Pete Buttigieg when he is talking to his billionaire friends

Let’s start with the framing of this article. Being wealthy is awesome, getting wealthy is awesome. Wealthy people aren’t necessarily bad people. Now that being said, inequality can only increase to a certain maximum until the system will break down, and nobody wants that. So this is what has been happening in the last three decades in America.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/BrickerEtAl_MeasuringIncomeAndWealthAtTheTop_ConferenceDraft-1.pdf’

Look at that, not only does the top 1% of the country own a grossly disproportionate share of the wealth, the top 10% of the top 1% (0.1%) own as much as the bottom 90% of the top 1%. It’s not just wealth concentration, it’s extreme wealth concentration into the very richest of the richest. Scrooge McDuck on steroids right here.

So on to Pete Buttigieg.

This guy is SMART, that is what is so scary about him. Tons of languages, Ivy educated, and many other accolades to his name. He is building a campaign that he positions as “for the people” but he is working for the billionaires. His strategy is to champion social causes to position as a morally upright politician and push policies that continue to make the richest richer. He touts policies like “let’s be nice” and “equal opportunity for all humans” that are politically correct and obviously the easiest path to take. Very brave Pete.

On the other side, he pays lip service to “economic opportunity” but his policies are written by the richest of the rich to cement their position on top of the world. He has two key strategies.

Championing policies that will never reach his desk to sign as bills. For instance, he wants to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr. The bill to do so was just struck down in Congress. It failed in 2013, it failed in 2014, it failed in 2019, and it probably won’t get to the president’s desk in the next term. Moreover, the major corporations are already preparing for a minimum wage increase by sending jobs to India or China and investing in automation. They operate in states where the minimum wage has already been increased significantly through state law so they are equipped for what may come. They have the capital to deploy to survive the change if it does come through, a new entrepreneur in rural America likely does not. Championing policies that will further concentrate wealth. To understand this you have to look at Dodd-Frank. Dodd-Frank was written to prevent the big financial institutions from allowing something like the 2008 mortgage crisis to happen again. Remember when we thought “too big to fail” was a problem? Well the actual impact of Dodd-Frank was a massive consolidation in the finance industry where the biggest banks are bigger than ever, and the smallest banks have seen their market share cut in half. The lesson here is that stuff that looks good on paper (more regulation, more reporting requirements, etc) is easily weathered by massive profitable corporations, but destroys small up and coming potential competitors.

Finally the old adage “tell me who your friends are, I’ll tell you who you are” is worth considering. He is the potential Democratic nominee who has more billionaire donors than any other nominee.

I don’t believe that this intelligent person doesn’t understand what he is doing. The billionaires that support him can certainly read between the lines and see how much his policies will benefit them. This makes Pete “The Billionaire’s” Buttigieg incredibly dangerous, because he is rallying the middle class only to sell them out to his billionaire friends. Pete will make wealth and income inequality in the country far worse, and while he sings a siren song of healing the gap he will tear us further apart by making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Update (10/13/19) — For the Buttigieg followers in the comments, a follow-up post.