Like their fearless leader, it looks like the 13 all male economic advisors named by Donald Trump in August have

failed to make the grade, at least as far as some major independent economists are concerned.

In numerous reports released by financial experts across the political spectrum after the last presidential debate, economists said Trump’s economic plan would be add $5.3 trillion to the national debt and fail to deliver on his promise of creating millions of new jobs.

In one report by Politico, Trump’s economic team is comprised of 13 men (and no women) and Trump said they have “unparalleled experience and success.” Of the 13 men, five are major donors whose families combined to give Trump’s campaign and his joint fundraising account with the Republican Party more than $2 million.  That alone proves that cannot be that smart since their money will likely be wasted when their man loses.

As far as Trump’s economic plan, one that would be “a tremendous economic machine,” that too is seriously flawed and will not meet Trump’s stated goals, economists said.

In a report from The Hill, economists said Trump’s claim that he would boost GDP from the current 1% to 4% or 5% is “not realistic,” according to Steve Zandi, chief economist at Moodys. Even an economist at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute said Trump’s GDP projections are “ridiculous.”

In perhaps the deepest cut of all, this same economist, Stan Veuger, said “Trump doesn’t really know what he is talking about, and his policy platform is so incoherent that he has to make claims like that.”

Trump’s popular plan of illegal immigrant deportations and cutting taxes for the wealthy would also add to the deficit and hurt the economy, Zandi added.  He also said Trump’s plan would eliminate 3.5 million jobs and push the economy into a recession.

As for Trump’s billionaire economic advisors, none of them have individually come forward to refute the economists and defend his plans. Looks like making money is very different from creating jobs and growing the economy.

One reason why the economic recover from the 2008 recession still lingers is that the national economy is based on growing via fiscal and monetary policy. Monetary policy is what the Federal Reserve manages.  Fiscal policy is what Congress does via legislation for spending packages. 

But since the Republican Tea Party has stymied every effort by the Obama administration starting from before Obama even took office. These Republican efforts started as early as 2008 and were formalized the night of Obama’s first inauguration in January 2009, as shown in this video featuring Newt Gingrich who admitted the plan. This was the start of the Republican’s effort to derail the U.S. government and halt fiscal policy and it continued during the entire eight years Obama was in office.. It now looks like Trump’s plan to kill the U.S. economy would do the same thing.

It’s a tough search, and by all accounts, it looks like it will get even tougher.

The simple reason is that today’s economic system is creating fewer new wealthier people.

And while this poses problems for wealth managers, it is a much more significant and destructive problem for American society.

For an industry that loves data, here are some new numbers to ponder as they will affect your business as wealth managers:

•  A new Harvard report finds that 51% of Americans between ages 18 and 29 do not support capitalism, Harvard researchers have found, while just 42% support it.
• A Federal Reserve Board study that asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency found that 47% said they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something or they would not be able to come up with the $400.
• In an article in the Atlantic, Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University, found that the median net worth of Americans has declined steeply in the past generation. It decreased 85% from 1983 to 2013 for the bottom income quintile, 63% for the second-lowest quintile, and 26% for the third, or middle, quintile.
• Research funded by the Russell Sage Foundation found that the inflation-adjusted net worth of the typical household (one at the median point of wealth distribution) was $87,992 in 2003. By 2013, it had declined to $54,500, a 38% decline.
• Nor are these dismal numbers restricted to lower- and idle-income people. Another study cited in the same Atlantic article found that nearly one-quarter of households making $100,000 to $150,000 annually said they would not be able to raise $2,000 monthly.

No New Wealth Spells Trouble for Wealth Managers

Now, we would assume wealth managers are concerned about finding new clients to generate their income. It would also be considered that their investment firm bosses are interested in expanding the number of wealthy people in the U.S. to perpetuate and expand their business. Sadly, this is not the case.

Financial services firms work against wealth creation in consistent, subtle ways, ranging from lobbying against any pro-investor disclosure provisions to supporting the increase in the minimum wage to publicly encouraging corporations to pay their share of federal taxes so average Americans would have more disposable incomes.

These are radical ideas for any corporation; anyone in any boardroom would lose their directorship position if they advocated it.  The same would be true for most wealth managers, who would risk their career reputations.

Time to Learn About Neoliberalism 

In the current presidential campaigns, income inequality has risen as a significant issue for most candidates to various degrees.  But aside from politicians who have their versions of income inequality, the best

explanations come from political scientists who have identified neoliberalism as the main culprit over the past 30 or so years as the primary ideological source of the rise of corporatism, libertarianism, selfishness, austerity, income inequality, free market absolutism, and the belief that government is the enemy of the people.

But I would bet most people in the financial services industry have never heard of neoliberalism. This political science term has nothing to do with modern versions of being liberal.

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy that initially believed state-run, market-oriented companies and democratic institutions could create a new, stable, peaceful, inclusive political structure. However, to achieve these goals, neoliberalism relies heavily on intervention from the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations.

This political idea can be traced to political economist Karl Polanyi, who proposed in 1944 that the concept of freedom in modern society has various meanings, including the use of freedom for both good and bad causes, according to David Harvey’s book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005).

One of the wrong causes of neoliberalism is that it creates wide income disparities, minimizes the role of unions, and promotes unfettered consumerism.  While these deficiencies were well known, the advocates of neoliberalism (mostly wealthy, right-wingers, including the John Birch Society) masked the unique benefits to a few well-placed financial beneficiaries. They said that neoliberalism would expand individual liberties. This led to the idea that government was bad, states should take over more legislation, privatization of public facilities (airports, national parks, prisons, public utilities, etc.), and regulation in all forms was terrible.

In the U.S., the first significant test of neoliberal policies occurred during the fiscal problems of New York City during the Seventies.  The darling of neoliberalism in the U.S. was President Ronald Reagan, who first applied neoliberalism in the U.S. in his effort to break trade union activism by firing the air traffic controller’s union in 1981. (In the UK, it was Margaret Thatcher.)

For people in the investment business, one of neoliberalism’s primary markers is the popularity of conservative Austrian economists Frederick Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and Milton Friedman.  These economists were blindly free markets and promoted the benefits of selfishness as the antithesis of social welfare that originated in the New Deal.  Neoliberalism also gained strength during the 1950s to combat communism and Russian expansionism.

The duplicity of all this is that Charles Koch’s father, Fred Koch, made millions working for Joseph Stalin by building and running five refineries in Russia that helped the dictator meet his first five-year plan, as described in “The Koch Brothers’ New Brand” in the New York Review of Books (March 10, 2016). Fred Koch then built over a hundred more refineries for Stalin.  Fred Koch then worked for the Nazis by providing plans for a major oil refinery that produced fuel for the Nazi air force.  Fred Koch admired the fascists and wrote in 1938 that Germany, Italy, and Japan were the “only sound countries in the world” since he hated the New Deal.

Years later, neoliberalism attracted the attention of the right wing in the U.S., including the John Birch Society and one of its primary benefactors, Charles Koch, who was one of the 11 founders of the John Birch Society, as cited in the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer (Doubleday, 2016).  The Birchers were not only anti-communist but anti-government.  By the 1970s, Koch founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York and wrote a paper on how a fringe movement could use secrecy to gain power. He neglected to say it would also be very well funded.

All this culminated publicly in 1980 when Koch ran as the vice president of the Libertarian Party on a terrifying platform that should be mandatory reading for all Republicans in 2016.  The nation is in dire straits if they have anything in common with this 1980 Koch-Libertarian Platform.

Here are just a few excerpts of the Libertarian Party platform that David Koch ran on in 1980:

• “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.”
• “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
• “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.”
• “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.”
• “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.”
• “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. In addition to being inefficient, the present system encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence.  Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.”
• “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.”

The Message for Wealth Managers

Like most professionals in the financial services industry, wealth managers and financial advisors who meet with clients who have $25,000 in investable assets strive to do the right thing for their clients and even comply with the new DOL fiduciary disclosure rules.

However, there is much more to building a successful practice than knowing the benefits of alpha, asset allocation, effective tax strategies, and details of new products.

To be effective, financial professionals must know more about the political environment in which they work.  This environment dictates the limits of their paying field and what shapes the lives of their clients and families when they leave the office.

This is why 51% of Americans between ages 18 and 29 do not support capitalism, and just 42% support it, according to a new Harvard study. What a growing number of Americans don’t like is unregulated capitalism, a central tenet of neoliberalism and right-wing Libertarianism, but something evident daily in the financial media in the form of stories about global price fixing in currencies, LIBOR, PIBOR, and the top-down fraud in the mortgage market.

One of the main reasons the 2008 recession still lingers is that Congress has adopted the neoliberal idea that Keynesian economics is the devil, so new public works programs can begin to provide jobs at the grass-roots levels.  This worked in the past, but Republicans want to starve the government of funds and power, a phrase used by Nixon OMB appointee David Stockman,

In later years, Stockman, who resigned from the Nixon Administration in 1985, was so repentant that he told interviewers, “Trickle-down economics was a wish, not a reality. It’s never worked. Lower taxes don’t generate more revenue. They generate deficits.

According to Pierre Tristam, “Reagan knew it. So did Stockman. So did their guru, Friederich von Hayek. The deficits were intentional all along. They were designed to ‘starve the beast,’ meaning intentionally cut revenue to press Congress to cut the New Deal programs Reagan wanted to demolish. ‘The plan,’ Stockman told Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, ” was to have a strategic deficit that would give you an argument for cutting back the programs that weren’t desired. It got out of hand.” (Interestingly, von Hayek later distanced himself from Reagan’s misappropriation of his economics.)

This is now well known and should be to financial professionals, financial journalists, and elected politicians.  However, the lies continue since the John Birch vision is unfulfilled.  The unsuspecting public has not yet lost faith in the federal government and its services.  When this happens,  federal services can be more easily privatized. It is also a way for so-called political outsiders to become more popular since the complexities of running a global government in a global economy are dumbed down because negotiators cannot make great deals.

So, if you want to be a wealth manager in a nation with diminishing wealth, it’s time to break with financial industry corporate management and find a way to make the entire nation more wealthy. In any case, it’s clear that the current system of unregulated capitalism is not building a nation of more wealthy citizens.

In a 2004 video message, Osama bin Laden boasted about leading America to a path of self-destruction, in an interview with Ted Koppel, the former managing editor of ABC’s “Nightline.”

In the video, bin Laden said “All we have to do is send two mujahidin…to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written ‘al Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.”

And while bin Laden was indisputably a diabolical Islamic fundamentalist fanatic, his main goal was never to defeat the U.S. militarily. His goal was to destroy the U.S. economy.

Yet as history has shown, bin Laden never did that.

Instead, we derailed the U.S. economy ourselves.

We did this through the Iraq War, the invasion of Afghanistan; creation of the Homeland Security Agency; the 2008 recession; subsequent unemployment that rose from 5% in December 2007 to 9% in 2009 and peaked at 10% in October 2009; bailouts of errant financial institutions; and an unprecedented Federal Reserve quantitative easing monetary stimulus policy. But there was even more.

It is true that bin Laden had nothing directly to do with the systemic mortgage fraud that caused the 2008 recession and the related domestic political wars intent on derailing the Obama presidency. But bin Laden’s acts ignited what historians could call an American over-reaction that caused war mobilization aggravated by recession.

Here are some key historical events to consider that helped derail the U.S. economy:

The Iraq Invasion

While the Bush-Cheney administration presided over the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions after the Sept. 11, 2011, (even though the Taliban had offered to turn over bin Laden if the U.S. could link him to the attacks), the political machine was already engaged for a huge war expenditure. Eventually, the war costs would tally more than $2 trillion, plus an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans. Combined, these expenses could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would eventually cost 6,840 American lives and 134,000, Iraq lives.

Another estimate of the war costs according to a 2011 report prepared by the Costs of War Project at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, found the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost at least $3.7 trillion, based on actual expenditures from the U.S. Treasury and future commitments, such as the medical and disability claims of U.S. war veterans. That estimate climbed to nearly $4 trillion in the update, a Reuters report stated.

So what was gained in the wars?

“The report concluded the United States gained little from the war while Iraq was traumatized by it. The war reinvigorated radical Islamist militants in the region, set back women’s rights, and weakened an already precarious healthcare system, the report said. Meanwhile, the $212 billion reconstruction effort was largely a failure with most of that money spent on security or lost to waste and fraud, it said.”

The 2008 Recession

The TARP bailout and the accompany plan by the Fed to start its quantitative easing plans made a huge impact on attempting to resurrect a damaged economy.

Eventually, the 2008 recession would destroy about $16.4 trillion of net household wealth from its peak in spring 2007, about six months before the start of the recession, to the nadir reached in the first quarter of 2009, according to figures from the Federal Reserve.  The financial devastation was so severe that despite a stock market recovery, a higher savings rate and consumer’s attempts to reduce debt, only a little more than half of that lost wealth –$8.7 trillion–was back on household balance sheets by the spring of 2011. The net effect of the recession, which still lingers today, is that American household wealth was $7.7 trillion less in 2011 than from before the recession.

So while there have been gains since then, personal finance pundits who bemoan the low savings rates of workers in 401(k) plans, they should remember the devastating effects of the recession.

The Deficit Increases

The wars and recession set the stage for an increase in the deficit.

“The price tag for the massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street and the nation following the 2008 financial meltdown has been whittled down to approximately $40 billion, according to a report from the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) cited by CNNMoney.” Source: NewsMax, May 2014.

“The Treasury Department spent $7.8 billion of the TARP monies helping taxpayers with underwater mortgages get cheaper loans. But $1.2 billion has been lost on loan modifications for borrowers who later defaulted anyway.” Source: Newsmax, May 2014

Deficit Records of Presidents (ratios of deficit to GDP)

George H. W. Bush (Bush I)

1989-92 4.0

1990-93 4.3

Average 4.2

Bill Clinton

1993-2000 0.8

1994-2001 0.1

Average 0.5

George W. Bush (Bush II)

2001-08 2.0

2002-09 3.4

Average 2.7

Barack Obama

2009-12* 9.1

2010-12 8.7

Average 8.9

*fiscal 2012 ends Sept. 30, 2012, so this figure is estimated

Source: Economic Report of the President, February 2012, as cited in Forbes , July 11, 2012.

As James Glassman, the author of this Forbes article notes, Bush’s deficit results were affected by the 10% deficit/GDP ratio in fiscal 2009. “A large chunk of spending in that year went to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. In fiscal 2009, TARP contributed $151 billion to the budget deficit, but in 2010 and 2011, $147 billion of that amount was recouped and thus reduced the size of the deficit during President Obama’s watch,” Glassman wrote. (These calculations are complicated and are available at the Office of Management and Budget.)

The Republican Pledge to Derail the Obama Presidency

On the night of Obama’s inauguration, a group of Republicans held a four-hour dinner at The Caucus restaurant (where a New York strip steak costs $51) in Washington D.C. to develop plans that would stop the Obama  administration, paralyze the Congressional and budget process and confront Obama and any of his officials as they sought to perform their duties.

Among the 15 or so people in attendance were Republican Representatives. Eric Cantor (Va.), Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Paul Ryan (Wis.), Pete Sessions (Texas), Jeb Hensarling (Texas), Pete Hoekstra (Mich.) and Dan Lungren (Calif.), along with Republican Senators Jim DeMint (S.C.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), John Ensign (Nev.) and Bob Corker (Tenn.). The non-lawmakers present included Newt Gingrich, several years removed from his presidential campaign, and Frank Luntz, a long-time Republican fanatic who organized the dinner where everyone sat at a large square table. However, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) missed the dinner because Draper wrote they had “an acrimonious relationship with Luntz.”

For several hours, the book says they plotted ways to not just win back political power, but to also stall Obama’s legislative platform. In the book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representative,” by Robert Draper, the meeting set the tone for Obama’s two-term presidency that resulted in blocked any legislation ranging from economic stimulus bills to challenging his Cabinet-level nominees.

“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes Kevin McCarthy (R-Cal.) as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.” (Sadly, the obstructionist McCarthy is now jockeying to take over the position of Speaker of the House.)

But Boehner and McConnell also endorsed the government shut-down plan.

In October 2010, Boehner, the incoming Speaker of the House, offered his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”

At about the same time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Shutting Down the Government

While this plot was hatched at a partisan dinner, it was more akin to a political coup since it was much more than a meeting of the “loyal opposition.” Taken in its historical context as the TARP bailout was meddling along and the nation was clearly entering a recession, the “loyal opposition” was essentially plotting to shut down the legislative process for what they thought was Obama’s single four-year presidential term. When Obama was re-elected in November 2012, the Republicans became more radical and more intent on shutting down the government. This is something bin Laden could never have dreamed for.

While that happened in October 2013 and was threatened twice in the past two years, (the latest in September 2015), the larger long-term negative impact for the entire nation from the economic perspective was that it de-coupled the ability of the U.S. to enact monetary and fiscal policy.   This meant that the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve did not reflect the fiscal policies (tax- and budget-related) that were the responsibility of Congress.

De-Coupling Fiscal and Monetary Policy

With Congress was paralyzed by the Republicans intent on discussing Benghazi, Planned Parenthood, the merits of de-regulation, dangers posed by the Environmental Protection Agency, voiding the Export-Import Bank, the “fallacy” of global warming, repealing the Affordable Care Act (since it would make Obama look like a statesman) by taking 55 separate House votes to overturn or defund it, that the bill is legal, as well as rear-guard actions by Republican attorneys generals that challenged the bill. Some of these anti-Affordable Care Act votes were taken after the U.S. Supreme Court decided the bill was legal. So while the Republicans votes almost as a block to confront Obama, enacting any national fiscal policy stopped. All this happened as the nation was mired in the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

It also put the Federal Reserve in an impossible position of trying to resurrect the economy by itself. This was something it was never intended to do. The nation moves ahead historically through coordinated fiscal and economic policy. Now, half of that equation was gone. This is one reason why the financial media has been talking ad nauseam about interest rates since June 2006, the last time they were increased. Yet by a variety of measures, the country is still emerging from the 2008 recession.

You Get the Government You Deserve

While Americans may not know all the details about how their government runs, they know something is wrong.

Some may think it’s a problem that only a corporate executive can fix, as if any government in the world is a business. Think of what happened in Italy when it was run by billionaire ($7 billion net worth), former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was elected as an “outsider who was going to bring a new efficiency to the public.” He eventually was forced to resign after financial scandals raised over his conflicts-of-interest, preferential treatment of friends, manipulative politics and sex scandals.

Others are looking to correct what they see as social excesses or for a populist to correct economic inequalities aggravated by the 2008 recession, years of stagnant wage growth and the feeling that Americans are just in a rat race.

But the main theme that most Americans can agree upon is that the country has not advanced since October 2001. Not enough major problems that nations face related to society, the economy, politics, race, or justice have been solved, especially since this is such a powerful nation with so many resources.  Some Americans may prefer this stagnation, but it’s certain that bin Laden would be enjoying the spectacle.