“Our new Constitution is now established; everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

The unimaginable presents itself as the average American citizens bear the brunt of debt repayment through increased taxation, inflation and it’s certain to cause internal instability across the country, when our national debt crisis actually really does reach the tipping point, whereby the military becomes even more underfunded than it already is and the government breaks its promises on Social Security and other programs. These are all indications that the country rests on the verge of collapse, unless something of real consequence is done to reverse course, if it’s even possible at this point.

For the moment, the interest rate on our national debt is already set to exceed Social Security and become the largest item in the budget. It will only grow bigger from this point on at am unstoppable and exponential rate, short of a miracle or some serious action to control spending and the growth of government,

If the national debt keeps tracking as projected, it won’t be long before the explosion of the interest rate expense crowds out funding for defense, Social Security and other domestic commitments. Without quick, certain, definitive and successful actions by the Trump administration, this time around, the U.S. is headed for a disaster of historical and epic proportions.

The U.S. is rapidly approaching the tipping point, the point of no return, for which there will not be found any leader capable enough or with any tools to stop a certain and total economic collapse. This makes the Trump administration’s success at this juncture in history all the more crucial since it almost certainly holds the future of the country and Her people in its hands, however capable or flawed they may be.

America is on a path to an economic collapse of such mammoth proportions, that we may full well see a repeat of something similar to the Great Depression, except multiplied by a thousand. For all the bluff and bluster coming from the Biden administration that the economy is booming and Joe’s own hushed whispered assurances its the best in U.S. history, nothing could be further from the truth, and when President-Elect Donald Trump takes charge on January 20th 2025, he will be inheriting an economic time bomb and an economy teetering on the brink of collapse.

However, it’s extremely hard to place any real faith in President Trump’s will to or ability to turn the economy around and make it healthy again, when he actually supports raising the debt ceiling for Congress, in essence abolishing it. The national debt already sits at well over $36 trillion and rising lickety-split, and yet, some aspects of Trump’s policies and overall agenda will require more mammoth spending, so one can readily see that there is nothing “conservative” about Trump or those of the New “Republican” Party who have fallen in lockstep – as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also recently called for abolishing the debt ceiling, in perfect agreement with Trump.

HHhhMmmmmm … what a strange world we find ourselves in these days as the American people continue to take one economic hit after another.

And even if President Trump actually does limit the federal government’s spending on all fronts shortly after he takes office, the current level of spending by the Biden regime will continue to have an extreme effect on our economy and contribute to more rising inflation over the next year or longer.

I had to buy some eye-glasses yesterday, in order to ease the strain on my eyes and ensure I wouldn’t be making any typos in future articles – oh, and also so I can pass the eye test to renew my driver’s license for the next eight years. But damned if I wasn’t shocked out of my socks when I was billed a total of $782 for bifocals, which included the $69 exam fee; sure, bifocals should cost more than regular eye-glasses, but nearly $800 dollars. C’mon now. How can this be, especially when it only costs about $50 worth of material to make them.

If the American people were in the best shape ever, regarding their purchasing power, as suggested by some experts [even over at the Wall Street Journal], they would have voted for Kamala the Commie. They wouldn’t have fought like hell to elect Trump in hopes for better economic days. It’s almost as if we’re all lying in a hospital bed, plugged into all sorts of artificial life support, tubes in every orifice and hemoglobin being pumped intravenously into our bodies, and after we weakly raise our heads to ask the doctor, “How am I doing?”, he responds, “You’re in fine shape and absolutely perfectly healthy, except for the fact that if we unplug anything you’ll drop dead.”

Just to put things in perspective, $2000 worth of assets from 1975 would currently cost an American citizen $11, 728. The U.S. dollar has lost 83% of its value since 1975; since that time, inflation has run at a rate of approximately 3.68% per year, some years less and some years much more, which resulted in a cumulative price increase of 486.42%

The U.S. dollar has been devalued by 20% in the Biden years alone, and prices as measure by the seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index (CPI) are currently up by over 20%, and much higher for some products, since the country has been under fire by Bidenomics.

Many Americans are already well aware that inflation and the dollar devaluation are just creative schemes that would be considered crimes, if it wasn’t the government driving the system and the dynamics of both. It’s basically backdoor taxation, and many Social Security and Medicare recipients can’t be happy that they are being paid in a debased currency, if they’ve noticed – but how could they not help but notice in this economy?

On December 19th 2024, a report was released by the Federal Reserve that projects inflation to be hotter than expected in the upcoming year. Normally one would make a natural assumption that this practically demands rate hikes from the Fed, but the market still predicts the Fed will cut rates after this meeting. All the numbers confirm that inflation is bottoming out and headed much higher, especially if one looks at the Producer Price Index – the leading indicator for the Consumer Price Index – because most usually business have their prices increase first and pass those increases on to the consumer afterwards. The case remains that we are headed in the wrong direction.

Our Gross Domestic Product is $29.37 trillion, we have a national debt of over $36 trillion with interest at over a trillion dollars on it, and in just the first two months of the federal government’s fiscal year of 2025, the Biden regime has already spent $624 billion more than the nation has produced. Is it any wonder why the nation is in trouble and so many individuals too.

Any nation that spends more in interest payments for its national debt, as the U.S. does now, cannot stay a great nation for very long, not at all. History is replete with failed empires that did just such a thing, from the Roman Empire, Habsburg Spain to King Louie XVI and on to the British Empire and the Ottoman Empire, as well.

And still the Biden economists’ beat their drums – those well-paid Marxist apologists, apparatchiks and propaganda peddlers, as they push the big, fantastic, delusional lie, that Americans are more prosperous now than ever before. The truth illuminates this lie and reveals the nation, on the whole, and the average citizen is much poorer than we were 40 or 50 years ago, or even five years ago, but that would disrupt the status quo of Biden and Company and their few “elite”, self-serving few oligarchs at the top and their control over the narrative and America’s wealth, as long as the bulk of the general population can be made to believe the propaganda that we’re all better off.

In the late-1970s, when I worked for the LaVergne Fire Department [LaVergne, Tennessee], during one of our typical gatherings at the local cafe, the any topics discussed between me and three of my older friends leaned into what was widely regarded as the economic malaise that the Carter administration had produced. One was a master carpenter who’d worked for himself all his life, one was the fire chief, and the other was an ex-soldier [Lt Colonel U.S. Army] who had served in combat in Vietnam. They all agreed at the time that if anyone was ever to achieve anything financially, they had to live frugally and initially save forty to fifty percent of their net pay, if they were actually serious.

This was still entirely possible in those days and well within reach, but it would be impossible today. How many workers are able to save forty percent of their pay, much less fifty? Maybe some can, but only because they are in the top ten percent of the wage earners today or they’re receiving family assistance, special discounts and subsidies. This is proof positive that we’re not just poorer than we were fifty years ago but we’re much more poorer.

In July of this year, data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis exhibited that personal savings had fallen to their lowest level since November of 2022. Just prior to the Covid plandemic, Americans, on average, were saving almost eight percent of their earnings. That number has decreased to 3.4% under the Biden regime.

The only real measurement of an individual’s prosperity is by way of the purchasing power of the hourly wage one receives for one’s labor. The only thing that truly matters is just how much value do you receive from your hour of work and just how much can one really buy with it. And currently, the average American barely gets jack-shit from their wage when one looks at how much it costs for the bare, simple necessities of life, utilities and groceries.

Look at automobiles and how far they have advanced and declined simultaneously from the days that Americans were simply glad to have a reliable, dependable, reasonably priced and relatively well-made made-in-America vehicle that would very seldom fail to deliver them safely to their destinations. Usually they had a heater and a radio and air-conditioners too became standard, and they were easy to repair, for the most part, for any man intelligent and industrious to do so. Obama’s boondoggle of Cash for Clunkers has currently priced even used cars out of reach for many Americans and Biden’s asinine requirement to go totally green with Electric Vehicles by 2035 has damaged the car industry, which now is preparing to retool and go back to the tried and true, since all the push towards electric vehicles did was produce vehicles that cost a small fortune and are bigger and heavier due to the cobalt batteries they use, and with all the electronics attached to them, no average American can work on them at home. And Lord, Lord, isn’t it a wonder how we got by without rearview cameras and in-vehicle hands free mobile phone technology for all those years, and vehicles turned into rolling entertainment centers.

And do we even want to speak on the housing situation, with the exorbitant rents and excessive mortgages people pay today. I recall my Mom paid approximately $17,500 for a brand new 1200 square foot home in 1972; to be fair, the builder misquoted the price five thousand too low but still honored the price. And that same house in that same area would now cost a person $250k. Throughout Middle Tennessee, home prices increased by 30% over the past four years, while property taxes have increased 25% to 30% depending on the county.

And now, if matters couldn’t get any worse, we find that job openings have fallen below eight million in the second half of 2024, far below the 12 million job openings that were available in March of 2022. This is largely a direct consequence from thousands of retail stores being forced to close in 2024, with thousands more slated to be shuttered and abandoned in 2025. All across the country we find the landscape littered with once thriving businesses boarded up, homeless people begging for a meal on street corners and a rising number of unemployed

If one looks at the current traditional rate of unemployment number today, that figure rests at 24.2% nationwide, far above the stated official number of 4.3%, because it is a measure of workers who are looking for work but can’t find a full-time job, work part-time but need full-time work, or earn a wage below the poverty line.

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey that was conducted between August 20th 2024 to September 16th 2024 revealed that 34% of Americans eighteen and older had to skimp and cut back on necessary expenses in order to pay their energy bill, had kept their home at an unsafe temperature, or were unable to pay the total amount on an energy bill at least once over the previous year.

President Trump has made clear that he believes a new massive American drive to produce energy at all levels will be the key to bringing down prices, ending the inflation crisis and accelerating economic growth. In a fairly recent interview [October 2nd 2024] with Dave Ramsey, a renown financial expert from Tennessee, Trump stated, “If you get the energy down, other things will follow … I believe I’ll be able to get energy down to fifty percent of what it is now in less than a year.” ~ The Hidden Cause of Inflation No One Is Talking About

In the meantime, all America, conservatives and communists alike, are on a freight train of out-of-control spending that is steamrolling the country in the wrong direction and on the wrong track with another freight train named “Disaster” promising a head-on collision of epic proportions.

The seemingly unsurmountable task of correcting the course of this economic catastrophe that Trump faces cannot be ignored, since millions of Americans already believed we were in a deep recession prior to the election, while many experts and political pundits have recently suggested that Trump can’t really stop this economic runaway train and disaster for the future. Thinking positive thoughts that Trump can do what he says he can, despite his own inclinations to spend trillions more of the taxpayers’ dollars, I pray he can and will, although I suspect that the years between now and 2035 will be some of the most tumultuous and chaotic we have seen to date and in our lifetime.

All America should be working hard to help set the nation back on course and praying that President Trump and his economic team are truly up to the job, because the alternative paints a horrendous image of a life of poverty, misery and suffering should the status quo remain, no matter the reason.

December 24, 2024

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.