As anyone will tell, economics is a multifaceted, highly volatile, dynamic topic with more moving parts and components than Carter has liver pills, but I have done the best I could here, in my own layman terms, to deliver a fairly comprehensive overview of the entire American economy and what it and its manipulators are doing to the country on the whole and the American people in the end.

Life imitates art. Most of America’s so-called “role models” are immoral, and America’s society has become immoral on the whole, too. Outside of the severely flawed modern Christian churches, every organ on American culture, for whatever passes as “American culture” today, pushes materialism, self-aggrandizement and living for the moment, in the theme of the 1960s slogan “if it feels good do it“.

Many things have come together in an effort to kill the American Dream, intentionally or not, from executive greed, e.g. multi-million dollar CEO bonuses, and consolidation of wealth that stagnates wages for the rest of the workers participating in the jobs markets.

The American Dream has become a fragile, nearly mythical thing for most, when some seventy percent of America is living paycheck to paycheck and barely have any savings at all, a situation that came to be via the complicity of both parties in the outsourcing of American jobs in the Third World and so many other schemes focused on benefiting the very few, as they refused to address the unnatural abundance of ongoing problems created by this rigged economy.

What we see today is what any and every society gets when it trusts those social engineers to hold the most important mechanisms of society in their hands to do as they will. Social engineering of American society in every sector has been the bane of all Americans.

Most of us, for the most part, have been able to really live the American Dream to some large degree, due to the luck of the draw and having been born early enough to benefit from the system, before it began its downward turn to its inevitable self-destruct, but I fear that it will be far out of reach for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and generations beyond, short of immediate great and drastic change and real economic reform of the manner in which business is conducted in the country.

~ At the Crossroads of America’s Economy ~

In 2025, America stands at a crossroads. By all official accounts, America’s economy is strong, as we hear Government officials from the Trump administration tout the “strong economy,” citing GDP growth, low unemployment, and moderate inflation. But for millions of Americans, these numbers feel like a cruel abstraction and an illusion that suggests a false prosperity. Beneath the glossy surface of economic indicators lies a nation increasingly divided between the extremely wealthy who profit from capital and speculation and the average American worker, and the reality is far more sobering: rising homelessness, overcrowded housing, meaningless rising wages, and the relentless erosion of purchasing power. The American Dream, once a beacon of hope, now flickers dimly for the working class and those who labor endlessly just to survive.

Raising the minimum wage is not a true solution for anyone or any part of the economy’s major ills. While it may offer short-term relief, it’s a band-aid on a deeper wound. Without sound money — currency backed by tangible value — wage increases merely chase rising prices. Inflation becomes a hidden tax, disproportionately hurting the poor.

Historically, sound money (like the gold standard) restrained government spending and protected purchasing power. Today’s fiat system enables unchecked monetary expansion, benefiting asset holders while impoverishing wage earners. Restoring monetary discipline — whether through commodity backing, fiscal restraint, or central bank accountability — is essential to long-term stability.

At the moment, the federal poverty level for a family of four is $32,150 annually, while an individual earning $15,650 per year is also considered to be living at a poverty level. If one makes less than this, well, it doesn’t take a genius to know that you are struggling like hell just to provide the necessities of life for yourself and your family.

For those unfortunate Americans earning less than $29,200 a year, you are now considered to be in the bottom ten percent of wage earners, although the designator of “middle class” has been given a wide berth and suggested to contain everyone who has a net worth of between $30k and $209k per year. The upper middle class have a net worth somewhere between $209k and $714k, while the upper class hold net worths of up to $2.1 million, followed by the wealthiest ten percent who, to put it bluntly, are just filthy rich, with a great deal of it unknown simply due to privacy laws and the proclivity for the use of offshore bank accounts amongst this group.

Approximately twenty-five million households make less than $30k each year.

Yes, our nation has many welfare programs and “safety nets” in place, and most Americans live better on welfare than billions of people across the globe, but even so, given the construct of our financial system, it is still every bit a struggle just to get by. We do see may millions of people thriving and buying nearly everything their little heart’s desire today, and by that measure alone, one might say it’s a “great economy”, but we also see many millions more living in squalor and lacking most of what is needed just to live a somewhat comfortable and normal life in America.

On the flip side of this, we must also consider that those folks at the bottom twenty percent of our economy are virtually living equal in many respects to the second lowest quintile of our population, once we adjust for the value of government benefits. In essence, America’s second-to-the-lowest working poor, those living in households closest to the bottom tier of the five income groups typically assigned in academic studies, have no real motivation to work other than their own character and pride motivate them to do better. If they did not work to some degree or another, they would fall to the lowest of America’s poor, but once one investigates the value of the benefits they would receive, they would actually be better off. And therein lies much of the drag on the U.S. economy, as the producers are forced by law to pay their hard-earned money into a system designed to care for many who simply do not try to do better, because it has become so lucrative just to do bad.

Each and every day we all witness the Cantillon Effect in America, whereby those first recipients of the newly printed money flooding the markets at the behest of the Federal Reserve Bankers receive and enjoy higher standards of living than the later recipients. And we also see a disproportionate rise in prices among a variety of goods in our economy. The first financial sectors to receive the newly printed inflationary money gain the most from it, as the money eventually filters its way throughout the entire economy. And obviously, the first recipients of this money when the Federal Reserve runs the presses at red-hot, warp speed are Wall Street bond dealers and the financial traders and speculators who form their ecosystems.

And in the meantime, we are all trapped inside this debt-based economy that has been led by an illegal, anti-American Federal Reserve Bank focused on enriching itself and its cronies at the ongoing expense of the American taxpayer since day one of its creation, to the overall detriment of the country and the American people — killing the American Dream along the way — manufacturing one boom and bust cycle after another and creating spates of high inflation that act as backdoor taxation along the way. And the fiat money and the devaluation of the U.S. dollar by these private bankers has been criminal, since the only real way to achieve economic growth and stability is to start with a sound and stable asset-based currency.

History offers a sobering parallel. The Roaring Twenties dazzled with stock market gains and opulence for the elite, while the working class teetered on the edge. That gilded age collapsed into the Great Depression. In contrast, the post-WWII era ushered in the “Great Compression”—a time of shared prosperity, largely driven by sound fiscal policy, despite the progressive taxation of the people at a 42% rate, with some top-tiered producers paying 91% if the tax loopholes weren’t there for them.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, income inequality shrank, and inflation-adjusted income for the bottom 90% grew fivefold. But beginning in the 1980s, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and globalization reversed this trend. Today, the top 1% hold nearly 20% of national income—matching levels seen just before the Great Depression.

The institutions that promised stability — government, education, finance, media — mutated into extraction machines. Still speaking in the soothing promissory tones of the old language that tickled every American’s ears with the promise of great wealth for little real effort, they now worked towards a new agenda and a new end result: to keep people compliant inside a system that no longer offers any real way out.

More than half of all thirty-year-olds were married homeowners in 1950, but today that number hovers around fifteen percent. Those who even try for home ownership find themselves facing a price-tag of somewhere between $280k to $500K, depending on location, just to find a decent, livable home. You can’t afford this on McDonald’s money, not a home, utilities, groceries, gasoline and everything else that comes with living in America today.

And no one can deny that each and every time a Democrat administration has been in power, Americans have been pushed out of work in order to create a dependent class that furthers the agenda of the Marxist-Maoist communists of America. It’s a globalist business model for government bureaucrats, NGOs, and politically connected private contractors. Simultaneously, Americans at almost all levels of income have been locked out of housing markets that have been manipulated by environmentalist restrictions, e.g. California in the aftermath of the wildfires, along with other far left locations, unrestrained illegal alien invasions, and increasingly by trillion-dollar hedge funds that take over entire neighborhoods for single-family homes.

Times have changed too, and the jobs markets are a conglomeration of industries past and those that survived the globalization from the 1970s to the present. I could go out as a young teen in the 1970s during Carter’s miserable recession years and still find good work, for one so young, although it might not have been all that glamorous or enjoyable. I’m not saying it was easy, but it was easier than today, for anyone with the gumption to get out and show their determination and willingness to actually work at a job. A person could usually walk into a place of business — clean, presentable and eager — and get hired that same day, but now, one must go online to compete with an untold thousands of other applicants in near anonymous fashion, with little to no chance their application will even be noticed. And this doesn’t even take into account how millions of illegal alien invaders are taking jobs from Americans and working in the country today, despite laws forbidding them from working here.

One should also note that America’s population has increased from approximately 209 million in 1972 when I was fifteen to nearly 350 million today, adding another dynamic to the economic situation we currently find in the country.

In an NBC article from August 13th 2025 by Shannon Pettypiece, one young American’s case perfectly illustrates the trouble young people today are facing, while being forced to return to live in their parents’ homes. The report stated in part:

“Sean Breen, who graduated this spring with a communications degree from California State University, Long Beach, said he and nearly all of his high school friends, both men and women, are back home living with their parents and unemployed. He said even those who went to top-ranked colleges and got seemingly in-demand degrees are unable to find work.

‘It is like a high school reunion,’ Breen said. ‘We’re all, we are back in Marin County this summer, all unemployed, all trying to find a barista job, a part-time something, because we haven’t found anything.'”

On August 7th 2025, FOX Business noted:

“Despite ticking down slightly from the previous quarter, the report showed that nearly 10% of credit card balances held by Americans aged 18-29 became 90 or more days overdue in the second quarter.”

A study released by Credit One Bank on August 8th 2025, revealed that 62% of the Gen Z folks have no emergency savings, double the rate of the Baby Boomers; and two-thirds of all consumers have six months or less in savings, with Gen X the least prepared.

I have often asserted, the bad, deeply flawed fiat money issued like monopoly money by our central bank is the mother of inflationary windfalls on Wall Street and the atrophying prosperity on Main Street America.

Recently, David Stockman, a well-known economist, wrote:

“In 2025 constant dollars, the real net worth of the average top 0.1% household grew nearly three times faster than the net worth of the average household in the bottom 50% over the same 35-year period. … Stated in absolute dollars, the real wealth of the average household among the bottom 50% increased by $21,000 over the past one-third of a century. By contrast, the real net worth of the average household among the top 0.1% rose by $117 million. That’s about 5,600X more.”

The disconnect between the elitist, globalist “experts” in America and reality becomes even more dramatic once one compares the production of goods since 2007 to the present with the constant dollar value of goods consumption during the same period. Cumulative real consumption of goods rose by sixty-two percent but domestic industrial output was up by only 1.4%. This massive gap could only have been filled by imports, which indicates on the margin, the growth of goods consumption over the last seventeen years [give or take a few months] was based on imports financed by massive current account deficits.

America’s total sum production in utility, mining, energy and manufacturing steadily climbed by 3.3% every year between 1954 and 2007, readily evidenced by the industrial production index, and yet since that era, it has essentially reached a pinnacle, seeming to have halted and rising only by 0.10% per year during the past seventeen years or so. In other words, the growth rate of America’s industrial foundation has been severely stymied, and it has plunged by ninety-seven percent since the Golden Growth Era of the 1950s, when one man’s salary was enough to take care of all the necessities for a family of four, provide luxury items too and even take regular vacations.

While many of President Trump’s recent policy moves in energy, steel, A.I and the electronic chip industries are promising thousands upon thousands of new jobs, most of this is still several years out and not really of much help to the people now, unless it’s those in the construction fields.

It’s worth noting that a massive new energy-guzzling A.I. data center — the Hyperion Data Center — is being constructed in Louisiana right now for META, that is the size of Manhattan. So far, Zuck says he plans to invest $10 billion in the facility, while he has secured another $29 billion from bond giant PIMCO and asset manager Blue Owl Capital, in order to build a data center projected to cost $50 billion. All I can say is “Uncle Sam better not toss in the other $11 billion“, because for my money, this anti-American piece of shit who censors free speech should not even be allowed to do business in America.

One of the worst things ever to be seen and heard in our country was the day a U.S. president deemed that certain companies were “too big to fail” and that we “must temporarily abandon the free-market system to save it”, as the sucking sound of American wealth leaving the country, for Europe and all points beyond, was heard like the roar of a million CAT5 hurricanes.

This nation has never fully recovered from what transpired in 2008 and again in 2020, and in fact, our people will spend the rest of this century clawing their way back to any real sense of prosperity, in a manner that might eventually demand letting the house of cards collapse or bringing it to its natural end early, by simply defaulting on the U.S. national debt and taking down the global markets with us. Yes, it will be bad, but it’s something that’s eventually coming anyway, of its own accord and the weight of its unsustainable mechanisms and demands.

Far too many within the federal government are in love with the Modern Monetary Theory, and they full well believe that the empire is forever and can endlessly fund any amount of grift and graft through borrowed and printed money. But not only is this erroneous, it is an egregious criminal way of operating outside the realm of reality. Every empire ever built on debt eventually imploded upon itself, and so too will this one.

Many say that our economy has survived far past all expectations, as many “experts” continue to contend that manipulations and artificial constructs have supported it for most of this century and that they can continue to do so, from now ’til who knows when — anyone’s guess is as good as the next.

America is living on debt, “money” borrowed from the future, a future the experts contend will be so over-supplied with energy and other Artificial Intelligence goodies that we will be able to pay the national debt down along with all the interest America is piling up with ease.

Others suggest that there simply isn’t any way to keep avoiding raising taxes across the board on all Americans, but as we have seen by way of past history, real-world responses always have revealed that higher tax rates rarely generate the results predicted by static economic models, as the American people bear the cost of less work, less innovation and less productivity leading to fewer opportunities for everyone, rich or poor.

Just as many other past administrations have made meager efforts at reining in massive out-of-control spending and make necessary “reforms” to our government, so too do we now find the Trump administration making meager cuts here and there and pretending that minor trims to the government are major reforms, even as it increases spending and grows the government in other sectors, refusing to tackle the demographic and entitlement time bombs ticking beneath us all. What we see today is the continued commission of a generational injustice toward our children and grandchildren, as an unsustainable, rapidly growing national debt is being left to them to pay through eventual higher taxes and a massive rate of inflation that will arrive as the dollar drops to all-time lows in value. This is economically and morally reprehensible.

Our current national debt sits above $37 trillion, and it’s projected to be well over $55 trillion by 2035. What could possibly go wrong? Total household debt increased by $185 billion to hit $18.39 trillion in the second quarter of 2025, according to the latest Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit.

Let’s not forget that $15 trillion of the national debt was accumulated in just eight short years over the past two administrations, one Republican and one Democrat.

The consequences of America’s out-of-control spending will surprise many when the hard rain finally falls, somehow believing in their arrogance that a day of reckoning will never come — that subsequent administrations can carry on business as usual, ever more corrupt and immoral and shorn of value, maximizing profits and gains for themselves and their cronies, aka Nancy Pelosi-style, pillaging and plundering the wealth of America via lobbyists, insider trading, short sells, and a sick, new version of crony-capitalism that is raging strong as ever, even under President Donald J. Trump. They think themselves immune from the consequences, but they are not, and the hell of it is that they are doing great damage to all America in the process.

Massive government spending — often on military adventurism, corporate bailouts, and bloated bureaucracies — has ballooned the national debt. Much of this spending is not only unnecessary but arguably unconstitutional, diverting resources from public goods like education, healthcare, and infrastructure.

This fiscal recklessness fuels inflation, erodes the dollar’s value, and punishes savers and wage earners. Families are forced to share homes, work multiple jobs, and still struggle to afford groceries, gas, and electricity. The economy may be growing, but prosperity is not being shared.

The corruption and moral rot of unlimited debt is presented as “free money” by those proponents of Keynesian and Marxist economics, but it’s unsustainable, unrealistic, and unaffordable in the end.

America’s economy is thrashing in the throes and the midst of a plan that began over a century ago under the Wilson administration, which contained a sophisticated pump and dump scheme that has very nearly drained all it can from America’s wealth base today. From 1913 to the present, the American people were forced to accept systematic changes in how America was governed and how citizens were legally classified. What followed was a mechanism that made every working American nothing more than a cog in the machine under a system of control disguised as progress, debt as opportunity, and collapse as evolution. The postwar boom of the 1950s didn’t contradict or attempt to reform or repeal that system but instead paved the way for its success and the people’s fall — those people who were outside the club.

The American Dream seems to no longer exist for most of America. What was once promised is now unaffordable. The institutions that upheld the illusion are failures, far gone and empty. They extract whatever assets and wealth they wish to take, but no longer inspire any hope whatsoever for America’s little man on the street. They preach prosperity for all while enforcing dependence. They sell admissions to the game for the golden ring while removing one’s own agency and the ability to actually succeed within the system.

And yet you will hear them regularly declare that the dream is alive.

Famed stand-up comedian George Carlin once humorously noted:

“That’s why they call it the American Dream — because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Yes, the American Dream is alive and well, but only for those who will ultimately step away from the system and make it on their own.

If current trends persist, America risks becoming a nation of modern serfs – bound not by chains, but by debt, inflation, and economic immobility. The erosion of the middle class and the rise of plutocracy threaten not just prosperity, but democracy itself.

America must choose: continue down the path of inequality and economic feudalism, or renew its commitment to liberty, opportunity, and justice for all. The economy should serve the people — not the other way around.

Let us not be lulled by the siren song of stock market gains while our neighbors go hungry. Let us demand an economy rooted in fairness — a true free market capitalist system free of overregulation, unnecessary government interventions, economic fascism and Marxist tenets like the Federal Reserve Bank and the income tax — sound money, and shared prosperity, whereby all men and women are left to succeed and prosper by their own capabilities, merit, and free associations and cooperation with other freedom-minded Americans.

Whatever new path we take as a nation, it must be a path that narrows the massive wealth gap and allows America’s working people to keep more of the fruits of their labor, while still allowing for those who take the risks of building a business to take the largest portion of the profits. Labor and owners/ management are not exclusive from one another and neither succeed without the cooperation of the other.

August 27, 2025

~ 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.