That was a counterpoint to the OPs concern about corruption today in an attempt to convey that it’s not all that different now, not to argue it’s better now.

The orange one has done his share of awful things (like every president), but if this virus hadn't appeared we would very much still be in the "sports team" situation.

We will certainly destroy ourselves by other means before "the deficit" affects us in the least. It never stopped us from buying more weaponry; now that there is obviously something else on which to spend money suddenly we should worry about it?

From what I have both seen and read, housing costs are the #1 cause of this. They have exploded in the last 25 years.

The thing that blows my mind is that the COVID recession shows no sign of slowing down house price growth, though it has tempered rents in expensive markets.

If housing still rises even now, something is totally insane.

Yet the Federal Reserve study whence the "$400 emergency expense" claim was sourced states that 75% of adults are doing okay financially or living comfortably. The question about a $400 expense was about how people would pay for an unexpected $400 expense, not if they could pay for it. Only 12% could not pay for a $400 expense. The news media always tries to paint a dire narrative.

Per the US government, the median household in the US has $1000/month left over after all ordinary expenses. At the 78%, this is around $3500/month. As this strongly suggests, the statistics you are referring to do not actually assert what is often claimed of them. The underlying studies paint a more consistent, and less dire, picture.

> 40% don't have the money to cover a $400 emergency expense

This is an often cited statistic that's been essentially debunked for being flawed and misleading[1][2].

> And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck

Again, not a particularly useful statistic because 1. real consumption per capita has been increasing[3], and 2. the US has the 2nd highest household consumption[4] in the world.

"Living paycheck to paycheck" includes people that are destitute, but also people that just consume more than they should, and also people that are unable to save money due to increasing housing costs (not due to inequality, but due to zoning regulations). Of those who claim to be living "paycheck to paycheck", you don't know which are destitute.

> For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses.

Sure, this has nothing to do with inequality. If you gave everyone health insurance in America today, inequality would hardly change. And inequality is NOT the root cause of America's healthcare system, the root cause is a series of policies passed in the 20th century that resulted in 1) healthcare being tied to employment, 2) a lack of any form of price transparency, 3) supply constraints on medical professionals that have resulted in the highest PPP adjusted salaries for medical practitioners in the developed world.

> Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.

We’ve always had mega-rich families. The new phenomenon we’re seeing now is not that "normal people" are competing with the super-rich, it's that they are competing with the upper-middle class. Where I live (Brooklyn), The rents aren’t driven up because I’m in a bidding war with Jeff Bezos; they’re driven up because I’m in a bidding war with other high earning millennial white collar workers. The “middle class” worker doesn’t stand a chance in our neighborhood.

Also the cost of living isn't up uniformly across the US, it's only up in most big cities where the root cause is attributable almost entirely to poor zoning regulations, not "inequality". You can see the salary one must earn to purchase the median house in every city[5] and outside SF/NY/Seattle, it's around the median household income.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...

[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4...

[3] https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA

[4] https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...

[5] https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c...

That’s just not true, in practice, though. Laws are written by legislators who ultimately need to win the confidence of their constituents. No amount of money will install a representative who cannot win a democratic election.

We’ve seen this play out time and time again.

Jeff Bezos’ own district in Washington State is represented by a socialist.

Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.

In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).

Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician. No amount of money was enough to make their core message resonate with ordinary voters.

Bernie Sanders spent $195 million on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both.

Joe Biden spent $105 million on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.

Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.

Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more). Decades of research[1] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[2] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[3]. Even the studies[4] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins.

In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.

Yes, money helps you broadcast your message. If your message resonates, you can even win elections (what a concept). But money alone isn't persuasive.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401

[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764203260415

[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...

[4] http://www.sas.rochester.edu/psc/clarke/214/Gerber98.pdf

The US is at or near the top for cancer 5 year survival rates.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...

> My grandfather who fought in foxholes in South Pacific jungles didn't have to worry about dying from a scraped knee, either.

I mean he literally had to worry about dying of gangrene from a scraped knee in the tropics, but I get your drift.