Six Trillion In. Scarcity Out.

The rot that fuels Trump-ism and why austerity can't fix America

Matthew Yglesias wrote a piece called “The case for progressive austerity.” His thesis: the only way to fix cost of living is to reduce inflation. The only way to reduce inflation is austerity. Stop dreaming. Cut spending. He says the quiet part loud: “There isn’t really that much to the ‘affordability’ issue other than trying to make inflation and interest rates lower.”

I’ve heard this before. We all have.

This is the same case anti-New Deal Democrats and Republicans made in the 1930s. It’s the same case the isolationists and Nazi apologists made about the expense of the Arsenal of Democracy. It’s the same case skeptics made about the space race. It’s the same case Fed chairs and Treasury secretaries made during Carter’s stagflation, when we chose austerity and deregulation instead of building our way out. That choice gave us Reaganism. Fifty years of neoliberalism. Fifty years of Democratic losses.

Matt’s ideas have been tested. They failed. If they worked, Democrats would be running things right now. They’re not.

You see, that’s where they’re at. You can’t make things better. You can only manage how fast they get worse.

I absolutely, positively, one hundred percent disagree.

Here’s the thing. Yglesias and the whole moderate brain trust are missing something obvious. America has a disease. Decades of offshoring. Financialization. Privatization. Administrative capture. We’ve destroyed our ability to make things and get things done. The productive capacity he assumes is waiting to be unleashed? It was disassembled and sold for parts.

Look at healthcare. We’re dumping almost $6 trillion into that system this year. Half from government. And what do we get? Over 80 percent of our counties are healthcare deserts. 120 million Americans can’t adequately access a pharmacy or a hospital or a trauma center.

Six trillion in. Scarcity out.

Where’s the money go? Over a third goes to administration. Billing specialists. Insurance intermediaries. Bureaucratic overhead. The UK’s National Health Service spends just over one percent of its budget on administration. Japan, with 3,500 separate insurers but one unified payment system, keeps administrative costs low because everyone uses the same fee schedule. We spend $2,500 per person per year just on paperwork. Researchers estimate $504 billion of it is pure excess — money that produces no care whatsoever.

We figured out how to get mail delivered to the top of a mountain. We figured out how to get water and electricity to every holler in Appalachia. But we can’t figure out healthcare?

Healthcare isn’t unique. It’s just a clear example.

Manufacturing. We had 19.6 million jobs in 1979. Now it’s under 13 million. China went from 6 percent of global manufacturing in 2000 to nearly 30 percent today. Wall Street and CEO’s gave them our capacity. They’re building soft power all over the world now. Infrastructure. Hospitals. Pipelines. The things we used to do. The only thing we can offer other countries is not bombing them.

Infrastructure. New York pays $4 billion per mile for subway. The global average is $350 million. We cannot build.

Same pattern everywhere. Money flows in. Productive capacity doesn’t come out. You get administrative overhead. Financial extraction. Asset bubbles. Middle management bullshit and nonproductive spending. It’s rotted our capacity.

So when Yglesias says deregulate and reduce the deficit and abundance will emerge? He’s assuming we have something left to unleash. You can’t deregulate a fab into existence when you’ve lost the supply chains, the engineers, and the tool-and-die makers. You can’t permit a building if no one knows how to pour the concrete anymore. You can’t deregulate skilled tradespeople into the workforce when we let the trades die. You can’t deregulate hospitals into rural counties when the whole system is structured to extract profit from cities.

The spring isn’t coiled and waiting. The spring was disassembled and sold for parts.

My grandfather worked for TVA. My uncles built the interstate highway system. Uncle Darrell surveyed it. Uncle John ran heavy equipment. My grandfather-in-law strung power lines across the hollers of Sneedville. When I drive down the street I see what unity can build. The dams. The lakes. The power lines. The schools and churches my uncle Bud’s company built. You can see the skeletons of the factories that powered families.

We did this before. When the Depression hit, we didn’t tell people to tighten their belts. We built. Rural electrification. The TVA. The CCC. When World War II came, we went from field to factory in eighteen months. The Arsenal of Democracy. We didn’t do it through deregulation. We did it through massive public investment in productive capacity.

That’s what we need now. Manhattan Projects for steel. Hydrogen. Batteries. Semiconductors. Machine tools. Retrain our people. Retool our factories. Public options that produce healthcare and housing and energy instead of just subsidizing private extraction.

The future of manufacturing will require fewer human hands. That means it must be reshored, not ignored. When the robots build what the world needs, they should build it here. The wealth they generate should stay here.

The Arsenal of Democracy helped win the fight against fascism at home and abroad. Something similar can work again.

Yglesias writes: “I hear the criticism that this is boring and that a political agenda needs to be sexier than this.”

Yeah, Matt. It’s boring because it promises nothing. But worse than boring is that it would be a disaster for America and the world.

Look around the world right now. Genocide in Gaza. Several genocides in Africa. Unrest in Iran. War in Ukraine. The United States kidnapping foreign leaders in Venezuela. Threatening to militarily invade Greenland. The French suggesting they might have to respond if we did. China building soft power across Latin America and Africa through infrastructure projects, hospitals, electrification — the things we used to do.

There is unrest everywhere. The old order is cracking.

And at home, people know houses cost more than they can afford. They know healthcare bandits are bankrupting families and the nation. They know their kids can’t afford to live where they grew up. They can feel the rot even if they can’t name it. When you tell them the answer is “technocratic tax reform and scalpel-like cuts,” they know you’re not serious. They know you’re saying, “life sucks and then you die.”

That’s how you get Trump. That’s how you get fascism. People told their problems are unsolvable will turn to anyone who promises to solve them. Even if those promises are lies.

I hope the best ideas win in 2026 and beyond.

Corbin Trent

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