With the midterm elections approaching, you will see all sectors of American society making grand promises in one form or another.

A few days ago, Elon Musk said that every American child would receive one share of SpaceX stock. Musk did not explain exactly how the shares would be distributed, but Trump quickly chimed in to tell everyone that the stock would not be given directly to individuals. Instead, it would be distributed “through TRUMPP ACCOUNTS,” with money going into accounts established by Trump.

Given the track records of Trump and Musk for making wild promises, and considering the current American political landscape, the chances that these so-called Trump accounts are not merely a political fundraising vehicle for Trump himself, and that they will continue to operate after he leaves office, are virtually zero.

In fact, another story has been making headlines in the United States over the past few days. Beyond the Republican proposal to distribute dividends to everyone through Trump accounts, there is also a Democratic proposal that California is about to vote on: imposing a one-time tax on the wealth of the rich to fund public services such as healthcare for ordinary people. This is the so-called “Billionaire Tax.”

Mark Zuckerberg immediately came out to threaten that he would leave California if the tax passed. Besides Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Larry Page have also threatened to leave. This means that even if California succeeds in passing the billionaire tax and overcoming other procedural obstacles, the actual effectiveness of the tax remains highly questionable.

Of course, both the Republican and Democratic promises point to one fundamental contradiction: the growth of American capital and the stagnation of ordinary Americans’ lives.

Everyone knows that the accumulation of wealth in the American stock market in recent years has been proceeding at a pace rarely seen in history.

So here is the question: as we can see from the chart, the past ten years have been the decade of the fastest growth in the American stock market. If the stock market has performed so well, does that mean the American economy has also enjoyed its best decade? Have ordinary Americans enjoyed their best decade as well?

Some financially illiterate commentators might genuinely answer “yes.” Unfortunately, the world does not revolve around the stock market.

If both the American economy and ordinary Americans had done so well over the past decade, we would not have seen Trump elected twice. We would not have seen Americans’ anger at AI and capitalists escalate into acts of violence. Nor would we have seen both Democrats and Republicans begin trying to placate the public with promises of wealth generated by capital.

So the same group of financially illiterate commentators might wonder: if the stock market is doing so well, how can there still be poor people? Why not just invest in stocks and become rich?

This is the equivalent of asking starving people, “Why don’t they eat meat if they can’t afford bread?” or “Why don’t they just eat cake?” After paying for rent, gas, insurance, and other living expenses, ordinary Americans simply have no money left to invest in the stock market.

As we can see, the bottom 90 percent hold only 13 percent of stock market wealth, while the bottom 50 percent hold just 1 percent. The more prosperous the capital market becomes, the more severe wealth inequality naturally grows. The gap between ordinary Americans’ lived experiences and the rosy figures reported by the capital markets becomes ever wider.

In the face of inequality on this scale, how many shares would actually need to be distributed to every person for it to make a meaningful difference? And that is assuming, to begin with, that capitalists are genuinely willing to give shares to the public.

Some countries have actually tried distributing shares to the entire population. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Russia pursued privatization by issuing privatization vouchers to everyone. People could use these vouchers to purchase shares in formerly state-owned enterprises.

So ordinary Russians received their “ticket to the capital market.” What happened next? They got their first taste of the power of the capital market, as Russia’s future oligarchs stripped them of everything they had. Many people needed cash to make ends meet and could not afford to hold on to their shares for long. They had little choice but to find ways to sell them to the wealthy.

Some might say this was a problem unique to Russia, and that it would not happen under a well-functioning government and economy. But how well the American government and economy are functioning today is a matter of opinion.

In fact, the United States itself has a history of distributing assets to private individuals. The Homestead Act of 1862, for example, distributed undeveloped land to ordinary people, land that had been seized from Indigenous North Americans. Its provisions also prohibited speculative reselling.

One could say that the Homestead Act worked somewhat better than the distribution of shares after the Soviet Union’s collapse. But even then, it failed to prevent capitalists from claiming land fraudulently or consolidating landholdings through various means. And even small farmers who managed to hold on to their own plots for a time were at an overwhelming disadvantage when competing with large landowners. In the end, they too were inevitably forced to sell their land.

The nature of capital is to concentrate. Under capitalism, no government or regulation can truly suppress this tendency. So any fantasy that giving ordinary people a piece of “capital” will somehow improve the system of wealth distribution reflects a profound ignorance of human society and capitalism.

Of course, some people may point to today’s promises and argue that the arrival of AI will change everything. They claim that the American economic system, the relationship between government and business, and the way society operates will all undergo fundamental transformations, allowing ordinary Americans to enjoy stable and lasting increases in wealth.

All I can say is that Americans have been hearing promises of money for everyone for decades, and not one has ever proved genuinely reliable. That is because the problem has never been technological or economic. It is political.

Giving money to everyone is never difficult. The difficult part is giving people money with real purchasing power, rather than something like the depreciating gold yuan notes of the past.

In fact, the United States already tried giving money to everyone during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a period, Americans could sit at home without working and still receive a certain amount of income. Those who owned stocks were even better off, enjoying the stock market’s rise as well. It was as if a utopia had arrived ahead of schedule.

But utopia never arrived. Instead, the United States experienced its highest inflation in 41 years. The political consequences and social turmoil caused by that inflation have persisted to this day.

Americans, suffering from inflation, voted the Democrats out of power because they hoped Trump would produce a miracle through forceful action. Now, suffering from inflation once again, they want to bring the Democrats back.

If even the United States, with the privilege of issuing the world’s reserve currency and printing money freely while making the rest of the world bear the cost, has ended up in this situation, how much better can other countries fare when they have to cover all their social spending from their own national budgets?

Just look at France, which is now engulfed in unrest, and you will understand.

Money does not simply fall from the sky. Whatever extra income ordinary people receive from government handouts will ultimately be swallowed up by inflation on a vastly larger scale, allowing the wealthy, whose fortunes are less affected by inflation, to continue robbing the poor to enrich themselves.

At the end of the day, we are still dealing with the same old problem: people do not live by consuming numbers representing capital. They need to consume actual goods in the real world. And goods do not magically replenish themselves on store shelves. They require actual productive capacity.

Some people will ask: Isn’t that what AI is for?

AI has certainly increased productivity in some areas, but there are still many forms of productive activity that AI cannot replace. Can AI replace the energy and infrastructure it consumes? Can it replace the manufactured goods that the United States no longer produces? Can it replace the cheap immigrant labor working on American farms?

If AI had delivered even one-tenth of the productivity gains promised by those making these grand claims, the United States should not be experiencing inflation. Instead, excess productive capacity should have driven prices down, delivering the kind of prosperity Americans once advertised: a dollar for fried chicken and a dollar for a big house.

The reality, however, is that AI is consuming American land and electricity, driving up the prices of related goods and services, without giving Americans anything close to a compensating increase in the goods and resources they receive.

Of course, some will argue that all the United States needs to do is preserve its financial hegemony and technological innovation. Manufacturing does not matter, they say, because the country can simply import what it needs from abroad.

Americans thought the same way many years ago. The result was the decline of manufacturing, which gave rise to Hillbilly Elegy, devastated the working-class communities and social structures built around manufacturing, intensified social tensions, and ultimately helped propel Trump into office.

That is why I once wrote about a question: Why does Trump reject the old dollar system, under which the United States could simply print pieces of paper and use them to buy iPhones from the rest of the world, and insist on making iPhones domestically instead? Because the damage caused by the hollowing out of American manufacturing cannot be captured by numbers alone.

Of course, now that the United States is even facing shortages of ammunition for military operations, the damage caused by its lack of manufacturing capacity is finally becoming visible in the numbers as well.

The world is material. Any vision of how an economy should function must be grounded in the actual production of material goods, rather than revolving exclusively around financial figures. And even when it comes to American financial figures, the picture looks far from rosy once you look at the other side of the ledger: debt.

For years, both American parties have talked about a “Universal Basic Income” (UBI) and various versions of the same idea. Yet no one has ever truly implemented it. The reason is that handing money to ordinary Americans, in every conceivable sense, is likely to produce the same outcome as the pandemic-era stimulus payments.

If material production cannot keep up with the pace of money distribution, the result will simply be greater inflation and mounting debt pressure in the United States. This is not a problem that can be solved by distributing dividends from the capital market or taxing capitalists.

As I once pointed out when criticizing the fact that American ammunition factories could play financial games without actually producing ammunition, the more easily capitalists and politicians can make money by sitting back and profiting from finance and technology, the less incentive they have to invest human and material resources in manufacturing that produces actual goods.

Of course, this does not stop the American government and capitalists from continuing to promise a wonderful future. In that future America, nothing will be in short supply. The country will have both wealth and productive capacity. All it will need to do is figure out a way to distribute money to the public.

Even if we go to the extreme and temporarily assume that all these promises are true, and that AI really can propel American productivity to the same heights as the stock market bubble, we return to the question we began with: Why would American capitalists be willing to distribute shares to everyone?

Let us think carefully about why American billionaires try to evade taxes whenever possible, yet are willing to donate money to Trump accounts.

Because capitalists do not spend money on charity out of the goodness of their hearts. Money given to politicians can be exchanged more efficiently for the things they want. So even if Trump really does take a few crumbs from billionaires’ political donations and distribute them to the public, it will only be because those billionaires have already extracted far more from the public through political deals, such as weaker regulation, lower taxes, and greater freedom to damage the local environment.

As I discussed in my earlier article, From Sheep-Eating to AI-Eating, the development of industries under capitalism has always been built on the exploitation and even killing of local populations. Today, when Americans confront data centers encroaching on local resources and damaging the environment, the process resembles the displacement and even deaths of existing residents during the “gentrification” of American finance and IT industries in earlier decades.

You will hear plenty of warm, beautiful promises about compensation and progress. But the final outcome will invariably be cold and brutal.

For those who are no longer needed in the process of development, capitalism will leave them to fend for themselves or even actively eliminate them. This has been true of Indigenous North Americans who were massacred, low-income tenants who died in “gentrification fires,” and the homeless people now filling American streets.

On the one hand, we are told that future productivity will become so advanced that human beings will no longer be needed. On the other hand, we are told that people in the future will be able to share in the wealth generated by that advanced productivity through stock ownership. These two claims are completely at odds with the logic of capitalist development.

At the end of the day, if human beings are worth so little, why would capital spend money on them?

If the United States really had a mechanism capable of forcing capital to care about whether people live or die, compelling American capitalists to distribute shares to everyone, preventing them from fleeing to other countries, exploiting loopholes in the rules, or using every available means to reconsolidate the wealth distributed to the public, then the United States could not possibly be the country it is today.

You might as well believe that American capitalists will suddenly discover their conscience as believe that a socialist revolution will break out in the United States. Neither is going to happen. We might as well think of something more progressive.

Editor: Zhiyu Wang