Americans the general sense of where the real American economy lies and the dynamics that suggest no matter how much the Trump administration or any successive administration props it up, an accounting is coming, and it most likely means the inevitable collapse of the U.S. economy. It won’t take much of a hiccup to cause a massive economic disruption to be accompanied by extreme social upheaval and violence, especially given all we have witnessed from our illegal alien “guests” – guests hell – damned foreign takers and looters.
Before this happens, despite Trumps efforts to rid us of taxes and stoke the economy by way of sound energy and immigration policy, we can expect to see Big Government fighting to survive. This means the American people will eventually be put upon with much heavier taxes in order for the nation to remain solvent, as government enforcers take their five pounds of flesh and make Americans bleed money, one way or another.
Almost everyone lives on debt today, except for me and a few others I know. The American Dream didn’t used to be about being buried in debt, and as a matter of fact, most of our ancestors shied away from using its mechanisms as much as possible, because they wished to stay far away from all the penalties that went hand-in-hand with any unfortunate default event.
But today, it appears we find more truth in the fun witticisms from George Carlin, who once noted you would have to be asleep to believe in the American Dream. ~ J.O.S.
The Extinction of America’s Middle Class
Americans are skeptical of President Trump’s “great economy”, as the middle class feel hard pressed just to provide the necessities of life this Christmas, while the poor are – well – ust poor and forever struggling if with a healthy heaping of Uncle Sam’s financial “help”. Many, who are not too well versed in economics, are struggling to understand why the cost of everything, from food to housing, cars, medical care and tuition, has risen so sharply since 2020, as our living standards decline before our very eyes, with everyone being herded down the road to serfdom and forced to work exponentially harder to earn more debased U.S. dollars that are growing exponentially weaker with each passing day, thanks to the instigation of high inflation by increasing the number of U.S. dollars by forty percent since 2020, massive borrowing and current massive levels of government spending.
Is America’s economy entering a recessionary period? Some would respond with a strong yes, despite the manipulated market predictions. Thirty-year bonds at an interim high? The social angst of it all is weighing heavy today, and it goes on and on and on, in a never-ending cycle.
Many players in the stock market and sectors of finance that gauge the health of the U.S. economy do so on the back of manipulated data that has gone through one shifting set of analytics after another, pushed by a variety of speculators and investors, rather than relying on the initial raw data as it arrives. Soaring asset prices do not always mean all is well and the economy is strong, and today’s conclusion that from experts who say the economy is strong is a collective hallucination that is soon to help create even more economic chaos.
The national debt currently sits at $38 trillion and counting, while the government keeps right on borrowing and engaging in out-of-control government spending, as if someone tossed the national credit card to a band of raving lunatics – I started to say monkeys, but even monkeys have better sense.
And the looters and takers of this nation are only making matters worse, as one might have noticed in a recent release from Newsweek that reported sixty-three percent of Americans “strongly support” government stimulus checks to fight inflation. Yes – our society’s population on the whole has become so ignorant, that they now clamor for currency debasement in order to combat the effects of currency debasement.
Flawed as it is, a good number of policies sold as solutions to inflation only make it worse and self-perpetuating. Much like a drug addict, we see the people demanding more of the very poison that’s killing them, along with the economy and America.
Whenever the experts detach from the raw real world of sound economic principles, in the service of convenience and abundance – the constant push to grow the GDP using the flawed Modern Monetary Theory and Keynesian economics – we set an artificial economy in motion, where the data is based on hope and projections much more than actual facts, an inter-connected, self-reinforcing hallucination bound for an inconvenient collision with the raw economics of the real world, as the current house of cards meets its demise and ultimate collapse.
The wealthy are able to absorb the economic hits to some large degree, but the so-called “middle class” is collapsing under the stress and strain of an array of economic factors and variables. The poor? Well, as usual, they are screaming bloody murder and demanding that Big Government do “more, More, MORE”.
Incredibly as it read, I recently ran across a report from BFG Financial that revealed sixty-two percent of Americans earning over $300k per year still struggle with credit card debt. And these so-called “experts” had the gall to suggest that making $300k per year no longer means a person is financially secure. – lord, Lord, LORD and throw in a My Goodness, too!
If I made $300k a year, I would feel so unbelievably doubly and triply blessed beyond my wildest imagination, and I could live in an outstanding fashion, having lived well on infinitely less money to date.
Who can’t make it on 300k a year? Who are these idiots? $300k is far from the middle-class cutoff and even farther from being remotely impoverished. If one cannot make it on 300k, it’s a personal problem and one centered on a lack of financial responsibility and discipline. These are the people trying to get it all and get it now, no matter what it takes and no matter that their consumer mentality is degrading our society by way of current credit defaults, as America, once a nation of producers, has been pushed by central bankers and “easy credit” to become a nation of consumers, while the nation is poised for a massive economic collapse unlike anything ever seen before.
It all comes down to choices and living within one’s means rather than trying to purchase every new toy that arrives on the market, whether it’s a new computer, car, gimmick product, the latest fashion in high-dollar clothes or the latest trendy worthless fad toy made in China and sold in America for a hundred times its worth. And of course, there are always those who believe they must portray a certain image as they dive deep into the game of keeping up with the Joneses.
Hell – Pay me $300k a year and I’d be as secure as a bug in a camel-hair rug and twice as content, ecstatic in fact. And I’d thank God for having found more success in earning my way through this life.
While it’s always fantastic to be able to live debt-free, there is a time and a place for it, so long as one manages it responsibly. Debt does not have to be a bad thing, especially as we note it was the expansion of credit that ultimately has allowed so many Americans to own their own homes. The other side of debt is savings. They’re loaned and pay savers interest. People have lost sight of the fact that historically, and in every sound banking system, savings were loaned for production, not consumption – as the debtor received them to build factories and working farms. The production from the factories and fields made the debt self-liquidating. But, consumer debt is never self-liquidating, and rather than borrow for production purposes, the average American today simply borrows to increase his standard of living, which quite often ends down a dead-end road for the borrower and the banks – banks, the other part of the story and part of the problem within America’s economy.
Still, such cases of personal irresponsibility do not negate the fact that all Americans are witnessing other severe problems of all sorts within this current fascist economic system, especially with the emergence of new economic bubbles that are close to the bursting point, including our credit, housing, and A.I. markets [yes, the young A.I. industry is already on the verge of a bust].
Borrowing more money to maintain spending, whether by individuals or the federal government, is nothing less than hanging on by one’s fingernails – not security for the poor and middle class, not financial security for the nation.
Americans see the erosion of traditional values and the trashing of the Constitution’s demand for a sound dollar backed by gold or an equivalence in silver. Not only are we dealing with a deteriorating economic situation, we find our culture and national identity on a slippery slope as well, subverted by radical, red-diaper doper babies grown to adulthood and their racist black lives matter and Muslim allies who hate America to Her core. And, in their adoption of a hand-to-mouth approach to living, far too many Americans have now embraced socialism and communism and all those ideas that are the antithesis of the American Dream, rejecting those values that helped build fine, decent, strong and independent and prosperous free individuals across so many past decades.
Part of the perception that the economy is flawed lies with the arbitrary economic cutoff lines between being poor and middle class. It’s easy to be charitable in times of plenty and excess, but becomes infinitely troublesome in hard times when folks are fighting over one last bruised banana. When a family making $65,000 a year is paying out $32,000 a year for childcare and so many thousands more for everything else, just to survive, they cannot help but feel somewhat resentful, as they watch their neighbor using an EBT card at the grocery store, while they have to put items back on the shelf. They witness illegal alien families receiving housing vouchers as they themselves face eviction. They see people getting everything they want for free, that they are working sixty hours a week to barely afford – “They” – the mother, father and oldest teen children all working fulltime jobs just to provide for food, housing and utilities, and a few extras and luxury items if they’re lucky.
Far too many Americans are far too willing to simply ride the welfare train and soak up all the free gravy without ever being asked to break a sweat for it. In the meantime, the middle class and wealthy bear the costs.
America has created a system whereby the only real way to survive appears to be that one must be poor enough to qualify for aid from the federal and state governments or rich enough not to be bothered by the current economic woes. And in the meantime, the middle class is fracturing and bearing the brunt of our declining economy as it is being raided, raped, cannibalized and essentially hollowed out and caused to diminish in size, to the point that we now see the largest gap in American history between the rich and the poor and the so-called middle class heads towards its extinction.
Although some “experts” today are trying to assert that the new poverty level is approximately $140k – with some claiming it to be closer to $150k – due to the wheelbarrows of money it takes to survive today, it really is right at $31,200 for a family of four, given all the various welfare programs at the disposal of all Americans who currently struggle to make ends meet. And at the moment, some seventy-three million Americans currently receive some sort of assistance from U.S. government welfare programs.
Michael Green, chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management, recently used conservative, national average data to show the various costs for meeting minimum needs today: Childcare requires $32,773; housing – $23, 267; food – $14, 717; transportation – $14,828; healthcare – $10,567; other essentials – $21,857. The required net income totals $118,009, which jumps to a required gross income of $136,500 once one adds approximately $18,500 in federal, state and FICA taxes, creating a threshold and a bottom-line floor that some still call “too little”.
Read More: Nearly Half of Americans, Including 1 in 5 Trump Voters – Blame President for Cost of Living
Years ago, mothers were the primary source of “childcare” since they typically were able to stay home, or if they did work, they had a support system with one or both grandmothers, perhaps an aunt or two, willing to pitch in to help them. So, while government help with childcare is deemed a necessity today, it was seen in that light in years gone by. Life truly was a family affair, especially in 1950s America.
In 1963, Mollie Orshansky, a Social Security Administration economist, created an economic gauge to determine exactly what was needed to survive at that time. According to the Orshansky model, roughly three times the amount for a family of four to purchase food represented the minimum amount necessary to live, since food, at that time, did take approximately one third of a family’s budget. She essentially noted that although it was virtually impossible to determine how much income was “enough”, it was quite easy to discover how much income was “too little”.
In a “great economy”, a society’s people produce more than they consume, and they save the difference. But when the U.S. dollar is inflated, no one can possibly save much. One is saving something that is losing value as fast as a person saves it. This is the real problem for all Americans.
Consider the following if you will. A person works long fulltime hours at a job for fifty or so, only to witness the Federal Reserve Bank print forty percent of the money supply in a few short years and inflate away twenty years of his work. This is what actually happened during the Covid event and subsequent mass psychosis, when our government indulged in a frenzy of currency debasement. And unless one’s wealth has increased by forty percent since 2020, one is left to struggle even more in a declining economy.
The Federal Reserve Bank, and central banks in general, is the enemy of the American people. It has no honest idea of what interest rates should be – no one does – and its policies are the antithesis of real free market principles that allow a people to thrive and prosper. The Federal Reserve Bank represents the fifth plank of the Communist manifesto, and it has been the driving force behind America’s currency debasement and every boom-and-bust cycle in our economy, since its inception in 1913; not only was its policies responsible for the Great Depression, it is currently the cause of the spiraling cost of living in America.
The average American feels practically compelled to speculate in stocks, real estate and crypto currencies, placing hope against hope that they can remain ahead of currency debasement, even if their expertise and knowledge is quite limited in these areas. In fact, the average American isn’t qualified to do this in any real productive or successful manner.
America is on track to witness exponentially greater political violence and extreme economic and civil upheaval. A relatively smart chimp could have seen this several decades out, but now, it appears the nation is sitting at the edge of the abyss, as all America holds its breath in anxious anticipation of what may actually come – what consequences we all may be forced to bear.
The next generation of Americans are being born into serfdom, largely because the country’s debt is actually sitting at around $160 trillion which includes the $38 trillion and growing national debt once one counts America’s contingent and deferred liabilities. One way or another, young and future Americans are being left to hold the bag and to pay the price for their fathers’ immoral, indefensible wasteful ways. The Americans being born today are entering the world already placed behind an economic eight ball.
“It can only end badly” some note. Badly is an understatement. At some point, America will suffer the Greater Depression, one that makes the 1929 Great Depression pale by comparison. And as a result, the present political divides will become even entrenched along hard lines and set on a course for the bloodiest civil war the world has ever seen, once the proverbial shit hits the fan and the end of the world as we know it finally arrives.
December 7, 2025
Justin O. Smith ~ Author
~ 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.
