Can Social Security Be Saved for Future Generations?

Are we wise enough to refuse politicians' offer of "free money" to spend today that was stolen from our future, and from our future generations? Probably not.

Can Social Security be saved for future generations? Many have already concluded it's hopeless, and if the current trajectory is left untouched, that is pretty much baked in. Only a radical reform of the program's basic purpose, design and funding mechanisms could return the program to anything resembling sustainability and fairness.

Let's start with a thought experiment: what if Social Security (SSA) had been an authentic pension plan rather than a pay-as-you-go social welfare program? The program's accounting artifices obscure the reality that there is no "trust fund" of cash sitting in an account somewhere; all benefits are paid out of taxes collected from workers and employers today.

An authentic pension plan deducts a percentage from workers' earned income and deposits these into a fund that earns income. The fund is in effect a savings account that accumulates the monthly deposits and interest until the worker retires, at which point the fund starts disbursing monthly retirement payments and continues to collect interest on the fund's remaining balance.

In contrast, the SSA "trust fund" is an accounting gimmick that makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but it's nothing more than self-serving delusion. The "trust fund" holds "non-marketable securities," a nice way of masking the truth which is when SSA payroll tax revenues don't cover SSA expenditures, the Treasury makes up the difference by selling Treasury bonds--the same way it pays for all other deficit spending.

When Social Security was launched in the late 1930s, the benefits were modest, and many people didn't live long enough to collect benefits at age 65. The taxes collected from employers and employees were modest. The percentage of the populace who qualified to receive SSA benefits was also modest, while the population paying SSA taxes included every formally employed worker and their employee.

Fast-forward to 1970, the first year I paid SSA taxes as a 16-year old field worker in the summer before my senior year of high school. As the chart below notes, the US population in 1970 was 203 million, and the 25.7 million people who received SSA benefits were 12.6% of the total population. Total SSA program costs were $32 billion. For comparison's sake, the Department of Defense (DoD) budget in 1970 was $80 billion.

In 2025, the situation has changed. The US population increased 67% to 340 million, the number of SSA beneficiaries has nearly tripled from 25.7 million to 74.5 million, and the program now costs about $1.6 trillion annually--almost double the 2025 DoD budget of $840 billion.

As noted on the chart below, SSA program costs have doubled from $800 billion in 2013, only 12 years ago, to $1.6 trillion today.

As is common when programs have essentially unlimited budgets and vast tax revenue streams, mission creep expanded those eligible to receive SSA benefits to include disability and Supplemental Security Income (SSI). These additional beneficiaries added to the program costs without increasing the tax rate collected from employers/employees, which has been unchanged at 12.4% (6.2% each from employer and employee) since 1990.

(The 2.9% Medicare payroll tax rate collected with SSA payroll taxes has been unchanged since 1986: 1.45% each for employer and employee.)

To answer this question--what if Social Security (SSA) had been an authentic pension plan rather than a pay-as-you-go social welfare program?--I did a deep dive into my own 55-year record of SSA contributions. This required some heavy lifting, as annual changes in inflation and the interest rate paid must be accounted for.

I used the BLS inflation calculator to adjust annual inflation, and the 10-year US Treasury bond yield as the benchmark for interest--in other words, as if my entire SSA payroll tax had been invested at the end of each year in 10-year US Treasury bonds. Yes, I know there are many quibbles with these benchmarks, but at least we can agree they are reasonable benchmarks.

The SSA calculates your benefit based on your highest 25 years of income, so the lowest-income 30 years of my 55 years of paying SSA and income taxes are dropped. The SSA also considers the average income of full-time workers: SSA National Average Wage Index. (On rare occasions, my income exceeded the average, but was generally sub-average.)

Adjusting your income for inflation and then organizing the adjusted number from highest to lowest offers interesting insights into the purchasing power of your wages over time. These reflect each decade's broad-based standard of living, as the higher the purchasing power of one's wages, the higher one's standard of living.

Adjusted for inflation, my highest earnings years were: 1989, 1997, 1990, 1985, 1976 and 1977. Two in the 1970s, when I was 23 and 24 years old, two in the 1980s, and two in the 1990s, decades in which more of the economic expansion "trickled down" to wages, a trend that ceased by the turn of the century when the dot-com bubble burst.

It is a sobering reflection on the US economy that the purchasing power of my wages as an apprentice carpenter at age 23 were rarely equaled in the five decades since. In terms of what my wages could buy, my earnings have never gone as far as they did in the mid-1970s, which is close to the peak of labor's share of the national income (chart below).

By pure happenstance, my monthly Social Security retirement benefit is within a few dollars of the national average, so my record happens to reflect the national average. (I started drawing my benefit at full retirement age 67. I continue to pay both employee and employer SSA payroll taxes on my self-employed income as a scribbler, ahem, "content creator.")

By age 67, the total nestegg of my SSA payroll taxes (not Medicare, only SSA) collecting whatever yield was paid by 10-year Treasury bonds reached $382,000 at age 67. Assuming the bond yields stay around where they are today--which are historically rather average--my nestegg would fund my retirement benefits until age 87, which significantly exceeds the current average life expectancy of American males (78 years).

I understand that many would say investing the payroll taxes in Treasuries is effectively tossing the money on a bonfire, but consider the possibility that if the entire working populace had a stake in Treasuries surviving a financial bubble collapse, then they might start electing (and re-electing) politicians who wouldn't stripmine everything within reach to get re-elected. That change in values and voting would change the course of the system.

The point of this exercise is to show that if SSA were converted to a true pension plan system, the average wage earner could accumulate a self-funding pension plan just by investing the payroll taxes in Treasury bonds. Yes, I know many would prefer to invest in gold or bitcoin or stocks, but nobody would be stopping anyone from investing their non-SSA savings however they wished.

Can Social Security be saved for future generations? Let's re-phrase the question in two ways.

1. Could money pile up for decades without politicians finding an excuse to drain that pool to win re-election by distributing "free money"? Not unless every politician who even suggested draining the pool for an "emergency" were voted out of office in the next election, without exception.

2. Are we wise enough to refuse politicians' offer of "free money" to spend today that was stolen from our future, and from our future generations? Probably not. And that's why Social Security is doomed to insolvency, and why we'll never muster the political will to replace pay-as-you-go with a real pension plan for America's wage earners. Short-term expediencies are the order of the day, as the Prime Directive is do whatever it takes to get re-elected every two years.



Wages share of gross domestic income: in a free-fall since 1970, and a cumulative total of $149 trillion shifted from labor to capital.



SSA tax rates 1937 to 2025


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The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

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Money, Credit, Growth and Depression: It's Complicated

If "growth" is all that matters, that leads to depending on credit and asset bubbles, which are self-liquidating in ways few see because, well, it's complicated.

Many people anticipate the demise of fiat currencies, for good reasons. This is the motivation for calls to return to the gold standard--currency backed by the tangible value of gold--or the equivalent use of bitcoin.

What few seem to ask is: why did authorities embrace fiat currencies in the first place? What prompted them to replace a gold-backed monetary system with a fiat currency system?

Were they misled by monetary theories, or delusional, or merely desperate?

Let's consider the complications of money in a system that demands "growth." As I noted in my recent post for subscribers, Not What We Expected: Why Our Fixes Will Fail, if banks are allowed to originate loans based on reserves--fractional reserve banking--then most of the "money in circulation" is created not by adding gold or bitcoin to the system but by originating mortgages, commercial credit, etc.

If credit is limited to loaning out a percentage of cash deposits, credit becomes scarce, and everything that depends on abundant, affordable credit--vehicle sales, real estate purchases, college diplomas, consumer credit--all dry up and blow away. This collapse of "growth" is called a depression. Without credit, assets collapse in value, savings are depleted to pay bills as employment shrinks, and so on.

This is why the early American economy was starved for credit: everybody wanted to do something great but they had no access to the money needed to do something great. Banks arose and failed, wiping out savers and borrowers alike, as loans were called and assets were liquidated for pennies on the dollar.

So how do you expand credit without expanding money in circulation? You can't, as credit-money is money, period. So $1 billion in gold or bitcoin backs the money supply, but what happens when banks issue $10 billion in mortgages and loans, money that is created out of thin air and enters circulation? Every dollar that was backed by X quantity of gold or BTC is now backed by 1/10th of X.

Then there's foreign trade. If imports and exports don't zero out--$1 billion in imports is balanced by $1 billion in exports--then the balance is paid in gold. Nations running trade deficits eventually run out of gold.

This was the case for the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the US ran sustained trade deficits with its allies for geopolitical reasons: it was deemed essential to prop up our allies to ward off the threat of the USSR and the appeal of Communism. Let your economy slide into Depression, and the promises of Communism start looking very attractive to people immiserated by impoverishment.

Once a nation runs out of gold, trade deficits are no longer possible. The problem is that sometimes trade deficits make economic or geopolitical sense, and so ending trade deficits is catastrophic for both importer and exporter.

OK, it's complicated. But it gets more complicated.

There's an interesting phenomenon we call The Network Effect: the more people that start using a network--for example, an online platform--the more useful and valuable the network becomes to both the users and the owners.

For example, Meta/Facebook. When FB was limited to university students, it was of limited value to users. Once it expanded to a global user base of 3 billion people, it became more valuable to users and its owners, as the data collected from users and sold to advertisers became much more valuable. Meta is now worth $1.9 trillion, larger than the GDP of Spain or South Korea. That's The Network Effect.

Currencies also manifest The Network Effect: the greater the sum in global circulation, the more valuable the currency becomes. (Note that issuing $1 trillion in a currency isn't the same as $1 trillion in global circulation: the currency must have some value and utility to be circulating in the global economy.)

The utility of a currency isn't based solely on the quantity in circulation, of course; a currency's value is based on trust in the currency as a reliable store of value over the duration of the trade, its status as a commodity of known value that everyone will accept in payment, its liquidity, i.e. the ease of converting it into some other currency or commodity, and the "backing" of the currency: the central bank and national economy that issues it.

The nation that issues the currency with the greatest Network Effect has an exorbitant privilege: it can issue bonds and emit fresh currency in size that enter circulation, in effect trading fiat currency backed by The Network Effect for real-world commodities.

As many have pointed out, this is both a blessing and a curse. But it's hard to part with the power generated by The Network Effect--not just for the #1 currency, but the #2 and #3 and #4 currencies as well.

The real problem here isn't just the complications of money: it's the insanity of needing "growth" by any means available, including borrowing more money than can ever be paid back and debauching the currency to maintain the illusion of "growth" even as the resulting inflation slowly impoverishes the majority of the population who have been reduced to debt-serfs or speculators counting on credit-driven bubbles in stocks and real estate to maintain their lifestyle and financial security.

If "growth" is the Prime Directive, then credit and fiat currency become the means to achieve it. That's the story of the 20th century. That was the "blessing" phase. The story of the 21st century is the "curse" phase, and there is no exit if "growth" is all that matters, because that leads to depending on credit and asset bubbles, which are self-liquidating in ways few see because, well, it's complicated.




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The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


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Is This the Last Bubble?

The consensus holds there will be another bubble after the Everything Bubble pops, but this might be misplaced confidence in the godlike powers of central banks.

The consensus holds that central banks--the Federal Reserve in the US--will gradually inflate away the world's rising debt burden while propping up assets and the economy with the usual bag of monetary magic: suppress interest rates so debt service costs ease, increase the money supply and credit to prop up asset bubbles in stocks and housing, and thereby generate growth in consumption via the elixir of "the wealth effect:" as assets loft higher, everyone feels richer and so they borrow and spend more.

Well, not everyone, because only the top 10% own enough assets to feel "the wealth effect," but since they account for 50% of all consumer spending, that's enough to maintain the status quo, in which the bottom 90% lose ground (especially the bottom 60%) and the top 10% are doing splendidly.

Should the bubble du jour pop, no worries, central banks will rush to the rescue as they have for 25 years, goosing money supply and credit, opening the floodgates of liquidity, pushing interest rates down so everyone and every entity can borrow and spend / speculate more, more, more.

This is a nice story, and proponents have the past 25 years of history to back it up. But beneath the surface appeal of this story--a Hollywood ending every time, as the Fed will inflate another bubble, one after the other in an endless loop--there are stirrings in the deep that suggest the Everything Bubble is the last bubble of its kind, and attempts to inflate another bubble when this one pops will collapse the entire rickety contraption.

In other words, everything is forever until it is no more. Let's consider some points that speak to the nature of speculative bubbles.

1. Speculative bubbles don't require central banks increasing money supply and manipulating interest rates. Recency bias leads us to imagine that central bank policies inflate and pop speculative bubbles via monetary levers, but the colossal South Seas Bubble in 1720 that popped with such devastating consequences arose and fell in the pre-central bank era. The madness of crowds--or more specifically, the greed-driven madness of greedy crowds is the core driver of speculative frenzies / bubbles.

2. Confidence is the foundation of speculative frenzies. Yes, confidence, as in a con. Back in 1720, the South Seas Company was supported by the establishment, and so confidence was high that it was a can't lose proposition. The riches skimmed by early investors encouraged this confidence.

Today, confidence that the Fed will rush to the rescue should the Everything Bubble pop is high, as is the confidence that the AI Bubble isn't a bubble because AI is going to change everything and that transformation will be immensely profitable--if not for the gold miners, then for those selling the miners picks and shovels.

3. Quasi-religious fervor, confidence, staggering gains and speculative frenzies all meld into one overflowing river, sweeping all before it. The primary force here is the belief that this isn't irrational, or speculative--it's all based on solid facts. That this was the exact same belief that powered bubbles in 1720, 1925-1929, 1998-2000 and 2004-2008 is brushed aside, for as we all know, this time it's different. Of course it is, but perhaps not in the way that the consensus anticipates.

Just as a break from all the fun and games, let's consider a chart of M2 money supply, generally conceded as the driver of stocks rising, and compare it to GDP--a measure of economic expansion--and the S&P 500 stock index (SPX).



It's interesting to note the ratio of M2 and GDP. That money supply and economic expansion would rise together qualifies as common sense, but what makes this interesting is the slippage in the ratio.

For two decades, GDP was roughly double M2. In 1981, M2 was $1.6 trillion and GDP was $3.1 trillion. In 2001, M2 was $5 trillion and GDP was $10.5 trillion. So far so good.

In Q1 2009, at the bottom of the stock market crash / Global Financial Crisis, there was bit of slippage: M2 was $8.4 trillion and GDP was $14.4 trillion--no longer 1 to 2.

By the pre-Covid high watermark of Q1 2020, M2 was $15.5 trillion and GDP was $21.7 trillion. After the Covid crash and stimulus, here in Q2 2025 M2 is $22.1 trillion and GDP is $30.3 trillion-- 1 to 1.37.

There's a phrase that describes this: diminishing returns. Goosing money supply is no longer goosing GDP to the same degree it once did.

Meanwhile, back in Speculative Frenzy-Land, the SPX is up 10X, from the biblical low in Q1 2009 of 666 to today's high of 6660 (well, 6656, but close enough).

This suggests that the means of boosting GDP is now inflating bubbles, not actual economic activity. This is supported by the chart of money velocity, which is a measure of economic transactions across time. It's generally conceded that money velocity increases in good times and decays in not-to-good times. Here we see that money velocity has fallen off a cliff and never recovered the glory days of widespread, organically expanding economic activity.



It is not coincidental that the peak of money velocity in the mid-1990s Internet boom aligns with the peak of wage growth and the bottom 50%'s share of financial net worth. Simply put, the 1990s were the last era of widespread prosperity of the sort that actually "trickled down" to the bottom 90%. This was also the last era in which housing was broadly affordable to households with average incomes.



Saying that money velocity is an indicator of economic catastrophe doesn't go over well in polite company, but there it is. Somebody barfed in the punchbowl, sorry about that.

Lastly, consider this chart of debt and growth in the US, courtesy of Tim Morgan of the invaluable analytic site Surplus Energy Economics. Note that the blue indicators of growth are considerably smaller than the red indicators of debt.



Put all this together and it's clear that stock market and housing bubbles are the only sources of "growth," which is another way of saying that "growth" is a chimera masking the second-order effect of goosing money supply, credit, debt and speculative asset bubbles: extremes of wealth and income inequality as the top 10%'s wealth, income and spending have soared while the bottom 90% have fallen behind.



Consider the possibility that the AI Bubble is a close match for the 1720 South Seas Bubble, a bubble that sucked in the smart money (Sir Isaac Newton) and dumb money alike, and then collapsed in spectacular fashion wiping out true believers, gamblers, Wise Men and the credulous--everyone who participated other than those who sold early and stayed out as the bubble inflated to giddy heights. Due to the limitations of Wetware 1.0, the number of people who can manage to do that is so small that it's signal noise.

The consensus holds there will be another bubble after the AI Bubble / Everything Bubble pops, but this might be misplaced confidence in the godlike powers of central banks. If the Fed just gooses money supply, credit and crushes interest rates, the next bubble might be in the 2028 equivalent of Pet Rocks or Beanie Babies, it won't matter. There will always be another bubble because the Fed wills it to be so.

Or perhaps the limits of this serial bubble-blowing have already been reached, and this is the last, final bubble before the reckoning where the banquet of consequences has been set and Nemesis is catering what's served.


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Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) audiobook     Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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The Moral Decay of Debt

Debt has moral implications, and in denying this, we're choosing a rendezvous with Nemesis

Let's start with a household analogy. A married couple have four fine children, and since expenses are higher than income, they borrow money in their children's names to fund their lifestyle and investments. Once the offspring reach 18 years of age, the debt their parents borrowed is theirs to service.

The offspring didn't get a say in how much money was borrowed or how it was spent, but the debt is now theirs to service (i.e. pay the interest) for their entire lifetimes, as the debt is simply too large to pay off with conventional wages.

The economy changed, and since wages don't go as far and costs keep rising, the four offspring borrow in their own children's names to afford the basics of a middle-class life.

The parents are now comfortably retired, drawing on their investments bought with borrowed money. The two generations behind them are now debt-serfs who funded their own lifestyles by borrowing even more money. Since the kind of house their parents bought for 3-times-income is now 6-times-income, the debt required to own a house and fund what is considered the minimum middle-class entitlements is multiples of their parents' borrowing.

Is anyone willing to call this offloading of ever-expanding debt onto future generations wrong, as in morally wrong, or have we lost the vocabulary and ability to declare the offloading of debt as morally disgraceful, a line that should never have been crossed?

Debt that cannot be extinguished and that is offloaded onto future generations is a manifestation of moral decay, a decay of the moral foundations of the economy and society that is terminal.

So here we are, cheering on a big reduction in the Fed Funds Rate to encourage an expansion of debt, as more debt means more spending and that means more taxes and corporate profits. The manipulation of interest rates and the financial machinery to encourage more debt is viewed as bloodless, absolutely devoid of moral judgment: when it comes to "growth" of asset prices, spending, taxes and profits, there is no wrong, as "growth" is the only good anyone cares about.

This is the perfection of moral decay. Offloading debt onto future generations--money borrowed to prop up a self-serving status quo that focused on expediencies, not future consequences--and then telling the debt-enslaved generations, "we'll inflate away the debt, and your wages will buy less and less, but no worries, we'll just borrow more to pay the interest due"--how is this not morally repulsive?

Here is Federal debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is a better measure of consequences, for it illustrates the Federal government's ability to counter a deep recession by borrowing and spending trillions of dollars is now limited by extreme debt levels.



Those who track the history of government debt generally draw the red-line at 100% of GDP, so 120% is already deep in the danger zone. History is rather decisive: any attempt to add trillions in additional debt at these levels has zero chance of working as intended, i.e. a pain-free way to boost "growth."

Note the debt-to-GDP ratio actually declined during both the stagflationary 1970s and the 1990s Internet boom. In both eras, the economy was still largely organic, i.e. unmanipulated enough that natural forces (supply, demand, risk aversion, writedowns of bad debt, etc.) could work through excesses of speculation and debt and restore not just balance sheets but legitimacy.

The Federal Reserve no longer trusted the system's self-correcting capacity and leaped into full-blown manipulation of financial and mortgage markets in 2008-09. The debt-to-FDP ratio soared from 60% to 100% in the post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) "save" of the Federal Reserve, which inflated the money supply and pushed ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and QE (quantitative easing) to boost borrowing.

As a result, private-sector borrowing also skyrocketed. Now that households and enterprises have borrowed up to their capacity to service debt, their ability to "borrow their way to prosperity" is also constrained.

Here is total debt, public and private (TCMDO). In Q2 1975, total debt was $2.5 trillion. If this had tracked inflation, it would have reached $15 trillion by Q2 2025. ($1 in Q2 1975 is $6 in Q2 2025.) (BLS Inflation Calculator)



Let's say that debt can double the rate of inflation if it's being invested productively. That would put today's total debt at $30 trillion.

But total debt isn't close to $30 trillion; it's $104 trillion and climbing, suggesting 70+ trillion is "excess debt." As for all this borrowed money being invested productively--given "waste is growth" planned obsolescence and rampant asset appreciation / speculation, it seems obvious that most of this borrowed money was consumed by ephemeral products and services or squandered chasing asset bubbles.

Debt has implicit moral implications, and in denying this, we're choosing a rendezvous with Nemesis--a rendezvous with Destiny that will be arranged by Nemesis, not the Federal Reserve or the Treasury.

Yes, debt can be productive, but it can also be exploitive, and therein lies the moral implications. Debt can never be amoral or bloodless; its moral nature cannot be extinguished. We appear to be destined to discover this truth the hard way.


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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) audiobook     Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

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Precarity and the Point of No Return

Or maybe it's just me, and all is well. Time will tell.

I often wonder if others feel the precarity of this era, or is it just me? It's hard to tell, as economic statistics don't measure precarity, they mostly measure averages and aggregates, all of which are glowing: GDP and profits up, unemployment low, and so on.

If precarity makes the news, it's the financial precarity experienced by many American households as costs rise and wages don't keep up, regardless of what the aggregate statistics are indicating.

This precarity is real, but it's not what's being featured. It's reflected in mirrors, not in headlines. In this mirror, we see millions of people pursuing side hustles and crowding into speculative casinos. If this isn't a reflection of desperation, it's something close to it. But this isn't news.

The precarity extends into the realms of public trust. Expertise backed by credentials--presented as evidence the public could trust the credentialed experts to serve the public interest with disinterested competence--have been eroded by self-interest. Public trust is as precarious as household budgets.

Faith in our future prospects is equally precarious. We're presented with an endless series of science-fiction fantasies brought to life--flying motorcycles, driverless taxis, household robots, energy so cheap we won't even bother metering it--but the mirror is reflecting a much different future, one of precarity, uncertainty and decay of what can't be measured like GDP or profits.

We all sense when we've reached a Point of No Return, a river like the Rubicon that should we cross it, there's no going back. There's another type of Point of No Return: the point in the journey where we realize we no longer have the resources to retrace our steps and return to the safety of what we left behind.

At this point, we can only go forward into an uncertain future, one without guarantees and one in which trust is diminishing as steadily as the water in our canteen. This is when the temptation to grasp at straws and seek scapegoats looms large, and the potential of losing our grip is a greater threat that the unknowns ahead.

There's a bad moon rising, and this makes our journey forward more precarious. We like to believe we're in control of our destiny, but the world around us has its own destiny, and we're making choices on a stage with its own gearing.



The gearing of precarity is guiding the machine, whether we're aware of it or not. I fear for the nation, as the journey ahead is faintly illuminated by a bad moon rising. I fear the dwindling sandbar between the raging currents of partisanship will disappear beneath my feet.



Or maybe it's just me, and all is well. Time will tell.


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) audiobook     Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Larry M. ($200), for your beyond-outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, Robert S. ($70), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Wandering Minstreli ($7/month), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, XX ($7/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

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"Upgrade Now" To Get What Was Previously Included At No Extra Charge

In this realm of extraction, exploitation, artifice and illusion, "growth" is garbage.

Tube of toothpaste: $4. Tube of toothpaste with cap: $5. You may reckon this is an exaggeration of the trend to coercing us to "upgrade now" to get what was previously included at no extra charge, but rest assured some marketing maven is reading this and thinking, hey, this is brilliant: we can make the cap leak or fall off, and then offer a Premium version with the cap they currently get for no extra charge.

We're being dimed to death by "Upgrade Now" to get what we once received at no extra charge. As I note in my new book Ultra-Processed Life, it's now impossible to parody the excesses of "upgrade now to Premium" because they're already self-parodying.

I didn't say nickel and dimed to death because inflation has already consumed the nickel. As costs soar, the nagging to "upgrade now to Premium" only intensifies.

The US Postal Service now offers Premium Tracking for a few extra dollars. When did regular tracking become so deficient that we now need Premium Tracking?

Airlines have squeezed more seats into the coach class to immiserate passengers to the point that they cave in and pay extra for an extra comfort seat which is only slightly more roomy than the standard coach seats of the 1980s.

The software you could buy once and use for years is now a subscription-only service. This is of course what Cory Doctorow has aptly called ensh*tification, the process of snaring customers which high-value offerings that are degraded once the hook has been set. Now that the sunk costs of switching are painful, the corporation squeezes more cash out of the immiserated customer.

If ensh*tification doesn't work, Corporate America doubles down with outright coercion and deception. Mr. Softee (MSFT, Microsoft) is a master of the this process. For example, the unwary customer discovers everything they've been saving hasn't been saved to their own drive; it's been saved to Mr. Softee's OneDrive, and guess what, Honored Customer, your OneDrive is now full and you need to pony up monthly cash to expand your OneDrive capacity.

As for transferring all your saved data from OneDrive to the drive you own, fuhgeddaboudit-baby, no dice.

In a similar fashion, every digital action now launches a nag to "upgrade to Premium." Do you want to schedule a bulk email to be sent later? Now that requires upgrading to Premium. The virus scan found a gazillion trackers that could be threatening everything you hold dear, but now the standard antivirus software doesn't fix that problem, you're prompted to upgrade to Premium to protect your precious digital life.

When did Corporate America veer so close to bankruptcy that it must now squeeze a few more dollars out of every customer lest it dry up and blow away? Well garsh, poor Corporate America must be barely scraping by. But if we look at corporate profits, they're at record highs, far above where they'd be if they'd only tracked inflation.



The propaganda of "free markets" promised that corporations would seek higher profits by increasing the value of products and services and reducing prices. The opposite is what's actually true: corporations are maximizing profits by reducing the durability and value of products and services and relentlessly immiserating customers to herd us into paying more for what we once received at no extra charge.

Let's call this what it actually is: the garbage time of history, a travesty of a mockery of a sham of "value," a ruthless exploitation of trapped consumers, who are already being bled dry as either debt-serfs or tax donkeys, or if particularly unlucky, both debt-serfs and tax donkeys.

In this realm of extraction, exploitation, artifice and illusion, "growth" is garbage.



The Garbage Time of History Is Global (9/5/25)


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) audiobook     Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Larry M. ($200), for your beyond-outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, Robert S. ($70), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Wandering Minstreli ($7/month), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, XX ($7/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

The Garbage Time of History Is Global

The key insight of "let it rot" and "the garbage time of history" is the inauthenticity of all "reforms."

The Chinese culture has a rich trove of apt, often humorous expressions that summarize a situation with imaginative metaphors. For example, let it rot (bai lan) summarizes the realization that the present era is the garbage time of history (lishi de laji shijian), and the appropriate response is to "actively embrace a deteriorating situation, rather than trying to turn it around."

The garbage time of history was "coined by essayist Hu Wenhui, that describes a period of prolonged societal decline or stagnation where a nation's system is no longer viable but hasn't collapsed, characterized by individuals being powerless and the future being set on a downward trajectory. The term is a metaphor for the final, inconsequential minutes of a sports game where the outcome is already decided, and any effort is futile."

The garbage time of history is not unique to China; the entire world is mired in the garbage time of history because we're all enmeshed in financial and globalized feedbacks and tightly bound subsystems that are the gearing of the world-system.

The gearing can't be changed, as that might disrupt those gorging at the money-trough, so cause-and-effect are limited to garbage in, garbage out: inputs are modified for show, spectacles are performed as a substitute for substance, and illusory solutions are batted around, as if the core problem is "money" rather than the gearing of the system.

The problems are far deeper than "money." A system geared for "growth at any cost" finds real advancement is limited, so a pretense of growth is favored: growth of "money," growth of gamed statistics, growth of waste, etc.

Since the gearing is fundamentally financial, everything else is for show. For example, "healthcare" in the U.S. is an extractive financial machine which operates behind a screen of providing medicine. Big Tech is an extractive financial machine operating behind a screen of search, social media and AI agents. Higher education is an extractive financial machine operating behind a screen of research, virtue-signaling and going through the motions of offering coursework and credentials.

The key insight of let it rot and the garbage time of history is the inauthenticity of all "reforms", as the "reforms" never change the gearing of the machine, they only modify the garbage being fed into the machine.

The score is Extractive Financial Machine, 103, Workers, Customers and Citizens, 17. There's four seconds left, so by all means launch the ball from 3-point land, and as spectacular as a bucket at the buzzer would be, it won't change the outcome of the garbage time of history.



The whole point of "reforms" is to leave the gearing unchanged behind a gaudy show of going through the motions of reforms that change nothing.


Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) audiobook     Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Larry M. ($200), for your beyond-outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, Robert S. ($70), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Wandering Minstreli ($7/month), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, XX ($7/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...

Entitled, Demanding--and Shunned

Since we didn't need relationships in a transactional system, we no longer have any.

To connect multiple threads into a coherent understanding, let's start with a real-life story. We're handy but some breakdowns require outside assistance. The fridge failed (GE brand, less than two years old) and it turned out to be difficult to find a repair tech. One had retired, others were swamped, one didn't return multiple calls, another had left the trade for another trade, and GE's own service only covers repairs under warranty (i.e. one year).

One of my wife's cousins had spoken highly of an experienced repair guy, and in leaving the gent a message my wife mentioned her cousin as the source of the recommendation. He had no business listing online; everything was word of mouth.

The gent eventually returned her call, asked for the model/make information, and agreed to swing by to diagnose the problem.

During their conversation the gent mentioned his 40+ years in the appliance / repair business, and that he only does work for people he knows. He no longer responds to strangers recommended by people he knows, as he's had bad experiences with newcomers and will have nothing to do with them. He only returned our call because we were family members of someone he knows.

His list of previous customers numbers in the hundreds, and these trustworthy, respectful people keep him as busy as he wants.

My shorthand for his bad experiences with strangers: they're entitled, demanding, discourteous, and find excuses not to pay him. His response is to shun those customers he doesn't already know, or in our case, family members of people he does know. (He knew two of my wife's cousins.)

Now let's connect a few more threads. Ours is an advocacy system. You want something, you have to advocate for it, often persistently, as "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." Customer service had degraded to the point where the system seeks to reduce costs by grinding down customers so they give up.

Advocacy merges easily into threats. After a trip in Asia, I knew I was on a US-flagged airline when a passenger who'd been accidentally jostled by another passenger snapped, "I'll sue you!" (This is one of those "only in America" things: "I'll sue you!")

The appliance tech mentioned that when a stranger outright refused to pay him and he said he would remove the part he'd just installed, the customer threatened to "call the police."

Threats are tactics, of course, to bulldoze your opponent, but they can also be the emotional response of those who grasp their powerlessness in the system.

Americans confuse rights, entitlements and advocacy. Our rights are rather limited, and are defined by an enormous body of legal rulings. Our entitlements--for example, to receive medical care under the Medicare or Medicaid programs--are often taken as rights, but they're not the same: we may be entitled to care but that isn't a guarantee we'll receive the care, as that depends on the local availability of enterprises who accept Medicare / Medicaid patients.

Providers can bail out of these programs, and those mandated to provide coverage (emergency rooms for example) can close down.

Entitlement leads to demands presented as advocacy which morphs into "it's my right." Well, actually, it's rarely our "right," beyond advocating our position via free speech, filing complaints with regulatory authorities or legal proceedings.

Now let's connect the final set of threads: the difference between transactions and relationships, systems that are based on transactions and systems that are based on relationships--not just immediate family and friends, but extended family ties and reciprocal-help relationships that are the core of community--a much used and abused term for what is largely a hollow slogan.

Ours is a transactional system: everything you need or want is for sale via a financial transaction. nobody needs a relationship to buy whatever they want; they just need money or credit. We approach a complete stranger who is employed by Corporate America or the government, and complete a financial transaction.

In a transactional system, we don't do anything for anyone unless we're paid. OK, help a stranger with a flat tire maybe, but develop reciprocal-aid ties with neighbors and others? We don't have time for those kinds of "investments" that "don't pay off."

Consider the difference between an appliance repair conducted as a transaction and one based on relationships. If the appliance is under warranty, the issuer of the warranty is obligated to arrange a repair by the contractual stipulations of the warranty. ("Some conditions apply," of course, meaning there may be exclusions, limits of liability, etc. Sorry about that, you should have read the fine print.)

The customer and the repair tech are strangers. The transaction is arranged by strangers in a corporate office. This transaction is lauded in the abstract as proof of the "trustworthiness" of the system.

A transactional system works marvelously until it breaks down. For example, the hospital closes due to financial losses, and so the ER is closed, too. We can demand our right to medical care but it's no longer available in our area. Or the warranty repair service is no longer available in our area, sorry.

The fragility of these transactional systems is hidden until they break down. And when they degrade and break down, then we're left with systems based on relationships--systems which have largely vanished in a highly mobile, rootless culture that's distilled everything down to "trustworthy" transactions.

If everyone is constantly moving, there is no way anyone can know members of your extended family because they're scattered thousands of miles apart.

In a transaction-based culture, relationships have little value, so they're depreciated. Why bother maintaining or forming relationships when you can get everything you want or need by staring at a screen?

Until all those hyper-optimized transactional systems start breaking down. Then the value of relationships is suddenly revalued--but few have any reciprocal-aid relationships with practical value. Networking is a superficial, shallow simulacrum of actual relationships, and that's all we have left.

Sure, I'll help you, but only if I personally know someone in your family. This is trust on a different level than the transactional trust of Corporate America or government agencies.

Transactions work great until hyper-optimized transactional systems cease to be hyper-profitable. Then we discover how fragile these systems are to disruption.

Since we didn't need relationships in a transactional system, we no longer have any. Demanding our rights and what we're entitled to isn't going to bring overly complex systems back; once they're gone, they're gone, and we'll be dependent on relationships, which are fundamentally reciprocal in nature.

In other words, you know--and helped--one of my family members, I'll help you. If you didn't, well I'm sorry, I'm busy.

Entitled, Demanding--and Shunned. That's the end-game of depending on transactions as a replacement for all the relationships that have gone by the wayside in a culture that reckons everything boils down to a series of bloodless transactions.

This is the transactional gearing we're caught up in...



...and it maps collapse rather closely.






Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

---

My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) audiobook     Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency.

Thank you, Larry M. ($200), for your beyond-outrageously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.		Thank you, Robert S. ($70), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, Wandering Minstreli ($7/month), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Thank you, XX ($7/month), for your splendidly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.

Read more...