Funny money skews wealth. From Bill Bonner at internationalman.com:
NEW YORK – Salvator Mundi, said to be by Leonardo da Vinci, is the world’s most expensive painting.
Last Wednesday, at auction, each square inch was valued at nearly $1 million – including the bummed-up, restored, and damaged parts.
The painting may not be da Vinci’s work. Or perhaps, since it has been so heavily doctored up, little remains of his work. And whoever’s work it was must have been having a bad day.
And yet, it sold for over $450 million (including auction-house charges) – a lot of money for such a depressing work of art.
Donald Trump as da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi
The question on the table: Why?
But since we don’t know the answer to that question, we’ll answer another one: How come so many people have so much money?
Made in the Middle
The latest GOP “tax reform” proposals raise questions, too.
Though billed as a “middle-class tax cut,” the middle class gets almost nothing from the proposed plan.
Instead, almost all the benefits go to: (1) business owners, and (2) the rich.
And since the feds are unwilling to cut spending, the middle class ends up with about $2.2 trillion of extra debt, which it will have to reckon with eventually.
We bring up the tax cut because we think it helps explain the painting. Not for nothing are Republicans and the modern Salvator Himself, Donald J. Trump, setting up the middle class for a huge bamboozle.
A train ride we took on Monday – the Acela Express from Baltimore to New York – was subsidized by taxpayers from all over the country.
The train runs from one end of today’s modern economy to the other. It goes from Washington, D.C. – the center of politics – to New York – the center of money.
In between is nothing but poverty and dereliction. There are factories that last made a product in the ’50s. There are workers’ houses almost unchanged in half a century. There are abandoned warehouses… wrecked cars… junk steel… and burly men in orange vests working with machines.
To continue reading: How the Deep State Squeezed America’s Wealth
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 