How an economic crash could line Trump's pockets

Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
November 5, 2024 

America’s billionaires would love to have a recession, particularly a really severe one.

In a recent “town hall,” billionaire Elon Musk acknowledged what 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists across the country have predicted: If Trump is elected and he and Elon undertake their project to gut government spending, it will provoke a severe recession.
“We have to reduce spending to live within our means,” Musk said. “And, you know, that necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”

Most Republican voters aren’t taking his embrace of a recession or a short-term depression like George W. Bush brought us seriously.

“Why would the Republicans,” they’re asking, “who generally represent the interests of corporations and the rich above all else, risk crashing the stock market and economy where those very same wealthy people have their money invested?”

The question itself reveals a misunderstanding of how things work for the morbidly rich.

They are, uniquely, in a position to profit from the same economic downturns that wipe out average working people or those who’ve put their money into 401Ks invested in the market or certain stocks.

This is a story as old as capitalism. During the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, for example, some of America’s greatest fortunes were made or massively expanded.


My (late) friend Gloria Swanson once told me over dinner in her apartment how her former manager and lover Joe Kennedy, who’d made a pile of money manipulating the stock market, bailed out as the market began its slide and even shorted the market, increasing his wealth. But once it had crashed, when everybody was broke, she said, he bought stock with a vengeance.

“Cash is king” was the phrase of the day, and Kennedy was well stocked in cash (he even bought a movie studio). By the end of the Depression, he was one of the richest men in the nation.

J. Paul Getty’s favorite phrase was, “Buy when everyone else is selling, and hold on until everyone else is buying.” It’s something you can only do at scale if you’re fabulously rich to begin with.


The afternoon of the Great Crash — October’s Black Tuesday under Republican President Hoover in 1929 — Getty skipped his parents’ golden wedding anniversary to head to Wall Street where he began buying stocks, particularly in small oil companies that were in trouble.
“It is the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing,” Getty later wrote. Out of that, he became one of the richest men in the world.

Flash forward to the modern era.

When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.


The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594.

While over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as a buying opportunity.

Working-class people were desperately unloading stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.


But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery really began, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.


Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, for example, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

Once again the market collapsed, this time under Republican Trump, and working people, now out of work, were selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food.


But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2007!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).


Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, the world's 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%, as U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

Billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by a full 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion was safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters.

And, apparently, they’re happily anticipating the next crash that their boys Musk and Trump, along with their bought-off Republicans in Congress, are working hard to bring to pass with threats of massive federal spending cuts.


— Economic downturns not only cut wages and present buying opportunities for the wealthy and corporate America, they also give massive companies far more leverage when negotiating with vendors, which are typically desperate smaller businesses.

— Billionaires and massive companies retain access to credit so they can leverage their buying opportunities in ways smaller companies and working class individuals can’t.

— And corporate power to fight unionization increases exponentially as workers scramble and compete for jobs that have become vanishingly rare.


But the average American can be forgiven for thinking that Republicans would be reluctant to crash the economy. Their lived experience is very different from that of Elon Musk (532% increase in wealth during the single year of 2020), Mark Zuckerberg (86% increase), or Jeff Bezos (65% increase).

During the Bush Crash, average income for the poorest 10% of Americans fell by a full 23%, making business (and billionaires) much more profitable while working people were skipping meals, selling their houses for a song, and cutting pills in half.

Thirteen years later, the Trump Crash threw 8,500,000 Americans out of work: According to the World Economic Forum, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 22.7 percent in 2020, higher than even during the Bush Crash, and it’s taken almost four years for working people to get back on track.

Small business revenue collapsed by more than a fifth under Trump, new business formation cratered, and by July 2020 one-in-five American families were behind on their rent. The rate of hunger in America doubled at the same time the GOP sought to cut food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits.

The Bush and Trump crashes, in other words, did the work the morbidly rich have been demanding for years. Wages fell, unions struggled, corporate profits hit highs literally never before seen in America, and hedge funds bought up millions of distressed single-family homes to flip into high-priced rentals.

The stock market became absurdly cheap with both crashes, providing both the multimillionaire members of Congress and their billionaire backers with what used to be once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunities.

Now, they want to do it again. And Musk is gleefully proclaiming his willingness to pull it off.

So don’t be so sure Republicans in the House and Senate won’t celebrate billionaires Trump and Musk dragging America into a second Republican Great Depression if they have a chance.

They and their billionaire buddies have almost nothing to lose and a new and even larger fortune to gain.

AMERIKA

Fannie Mae CEO says she has never seen a housing market like this before

Fannie Mae CEO Priscilla Almodovar has worked in the housing-finance industry for decades, including during the 2007-09 financial crisis. The current market is unlike any she’s ever seen, she said. - 

Cindy Ord/Getty Images for American Institute for Stuttering

Aarthi Swaminathan

MARKET WATCH

Wed, October 16, 2024

After two decades working in housing policy, Priscilla Almodovar is intimately familiar with the challenges the U.S. faces when it comes to housing.

The Brooklyn native took the reins of the New York State Housing Finance Agency in 2007 amid a financial crisis that was fueled by a crash in subprime mortgages. Today, buyers are facing the opposite problem: Demand for homes is so insatiable that even as mortgage rates remain elevated and home-insurance costs soar, home prices keep inching up to new record highs.

As the chief executive of Fannie Mae FNMA, a government-sponsored enterprise that backs one in four residential mortgages in the U.S., Almodovar, 57, has a front-row seat to it all. That lands her on the MarketWatch 50 list of the most influential people in markets.

“It’s a highly unaffordable market right now. We are monitoring and following all these trends, things that we’ve never seen before,” Almodovar told MarketWatch in an interview.

“You have home prices the highest we’ve seen in two decades,” she said.
Home sales on track for worst year since 1995

Home buyers and renters are facing record-high housing costs. The issue has become such a big priority for average Americans that the presidential candidates are proposing various solutions to make homeownership more affordable.

Meanwhile, some renters are taking matters into their own hands with rent strikes, while some aspiring homeowners have abandoned the idea and decided to rent indefinitely, finding it far cheaper than owning.

Even though mortgage rates have come down after the 30-year rate posted a big jump to 8% in October 2023, the average mortgage payment — which includes principal and interest, as well as property taxes and homeowners insurance — hit a new record high of $2,070 in August, according to Intercontinental Exchange. That’s up 24% from before the pandemic.


Mortgage rates are unlikely to drop back down to prepandemic levels anytime soon, Almodovar said. Regarding the 3% rate seen during the pandemic, she said, “we probably will never see that again in our lifetime.”


Even if buyers can afford the price of a home, there aren’t many options to choose from. The market is still enduring the lock-in effect, with current homeowners seeing little benefit in selling their current property and buying a more expensive one at higher interest rates.

The lock-in effect in particular is an unusual phenomenon that has stalled the housing market. Homeowners’ unwillingness to sell resulted in home sales that were 57% lower in the fourth quarter of 2023 than in the same quarter the previous year, the Federal Housing Finance Agency estimated in March.

Put another way, the lock-in effect “prevented” the sale of 1.33 million homes, the agency said.

Addressing the nation’s housing challenges will likely take more than initiatives from whoever wins the presidential election. Bringing the cost of housing down will also require policy makers at the federal, state and local levels to get involved, Almodovar said.

“There’s a consensus today that part of the solution is more supply,” she said. That means preserving the nation’s old existing homes and also building new units, she added.

Many of the obstacles to increasing housing supply are controlled at the local level, she noted.

“It’s zoning. It’s not-in-my-backyard NIMBY-ism,” Almodovar said. “The No. 1 issue is the local. That’s where decisions really get made.”
Homeownership is still part of the American dream

The pressure brought on by high rates and high prices has stalled the housing market. Fannie Mae’s economists expect only 4 million existing homes to be sold in the U.S. through 2024, the lowest number since 1995.

Nonetheless, most Americans aspire to own a home. About 84% of respondents in a 2023 survey by LendingTree said that homeownership is part of their American dream.

Almodovar grew up in New York City, and her parents bought their first home when she was 5 years old. In reaching that milestone, they felt like they had achieved the American dream, she recalled, noting that the idea is still “very much ingrained in what we think, and the mindset of our country.”

For that reason, the current environment has made housing “one of the most important domestic policy issues that we have to tackle,” Almodovar said.
Housing costs pushed up by unstable variables

It’s not just the challenges of saving for a down payment and of navigating elevated mortgage rates that are making homeownership unaffordable for many Americans. Rising insurance costs also mean homeowners are struggling more to fit their monthly payments into their budget.


Unlike a monthly mortgage payment, which remains the same throughout the life of a fixed-rate loan, insurance costs have surged over the last few years, adding instability to an otherwise stable 30-year loan.

Recent natural disasters — including hurricanes Milton and Helene, which caused significant damage in parts of the southeastern U.S. — illustrate the challenges climate change is posing to homeowners and to the housing industry.

Climate risk is something Fannie Mae is monitoring closely, Almodovar said.

As real-estate companies race to bring climate-risk information to prospective home buyers and homeowners, government agencies are revving up not only to offer assistance to affected homeowners but also to impose a moratorium on foreclosures of mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration.

They are also trying to stay ahead of the risk by encouraging people to make their homes more resilient to climate disasters.

Because it guarantees one in four mortgages in the U.S., Fannie Mae has skin in the game — and officials there are worried.

There is a gap between how much risk is understood by homeowners and what private-sector companies know, Almodovar said.

The federal government publishes maps of places that are expected to flood, but Hurricane Helene demonstrated how locales that are further inland and have historically not been prone to flooding can end up inundated. “So it is something that concerns us,” Almodovar said.

Ultimately, “climate is one of those areas where there’s no one silver bullet,” she said. Instead, “it’s really all sectors working together, and all industries working together.”

Nationalize the Banks

HEAR, HEAR

By Christopher W. Shaw

September 26, 2024

Source: Catalyst


Source: Glen Scarborough Wall Street. Flickr.

LONG READ

As a lonely critic who dared to challenge Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan during the stock market mania of the late 1990s, then congressman Bernie Sanders received recognition from the political left and dismissive coverage from the mainstream media. Sanders subsequently won significant national attention as an outspoken populist critic of the banking system in the wake of the 2007–8 financial crisis. After declaring his presidential candidacy in 2015, he cemented this reputation as the nation’s preeminent critic of bankers, using the campaign to express the anger that many Americans shared about the financial crisis and the resulting bailout. “If elected president,” Sanders pledged, “I will rein in Wall Street so they can’t crash our economy again.”1 Hillary Clinton conceded the appeal of this campaign promise when — panicked by the popularity of Sanders’s attack on finance and unable to respond effectively to his criticisms — she sought to change the subject by exclaiming, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow . . . would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?”2 The stand that Sanders took against the banks was compelling, true to the contemporary moment, and appeared novel. But although unfamiliar to the times, opposing the excesses and power of bankers was hardly original. Sanders emerged as the successor to an influential strand of American political culture with deep historical roots that has motivated far-reaching economic demands in the past and could do so again in the future.

As the Sanders campaign demonstrated, while banking is widely considered to be dry and dull, it’s nevertheless an issue that can energize working-class politics. Discussing and debating banking calls attention to opposing material interests, which promotes a politics that is attuned to questions of class. Workers confront the relevance of banking to their daily lives every time they check their account balance or pay a bill.3 When Sanders presented financial policy as a clash between Wall Street on the one hand and “working families” on the other, he articulated a class-based populist message that could reach a diverse spectrum of working-class voters. In the past few years, local single-issue groups promoting public banks made real headway in several heavily Democratic cities and states. Among other issues, their campaigns foregrounded green energy projects and unequal credit access due to racial discrimination. This messaging excites liberal Democratic politicians, but its capacity to forge broader coalitions and inspire the solidarity that sustains working-class politics is more limited.4

A look at the past reveals that banking programs that are framed in universal terms can offer an effective organizing device with widespread appeal. Shared commitments to remaking the banking system were the cornerstone of an influential American political tradition. In the late nineteenth century, the “money question” galvanized two mass political parties that protested Gilded Age inequality, the Greenback and Populist parties. In the early twentieth century, large numbers of workers and farmers across the nation rallied around banking reforms as a means to make American society more democratic. Seen in the light of this history, the promise of material benefits from government banking continues to present a source for working-class political mobilization today.

Recent polling indicates that the public is dissatisfied with the private banking system. In 2024, the Pew Research Center revealed that 60 percent of Americans think that banks have a negative effect on the nation. This discontent with the current banking system is bipartisan: Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to view banks as having a negative impact.5 Such an outlook conformed with the findings of earlier surveys. A 2016 poll by Edison Research found that a majority thought Wall Street — a term commonly used for large banks — did more to hurt than to help the lives of Americans, an opinion that prevailed across racial, gender, educational, and partisan lines, with one exception. The only group that bucked this pattern were those with postgraduate educations, though here, too, a plurality thought Wall Street did more harm than good.6 And these poll results aren’t a post–financial crisis phenomenon. When Louis Harris and Associates conducted polling on the subject in 1996, amid an economic boom, the firm’s chairman concluded that the public’s impression of Wall Street was “awful.” In the survey, 61 percent of Americans agreed that Wall Street was “dominated by greed and selfishness” and 64 percent agreed that “most people on Wall Street would be willing to break the law if they believed they could make a lot of money and get away with it.”7

Government banking could open up new economic possibilities. Absent the imperative to maximize profits, public banks from the local to the federal level could help advance social democratic policies. Operating under the mandate to promote social welfare, such banks could help finance universal government programs. Public infrastructure projects would be prime candidates for these loans. Importantly, government banking would bolster public control over capital flows. Increasing funding opportunities for social goods and government services would invigorate the public sector. Government banking could allow for greater public management of capital allocation among different economic sectors and make investment decisions more democratically responsive.

Securing these results would demand that the administration of government banks be organized around public transparency and accountability. Publicly appointed and elected governing committees would help hold decision-makers responsible to voters. Fostering interaction between government banking officials and the people their decisions affect would promote the leadership’s concern for social needs and public opinions. Requiring officials to consult regularly with the full spectrum of social stakeholders through advisory councils and open meetings would offer a means of institutionalizing such connections. Placing officials under regular oversight and review by elected legislatures would further promote democratic responsiveness.

Opponents of government programs habitually claim that Americans are inherently opposed to government programs. Yet voices on the political right are among those questioning this cliché. In a 2024 survey, American Compass, an organization that advocates a “new conservative economic agenda,” found “vanishingly little support across parties for reducing any of government’s major roles.” Under one-fifth of those polled thought government programs were “usually unhelpful,” while the majority were open-minded on the subject, stating that they “don’t believe a general rule of thumb [on government’s role] makes sense.”8 This undoctrinaire verdict indicates that most Americans can be receptive to the merits of government programs — an attitude that has historical precedent in the United States. The twentieth century witnessed the New Deal, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, a slew of reforms during President Richard Nixon’s administration, and numerous other government initiatives. More recently, right-wing opponents of health care reform fervidly attacked the Affordable Care Act and framed it as emblematic of “big government.” During the past decade, this law has gained steadily in public acceptance, and all but ten states — mostly in the South — have adopted the program’s Medicaid expansion.
Banking for the People

Though bankers might seem omnipotent, the nature of banking makes the entire sector susceptible to public pressure. The very mechanics of banking yield major vulnerabilities to negative popular opinion: there is always the risk of depositors withdrawing their money and closing their accounts. In the early 1980s, boycotts targeting banks proved an effective tool for activists defying deindustrialization in western Pennsylvania. In one instance, such a boycott helped protect thousands of workers’ pensions and severance pay. In another, a threatened boycott reversed plans to shutter a plant employing 650 workers.9 Strategically more significant is the leverage that the public has over banking in the political realm. While the political influence of bankers is well known, their need to pursue self-protection through political involvement is less noted. Banks are reliant on government, particularly the national government. The private banking system is both a relatively regulated branch of the economy and favored with the privilege of a federal safety net, which is integral to its existence. The banking system depends on confidence rooted in continuing support from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve System, and ultimately the federal government itself. The current power of bankers is less a structural matter of course than the consequence of an absence of political challenges.

During the early twentieth century, the private banking system faced significant grassroots criticism. Keen public interest in financial questions reflected the political inheritance of Greenbackism and Populism. Influenced by these traditions, and also by the rising socialist movement, many Americans looked forward to establishing government banks.

Discussion of the subject of government banking evokes an enduring line of historical inquiry: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” Over the years, numerous explanations have been offered to this question, including racial and ethnic animosities, high levels of social mobility, an entrenched two-party system, and an intensely individualistic culture. More recently, historians writing in the latter part of the twentieth century interrogated the premise of this question itself, revealing that socialism not only existed in the United States but had roots in the American heartland. Their research situated small Midwestern cities of the Progressive Era, the countryside of Oklahoma during the same period, and the nineteenth-century Indiana milieu that produced Eugene V. Debs at the center of the nation’s socialist history.10 When historians recovered the socialist past of the early twentieth-century United States, they also resurrected the memory of the movement’s substantial appeal to workers and farmers. In 1920, Debs famously received close to one million votes for president while imprisoned at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary due to his opposition to World War I.

Yet an important dimension of the question of socialism’s appeal remains comparatively neglected: the prevalence and popularity, beyond the Socialist Party of America, of economic ideas that intersect and overlap with socialism. In this article, I will explore an aspect of the American past that has been lost: a mass movement of working people who sought to socialize banking. During the first half of the twentieth century, widespread public condemnation of the private banking system and the bankers who controlled this fundamental feature of capitalism led to broad support among working people for creating government banks and nationalizing privately owned ones.11

The appeal of government banking to early twentieth-century Americans resulted from a remarkable level of popular engagement with financial policy questions, one largely absent today. Material concerns drove these workers and farmers to push for a banking reformation that would make the economy more equitable. Such critics of the banking and monetary status quo thought broadly about economic matters. But there was a smaller, less influential group whose interest in money was narrower. An exclusive focus on financial affairs led these critics to believe that the only necessary economic change involved tinkering with money. Among these were establishment figures whose attempt to use monetary reform to forestall other economic reforms reveals the reactionary motivations behind such programs. During the Great Depression, for example, one conspicuous lobby for inflation — the Committee for the Nation — was an organization of business executives who opposed the New Deal. There were also politically and socially marginal reactionaries, typically of an antisemitic variety, whose conspiracy theories incorporated financial nostrums. The political program of the 1930s protofascist group the Silver Shirts, for instance, addressed monetary matters. A distinguishing feature of their program was the doubtful proposition that replacing physical currency with a network of checking accounts would eliminate “money crimes” like robbery and the extortion of ransom through kidnapping.12

While groups such as the Committee for the Nation and the Silver Shirts attempted to turn mass involvement with financial questions to their own ends, elite-orchestrated and fringe political programs unfolded apart from the grassroots banking politics of working people. Truly populist banking politics, by contrast, was rooted in labor unions and farmer groups, institutions that working people organized, led, and funded themselves. Numerous worker and farmer institutions, from the local to the national levels — ranging from the Chicago Federation of Labor to the National Farmers Union and the United Mine Workers of America — provided forums where heterodox financial ideas circulated, including the belief that establishing government banks would combat the abuses of the existing financial system as a whole.

On an individual level, working people were interested in banking because they wanted safety for their savings and greater access to credit. The motive here was less about becoming rich than about attaining the modest prosperity that would offer basic financial security to them and their families. They also hoped to overcome the economic, political, and social threat posed by the concentration of vast financial power in only a few hands. Opponents of the “money power” endeavored to tame it for the sake of democracy. Working people understood Wall Street to be the headquarters of capitalism, autonomously deciding where investment would and would not be channeled. They believed that the profit-seeking excesses of large, unaccountable financial institutions frequently threatened economic stability.13 Accordingly, on this front as well, working people’s quest for financial security made reforming the banking system a priority for them, because they understood that, operating with minimal oversight, banks both caused and magnified the recurring depressions that regularly wreaked havoc in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The collective political action that emerged from policy discussions within organizations of workers and farmers drove significant changes to the banking system from the 1910s through the 1930s. A major impetus for most of the era’s banking reforms was persistent public pressure, consistently expressed through elected officials, for more government involvement in this critical sector of the economy. In comparison with today, the banking system operated more autonomously from government, stamping this reform agenda as a clear break with past practice. Still, the vigor of popular involvement in grassroots banking politics produced victories despite the burden of precedent and the banking fraternity’s bitter resistance. The possibility of government enterprise in the form of public banks presented a sweeping policy option that loomed over all contemporary financial debates. The threat of such a radical step eased reforms that now appear moderate but were opposed adamantly by bankers at the time, who attacked the FDIC, Farm Credit System, and now defunct Postal Savings System. Contrary to their fears, following its establishment in 1934, the FDIC brought unprecedented stability to the banking system. It was the keystone of a reformed financial order that no longer fueled sharp booms and busts, providing a foundation for post–World War II mass prosperity and neutralizing future demands for far-reaching changes to banking.

Historical accounts of mass engagement with financial politics in the modern society that emerged between the Civil War and World War II have emphasized monetary debates, especially the 1890s conflict over the currency that arrayed the gold standard against bimetallism (basing money on both gold and silver). But grassroots banking politics in the early twentieth century was less focused on how money ought to be defined than on the purpose of financial institutions. Making finance accountable to the material and moral concerns of working people was at the heart of this mass movement. Its supporters believed that stripping the control of money and credit from bankers would end the profit motive’s power not only over individuals but also over investment decisions that shaped larger economic developments. The idea of organizing banking to serve working people — instead of exploiting them — mobilized workers and farmers, who pursued a populist economic vision that aligned with socialist ideals. In his 2016 campaign, Sanders revealed that financial reform can still motivate working-class voters today.
Greenbackers, Populists and Socialists

The 1928 and 1932 Socialist Party vice presidential nominee James H. Maurer entered politics through his involvement in financial reform. His political activism was pivotal to the development of the strong socialist movement in Reading, Pennsylvania, that peaked in the late 1920s.14 Socialism in the city was rooted among its largely Pennsylvania Dutch working class — a background that Maurer shared. Overcoming poverty and illiteracy, he forged an alliance between organized labor and socialism in his hometown, eventually becoming president of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Labor. A newsboy at six years old and a factory laborer at ten, at sixteen Maurer was an illiterate apprentice in a machine shop. But his life changed forever thanks to a politically active machinist who taught him how to read. Under this fellow worker’s tutelage, Maurer embarked upon an intensive program of self-education on the topics of “banking, the gold standard, bimetallism, paper money, inflated currency, contracted currency, free coinage of silver.”15 He had become one of many working-class students of finance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Learning about financial issues was an empowering experience for Maurer. “Before I was seventeen,” he recalled, “I believed I knew more about banking and the manipulation of money than most Congressmen did.” Although too young to vote, Maurer became an enthusiastic member of the Greenback Party. Greenbackers wanted the federal government to combat the frequent economic depressions and ruinous deflation of the late nineteenth century by printing large amounts of paper currency. Through his involvement with the Greenback Party, Maurer learned the mechanics of political organizing, carrying the flag in the party’s parades, distributing its literature, and generally doing whatever work needed to be done. By the 1890s, the Greenback Party was moribund, but its financial ideas had a new home in the growing Populist movement — a mass protest against laissez-faire capitalism that won adherents among Midwestern wheat farmers and Southern cotton farmers, Western miners and urban construction workers. Maurer found himself in great demand as a speaker at Populist events throughout Pennsylvania. “Bankers particularly came in for scathing abuse,” he recalled. “We handled them without gloves.”16

The banker was a figure who represented unearned wealth and unaccountable power. Casting a critical eye on the riches that bankers enjoyed and the undue influence they exercised helped contemporaries think in more systemic ways about the unfairness of economic arrangements that privileged some and disadvantaged others. The Panic of 1907, for example, was caused by a reckless and bungled attempt to corner a mining stock and the ensuing failure of banks connected with the unsuccessful speculators. The federal government hurried to rescue shaky banks with a sizable no-interest loan. Meanwhile, the economic depression that this financial crisis caused threw millions of workers out of their jobs. A socialist member of the United Mine Workers of America blamed the depression on the “instability of our present banking system . . . augmented by . . . stock gamblers and money sharks, beside whom a common horse-thief or safe-breaker would be a respectable citizen.”17

In the aftermath of the 1907 crisis, the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in the nation, the Appeal to Reason of Girard, Kansas, used banking to dramatize the disparate nature of government involvement in the economy. “What is a banker to do in a financial crisis if he is out of cash?” the newspaper asked. “Come to the United States treasury and help yourself to government money.” The federal response, the Appeal observed, was entirely different in the case of unemployed workers. “What is a man to do who is out of work in a financial crisis and is starving? God knows!”18 The privileges that bankers enjoyed provided the Appeal with an instructive case study of how, despite criticisms of socialism that romanticized laissez-faire principles, government was already active in the economy. Government’s finger was tipping the scale in favor of capitalists and against working people, whereas socialism would orient government efforts toward aiding the working class.

When socialists criticized bankers and the privately owned banking system, they connected with an established pillar of working-class political culture. Large numbers of workers and farmers studied, discussed, and debated a variety of financial reforms. And with a lineage extending back to the Greenbackers and the Populists, government banking was deeply embedded in this political tradition. However, as the socialist movement grew in the first decade of the twentieth century, a former Populist vice presidential nominee, Thomas E. Watson, became one of socialism’s more vociferous critics. Many participants in the Populist uprising of the 1890s — most of whom were farmers — disagreed with Watson. They considered socialism to be a fuller development of their political philosophy. “I had the pleasure of voting for you in ’92,” a resident of upstate New York informed Watson, “and it is a matter of profound regret . . . that you cannot . . . step forward into the Socialist party.”19 Yet despite Watson’s denunciations of socialism, he promoted the idea of a federal bank that would make low-interest loans more widely available. It’s unsurprising then, given these two movements’ overlapping ideas, that in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, historian James R. Green found that “former radical Populists played an important role in building the early Socialist party locals.” Their political efforts proved highly successful, with one in six Oklahoma voters casting their ballots for Debs in the 1912 presidential election, an electoral result that rested on enthusiastic support from farmers.20

In 1912, the Socialist Party had put aside the ideological objections of some members and embraced farmers as fellow members of the working class.21 For workers, banking was an urgent political issue because the existing system’s instability ignited and fueled punishing economic depressions. Moreover, given that periodic hard times were a fact of life, those who managed to accumulate a nest egg wanted it to remain secure. In addition to these concerns, affordable credit was an especially pressing matter for farmers, since for them borrowing from lenders was analogous to the wage relationship between workers and employers. Credit allowed farmers to purchase essential supplies like seeds and fertilizer, and the agricultural loans that farming required typically imposed high and even usurious interest payments. Therefore, when socialists discussed banking, they spoke directly to a paramount concern of farmers. A leading socialist organizer in Oklahoma, Oscar Ameringer, stressed that “nationalization of the banking system, loaning money at actual cost, would give capital to the usury ridden farmer at a rate . . . lower than his greatest expectations.”22 The high cost of farm loans motivated supporters of the Bank of North Dakota — the sole state bank in the nation today — who persevered against opposition to its creation in 1919 and subsequently shielded the institution from attacks during its vulnerable early years.23

“The collective ownership and democratic management of the banking and currency system” became part of the Socialist Party platform in 1912.24 But government banking was much discussed and highly popular among working people well beyond party circles throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Postal banking was one form of government banking that received extensive public support. Numerous labor unions and farmer organizations lobbied to secure the 1911 establishment of the Postal Savings System, whose sole function was to offer savings accounts for small depositors. Shortly after the system’s inauguration, the 1912 American Federation of Labor convention sought to expand its role, resolving that funds deposited in the Postal Savings System should “be loaned to individuals . . . preferably to laboring people striving to obtain a home.” For decades, working people continued to urge that the Post Office Department become a full-fledged bank, offering checking accounts and low-interest loans through the nation’s extensive network of post offices.25

An additional legislative victory during this era that owed much to advocates of public banks involved farm lending. From the Populist movement forward, farmers had called repeatedly for the national government to provide them with affordable credit. Farmers frequently condemned bankers as superfluous and burdensome intermediaries who extracted unearned profit through interest payments. “Why not cut out this useless middle man, and the high rates of interest?” demanded one Nebraska farmer. In 1915, the Appeal to Reason spoke to this grievance, observing that under existing practices “the farmer suffers most” — even becoming “a debtor citizen” — and proposing to replace “private control of money and banking” with “absolute public control.” That summer, the nation’s three largest farmer organizations “unanimously agreed” on a plan that would create a federal government program for loaning money directly to farmers at low interest. The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 established an agricultural lending system that fell short of achieving the strictly governmental institution that many farmers favored. Still, this new system had access to funding from the United States Treasury and was governed by public officials. As farmers had predicted, the result was lower interest rates under more favorable terms.26
Producers and Parasites

Public banking proposals multiplied rapidly during the early years of the Great Depression, when one-fifth of the nation’s privately owned banks failed. In addition to difficult economic conditions, mismanagement and white-collar crime played significant roles in the banking crisis. In response to this financial disaster, the grassroots of the socialist movement pressed the case for government banks. “Captain Kidd in his most balmiest days would have gladly exchanged his piracy business for this ‘legitimate’ banking business,” one socialist declared in a letter to the editor. “The public ownership of all the banking institutions . . . is the only hope of the public for redemption from the present chaotic banking conditions that has helped paralyze this country.” Another correspondent implored the Milwaukee Leader “and all the other Socialist papers [to] print a form for a petition that the people could use to petition the government to establish government banks.” The Reading Labor Advocate did not promote such a petition drive but did urge that banking be “made a government function” as the “first step” toward replacing “the private profit system of industry.”27

The collapse of the private banking system in 1933 forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare a national bank holiday immediately following his inauguration. The Socialist Party presented the new administration with a plan for transitioning to government banking. The Houston Post, a Democratic newspaper, predicted that recent events would make the nation especially receptive to socialist banking proposals.28 Yet given the extent to which the Depression undermined the standing of financial, business, and other orthodox economic authorities, the 1930s proved to be particularly frustrating for the movement. The Socialist Party’s emergence from World War I as a significantly reduced political force set the stage for this anticlimactic period. Socialist leader Norman Thomas perceptively observed that the New Deal undercut the party’s appeal, sarcastically remarking that Roosevelt carried out its program “on a stretcher.”29

Yet during the Depression, farmers and workers demanding government ownership and operation of banking embraced principles that socialists upheld, notably that existing economic arrangements awarded unaccountable private actors too much power, that the profit motive should not govern economic activity, and that the economy was a collective endeavor that ought to promote the common good. For example, New York City plunged into a fiscal crisis in the early 1930s, which empowered bankers to dictate budget policy as a condition for extending the loans that the city required to avoid default.30 Socialist leader Morris Hillquit recommended a municipal bank “as a protection against the domination of private bankers.”31 Appalled teachers in the public school system rallied to this cause, and their union denounced the banks for subverting fundamental democratic practice. In 1933, the American Federation of Teachers condemned the bankers’ “conspiracy to control government through their power to withhold credit,” resolving in favor of “a system of national banks under federal ownership and control.” The union had concluded that “only through government control of banking and credit can the manipulation of our financial structure for private ends be terminated.”32

Meanwhile, on the other side of the nation, the leading organization of small farmers in California — the State Grange — declared in its journal that banking “is not a producer of wealth — it is a middleman” and envisioned government banks that made affordable credit available on an equitable basis. Since banks were merely the intermediary between money and borrowers, these farmers believed it was necessary to remove the profit motive from banking by making “the government . . . the channel through which the cash and credit of the nation is made available to the people.” This arrangement would promote modest economic success, thereby supporting the financial security of citizens and sustaining the health of communities. Emphasizing that banking should not operate in the interest of profit extraction, the district grange of San Joaquin County insisted that “the service which money is designed to perform is that of a collective nature . . . private control of either the circulation of credit or the expansion of credit destroys the equitable feature of this service.” These Grangers accordingly “urge[d] a complete control of all monies by the government and the distribution of all monies through government agencies.”33

New Yorkers and Californians promoting the transformation of banking into a government function represented a prevalent opinion among working people nationwide. Support for nationalizing banking was expressed in multiple forms and in varied places, including through the state federations of labor of Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington; the state granges of California, Idaho, Missouri, Oregon, and Washington; and the state farmers’ unions of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Montana.34 As late as World War II, the Minnesota State Federation of Labor wanted “private persons and corporations . . . forbidden to do a banking business . . . in order that value of money, of commodities, and of Labor power be stabilized and freed from the manipulations of speculators.” During the war, a union oil worker (and devoted advocate of government banking) echoed the venerable tradition of warning that “a few ruthless, cold-blooded, brutal private bankers have the power to bring on . . . continued economic chaos.”35

Although historians writing after the cultural turn often portray each glance, gesture, and utterance of marginalized individuals as consequential acts of resistance, a historical discrepancy exists between the prevalence of grievances among working people and the comparative infrequency of political action on their part.36 In order to produce effective action, a sense of injury requires a cogent interpretation of its causes. Workers and farmers who studied banking issues regularly concluded that bankers were parasites who profited from the labor of producers. This understanding encouraged working people to believe that their labor entitled them to both a fair share of what the economy produced and greater control over economic institutions themselves. After all, even though bankers performed no productive service, the existing banking system imposed these superfluous middlemen — exploitative figures who used the money that depositors had earned to extract undeserved income from borrowers.

The sharp juxtaposition of productive labor and unproductive finance yielded a producerist analysis that promoted a sense of solidarity among working people. Producerism holds that honest work creates wealth; hence producers should receive the fruits of their labor, not idle parasites. “What do the bankers produce that they can live on the fat of the land while we who produce everything have almost nothing of what we produce?” asked one Californian during the Depression.37 This perspective expressed a stark perception of opposing economic interests — a form of class division that inspired political action. Workers and farmers who considered themselves contributors to the commonweal shared a sense of exploitation at the hands of these nonproducers. Producerist convictions inspired working people to imagine banking alternatives that would rectify existing injustices and elevate the common good. Discontent with the private banking system promoted the idea that government banking could make the economy more responsive to democratic principles. This insight advanced a sense of the possible that motivated activist workers and farmers to campaign for public banks through their membership organizations.

Of course, in spite of the strength of public support for government banking, private banking remains the default model in the United States. When the banks collapsed in 1933, President Roosevelt was compelled to impose federal control over the entire system. The prestige of bankers was badly tarnished, and banks were not functioning. “It ought to be accepted as a principle,” Norman Thomas argued, “that banks saved only by government action . . . should pass absolutely into the control of the government and not be returned to the owners who could not manage them.”38 But in this moment of crisis, Roosevelt made the expedient decision to resurrect the private banking system. One supporter of the socialization of banking with contacts inside the administration reported that “the money changers whom Mr. Roosevelt drove out of the temples in his inaugural [are] congregating in the White House and telling him what to do.” The leading administration official during the crafting and execution of the bank holiday later observed that “capitalism was saved in eight days.”39

The ability of the private banking system to survive this trial shows how firmly entrenched its power was. But the extent of this power also makes clear both how audacious the grassroots banking politics campaign was and how remarkable its achievements were. The hostile opposition of bankers, for example, could not prevent the establishment of a government bank that extended throughout the nation: the Postal Savings System, often referred to as “Uncle Sam’s Savings Bank.” Rather than deter champions of government banking, awareness of the strength of their opponents actually motivated populist advocacy. “Do not get it into your heads brother farmers that these well fed bankers are going to let you get away from their crib if they can help it,” stressed Grange leader Carey B. Kegley. “The picking is entirely too good for them ever to permit you to be relieved from paying tribute.” Proponents of postal banking maintained their efforts to extend the institution following its establishment. Kegley, for example, proposed lending its funds to farmers at low interest.40 The possibility of comprehensive postal banking remained a threatening prospect to bankers until waning public interest in financial questions allowed them to lobby successfully for the Postal Savings System’s termination in 1966.

From today’s vantage point, it’s remarkable how frequently bankers were forced on the political defensive during the first half of the twentieth century. The relative ease with which bankers have promoted their desired deregulatory agenda and extracted government bailouts in recent decades underlines this point. “The banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill,” stated Senator Richard J. Durbin during the 2007–8 financial crisis. “And they frankly own the place.”41

The achievements of banking politics in its heyday were possible because of the vibrancy of the era’s worker and farmer organizations. Institutions that working people created and maintained served as schoolhouses where members discussed and debated financial issues. These autonomous spaces were relatively free of the economic orthodoxies that were used to defend established power relations. Within this sphere, bankers lacked authority and standing, which fostered an oppositional politics that — unlike the society at large — did not defer to the private banking system and its allies. Through participation in this populist political culture, workers and farmers became more fully conscious of the extent to which their own interests were at odds with the existing banking and monetary system, and consequently freer to formulate their own visions for what that system should become. Additionally, labor unions and farmer organizations provided working people with a collective voice that amplified their influence inside policymaking circles. This institutional framework allowed working people to challenge the prerogatives of bankers.
Sanders 2016 and Afterward

The economy and resulting social structure that made possible early twentieth-century banking politics has passed into history. The small farmers who were central to this politics are much diminished in number, and the labor movement has been in retreat for decades. But the inherent economic dynamic that generated mass interest in banking questions remains relevant today. In important respects, the relationship between the public and the current banking system resembles the situation that gave rise to grassroots banking politics over a century ago. Large numbers of Americans increasingly contend with burdensome debts as a regular feature of their lives. And the banking structure has become more unstable in recent decades, producing the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, the financial crisis of 2007–8, and the spate of failures among large so-called “regional” banks in 2023. Stimulating a renewed interest in banking politics, as Sanders did, could create pressure for vital changes in American society today.

In his 2016 presidential campaign, Sanders achieved a significant breakthrough: reintroducing politics rooted in class analysis to the national scene. One of his main themes on the campaign trail was the threat that banks — and especially the large banks of Wall Street — posed to working families. Sanders demonstrated that banking could again become an issue that mobilizes voters. He described “an economy and a political system that has been rigged by Wall Street to benefit the wealthiest . . . at the expense of everyone else.” Too-big-to-fail banks and pervasive white-collar crime, Sanders argued, define the nation’s banking system, abetted by a regulatory regime that “has been hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating.” He promised a dramatic departure from existing policies if elected. “Big banks will not be too big to fail,” Sanders pledged. “Big bankers will not be too big to jail.”42

Although a democratic socialist, Sanders did not advance the nationalization of banking as the solution. The political culture of banking politics that made such proposals so common in the past had faded away decades earlier. Still, Sanders promised a true break from the status quo that included reviving postal banking, which would have “an important role in providing modest types of banking service to folks who need it.” Furthermore, Sanders made Clinton defend her affiliation with Wall Street, demonstrating that for many voters such connections with the financial sector had become a political liability. The populist analysis of the banking system that Sanders articulated echoed criticisms that were heard widely in the early twentieth century. “A handful of people on Wall Street,” he observed, “have extraordinary power over the economic and political life of our country.” But the most striking link to the past was how Sanders proposed to do something about this undue influence. “When millions of working families stand together, demanding fundamental changes in our financial system,” he observed, “we have the power to bring about . . . change.”43

Socialism received a major boost from the Sanders campaign, but today’s socialism isn’t the working-class movement of the early twentieth century. Among members of the nation’s largest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, a 2021 survey found that more than 80 percent had a college degree and 35 percent had an advanced degree.44 But when Sanders talked about banking, he reached a different audience. A key strength of Sanders’s 2016 candidacy was the clarity of his class-based message. By addressing banking, Sanders communicated a commitment to advancing the material interests of working people. Placing discussions about banks, bankers, Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve at the center of his campaign allied Sanders with struggling workers — those harmed by financialization, deindustrialization, corporate outsourcing, foreign-trade agreements, and the other economic reconfigurations that have disadvantaged workers. His depiction of finance offered structural clarity and presented specific reforms without becoming overly technical. Rebuilding working-class institutions and political power requires this type of compelling analysis of issues that are relevant to the everyday lives of citizens.

Consumer banking services are fundamental to daily life. At publicly accountable government banks, working people would benefit materially from consumer services that are not grounded in profit extraction. At public institutions, the profit motive wouldn’t inspire administrators to shave expenses and inflate revenues by increasingly monetizing, minimizing, and even eliminating functions that depositors and borrowers value — a never-ending push within the private banking system.45 The agenda of officials wouldn’t revolve around levying high interest payments, imposing large fees, inventing entirely new fees, automating customer service jobs, closing branch offices, and devising various strategies to reduce services and nickel-and-dime consumers. Instead of commodifying personal financial information, public banks could offer privacy protections. Credit unions represent a notably successful example of cooperative enterprise in the United States because they provide their members an attractive alternative to for-profit banks. Government banking would attract patronage and win public support for the same reason.

Government banking could have a salutary macroeconomic function, offering countercyclical support when economic conditions worsen. Stepped-up lending during such periods could reinforce other fiscal and monetary responses, including jobs guarantee programs. At the state and local levels, government banks could brace sagging budgets amid tax-revenue declines. The funds of government banks could create opportunities to extend concrete gains to working people in normal economic times as well. The following discussion suggests some ways that government bank assets could be used to benefit working people in their everyday lives.

Austerity policies have diminished numerous public goods, but government banking could provide affordable opportunities for financing a diversity of job-creating public works projects at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels. Instead of confronting burdensome interest payments through the typical array of private lenders and bondholders, government agencies could borrow funds at more attractive terms, making possible projects that would otherwise be deemed unviable.

The nation’s public spaces are too often poorly maintained and even crumbling. Educational facilities such as schools and libraries, in addition to more specialized structures like museums and planetariums, could be constructed and renovated using financing provided by government banks. Buildings that serve the public, from municipal hospitals and clinics to community centers and post offices, could be transformed from blueprints into bricks and mortar. New and improved recreational spaces, including parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, tracks, baseball and softball diamonds, and basketball and tennis courts, could be another outcome of such financing. Cash-strapped public transit and other infrastructure systems struggling to make needed improvements and repairs could also benefit. The Tennessee Valley Authority stands as a legacy of the New Deal and evidence of what government infrastructure initiatives can accomplish.46 Government banks could finance infrastructure projects involving transportation, energy, water, communications, and other sectors from the local to national levels.

Affordable housing is a pressing issue throughout the nation. Increasing numbers of working-class residents of both major cities and rural areas are finding it difficult to maintain a stable housing situation. Fiscal constraints are an obstacle to otherwise workable government-owned and rent-regulated solutions. While private investors avoid housing projects that don’t promise high returns, government banks could fill that void by financing social housing programs, ones that need not repeat the mistake of mid-twentieth-century public housing projects of limiting eligibility to lower-income residents. Shoddily constructed, poorly maintained, loosely managed projects intended only for very low-income residents were a recipe for failure. This unfortunate precedent supports not being so exclusive in the future. Many people in middle-income brackets would welcome the opportunity to participate in quality, well-managed social housing programs.47

Using the financial power of government banks to save jobs would forge a critical connection between these institutions and the lives of workers. In response to the deindustrialization that devastated numerous communities during the 1970s and 1980s, a movement emerged among workers to acquire and operate discarded manufacturing facilities. In 1987, the historian and labor activist Staughton Lynd observed that such ideas “have made something akin to socialism acceptable to middle American working people.”48 However, in order to be viable, this concept requires workers and their allies to secure large sums of money. Under the private banking regime, lack of the necessary financing for such endeavors has impeded this strategy. Although the wave of intense disinvestment that created the Rust Belt has passed, corporate abandonment has continued.49 Government banking could alter the calculus when workers face job losses.

Government banking presents opportunities for a host of public policy options, serving as a stimulus for potential government solutions to existing social problems. Objections on financial grounds frequently halt proposals for new and expanded public services and projects. The pool of funds in government banks would loosen this restraint. In this way, government banking could combat public resignation to the status quo. While it would remain necessary to set policy priorities, ideas once dismissed as unrealistic would be deemed worthy of further consideration. Proposals that previously appeared unrealizable would look more attainable. It would become easier to imagine viable social change. The basis of political life would move toward possibilities.

During the first half of the twentieth century, millions of Americans supported government control of banking in a nation where socialist principles supposedly lacked appeal. They wanted the economy to operate in the service of the workers and farmers whose labor underwrote national prosperity, and they believed that realizing this populist vision required a banking system oriented toward public service instead of private profit. Although most advocates of government banking did not identify as socialists, they were sympathetic to the socialist ideal of democratizing the economy. The recent rise of Bernie Sanders in national politics reveals latent support for socialist ideas among working-class voters, including the white working class, who are frequently dismissed as innately reactionary.50 The history of banking politics in the United States is a striking reminder of what organized working people can achieve. Similar financial grievances circulate among the American working class today, serving as a potential source of popular political action in the future.

Notes.

1. Bernie Sanders, “Remarks on Wall Street and the Economy in New York City,” American Presidency Project, January 5, 2016. The people who figure in this article tended to switch between such terms as “Wall Street” and “bankers” when referring to those who had financial power. Their analyses, however, were drawn primarily from the actions of banks and bankers, which are the terms I favor in this article.

2 Kirsten Powers, “Hillary’s Bernie Problem: Pie-in-the-Sky Sanders,” USA Today, February 16, 2016.

3 For millions without bank accounts, the absence of banking services is a relevant matter.

4 Jared Abbott et al., Commonsense Solidarity: How a Working-Class Coalition Can Be Built, and Maintained (Brooklyn, NY: Jacobin, Center for Working-Class Politics, YouGov, 2021); Matt T. Huber, “Still No Shortcuts for Climate Change,” Catalyst 4, no. 4 (2021).

5 From Businesses and Banks to Colleges and Churches: Americans’ Views of U.S. Institutions (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2024).

6 Philip Bump, “Shock Poll: Everyone Hates Wall Street,” Washington Post, June 30, 2016.

7 R. Thomas Herman, “Many Think Selfishness, Greed Are Widespread on Wall Street,” Wall Street Journal, October 18, 1996.

8 The American Appetite for Government (Washington, DC: American Compass, 2024).

9 Michael Schroeder, “Mesta Plans More Pay,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 11, 1983; R. Lee Hotz, “Coalition’s Muscle Keeps City Nabisco Plant Open,” Pittsburgh Press, December 22, 1982.

10 Frederick A. Barkey, Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898–1920 (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2012); Richard W. Judd, Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Donald T. Critchlow, ed., Socialism in the Heartland: The Midwestern Experience, 1900–1925 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

11 Christopher W. Shaw, Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

12 Herbert M. Bratter, “The Committee for the Nation: A Case History in Monetary Propaganda,” Journal of Political Economy 49, no. 4 (1941); Scott Beekman, William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Right-Wing Extremism and Occult (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 83–93.

13 This commonly held interpretation corresponds with Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967),544–45.

14 William C. Pratt, “The Reading Socialist Experience: A Study of Working Class Politics” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1969); Henry G. Stetler, The Socialist Movement in Reading, Pennsylvania, 1896–1936 (Storrs: University of Connecticut, 1943).

15 James H. Maurer, It Can Be Done (New York: Rand School Press, 1938), 90.

16 Maurer, It Can Be Done, 90, 110.

17 United Mine Workers of America, Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Convention (Indianapolis: Cheltenham Press, 1908), 235.

18 “The Banker Knows,” Appeal to Reason, January 25, 1908.

19 “Letters From the People,” Watson’s Magazine, April 1906.

20 Green, Grass-Roots Socialism, 27, 29, 244–52.

21 John Spargo, ed., National Convention of the Socialist Party, 1912 (Chicago: Socialist Party, 1912), 192–93; Lawrence C. Goodwyn, “The Cooperative Commonwealth and Other Abstractions: In Search of a Democratic Promise,” Marxist Perspectives 3, no. 2 (1980): 20–22; Donald B. Marti, “Answering the Agrarian Question: Socialists, Farmers, and Algie Martin Simons,” Agricultural History 65, no. 3 (1991).

22 Oscar Ameringer, Socialism for the Farmer (St Louis: National Rip-Saw Publishing Co., 1912), 28.

23 Michael J. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 97–99, 147–49, 153, 232–34; Alvin S. Tostlebe, “The Bank of North Dakota: An Experiment in Agrarian Banking” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1924), 123–62.

24 Spargo, National Convention of the Socialist Party, 197.

25 American Federation of Labor, Report of Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual Convention (Washington, DC: Law Reporter Printing Company, 1912), 379; Christopher W. Shaw, “‘Banks of the People’: The Life and Death of the U.S. Postal Savings System,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 1 (2018).

26 “Bankers Have Bound the Farmers Hand and Foot,” Appeal to Reason,February 27, 1915; Christopher W. Shaw, “‘Tired of Being Exploited’: The Grassroots Origin of the Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916,” Agricultural History 92, no. 4 (2018).

27 “The Banking Pirates,” New Leader, November 21, 1931; “Banking,” Milwaukee Leader, February 17, 1933; “When Will the Banks Open?” Reading Labor Advocate, March 17, 1933.

28 Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), 136–42; Shaw, Money, Power, and the People, 183.

29 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988), 114–15; Herman E. Krooss, Executive Opinion: What Business Leaders Said and Thought on Economic Issues, 1920s–1960s (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1970), 20–21; Arthur Mann, “Socialism: Lost Cause in American History,” Criterion 19, no. 3 (1980); W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 204.

30 Cynthia Horan, “Agreeing with the Bankers: New York City’s Depression Financial Crisis,” Research in Political Economy 8 (1985).

31 “Hillquit Proposes a Municipal Bank,” New York Times, October 20, 1932.

32 American Federation of Teachers, Proceedings, Seventeenth Annual Convention (n.p., 1933), 462; American Teacher 17, no. 1 (1932): 27.

33 “State Owned Banks May Solve Problem,” California Grange News, July 1934.

34 Shaw, Money, Power, and the People, 183, 206–7, 230, 259, 269.

35 Minnesota State Federation of Labor, Proceedings of the Sixty-Third Convention (St Paul, MN: The Federation, 1945), 112; Oil Workers International Union, Proceedings, Fourteenth National Convention (Fort Worth, TX: OWIU, 1943), 201.

36 E. P. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, Douglas C. Hay et al.(New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 304–8; Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 106–10.

37 Shaw, Money, Power, and the People, 24–26, 267.

38 Norman Thomas, “Timely Topics,” New Leader, March 11, 1933.

39 Ernest H. Gruening to Norman Thomas, March 9, 1933, reel 1, Norman Thomas Papers, New York Public Library; Rexford G. Tugwell, In Search of Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 272; Raymond C. Moley, After Seven Years (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1939), 155.

40 Washington State Grange, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Session (Olympia, WA: Recorder Press, 1913), 37.

41 Robert Weissman and Joan Claybrook, The Corporate Sabotage of America’s Future and What We Can Do About It (Washington, DC: Essential Books, 2023), 33.

42 Sanders, “Remarks on Wall Street.” See also Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2016), 296–317.

43 Sanders, “Remarks on Wall Street”; “Why Bernie Sanders Wants Post Offices to Offer Banking,” Scripps News, October 29, 2015.

44 DSA Growth and Development Committee, DSA Member Survey Report, 2021 (n.p., 2021).

45 Ralph Nader, In Pursuit of Justice: Collected Writings, 2000–2003 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 208, 236–37, 371–73, 399–401; Bob Sullivan, Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day — and What You Can Do About It (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 57–69.

46 Robert D. Leighninger Jr, Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 102–17.

47 Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000), 105–24.

48 Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Mike Stout, “Eminent Domain and Bank Boycotts: The Tri-State Strategy in Pittsburgh,” Labor Research Review 1, no. 3 (1983); Staughton Lynd, “The Genesis of the Idea of a Community Right to Industrial Property in Youngstown and Pittsburgh, 1977–1987,” Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (1987).

49 John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, “The Social Costs of Deindustrialization,” in Manufacturing a Better Future for America,ed. Richard A. McCormack (Washington, DC: Alliance for American Manufacturing, 2009).

50 J. C. Gillies, “‘Feel the Bern’: Marketing Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialism to Primary Voters,” in Political Marketing in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, ed. J. C. Gillies (Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); E. S. Fertik, “The New Political Arithmetic: Who Voted for Bernie, Who Voted for Hillary, and Why,” New Labor Forum 25, no. 3 (2016).



Christopher W. Shaw is the author of Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic and First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat.

Fact Checking the Harris-Trump Debate

In their first debate, and first meeting, the presidential candidates attacked each other on the economy, taxes, immigration and abortion.


By Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, D'Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson, Jessica McDonald, Saranac Hale Spencer, Alan Jaffe, Kate Yandell, Ben Cohen, Logan Chapman, Sarah Usandivaras and Ian Fox

Posted on September 11, 2024

Summary

The highly anticipated debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was a combative event in which facts were repeatedly trampled and distorted.In a lengthy exchange on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Trump made several statements that were either false, misleading or unsupported, and Harris got a couple of facts wrong, too.Trump referred to a rumor that began on Facebook alleging that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating local pets. City police have said there have been “no credible reports” of that kind of activity.Harris claimed Trump intends to enact what in effect is a “sales tax” which she said economists estimate would raise prices on typical American families by almost $4,000 a year. That’s a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.But Trump was also wrong when he claimed Americans would not pay higher prices due to tariffs, and that the higher prices would be borne by the countries the tariffs are levied against. Many nonpartisan economists disagree about the amount that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise prices for American families, but most agree it would be substantial.Trump falsely claimed that Harris was sent “to negotiate peace” between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022. Days before Russia invaded Ukraine that month, Harris met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskky in Germany. She did not meet with Putin, as Trump said.Harris falsely claimed that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.” When President Joe Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.4% — lower than it was during several administrations since the 1930s.Harris and Trump traded jabs on manufacturing job performance in their respective administrations, with each claiming the other lost jobs, but both sides are cherry-picking from the statistics.Trump repeated his unsupported claim that “millions of people” are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” And he said these migrants were “taking jobs” from “African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.” Employment and union membership data show no evidence of that, either.Trump repeated his false claim that everyone — liberals and conservatives — wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.The former president repeatedly said Democrats, including vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, were in favor of abortion “in the ninth month” — or even after birth. Abortion that late is exceedingly rare, and abortion after birth does not exist. It’s homicide, and it’s illegal.Harris repeated the assertion that Trump “will sign a national abortion ban” if reelected, but Trump said that he does not intend to sign such a ban. Harris also tried to tie Trump to Project 2025’s proposal for mandatory abortion reporting, but Trump has tried to distance himself from the document.The vice president claimed Trump’s economic policies led to “one of the highest” trade deficits in American history. But the annual trade deficits during the Biden administration have exceeded those under Trump.Trump again falsely claimed that fraud was responsible for his loss in the 2020 election, and wrongly claimed that none of his lawsuits making that allegation had been decided on the merits.Trump said Harris “will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania.” When she was running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris did say she was “in favor of banning fracking.” But in an Aug. 29 interview on CNN and at the debate, Harris said, “I will not ban fracking.”Harris claimed that Trump’s tax proposal would “provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America’s deficit.” That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.Trump falsely claimed that Harris “has a flat plan to confiscate everybody’s guns.” Harris has not called for taking away all guns, and her campaign said she no longer supports a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons.”Trump claimed that he had “no inflation” during his presidency, while inflation experienced under Biden has been “probably the worst in our nation’s history.” Inflation was low under Trump, but it wasn’t zero. And while Inflation has risen significantly under Biden, it is far below record levels.Trump made the curious claim that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act, even though he tried, and failed, to repeal and replace it while he was president, and he backed a lawsuit that would have nullified the law.The former president wrongly claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof,” and that FBI data to the contrary is a “fraud” because “they didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.” The latest FBI statistics are based on voluntary reporting from a higher participation of cities than any year during Trump’s presidency.Trump falsely claimed that the number of jobs created during the Biden administration “turned out to be a fraud.” The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a downward revision in the jobs tally during its routine annual revision of jobs data.Trump wrongly claimed that under his administration, “we had the greatest economy.”Harris claimed that Trump “wants to be a dictator on Day 1,” but the former president has said that he was joking when he said he would be a dictator for one day.Trump repeated a popular talking point, calling Harris the “border czar.” She was never in charge of border security, rather, she was tasked with addressing root causes of migration from three Central American Countries.Trump repeated another familiar claim, wrongly saying that the U.S. had left “$85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment” when it left Afghanistan.

The debate was hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.

Analysis

Trump, Harris on Jan. 6 Attack on U.S. Capitol

Co-moderator David Muir kicked off a lengthy back-and-forth between the candidates about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol when he asked Trump if there is anything “you regret about what you did on that day.”

In his response, Trump made several statements that were either false, misleading or unsupported, and Harris got a couple of facts wrong.

The former president spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, on the Ellipse not far from the Capitol, where members of Congress were gathering to begin the process of accepting the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president. In his speech, Trump told his supporters that the Democrats stole the election, making numerous false claims about election fraud in swing states, and called on then-Vice President Mike Pence to “do the right thing” and reject electoral votes for Biden, so that Trump could remain president.

He also told his supporters to march to the Capitol. They stormed the building, attacked law enforcement officers and interrupted the counting of the electoral votes, which wasn’t completed until the early hours of Jan. 7, 2021.

In response to Muir, Trump claimed that he had “nothing to do” with the “Save America” rally “other than they asked me to make a speech.” In fact, Trump heavily promoted the rally on social media, telling his followers in one post that a new report proves it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the election” and urging them to attend the Jan. 6 rally. “Be there,” he wrote, “will be wild!”

Trump baselessly claimed that he “went to Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington, D.C.,” Muriel Bowser, and offered to give them “10,000 National Guard or soldiers” for Capitol security. He also falsely claimed that “Nancy Pelosi rejected me,” blaming the then-House speaker for a lack of adequate security.

“It would have never happened if Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington did their jobs,” he said. “I wasn’t responsible for security. Nancy Pelosi was responsible. She didn’t do her job.”

As we have written, the claim that Pelosi is responsible for Capitol security is exaggerated. The speaker appoints one member of the four-member Capitol Police Board, which oversees Capitol security. Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, also appointed a member.

As for Trump’s claim that Pelosi turned down his request for 10,000 National Guard troops, the House select committee on the Capitol attack said it found “no evidence” of that. In its report, the committee noted that then-Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller said there was “no direct order from the president” to put 10,000 National Guard troops on the ready.

Trump claimed to have new evidence, citing a tape of Pelosi discussing the attack on the day that it happened. “Her daughter has a tape of her saying she is fully responsible for what happened,” Trump claimed. “They want to get rid of that tape.”

Trump is referring to a video released in June by the House Republicans. In the video, which her daughter took on Jan. 6, 2021, Pelosi can be seen questioning the security plans and taking some responsibility for not making sure that security was adequate.

“We have responsibility, Terri. We did not have any accountability for what was going on there, and we should have,” she said. “Why weren’t the National Guard there to begin with?” When someone in the car said that security officials thought they had sufficient coverage, Pelosi angrily responded, “They clearly didn’t know, and I take responsibility for not having them just prepare for more.”

In the video, Pelosi did not say that Trump offered to provide the Capitol with 10,000 National Guard troops, and she did not say, as Trump claimed, that “she is fully responsible for what happened.”

When asked to respond, Harris recalled being at the Capitol that day — but got some facts wrong.

“On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured and some died, and understand the former president has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason,” Harris said.

Harris is correct that 140 law enforcement officers were injured on Jan. 6, 2021, but she was wrong to suggest “some died” that day. As we wrote, none of the officers who provided protection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died that day, although five officers did die in the days and months after the riot — including one that died the next day after suffering two strokes. Four other police officers committed suicide.

Harris also went too far when she said Trump “has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason,” referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

The violent attack on the Capitol was the reason for his second impeachment, which charged him with “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” But it wasn’t the reason for the federal indictment. In that case, as we have written, Trump was charged with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. Notably absent from the indictment, the New York Times reported, was “any count that directly accused Mr. Trump of being responsible for the violence his supporters committed at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Harris also went on to misleadingly claim that Trump is again threatening violence. “Donald Trump, the candidate, has said, in this election, there will be a bloodbath if this and the outcome of this election is not to his liking,” she said. As we have written, Trump made his “bloodbath” remark at a March 16 rally in Ohio, while warning of China building auto manufacturing plants in Mexico that will cause a hemorrhaging of U.S. auto jobs. A campaign spokesperson told the Washington Post that Trump was referring to “an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers” if he loses the election.
Falsehood About Immigrants Eating Pets

In the midst of commenting on immigration, Trump referenced a debunked rumor that has been circulating widely on social media this week.

Referring to immigrants in a southwestern Ohio city, the former president said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

But, according to the Springfield News-Sun, the rumor began in a local Facebook group. “The original poster did not cite first-hand knowledge of an incident,” the newspaper reported. “Instead they claimed that their neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat and found it hanging from a branch at a Haitian neighbor’s home being carved up to be eaten.”

City police have said that there’s no evidence to support the claims.

“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” the Springfield police said in a statement provided to several news outlets this week.

And, in an unusual move, one of the debate moderators, Muir, provided some live fact-checking, saying, “ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Indeed, on Sept. 9, Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck provided the same statement as the police to ABC News, and said, “Additionally, there have been no verified instances of immigrants engaging in illegal activities such as squatting or littering in front of residents’ homes. Furthermore, no reports have been made regarding members of the immigrant community deliberately disrupting traffic.”

Even though there’s no evidence to support the claim, it has been amplified by Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, who posted on X on Sept. 9, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

He backtracked the following day, posting on the same platform: “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
Tariffs

Harris claimed Trump intends to enact what in effect is a “sales tax,” which she said economists estimate would raise prices on typical American families by $4,000 a year. That’s a high-end estimate from a liberal think tank about Trump’s plan for “universal baseline tariffs” on imports.

But Trump was also wrong when he claimed Americans would not pay higher prices due to tariffs, and that the higher prices would be borne by the countries the tariffs are levied against. Many nonpartisan economists disagree about the amount that Trump’s proposed tariffs would raise prices for American consumers, but most agree it would be substantial.

According to Harris, her opponent “has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month.” She said, “Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year.”

As we’ve written, Trump has been inconsistent and opaque about what exactly he is proposing, but most often he has talked about a 10% across-the-board import tax combined with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. On other occasions, he has floated a baseline tariff as high as 20%.

The estimate cited by Harris, $4,000, comes from a liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, based on a 20% across-the-board import tax combined with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.

Other nonpartisan groups have come in with lower estimates. Based on a 10% worldwide tariff and a 60% tax on imported Chinese goods, the Tax Policy Center estimated a more modest $1,350 cost to middle-income households. Using those same parameters, an analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost a typical middle-income household about $1,700 in increased expenses each year. The Tax Foundation estimates such tariffs would amount to an annual tax increase on U.S. households of $625.

So Harris has taken advantage of Trump’s inconsistent comments about the amount of his proposed universal tariffs to provide a high estimate of its cost to Americans. But Trump’s claim that his tariffs wouldn’t cost Americans at all is misleading.

Americans are “not going to have higher prices,” Trump said. “Who’s going to have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years.”

As we noted above, economists say American consumers, at least in the short term, would see higher prices due to a universal tariff.

As Erica York, senior economist and research director with the Tax Foundation’s Center for Federal Tax Policy, told us earlier this year, “When the U.S. imposes a tariff, the person in the United States who is importing the good pays a tax to the U.S. government when they import the foreign goods. U.S. tariffs are taxes on U.S. consumers of foreign goods that must be paid by the importer of the good.”
Harris Did Not Negotiate Ukraine-Russia Peace

During an exchange about U.S. support for Ukraine, Trump falsely claimed that Harris was tasked with negotiating peace between Ukraine and Russia and their respective presidents.

“Nobody likes to talk about it, but just so you understand, they sent her to negotiate peace before this war started,” Trump said of Harris. “Three days later, [Russian President Vladimir Putin] went in and started the war because everything they said was weak and stupid. They said the wrong things. That war should have never started. She was the emissary. They sent her in to negotiate with [Ukrainian President Volodymr] Zelenskyy and Putin.”

That’s not what happened. As we’ve written, in February 2022, Harris traveled to Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference to talk with European leaders about world topics, including Russian aggression toward Ukraine.

In a Feb. 19 speech, she warned that the U.S. and its allies would “impose significant and unprecedented economic costs” if Russia attacked Ukraine. She also had in-person meetings with several heads of state, including Zelenskyy and the leaders of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

But Harris did not negotiate peace between Putin and Zelenskyy. Russia reportedly did not send a representative to the security conference that year, and Harris also did not travel to Russia to meet with Putin.

“To be honest, I can’t remember a single contact between President Putin and Ms. Harris,” Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for Putin, said in July when asked whether Putin had ever talked with Harris.

Prior to the Munich conference, U.S. officials had been warning that Russia planned an invasion of Ukraine. In a Feb. 18, 2022, presser, Biden said, “We have reason to believe the Russian forces are planning to and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week — in the coming days.” Then Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24.
Harris Wrong About Unemployment

While talking about what the Biden-Harris administration inherited from the Trump administration, Harris falsely claimed that “Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the U.S. unemployment rate peaked at 14.8% in April, as businesses and other services shut down to try to slow the spread of the coronavirus. But the economy had begun to recover by the time Biden and Harris took office in January 2021, when the unemployment rate had declined to 6.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That was not the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, which followed the stock market crash of 1929. The unemployment rate was higher than 6.4% for 65 consecutive months from October 2008 until March 2014, which included periods under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The highest rate during that period was 10% in October 2009, a few months after the “Great Recession,” which began in December 2007, ended in June 2009.

Before then, the unemployment rate had reached as high as 10.8% under President Ronald Reagan in November and December 1982.
Manufacturing Jobs

Harris boasted that the U.S. has “created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs, while I have been vice president. … Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs.” Trump countered that “they lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month.”

As we wrote recently, both are cherry-picking data points.

The economy added 462,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first two years in office, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and then lost 43,000 in his third year, before the pandemic-fueled recession hit.

The economy then shed nearly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs in the first few months of the pandemic, a little more than half of which returned before Trump left office. So Harris is correct that there was a net loss of manufacturing jobs – 178,000 — over Trump’s full term, but the vast majority of job losses under Trump were due to the global pandemic.

As of August, the U.S. has added 739,000 manufacturing jobs under Biden and Harris — short of the 800,000 mentioned by Harris. (And those numbers may soon change in ways that will markedly change the Biden administration’s record. Preliminary estimates of annual revisions to the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March indicate that the BLS’ monthly estimates may have overshot manufacturing jobs by 115,000.) As for Trump’s claim that “they lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month,” that’s actually an undersell. BLS data show a loss of 24,000 manufacturing jobs between July and August, and a net decline of 39,000 this year.

In other words, the trend under both Trump and Biden followed a similar pattern: two years of growth following an economic downturn, followed by job losses in the third year.
No Evidence for ‘Prisons,’ ‘Mental Institutions’ Claim

Echoing a whopper of a claim he has been making since last year, Trump claimed that “millions of people” crossing the southern border illegally are “pouring into our country from prisons, jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.”

Immigration experts told us there’s simply no evidence for that. One expert said Trump’s claim appeared to be “a total fabrication.”

Trump has repeated the claim many times, but he hasn’t provided any credible support for it.

In June, we looked into Trump’s claim as it relates to Venezuela, because he has repeatedly linked a drop in crime there with his claim about countries emptying their prisons and sending inmates to the U.S. Once again, during the debate, Trump stated: “Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down? You know why? Because they’ve taken their criminals off the street and they’ve given them to her to put into our country,” referring to Harris. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela, but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.

He said the drop in crime is partly due to worsening economic and living conditions, which have caused nearly 8 million people to leave the country since 2014. The vast majority have settled in nearby South American countries.

Trump also claimed that those coming into the country were “taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.” We previously found no evidence for that, either, in employment and union membership data.
Overturning of Roe v. Wade

In discussing abortion, Trump once again repeated his false claim that everyone wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.

“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote — and that’s what happened,” he said, also incorrectly crediting six justices on two occasions.

In 2022, after Trump appointed three conservative judges to the court, the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 decision in a 5-4 ruling, immediately putting in place restrictions on abortion in nearly half of states. Since then, as Trump went on to note, several states have voted to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitutions or reject further restrictions.

Experts have previously told us that Trump’s claim is “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.” Contrary to his claim, most Americans opposed the ending of Roe v. Wade. And even though some scholars have been critical of some of the legal reasoning in the decision, many did not wish to end Roe.
No Abortions ‘After Birth’

In casting his opponent as “radical” on abortion, Trump repeatedly claimed Democrats support abortion “in the ninth month” or later.

“They have abortion in the ninth month,” he said, before alluding to misconstrued comments by former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam. “He said, the baby will be born and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.” (Trump initially misidentified him as the former governor of West Virginia.)

“Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine,” Trump continued, referring to Walz. “He also says, execution after birth. It’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born.”

Trump hit the same point again later, again invoking Northam. “You could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month, and probably after birth,” he said. “Just look at the governor, former governor of Virginia. The governor of Virginia said, we put the baby aside, and then we determine what we want to do with the baby.”

As the moderator noted, no state allows people to kill babies after birth. That would be infanticide, and it’s illegal.

Some states do not have gestational limits on abortion, including Minnesota. Last year, Gov. Walz signed a bill protecting abortion following 2022’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The law eliminated nearly all restrictions on abortion, including gestational limits.

It also removed a requirement that medical personnel “preserve the life and health” of an infant born alive as the result of an abortion. As one obstetrician explained in an editorial in the Minnesota Star Tribune, this is so that parents of a dying infant can hold their baby and say goodbye, and not be forced to watch while the child receives futile medical intervention (the law still requires the infant be given proper medical care and be “fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law”).

Most abortions are performed early in pregnancy. According to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which are for 2021, 80.8% of abortions were performed at or before nine weeks of gestation, and 93.5% were performed at or before 13 weeks. Fewer than 1% were performed at 21 weeks or later. The figures are voluntarily reported and apply to legal abortions in 48 reporting areas in the U.S. (D.C, New York City and all states except for California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey).

In Minnesota, 88% of induced abortions occurred at or before 12 weeks of pregnancy in 2022, according to the latest available data from the Minnesota Department of Health. No abortions occurred in the ninth month.

Trump’s references to Northam are distortions of comments the former governor made in a radio interview in 2019. Trump has previously misrepresented the comments in his State of the Union address that year.

In the interview, Northam, who is a physician, said third-trimester abortion is “done in cases where there may be severe deformities. There may be a fetus that’s nonviable. So in this particular example, if a mother’s in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Northam later clarified that he was not suggesting infanticide, and a spokesperson said Northam was “focused on the tragic and extremely rare case in which a woman with a nonviable pregnancy or severe fetal abnormalities went into labor.”
Trump’s Stance on National Abortion Ban, Pregnancy Monitoring

As she has said before, Harris predicted that Trump “will sign a national abortion ban” if reelected. But Trump has said this year and stated again during the debate that he would not sign such a ban.

“It’s a lie,” Trump said in response to Harris’ debate claim. “I’m not signing a ban, and there’s no reason to sign a ban, because we’ve gotten what everybody wanted” — for abortion “to be brought back into the states.” Trump was referring to the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade.

He later again denied plans to sign a national abortion ban, saying, “And as far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of [an] abortion ban, but it doesn’t matter, because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”

But it does matter if Congress sends a national abortion ban bill to the next president’s desk. Trump did say during his first presidential campaign and presidency that he would support a federal ban on abortion past 20 weeks in most cases, and he has reportedly more recently privately expressed support for a 16-week abortion ban.

Harris also referenced Project 2025, a conservative document Trump has tried to distance himself from. “Understand, in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion — a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” Harris said.

As we’ve written previously, Project 2025 does propose mandatory reporting from states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on miscarriages and abortions. But Trump’s campaign has said that Project 2025 “should not be associated with the campaign.” Trump has recently claimed to “know nothing” about Project 2025, although parts of it were written by former members of his administration.

When asked in April about whether states with abortion bans “should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban,” Trump said such monitoring should be left up to the individual states.
Trade Deficit Higher Under Biden

Moderator Muir asked Harris about the Biden administration’s decision to keep in place a number of the tariffs levied by Trump on other countries.

Harris responded: “Well, let’s be clear that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit — one of the highest we’ve ever seen in the history of America.”

But as we previously wrote, the trade deficit under the Biden administration has exceeded the deficit during Trump’s term.

As of May, the U.S. goods and services deficit over the previous 12 months was $799.3 billion, according to data published in early July by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The trade deficit that period was about $145.6 billion higher, or about 22.3% more, than in 2020, when Trump was president. The trade deficit in 2020 was the highest annual deficit under Trump, at $653.7 billion.
Trump Refuses to ‘Acknowledge’ 2020 Loss

Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In the popular vote, Biden received a total of 81 million votes to Trump’s 74 million. In electoral votes, Biden garnered 306 to Trump’s 232.

But the former president has continued to spread disinformation undermining the integrity of the election, saying that he would have won if there hadn’t been widespread fraud.

Debate moderator Muir asked Trump, “Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?”

“No, I don’t acknowledge that at all,” Trump responded, going on to wrongly claim that his election-related lawsuits were rejected on a “technicality.”

“They said we didn’t have standing,” Trump claimed.

But a list of lawsuits alleging fraud in the 2020 election, compiled by the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, shows several cases that were decided on the merits — including some brought by the Trump campaign.

And, as we have written, local, state and federal judges have said that Trump’s lawyers provided no evidence of fraud.

For example, Bucks County Court of Common Pleas Judge Robert Baldi in Pennsylvania rejected the Trump campaign’s attempt to toss out absentee ballots in Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia. In doing so, Baldi, a Republican, wrote “that there exists no evidence of any fraud, misconduct, or any impropriety with respect to the challenged ballots.” The Trump campaign appealed, but Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer upheld the lower court ruling and also noted that Trump’s lawyers made “absolutely no allegations of any fraud.”

Trump’s own election security officials at the time also called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history.”
Fracking

Trump repeatedly said that Harris would ban fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a technique that uses water, sand or chemicals to extract oil and natural gas from underground rock formations. Harris said she would not.

Fracking can impact the environment, including potential contamination of groundwater, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“She will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania,” Trump said during the debate in Philadelphia. “If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one.”

Moderator Linsey Davis also asked Harris about how her position has changed on fracking. Responding to Davis, Harris said, ”Let’s talk about fracking, because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020 I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as vice president of the United States, and in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”

But when she was a candidate in the 2020 race for president, Harris said that she was opposed to fracking. During a September 2019 CNN town hall, Harris was asked by a climate activist if she would commit to a federal ban on fracking because of environmental concerns for local communities. Harris answered, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking, so yes.”

Harris didn’t exactly make her position clear in 2020, as she said in the debate. Instead, in the 2020 vice presidential debate, she said, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking.”

More recently, in an Aug. 29 interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Harris said, “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.”

The Inflation Reduction Act does not refer specifically to fracking, but it does open up federal land to oil and gas leases, which would involve the use of fracking to extract natural gas on some of that land.
Trump Tax Cuts

Harris misleadingly claimed that Trump’s tax proposal seeks to “provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion [added] to America’s deficit.”

That’s the estimated 10-year cost of extending all the tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax law, but those tax changes benefited people of all income groups.

As we’ve written, the vice president is referring to a 10-year cost estimate of extending all the income and corporate tax cuts included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed in December 2017. If Congress does not act, many of the tax cuts, including the individual income tax cuts, will expire after 2025. Trump has proposed keeping them.

But extending the tax cuts would not just benefit large corporations and billionaires, as Harris suggested.

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, wrote in a July 8 blog item that it would cost an estimated $4 trillion over 10 years to extend the TCJA’s expiring tax cut provisions. If that happens, less than half — about 45% — of the tax cut benefits would go to taxpayers earning $450,000 or more, Gleckman said.

For example, under the TCJA, the child tax credit doubled from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, and the first $1,400 was made refundable, meaning the credit could reduce a family’s tax liability to zero and it would still be able to receive a tax refund, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income cutoff for the child tax credit, or CTC, also increased from $110,000 to $400,000 for married couples filing jointly. Those earning less than $400,000 also benefit from changes made in 2017 to the individual tax rates and brackets — which also will expire after 2025 unless Congress acts.

Overall, the Tax Policy Center’s distributional analysis found that the tax burden of a typical household in the middle income quintile would decrease by 1.1% should Congress extend the TCJA’s provisions, as compared with a 1.7% decrease in the tax burden for a typical household in the top income quintile.
False Gun Confiscation Claim

Harris, Trump claimed, “has a flat plan to confiscate everybody’s guns.” That’s false. Harris has no such plan.

In 2019, during her first campaign for president, Harris said that she would support a mandatory buyback program for so-called “assault weapons” — but not all firearms.

“There are certain types of weapons that should not be on the streets of a civil society,” Harris said, referring to assault weapons, which she called “weapons of war,” in a November 2019 NBC News interview, for example. While Harris still supports a ban on purchasing assault weapons, her campaign told us that, as of 2024, she is no longer advocating that Americans be required to give up the assault weapons that they previously purchased.
Inflation

Trump made false claims about inflation during his tenure in office and Biden’s.

During an exchange over Trump’s proposed tariff policy, the former president said that under his administration there was “no inflation, virtually no inflation,” and that the current administration “had the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country.”

Inflation was low during Trump’s presidency, but it wasn’t zero.

As we wrote in “Trump’s Final Numbers,” the Consumer Price Index rose 7.6% under Trump — an average of 1.9% in each of his four years in office. That continued a long period of low inflation, including during the Obama administration (1.8% annual average) and under George W. Bush (2.4% average).

It isn’t true that under Biden the U.S. has experienced inflation “like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history,” as Trump claimed.

The largest 12-month increase in the Consumer Price Index occurred from June 1919 to June 1920, when the CPI rose 23.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a 2014 publication marking the 100th anniversary of the agency’s tracking price changes.

Under Biden, the biggest increase occurred during a 12-month period ending in June 2022, when the CPI rose 9.1% (before seasonal adjustment). BLS said it was the biggest increase since the 12 months ending in November 1981.

Inflation has cooled since then. More recently, the CPI rose 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July, according to the BLS.

Altogether under Biden’s presidency, the CPI has risen 19.4%.
Affordable Care Act

Trump made the curious claim that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act, even though he tried, and failed, to repeal and replace it while he was president. His administration also supported a lawsuit that would have nullified the entire law.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2021 that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring the suit.

If he “saved” the ACA, it was not for lack of trying to end it.

In the debate, moderator Davis asked Trump about his recent statement that, if elected, he would keep the ACA, known as Obamacare, “unless we can do something much better.” Davis asked if Trump had a plan to replace the law.

Trump said, “I have concepts of a plan” that “you’ll be hearing about it in the not too distant future” and that “I would only change it if we come up with something that’s better and less expensive.”

The former president has made similar comments before. During the 2020 campaign, he said, “What we’d like to do is totally kill it, but come up — before we do that — with something that’s great.” He has yet to release a replacement plan for the ACA.

What’s “better” is a matter of opinion, of course. One of the main provisions of the ACA is that it prohibits insurers from denying coverage or charging people more based on their preexisting health conditions, provisions that most notably have affected those seeking to buy their own coverage on the individual market. Trump has expressed support for preexisting conditions protections, but his record shows he has backed ideas that would weaken the law’s provisions.

Trump supported a 2017 GOP bill that would have included some, but not all, of the ACA’s protections for those with preexisting conditions. He also pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status.

In late September 2020, Trump signed an executive order that made the general proclamation: “It has been and will continue to be the policy of the United States … to ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions can obtain the insurance of their choice at affordable rates.” He said the order put the issue of preexisting conditions “to rest.”

It did not. Karen Pollitz, who was then a senior fellow at KFF, told us at the time that the order was “aspirational” and had “no force of law.”

Despite Trump’s comments that he may still replace the ACA, several top Republicans have said the issue is a non-starter in Congress.
Crime

Trump wrongly claimed that “crime in this country is through the roof,” and that FBI data to the contrary is a “fraud” because “they didn’t include the cities with the worst crime.” FBI data for 2023 is based on reporting from a higher participation of cities than any year during Trump’s presidency, and the figures show violent crime is trending down.

As we have written, in Trump’s last year in office — 2020 — murders and violent crime went up, and there was a smaller increase the following year, Biden’s first year in office. But since then, murders and violent crime have been dropping.

The FBI 2022 annual report showed a slight decline in the nationwide murder rate and a larger drop in the violent crime rate between 2020 and 2022. Preliminary FBI figures for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 show further declines in violent crimes and murders. The 2023 figures are based on data from voluntary reports by 79% of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., representing higher participation than any year during Trump’s presidency.

The final numbers and information about nationwide crime rates, which are adjusted for population, won’t be available until the FBI’s annual crime report is released in October.

The trend in the FBI reports is backed by other credible sources as well.

AH Datalytics’ analysis of data about homicides from more than 200 large U.S. cities showed homicides declined by about 12% in 2023, crime analyst Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, told us in May. Its data show murders have continued to drop this year overall. The FBI data also track with a large decline in shooting victims in 2023 documented by the Gun Violence Archive.

The latest figures from the Major Cities Chiefs Association also show a decline in murders and violent crime. The number of murders went down by 17% from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024 in 69 large U.S. cities that provided data.

And finally, the Council on Criminal Justice’s mid-year 2024 crime report representing data from 39 cities found: “Overall, most violent crimes are at or below levels seen in 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020. There were 2% fewer homicides during the first half of 2024 than during the first half of 2019 and 15% fewer robberies. Aggravated assaults and domestic violence incidents also are below levels seen five years ago.”
It’s Not Fraud, It’s Routine Revisions

After falsely claiming the FBI crime data are fraudulent, Trump claimed the “number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.” The jobs data isn’t fraudulent, either.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics last month announced that it would likely revise monthly employment figures based on more comprehensive data — a routine revision it does every year.

“There’s no evidence whatsoever of any manipulation or padding,” David Wilcox, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and director of U.S. economic research at Bloomberg Economics, told us when we wrote about Trump’s claims in August. He called the BLS’ recent announcement “completely formulaic,” as it reflected the same pattern of how the BLS has been revising the job figures over many years.

As we’ve written, the BLS publishes monthly employment figures that come from a survey of more than 100,000 employers. Later, it obtains more comprehensive data from state unemployment insurance tax filings that employers submit to determine what taxes they owe to unemployment benefit programs. Once a year, the BLS adjusts its monthly estimates based on those state filings.

This year, the BLS announced on Aug. 21 a preliminary estimate that the number of jobs created over the 12 months ending in March would likely be adjusted downward by 818,000 jobs. That’s an adjustment of -0.5% to the March level of employment, larger than the average revision over the last 10 years. There have been other large revisions in the past, however.

The annual revision for 2019, under Trump, was a reduction of 514,000 jobs, or -0.3% of the initial March 2019 employment estimate. The 2009 revision was a reduction of 902,000, or -0.7% of the original March 2009 estimate.

BLS’ final estimate for the year ending in March 2024 will be issued in February 2025, when the January employment report is released. That’s when the final revisions have been issued each year dating back to 2004.

The U.S. has added 15.8 million jobs under Biden. An 818,000 downward revision would drop that number to about 15 million.
More Repeats

The candidates repeated several other claims we have fact-checked before:

Economy. Trump revisited one of his commonly repeated claims, saying at the beginning of the debate that, under his administration, “we had the greatest economy.”

But the U.S. didn’t have “the greatest economy” under Trump. Economists look to real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product growth to measure economic health, and that figure exceeded Trump’s peak year of 3% growth more than a dozen times before he took office.

Every president since the 1930s except for Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover has seen a year with at least 3% growth in GDP.

Dictator. The vice president repeated one of her favorite talking points when she claimed Trump “wants to be a dictator on Day 1.” He said he was joking when he said he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”

Harris was referring to a comment that Trump made at a Fox News town hall in December. At the event, Sean Hannity gave Trump the chance to respond to critics who warned that Trump would be a dictator if elected to a second term. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” Hannity said. Trump responded, “Except for Day 1.”

Trump went on to say, “We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”

Trump later claimed he was joking with Hannity. In a Feb. 4 interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump said: “It was with Sean Hannity, and we were having fun, and I said, ‘I’m going to be a dictator,’ because he asked me, ‘Are you really going to be a dictator?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’m going to be a dictator for one day.’ I didn’t say from Day 1.”

Trump told Bartiromo his “dictator” comment was “said in jest.”

Border czar. Trump falsely claimed Harris is the “border czar.” She’s not.

As we have written, Biden in March 2021 tasked Harris with leading efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Central American initiative, known as the “Roots Causes Strategy,” seeks to deter migration from those countries by, among other things, providing funds for natural disasters, fighting corruption, and creating partnerships with the private sector and international organizations.

Harris was not put in charge of U.S. border security, as the “border czar” title implies. That is the responsibility of the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Afghanistan. If Trump had been president during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said, “We wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand new, beautiful military equipment behind.”

But that’s a gross exaggeration. That figure — actually $82.9 billion — was the total amount spent on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the war began in 2001. But it wasn’t all for military equipment, and most of the equipment purchased in those two decades had become inoperable, relocated, decommissioned or destroyed.

CNN reported in April 2022 that a Department of Defense report said $7.12 billion of military equipment the U.S. had given to the Afghan government was in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.

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