Economist Justin Wolfers delivered a searing shock to the hosts of MS NOW’s “The Weekend” on Saturday. And his news carried an unnerving warning to the state of the nation’s vulnerable democracy.
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Government statistics released this week show the annual inflation rate hit 4.2 percent in May — the highest in three years — while the latest YouGov poll shows almost 60 percent of Americans say the economy is getting worse.
But this isn’t the extent of the pain the vast majority of the nation is suffering. While it is aching, it is losing power too.
Newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk invested more money than most Americans even dream of in President Donald Trump’s re-election effort. But his new trillionaire status means his investment was even more effortless than before.
“I’m not going to start with Musk being worth a trillion. I’m going to go back to 2024, when he invested $250 million in the American election,” said Wolfers, professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. “That was almost certainly enough to win Donald Trump the election. Trump winning margin across the three swing states was only 230,000 votes, so you needed to switch 115,000 voters. … Even if he was so inefficient, it cost $1,000 per vote switch, Musk’s money won the election for Donald Trump.”
But that was just the start of it, assured Wolfers.
“That’s Scary Fact No. 1: we’ve already got an oligarch who put a billionaire in charge of our country. Let me blow you away with Scary Fact No. 2,” Wolfers went on. “This is where you need to understand the difference between $1 trillion — that’s what the bloke’s got — and $250 million, which is what he spent.”
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“That’s not 1 percent of his wealth,” continued Wolfers. “It’s not 0.1 percent of his wealth. It’s 0.025 percent of his wealth. Musk bought one American election, and has enough money left over to buy another 3,999 elections.”
Wolfers did not even touch upon the “politics of resentment” beginning to seize Americans watching Musk expand his trillions while they struggle to pay for gas and beans.
“We don’t need to [do that],” said Wolfers. “What we really need to do is talk about protecting democracy in an age of this sort of concentration of wealth.”
“Well, Justin, you just made me very angry talking about that,” admitted Weekend co-host Eugene Daniels, who was already pulling up stats from Inequality.org and the Federal Reserve revealing the top 1 percent of U.S. income brackets owns 31 percent of the wealth share while the bottom 90 percent have 32.6 percent of the wealth share.”
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