If you look at payments to labor as a proportion of national income or gross domestic product, you find profits going way up, investment and savings going up.

Today's national income statistics make it appear that Goldman Sachs is productive. As if Donald Trump plays a productive role. The aim is to make it appear that people who take money from the rest of the economy without working are productive, despite not really providing any service that actually contributes to GDP and economic growth.

One basic myth is that rich people get wealthy by earning income. But that's not how most get rich. Most of the gains of the rich people since 1945 have been "capital gains".

What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.

Textbooks don't teach people how to avoid paying any income tax. But that's what an army of tax lawyers and corporate tax accountants do.

People think of a parasite as simply taking money, taking blood out of a host or taking money out of the economy. But in nature it's much more complicated. The parasite can't simply come in and take something. First of all, it needs to numb the host. It has an enzyme so that the host doesn't realize the parasite's there. And then the parasites have another enzyme that takes over the host's brain. It makes the host imagine that the parasite is part of its own body, actually part of itself and hence to be protected. That’s basically what Wall Street has done.

A derivative is a bet on whether a stock, or a bond or a real estate asset, is going to go up or down. There's a winner and a loser. It's like betting on a horserace.