Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Monday, May 11, 2026
US economic growth peaked during the Reagan administration because America is a debt-based economy and we turned our backs on the formula during it
The trend for the growth of the total universe of US debt, TCMDO or total credit market debt outstanding, rolled over after 1985, one year after GDP did.
TCMDO is the real money, almost $108 trillion at the end of 2025. In 1985 it was $9 trillion.
M2 was merely $22 trillion at the end of 2025.
TCMDO is the sum total of debt expansion throughout the sectors of the economy.
Historically, most people have experienced it this way.
You get a full time job, which itself was created by a business selling debt in the form of stocks and bonds in order to expand its operations and future profits, and you go buy a house, putting down $100k on a $500k property. The bank loans you the $400k through fractional reserve lending on a small portion of its reserves but secured by the house. That new money is created out of thin air but is actually represented by the "guaranteed" future income stream of your job for 30 years, because you're a smart, reliable guy who never misses a day of work. TCMDO expands, and expands some more each time this happens.
When the conditions disappear for full time job creation, the process slows down. You can see the decline in the growth of the economy in the decline of the growth of the debt. Yes, everything is still growing, but not as vigorously.
Full time as a percent of population peaked 26 years ago, in 2000, at 53.55%, but retested the 1975 low of 46.74% in 2010 and 2011 at 46.97%, back-to-back years in the Late Great Recession.
Housing strength persisted in the immediate post-Reagan period on the illusory basis of windfalls from massive ordinary income tax cuts combined with the demographic peaking of the 1957 Baby Boom turning 40 in 1997 driving demand, but the hollowing out of the economy had already begun with the move of 20,000 manufacturers abroad after the 1986 tax reform.
Early warning signs began flashing already during the Clinton era.
Clinton immediately raised taxes in 1993 after he promised not to raise them in 1992, began a long series of cuts to federal government employment, and gutted the US Navy.
Americans were already struggling at the time and ominously tapped housing equity to sustain their middle class standard of living. Owners' Equity in Real Estate averaged 70% 1982-1986 inclusive, but plunged ten points within a decade to 60% 1996-1999 inclusive.
Homes had become piggy banks, preparing the way for 1997, the year Clinton and the Republicans went further still and turned homes into mere commodities, which in turn prepared the way for the housing catastrophe of 2008. From 1997 a flood of 70,000 more manufacturers began moving out as globalization kicked into high gear and China gained admission to the WTO in 2001.
Almost no one today wants to say out loud how unpatriotic this whole business was.
Reagan tried to convince us that we know best what to do with our own money, and we promptly turned around and staked our fortunes on foreign investment, not domestic.
Libertarianism is a lie.
Today you will be hard-pressed to identify a major manufacturing concern with 100% of its operations in the US. Tesla is a standout (heavily subsidized by the federal government!), but other than that most of the businesses which remain patriotically committed to the American idea are pretty small beer compared with how it used to be.
The formerly domestic debt expansion was exported abroad, creating middle classes where none existed before, especially in East Asia, and doing so cost businesses A LOT less, the key attraction for them.
As a result, enormous profits accrued to the owners of capital while wage earners here struggled to maintain the American dream. Wealth inequality soared, and now our children are 40 before they buy their first home.
TCMDO grew at a compound annual rate of 8.355% 1945-1985, but at only 6.398% 1985-2025. The change from optimism to pessimism can be traced in the trend lines.
Continued growth of TCMDO at the former rate but after 1985 would have yielded TCMDO at the end of 2025 of $223 trillion, or 106% more "money" than we actually have.
$115 trillion is "missing", or at least something like that. We will never know for sure, but some of us can still imagine because we watched the great betrayal actually happen.
This is why I say socialism is the future, not because I want it or because I think it will work.
People are going to figure this out eventually, get angry, and do the wrong thing, just like we did during the Reagan administration.
Sunday, May 10, 2026
So-called libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy advocates for limiting local control of zoning laws, blames local governments for high house prices, homelessness, and out-migration as if Michigan were California
... Michigan needs to learn the lessons of other states. California allows strict local zoning and tries to solve its housing problems through large government subsidies. The result is sky-high housing costs, a large homeless population and people moving elsewhere. ...
Local governments aren't to blame for federal legislation which turned homes into HELOC piggy banks and mere commodities to be pumped and dumped to escape capital gains taxation.
Fewer than 775,000 people are homeless in the United States, most of them by choice because of mental illness and drug abuse. Meanwhile there are 149,006,000 total housing units in the United States, 15,305,000 of which are unoccupied.
Things are already changing enough to make Michigan more attractive as a place to live. Michigan is a net in-migration state for the first time in 30 years in 2025.
There are no compelling reasons to take away local control of zoning authorities, unless you want the freedom to turn quiet neighborhoods where people want to live into Airbnb hellholes like Austin, Texas where many no longer do.
Total global visible oil inventories are forecast to fall to 7.6 billion barrels from 7.8 billion currently by June 1
Demand destruction of 5.6 million barrels per day globally is assumed.
The USA used approximately 20.6 million barrels per day in 2025, or 7.52 billion barrels.
IMF: Transits through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait remain half of what they were prior to the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and have not come close to replacing lost Persian Gulf shipping
... In the Red Sea, attacks on shipping that began in 2023 forced many vessels to reroute around Africa rather than use the Suez Canal. More than two years on, transits through the Bab el-Mandeb strait between Yemen and Djibouti remain stuck at roughly half their pre-attack level. ...
More.
I stopped caring about this particular economic measure when I realized that it obscures the fact that the top 20% in this country receive 60% of the income it displays
Frankly, most of the economic charts produced by the government do this kind of thing.
Most of the time the rich use this data to tell you how well things are going, when what they really mean is how well it's going for them.
It's an aggregate measure, so that the vast sums earned by the rich distort higher what's actually happening to the majority.
In the as-reported numbers at the time, everything actually went sideways for a time during the Great Recession and personal income actually fell, except that even that decline disappeared as the revisions to the data came in. The rich still made money in the Great Recession, enough to lift this aggregate measure ever higher right through the recession even as banks failed by the hundreds and millions lost their jobs and homes.
But the rich use this particular data set right now to tell you things like "you don't know how to shop" and "groceries have never been cheaper", you ignoramus.
They controlled roughly 60% of all income from 2020 to mid-2025, and the top 20% by wealth held nearly 72% of total household wealth as of Q4 2025.
The top 20% received roughly $14 trillion of the $23 trillion in this chart in March 2026, leaving the remaining $9 trillion, 40%, to be split by the 80%, the rest of us, however we must.
Rising prices of anything will naturally impact the 20% far less than the 80%.
It's another "let them eat cake" moment.
Saturday, May 9, 2026
AOC's goal goes far beyond becoming president: It's single payer healthcare
“They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Presidents come and go … elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever.”
More.
Friday, May 8, 2026
Elusive full-time jobs which fell off a cliff in the Great Recession hold back couple from having the children they want
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| 52% had a full time job on average in 2007, just 49% in 2025 |
... Clare Zakowski, a 28-year-old who works part time as a manager at a therapy practice, says she would welcome a federal paid family leave program, not that Congress is offering. She has always loved children; as a high schooler in Green Bay, Wis., she babysat and ran the activities for a summer camp. “I love their naïveté and innocence,” she told me. “I just think kids rock.” Ms. Zakowski has been with her boyfriend for over seven years, and children have been part of the discussion since the two first got together. But lately, she has been appalled by the manosphere, and worries about how A.I. will affect society. “The news every day is crazy, and it’s been that way for a while,” she said. “It just feels like we’re living in a really, really weird time.” Beyond paid leave (or universal health insurance, for that matter), she yearns for something deeper: a sense of security, something that she has yet to experience in America in her adult lifetime. “I feel like there’d have to be, I want to say a revolution, but basically big political change, like a moral awakening from everyone,” she said.
She had been looking for a full-time, higher-paying job to set herself up for parenthood, but found the search to be so stressful that she gave up. “I know there can be negatives to not planning ahead,” she told me, but “who even knows what the future holds?” ...
More.
Birth dearth blamed on chaos and uncertainty produced by the Great Recession
... In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, however, sometimes referred to as the Great Recession, births in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland declined, and then declined some more, even as their economies recovered throughout the 2010s. Little about those nations’ family policies had changed, and as far as anyone could tell, men were still doing their share of the dishes. The same downward trend held in the United States, where births have fallen by about 23 percent since 2007, despite high rates of immigration until last year. Births have also been declining in East Asian countries, even though governments in the region have thrown buckets of money at the problem. And in France, despite its longstanding pronatalist policies.
... What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.
... The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad. ...
More.
In 2023 Trump claimed 15 million illegals were in America, then in 2024 he upped it to 16 and 18 million, and then finished the year at 21 million, and now it's 25 million
For a decade from 2009-2019 illegal aliens in the United States were widely estimated at 11 million.
In April 2026 the foreign born civilian noninstitutional population over the age of 16 is 49.66 million, 6.14 million more than in April 2019 and down 780k from the March 2025 high.
Many millions of illegals will remain after Trump is gone, because he is neither serious nor competent.
CNBC: AI has destroyed 342,000 information services jobs since the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022
... information services lost 13,000, part of a continuing trend that has seen the category down 342,000 jobs since November 2022, coinciding with the rise of artificial intelligence. That has equated to a loss of 11% of jobs during the period. ...
More.
Trump's dumbass, incompetent deportation policy of prolonged ICE detention until they cry uncle and leave voluntarily is the mouse that roared
At this rate Trump will have to be president for 138 years to deport 9.5 million illegal aliens.
80k voluntary departures in fourteen months is a drop in the bucket when there are millions of illegals here, but spending tens of billions of dollars to do it sure isn't.
... Immigration judges issued more than 80,000 “voluntary departure” orders
from January 2025 through March of this year, according to court data
obtained by the Vera Institute of Justice and shared with The Washington
Post. ...
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