The gold gilding hid the ugliness and raw corruption that truly defined the era.
By Cliff Montgomery – May 2nd, 2025
A few days ago, we discussed Elon Musk’s first major foray into government officialdom – and came to the conclusion that he has already turned the U.S. government into something too weak and too small to be of much practical use for most things.
Of course, that is precisely what U.S. conservatives like Elon Musk and Donald Trump have wanted for years. But very few living people can tell you what happens in practical terms when the federal government no longer has the personnel to perform a host of essential services.
The United States has enjoyed a fairly robust mixed economy – that is, a combination of private and public economic investment and engagement (Capitalism and Socialism) – since the mid-1930s. The public side of the investment was initially expanded to combat the Great Depression, but was kept to further expand and continue the untold benefits of such an economy for the majority of its citizens.
However, Trump has waxed on about the ‘wonders’ of the so-called “Gilded Age” – an era of the late-19th Century United States in which big financial barons like Rockefeller, Carnegie and Hearst essentially ran the country as they wished.
Trump – and, presumably Musk – see it with rose-colored glasses as a time that might, well … make America great again.
But those who lived through those times – and weren’t one of the rare billionaires – thought quite differently of the era.
The very name, “Gilded Age,” was penned by 19th Century literature legend Mark Twain, along with Charles Dudley Warner. It was the name they created for a 1873 novel entitled, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” which satirized this period of U.S. history.
Twain and Warner had a personal experience of that period. They called it the “Gilded Age” because, they said, the wealthy individuals had developed a habit of covering the items they bought with a thin veneer of gold gilding, which – they added – was intended to hide the ugliness, crippling greed and raw corruption that truly defined the era.
A few quotes from the book:
- “The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.”
- “I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.”
During this period, the income disparity between the wealthy few and everyone else in the U.S. understandably became a scandal.
“Because their businesses were built on exploitative practices, including low wages, dangerous working conditions, price fixing, and political bribes, these men became known as robber barons,” according to Investopedia.
“During the same time period, the wealthiest two percent of American households reportedly owned more than a third of the country’s wealth,” states a 2022 article from Town & Country Magazine, “and the top 10 percent owned approximately three-quarters of it. The working class suffered tremendously, but rich Americans lived lavishly.”
To state it directly, everyone one else in the U.S. – who did the overwhelming majority of the actual work – had to make do with less and less, as the wealthy few continually accumulated ever-increasing amounts of the profit from that labor for themselves.
And this leads us to Musk and to Trump.
To some fair extent, the massive government slashes and burns were meant to pay for Trump’s huge tax bribes to billionaires like Elon Musk – and for a sweet gift to himself. As the news source the Independent makes clear, Musk gutted and burned essential government investment and employees, “even [as] the Trump administration works to slash the nation’s income via tax cuts that will largely accrue to the wealthy by $4.5 trillion.”
Being wealthy in the U.S., they’ve already received rewards beyond those provided by any other economically-developed country. They might at least pay what everyone else pays in income tax, to keep afloat the system that benefits them so much more than everyone else – but no.
“President Donald Trump has outlined many tax proposals that would give the biggest benefits to high-income people and profitable corporations,” declared a scathing report from the Minnesota Budget Project (MBP), a Minnesota-based policy think tank, even as those proposals “leave everyone else behind.”
“Trump tax plans – like extending most provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that are set to expire,” continued the MBP, “special tax breaks for people who earn some kinds of income, or new corporate tax cuts” are activities that “would provide the largest tax cuts to higher-income households and profitable corporations.”
“Because the Trump tax plans are also very costly, they could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit every year,” stated the MBP, before adding that the plans would also “put health care, food support, and other public services that low- and middle-income people benefit from on the chopping block,” all in order “to pay for those tax cuts.”
“The plans also leave the American people worse off,” added the MBP, “because they will not achieve the promised economic benefits via wage increases and business investment.” On top of all that, the MBP also points out that “family budgets could be harmed by [Trump’s] proposed tariffs.”
“Trump’s tax plans are expensive, skewed towards the rich, and [are] an ineffective means of improving the economy,” stated the MBP.
Remember all this the next time you see a picture of Elon Musk celebrating his massive government firings with a gleaming, studded, specially built chain saw – and remember that it’s based off of the golden chain saw of far-right Argentinian President Javier Milei, which is about as close to gilded as it gets. Like the gilding of old, the gold and studs are there to hide the ugliness, the hatred of government activities that ensure a basic fair play and equality under the law, and raw corruption of people like Milei, Musk and Donald Trump.
