By Robert Reich / RobertReich.org

Hillary Clinton won’t be the only

winner when Donald Trump and his fellow haters are defeated on Election Day (as looks increasingly likely). Another will be Paul Ryan, who will rule the Republican roost.

Democrats may take back the Senate but

they won’t take back the House. Gerrymandering has given House Republicans an

impregnable fortress of safe seats.

This means that in order for President Hillary

Clinton to get anything done, she’ll have to make deals with Speaker Paul

Ryan.

While the Clinton-Ryan years won’t be marked by the same kind of petulant gridlock we’ve witnessed over the last eight, the ascendance of Ryan and Clinton will mark a win for big business and Wall Street over the strongest

anti-establishment surge America has witnessed since Great Depression.

Clinton might be able to

summon Ryan’s support on a “Buffet rule” for the highest-income taxpayers – an

effective minimum tax of 30 percent on top incomes. She might also be able to

wangle some additional spending on infrastructure and paid family leave.

But the price Ryan can be expected

to exact will be lower corporate tax rates, along with a tax amnesty on

corporate profits repatriated to the United States. And to offset the added

spending and tax cuts, Ryan will probably want Clinton to trim Social Security

(perhaps reviving the terrible idea of a “chained” CPI for determining cost of

living increases), and slow the growth of Medicare.

None of this will do much to remedy

the central economic challenge of our era – reversing the declining incomes and

wealth of most Americans.

Although incomes rose in 2015, the

typical household is still worse off today than it was in 2000, adjusted for

inflation. The assets of the typical family today are worth 14 percent less

than the assets of the typical family in 1984. And the typical job is less

secure than at any time since the Great Depression.

These trends are not sustainable – neither

economically nor politically. They generated the fury that’s

undergirded Trump’s ugly campaign, and fueled the anger that propelled Bernie Sanders’s

insurgency.

They’ve fed a growing sense that

the political-economic system is rigged in favor of those at the top.

And it is. Big money has corrupted

our democracy, resulting in laws and rules that systematically favor big

corporations, Wall Street, and the very rich over everyone else.

Consider, for example, the growing

market power of leading pharmaceutical companies, private health insurers, the biggest

Wall Street banks, giant cable providers, four major airlines, and five largest

high-tech companies. And the decreasing market power of unions.

The resulting imbalance is transferring

money out of the pockets of average Americans directly into the pockets of

major shareholders and top executives.

A similar upward distribution is

occurring through bankruptcy laws that allow giant corporations and billionaires

to avoid paying what they owe, yet don’t allow average people overburdened with

mortgage or student debt to renegotiate those obligations.

Mandatory arbitration clauses in

contracts with giant corporations are forcing people to give up rights under a

wide variety of consumer and employment laws. Meanwhile, workers classified as

“independent contractors” are losing whatever rights they once had under the

nation’s labor laws.

In all these respects, the American

political economy has become radically imbalanced.

The reforms Hillary Clinton and Paul

Ryan are likely to agree to are miniscule compared with the scale of this imbalance.

Hopefully, the leaders of big

business and Wall Street – the true winners of the 2016 election – will realize

that although they avoided Trump’s authoritarian populism and Sanders’s

“political revolution” this time around, they won’t for much longer.

The forces that gave rise to both

will grow unless our political economy is rebalanced to work for everyone and

not just for those at the top.

There is precedent. In the first

decades of the twentieth century, enlightened business leaders joined with progressive

reformers to rebalance American capitalism – thereby rescuing it from the

savage inequalities and corruption of the Gilded Age.

If they understand what happened in

the 2016 election, enlightened business leaders will do so once again.