By Jeffrey D. Sachs*
America is a country of undoubted vast strengths – technological, economic, and cultural – yet its government is profoundly failing its own citizens and the world. Trump’s victory is very easy to understand. It was a vote against the status quo. Whether Trump will fix — or even attempt to fix — what really ails America remains to be seen.
The rejection of the status quo by the American electorate is overwhelming. According to Gallup in October 2024, 52% of Americans said they and their families were worse off than four years ago, while only 39% said they were better off and 9% said they were about the same. An NBC national news poll in September 2024 found that 65% of Americans said the country is on the wrong track, while only 25% said that it is on the right track. In March 2024, according to Gallup, only 33% of Americans approved of Joe Biden’s handling of foreign affairs.
At the core of the American crisis is a political system that simply fails to represent the true interests of the average American voter. The political system was hacked by big money decades ago, especially when the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign contributions. Since then, American politics has become a plaything of super-rich donors and narrow-interest lobbies, who fund election campaigns in return for policies that favor vested interests rather than the common good.
Two types of groups own the Congress and White House: super-rich donors and single-issue lobbies.
The world watched with jaws agape as Elon Musk, the world’s richest person (and yes, a brilliant entrepreneur and inventor), played a unique role in backing Trump’s election victory, both through his vast media influence and funding. Countless other billionaires chipped in to Trump’s victory.
Many (though not all) of the super-rich donors seeks special favors from the political system, and those favors will now be duly delivered by the Congress, the White House, and the regulatory agencies freshly staffed by the new administration. Many of these donors also push one specific deliverable: further tax cuts on corporate income and on capital gains. Such tax breaks on capital income have been duly delivered by Congress for decades no matter their impact on the ballooning federal deficit, which now stands at nearly 7 percent of GDP, and no matter the fact that pre-tax national income has continued to shift powerfully away from labor income to capital income.
Many business donors, I would add, are forthrightly on the side of peace and cooperation with China, as very sensible for business as well as for humanity.
There would have been precious little difference with a Harris victory. The Democrats have their own long list of the super-rich who financed the party’s presidential and Congressional campaigns. Many of those donors too would have demanded and received special favors.
The second group with their hold on Washington are the single-issue lobbies. These powerful lobbies include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, Big Oil, the gun industry, big pharma, big Ag, and the Zionist Lobby. American politics is well organized to cater to these special interests. Each lobby buys the support of specific committees in Congress and a few national leaders in order to win control over public policy.
The economic returns to special-interest lobbying are huge: a hundred million dollars of campaign funding by a lobby group can win a hundred billion of federal outlays and/or tax breaks. This is the lesson, for example, of the Zionist lobby, which spends a few hundred million dollars on campaign contributions, and harvests tens of billions of dollars in military and economic support for Israel.
These special-interest lobbies do not depend on, nor do they care much about, public opinion. Opinion surveys show regularly that the public wants gun control, lower drug prices, an end of Wall Street bailouts, renewable energy, and peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. No matter. The lobbyists ensure that Congress and the White House deliver continued easy access to handguns and assault weapons, sky-high drug prices, coddling of Wall Street, more oil and gas drilling, weapons purchases for Ukraine, and wars on behalf of Israel.
The two most dangerous lobbies are the military-industrial complex (as Eisenhower famously warned us in 1961) and the Zionist lobby (as detailed in a scintillating new book by historian Ilan Pappé). The military-industrial complex aims for US “full-spectrum dominance.” It’s purported solutions to world problems are wars, covert regime-change operations, US economic sanctions, US info-wars, color revolutions (led by the National Endowment for Democracy), and foreign policy bullying. These of course have been no solutions at all.
The military-industrial complex (MIC) dragged Ukraine into a hopeless war with Russia by promising Ukraine membership in NATO in the face of Russia’s fervent opposition, and by conspiring to overthrow Ukraine’s government in February 2014 because it sought neutrality rather than NATO membership. The military-industrial complex is currently – unbelievably – promoting a coming war with China. This will of course involve a huge and lucrative arms buildup, the aim of the MIC, but also threaten World War III or a cataclysmic US defeat in another Asian war.
The Zionist lobby has been at least as damaging, and perhaps more damaging. While the Military-Industrial Complex has stoked NATO enlargement and conflicts with Russia and China, the Zionist Lobby has stoked America’s serial wars in the Middle East. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, more than any US president, has been the lead promoter of America’s disastrous overt and covert wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Sudan.
As Netanyahu repeatedly stated, Israel aims to keep the land it conquered in the 1967 war to prevent a Palestinian State. This expansionist Israeli policy, in contravention of international law for several decades, has given rise to militant pro-Palestinian groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Netanyahu’s policy is to topple the governments – including Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Iran – that support these resistance groups.
Incredibly, because of the stunning political power of the Zionist Lobby, the US military has actually and repeatedly undertaken Israel’s wars of choice! Former Marine Commander Dennis Fritz has recently described in detail how the disastrous Iraq War in 2003 was in truth Netanyahu’s war. Here is Netanyahu in October 2002 telling the Congress just how wonderful and successful the Iraq War will be. Netanyahu and the Zionist Lobby under this thrall have never uttered an apology to the US citizenry for squandering trillions of dollars of US funds and starkly diminishing America’s standing in the world.
In the meantime, while the US plutocracy has delivered wars of choice for the MIC and for Israel, and tax cuts for the rich, it has offered no real solutions for working-class Americans. During the period after 1980, automation hit the American working class very hard. As in other high-income countries, employment in manufacturing fell sharply as assembly-line workers were replaced by robots (the automobile plants being a prime case), and the working class found itself in lower-paying and mainly service-sector jobs. Meanwhile, the returns to capital soared, with the overall stock market valuation rising from 55% of GDP in 1985 to 200% of GDP today.
Yet this was not the end of it. Soaring costs of health care and staggering college tuitions formed a pincer movement, squeezing the working class between falling or stagnant wages on the one side and rising education and healthcare costs on the other side. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans did much of anything to help the workers.
Trump’s voter base is the working class, but his donor base is the super-rich and the lobbies. So, what will happen next? More of the same – wars and tax cuts – or something new and real for the voters?
Trump’s purported answer is a trade war with China and the deportation of illegal foreign workers, combined with more tax cuts for the rich. In other words, rather than face the structural challenges of ensuring decent living standards for all, and face forthrightly the staggering budget deficit, Trump’s answers to date are to blame China and migrants for low working-class wages and wasteful spending for the deficits. This has played well electorally in 2016 and 2024, but will not deliver the promised results for workers. Manufacturing jobs will not return in large numbers from China since they never went in large numbers to China. Nor will deportations do much to raise living standards of average Americans.
This is not to say that real solutions are lacking. They are hiding in plain view – if Trump chooses to take them, over the special pleadings of the super-rich and the lobbies that paid for his election. If Trump chooses real solutions, he would achieve a strikingly positive political legacy for decades to come.
The first is to face down the military-industrial complex. Trump can end the war in Ukraine by telling President Putin and the world that NATO will never expand to Ukraine. He can end the risk of war with China by making crystal clear that the US abides by the One China Policy, and as such, will not interfere in China’s internal affairs by sending armaments to Taiwan over Beijing’s objections, and would not support any attempt by Taiwan to secede.
The second is to face down the Zionist lobby by telling Netanyahu that the US will no longer fight Israel’s wars and that Israel must accept a State of Palestine living in peace next to Israel. This is the only possible path to peace.
The third is to close the budget deficit, partly by cutting wasteful spending – notably on wars, hundreds of useless overseas military bases, and sky-high prices the government pays for drugs and healthcare – and partly by raising government revenues. Simply enforcing taxes on the books by cracking down on illegal tax evasion would have raised $625 billion in 2021, around 2.6% of GDP. There is certainly no room for new tax cuts for the rich. The income group that needs tax relief is the working class, with tax relief and higher income support for low-wage workers more than offset by higher, not lower, taxes on capital income.
The fourth is an innovation policy (aka industrial policy) for the common good. Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley friends can surely help. America’s innovation capacity is vast, a reflection of a remarkable ecosystem of venture capital, startups, leading universities, and an open society that attracts talent from all over the world. Innovation is not the problem. The challenge is innovation for what? The goal of public policy should be to ensure that innovation serves the common good, including the poor, the working class, and the physical environment. This will be achieved by adopting national goals that go beyond pure profits or new weapons systems.
The new AI and digital technologies can potentially usher in a new era of low-cost healthcare coverage; low-cost higher education such as through high-quality, low-tuition online learning; low-cost public transport, such as through shared, autonomous vehicles; and other AI-enabled cost savings that would raise real living standards of all workers.
The new technologies can deliver a high-quality, low-cost zero-carbon energy system, built on renewable energy sources, long-distance power transmission, smart management of infrastructure, efficient appliances, hydrogen economy, electric vehicles, hydrogen production, hydrogen use in steel-making and other industrial processes, smart materials, fourth-generation nuclear energy where safe and cost effective, and other sectors.
Ironically, Trump and the Republicans have long resisted these technologies, thereby letting China take the lead pretty much across the board. Perhaps Musk will convince Trump that America can and should join China as a major global exporter of these technologies. In truth, China has been and should remain America’s partner in innovation, not its foe. China’s highly efficient and low-cost manufacturing facilities, such as Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai, have often put Silicon Valley’s innovations into worldwide use.
All four of these steps are within Trump’s reach, and would justify his electoral triumph. I’m not holding my breath for Trump to adopt them. American politics has been too rotten for too long for any real optimism in that regard, yet these four steps are all achievable, and would greatly benefit not only the business leaders who backed Trump’s campaign but the tens of millions of disaffected workers whose votes put Trump back into the White House.
*Article sent to Other News by the author
*Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.