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MAGA voters desperately want to feel as though they are a part of Donald Trump‘s band of billionaires, but every time they bend the knee, billionaires use it to take one more step toward an oligarchy.
As Trump fleshes out his cabinet with a who’s-who of wealthy people, it’s becoming more and more clear that the rich are going to milk this administration for all it’s worth. Incoming Secretary of the Treasury, billionaire Scott Bessent might be more experienced and less Trump crazy than the other nominees, but the he’s just as apathetic about the average American as the rest of them.
The hedge fund manager shot down any chance of raising the federal minimum wage during his Jan. 16 hearing, dashing the hopes of low-income workers across the country.
Nearly half of the United States is still stuck with a $7.25 per hour minimum wage, and Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary sees absolutely nothing wrong with that. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Bernie Sanders asked Bessent if he thought “we should change the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.” Bessent responded with, “No, sir,” leaving zero room for confusion.
“Right now in America there are more than 20 million workers who are making less than $15 an hour,” Sanders said, “and nearly 40 million… earning less than $17. “Shamefully,” he continued, “the federal minimum wage has not been changed since 2009.” He asked Besset if he would be willing to work with himself and change it to “raise millions of Americans out of poverty,” and Besset showed off his political chops with a nothing answer: “I believe it’s more of a statewide and regional issue.”
MAGA ranted and raved about the cost of living to no end in recent years, yet Republicans can’t even consider raising wages to keep up with the rising prices. There isn’t a grocery store in the country that carries bacon for less than an hour’s worth of pay, but suddenly Trump’s administration is unwilling to do anything about it. Then again, billionaires can hardly understand the plights of everyday working people, even if they spent months carrying around bacon for photo ops.
Piling on the insults, Bessent held a press conference the following day, during which he whined about the administration’s true top priority — tax cuts for the wealthy. Calling the issue a “pass fail” problem, he claimed that “if we do not fix these tax cuts, if we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity.”
How tax cuts for the wealthy could possibly impact middle and working-class people positively has yet to be seen. The demographics Bessent claims the tax cuts will save are already being squeezed out of existence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a record amount of wealth was transferred from the middle class to the upper class. The pandemic is also considered an economic sudden stop, one whose effects we’re still dealing with today. The gap between working-class people and the wealthiest Americans is worse than it was just before the Revolution — and that’s factoring in slavery.
Bessent went on to claim that if these tax reformations don’t come to pass, there will be “a gigantic middle-class tax increase” and that “we will see the child tax credit halved,” with tax deduction also being halved. “We call it a sudden stop,” Bessent says, “and it will fall on working Americans.”
Bessent is openly admitting that the wealthy are holding the rest of us hostage. Either we let them slowly bleed us dry or they’ll stop investing and bring everything crashing down. On the bright side, at least Bessent is against the cryptocurrencies endorsed by Elon Musk and has promised to keep the Federal Reserve independent from the White House. So while we don’t get pay increases and the rich get richer, at least Trump won’t be sticking his grubby little fingers into the Federal Reserve. What a nice nugget of hope to cling to as the convicted felon MAGA Americans elected president guts their country like a fish and claims the blood is gold. Well done, you. I hope you’re happy.