Jack Rasmus

Listen to my January 10, 2025 Alternative Visions radio show and my predictions for 2025 political events, both US and global. Go to:

Watch my Jan. 5, 2025 Youtube interview with Garland Nixon discussing the key geopolitical and economic events as US and global economies enter 2025. Topics include: how USA is making Europe its economic dependency, why EU will implode next decade, what’s behind Zelensky’s cutoff of Russian pipeline gas to Europe, why is Trump talking about taking over Greenland and Panama canal, the future of BRICS, US dollar, US ‘twin deficits’, coming massive US austerity cuts to social programs in 2025, why USA is now ‘circling the wagons’ of its core empire. Also discussed are the real political & economic legacies of Jimmy Carter and his presidency as the anteroom between the crises of the 1970s decade and the Neoliberal capitalist restructuring in the 1980s to the present.

For my predictions for the US and global economy for the year 2025 ahead, listen to my January 3 Alternative Visions radio show at:

https://alternativevisions.podbean.com/e/alternative-visions-predictions-2025-us-global-economy/

(Listen to the January 10 Alternative Visions show for predictions for US & Global politics)

Listen to my December 27, 2024 Alternative Visions radio show’s annual review of the critical events–economic & political, USA and global–for the past year. (Check out this coming Friday, January 3, 2025 show for my predictions for 2025). GO TO:

https://alternativevisions.podbean.com/e/alternative-visions-2024-year-in-review-show/

SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT

Today’s show is the annual year end summary of the more important events and developments for 2024 for the economy and politic: A review of the US economy inflation trends, Fed rate policies, US goods sector recession, USA’s runaway budget deficit and national debt, Longshore union negotiations, Artificial Intelligence & Tech trends, pending 2025 Austerity social program cuts & Musk’s DOGE, Biden sanctions on Russia and China, BRICS expansion, the state of Europe & China economies, and the emerging global currency instability as prices and US $ rise. Political review includes the US election of 2024, Trump’s victory, Biden’s coup & Democrat party confusion, and globally the War on the ground in Ukraine, Israel wars in Lebanon-Iran-Yemen, and the collapse of Syria and its consequences. (NEXT WEEK: Annual economic and political predictions for 2025 and review of last year’s predictions for 2024)

Catch up on year end events in my latest December Alternative Vision radio shows on the US and global economy and global changes in the Ukraine and Syria.

Key Economics Events of 2024: December 20, 2024 Show

https://alternativevisions.podbean.com/e/alternative-visions-key-economic-developments-year-end-2024/

Today’s show discusses the key economic events of recent weeks and their relevance to economic policy in 2025. Why did the debt-ceiling deal collapse and then pass last week. What does it mean. Trump’s fiscal strategy taking shape: tariffs, tax cuts, and austerity social spending cuts coming. Musk-Swarmy’s DOGE. Why it won’t resolve the chronic $1 trillion plus annual budget deficits, rising national debt, and $ trillion annual payments to rich bondholders. Neoliberalism fiscal contradictions and crisis will continue. What’s Musk’s DOGE plans? Why the Fed cut interest rates but admitted inflation is rising into 2025. Why inflation will continue to rise. As rates rise will a rising dollar in turn precipitate a global currency war? (Next week show: review of key events of 2024 and my predictions for 2024 made December 2023 last year)

The Empire Strikes Back: December 13, 2024 Show

https://alternativevisions.podbean.com/e/alternative-visions-the-empire-strikes-back/

As follow up to last week’s show Ukraine war is center topic. But in past week pro-NATO forces opened up new ‘fronts’ well beyond the conflict. Not by accident rebel forces, coordinating with Turkish, Israeli and US forces accelerating an attack in Syria opening a new front Russia must commit forces to. Another front is Georgia as CIA-US NGO forces continue street demonstrations to try to overthrow that country’s elected government, in a ‘color revolution’ effort much like Ukraine 2014. Yet a third front is the events in So. Korea where the pro-US president attempted to declare martial law, reversed by the Parliament, but supported by the Korean and US occupation military. The show explains how all three events are best understood as events related to US empire counters to Russia-China. Trump’s latest tariff moves against China and BRICS also part of the counter strategy. Show concludes with analysis of Trump’s several anti-war initial nominees being rejected as US neocons & Biden admin. buy time to restore aid & weapons to Ukraine

For my discussion of ’14 Reasons Why Prices Are Higher Than the CPI Reports’, listen to my Friday, November 14, hour long Alternative Visions radio show on how the CPI under-reports inflation (with additional comments on Trump’s cabinet appointments and Russia’s two new offensives in Ukraine).

To Listen Go To:

https://alternativevisions.podbean.com/e/alternative-visions-14-reasons-why-prices-are-higher-than-the-cpi-reports/

For those who prefer to hear instead of read, listen to my Alternative Visions radio show last friday, November 8, for my analysis ‘Why Trump Won-And Some Consequences’. Supplements the print article (more ad-libbing as well for what it’s worth).

GO TO: https://alternativevisions.podbean.com/e/alternative-visions-why-trump-won%e2%80%94and-some-consequences/

Here’s my latest, and first post-election, analysis of the recent Trump and Republican victory this past week. And some of what may be soon coming. Jack Rasmus, copyright 2024

“It’s now more than 48 hours after the election, the dust has settled, and the results are in except for a late counting in the state of Arizona–the outcome of which won’t affect the results of the election. Trump has won an undeniable victory, both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.

Political pundits, pollsters, and over-paid political strategists who seem to get it wrong repeatedly every election cycle are now concocting all manner of explanations and mightily spinning their excuses. Some say Harris lost because the Democrats’ ‘ground game’—i.e. get out the vote efforts—failed; or that the $1 billion in campaign contributions she received during the summer was ill spent; or her TV ads were poorly focused; or her ‘politics of joy’ theme grated on the mood of voters who were anything but happy. But all these tactical explanations of the Democrats’ devastating defeat—which was across the board and not just for Harris—are obviously irrelevant.

The pundits and political strategists who forecast the election wrong are now failing to understand its results as well. Here are the more important takeaways from the election:

A Popular Vote Anomaly?

The electoral college result thus far, with Arizona’s 11 votes pending, is 301 for Trump and 226 for Harris (270 needed to win). Trump also won the popular vote with 73.4 million vs. 69.1 million for Harris—as of the popular vote count late November 8.

Perhaps the most glaring indicator of what went wrong for Harris, however, is the big shift in the popular vote away from Democrats in 2024. In 2020 the Democrats polled 81 million votes in the presidential race. In 2024 so far only 69.1 million. That’s 12 million fewer votes for Democrats! How to explain that fact?

Did all the 12 million cross over to Trump? Apparently not. Trump’s 2024 popular vote was not that much different from 2020. He received 74 million in 2020 and in 2024 so far about 73.4 million.

These contrasting numbers raise two interesting questions:

Where did Harris’s missing 12 million popular votes go, if not to Trump? The corollary question also arises: did Biden and the Democrats really receive 81 million votes in 2020?
Whichever the explanation, the mainstream legacy media (CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, WAPO, etc) are conspicuously avoiding any analysis of this missing 12 million or the apparent vote count anomaly.

But one thing is irrefutable in the official vote tally: roughly 13 million fewer turned out to vote for either candidate in 2024 and 12 million were Democrat voters. The only logical conclusion therefore is that 12 million Democrrat voters apparently stayed home and did not vote. So why?

Whatever the popular vote, it is irrelevant for US presidential elections. Only the archaic electoral college vote matters. Why the USA keeps that institution when it allows ‘one person one vote’ for all other voting for members of Congress is interesting. Two-thirds of voters have indicated in multiple surveys recently that they want a direct vote for the president and an end to the Electoral College. Why both parties continue with the system says much. Nevertheless it’s a question—like a Florida 2000 election ballot ‘chad’—that will be left hanging for now.

Electoral College Vote Repeat

Trump’s 301 (eventual 312) electoral college votes confirms this writer’s prediction this past summer that the swing states would flip back to 2016 numbers and Trump. 2024 would be a 2016 swing states déjà vu election.

In the 2020 election, Biden’s electoral college vote was 306 to Trump’s 232. In 2016 Trump won 304 electoral college votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227. The winning margins of 304 (2016), then 306 (2020), now 301 (312) in 2024 is not merely coincidental.

The largely similar electoral college counts in 2016, 2020, and 2024 suggests strongly that deeper forces in the US political system created a shift beginning 2016 and have continued ever since.
Trump’s election in 2016 was therefore not the aberration as many Democrats and mainstream media argued in 2020; Biden’s in 2020 was.

Events of the past decade suggests the fallout from the economic crash and crisis of 2008-10 is still having its longer term political impact. Voters’ overwhelming concern with economic issues in 2024 reveal it is still reverberating. In 2024 it was manifested in inflation. In 2020 it was massive Covid job loss. Since 2008 it’s been the steady decline in real income and living standards for tens of millions of American households—amidst the accelerating income and wealth for the 1% or 5% households largely attributable to accelerating financial asset markets and values. As one famous pundit said more than three decades ago: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

One might clarify that: “it’s the lopsided economy, stupid!” Economic conditions have deteriorated much further since the 1990s when that statement was made, especially after the 2008-10 crash and crisis followed by the Covid induced crash. Some political elites apparently never learned the economic lesson.

Throughout this past summer this writer has been predicting Trump would win the electoral college vote by slightly more than 300—by 302 to 236 to be exact. This forecast was based on the assumption he would win all the seven swing states, except for Michigan. In retrospect he has won the latter state as well. (see my piece “November 2024: A Swing States Déjà vu Election?” at the LA Progressive website last week).

Inflation and other economic conditions during the Biden years were firmly established by opinion polls since the start of 2024 as the primary concerns of voters, thereafter strongly confirmed again in the September Gallup poll.

Put in a long term perspective, Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and her loss of the ‘blue wall’ states in the north can be largely attributed to the weak GDP economic recovery after 2010 and the even weaker related job recovery during the Obama years. GDP grew around only 60% of normal after 2010 when compared to the prior nine US recessions since 1948. More importantly, jobs lost after 2007 due to the 2008-09 crash did not recover to 2007 levels until 2015. It took six years just to get back to pre-recession job levels. Add to this Hillary Clinton’s well known approval of free trade treaties and its offshoring of jobs effect—as well as her strategic error of not even bothering to campaign in the blue wall states—and the result was a predictable 2016 Trump sweep of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and victory. It was still ‘the economy, stupid’.

In 2020 Biden also largely won for economic reasons—specifically the severe recession and job losses of 2020 due to the Covid pandemic economy partial shutdown. Biden swept back the blue wall states and won handily—almost exactly with the same electoral college votes that Trump had won with four years earlier! That stupid old economy had not gone away.

In 2024, the Covid induced mass layoffs in 2020 no longer prevailed but were replaced by another Covid induced economic consequence: inflation which erupted in fall of 2021. Prices for goods started abating by 2023 but inflation in the much more ubiquitous services sector of the US economy remained chronically high throughout 2023 and into early 2024.

Official government statistics estimate the price level rose 24% over the four Biden years but real inflation adjusted take home pay for tens of millions of households was impacted more severely than the statistics or politicians and media suggested during the recent election.

Actual inflation impact on family budgets was more like 30%-35%, especially after considering the sharp rise in interest rates starting March-June 2023 and rise in taxes, neither of which are included in calculations of the government’s price statistics. Households also pay for interest out of their take home pay and family disposable income. Mortgage rates rose 114% under Biden. Credit card average rates rose from 16% to 23% and households carried over record level of that debt monthly. New student loan rates rose from 4% to around 7%. And new auto loans from4% to 9%. And that’s not considering local taxes and fee hikes. Or problems with the methodologies and assumptions in government price calculations that tend to under-estimate actual inflation.
Households and voters knew what the real picture of affordability was the past four years—even if politicians, media, and mainstream economists did not!

This background of the voting outcomes since 2016 and longer term economic causes raises the more immediate question ‘why Harris’ lost in 2024. It certainly wasn’t due to irrelevant tactical explanations as the media and pundits now argue. And while jobs and inflation were the critical, even key, longer term causes determining election outcomes, in themselves they still don’t explain it all.

There were strategic failures for Harris’s defeat’; nor indeed defeat for the Democrat party in general since its losses in November were across the board in both houses of Congress, governorships, and other local elections. In addition, Trump’s strategy targeting disaffected you males, mostly working class and across racial lines, proved effective in turn.

Why Harris & Democrats Lost

Failure to Differentiate from Biden…

High on the list of why Harris lost must be her failure to differentiate her proposals from those of Biden, especially on economic issues. When directly asked in an interview during the campaign what she would change from Biden’s policies she replied: “nothing”. That was perhaps the turning point of sorts in the campaign. Voters weren’t looking for ‘nothing new’. They wanted economic change that directly affected their declining real take home pay that had been slashed by 30%-35% inflation since 2020.

Harris this past week experienced what might be called the ‘Hubert Humphrey’ effect. In 1968, Democrat Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election. His policy for escalating the war in Vietnam, combined with the inflation of the late 1960s, meant it likely would not win. His VP was Humphrey who became the Democrat party presidential candidate that year. But Humphrey would not break with Johnson’s war policy nor did he offer any answer to the rising inflation of the mid 1960s. War and inflation doomed his campaign in 1968, which he lost convincingly to Richard Nixon. Similarly, Harris’s refusal to break from Biden war policies in 2024 or to offer any answer how she’d lower prices for households played a big role in her defeat. Both she and Humphrey were convincingly defeated.

The Hubert Humphrey Effect should consequently be renamed the Humphrey-Harris Effect.

US voters wanted to hear specifics on how the candidates proposed to reverse the decline in their living standards. Harris gave them mostly platitudes. The Democrat party leaders may have removed Biden as their candidate over the summer, replacing him with Harris, but they left his policies intact. Voters understood they were still voting for Biden. Especially Democrat voters as 12 million of them stayed home.

Some traditional Democrat constituencies jumped ship. Election data already show that many more black male voters voted Trump than in prior elections. So too did Hispanic voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania. Even Puerto Rican voters—who the mainstream media hyped would turn on Trump because of some comic at one of his rallies made disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans—voted Trump in key constituencies. And there were the white suburban women who the Democrats bet would vote Democrat based on the reproductive and women’s rights issues. In key swing states like Pennsylvania it appears they too voted by narrow margins for Trump.

Identity Politics Themes No Longer Resonate….

What all this may mean is economic issues and questions of class trumped identity issues of gender, sexual orientation, and race on which Democrats had based their campaigns in recent years had become of secondary at best importance to voters. Legitimate polls like Gallup were shouting this message all year and especially in latter months of the campaign. Democrat leaders were deaf, however. They apparently believed just changing the face of their candidate and throwing billions of dollars into the race this past summer would ensure re-election. It was another big strategic error.

If Harris failed to differentiate herself from Biden, then the Democrat party leadership kept her largely campaigning on issues of identity—gender, race, and sexual orientation.

January 2021 Is Not the Issue…

A third related strategy failure was the Democrat elevation of the January 6, 2021 events and Trump’s often out of context rally statements as a key issue. It wasn’t. It ranked well down the list in almost all voter opinion polls. Just as in 2016 allegations that the Russians were interfering in the election and had Trump in their pocket had little influence on voters choices. In 2024 did voters didn’t believe the charge that Trump was the destroyer of American democracy incarnate, a felon, or closet fascist—or just didn’t care even if true—any more than they believed in 2015 Trump was the puppet of Putin.

Both the Democrats pushing of identity issues and the personality attacks on Trump as either foreign agent or a felonious fascist gained much traction. The economy was paramount in both 2016 and 2024, as it was in 2020. But Harris and the Democrats just couldn’t let go of the old saws and themes that no longer worked, and get focused on the economy.

Emerging Electorate & Party Realignment…

Another strategic reason why Harris and Democrats lost has to do with the shift in constituencies in the past decade. It’s now clear that Trump has been able to start building a base in the working class, especially among young male voters. This is now being called the ‘Bros Vote’. But it’s mostly young, non-college, males who have been among the most disaffected segments of the voting population in recent decades. They are young millennials and GenZers who have experienced the most negative effects of low wages, housing unaffordability, low paying jobs at which they must work two and sometimes three to get by, and other related issues. Democrats appear to have abandoned them, as the party has drifted steadily away from the traditional working class since the 1990s and toward suburban women, LGBTQ voter constituencies, professionals, and college graduates. This is a cultural thing that sometimes gets expressed in elites’ slips of the tongue—like Hillary’s calling them ‘deplorables’ in 2016 and Biden recently referring to them as Trump’s ‘garbage’.

Not all of Harris’s lost is attributable to her failures or Democrat party leaders failures. Some of the loss is explainable by Trump’s own personal appeal, his policy initiatives during the campaign, and his political strategy in general.

Trump Talks & Appears Like They Do…

Part of Trump’s appeal is evident when he speaks. He’s crude, sometimes incoherent, makes off the wall statements, insults people he doesn’t like, embarrasses himself. In other words, he often sounds like them in their own every day conversations. It makes him appear authentic to them. Democrats and their intellectual, educated supporters are often shocked by this behavior. They find it abhorrent. They are turned off by the crude working class ‘banter’ that is part of normal communication for this constituency. But they live in a different cultural world than the Bros constituency as well as the working class black and Hispanics.

The difference could be viewed in Harris rally speeches and even her final concession. It was all too perfect. Not a missed phrase. Straight from the teleprompter. As if she’s reading her comments, which of course she was. Too many platitudes, canned metaphors, and planned anecdotes. In other words, not natural or authentic.

Trump’s Working Class Policy Proposals…

Overlaid on this class cultural divide is the fact that Trump appealed to working class voters with policy measures that should have been Democrat, and often were in decades past but no more. Trump proposed no taxes on tip income, which Harris quickly copied; he proposed no tax on overtime pay and to remove taxing of social security benefits—which Harris conspicuously did not copy. Trump’s proposal for child care credits were more generous than Harris’s. And his proposals on tariffs as way to force corporations to relocate jobs back to the US seemed more convincing than Harris’s which was ‘no different’ than Biden’s which was to shower grants of tens of billions on companies to bribe them to ‘onshore’ back to the US. Even Trump’s immigration proposals were often stated as job creating, even if somewhat questionable in that effect.

In short, Trump at least verbally turned toward working class voters in the election, while Harris and Democrats seemed to further champion suburban women, identity issues, and push the worn out hackneyed line ‘Trump is a Russian pawn and closet fascist who’ll destroy democracy, the country and civilization itself’.

Widening Generational Divide…

But for the tens of millions of new younger voters who came of voting age a decade ago, the Democrats’ leading election themes tying Trump to Russians and autocratic behavior are dead. Perhaps not dead but dying as well are the various themes associated with identity politics. Identity issues will not go away but they will no longer be predominant. The focus on identity does not resonate with the Bros swing vote and has even become antagonistic. Nor do they elicit the same tacit approval within the Hispanic and Black voting constituencies in a period when the economic stress for tens of millions of working class households is approaching a breaking point after decades. A quarter century later it’s still ‘the economy, stupid!’. In fact, more so than ever before.

Some Likely Consequences

It’s somewhat early to define what Trump will now do as president in a second term. But there are outlines from the campaign and his own issues focus in his statement.
Most likely the initial actions will be associated with what he can do without Congressional legislation by means of his own Executive Orders.

At the top of his initial list will be EOs related to illegal immigrants’ deportations and rebuilding his border wall. EOs related to alternative energy matters and the environment will also take an early hit. Oil drilling permits are included in the latter action list.

Deregulation in general will also appear early. Elon Musk will make recommendations cutting government regulations to save spending and Trump will act more or less perfunctorily on Musk’s recommendations. Much of that can be done via EOs as well.

A third area is tariffs. Trump’s promise to raise tariffs 10%-60% (latter on China imports) will come quickly. It’s not coincidental among his first appointments already is Robert Lighthizer as Trade commission.

Trump believes that an increase in government revenue from raising tariffs and a big cut to social programs spending and deregulation will result in a major offset to US budget deficits, which rose last year to $1.8 trillion and is currently running at a $2 trillion estimate for 2025. Tariff revenues, deregulation and even general Austerity social spending program cuts (coming in the spring by Congress) will not even come close to cutting the deficit by a $1 trillion!

Trump believes the fiction that cutting business taxes further in 2025 will result in stimulating economic growth and thus tax revenues. He believed that when he cut taxes in 2018 by $4.5 trillion. It didn’t have the effect on economic growth then. Continuing his 2018 tax cuts (estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost the government $5 trillion over the next decade) and even adding to more cuts in 2025 will not even come close to resolving the fiscal crisis and economic train wreck that’s around the corner in 2025 and after. But tax cutting will again be his and his Republican Congress’s priority in 2025 nevertheless. That too will come this spring.

Voters who put their hopes in a fundamental change in direction for the country voting for Trump and Republicans may be therefore disappointed. Not that that’s anything new. The economy will therefore continue as the number one issue of voters come the 2028 election.

Jack Rasmus
November 8, 2024

My following article was published on Monday, November 3, by the CANADIAN DIMENSION magazine. What are they saying about the main issues polls show are priority for American voters? And what have they remained silent about during the campaign that may prove even more important to American voters and families in the next four years?

“National opinion polls show that with just one week to go in the US presidential election, Trump and Harris are virtually tied at 47 percent each. But national opinion polls are irrelevant as they predict little in terms of the actual outcome. This is because, in America’s archaic election system, it is not the people but the Electoral College (EC) delegates, appointed by their respective states, who decide who wins.

Technically, these delegates cast their votes for president based on whichever candidate receives the majority of the votes in their respective states. However, as the world witnessed in the 2020 US election, some EC delegates were prepared to vote contrary to the voters in their state; and some governors and legislatures were prepared to send competing delegations to the EC.

The election is still not over when the EC delegates meet in December to cast their states’ votes. The delegates’ votes are recorded and the results are sent to Congress on January 6. Technically, Congress could choose not to accept the delegates’ votes—as nearly occurred on January 6, 2021. Since 2021, Congress has passed new rules to seek to clarify the process—but those rules are still untested and remain unclear, in some respects, as to how Congress will confirm the EC tally this December to determine the final outcome of the Harris versus Trump contest. The Congress has the final say in regard to accepting the EC delegates’ votes.

Further uncertainties may arise after November 5, should either party challenge the state vote outcomes in court, delay sending delegates to the EC counting in December, or otherwise tie up the new procedure in the courts before the January 6 final confirmation by Congress. It is well known that both parties have been preparing to spend millions to legally challenge the results in several states, in particular the “swing states,” either to delay or even overturn the vote results or EC delegate appointments. In other words, post-November 5, events may prove even more dramatic than those that followed the November 2020 election.

Decision by swing states, not popular vote

However the process unfolds, it is in the seven swing states that this year’s outcome will be decided—just as it was in 2020 and 2016. And if current trends continue through the final week before the election, the result may turn out a close repeat of the 2016 one. In that election, the outcome was determined, essentially, in the swing states.

The seven swing states are: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Some analysts say that Virginia—once solidly Republican but lately shifted to the Democrats in slim margins—should be included in the swing state column this time as well.

To reiterate a key point: what happens in those seven (or eight) swing states will determine the election, not the popular vote as predicted by the polls. And perhaps not simply by the voters in those key states, but by the two parties’ legal teams and other behind-the-scenes political machinations by the political elites.

So, the likelihood is great that the American public will not know on November 6 who their president will be in 2025. That may take weeks. Or months.

Such is the legacy of the limited electoral democracy in the United States, where “one person, one vote” is not, nor ever was, the rule for electing presidents. At one point in the past, senators were selected in backroom wheeling and dealing by state legislatures and governors.

Changing that “system,” and bringing in “one person, one vote,” took longer than a century. That this has not been done for the presidential election testifies to the fact that neither of the two main parties has any serious interest in abolishing the Electoral College and switching to direct election of the president. The parties like it this way. Direct election would eliminate the many possibilities to manipulate the election that the EC system enables (possibilities we saw play out in 2020 and may see again this year).

Several other important trends may also influence the election outcome. One of these, not surprisingly, is money.

Political party realignments

In 2010, the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to allow virtually unlimited campaign contributions by wealthy donors and corporations, a trend that has continued to escalate ever since. Billions of dollars are now spent on the elections. In recent weeks, for example, Kamala Harris and the Democrats reportedly raised $1 billion in just three months (July–September). And, in the past week, another $97 million. In contrast, Trump spent $417 million during the summer and just $16 million in recent weeks. This represents a historic shift: traditionally, it was the Republican Party that received the big-money contributions. With 2024, that mantle has been passed. Today, the Democrats are the party of big money.

At the same time, money flows from or on behalf of foreign nations have also accelerated. For example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has admitted to spending more than $100 million on 2024 election candidates—and that is only what’s admitted publicly. Of the organizations that make election contributions on behalf of foreign powers, AIPAC is the only one exempt under US law from registering as a foreign agent.

There may also be, since 2016, another party realignment underway—not simply in regard to support from wealthy donors but also from other constituencies. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, are clearly making a bid for working class support, with proposals to cut taxes on tip income, overtime pay, Social Security benefit payments, childcare tax credits, state and local tax deductions, and other measures. To a limited extent, Harris has mimicked some of these proposals. Perhaps most interesting is Trump’s proposal to eliminate the tax on Social Security benefits (not to be confused with the payroll tax). Although this tax is still a relatively recent one, introduced under Reagan in the 1980s, Trump now proposes to repeal it. Meanwhile, Harris and the Dems—once the champions of Social Security—are conspicuously silent. Can it be that the Trump Republicans are now shifting toward working class constituencies, while Harris and the Democrats focus on identity issues and Trump’s personality? Further evidence that such a realignment is underway, if still in the early stages, comes from key neocons and anti-democracy political characters such as Dick Cheney and John Bolton, who now support Harris and campaign with her. Are today’s Democrats now the party of war and empire?

Another important trend is the recent emergence of social media channels and personalities as key outlets of communication to voters. It is well known by now that voters under 35 don’t watch mainstream outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and the like; nor do they read the New York Times or the Washington Post—or any print media, for that matter. Instead, candidates are seeking out interviews with social media celebrities as never before.

Defining issues for 2024

The current election is notable not only for the issues being raised by Trump and Harris, but for the issues the candidates decline to address. Since the start of this year, national polls have indicated that the economy—and specifically inflation—is the number-one issue. A recent Gallup poll showed the economy to be the most important issue by far, with a huge majority of respondents calling it either “very important” or “extremely important.”

The issue of second-highest concern is democracy. This is a more complex issue, one that means different things to different voters. For Democrats, this means concerns about Supreme Court decisions and the future of abortion and women’s rights, but also points to support for the Democratic Party’s incessant focus on Trump and the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots. For Republicans, it means concerns about the Democrats in relation to censorship, widespread “ballot denialism” against challengers (whether former Democratic Party members or third-party challengers), Democrat manipulation of their own party’s primaries, the Dems’ use of “lawfare” (in particular legal attacks on Trump), and general concerns regarding manipulation of election vote counts.

The number-three concern, according to the Gallup poll, is immigration, often linked by Trump to issues, real or imagined, such as crime, loss of jobs to “illegals,” privileging of immigrants over US citizens for welfare assistance, housing availability, and other social conditions.

All other issues—from education and health care to taxes and abortion, climate change, race, transgender rights, and foreign policy—rate lower in terms of voter interest. Foreign policy issues, it seems, are not much on US voters’ minds this cycle.

Notably, among the Gallup respondents, Democrats did not list the economy among their top-five concerns—or immigration, crime, taxes, or war. For Democrat voters, this election is mostly about Trump, January 6, the Supreme Court, and women’s and transgender rights. In other words, the Democrats’ messaging centres mostly around what Republicans call “woke” issues and a personal focus on Trump. In contrast, Trump supporters focus on more traditional “pocketbook” concerns: inflation, wages, taxes, crime, and national security issues like war and terrorism.

A deeper inspection of these issues suggests the Democrats may again be “fighting the last war,” as the saying goes. Polls show undecided voters in swing states—in contrast to hardcore party loyalists—just don’t care that much about January 6. Neither are charges regarding Trump’s behaviour among their greatest concerns. Yet the Democrats, nonetheless, continue to hammer away at the personality issue: Trump instigated the January 6 Capitol riot, or Trump is a felon, a womanizer, a Putin pawn, and a Hitler lover. Or, more lately (and with some irony given recent events), Trump suffers from early dementia. Not be outdone, Trumps calls Harris a “fake Black,” unintelligent, and a Biden puppet. For undecided voters in the swing states, however, all this personality bashing, on both sides, is likely just so much political “noise.” And, at this point in the campaign, they are the voters who matter.

Yet the candidates address economic issues like inflation with political platitudes, focus on their distorted interpretations of “democracy,” and continue to engage in personality bashing. Perhaps even more important, there’s been no discussion of the existential issues that will impact voters—and the country’s very stability—even more dramatically in the months immediately following the election.

Such existential issues include the growing fiscal crisis, as US deficits approach $2 trillion per year and the national debt spirals toward $40 trillion and beyond; the near certainty of severe austerity measures including program spending cuts in 2025, regardless of who wins the election; an escalating series of proxy wars leading to region-wide conflicts, perhaps even nuclear ones, in Europe and the Middle East; and the expansion of the BRICS economic block, which threatens to replace US/G7 dominance over the global economy and would bring a deep contraction of living standards in the US and the G7 countries.

It is notable that issues so critical as these are barely ever mentioned by either candidate. Nor were they raised by moderators in the presidential debates. Nor are they addressed in the mainstream media, even at this late date.

What follows is an analysis of such key, often existential issues, which have either received scant mention by the candidates or simply not been addressed at all.

Inflation and the economy

Since the beginning of 2024, polls have shown that the economy, chiefly inflation, is the number-one voter issue for voters. The Democrats tout a slowdown in the rate of price increases to approximately 2.5 percent in the past year. But is it this recent slowdown, or the cumulative rise in the general price level, that is giving voters the impression that inflation is the biggest issue?

Harris and the Democrats focus on the leveling-off of gasoline prices over the last year and the official government inflation index showing food prices have risen only one percent in the last twelve months. Harris has proposed a $25,000 credit toward down payments for new home buyers to partially offset increasingly unaffordable house prices, and touts the Biden program for reducing expensive drug prices for ten new itemized prescription drugs to take effect in 2026.

Trump and the Republicans charge these are just economic band aids and argue the general price-level rise since 2020 is the key inflation indicator, despite the recent slowdown. Households face prices that have levelled off some, yet remain 30–35 percent higher than in 2020.
The reality appears closer to the Republican view. Prices of the most frequently purchased grocery items are up 21 percent since 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal. A few of these increases include: gasoline at the pump (+38 percent), eggs (+113 percent), milk (+24 percent), loaf of bread (54 percent), chicken breast (+37 percent). Even the price of fast food meals at McDonald’s is up 40 percent since 2019. Premiums have risen for home, health, and automobile insurance—the latter by more than 20 percent in just the past year. And housing prices are up 47 percent, according to the national Case–Shiller index. And that doesn’t count what working class voters actually pay for their homes each month in mortgage payments, which have risen 114 percent since 2020 due to interest rates and other fees.

The Democrats conveniently ignore the fact that the government’s official 2.5 percent consumer price index rise over the past year doesn’t include mortgage rates or fees. Nor do official inflation indexes include any other interest rate hikes, for that matter. Average credit card rates have risen from 16 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today, as US households carry over bigger-than-ever unpaid balances on their cards from month to month. The same can be said for student loan rates, auto loan interest, and installment loans—all of which have risen sharply since 2022.

This surge in price levels has devastated real disposable income for US households. And that’s what they’ll remember when they vote.
The inflation level might not be an issue if real wages increased at a similar rate. But they haven’t for four years. Real median weekly earnings (i.e., hourly wage x hours worked) have contracted slightly.

They decline even faster if you count the more than 50 million part-time, temporary and gig workers in the US economy, per federal government figures. And real weekly earnings would decline further yet if interest rates and tax increases were included in the government’s inflation adjustment, which they aren’t.

Even official government data for full-time workers’ median weekly earnings, when adjusted for inflation in 1983–84 prices (the base year the government uses to measure long-term real wages), show that real wages declined by 2.8 percent in 2021–23, levelling off at 0.4 percent the past year; whereas during Trump’s first three years (2017–19), they rose a modest one to two percent.

Not surprisingly, Trump and Vance talk about the reduction in real take-home pay impacting all workers, not the average hourly full-time wage, unadjusted for inflation, touted in the Harris-Walz campaign messaging.

Decline of democracy

The second-most important issue to voters is the very real impression that the norms and practices of democracy in America have been subtly but steadily dismantled over recent decades. This problem surfaced in the public consciousness during the 2000 election when the Supreme Court, in its Bush v. Gore decision, in effect “selected” George W. Bush as president by halting the Florida vote recount. The threat to democracy intensified the following year in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which US neocons leveraged to impose the Patriot Act, reversing long-standing civil liberties, and launched a program of intensified surveillance of US citizens that continues to this day. A decade later, in 2010, the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United ruling and gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, effectively endorsing widespread gerrymandering of House of Representatives districts by both parties. Then came the court’s decision that the two main parties need not abide by any democratic principles in running their respective organizations. The parties, it would seem, are essentially private clubs.

Neither party nor their candidates offer any concrete proposals to rescind the Patriot Act and its attack on civil liberties. Or to pass legislation to override the Supreme Court’s disastrous green-lighting of unlimited campaign contributions. Or to abolish the Electoral College. Or to reverse the Congressional gerrymandering, which has ensured that no more than 50 House seats are ever competitive contests. Or to restore the Voting Rights Act. Or to undo voter suppression. Or to reform their own organizations democratically, to ensure the party members actually choose the candidates.

The Democrats, in 2024, have reduced the issue of the decline in democracy to the events of January 6, 2021, in order to tag Trump as a “demon of democracy” who, if elected, will open the floodgates to authoritarian and even dictatorial rule. The Republicans remain silent about their voter suppression initiatives, seek to reverse mail-in ballots, and complain about Democrats’ ballot denialism, plans for social media censorship, and politically weaponized “lawfare,” but propose no action.

Illegal immigration

The third issue of greatest interest to voters is, according to Gallup and other polls, the issue of illegal immigration along the country’s southern border. Government data shows that an average of two million people per year crossed into the US in 2022 and 2023. Data for 2024 are not available yet. Immigration slowed in 2020–21, due largely to a weak US economy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democrats focus on Trump’s demand to deport the “illegals,” specifically the cost and likely impossibility of physically enforcing such measures. Trump focuses on the consequences of the Biden-Harris policies of the past four years, impacting jobs, housing, and crime. Both accuse the other for the thousands of children of immigrants that have gone unaccounted for during both administrations. Trump takes a page from the old “welfare reform abuses” playbook, accusing the Democrats of giving each “illegal” a $2,000 cash debit card and setting them up with free housing, while millions of Americans languish with little to no housing and without cash resources. Democrats accuse Trump of sabotaging a recent bipartisan congressional bill to regulate immigration simply to boost his campaign.

While Trump and Harris push their respective positions at rallies and appearances across the northern swing states over the election’s closing weeks, neither says anything about the existential issues noted previously: the deficit and debt, the coming austerity program cuts, the escalating proxy wars and slide toward potential nuclear confrontations with Russia or Iran, and the BRICS challenge to US global economic hegemony.

Deficits and debt

Neither candidate admits how much each party has contributed to the deficits and debt during their recent administrations. In 2000, the US national debt was $5.674 trillion when George W. Bush entered office; when he left, it was $10.024 trillion—nearly double. Starting with Bush’s $10.024 trillion as a base, when Obama left office at the end of 2016 the national debt had risen to $19.573 trillion, nearly doubling again. By the time Trump left office at the end of 2020, it had risen to $26.945 trillion in just four years. As of October 2, 2024, under Biden—just another four years—the national debt rose to $35.680 trillion. By year’s end, it is expected to be $36.260 trillion.

So, if we compare who performed worse, Trump or Biden, in their four years in office: Trump added $7.372 trillion to the national debt and Biden added $9.315 trillion.

For both presidents—and, indeed, since 2000 generally—the rise in deficits and debt is attributable to four factors:

• $16 trillion in tax cuts, at least three quarters of which have accrued to corporations, businesses, and wealthy investors (as well as slow growth of the US economy, and therefore also tax revenues, after 2008).
• $8.5 trillion for US wars, the Pentagon, and US defense spending in general, which now costs more than $1.2 trillion per year.
• Price gouging by health insurance and Big Pharma companies, which have driven up the cost of government-subsidized health care programs.
• Crisis-related government spending programs in 2008–10 ($1 trillion) and again in 2021–22 ($3 trillion).

None of the $36 trillion national debt, by the way, includes spending by the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, whose total balance sheet debt rose from $0.8 trillion in 2007 to $5 trillion by 2016 and then to $9 trillion by 2021. Nor does the $36 trillion figure include state and local debt, which averages around another $2–3 trillion. (Shortfalls in the Social Security and Medicare programs do not form part of the annual budget deficit or national debt figures above.)

The growing fiscal crisis will likely erupt at some point during the next president’s term in office. On average, deficits have exceeded $1 trillion and been rising every year under both Republicans and Democrats since 2016. In 2024 alone, the official US deficit figure was $1.8 trillion. This has meant that annual interest payments to wealthy bondholders, domestic and foreign, this year cost $950 billion—more than the Pentagon budget. The deficit acceleration will continue. The Congressional Budget Office, the research arm of Congress, estimated this year that another $20 trillion will be added to deficits, rising to $56 trillion in 2034. That’s a continuing average of $2 trillion per year and means that, by 2034, interest payments on the debt will rise to $1.7 trillion.

That’s $0.95 trillion today, and $1.7 trillion in a decade, rushing out of the annual budget and into the pockets of wealthy bondholders! That’s more than Social Security and more than even the Pentagon. A fiscal train wreck is around the corner in America.

In short, deficits and debt are issues of immense importance to the stability of the economy and standard of living for millions of Americans over the next decade. But neither candidate, Harris or Trump, has spoken a word about it. And neither candidate will, because they would in effect be pointing the finger at themselves.

Austerity and program cuts

In terms of solutions to the fiscal crisis, neither party will raise taxes for the wealthy and their corporations to reduce the deficit. Democrats have shown over the last four years that, despite promises to the contrary, their actions have been fully in accord with Trump’s $4.5 trillion in tax cuts in 2018, which contributed greatly to the rising deficit. Trump favours the permanent extension of these cuts (80 percent of which accrue to investors and businesses) when they come up for renewal in 2025. The Congressional Budget Office estimates this will represent an additional $5 trillion hit to the deficit and debt. The Democrats’ big-money donors will not permit them to reverse the tax cuts either.

Neither Harris nor Trump will address the root causes of the annual trillion-dollar-plus deficits and escalating national debt. Whoever wins in November will continue to raise Pentagon spending to support America’s imperial proxy wars. They will ensure that the Treasury continues to pay bondholders $1–1.7 trillion each year to prevent a collapse of the US dollar. And they will enact even more tax cuts for businesses and investors.

Instead of reversing tax cuts, they will implement social spending cuts—and these will include Social Security—even as they have said nothing about the coming austerity cuts and tell lies about how they won’t cut Social Security.

The BRICS challenge and the decline of empire

While Trump and Harris campaign, the economic foundations of their very system are fracturing. Formed in 2009 by five countries— Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—the BRICS was initially created to bring together the leading economies of the Global South to address the consequences of the global financial crash and recession of 2008–09. By that time, the world had moved on from the 1980s, when the leading global financial and economic powers, the US and the UK, introduced what has been called the neoliberal policy revolution in response to the economic and political crises of the 1970s.

US capitalism was not only rescued in the 1980s but set out upon a massive worldwide economic expansion. America’s global hegemony was restored and its empire grew. That growth accelerated in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of China to Western investment, and the further deepening of neoliberal policies. In 2008, however, the expansion and its associated policies hit a wall from which the US global economic empire has still to recover fully. Trump tried to restore it, but failed. History will show the same for Biden.

In the 21st century, the US has sustained itself on the strength of its foreign investments, financialization of the economic system, and new technologies. However, the Global South has expanded economically. It is no longer the Global South of the 1980s, which was largely dependent on the West economically, and much weaker politically and militarily than the US and its G7 allies.

With the advent of neocon control over US foreign policy beginning in the late 1990s, US elites have resorted to wars and violence to maintain their empire. In the face of crises in 2008 and 2020, they have struggled with the rise of the BRICS—particularly the competitive challenge from China, Russia’s recovery from its post-USSR depression of the 1990s, and growing assertiveness by Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia as well as India, Brazil, and others. The Global South wants a bigger voice in the institutions of empire. So far, however, the US and its G7 allies have allowed them only token participation in those institutions.

In the midst of the 2024 election, therefore, the rise of the BRICS is moving to a new stage, as its current and prospective members met in Kazan, Russia, this past October. Twelve new member countries are in the process of joining the current nine. Notable among the new additions are several important nations and economies: Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, in Southeast Asia; Algeria and Nigeria, in Africa; several Central Asian countries and Turkey; and Bolivia and Cuba, in Latin America. And it is reported that as many as 80 countries are interested at least to some degree.

The eventual outcome of the BRICS challenge will be the displacement of the key institutions underlying the US global empire: the SWIFT payments system, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and, eventually, the US dollar as the dominant global reserve and transactions currency. The recent BRICS Kazan Declaration is a 108-clause blueprint that outlines where the organization is headed and describes a set of global economic institutions parallel to the Bretton Woods system created in 1944, upon which the US post-war economic empire has been based ever since.

The BRICS represents an existential challenge to the United States. However, neither Trump nor Harris, nor their respective Republican and Democrat leaderships, are saying anything about it during this election. Perhaps to do so would be too dangerous for their political aspirations, the consequences too great? Or perhaps they simply haven’t formed a consensus on a strategy yet, beyond “strong-arming” the Global South into submitting once again to their “rules-based international order”?
It is likely, however, that once the election is over the BRICS will become the key topic of debate among the US elites and their G7 allies concerning “what is to be done.” By then, the November 2024 election will be history. And voters will have had no say on what actions the US imperial elites and their allies will take in response to the existential challenges currently on the horizon.

Jack Rasmus
November 4, 2024

Dr. Jack Rasmus is the author of several books on the United States and the global economy, including The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump (2020), Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy (2016), and The Twilight of American Imperialism (forthcoming later this year form Clarity Press). He is a host for the radio show Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network, a journalist, a playwright, and a former professor of economics at St. Mary’s College (retired). He worked for 20 years for various tech start-ups and global companies, prior to which he served for 15 years as an organizer and local union president with several American unions.