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I think what the Trump admin is doing is horribly corrupt and I hope the lot of them go to jail for that and other things, but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.


> ...but in relative terms what Trump is doing is still less corrupt than what happens in many poor countries.

In relative terms?

So what you're saying is that Trump and his family grifting Americans for a couple billion dollars so far in his second term is better than, say, Hun Sen and his family grifting Cambodians for somewhere between $500 million and $4 billion over ~40 years because the US economy is so much bigger than Cambodia's?


I would measure by relative destruction of wealth since corruption is an inefficient destructive process that can quite often yield very little left to steal.


The US, as I noted, is the wealthiest country in the world according to numerous metrics. Yet the median savings is only $8,000, the Brookings Institute found that "the overall share of middle-class households that do not make enough to afford basic necessities where they live ranges from 23% to 57%" and so on.

It is all but impossible to calculate how much wealth has been "destroyed" and, more importantly, how much wealth has been transferred from the middle class to the upper class by way of institutionalized corruption that many people, you included, won't even acknowledge as a form of corruption.

Meanwhile, members of Congress are laughing all the way to the bank.




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