When GDP rises and democracy comes

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has just passed two conference halls in Congress. It cuts more than $1 trillion in fees from Medicaid and cuts the Anti-Hunter Program by $295 billion, while also carrying out tax breaks, with 72% of the proceeds accounting for the top 20% of earners. At least 16 million Americans are expected to lose health insurance.

Meanwhile, the bill allocates $170 billion in immigration enforcement, bringing ICE’s budget balloon from $10 billion to more than $100 billion. This is more than twice the cost of Israel on its entire army during wartime. We spend more money chasing gardeners and dishwashers than most countries defend the entire country.

However, all of this cuts health care throughout the trillion-dollar reshuffle, all of which goes to deportation, bringing all these tax breaks to the rich – not a dime for building any real thing. No infrastructure. No manufacturing capability. No investment in the production economy actually creates good jobs. Trump sold himself to the laborer, the guy who would take back the factory and repair the bridge as a builder. Instead, he is running the same extraction scam as every Wall Street hack before: picking it up from the bottom, sending it to the top, and building nothing. All harvested, no seeds.

Look at the US’s own model. Our GDP has soared over decades, what have we gained? Ross Perot serves as a billionaire populist. Obama’s campaign for change candidate. Bernie’s Revolution. Trump has been appointed three times and was elected twice. When the institution fails to achieve a real prosperity, Americans turn to those who promise to blow up the system. When liberals fail, we turn to strong men.

This pattern is repeated worldwide. Poland recorded the fastest GDP growth in the EU in 2024. Foreign companies used cheap labor, extracted profits, and sent them home. Polish workers find people who make others rich, and you stay poor. Therefore, the Poles rejected the authoritarian law and the Judicial Party accused of undermining democracy. In Hungary, it is the same as Orbán. GDP indicators rise; democracy becomes more shaky.

We have established a fundamentally extracted economic system. They generate impressive GDP numbers by hollowing out the actual production capacity that makes people’s lives better. Extraction refers to cities selling water systems, toll roads in the state auction, counties that privatize ambulance services – GDP sees it as growth. We are liquidating community infrastructure built by generations and selling it to entities without public interest shares.

Simon Kuznets, who invented GDP in 1934, warned clearly: “The welfare of a country is almost impossible to infer from the measurement of national income.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that people who never built fuck things with their hands should be responsible for global economic policy. I’m talking about people who don’t know how to save lives with ratchet straps. These people looked at American manufacturing in the 1980s and thought, “We don’t need a better car than Japan. We’re going to be a distribution and assembly center.” What they don’t know (because they never really did anything) is that when you make a mouse group, you also figure out how to make a better mouse. Innovation follows production.

Japan shows that there is another way. When their bubble occurred in the early 1990s, they could have cut spending and guts of social plans. Instead, Japan launched 15 fiscal stimulus packages between 1990 and 2008, accounting for about 28% of GDP and about 40% of public works. Not a financial engineering – an effective infrastructure. They retained the manufacturing base.

The IMF, the World Bank, every financial publication calls it a disaster. Wall Street wants the kind of reward that can only be obtained by squeezing staff until they bleed. Japan refuses to squeeze. When hit in 2008, their weathering was better than the big financial economies that taught them over the years.