America is a Long Con

That is not what was intended, but what it has become.

Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

A long con is an elaborate confidence game that develops in several stages over an extended period of time wherein the con man or swindler gains the victim’s trust, often bypassing small profits with the goal of reaping a much larger payout in the final maneuver:

The key to pulling off a long con is giving your marks the illusion of control while you and your team manipulate their choices.

Does that sound like your lived experience?

Everyone loves a good long con, as long as it isn’t happening to them.

One of the best examples of a satisfying long-con is the movie The Sting (1973) staring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Yes, it’s an old, old movie, but a satisfying one as you figure out the twists and turns of conmen running a fake off-track betting scam to get the best of a notorious gangster in 1930s Chicago. The film is only about 2 hours so the “long” in “long-con” isn’t that long, but the intricacy of the scam is impressive when you figure it all out in the end. There are many famous long-cons in real life like Charles Ponzi, who the sold fake stocks in the 1920s and Bernie Madoff who stole millions of dollars from his clients over decades, to the selling of the Eifel Tower, to a man who convinced many in high society that he was indeed a member of the famous and powerful Rockefeller family.

Cons are fascinating to study because they all depend on the weaknesses in our human nature to trust and have confidence in those that promise us the world, or the Eifel Tower, or untold riches, or America.

America as a long-con.

The idea of America as a long con popped into my head recently, so I thought I would explore it with a little research. I’m not happy to say, the shoe fits.

America is perhaps the greatest promise ever made by a government. At the time, what the authors of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution had in mind was madness to the rulers of the day. This band of rebels in the United States colonies come along and say they are going to become a constitutional republic, with representative government where the people elect their representative. Yes, only white, male, landowners could vote or serve in the government at the time, but even then, the idea of self-rule on the scale the United States was considering was ridiculous.

But in the end, it worked. And boy, did it. America became the most wealthy and powerful nation the world has ever seen. In time women were given the right to vote and impediments to voting that minorities faced were legislated away in the 1960s. And the promise that America could become what it was always meant to be - for everyone – was an amazing thing to think about.

But things didn’t work out that way.

Somewhere, in some alternate reality, that may have happened. But not here.

A 2020 study by the RAND Corporation put the first-ever price tag on how much income inequality costs American workers. The bill is $50 trillion. According to the study, $50 trillion has been diverted from working Americans to the wealthiest 1% since 1975.

Here is a graphic I have used before to show this visually.

Total family wealth has gone nowhere for the bottom 50% of Americans. Those from the 51^st to 90^th percentile have enjoyed modest growth in their wealth, while the top 10% have enjoyed exponential wealth growth over the past 50 years. This graphic only goes to 2019, but the trend has continued since then. The Rand study puts that number at $50 trillion. Some would call that theft. Nope, that’s just America.

America has become a confidence game that developed over an extended period of time wherein those in power gained the victim’s trust, through representative democracy, which is now owned by the wealthy and corporations. Slowly, over the past fifty years, laws have been written, court precedence set, and lobbying dollars flowed to ensure that America serves corporations and the wealthy before it serves America’s citizens.

The reason America has a healthcare system that itself is a long-con that charges high premiums and denies service, is that healthcare corporations are allowed by law to buy politicians in America. Corruption is out in the open.

The reason the effective tax rate of billionaires is lower than the middle class, is because those billionaires own the politicians who write the tax code.

We can measure this.

The Gini Coefficient, was named for Corrado Gini, who came up with the measurement to assess the inequality in a country. A coefficient of zero, means a society of perfect equality, or everyone has the same. A coefficient of 1 represents maximum inequality, or a society in which one person has all the wealth. The partial list below shows you inequality based on the Gini Coefficient for a number of countries around the world. At about 0.41, the United States is nearly twice as unequal as Norway. The Gini Coefficient tracks the graphics we saw before, as the current Gini Coefficient for the United States is about 20% higher today than it was in 1980.

South Arica 0.63

Brazil 0.52

United States 0.41

China 0.36

Canada 0.32

Sweden 0.33

Norway 0.28

Here is the Gini Coefficient for the United States over time:

The numbers are a little hard to read, but the Gini Coefficient for the US was lowest in about 1980 at about 0.35. We suddenly became more equal around Covid when Universal Basic Income was experimented with, which drastically reduced poverty. But our inequality snapped back and now sits at about 0.41.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness … Behind a Pay Wall.

Those of us born in the United States, or those who have come to the United States for better opportunity were famously promised, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness nearly 250 years ago.

But those items are exceedingly out of reach for the majority of Americans.

Life – A recent LendingTree survey found that 23% of Americans have medical debt, and another 22% say they've previously had medical debt. Healthcare is a right that is paid through collective taxation in every other developed country in the world. In America, about a quarter of our population is in debt for something that is free in the civilized world. Why? So that corporations can make profits.

The leading cause of death of children in the United States is from firearms. Why? Because gun manufacturers have very strong lobbying efforts to ensure that no regulations get put on firearms sales, and that laws around gun ownership and gun safety are lax. The United States is the only developed country in the world with a gun problem which often gets in the way of their pursuit of life.

Liberty – The United States has a two tiered justice system where those with wealth who can afford good lawyers are favored over those who cannot afford justice. The wide majority of Americans believe that there is a two tiered justice system. Oh, and we have a for-profit prison industry in the United States. Why? So that corporations can profit by more people being put in jail.

The Pursuit of Happiness – Happiness isn’t just owning a home. But the American dream always has a home in it. As of the first quarter of 2023, the homeownership rate in the U.S. is 66%. The homeownership rate among young adults (25-to-34-year-olds) has declined from 45% in 1990 to 41.6% as of 2021. The main way that Americans build wealth is through home ownership. That chart that shows stagnant wealth for the bottom half of Americans for the past 50 years, home ownership is just the most expensive of those things that people can’t afford. Prices have been going up for everything for 50 years, and wages have not kept pace. Why? Because the oligarchs own the government that writes the laws and writes the tax-laws that favor the wealthy.

Although the United States ranks the highest in GDP, it usually ranks low in measures of happiness and well-being. We work ourselves to the bone to get that high GDP and for what? We are less healthy, and less happy than most developed countries. America now has 815 billionaires who currently hold a record $6.7 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans control $3.7 trillion in wealth.

A long con is an elaborate confidence game that develops in several stages over an extended period of time wherein the con man or swindler gains the victim’s trust, often bypassing small profits with the goal of reaping a much larger payout in the final maneuver:

The key to pulling off a long con is giving your marks the illusion of control while you and your team manipulate their choices.

That sounds like America.