Richard D. Wolff is an American economist and a recurring guest of John Kiriakou, who introduces him as “one of my favorite people” and “one of the most recognizable and sought-after economists in America.”[1] By Kiriakou’s account he is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs at the New School in New York, having previously taught economics at Yale University and the Sorbonne among other places. He hosts a weekly programme called Economic Update, carried on YouTube, Free Speech TV and WBAI in New York on the Pacifica Network, and has written many books on economics, most recently Understanding Capitalism.[1][2] Kiriakou closes their conversations with the same line: “I always feel smarter after we have spoken.”[3] Welcoming him back to Deep Focus in April 2026, Kiriakou named the two reasons he enjoys the conversations so much: “not just because you’re from Youngstown, Ohio, but because you speak in plain English and Americans can understand you.”[4]
Self-description
Wolff describes himself as “a critic of capitalism all my life” and as “a product of the elite schools of the United States” — Harvard, Stanford and Yale — where, he says, his teachers “did their level best to make me an enthusiastic pro-capitalist thinking person” and “it didn’t work.” His position is not that capitalism is unworkable but that “the human race can do better,” by analogy with societies that once took slavery and serfdom as permanent.[5][6][7] He directs an organisation called Democracy at Work, founded on the argument that workplaces run by an owner and a board with no say for employees are not democratic, and says his audience has grown exponentially over a decade.[8][9]
The argument he brings to Kiriakou’s audience
Wolff’s core claim about tariffs is definitional: “Tariff is simply a word for a kind of tax. Nobody should be fooled.” Because only a government can tax its own people, a tariff announced against another country is in fact a tax paid by Americans who import goods, remitted to the American government — what earlier American usage called an import duty.[10][11][12] He connects that to federal borrowing: successive administrations of both parties have declined to tax corporations and the rich, and cannot tax working people further, so they borrow from the same wealthy who were not taxed — the arrangement, in his telling, that produced a deficit approaching two trillion dollars and made Japan, the largest single creditor of the United States, and China, the second, less willing to keep lending.[13][14][15][16] He borrows a formulation from a former Greek finance minister to summarise it: “Trade war is simply a disguised form of class war.”[17]
On the periodicity of downturns, Wolff told Kiriakou that the National Bureau of Economic Research’s history shows capitalist economies crashing on average every four to seven years, and that Americans give each crash its own name — the dot-com crisis, the subprime mortgage crisis, Covid — so as not to notice the recurrence: “the names change, the phenomena does not.”[18][19] By the following spring he was applying the arithmetic to the present year. Counting from the dot-com crash in the spring of 2000, the subprime crash of 2008 and 2009 and the Covid crash of 2020, his conclusion was blunt — “do the math. It’s 2026, we’re due” — and with the tariff regime and the energy shock stacked on top of the schedule, he expected one, noting that on this single point he agreed with the head of JP Morgan Chase, “with whom I don’t agree on anything else.” His outer benchmark was the depression of 1929 to 1940: eleven years, unemployment peaking at 25 per cent, six times the rate at the time of the interview.[20][21][22]
The tariffs themselves he came to treat as a smaller economic instrument than a political one. Tariffs are old, he told Kiriakou, and countries have been imposing them on one another for centuries, so people have learned “how to evade them, avoid them, negate them, undermine them”; they do damage and raise costs, “but they are not anywhere near as powerful as the politicians who use them.” Much of what happens in Washington, on his reading, is “carefully choreographed political theater” — which is how he explained a president taking the risk of imposing tariffs without asking a Congress his own party controlled and would have given him.[23][24][25]
The theatre, in his account, serves a denial. “The American empire, and with it American capitalism, are now declining. In the 20th century, we were going up. And that was a good ride for many of us. But now we’re going down.” The decision of American leaders is to pretend otherwise — “it’s what psychologists call denial” — which is why, he said, neither Trump nor Biden nor Harris said a word about a declining empire during the presidential race, despite the wars lost in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and the one being lost in Ukraine. His closing generalisation: “empires are famous for overreaching as they begin to decline, only to discover that it accelerates the decline.”[25][26][27]
His April 2026 appearance was given over mainly to the war: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as Iran’s declared counter-strategy, the European jet fuel shortage it produced, and the rupture with the European allies who had not been warned the attack was coming.[28][29]
His objection to the federal workforce cuts is that they are not an efficiency measure at all. He gave Kiriakou the numbers: about five million federal employees, half of them military, leaving two and a half million civilians; five million civilian employees across the fifty state governments and fifteen million more at local and municipal level. Anyone serious about the efficiency of government employment, he argued, would look where the employees actually are — and the federal civilian workforce is the same size today as it was in the 1960s, when the country had a hundred million fewer people.[30][31][32][33][34]