Pam and Russ Martens — The Right Wing Group Behind Donald Trump’s Rise Aims to Keep Fear Alive

Citizens United and the Koch Bros.

Donald Trump played a minor role by promoting birtherism.

The pieces are starting to fit together.  "Draining the swamp"?

Wall Street On Parade
The Right Wing Group Behind Donald Trump’s Rise Aims to Keep Fear Alive
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

See also

But let’s be clear. Trump is not a Keynesian. He is taking a page straight out of Reaganomics. When Reagan came to office, he embarked on a huge tax cut. At the same time, finance was given a free hand and business was deregulated aggressively. As Reagan’s advisers argued, lower tax rates and fewer regulations would create more incentives for business to invest and consumers to spend, and therefore the federal budget deficit will not rise significantly as incomes and tax receipts grow. But while GDP grew under Reagan, unions were undermined and the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, was mostly allowed to sink. Above all, incomes became much more unequal, the beginning of an income gap, that has continued growing, with only a couple of interruptions until recently, and that has specifically hurt the white working class. The top 1 percent now earns 18 percent of all income—double what it did when Reagan entered office.

Like Reagan, Trump says he will undertake large tax cuts for businesses and individuals. According to the Tax Policy Center, these cuts could reduce tax revenues by $7 trillion over the next ten years. Yet he has offered few plans about how he might cut the budget to reduce the flow of red ink. To the contrary, he plans to raise military spending (like Reagan did), embark on a huge infrastructure program, and—encouragingly—promises not to cut Medicare or Social Security. Instead Trump—supported by one of his main economic advisers, Peter Navarro of the University of California at Irvine—is claiming, like Reagan before him, that the tax cuts will produce a huge pop in economic growth, and therefore that tax revenues will rise rapidly.

The New York Review of Books
Trump: What the Market Is Really Saying

Jeff Madrick