The MAGA Rosetta Stone

Decoding the $79 trillion heist that shaped our politics

by Rich Herschlag

Figuring out how we got here—to this horrific, surreal, impending fascist place—has become an industry. The explanations are diverse but are the same ones over and over again—dark money, PAC money, Russian influence, government corruption, toxic social media, the Citizens United decision, longstanding culture wars, the Federalist Society, failure of legacy media, declining educational standards. On any given day any mainstream or non-mainstream journalist can pick anything off of this menu and turn it into anything from a snack to a six-course dinner.

But I propose with as much sincerity as I can muster at this late date that there was a precondition for the impact of any of these factors—a sine qua non that is strongly evidenced by history and without which the American population could never have been nearly so vulnerable. That is the 50-year redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the very top. This economic arc is described aptly in the RAND report on the income gap first published in 2018 and updated in 2023.

For anyone who has heard Bernie Sanders preach about the decline of the middle class but is less familiar with the hard, cold numbers supporting such claims, the RAND report is a well researched, concise, brutally objective paper. In short, from the end of World War II till about 1975 productivity gains were distributed somewhat proportionally throughout the spectrum of economic classes. However, from about 1975 up through the present, nearly all such productivity gains have accrued to the top 10 percent of the population by income, and a highly disproportionate percentage of that to the top one percent.

The RAND report takes the more equitable distribution pattern of 1946-75, extends it theoretically to the present day, and compares the result to the modern economic reality. The result is a $79 trillion “transfer” of wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent. Supporting this supposition is a data rich graph showing roughly 67 percent of income in 1975 going to the bottom 90 percent, but only about 47 percent of income in 2021, with a steady decline in between. In this same time span the yearly gross domestic product per worker (in constant 2023 dollars) rose from about $90,000 to about $170,000. All told, the material benefit of an unprecedented increase in national productivity went almost entirely to the top 10 percent.

The reasons for this increasing gap, or “wedge” as it is referred to in the RAND study, are not addressed in the study itself but are well known and include a long term shift toward federal taxation policies more favorable to the highest income groups starting in the late 70s, a steady decline in unionization, obsolescence of millions of domestic jobs due to new technologies and increasing globalization, and the rise of the investor class. A quick personal anecdote was what I discovered a few years ago when I started taking dividends from our IRA. As investment income, those dividends were generally taxed at 15 percent, while money earned by actually working was taxed at roughly twice that rate. Nice non-work if you can get it. For anyone not already blessed with sufficient capital to reap substantial dividends, the prospect of ever getting to the Promised Land seems more distant with every passing year.

In concrete terms, the current yearly income wedge for the average 90-percenter in 2023 dollars is roughly $32,000. In a given year that is roughly the difference between living well and not. Between being able to save and not. Between being able to pay the monthly expenses, travel, cover unexpected medical and auto repair bills and not. Over the course of a decade or so the cumulative wedge is the difference between purchasing a house, paying for an education, starting a business and not. Over a career it is the difference between living the American dream and the American nightmare.

Not just economically but physically and emotionally as well, the average American worker over the past 50 years has been the proverbial boiling frog, rarely sustaining a singular devastating economic event but rather experiencing a barely perceptible day to day malaise of discouragement and hopelessness punctuated periodically by an inability to reach certain plateaus that were at one time considered a birthright. A thorough daily or weekly reckoning and the futile, masochistic number crunching such an effort would require is pointless, but the sinking feeling of doing the math roughly and quietly in your head from time to time is ever-present like the low decibel hum of annoying traffic. You learn to block it out except when you absolutely can’t. You know you’re a loser in these Hunger Games, and the nearly constant parade of winners builds up resentment that politically, socially, and culturally is a powder keg.

I would argue that the powder keg blew in the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the resulting forest fire acquired critical mass in 2024. The vast majority of Americans have little or no faith in a political system that under both parties failed them for the better part of a half century. As both major parties were culpable, neither one in 2016 was in a position to elect a business-as-usual candidate, and the GOP—fairly easily hijacked for its particularly cavernous vacuum of middle class hope—made the necessary move to secure power by reluctantly embracing a fan favorite who shared the party’s ends far more than its means. As of 2016 there was plenty of blame to go around, and only one candidate was able to harness it cruelly, unapologetically, and effectively.

In a nation already politically compromised and generally bitter, blame is a far more intoxicating elixir than self-sacrifice or compromise. Blame is potent, mesmerizing, and deceptive in its outsized ability to drum up tribalism. Blame adrenalizes and prompts even normally peaceful folks to rise to the occasion of hatred. Deep-seated within nearly every individual is a primal belief that he is better than other people and his own troubles are someone else’s doing. While the former is generally a conceit, in this particular case the latter is generally true. While understanding very little else, Donald Trump’s intrinsic read of these human proclivities and where we are collectively allowed him to light the fuse.

Even in a largely dysfunctional system, the pendulum of presidential elections dating back at least to the late 1800s remained operative as recently as the election of Joe Biden in 2020 and arguably the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. Without some sort of newly intensified corruption from the top down, that pendulum would likely swing back in 2026 and 2028. Most blatantly as of late, the current administration is doing everything it can to grab hold of that pendulum before it can swing back and to never let go.

For many of us democracy lovers, this administration is a crime in progress that must be stopped at any cost. But consider that the average American wage earner—the same one the RAND report demonstrates conclusively was slowly and systematically screwed—for the most part just doesn’t care. This is a frightening thought, mostly because we know it to be such a long time in the making. The general public’s 2024 price-of-eggs deal with the devil was rarely viewed askance by the legacy media but was rather normalized as legitimate politics. It is a given that as a population becomes increasingly desperate it will opt for or more radical choices and fundamental tears in its political fabric.

While this trend is currently evidenced more by the American far right with its ICE raids, sacking of “disloyal” federal employees, threatening of uncooperative elected officials, military invasion of demonized states and cities, and extortion of “liberal” universities and media outlets, we should also consider the far left that hopes one day to pick up the pieces and from them fashion an as of yet ill-defined but nonetheless authoritarian counterrevolution. This was roughly the downward spiral of ancient Rome, 1933 Germany, 1959 Cuba, and countless South and Central American nation-states, many of whom we helped down the road to political perdition in the name of cheap minerals and strategic military advantage.

Now that these pernicious forces—deserved or not—are coming hard and fast for our own hides, our thoughts are likely less academic or abstract and more trained on wining the short term forthcoming legislative and electoral wars. Exactly how this reckoning unfolds is largely unpredictable in the near future. In the long run, however, we have a duty to remember that pay-to-play, relentless gerrymandering, a corrupt Supreme Court, a cowering corporate media, and a weaponized social media—lethal as they are—are more symptoms than causes of the problem. As a primary cause none can rival the indifference, disengagement, and even hostility of the American people, which represents a gutting of the original animus of the Constitution.

Recent polling shows only a slim majority of Americans support what they understand to be “capitalism” and a majority of Gen Z is actually against it. Just as when you starve animals in the woods you can’t quite be sure of the consequences in the suburbs, when you economically disempower a people you can’t be certain of the outcome except that it will eventually be destructive for everyone, even the masterminds. When it comes to understanding the counterproductive political language of the day, the RAND report is the Rosetta Stone. Once the smoke clears and it’s time to rebuild our trust and our institutions, the RAND report must continue to be at least a warning.

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