwide revenue”—but after Bretton Woods in 1944, his warnings have been utterly ignored as GDP grew to become the worldwide customary.
Someplace alongside the way in which, we determined that individuals who’d by no means constructed a fucking factor with their fingers ought to be accountable for world financial coverage. I’m speaking about people who couldn’t work out easy methods to use a ratchet strap to save lots of their lives. These are the individuals who checked out American manufacturing within the Nineteen Eighties and thought, “We don’t must make higher vehicles than Japan. We’ll simply change into the distribution and meeting middle.” What they didn’t perceive—as a result of they’d by no means truly made something—is that while you make the mousetraps, you additionally work out easy methods to make higher mousetraps. Innovation follows manufacturing.
Japan reveals that one other path exists. When their bubble burst within the early Nineteen Nineties, they might’ve slashed spending and gutted social packages. As a substitute, Japan launched 15 fiscal stimulus packages between 1990 and 2008, totaling roughly 28 % of GDPwith public works accounting for about 40 %. Not monetary engineering—precise infrastructure. They preserved their manufacturing base.
The IMF, the World Financial institution, each monetary publication known as it a catastrophe. Wall Road needed the form of returns you solely get by squeezing working folks till they bleed. Japan refused to squeeze. When 2008 hit, they weathered it higher than the closely financialized economies that had been lecturing them for years.
GDP can’t measure the distinction between making issues and serving individuals who make issues. A nation of house well being aides and retail staff—regardless of how important their work—has no leverage in opposition to world capital. Actual energy comes from productive capability. When you possibly can construct the chips, the machines, the infrastructure, you will have bargaining energy. When you possibly can solely serve those that personal these items, you’re dependent. GDP treats a greenback earned constructing chips the identical as one earned stocking cabinets.
This measurement failure drives coverage failure. We optimize for Wall Road metrics—fast GDP progress, excessive returns, most extraction—as an alternative of constructing productive capability, creating good jobs, creating infrastructure that lasts. When that makes most individuals’s lives worse, they vote for populists who promise to tear all of it down. Or worse—they begin pondering possibly democracy itself is the issue.
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Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley’s court docket thinker, brazenly requires America to be run by a CEO-monarch. His concepts are taken severely by Thiel, Vance, Andreessen. These CEOs can’t construct planes that fly or chips that compete. When GDP is your solely god, democracy turns into expendable.
America’s selecting extraction on steroids. Trump’s Huge Stunning Invoice cuts the security internet to juice the numbers. When these 16 million folks lose protection, when households can’t afford meals, when rural hospitals shut—we could nicely obtain the form of “effectivity” that appears good in a Wall Road spreadsheet however devastating in a group.
We maintain questioning why democracy is below menace in so many corners of the world. Maybe it’s as a result of we’ve created a Western financial system that works nicely for many who personal belongings and poorly for many who work for a residing. Actual freedom requires actual manufacturing—staff who construct issues have leverage; staff diminished to servants don’t. Poland’s staff couldn’t combat extraction as a result of they’d been diminished to low-cost labor. Japan’s staff maintained energy as a result of they nonetheless construct issues that matter.
GDP is a false god. Time to discover a higher faith.
Corbin Trent
Corbin Trent is an Appalachian manufacturing facility proprietor turned political strategist, cofounder of Justice Democrats, and former communications director for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He writes about rebuilding America at AmericasUndoing.com.
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