Asking The Wrong Questions
How Americans misunderstand the economy
I saw a stat the other day that surprised me a bit. I was watching the stock market drop faster than Trump’s poll numbers, and I decided to find out what percentage of Americans actually owned stock. I found out that 48% of us don’t own even a single share. It’s the most often discussed economic indicator, yet every conversation about it excludes half the country. I think we might be having the wrong discussion.
I believe every good conversation begins with a smart question, so here’s mine:
What is an economy for?
For decades now, corporate media has owned the discussion of the American economy, and their answer to my proposed question is simple: The US economy exists to create wealth, and that wealth belongs to our betters. And for decades now, they have been intentionally and horribly wrong. This is why we talk ceaselessly about the market but never about wealth inequality. It’s why workers haven’t had a raise since before Reagan was in office. It’s why the number one cause of homelessness is medical debt. And it’s why our standard of living is falling even faster than the market and Trump’s poll numbers combined. Our economy is truly and fundamentally broken because we have forgotten what an economy is really supposed to do.
The economy exists for one reason and one reason only, and that is to create good lives for American families. Every dollar created should make things better for all of us, but that isn’t even close to what happens. Instead, we have created a system in which the rich gamble with our futures. When they win, they keep the money. And when they lose, we pay the tab. They privatize their gains, then they socialize their losses. And it’s been going on for so long now that most of us don’t even realize just how f---ed up it is.
Almost every one of my readers belongs to the same group. We are the working class, and we create all the wealth. All of it. Every single dollar. Billionaires only possess that wealth, and that stops the moment we say so. This is why our corporate media spends so much time talking about left vs. right, black vs. white, Democrat vs. Republican, and so on. They slice us and dice us because if we ever did actually join together in any meaningful way, everything would change. And the rich like things just as they are, and they’re willing to spend billions of your dollars to make sure change never comes.
America is the richest nation in the history of history. There is nothing we can’t do, and there is nothing we can’t achieve. We can stay good capitalists and also recognize and fix the flaws in the system. We can reward achievement and also make sure no one dies penniless in the gutter. We can do for others without abandoning our own ambitions.
But we can’t do any of this while we care more about who’s using what bathroom than we do about who has their greedy little hands in our pockets.
The rich stole America from us, but solidarity can bring it back. America doesn’t need billionaires. America just needs better Americans.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days fighting for working families as the Executive Producer of The Rick Smith Show, and his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.