Why Don’t Plutocrats Care That Trump Is Tanking the Economy?
One would expect all this financial mismanagement to have billionaires elbowing one another to get into the anti-Trump resistance. But Steven Rattner, a former Wall Street investor who was President Barack Obama’s auto czar, wrote last week in The New York Times that “many, maybe even most, of the people I’m talking to in private are still quietly cheering his move-fast-and-break-things approach” even though one of the things Trump is breaking is the economy. Confidence among chief executives rose to its highest level in three years in February even as consumer confidence dropped faster than it has in three and a half years. It was hard to read Rattner’s piece and not conclude that plutocrats are kind of stupid. (Not Rattner, however; he’s appropriately pessimistic.)
I’m well aware that the economic fortunes of this country often diverge from those of its richest inhabitants. But when the stock market tumbles and the bond market is pushed to the edge of a cliff, that tends to cost plutocrats no small amount of money. Elon Musk’s adventures in government have been so ruinous to Tesla’s stock price that Musk himself lost a reported $156 billion so far this year. I was not previously familiar with a universe in which even the world’s richest person would shrug off losing $156 billion. That almost half Musk’s present net worth!
Those losses are attributable largely to consumers being disgusted by Musk’s own giddy sabotage of the federal bureaucracy. But Musk is also destroying other people’s wealth—along, probably, with some of his own—by destabilizing the government. Yes, Elon, our economy depends on a stable government! As the economist Dean Baker points out, Musk’s arbitrary cuts are especially costly to the health care sector, which (as I’ve pointed out) is the biggest employer in the United States. How can you be a plutocrat and not have some financial stake in the country’s biggest industry? For that matter, why did Big Pharma, which I thought runs the country, allow Republican senators to confirm their sworn enemy Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary? According to Politico, it held back mostly from fear, which isn’t the same thing as false consciousness. But another reason Big Pharma was silent was that it thinks, hubristically, that it can handle Kennedy, which is false consciousness in spades.
