Year: 2024

Trump’s Is a Cabinet of Deplorable Billionaires

Buck Banks

$9 billion

Trump has nominated at least 10 billionaires (or billionaire spouses) to cabinet positions and other top roles, making the incoming presidential team the wealthiest in history. Just his cabinet nominees are collectively worth more than $9 billion, according to New York Magazine. Though Biden’s cabinet is also a moneyed persons club, its wealth amounted to just $118 million in 2021, per Forbes.

Graph Shows When the U.S. Healthcare System Went off the Rails

Nixon's Healthcare Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 played an early role in enabling corporations to profit off sick and dying Americans

Jon Ponder
Chart source: Our World in Data

This graph shows the point at which the efficacy of healthcare in the United States diverged from the systems of its peer and competitor countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France and Japan. It shows that at the point when healthcare spending skyrocketed in the United States, the results of the enormous spending began to falter as measured by life expectancy.

Obviously, there were many factors that led to this divergence. But one factor in particular stands out. In 1973, President Nixon pushed through Congress and then signed into law the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, which changed the operating parameters of HMOs and other pre-paid medical plans. Its advocate was Edgar Kaiser, a wealthy California donor and president of Kaiser Permanente.

[…]

U.S. Economy Added 227,000 Jobs in November

Buck Banks

227,000

America’s job market rebounded in November, adding 227,000 workers in a solid recovery from the previous month, when the effects of strikes and hurricanes had sharply diminished employers’ payrolls, reported the Associated Press. Last month’s hiring growth was up considerably from a meager gain of 36,000 jobs in October. The government also revised up its estimate of job growth in September and October by a combined 56,000.

Musk Paid a Quarter-Billion to Elect Trump

Buck Banks

$250 million

“Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the final months of this year’s election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, federal filings revealed on Thursday,” the New York Times reports. “The sum is a fraction of Mr. Musk’s wealth. But it is nonetheless a staggering amount from a single donor, who poured the cash into allied groups and is now playing a role in helping shape the next administration.”