When GDP Goes Up and Democracy Goes Down

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” just passed both chambers of Congress. It slashes over $1 trillion from Medicaid and cuts anti-hunger programs by $295 billion, all while delivering tax breaks where 72 percent of all benefits go to the top 20 percent of earners. At least 16 million Americans are projected to lose healthcare coverage.

Meanwhile, the bill allocates $170 billion for immigration enforcement—making ICE’s budget balloon from $10 billion to over $100 billion. That’s more than twice what Israel spends on its entire military during wartime. We’re spending more on chasing gardeners and dishwashers than most nations spend defending their entire nations.

Yet in this entire trillion-dollar reshuffling—all these cuts to healthcare, all this money for deportations, all these tax breaks for the wealthy—there’s not a dime for building anything real. No infrastructure. No manufacturing capacity. No investments in the productive economy that actually creates good jobs. Trump sold himself to working people as the builder, the guy who’d bring back factories and fix the bridges. Instead, he’s running the same extraction scam as every Wall Street hack before him: take from the bottom, give to the top, build nothing. All reaping, no sowing.

Look at America’s own pattern. Our GDP has skyrocketed over decades, and what do we get? Ross Perot running as the billionaire populist. Obama running as the transformational candidate. Bernie’s revolution. And Trump—nominated three times, elected twice. When the establishment fails to deliver real prosperity, Americans turn to whoever promises to blow up the system. When liberals fail, we turn to strongmen.

The pattern repeats globally. Poland recorded the EU’s fastest GDP growth in 2024. Foreign companies used their cheap labor, extracted profits, sent them home. Polish workers got jobs where you make someone else rich while you stay poor. So the Poles reelect the authoritarian Law and Justice Party, accused of undermining democracy. Same in Hungary with Orbán. GDP metrics rise; democracy becomes shakier.

We build economic systems that are fundamentally extractive. They generate impressive GDP numbers by hollowing out the actual productive capacity that makes people’s lives better. Extraction means cities selling water systems, states auctioning toll roads, counties privatizing ambulance services—GDP counts it all as growth. We’re liquidating community infrastructure built over generations, selling it to entities with no stake in the public good.

Simon Kuznets, who invented GDP in 1934, explicitly warned against this—“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income”—yet after Bretton Woods in 1944, his warnings were completely ignored as GDP became the global standard.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that people who’d never built a fucking thing with their hands should be in charge of global economic policy. I’m talking about folks who couldn’t figure out how to use a ratchet strap to save their lives. These are the people who looked at American manufacturing in the 1980s and thought, “We don’t need to make better cars than Japan. We’ll just become the distribution and assembly center.” What they didn’t understand—because they’d never actually made anything—is that when you make the mousetraps, you also figure out how to make better mousetraps. Innovation follows production.

Japan shows that another path exists. When their bubble burst in the early 1990s, they could’ve slashed spending and gutted social programs. Instead, Japan launched 15 fiscal stimulus packages between 1990 and 2008, totaling approximately 28 percent of GDP, with public works accounting for about 40 percent. Not financial engineering—actual infrastructure. They preserved their manufacturing base.

The IMF, the World Bank, every financial publication called it a disaster. Wall Street wanted the kind of returns you only get by squeezing working people until they bleed. Japan refused to squeeze. When 2008 hit, they weathered it better than the heavily financialized economies that had been lecturing them for years.