2026 Archives

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids — Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. — Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. — Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. — America’s oligarchs and the Republican Party they own know how to hold onto potentially wayward members of Congress. — The solar industry claims a scalp. — Is Israel using rape, electric shocks, and beatings to discourage activists from bringing food and medicine to Gaza? — Is that a squirrel on Trump’s head?

Americans aren't embracing socialism—they're rejecting 45 years of Reaganomics, billionaire rule, and an economy rigged against the middle class… Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, declared yesterday morning, seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class. Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism —that most other developed countries enjoy right now.

Since Nixon, Republicans have shifted wealth from working Americans to the morbidly rich. Dems should repeat that simple affordability message everywhere, every day, without apology or hesitation… “Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.” — Abraham Lincoln A July 2026 CNN/SSRS poll found that 71 percent of Americans believe Trump and his regime have not gone far enough to lower the price of everyday goods, leaving the middle class screwed. A Trump-voting caller to my show yesterday, along these same lines, tried to mansplain to me that things really aren’t that bad, and that the numbers I’ve been using to describe the economic destruction by Reaganism are exaggerated. For years I’ve been documenting the destruction of the American middle class at the hands of the GOP and neoliberal politicians (including some corporate Democrats). I wrote about it extensively and did a deep dive into the problem and its causes in my books Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, and, just last month, Who Killed the American Dream? As a result of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society “socialist” programs, about two-thirds of American families were in the middle class with a single paycheck by 1973 as reported by The New York Times; today that number could be as low as a third of us, depending on your definitions. And that’s where things get confusing, with statistics flying fast and furious (although everybody agrees Reaganomics has whacked working people), raising the question: What actually constitutes the middle class?

Measuring the Death of the Dream The destruction of the American Dream isn’t just an abstraction; it’s measurable. (See Chart 9.1) In 1980 when Reagan was elected president, at the peak of the American Dream, fully two-thirds of American families were in the middle class. A single income could support a family, buy a house, take an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and even retire with dignity. Today, only 43 to 47 percent of Americans qualify as middle class (depending on whose numbers and what criteria you use). And it takes two full-time incomes today to achieve what a single union job gave a family in 1980.