Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the week in case you missed them:

Even Her Own Allies Have Had Enough of Justice Jackson

Last year when the federal workforce layoff case reached the Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a 15-page solo manifesto howling that the layoffs represented a “wrecking ball” against democracy.

The only problem— the case before the court had nothing to do with whether layoffs were good or bad. The justices were merely tasked with ruling on a narrow procedural question. But KBJ felt compelled to showcase her leftist credentials regardless.

Jackson’s soliloquy was so out of line that even fellow liberal Justice Sotomayor publicly corrected her, clarifying that “the [layoffs] themselves are not before this Court. . .”

Then, earlier this year, Jackson showed up at the Grammys and gave a standing ovation when Billie Eilish declared “no one is illegal on stolen land” and shouted “f*ck ICE” from the stage. Hardly appropriate for a sitting Supreme Court Justice, sworn to uphold the Constitution— including immigration law.

If you were hoping she was just settling into a new role on the bench, think again.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Chiles v. Salazar— a controversial Colorado state law that effectively banned therapists from helping gender-confused kids.

Under the new law, if a boy who thinks he’s a girl goes to counseling, it’s against the law for the psychologist to help the boy see himself as a boy. According to the State of Colorado, the only acceptable answer is, “OF COURSE YOU’RE A GIRL!”

The Supreme Court ruled almost unanimously that this law violates the Constitution because it infringes upon the therapist’s free speech.

Even ultra-liberal justices Kagan and Sotomayor ruled that the Colorado law violated freedom of speech.

Justice Jackson was the lone dissent. And she wrote a 35-page opinion— longer than the majority opinion and Kagan’s concurrence combined— arguing in favor of the Colorado law.

Jackson’s opinion was so bonkers that Justice Kagan, her own ideological ally, took the unusual step of publicly rebuking her, writing “Her view . . . rests on reimagining—and in that way collapsing—the well-settled distinction” of free speech.

Pretty embarrassing.

But then on Tuesday, during oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case, Jackson waded into the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.

The amendment grants citizenship to anyone “born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The case hinges on those last five words. The Trump administration argued that illegal migrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because they don’t have “allegiance” to the US— and hence birthright citizenship does not apply to them.

Jackson tried to gut that argument with a curious example: ““If I steal a wallet in Japan, I am subject to Japanese laws….. in a sense, it’s allegiance.”

In short, a sitting Supreme Court Justice thinks that breaking the law = allegiance = entitled to citizenship.

Canadian Socialists Spent Their Convention Arguing Over Who’s Most Oppressed

Canada’s New Democratic Party— the country’s far-left political party— held its federal leadership convention last week in Winnipeg.

The party distributed color-coded “equity cards” to convention delegates at registration. The NDP recognize five “equity-seeking groups” in its constitution— women and non-cis men, racialized members, Indigenous members, 2SLGBTQ+ members, and persons with disabilities.

If you belonged to one of those groups, you got a card. Green for gender, pink for race, etc.

The cards gave holders priority access to the microphone during floor debates, allowing them to cut the speaking line.

If you’re doing the math, you’ve probably noticed: the only person at this convention without any cards would be a straight, white, able-bodied man.

Hilariously, at what amounts to a victimhood convention, that’s roughly nobody. So in practice, almost everyone had cards.

The system had no rules for what happens when two card-holders both want to speak. Whose card wins? They built an entire hierarchy of oppressed people and forgot to rank it. So naturally, this led to a kind of victimhood Olympics.

One woman stood at the microphone waving her green gender equity card, complaining that the chair had called on someone else first.

A black woman responded by playing her actual race card: “I want everyone to be mindful that these cards, for individuals like myself who identify as a Black woman, have no value outside of this space.” Her point: but my oppression is more real than yours— so my card should outrank yours.

What trumps black woman? Trans. And as one trans delegate complained,

“It’s hard as a racialized and transgender delegate to sometimes use this card… it’s frustrating when these are my rights being directly under attack right now in Alberta and a cisgender woman had spoken over me.”

Meanwhile, the convention chair— who identifies as nonbinary— halted proceedings at one point because a delegate, mid-speech about the Iran conflict, addressed the chair as “madame.” The substance of what was being said didn’t matter. The pronoun did.

And on the final day, the party’s solution to the chaos was not to scrap the system. They expanded it.

This party used to be about healthcare and workers’ rights. Now they spend their time building a color-coded hierarchy of victimhood, then arguing over whose suffering entitles them to speak first into a microphone, even though no one is listening to the substance of their ideas, but rather privilege-checking their use of pronouns.

Oregon’s Animal Cruelty Measure Would Criminalize Farming, Hunting, and Pest Control

In Oregon, animal rights activists are closing in on enough signatures to put a ballot measure before voters in November called Initiative Petition 28, or the “PEACE Act” (People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions).

Like every state, Oregon exempts certain activities from animal cruelty charges: hunting, fishing, farming, medical research, pest control, etc.

This law would eliminate all of those exemptions. The only remaining exceptions would be self-defense and good veterinary practices.

Hunting and fishing— which currently produce $1.9 billion in economic activity— would become crimes.

Raising cattle for beef or dairy— Oregon’s largest livestock commodity— would be illegal. 37,000 farms and ranches and 80,000 agricultural workers would be affected.

Artificial insemination of livestock would be classified as “animal sexual assault.” Pest control would become a crime.

Don’t worry, though. The campaign’s own website helpfully explains that exterminators could “easily continue their profession in the broader field of rodent management” by humanely catching mice alive and releasing them outside… no doubt after a good mouse-massage.

Funded by PETA and other national organizations paying signature gatherers $25 an hour, they’ve collected over 100,000 and only need a few thousand more by July to get it on the ballot.

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It was an act of desperation. Portugal’s economy was in shambles— bailed out by the EU two years earlier, unemployment above 16%, property values cratering. The government needed foreign capital, and it was willing to trade residency permits to get it.

And since Portugal is part of the European Union, that residency card wasn’t just a ticket to Lisbon— it gave new property owners the legal right to travel, live, and work across all EU member countries.

The pitch worked. Over the next decade, Portugal’s Golden Visa brought in more than €7 billion in foreign investment.

Other cash-strapped European countries took note, and Greece, Spain, Cyprus, and Malta soon launched their own versions.

For years this was one of the easiest ways to establish a legal foothold in Europe— buy a home in a romantic getaway you enjoy, and get the right to live there.

Maintaining residency often comes with time commitments of living at least six months in the country each year. But Golden Visas are especially appealing as a “backup” residency because they require very little time on the ground.

That era is ending.

Portugal eliminated real estate as a qualifying investment in late 2023, restricting its program to cultural/ scientific contributions and business/ venture capital avenues.

Spain shut its Golden Visa program entirely in April 2025 after property prices began to skyrocket.

Two of the most popular programs in Europe, gone within two years of each other.

And the countries that still allow property-based residency have raised their minimums dramatically.

Greece is the clearest example. A few years ago, you could buy property almost anywhere in the country for €250,000 and qualify for residency.

Today, if you want that bargain price, you have to buy a commercial property that has already been converted to residential use, or purchase a listed heritage building and restore it.

Standard turn-key residential property that does not require renovation now starts at €400,000 in lower-demand areas and runs up to €800,000 in Athens, Thessaloniki, and the most popular islands like Mykonos, Santorini, and Crete.

It’s still a great option if you like the idea of buying a vacation home on a Greek island, and can afford it. But it is a much bigger commitment than it used to be.

Malta has gotten significantly more expensive. When it launched its residency program in 2015, you could buy property for as little as €270,000 in Gozo or southern Malta, with €30,000 in government fees.

Today, the minimum purchase is €375,000 plus a whopping €99,000 in government fees. The fees alone have more than tripled. Crazy.

Cyprus used to offer one of the most powerful programs in Europe— full citizenship by investment, with a total cost north of €2.5 million when you added the mandatory residential property purchase and government donations.

That was killed in 2020 after an Al Jazeera investigation caught the Speaker of Parliament and a sitting MP on camera offering to help a supposed criminal obtain a passport. Then the European Commission piled on with formal infringement proceedings, declaring that “European values are not for sale.”

Today it’s been reduced to a residency-only program requiring €300,000 plus VAT in new residential property.

Latvia offers the cheapest remaining turn-key real estate option in Europe, though even it has tightened significantly. When the program launched in 2010, you could buy rural property for as little as €71,000 and qualify. Today, the minimum is €250,000 and there’s a 5% state fee on top.

But that’s not a bad deal for a safe, affordable EU country whose capital has one of the best-preserved medieval old towns in Europe.

And outside Europe, there are still some attractive programs.

In Panama, you can obtain legal residency by purchasing property for roughly $300,000. And that money goes a long way — property prices run between $100 and $200 per square foot, meaning $300,000 buys genuinely nice real estate.

Mexico doesn’t even require a property purchase. You just need to prove your income or savings meets a modest threshold — roughly $4,500 per month in recurring income, or about $75,000 in savings for temporary residency. Retirees can often qualify for permanent residency directly.

And then there’s Turkey, which offers something none of the European programs do: actual citizenship, not just residency. Purchase $400,000 in real estate, and you become a Turkish citizen— though this price has also risen from $250,000.

The great thing about these programs is that you’re not just acquiring residency — you’re acquiring a real asset in a foreign country. A property that gives you both a personal and financial foothold outside your home country.

While things are good, it could simply be a vacation home you visit once a year that generates rental income while you’re away.

But if things in your home country ever deteriorate to the point that you want to get out of Dodge, whether temporarily or permanently, it makes sense to have already established a place to go where you have the legal right to enter, live, and work in that country.

The world is clearly going through a phase of more conflict and less cooperation… so having a another place to go is a sensible part of a Plan B.

These residency by investment programs change constantly; thresholds rise, rules tighten, and some get eliminated entirely. That’s why it doesn’t pay to procrastinate when you’ve decided to pursue second residency.

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That’s about $1,000 per employee, which might not sound so crazy, until you realize that this was during a period when only 9% of DOT employees were actually showing up to the office.

But the furniture budget of the Department of Justice was even worse— $408 million on furniture in four years, with an average attendance rate of just 35%.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) dropped $250,000 on a single “refresh” of Herman Miller chairs. My only hope is this was part of developing some new revolutionary bulletproof chair cushion.

All told, federal agencies have spent $4.6 billion on furniture since 2021 — much of it for offices that have sat empty while employees work from home on Zoom.

If this were an isolated case of waste, you might write it off as bad management at a couple of agencies.

But it is not.

In February, the Government Accountability Office calculated the final cost of the Employee Retention Credit— a COVID-era program that ended in 2021. Total payout: $283 billion.

But 83% of that money ($235 billion) was paid out YEARS after the pandemic ended; the fraud mills kept filing bogus claims, and the IRS just kept writing checks.

Also in February, the FCC’s inspector general discovered that Lifeline phone providers in California had been billing the government to provide phone and internet service to 94,000 dead people— $3.8 million worth of calls that were never made, to phones that were never used, for people who were no longer alive.

The examples never stop.

Senator Joni Ernst recently uncovered Pentagon-funded research projects that included studies on octopus hypnosis, monkey mind-reading, snail mucus, and elephant seal sleeping habits, all funded through a contracting loophole called “Other Transaction Agreements”.

These OTAs allow agencies to spend money without competitive bidding, standard oversight, or public disclosure of costs.

How much did each project cost? That’s the beauty of the system — the government doesn’t have to tell you. But the GAO found that $77.5 billion flowed through these agreements between 2021 and 2025 without proper public accounting.

The National Science Foundation spent $14.6 million teaching monkeys to play a video game inspired by The Price Is Right. USAID spent $20 million producing Sesame Street in Iraq and $69,000 on dance classes in Wuhan, China.

And every single year, the federal government makes hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments— money sent to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.

Last year’s total: $186 billion. That includes payments to deceased individuals, ineligible recipients, and programs that can’t even verify whether the money should have gone out at all.

Since 2003, the cumulative total has reached $2.8 trillion, i.e. a full 7% of the national debt that simply would not exist if the government was minimally competent.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has failed its own audit for eight consecutive years. Auditors could not verify more than 60% of the department’s $4.65 trillion in assets.

Congress’s response? Hand the Pentagon its first-ever trillion-dollar budget. They cannot account for the money they already receive, so why not give them even more?!?

Then there’s the end-of-year ritual. Under “use it or lose it” rules, agencies that don’t exhaust their budgets risk getting less money next year.

So in the final five days of fiscal year 2025, the War Department spent $50.1 billion in grants and contracts, including $6.9 million on lobster tail, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $15 million on ribeye steak, $225 million on furniture, including a $98,329 Steinway grand piano for a general’s home.

Makes sense. Perhaps a stirring rendition of “Great Balls of Fire” is just what we need to defeat Iran.

For context, only nine countries on Earth spend more $50 billion on their entire annual defense budget. The Pentagon spent that in five days.

None of this is secret. DOGE found it. Inspectors General found it. The GAO found it. Senators publish it in annual reports that make headlines for about a day.

And then nothing changes.  Congress doesn’t cut a dime.

They act like it is simply impossible, that children would be starving in the streets, national security would be at risk, and farms would lay fallow, that we would all burst into flames if they cut the budget.

This might be one of the most effective lies ever perpetrated on a population— that we simply cannot, must not cut a dime in spending, for the consequences would be catastrophic.

The federal government spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025. $2 trillion of that was borrowed. $1.2 trillion was spent on interest to service the $39 trillion national debt.

And over the next decade, the CBO expects Congress to add another $23.1 trillion to the debt. It will almost certainly be much more.

This is arguably the single greatest threat to America. Not China, not hysteria over AI, not any of the foreign adversaries that dominate the headlines— but the slow, compounding, mathematically inevitable consequences of a government that cannot stop spending money it doesn’t have.

And the most infuriating part is that it should be so easy to cut the most obvious, most indefensible waste. The $600 billion in outright fraud Secretary of Treasury Bessent estimates in the budget every single year. The $200+ billion in improper payments. The $100+ billion in legal graft that flows to political allies.

That alone would cut nearly half the deficit, without even touching the furniture for empty offices or octopus hypnosis experiments.

But if Congress is unwilling to even lift a finger for such obvious absurdity, what are the odds they’ll tackle Social Security’s impending insolvency, just six years away? Or give foreign countries the confidence to keep investing in US government bonds? Or behave in a way to keep inflation in check?

Seems pretty low to us. Which is why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

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America owed about $75 million in debt from the Revolutionary War. Individual states had already defaulted. Foreign creditors considered the new country a total joke. And domestic bondholders at home were selling their worthless government IOUs for pennies on the dollar.

So, Hamilton came up with a solution. It was highly controversial, but he managed to convince Congress to approve it.

In short, Hamilton issued brand new bonds to investors that effectively rolled up all existing state and federal debts. These new bonds were backed by dedicated tax revenue– including, most controversially, a tax on whiskey. Today that would be the equivalent of taxing Instagram use.

But in fairness his plan worked. Within a decade, US bonds traded for full value. Foreign capital flooded in. The country’s creditworthiness went from laughingstock to gold standard (quite literally after they passed the Mint and Coinage Act of 1792).

Hamilton’s success wasn’t some clever financial trickery. The whole idea was to establish credibility: demonstrate that America was serious about paying its debt. He paired every dollar of borrowing with a specific tax to repay it all. Bondholders could look at the tax revenue, look at the debt, and do the math.

And the math worked.

But that was 237 years ago. Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell admitted that the math no longer works.

“[Today’s] level of the debt is not unsustainable,” Powell said, “but the path is not sustainable. It will not end well if we don’t do something fairly soon.”

Look at that again to understand what he said: the amount of debt ($39 trillion) is not the problem. The problem is the trajectory.

America, he noted, is the world’s reserve currency issuer with the deepest capital markets on earth. It can carry a larger debt load than smaller countries. And that’s true.

But Powell also acknowledged the obvious part: “Our debt is growing substantially faster than our economy. And in the long run, that’s kind of the definition of unsustainable.”

He’s right.

The Congressional Budget Office projects net interest payments on the national debt will hit $1 trillion this fiscal year— nearly triple from 2020. Through the first three months of FY2026, the Treasury has spent $270 billion just on interest. And that doesn’t include the principal amount of debt that has to be repaid to foreign creditors who simply want their money back.

The CBO also projects that, by 2031, the average interest rate on government debt will exceed the rate of economic growth. If interest on the debt is 6%, and the economy is only growing at 4%, then the problem becomes self-reinforcing: debt will grow faster than the economy no matter what Congress does.

This would be a fiscal death spiral, and CBO’s own numbers say it’s just five years away.

After WWII, America faced a similar burden; the public debt was 106% of GDP in 1946. But within three decades the ratio had plummeted to 23%.

How? Simple. The government consistently ran budget surpluses, while an industrial boom powered significant economic growth. Plus (and this is the part nobody likes to mention) the Federal Reserve pegged interest rates below inflation for years– quietly taxing bondholders through financial repression, which slowly melted the debt away.

Not one of those conditions exists today. The US government hasn’t run a budget surplus in decades. Q4 2025 GDP growth was just revised down to a pathetic 0.7%. And inflation is running hot enough that the Fed can’t cut rates without making it worse.

There’s a certain dark humor in the Fed Chairman delivering this warning.

After all, this is the same man who presided over the most aggressive monetary expansion in history: trillions of newly created dollars, years of near-zero interest rates, ‘Quantitative Easing’ that made the government’s borrowing habit completely painless.

The Fed didn’t invent politicians’ spending addiction. But they did hand Congress an unlimited credit card with a 0% introductory rate. Now that the teaser rate has expired, the new interest bill is $1 trillion per year.

The Chairman’s proposed fix? “We don’t have to pay the debt down,” he said. “We just need to have the economy actually growing more quickly than the debt.” Then he added, with a self-aware shrug, “I pretty much limit myself to those high-level points, which essentially everyone ignores.”

So, is Congress going to suddenly find its inner fiscal discipline? Will the Bernie Sanders, AOCs, and Elizabeth Warrens of the world make critical regulatory reforms to unleash economic growth?

I’m not holding my breath.

The most likely course of action– as we have argued for years– is that Congress will continue to do nothing… which will ultimately cause the dollar to lose value and purchasing power. Your savings, your income, your retirement account will all buy less.

History is unambiguous about this. Governments invariably choose inflation. Every single time.

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His story was one of dozens featured in a recent Wall Street Journal article about Americans are leaving the country in record numbers.

Americans residing in Portugal have increased 500% since COVID. More Americans moved to Germany last year than Germans moved to America. Requests to renounce US citizenship jumped 48%.

And these days, it’s not all that hard to understand the allure.

The United States is a country where kindergarteners routinely practice active shooter drills— where a father’s breaking point isn’t the first armed threat at his kid’s school, but the second.

It’s a country where a 23-year-old woman named Iryna Zarutska was sitting on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a man with 14 prior arrests including armed robbery who had been released without bail pulled out a knife and killed her.

And yet when federal agents try to arrest and deport violent criminals, mobs show up to block them. Cities pass sanctuary policies. Removing illegal immigrants with violent criminal records is treated as an act of fascism.

Then there’s the slow suffocation of common sense.

People are fired and blacklisted for expressing opinions that were obvious truths ten years ago. Universities have turned into ideological minefields where medical professors self-censor biological facts to keep their jobs.

Children are being taught radical race and gender ideology in public schools— and parents who object are treated like domestic terrorists.

Business owners are drowning in regulations, tariffs, and compliance costs that change with every election cycle.

Congress is full of unqualified people who can barely contain their contempt for one another, let alone govern.

Is there anyone, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, who thinks this is going well?

The left thinks America is sliding into fascism. The right thinks it’s sliding into communism. There are factions within factions, divisions are growing, and there always seems to be a new reason to rage.

In the past, there have always been citizens who threatened to leave if/when a certain political candidate won. When George W. Bush became President, liberals said they were moving to Canada. When Obama got elected, conservatives said they’d had enough.

For the first time in modern memory, the discomfort isn’t partisan— it’s universal. Everyone feels it.

On top of the social chaos, the cost of living is crushing people. Housing in most major cities is absurd. Grocery bills keep climbing. Healthcare is a financial catastrophe for anyone without employer coverage— and increasingly for those with it. Retirees on fixed incomes are watching their purchasing power evaporate.

Which is why a woman the WSJ spoke to from Buffalo making $80,000 a year couldn’t make ends meet. She moved to Albania, where she lives comfortably on $1,000 a month. She now helps other Americans on Social Security and disability do the same.

It’s only going to get worse. The US national debt surpassed $39 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office projects $24.4 trillion in additional deficits over the next decade. That means more inflation. Higher taxes. Less purchasing power.

If you want a preview of what’s coming, look at the Netherlands. The Dutch government, strapped for cash, is trying to pass a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains— meaning they’ll tax you on investment gains you haven’t even sold yet.

Similar proposals have already been floated in the US— and with people like Mamdani being elected in New York City and Gavin Newsom gearing up for a White House run, how long before they become a reality?

That’s the playbook when governments run out of money. And the US government is running out of money faster than almost anyone.

We’ve been writing about all of this for over sixteen years.

We were among the very first voices talking about international diversification, second residencies, Plan B strategies, and the importance of not having all your eggs in one country’s basket.

Back then, people thought we were nutty. ‘Why would anyone leave the greatest country in the world,’ they asked.

Now it’s front-page news in the Wall Street Journal— right alongside a lot of other things we’ve been talking about for years: the debt crisis, gold, the erosion of the dollar’s reserve currency status.

We said: buy gold. Diversify internationally. Consider a second residency. Build a sensible Plan B.

These aren’t fringe ideas anymore. Everyone intuitively understands why these are important steps.

That said, it’s often hard to understand where to even begin doing something about it.

Which is exactly what our Plan B Confidential service is for.

We provide actionable intelligence on second citizenships, foreign residency programs, international banking, tax strategies, and real asset investments— drawn from boots-on-the-ground research and a professional network across the globe.

Again, we’ve been doing this for 16 years, so our Rolodex of trusted service providers runs deep.

Right now, given how important it is to have a Plan B for what’s happening, and what’s to come, we’re offering a 40% discount on membership (for the first time in years).

Click here to learn more about Schiff Sovereign’s Plan B Confidential.

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“Just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong,” she said. “Get out of town. Because you do not represent our values. You are not New Yorkers.”

Well, a lot of people took her advice.

Over the past several years, more than 125,000 New Yorkers relocated to Florida. And they weren’t the illegals suckling the teet of free government money; most of the 125,000 who left were very wealthy taxpayers. And they didn’t just bring their suitcases— they brought their money.

And the thing about New York’s tax system is that those ultra-wealthy matter A LOT. Just over 3,000 wealthy taxpayers in New York— the top 0.03%— generate roughly 19% of the state’s income tax revenue.

So without those same taxpayers that Hochul chased away, the state’s tax revenue plummeted.

And naturally Governor Hochul is now singing a very different tune. She recently spoke at a political conference saying,

“I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state. Now, there are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up— cut me the checks if you want to be supportive. But maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who we can bring back home, because our tax base has been eroded.”

Read that again. In 2022, she told anyone who disagreed politically to get out of town. In 2026, she’s practically begging millionaires to come back… almost like it’s some sort of membership drive.

Moreover, just a few days after her desperate plea for millionaires, Hochul published an op-ed announcing that she wants to postpone implementation of New York’s cap-and-invest climate program— the centerpiece of the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

Why? Because her own state agency’s official analysis projected the regulations could increase utility bills by over $4,100 a year and increase gas prices by an additional $2.23 per gallon.

Of course, that is the entire point for climate fanatics. They WANT the costs of carbon based fuels to rise to discourage use.

Which is probably why Hochul doesn’t want to REPEAL the law. She wants to DELAY it.

Hochul wants to push full implementation out until the end her second full term as governor… so that it won’t be her problem politically.

Although the climate law was passed before her tenure, Hochul embraced it as her own— issuing a 2022 executive order to accelerate its implementation, personally announcing the cap-and-invest program in her 2023 State of the State address, and calling herself “the staunchest environmentalist and fighter of climate change in New York’s history.”

Kathcy Hochul, like so many other politicians of her ilk, is an inspired idiot.

She thinks it’s great to demonize the other side and tell them to get the hell out while she’s on the campaign trail.

Then reality hits, and she realizes those are her tax cows she needs to milk if she has any hope of paying for her “generous social programs” that convince welfare queens and illegal immigrants to vote for her.

She thinks it’s great to play climate crusader when there’s a camera rolling. Until rising utility costs infuriate voters and threaten her own political career.

This is why having a Plan B matters so much. When your state views you primarily as a source of revenue to fund programs you didn’t ask for and don’t benefit from, the rational move is to go somewhere you are wanted.

The same thing can happen at the national level. And it’s not that hard to give yourself the option (but not the obligation), through foreign residency or citizenship, to move somewhere that welcomes you, with a lower cost of living, with better tax rates, or a more friendly atmosphere.

And that’s really what a Plan B is all about— making sure you always have options.

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It’s crazy. Every single senator on that committee acknowledged that Social Security will run out of money in roughly six years.

The Senate Budget Committee— one of the most powerful committees in Congress— convened what could almost be described as an emergency hearing to figure out how to fix it.

And nobody cares.

No media coverage. No headlines. No cable news panels. Nothing.

This is a program that roughly 50 to 60 million Americans depend on. It’s one of the largest programs in the entire federal budget— on par with national defense spending.

Just imagine if the Pentagon were about to run out of money. That would be front-page news around the world. There would be Congressional hearings, press conferences, emergency sessions.

But Social Security running out of money in just six years? Apparently that five-alarm fire doesn’t even warrant a mention.

If there’s one positive takeaway, it’s that everyone on the Senate committee agreed they need to do something. There was genuine, bipartisan consensus that the problem is real, it’s urgent, and it requires action.

Then they went and debated solutions… and that’s when the session became utterly hilarious.

For example, one senator proposed that the federal government create a brand new investment fund— “pre-funded” with $1.5 TRILLION. He believes that the government will invest this money so brilliantly, so skillfully, that it will save Social Security forever.

This is just classic Washington thinking. The solution to every problem is always more government control. More committees. More agencies. More trillions.

But the most hilarious part— and you can actually see this on the video— is that while the Senator was laying out his new plan, a camera operator in the background, who probably works for C-SPAN, started visibly shaking his head in disgust.

The average working guy understands what apparently United States Senators do not: handing politicians a $1.5 trillion permanent investment fund is not a solution. It’s a problem.

And not just a problem— it’s a fraud magnet.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already estimated that roughly 10% of the federal budget, around $600 billion per year, is lost to outright fraud. That’s the existing level of fraud, with existing programs. Now imagine layering a $1.5 trillion investment fund on top of that— managed by the same people, overseen by the same bureaucrats, with the same lack of accountability.

Social Security is hurtling toward insolvency, and the big idea from a senior United States Senator is to let politicians manage a $1.5 trillion investment fund.

Because that worked out so well the last time they tried it.

Remember when Pete Buttigieg, as Secretary of Transportation, was handed $1.2 trillion to spend on American infrastructure? His stated goal was to “deliver $1.2 trillion worth of value.” In other words, his best-case scenario was a 0% return on investment.

And he couldn’t even manage that. The $7.5 billion electric vehicle charging program, which promised 500,000 stations by 2030, has built fewer than 100 after nearly four years.

In Baltimore, where the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March 2024, the city initially said reconstruction would cost $1.7 billion and be complete by 2028. Nine months later they revised the cost estimate to $5.2 billion, and completion to 2030.

And where, exactly, would this $1.5 trillion in “pre-funding” come from? The government is already running a deficit of $2 trillion a year. The national debt is approaching $40 trillion. They don’t have $1.5 trillion lying around.

So they’d borrow it. Which means more debt. More pressure on interest rates. More inflation. More printing. And ultimately, more waste, more corruption, and more scandals.

Everyone knows this. Even the guy in the background operating the camera.

The good news is that there does appear to be at least some political will to address the problem.

And there are relatively straightforward fixes available, and the committee at least recognizes that the longer they wait, the more painful the fixes become.

We’ll see what happens. But this hearing perfectly illustrates what always seems to happen in Washington: in trying to “solve” a crisis, their good idea factory creates even more problems, more waste, and more fraud than what they started with.

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It is, arguably, the most important financial document published in the country each year— the government’s own accounting of what it owns versus what it owes.

And the numbers are devastating.

The bottom line is that the government is reporting assets of $6 trillion, versus liabilities of nearly $48 trillion.

That gives it a “net worth” of NEGATIVE $42 trillion, which is the worst financial position on record.

Now, in fairness— and I’ve pointed this out before— governmental accounting is not always grounded in the real world.

The report, for example, places no value on the potential trillions (if not tens of trillions) of dollars’ worth of natural resources in the ground. And it assigns relatively little value to other hard assets like real estate.

But there’s no sugar-coating it. The fiscal situation is absolutely atrocious, and it gets worse every year.

The good news may be that the people in charge at least seem to understand this; Treasury Secretary Bessent acknowledges in his introduction that the situation is bad and that it needs to be improved quickly.

He writes, “Getting our fiscal house in order is not only an economic imperative, it is also essential to preserving the strength and credibility of the United States at home and abroad.”

And he discusses how they’d like to do it — through “reining in government spending and growing the economy,” through deregulation, as well as “energy abundance.”

Hallelujah. That is the exact formula to fix this looming fiscal crisis.

For the Treasury Secretary to even admit this is borderline unprecedented.

I’ve read through the Treasury Secretary’s introduction to these annual financial reports going back a couple of decades.

In 2002, for example, Secretary John Snow (who clearly knows nothing) wrote a very bland intro letter about accounting rules, with no acknowledgment of mounting military spending or the recession.

By 2007, Secretary Hank Paulson was beaming about how great the economy was, with no mention unsustainable discretionary spending— and this was only months before the entire financial system nearly collapsed.

In 2014, Secretary Jack Lew bragged about a slight decline in the budget deficit, even as the national debt was spiraling out of control.

And by 2023, Janet Yellen took a victory lap about how white-hot her economy was, completely ignoring the skyrocketing national debt and inflation fueled by COVID-era deficit spending.

This current report is the first time I’ve seen a Treasury Secretary seriously acknowledge the problem.

The obvious question then, is, having correctly identified both the problem and the solution, are they actually going to be able to execute?

I certainly hope so. Unfortunately many of the things he mentions, like tax reform, regulatory reform, and spending discipline, fall exclusively under the authority of Congress. And the majority of those 435 people are unserious about spending cuts.

There are a few things that the administration can execute on its own. Energy policy is one of them, and as we’ve said before, they have done quite a bit to boost nuclear energy.

Obviously a lot is riding on what happens with Iran when it comes to oil. A peace deal could potentially drive more foreign investment into US Treasuries, which would result in lower interest rates and lower inflation— and buy America time to restore its fiscal responsibility.

But it could also go the other way and drastically erode confidence in the United States.

So we’re really at a tipping point right now.

If Iran ends poorly, we could likely see foreign countries avoiding US Treasuries— putting more pressure on the Federal Reserve to ‘print’ money to finance the deficit. That would end up generating a lot more inflation.

The bigger problem is that Social Security is set to run out of money in six years. So, if Iran ends poorly and there’s no serious fiscal reform, I think that 6-year window is when the US would see major economic consequences.

One canary in the coalmine is rising interest rates. Right in front of our eyes, the 10-year and 30-year Treasury yields have been rising to near their highest levels in twenty years.

This is the opposite of what’s supposed to happen.

In the past, during times of crisis (including war), the world rushed into US Treasury bonds as the “risk free” asset. And yields plummeted due to the surge in demand.

Now it’s the opposite. Since the war began a few weeks ago, the 10-year yield has gone from 3.97% to 4.39%. Yields are up, not down. That’s the opposite of what normally happens in a crisis.

The jury is still out, and I sincerely hope they’re able to conclude a great deal.

But if confidence continues to erode and yields keep rising, the Federal Reserve will be under enormous pressure to step in with a new Quantitative Easing program. In other words, they’ll ‘print’ money to buy US government bonds and finance the deficit.

And as we saw during the pandemic, when the Fed created roughly $5 trillion out of thin air, that led to 9% inflation.

Bottom line, it’s definitely time to be thinking about a Plan B.

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Obviously, there are the usual suspects like the New York Times and Washington Post who have called it “folly” and “rotten”. But plenty of voices on the right have joined in the criticism as well.

Tucker Carlson calls it “absolutely disgusting and evil”. Thomas Massie says it is “not America First”. Joe Rogan says it’s “insane”. Joe Kent, formerly the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned his post because Iran was not “an imminent threat” and there was no “clear path to a swift victory”.

In short, there are plenty of respectable and informed views that Iran is (1) not going well, and (2) not in America’s interests. And I can certainly understand their points of view.

Personally, I see this from a lot of different angles– some positive, some negative. But at the same time I also think there’s a possibility that what’s happening right now might actually BE the plan.

Just consider: the US national debt is $39 trillion. Deficits are piling on an additional $2 trillion per year. Social Security is only six years away from running out of money. And the vast majority of United States Congressmen couldn’t possibly care less.

It doesn’t make you unpatriotic or unAmerican to understand this simple truth: US government bonds are simply not as attractive as they used to be for foreign investors.

The leadership of every foreign country on this planet recognizes that they could wake up tomorrow morning and find out that their Treasury holdings have been frozen. Or they could be sanctioned. Or there could be another tariff escalation. Or their alliance terminated. Or another military strike.

They also believe that Congress will continue to do nothing about America’s spiraling debt and budget deficit. Interest on the debt already exceeds 22% of federal tax revenue, and the problem is rapidly becoming much worse.

They also know there’s a good chance the Federal Reserve will fail to achieve price stability, and that inflation could easily go much higher from here.

All of that spells plenty of risk, especially for foreign governments and central banks. Given that US Treasury securities pay a measly 4%, it hardly seems worth their investment.

That’s why so many foreign governments and central banks around the world started moving a portion of their strategic financial reserves away from the US dollar… and into gold. This has been a trend for a few years now– central bank gold purchases surged in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

That’s a huge problem for the US government, which critically needs foreign investors to continue buying Treasury bonds. Treasury demand from foreigners helps keep interest rates down and inflation in check.

Conversely, if foreigners ditched the dollar entirely, inflation and interest rates would both skyrocket.

So, what better way to prevent this than to give foreigners an extremely compelling reason to buy US Treasurys and hold US dollars?

Oil is the most widely traded commodity in the world. Every country needs it, and despite the cries of deranged teenagers who superglue themselves to the pavement, demand for oil keeps growing.

Oil has traditionally been bought and sold in US dollars… even when neither buyer nor seller are American. So, when Australia sells oil to India, that transaction takes place in US dollars.

The sheer volume of the oil trade means that every country stockpiles US dollars in order to participate in global energy markets. And they typically hold US dollars by buying Treasury bonds.

This war might possibly have been a ploy to gain control over Iran’s oil: punch them in the face, decimate their leadership, destroy much of their military capabilities… and then offer a peace deal:

“We will lift sanctions and allow you to sell oil on the global market, and even line up investment to expand your production, as long as everything is denominated in US dollars. No oil will be sold in any other currency. Better yet, we’ll push you to peg your currency to the US dollar, just like other countries in the region.”

Obviously, they would never communicate such a strategy in public; they’d never stand on stage and tell CNN what they’re really trying to accomplish.

But in the end, maybe they don’t really care if there’s true regime change in Iran. Maybe they don’t really care about Israel’s objectives either. Perhaps the singular American goal is to boost foreign demand for the US dollar.

And it’s possible they might just pull that off.

Again, I’m just speculating. The only thing we can say for sure is that there’s a lot riding on this outcome.

If they succeed, the resurgence of the dollar could buy the US enough time to fix its problems. If they fail, it could be the proverbial nail.

That’s why this war in Iran could end up right alongside 9/11, the GFC, and Covid as one of the most consequential events of our time.

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Here are a few of this week’s stories in case you missed them.

20 million Americans just found out what “affordable” healthcare actually costs

The Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010 with a promise that healthcare would finally be affordable. It wasn’t. Since the ACA became law, the average family health insurance premium has nearly doubled— from $13,770 to almost $27,000 a year.

So by 2021, the government had to introduce enhanced subsidies just to keep Obamacare’s own premiums from crushing the very same people that it was supposed to help. At the peak, 24 million people were enrolled and 92% of them were receiving taxpayer-funded premium subsidies.

The “Affordable” Care Act could only be sustained by massive government handouts on top of the massive government program.

When those subsidies were set to expire at the end of 2025, the same Democrats who created this mess triggered a 43-day government shutdown, fighting to keep the money flowing rather than fix the program. They lost. The subsidies expired on December 31, 2025.

Now the results are in.

Average annual premium payments more than doubled— from $888 to $1,904. Of the 24 million people enrolled in ACA plans last year, roughly 2.4 million have dropped health insurance entirely. Another 5 million switched to other coverage. And 17% of those still hanging on aren’t sure they can afford premiums for the rest of the year— meaning the exodus is far from over.

More than half of those who kept their plans say they’re cutting back on food and basic household items just to cover healthcare.

This is simple economics. When the government shows up with a bottomless wallet, the entire industry restructures around the guaranteed revenue. Prices rise as a result.

This has happened literally every single time the government has stepped in to make something more affordable— education, child care, housing, and now medical insurance.

The “Affordable” Care Act was never affordable. It was subsidized. And now tens of millions of Americans are learning the difference.

Finally, the Teachers Unions Lose and Students Win

Stacy Davis Gates makes over $270,000 a year running the Chicago Teachers Union. This is the same school district where only 43% of students can read at grade level and 27% are proficient in math— and that’s AFTER the state lowered proficiency standards.

The district’s budget has nearly doubled since 2012, i.e. the more money they spend, the worse the results.

So naturally Ms. Gates got a promotion. Last October she was unanimously elected president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers (i.e. statewide union), giving her control over 103,000 members in Illinois.

She has wasted no time using that control to fight a federal new school choice program which would give parents the opportunity to move their kids from failing schools.

Rather than acknowledge that her schools are rampant failures and that parents should have the right to move their children to better performing schools, Gates has called school choice “the choice of racists” and formally urged Illinois not to participate.

I’m not even sure what that means; she seems to be asserting that the teachers are exclusively black, the fed-up parents are exclusively white… and that ethnicity is the reason parents are upset, i.e. NOT the fact that their kids can’t read. This is a clinical level of insanity.

Under Stacy Davis Gates, her CTU’s political action committee donated $72,500 to State Senator Graciela Guzman— who, literally on the same day as the donation, submitted a bill to ban Illinois from participating in the school choice program.

Nonetheless, voters in more than 30 counties weighed in on whether Illinois should opt in — and the measure passed in every jurisdiction that has reported results so far, with support ranging from 56% to 77%.

Inject a little free-market competition into a system that has failed students for decades. Let parents choose. Let schools compete. The only people opposed are the ones who benefit from a captive audience.

Oh, and Gates sends her own child to a $16,000-per-year private school.

So she clearly understands that school choice works. She just doesn’t want anyone else to have the right to choose.

The EU “simplifies” its AI regulations — by making them more complicated

Only the European Union could use the word “simplification” to describe what happened on Tuesday.

The European Parliament voted 101-9 to adopt changes to its Artificial Intelligence Act — a law that runs 458 pages, contains 180 recitals, 113 articles, and 13 annexes, totaling roughly 88,000 words.

The “simplification” modifies 30 articles, adds a brand-new banned category of AI, and creates three different compliance timelines instead of one — November 2026, December 2027, and August 2028.

Of course, the European Commission itself missed its own February 2026 deadline to publish guidance on how companies should comply. The standardization bodies tasked with developing technical standards also missed their deadline. At least 12 member states missed the deadline to appoint enforcement authorities. And 19 hadn’t even appointed a single point of contact.

In short, regulators who don’t adhere to their own deadlines have written rules based on standards that don’t yet exist, enforced by authorities who haven’t been appointed, in a law that hasn’t been fully implemented. And they just voted to “simplify” it all by adding more rules.

The damage is already real.

Apple delayed launching AI features in Europe, only rolling out a partial version months after American users had access. Meta delayed AI features and refused to sign the EU’s voluntary AI code of practice.

Google DeepMind’s head of public policy said the Act “was devised before ChatGPT had even come out.” Meta’s public policy director said “European citizens and consumers suffer” as a result of the regulations.

The specific rules are even more absurd than the process.

The EU classified healthcare, education, and employment as “high-risk” AI domains — the very sectors where AI could deliver the greatest benefits to ordinary people.

An AI system that helps a doctor diagnose a rare disease faster? Forget it. An AI tutor that detects when a student is struggling and adjusts its teaching? Banned outright (the EU prohibits emotion-recognition AI in schools). A recruitment tool that matches workers to better jobs? Subject to fines of up to 35 million euros or 7% of global revenue.

This is technology that could raise living standards, increase productivity, improve healthcare, and make personalized education accessible to millions.

Instead, Europe has ensured its 450 million citizens will be the last people on earth to benefit from it.

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It points out that the United States has never entered an economic downturn as indebted as it is today— meaning there is essentially zero fiscal space to respond to the next crisis.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, national debt stood at roughly 35% of GDP. By the time it was over, debt had ballooned to about 70%.

Then, when COVID hit in 2020, debt was already at 80% of GDP. By the time that was over, it had surged past 100%.

Today the official national debt is almost at 130% of GDP. That’s well beyond the World War II record.

Each economic crisis starts from a worse position, requires more borrowing, and leaves the country deeper in the hole.

None of this should be surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention. We’ve been writing about this for years.

We said it in 2019 when everything was going great— record stock market, record tax revenue, healthy economy— and the government still ran a trillion dollar deficit.

We wondered out loud— if the government still runs a $1 trillion deficit when everything is great, how bad will the deficit be when there’s an actual crisis?

We didn’t have to wait long to find out; Covid hit shortly thereafter, causing the government deficit to surge to $5+ trillion.

So what happens when the next recession hits? Where does the money come from?

The CRFB’s proposed emergency plan gives you the answer. First, freeze Social Security, Medicare, and all discretionary spending — no cost-of-living adjustments, no growth, nothing.

Then, freeze tax brackets too, so that inflation quietly pushes more Americans into higher brackets.

And on top of all that, phase in a brand new “deficit reduction surtax”: an additional tax on income above $100,000 that ratchets up every year until deficits fall to 3% of GDP.

Of course this would all be so politically toxic that the report concedes nothing will be done until… a crisis forces it.

But that doesn’t mean Americans aren’t already feeling the consequences of higher deficits.

Last year, a Yale Budget Lab report found that federal deficit spending since 2015 has pushed interest rates up by nearly a full percentage point.

The government borrows so much money that it crowds out private lending, forcing everyone else to pay more. You’re essentially competing with the government for a loan.

For a new homebuyer, that single percentage point adds $76,014 in extra costs over a 30-year mortgage — roughly $2,534 per year, or about $211 every single month. Auto loans cost an extra $670. Small business loans cost an extra $7,723.

So when a young couple can’t afford their first house, or a small business owner pays more to expand, part of that cost is a direct, measurable consequence of Washington’s borrowing binge.

The national debt isn’t an abstract number on a screen in Washington. It’s higher interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards.

And the government borrowing is only accelerating.

Over the past year, the debt grew by $2.7 trillion; that’s a sharp increase from the $1.8 trillion federal deficit in fiscal year 2025.

So not only is the national debt growing, but the rate at which the national debt is growing… is growing. (If you’re a math wonk, the second derivative is positive.)

At the current trajectory, the debt will cross $39 trillion by the end of this month. And $40 trillion by the summer… not long after America celebrates its 250th birthday.

What’s crazy is that the people in charge of tracking all of this spending can’t figure out where the money goes.

On March 5, a government auditor reported that the Office of Management and Budget cannot even produce a complete inventory of federal programs, despite being legally required to do so.

It’s not that the OMB is lazy or incompetent; it’s that there are simply too many federal programs… and the complex web of spending makes it virtually impossible to tally up all the various offices, agencies, sub-departments, committees, special advisory boards, emergency programs, etc. that exist in the federal government.

Congress makes things much worse when they appropriate annual funding for some program— sort of ‘fire and forget’. So decades go by since a program was originally created…yet it continues to receive money each year even though nobody knows what it’s for.

Bottom line, the government now spends $7 trillion each year. And they can’t figure out where it goes.

We’ve spent the last 16 years helping people build a Plan B— because even back in 2010, the trajectory of fiscal spending was obvious.

Look, the world’s not coming to an end. But it would be naive and foolish to think there won’t be consequences to such a dismal financial situation. There already are.

And it’s important to think about this, because the earlier you start preparing, the more options you’ll have to mitigate the consequences.

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The saunas were fed by nearby hot springs and often maintained by Buddhist monks; in this way they were viewed as almost sacred… and certainly healing. The heat was believed to promote circulation, detoxification, and overall health, plus the social gathering in the saunas reinforced relationships within the community.

But, again, medieval Koreans had modest values. And for that reason, they separated men and women in different saunas. That wasn’t a new idea either; many civilizations, going back to the Roman baths, or thermae, separated genders when nudity was involved.

This should hardly be a controversial topic even today. But leave it to angry Leftists to turn public nudity into a human rights case.

Olympus Spa in Washington state is a traditional Korean sauna; as such, it is for women only– and many patrons bring their minor-age daughters along.

Per the Korean tradition, the women are typically nude. And the owners– Koreans themselves who happen to be devout Christians– believe that grown men shouldn’t be naked in a public place in front of women and girls.

You can just smell the Left’s disdain for such basic social norms. And sure enough, a few years ago, a grown adult, nonbinary transgender queer “AMAB” (assigned male at birth) named Haven Wilvich sought entry to the spa.

The spa denied entry, and Wilvich then filed a complaint with the state Human Rights Commission.

Think about that again. We’re not talking about some form of modern slavery. Or warlords holding children at gunpoint. Or China’s internment of its Uyghur population. Or the Taliban’s brutal suppression of women’s rights.

Nor are we talking about Wilvich being denied a critical need, like admission to a hospital for emergency care.

This was quite simply a biological man demanding to access to nude female children. And the state HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION jumped all over it like they were saving the world from genocide.

After being forced to change their gender policy, the spa’s owners, Myoon and Sun Lee (joined with some anonymous ‘Jane Doe’ female customers) filed a lawsuit against the Human Rights Council.

The Lees alleged that their own rights, including their First Amendment religious freedom, had been violated by the heavy hand of the state.

But the Court found such allegations preposterous and dismissed the case. The judge made it very clear– the only rights being violated were the nonbinary transgender queer AMAB’s rights. Everyone else’s rights are irrelevant and should be trampled upon in the name of social justice.

The Lees then requested an appeal to the US Ninth Circuit, where a judicial panel refused to even hear the case. The Lees petitioned again for a re-hearing at the Ninth Circuit, and that request was rejected late last week.

I read the 105-page opinion over the weekend; it’s hard to not be disgusted given how the judges justified rejecting the Lees’ appeal… based on procedural technicalities

The majority claimed, for example, that the spa owners “did not challenge [the definitions] or the language” of Washington’s anti-discrimination law (known as WLAD), nor did they sufficiently “argue that the statute was vague” or that “the HRC’s [Human Rights Commission] related policies” were inappropriate.

Unbelievable. A grown adult wants to walk around naked in front of children, and the Ninth Circuit is busy debating legal definitions and policy memos.

One of the few dissenters was Lawrence VanDyke, a Trump-appointed federal judge who wrote bluntly in his opinion:

“This is a case about swinging dicks. The Christian owners of Olympus Spa— a traditional Korean, women-only, nude spa—understandably don’t want them in their spa. Their female employees and female clients don’t want them in their spa either. But Washington State insists on them. And now so does the Ninth Circuit.”

Most of the other justices, along with the legacy media, pounced all over VanDyke for his foul language. Unsurprisingly they were far more offended by his potty mouth than by the men who want to parade their genitals in front of prepubescent girls.

It’s enraging that the ‘experts’ in power– who are charged with maintaining our civilization– are becoming more destructive by the day.

They justify their decisions with legal vagaries and high sounding talk of human rights… without realizing how ridiculous they sound. GOING TO A DAY SPA IS NOT A HUMAN RIGHT! Duh.

But that’s not even the point. I read Wilvich’s entire blog site, going back several years. And my conclusion is that Wilvich is an extremely angry and unstable person.

The March 5, 2023, entry, for example (entitled “Fuck America”) viciously laments that “even my own liberal bubble is threatening to pop” because the country was not woke enough.

Bear in mind that 2023 was the same year that a trans activist exposed they/their boobs on the White House lawn in a symbol of peak, Biden-era insanity. Yet even that was insufficient progress for Wilvich.

This person needs serious, professional help. And I don’t mean that in a derisive way. It’s just a fact. But rather than get major psychological support, Wilvich was given a pulpit… and the power to force hard-working business owners to betray their commonsense value system.

Wilvich even gloated about it, writing later on they/them’s website, “I did it! I got the main naked lady spa in the area to change their policies and allow all self-identified women access regardless of surgery and genitals.”

In short, business and property owners have no rights. Their female patrons have no rights. Girls as young as 13 who are now forced to be nude in front of grown men… have no rights. Only they/them have rights.

This is an extremely unserious system of justice.

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On the other side of the world, German Chancellor Angela Merkel panicked.

Her government had extended the operating lives of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors just five months earlier. But, because of the earthquake in Japan, Merkel reversed course overnight and mothballed eight German reactors.

But Merkel’s decision wasn’t really about natural disasters. It was political.

Merkel was terrified of Germany’s Green Party— which was literally founded on anti-nuclear activism in 1980 and had been gaining ground. A critical regional election was just two weeks away, and Merkel was hoping that she might pull out a victory if she killed the reactors.

Her gambit didn’t work, and the Greens won anyway.

But at that point the fate of nuclear had already been set in motion. Within three months, the German government decided to phase out EVERY nuclear reactor in the country.

Bear in mind that Germany’s 17 reactors were generating over a third of the country’s electricity… with zero carbon emissions. That’s a pretty good thing for a country obsessed with climate change.

Yet Germany’s Green party had inexplicably spent decades campaigning to close them, i.e. to shutter the cleanest, most carbon-free source of baseload energy known to man.

Germany committed to replacing its nuclear plants with solar panels. Naturally this meant that, in a country where the sun barely shines, Germany became increasingly dependent on natural gas— most of which is piped in from Russia.

The true extent of this idiocy didn’t reveal itself until February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine: Germany joined Western sanctions against Russia. Russia retaliated by throttling gas supplies. And Germany had no fallback.

So Germany— the country that had lectured the entire world on carbon emissions— frantically restarted more than 20 coal-fired power plants. Then they imported 42 million metric tons of coal, including a surge from southern Africa. They even bulldozed the village of Lützerath to expand a lignite mine, dragging away protesters.

Germany also became a net electricity importer, buying power from France’s nuclear grid.

And gee what a surprise: German electricity prices are now the highest in the European Union. One obvious consequence is that Germany is no longer industrially competitive due to energy costs.

And that brings us to March 6, 2026.

Manuel Hagel, a 37-year-old political candidate from ex-Chancellor Merkel’s party, visited an elementary school. National television cameras were rolling as Hagel attempted to explain the greenhouse effect to the children:

“Between the earth and the sun is the atmosphere. And as this gets increasingly thin, the sun gets hotter and hotter. And the reason for this is CO2 emissions and and and. And that is the greenhouse effect.”

Unfortunately his explanation is completely wrong. The greenhouse effect works because CO2 and other gases trap heat within the atmosphere; it has nothing to do with the atmosphere thinning or the sun getting hotter.

This is a guy who takes away stoves and gasoline powered vehicles in the name of reducing carbon emissions. Yet he doesn’t even understand the basics of his own ‘science’.

Zee German leadership humiliated themselves even more when, on March 10, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stood at the Nuclear Energy Summit in Paris and declared that Europe’s retreat from nuclear power had been “a strategic mistake.”

“In 1990 one-third of Europe’s electricity came from nuclear, today it is only close to 15%. This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice, I believe that it was a strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emissions power.”

She’s right, of course. It was a mistake. An extraordinarily costly one.

This is hilariously ironic since Von der Leyen is German. She served in Merkel’s cabinet. She personally voted to phase out nuclear, and her own policies at the Commission have been to quietly phase out nuclear power.

Also this week, Germany’s current Chancellor (Friedrich Merz) weighed in on this nuclear blunder when he called the reactor phase-out “a mistake” and said, “I regret this.”

Great. Then fix it!

But they’re not going to do that. Unfortunately for Germany, said the Chancellor, “it is the way it is, and we are now concentrating on the energy policy we have.”

Unbelievable. So, in summary:

• Germany (initially by Angela Merkel, then later by subsequent governments) destroyed their clean, cheap nuclear plants
• They did this for idiotic political reasons
• This led to a major energy crisis, which triggered an economic crisis
• Nearly everyone in power now acknowledges this was a huge mistake
• But they aren’t going to even bother trying to fix it

As we’ve written before, abundant cheap energy is one of the few forces that can reliably keep inflation in check. It fuels stronger growth, lowers prices, and makes life better for everyone.

The US, at least, is heading in the right direction for now, thanks to recent executive orders to reform nuclear licensing, fast-track small modular reactor designs, and create the first real momentum the US nuclear industry has seen in decades.

But the risk is obvious: one election, one change in administration, and a new set of politicians could gut all of that progress overnight — just like Merkel did in 2011.

Germany is a fifteen-year case study in how terrible policies can weaken a country.

And that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

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And the Duke had his eye particularly fixed on the borough of Horsham in southern England because of its unique political characteristics.

Horsham was quite fanciful to a power-hungry aristocrat; not only did it send two members to Parliament, but in order to be a registered voter in the Borough, you had to own one of a handful of very specific properties.

This meant that, at most, only a few dozen people selected two MPs– giving whoever controlled the land in Horsham a LOT of power. And the Jockey Duke wanted that power. That’s why he spent the better part of 20 years (and a ton of money) buying those specific ‘voting’ properties.

By 1790 he had assembled enough land votes to assert control of the borough. But unfortunately for him, an elderly widow by the name of Lady Francis Irwin was standing in his way.

Lady Irwin had inherited some of the other vote-eligible properties from her late husband, and she wasn’t about to let the Jockey Duke take over her town.

So, prior to the election of 1790, she subdivided a portion of her land into dozens of tiny holdings– some as small as a few square feet. Then she claimed those tiny plots were owned by people who, for the most part, had never even set foot in Horsham. Some of them may have been made up entirely.

Regardless, dozens of new votes were cast on behalf of those ‘property owners’, and the votes were just enough to win. The Jockey Duke lost the election. And the election after that. And the election after that. In fact, he didn’t win until Lady Irwin died in 1807.

This wasn’t the first time in history that an election was rigged with fake votes… or voters who never should have been eligible. It’s an ancient practice, dating back to classical Greece when non-citizens infiltrated the eklesia to cast illegal votes. Naturally, some of those illegal voters were brought in by politicians themselves.

Voter fraud is so common in history that there have even been longstanding concerns over ballot tampering and forgery during papal conclaves, even as recently as 1958.

So, it seems pretty obvious that politicians should want to bolster confidence in elections… and take reasonable steps to modernize and improve upon their processes. That should be especially true in the world’s most advanced representative democracy.

Here’s an interesting personal anecdote– I have Italian citizenship through ancestry, and the country is currently having a national referendum on its constitution.

I’m registered as an overseas citizen at my local consulate… and, they actually sent a guy (literally just yesterday) to my HOUSE to hand deliver the ballot, check my ID, make sure I filled it out, and take it back to the consulate.

So not only did they want to ensure that I voted, but they also made sure that I am a citizen. That last part seems pretty basic.

The SAVE Act in the United States is designed to do just that. I actually read the legislation– and it’s pretty straightforward, not one of these crazy bills that goes on for thousands of pages.

In short, the Act would require voters to provide “Documentary Proof of United States Citizenship” prior to voting or registering to vote. And there are plenty of ways to demonstrate this.

Yes, I know there may be millions of people who don’t have a passport, or they don’t have access to their birth certificates, or they don’t readily have their Social Security cards.

But it’s not that hard.

Sure, maybe some people will grumble about the cost of obtaining proof of citizenship. But there are plenty of easy ways around that, including one of the Left’s favorite siren songs: subsidies for the lowest income applicants.

But the critics of this bill (almost exclusively on the Left) don’t talk about ways to solve these minor problems. They don’t talk about how to reform the bureaucracy to make it easier and cheaper to obtain ID and proof of citizenship. Nor do they propose other ways to improve election integrity.

Instead, they just claim (without explanation or evidence) that the bill is racist. The implication, apparently, is that black people are incapable of obtaining ID… and that strikes me as an extremely racist assertion.

The only reason I can think of why someone would be so opposed to this bill is because they want non-citizens to [continue to] vote in US elections. Chuck Schumer claimed that “tens of millions” of voters would be de-registered as a result of the law– which is sort of the whole point.

Opposition is crazy. Plenty of other countries already check citizenship. But the American Left has no interest in restoring election integrity or voter confidence. So, they just denounce election reform as racist.

Perhaps with enough pressure from the President the SAVE Act might actually pass the Senate. But, while I hate throwing cold water on this, it’s clear there will still be plenty of room for fraud.

If the law passes, for example, I wouldn’t be surprised to see places like California create new state-issued ID cards certifying the bearer’s US citizenship. And these IDs would then either be ‘erroneously’ issued by a state agency, or flat-out falsified. Either way, illegals could still vote.

There’s also a part of the law requiring local officials to ask voters “Are you a US Citizen?” … well duh, if someone is willing to break the law to vote illegally, they probably have no problem lying about that question.

Bottom line, I don’t know what the right answer is. The SAVE Act will hopefully make a difference, but there’s still plenty of room for fraud. Criminals always find a way to cheat.

But at a minimum it would be nice to see the Senate do the right thing for once, and push through a piece of legislation that protects Americans’ interests.

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An aging, out-of-work game hunter and security guard, Monty had been unemployed for quite some time. Fortunately, he was getting by, but living off the generosity of a family in southern California who had taken him in. Without them Monty would have almost certainly been living on the street.

But things started to change for Monty on a fateful day when his host family received a letter in the mail from a local bank– addressed to Monty. They eagerly ripped open the letter to find that the bank had pre-approved old Monty for a substantial line of credit!

They all found this extraordinary… and not just because Monty had no job, no income, no assets (i.e. a classic “NINJA loan” from the early 2000s). What was particularly unique about this case is that Monty was a dog.

We’ve talked about this a lot over the years– but in case you’re too young to remember, the early 2000s was a decade in which anyone and everyone was able to borrow money.

The Federal Reserve had slashed interest rates to zero– which made borrowing look cheap… even free. And government policy was prompting banks to ignore all common sense and underwrite loans to anyone with a pulse… and occasionally some people without a pulse.

The stories covered in books like Michael Lewis’s The Big Short are hilarious– dead people, homeless people, unemployed people, prison inmates, canines and cats… they were wall approved for mortgages despite having no ability to make monthly payments.

There were so many loans being issued that the US mortgage market quickly ballooned to $11 trillion.  Investment banks packaged up these dubious loans and dressed them up as special investment-grade bonds… and then the big Wall Street ratings agencies (like S&P, Fitch, etc.) slapped the highest quality “AAA” rating on them as if they were risk-free.

The whole system blew up in 2008, causing multiple financial institutions to collapse– triggering the Global Financial Crisis.

The warning signs were there all along. But very few people paid attention.

My friend and partner Peter Schiff was one of the few voices of reason who accurately predicted this crisis years before it actually happened; Peter used to go on live television and get laughed at by CNBC’s panel of ‘experts’. But in the end, Peter was right… and the whole system blew up.

It turns out that lending money to broke, unemployed people who cannot pay is a pretty stupid lending policy.

Now, you may have heard about new trouble emerging in the financial sector. And gee what else is new. Finance guys almost invariably find ways to generate short-term profits while creating long-term risk.

And the latest brewing financial crisis of the day is the so-called ‘private credit market’.

Private credit is what it sounds like– funds and investors (i.e. NOT banks) underwrite private loans to companies. This isn’t particularly controversial; private lending is one of the cornerstones of capitalism.

And usually these loans are asset-backed– just like a real estate mortgage– so the lender has collateral.

Private lending was initially brought on by the ultra-low interest rates of the pandemic era (when companies could borrow for 3%); and it also ballooned– estimated at roughly $3 trillion. That’s a pretty chunky number, even in the $30+ trillion US economy.

But, just like the subprime market in the years before the GFC kicked off, there are starting to be warning signs that private credit is cracking.

One of those– most notably– is that a major private lending fund (run by Blackstone, one of the world’s largest asset managers) has capped redemptions, i.e. they have limited the amount of money that investors can withdraw.

This is a pretty clear sign of strain. Perhaps not the proverbial canary in the coal mine… but it’s a big deal that an investment firm with the size and reputation of Blackstone isn’t letting its investors out of their fund.

(In fairness, the fund documents do stipulate redemption limits. But it’s pretty unusual for an asset manager to have to exercise this clause.)

Another sign of strain is that default rates are up dramatically. Fitch (the same guys who slapped AAA ratings on NINJA loans 20 years ago) estimated that roughly 10% of US private loans are in default. That’s a big number, and it could go a lot higher.

A key reason is that interest rates are MUCH higher today than when many of these loans were originally underwritten. So, any borrower that needs to refinance (which is likely the vast majority) will see a massive spike in monthly payments.

That will be unaffordable for a lot of borrowers, resulting in even higher defaults. Plus, general economic malaise could contribute to higher default rates too.

A chief concern about private credit is that many loans were like subprime “NINJA loans”, i.e. private loans that were way too big, issued to borrowers who were not creditworthy.

I doubt anyone will shed any tears that Blackstone might lose money in a bad deal. But there could be knock-on effects– specifically to banks.

I know the whole point of ‘private’ credit is that the loans are NOT issued by banks. But in a rather peculiar twist, banks often loan money to private credit funds, who in turn loan that same bank money to the final borrower. Strange, right?

Bottom line, banks are exposed.

A few prominent voices lately have been warning that this private credit fiasco has all the hallmarks of the early 2000s subprime bubble… and that the next GFC is upon us.

And there are definitely similarities. But a LOT of major differences too– most notably size. The private credit market is MUCH smaller than subprime was, and it’s difficult to see how those losses would take down the US financial system again, let alone the entire global economy.

But there are also significant existing risks in the banking sector– like rising defaults in traditional office and commercial loans, and mark-to-market losses in banks’ bond portfolios.

We’ve talked about this before– US financial institutions are collectively sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized losses, and most of those losses ironically come from Treasury bonds. So, another ~$100+ billion hit from private credit could definitely hurt banks.

I’ve been looking at this pretty hard, but at the moment I don’t see some epic crisis emerging from private credit.

That said, one EASY Plan B option to safeguard your capital is to hold funds at Treasury Direct.

Through Treasury Direct, any US citizen is able to set up an account and hold virtually any amount of money through ultra-short-term T-bills; it’s like keeping your money in a 4-week certificate of deposit, but without any bank counterparty risk.

As we’ve discussed many times before, the US government is in pretty dire financial straits. But even I don’t think they’re going to default in the next four weeks.

So, this is a safer alternative to hold cash–and you can quickly link your Treasury Direct account to your bank for easy back & forth transfers.

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The Iranians were ruled by an extremely aggressive king named Shapur I who had little respect for the Roman Empire’s grandeur and authority.  And with limited Roman presence in the Middle East, Shapur saw an opportunity to pounce.

From their capital in southwestern Iran, the Sasanids invaded west into Roman lands (modern day Syria and Turkey). And Rome’s 13-year-old emperor, Gordian III, personally led an army to repel his new enemy. But the Romans were vanquished, and Gordian was killed.

His successor, Philip the Arab, sued for peace and offered Shapur a tremendous amount of money to stop fighting. Needless to say, Shapur took the money… but continued the war.

By the year 260, the war was going very badly for Rome; their forces were depleted, their treasury exhausted, their supplies running thin. And at the Battle of Edesssa that summer, the Roman Emperor himself was captured by Iranian forces… and marched back to Persia as a captive.

This wasn’t necessarily THE singular moment that shook up the ancient world. Rome was already in deep trouble at that point– and everyone knew it.

The Roman economy was weak. Inflation was kicking in to high gear. Political corruption was rampant. The once great empire that built extraordinary works of architecture and engineering couldn’t manage to get anything right anymore. It was embarrassing.

So, when news of the Roman Emperor’s humiliating defeat, capture, and forced march back to Iran spread across the ancient world, people probably just shrugged their shoulders and thought, “well that figures…”

Even just a century before, such news would have been met with disbelief. But by the third century, Rome’s extreme failures and incompetence had become normalized… almost expected.

One key impact was that foreign kingdoms– most of whom happily traded with the Roman Empire to access its vast and relatively prosperous consumer market– started to lose confidence in Rome… and Roman currency.

Rome’s primary silver coin, for example, had been debased from 98% silver purity during the reign of Augustus in the first century AD, down to just 15% by the middle of the third century.

Yet for more than two centuries, Rome’s foreign trading partners continued to use those heavily debased coins… simply because Rome had a large and terrifying army.

That’s easy to understand; when everyone believes you’re a military superpower, you can get away with some pretty outrageous currency dilution.

But that military defeat (plus the Roman Emperor being captured and marched back to Persia) shredded the perception of Roman invincibility. Suddenly the empire looked weak… and trading partners revolted.

Over time, merchants began rejecting Roman coinage and instead demanded payment in either premium goods (like spices or silk) or in hard assets– like gold.

More importantly, because foreign merchants no longer wanted to use them, those Roman coins rapidly made their way back home… and the flood of currency back into the Roman economy caused yet another severe bout of inflation.

This is not a particularly unique story. The cycle of power, the rise and fall of empire, the loss of reserve currency status, is all too familiar in history. And it’s worth wondering if we’re witnessing the same cycle now.

Perhaps. Despite its challenges, I am and always will be rooting for America. And I’ve argued many times before that the US has a [narrow] window to escape the gravitational field of its fiscal black hole… to reassert the dominance of the US dollar… and to reestablish its place atop the global order.

It helps that the US economy is ridiculously innovative, that Europe keeps shooting itself in the testicles in the most inconceivable ways, and that China has its own extreme demographic and economic challenges. So, it’s still a jump ball from here.

But there is a distinct possibility that, like Rome in the 3rd century, America’s trading partners could rapidly move away from the US dollar. Again, I’m in no way rooting for this to happen. But some evidence is already in front of us.

The gold price is an obvious example. Gold isn’t some sh!t-coin or meme stock that suddenly became popular in a Redditt chat room.

Gold’s rise, as we have been predicting and reporting for years, is because foreign governments and central banks have been losing confidence in the United States.

They saw an American president shake hands with thin air. They saw the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. They saw the Treasury Department routinely freeze US dollar assets that were held by foreign countries. They saw eye-popping US budget deficits and a Congress unwilling to stop it.

All of this prompted foreign governments and central banks to reallocate just a tiny portion of their US dollar assets into gold. And just that tiny (few hundred billion dollars) reallocation caused gold to hit $5,000.

Frankly I think very few people really appreciate how much higher gold can go from here.

Foreigners are sitting on $40+ trillion in US “cash-adjacent” assets, like Treasury bonds, bank deposits, money market funds, etc. And if just a few hundred billion dollars pushed the gold price up to $5,000, what will happen if they invest, say, $4 trillion in gold? Even that would only be 10%.

After modeling with a few AI simulations, and a little help from JP Morgan’s analysts, a $10,000 gold price would entail foreign governments and central banks scooping up about 10,000 metric tons over the next few years.

Now, to be fair, this would be unprecedented. The highest annual central bank purchases reached 1,000 tons in 2024, so it’s literally never happened. Such a shift into gold would only occur if there were a key geopolitical shift signaling that other countries have truly lost all confidence.

That’s unlikely as long as the US is able to maintain military dominance. But it’s also why so much is riding on the outcome of Iran.

Source

That’s a higher percentage than people who think America’s biggest problem is the economy. Or immigration. Or inflation.

Think about that for a moment. The institution whose entire job is to solve problems has become, in the eyes of the public, the single biggest problem of all.

Joseph Tainter described exactly this phenomenon in his 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter studied empires from Rome to the Maya and found the same pattern every time: as societies grow, they create layers of bureaucracy and complexity to solve problems.

Eventually the bureaucracy becomes so bloated and expensive that it stops solving anything — and starts generating new problems instead.

And you can see it playing out in real time. Rather than address why it is failing to solve problems with the $5 trillion plus it already collects, a growing number of politicians simply want to extract more wealth from the people who create it.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Ro Khanna just introduced the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act” — a 5% annual wealth tax on America’s roughly 938 billionaires, which they optimistically estimate would raise $4.4 trillion over ten years. That’s about $440 billion a year.

Sounds like a lot. Until you remember the federal government is running $2 trillion deficits every single year. Sanders’ grand plan wouldn’t cover a quarter of the annual shortfall.

And that’s the best case — which assumes no billionaire leaves the country, no assets decline in value, no capital flees to friendlier jurisdictions.

Britain tried something similar when the Labour government abolished its 110-year-old “non-dom” tax regime. The result? Over 10,000 millionaires left the country, and tax revenue actually fell.

But even setting aside the question of whether it would “work,” a 5% annual tax on existing wealth — compounding every year — is an extraordinarily destructive idea.

It’s not a tax on income. It’s a tax on assets — on the factories, businesses, and investments that employ people and produce things.

If you tax at 5% annually, within 15 years you’ve confiscated more than half the wealth. You haven’t funded the government. You’ve just driven capital, talent, and entire companies to friendlier places.

Then what? America is poorer. There are fewer businesses, fewer jobs, fewer wealthy people left to tax. Growth slows. Tax revenue declines. The deficit gets worse, not better.

The federal government already collects $5.2 trillion a year in tax revenue. The problem was never insufficient taxation. It’s a spending addiction that no amount of taxation can feed.

And we know that’s true because the entire federal budget in 2019 was $4.4 trillion.

If Congress had simply held spending at that level, the government would have posted an $800 billion surplus last year. Even adjusted for inflation, they would have roughly broken even — without making a single spending cut.

Instead, spending surged 59% to over $7 trillion.

And what did Americans get for it? Roads and bridges are still crumbling. Social Security is still barreling toward insolvency. Is America safer? Is inflation down? Do we receive more government services?

No.

The only people it’s working out for are the Somali immigrant fraudsters who are part of the network that steals $600 billion from taxpayers every year.

And the bureaucrats in California, where the legal graft funnels $100 billion in government grants to DEI initiatives, intersectionality programs, and non-binary construction apprenticeships.

Of course this dysfunction is not just at the federal level.

In Los Angeles, fire victims who lost their homes in the devastating Palisades fires have been receiving citations from the city’s fire department — for failing to clear brush on properties that already burned to the ground.

In Baltimore, where the Francis Scott Key bridge collapsed in March 2024, the city initially said that reconstruction would cost $1.7 billion and be complete in 2028. Nine months later they revised their cost estimate to $5.2 billion, and completion to 2030.

These people just cannot execute.

This is what late-stage institutional decay looks like. Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow, grinding loss of competence and legitimacy — where the government’s primary function shifts from solving problems to perpetuating itself.

But here’s the thing — history shows that this kind of decay is less “end of the world” and more forest fire. Painful, yes. Destructive, absolutely.

But forest fires clear out the deadwood, return nutrients to the soil, and make way for new growth. It’s happened to every overgrown empire in history, and what comes after is almost always better than what came before.

The sensible course of action is to make sure, one, you have fire insurance, and two, you’re positioned for the new growth.

That’s what a good Plan B is all about.

Source

You’ll be asked to fill out compliance forms explaining the purpose of the transfer. Your bank’s compliance department will review the transaction. A Currency Transaction Report will be filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. And depending on the bank, you may receive a follow-up phone call asking you to further justify why you’re moving your own money.

Try to open a bank account overseas and it gets even more fun. Under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, every foreign bank on Earth is required to report American account holders to the Internal Revenue Service. The paperwork burden is so heavy that thousands of foreign banks have simply stopped accepting American clients altogether.

Deposit $10,000 in cash and the government automatically files a report. Split it into two deposits of $5,000 to avoid that report and you’ve committed a federal crime called “structuring” — punishable by up to five years in prison.

This is the financial surveillance infrastructure that every American lives under. It was built over decades, starting with the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970 and expanded massively by the Patriot Act after 9/11. We are told it exists to catch money laundering, drug trafficking, terrorism financing, and financial crimes.

Yet over twelve years, Jeffrey Epstein moved $378 million across 270 wire transfers without a single flag.

Bank of New York Mellon — one of the oldest and largest financial institutions in America — processed every one of them. At least 18 were round-dollar $1 million wires in 2007 alone — textbook structuring.

The bank’s own compliance review could not identify a legitimate business purpose for any of the 270 transactions. And no Suspicious Activity Report was filed until 2019 — only after Epstein had been arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

More than a decade passed between when the transactions occurred and when regulators were notified.

This wasn’t an isolated case, either. Both JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank settled lawsuits related to their Epstein banking relationships. The pattern was identical: process the money, ignore the red flags, settle quietly later.

But while the banks were asleep, another arm of the government was not.

The Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces Fusion Center — which pulls together financial intelligence from the Treasury Department and other federal law enforcement agencies — compiled a trove of data on Epstein and his associates: suspicious financial transactions, border crossings, and other records from across multiple agencies.

Based on that intelligence, the Drug Enforcement Administration opened a formal investigation codenamed “Operation Chain Reaction,” targeting Epstein and 14 co-conspirators for illegitimate wire transfers tied to narcotics and prostitution in the US Virgin Islands and New York City.

And once again, nothing came of it.

The investigation ran for at least five years. No charges were ever filed. And the names of all 14 co-conspirators remain redacted to this day.

So what exactly is the point of all the surveillance and regulation?

All this infrastructure — the reports, the compliance departments, the cross-agency intelligence sharing, the billions spent building a surveillance apparatus that monitors every dollar the average American moves — and it couldn’t produce a single charge against the most prolific child sex trafficking operation in modern history.

But split a $10,000 deposit into two transactions at your local bank, and you’re facing five years in federal prison.

The entire Know Your Customer regime, the Currency Transaction Reports, the Suspicious Activity Reports, FATCA, the anti-structuring laws — all of it functions perfectly. Against you.

The financial surveillance state is enormous, expensive, and genuinely burdensome to ordinary people.

But the cost isn’t just personal inconvenience — it’s economic.

The Code of Federal Regulations is nearly 200,000 pages. Every one of those pages represents time and money that businesses and individuals spend on compliance instead of productive activity. And it shows. Real GDP growth in the United States has averaged just 2% since 2000, down from 3.3% in the 1980s and 1990s.

That 1.3% gap might sound small, but it isn’t. Higher growth means higher incomes, higher corporate earnings, and dramatically higher tax revenue — without raising rates.

If real growth had stayed at 3.3% over the past two decades, the federal government would have collected so much more in revenue that budget deficits would have been non-existent. America’s debt-to-GDP ratio today would be under 50% and falling, instead of above 120% and rising. Social Security would be fully funded. The dollar’s dominance would be unquestioned.

Instead, the national debt is north of $38 trillion and climbing by roughly $2 trillion a year. The simplest path out is growth — grow the economy faster than the debt, and the ratio shrinks on its own. But that requires a government willing to get out of the way.

Look at who we’re counting on to make that happen: Congress full of Epstein’s friends, or people covering for Epstein’s friends. And even if you’re generous and set that aside, this is the same body that can’t pass a budget without threatening a government shutdown every few months, that hasn’t meaningfully cut spending in decades, and that just projected $24 trillion in cumulative deficits over the next ten years as if that’s an acceptable baseline.

These are not serious people solving serious problems.

And that’s what a Plan B is all about — making sure your family’s future isn’t dependent on their competence.

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Google Trends shows that searches for “WW3” and “nuclear war” spiked over the weekend.  Similar hashtags on social media (#WW3, etc.) also surged.

It doesn’t help that much of the legacy media has been stoking these fears, as they almost always do.

Now, I suspect most people already have very strong opinions on the conflict. I certainly do. So there’s no sense in spending time today trying to litigate whether the military action was a good idea; we’ll all find out soon enough.

Instead, I want to focus on two key points:

The first is that—regardless of how someone feels about this conflict— World War III is LESS LIKELY today than it was on Friday. And it’s not hard to understand why.

US military capabilities have been on full display this year— first in Venezuela, where special operations forces managed to extract one of the world’s most tightly protected dictators… and it was over in a matter of hours.

Only weeks later we see total dominance of Iran’s air defense systems— most of which are Russian or Chinese technology.

In other words, China and Russia saw their military technology completely embarrassed by the United States.  And this unmitigated defeat makes them both less interested in taking on America’s military.

More importantly, Russia is completely depleted after four years of war in Ukraine. China’s military has almost no combat experience and has never had to project power beyond the South China Sea.

So while they’ll certainly phone in their condemnations and strongly worded tweets, these countries have neither the capacity nor the inclination for war.

It’s also noteworthy that the US rolled out a new weapon against Iran— a ‘kamikaze drone’ which was first pioneered by the Iranians themselves.

Over the past several years the Iranian military developed its low-cost Shahed-136 drone— and sold vast quantities of them to Russia for use in Ukraine.

Well, an Arizona-based defense startup reverse engineered the Shahed-136… and made major improvements with respect to range, firepower, networking, cybersecurity, and more.

It’s also dramatically more cost effective and can be manufactured in America at less than half the price as the Iranian variant.

This shows how valuable the US private economy can be in war— managing to best the Iranians at their own game in less than a year. Foreign adversaries cannot ignore this.

Look, nothing is impossible. But in terms of probabilities— at this moment, the specter of world war, nuclear war, etc. is actually lower… and adversary nations’ appetite for direct military conflict is diminishing by the day.

The second point is what’s really at stake.

Military action of this scale brings almost infinite permutations. And, yes, there are many possibilities which result in the US subduing Iran’s military and a new, America-friendly regime takes control of the country.

China has already lost access to Venezuelan oil. Now they stand to lose access to Iranian oil. This is bad news for China’s domestic economy.

More importantly, by exerting de-facto control (or at least significant influence) over most of the largest oil supplies on the planet—Iran, Venezuela, the US, most of the Gulf states— America would be able to re-establish the US dollar’s dominance.

Every country that wants to buy oil— which is pretty much everyone— would need to own and hold US dollars to pay for it. This means that foreign countries must continue buying vast quantities of Treasury bonds—helping to finance America’s deficit and keep interest rates down.

But there are other outcomes as well.

If the remaining military campaign does not go well— if the Iranian regime manages to suppress the protestors, survive the bombings, and maintain their grip on power— then the US could be in trouble.

US casualties at that point will be mounting. Munitions will be depleting rapidly. And most media attention and political opposition will pounce on the President.

Frankly I’d expect to see more well-funded protests and professional agitators making a stink across American cities, i.e. the Left will fall back on its Minneapolis/ICE playbook to force a military withdrawal.

China and Russia would likely take advantage, capitalizing on US weakness and the fact that America’s relations with Europe are heavily strained.

Between the tariff chaos, domestic social divisions, Congressional intransigence, constant government shutdown threats, etc., adding in a humiliating military defeat in Iran might just be the final straw.

Led by China, other nations could come together and say, ‘enough is enough’, then force a new Bretton Woods style convention to formally establish a new order that strips the US of its power.

Again, there are nearly infinite ways in which this could play out. But regardless of where someone stands on this weekend’s airstrikes, it’s important to acknowledge the stakes.

A successful outcome could provide major benefit to the dollar for decades to come. Defeat could trigger the end of US geopolitical dominance.

America might just be on a precipice. And we’ll find out which way it goes over the coming weeks.

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Here are a few of this week’s most absurd stories in case you missed them.

In New York City: Voter  Fraud is OK. But snow shovel fraud must be stopped.

As a major snowstorm hit New York City last week, Comrade Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked his fellow New Yorkers to pitch in and help shovel snow.

But… there was a catch. Those who turned up to do the work were asked to provide valid paperwork, including two forms of ID and a Social Security card.

Bear in mind, no one in New York had to present ID in order to vote for Mamdani. But they had to present ID in order to shovel snow for him.

The mayor’s office cited federal labor regulations requiring proper ID in order to employ people.

But wait a minute— if requiring ID to vote is “racist”, then isn’t it also racist to require ID to work?

The Left claims that voter ID requirements are burdensome barriers which will disenfranchise  minority communities; the implication, of course, is that only white people are competent enough to obtain valid ID… which strikes me as an incredibly racist assertion.

But even if true, that same woke logic suggests that labor ID requirements also prevent minority communities from being able to work.

So why don’t we see the Left championing the right to work without ID? For some reason, they just want people to be able to vote without ID.

$750,000 for having the wrong opinion on Facebook

Canada can’t seem to find the resources to provide wheelchair ramps for its mangled and disabled veterans. But they’ve found plenty of resources to spend years prosecuting a school board trustee for his Facebook posts.

Over a five-year period, an elected school board trustee in British Columbia named Barry Neufeld made social media posts and public statements criticizing the province’s sexual orientation and gender identity curriculum.

In his posts, he called gender ideology an “absurd theory” and a “weapon of propaganda,” and he argued that pushing these ideas in school was tantamount to “child abuse.”

Obviously such wrongthink must be stopped. So, the same government that debanked the freedom convoy protesters set its sights on prosecuting Mr. Neufeld.

And last week the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal ruled that Neufeld’s statements constituted hate speech and workplace discrimination against LGBTQ teachers.

His punishment will be a $750,000 fine… all for expressing “opinions” that were, for 99.999% of human history, biological facts.

The Netherlands wants to tax unrealized gains

I recently ran into a Dutch guy who’s shopping around for a new country to live in. Not for the weather. Not for a job opportunity

He’s leaving because the Netherlands is on the verge of taxing money he hasn’t even made yet.

Earlier this month, the lower chamber of the Dutch parliament passed a new tax that would levy a 36% rate on unrealized capital gains — meaning the annual change in value of your stocks, bonds, crypto, and mutual funds— even if you never sold a single share. It passed with 93 out of 150 votes.

Under the new system, the Dutch government would assess the value of your investments on January 1, then again on December 31, and send you a tax bill based on the difference. They’ll generously let you keep the first €1,800 in gains tax-free each year. After that, the government takes 36% — on money you haven’t even received.

And if you don’t have the cash to pay a 36% tax bill on gains that only exist on paper? You’d have to sell — liquidating assets to cover a tax on wealth you never chose to realize.

Real estate and qualifying startup shares were exempt, taxed only upon actual sale. How generous.

The bill still needs Senate approval to become law. And on February 25, the Finance Minister conceded it would need amendments because it likely can’t survive the Senate in its current form.

But even if they water it down, the fact that it sailed through the lower chamber of parliament is extraordinary. And there’s a good chance the final version is still some form of unrealized capital gains tax, just less severe.

It’s a classic anchoring tactic: propose something outrageous, then “compromise” to something merely bad, and everyone feels relieved.

There is truly no end to the creativity of politicians when it comes to inventing ways to take your money.

And raising taxes is always their only approach; they never spend responsibly, never manage resources effectively. They waste and squander everything they’re given, and rather than reflect on their own poor decisions, they simply demand more.

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Hollywood was paying him handsomely again. But there was a problem. The top marginal income tax rate was 92%, and Sinatra was about to watch most of his comeback earnings disappear before a single penny ever hit his bank account.

So Ol’ Blue Eyes did what every major Hollywood star at the time was doing: he set up what was known as a “collapsible corporation.”

The tactic was simple. Instead of collecting his fee personally — where it would be taxed at 92% — Sinatra had the studio pay his corporation, which was taxed at roughly 50%. He’d take a modest salary out of the company. Then, when the picture wrapped, he’d sell the corporation’s stock and pay the 25% capital gains rate on the proceeds.

The 92% rate was the law. But in practice, it was a fiction.

Back in the 1950s, fewer than 10,000 households in the entire country — out of 57 million tax returns — earned enough to even reach the top bracket. And those who did had so many deductions and shelters available that the top 1% paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 16.9%.

I think this is important to point out because, just last week, TIME Magazine published an article titled “Tax the Rich. They’re Not Going Anywhere”. They argued that wealthy Americans are too “sticky” to flee, so cities and states should feel free to squeeze them.

New York’s mayor Zohran Mamdani wants an additional 2% tax on incomes over $1 million. California voters are expected to vote on a “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires. TIME cheers them all on.

In Britain, the Labour government already abolished the “non-dom” regime — a 110-year-old policy that let wealthy foreigners shield overseas income from UK taxes. As a result of changing this program, Britain drove over 10,000 millionaires out of the country.

But rather than eat their humble pie and admit a policy failure, the left wing of their party is pushing for a new wealth tax. On top of that, they continue gaslight people and insisting, just like TIME magazine, that wealthy people don’t leave when tax rates rise.

Across the pond in America, Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren have been beating this drum for years— demanding that the wealthy pay their “fair share.”

What IS the fair share? They never say. They never commit to a number.

So let’s look at the numbers they keep ignoring.

In 2022, the top 1% of American taxpayers paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes, according to the Tax Foundation. The top 10% paid 72%. The bottom 50% paid 3%.

And the top 1% doesn’t just pay a large share — they pay a share wildly disproportionate to their income. They earned 22.4% of all adjusted gross income but shouldered 40.4% of the tax bill. That’s nearly double their proportional share.

This isn’t new. It’s been the trend for decades — and it runs in exactly the opposite direction from what the “fair share” crowd implies.

In 1980 (when the top marginal tax rate was 70%), the wealthiest taxpayers (the top 1%) paid 19% of all federal income taxes. Today, again, the top 1% pay 40.4% of the taxes, even though the highest marginal tax rate is much lower.

How? Because the Tax Reform Act of 1986 — a bipartisan deal signed by Ronald Reagan — made a simple trade: dramatically lower rates in exchange for closing the loopholes. No more passive loss write-offs zeroing out taxable income. No more converting salary into capital gains through shell corporations. No more Frank Sinatra deals.

The rates were lower, but there were fewer places to hide. And these changes to the tax code resulted in the wealthy paying MORE tax, not less.

Even if you go back to the days of 92% rates (which the Left loves to bring up), the effective rate for the top 0.1% was only 21%.

But even setting all of that aside — even if you could squeeze a few more percentage points out of the top 1% — it wouldn’t fix anything. The federal government is running $2 trillion annual deficits. Higher taxes are not the solution.

Cutting the deficit requires spending restraint. And economic growth.

Given Congress’s intransigence in cutting spending, growth is the easier option. But it a stable, predictable business environment with minimal bureaucracy.

Instead, we get an environment that changes every four years — sometimes every four weeks. One administration’s regulations get undone by the next. Businesses get sued over rules that didn’t exist two years ago.

Take the infamous Corporate Transparency Act.

Congress passed this law in 2021 requiring roughly 32 million small businesses to file “beneficial ownership” reports with FinCEN. The penalties for failure to do so were $500 per day in fines and up to two years in prison.

Never mind that the government already collects this information through K-1s, 1099-DIVs, and existing bank regulations. Never mind that large banks and publicly traded corporations were conveniently exempted.

The onus fell on small, family-owned businesses: the restaurant owner figuring out how to keep waitstaff from quitting, the small shop already buried in paperwork. Well, Congress gave them yet another form to fill out under threats of penalties and imprisonment.

But then the regulations changed— SEVEN TIMES in four months. A federal judge blocked the law. Three days later, an appeals court reversed him. Three days after that, a different panel reversed the reversal. Then the Supreme Court weighed in.

The Treasury Department kept issuing new deadlines to comply, and no business owner had any idea from one week to the next whether they were in compliance.

In the end, the White House simply canceled it— which was the right thing to do. But the next President might very well put it back in place.

The whole ethos was that every small business owner is a potential money launderer. Never mind the money laundering rules already on the books — rather than fix what wasn’t working, Congress just piled on more. That’s how you end up with a Code of Federal Regulations over 188,000 pages long.

That’s the real problem. Not that the wealthy aren’t paying enough. That the business environment in America is so needlessly complex, so maddeningly unstable, that it chokes the growth that would actually generate the revenue politicians claim to want.

If they spent as much energy making it easier to build a business as they do dreaming up new ways to “soak the rich,” the tax base would take care of itself.

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So Ned grabbed a hammer and smashed the machine to pieces.

The story spread across England’s textile country. Over the next thirty years, Ned Ludd became a folk hero for every worker who felt threatened by the new machines that were pouring into their factories.

Now, the story is probably a myth — there’s no hard evidence Ned Ludd ever actually existed. But it didn’t matter. The movement that took his name was very real.

In March 1811, textile workers across England’s industrial heartland began breaking into factories at night, smashing power looms with sledgehammers. They called themselves Luddites. Over 200 machines were destroyed in the first month alone.

It was all motivated by fear; workers were terrified that machines would take their jobs and steal their livelihoods.

But think about the world back then: in the early 1800s when the Luddites were smashing looms, roughly 90% of the world’s population lived in what today would be considered extreme poverty.

Life expectancy in England was only about 35. One in three children didn’t make it to their fifth birthday. Houses were tiny. Food was scarce. Clean drinking water was a luxury. Heating your home meant an open fire, and most of the warmth went up the chimney. Indoor plumbing didn’t exist. Neither did antibiotics, electricity, or refrigeration.

That was normal life in 1811. But fast forward just over two hundred years.

Extreme global poverty has fallen from 90% to under 10%. Life expectancy has more than doubled. The poorest American today — not the wealthy, the average person — has access to more information, nutrition, comfort, and opportunity than the richest king on earth could have imagined in 1811.

Our homes are bigger. Our food is more plentiful. Our energy supplies are more abundant… and far more efficient.

And the reason is technology.

Every major leap in human prosperity has followed the same basic mechanism: new technology makes people more productive. More productivity increases supply of goods and services. More supply means lower prices. Lower prices mean more prosperity for everyone.

At the same time, there is always some short-term pain. Entire vocations and industries disappear… and that sudden change can be both difficult and scary.

But think about it— in literally EVERY major technological advancement throughout history, overall employment went UP. Economies prospered. Workers prospered.

That’s the great fear sweeping the world right now regarding artificial intelligence, and a lot of people are worried.

Earlier this month, for example, a viral essay by an AI startup CEO tore across the Internet and was viewed more than 80 million times.

His thesis: AI will have a COVID-level impact on the world, and the industry right now is the equivalent of being back in January 2020. Everything feels normal at the moment. But he believes that life will be unrecognizable (just like during Covid) in just a few months.

But while Covid was temporary, he believes the AI impact will be permanent.

Amazingly enough, due to this one viral essay, investors began dumping their stocks, triggering a major selloff.

Cybersecurity stock CrowdStrike, for example, dropped roughly 16% in days. Travel companies like TripAdvisor are down nearly 30%.

Financial firms like Charles Schwab and Raymond James fell 7% to 9% in a single session. Software giants like Salesforce and ServiceNow have shed a quarter to a third of their value.

All told, roughly $2 trillion in market value has been wiped off software stocks alone.

The logic behind the selloff is: if AI can scan code for security vulnerabilities, why do you need CrowdStrike? If an AI agent can plan your entire trip, book flights, and find the best hotel, why do you need TripAdvisor? If a chatbot can manage a portfolio or draft a financial plan, why are you paying Raymond James?

Investors looked at these industries and decided that AI wasn’t just going to help these companies — it was going to replace them. And they sold.

It’s amazing how overblown this is.

People said the same things about the Industrial Revolution — that machines would make human labor obsolete and destroy the working class.

They said it about personal computers in the 1980s — that automation would wipe out office jobs.

They said it about the Internet in the late 1990s — that e-commerce would obliterate entire sectors of the economy.

Every single time, the prophets of technological doom were wrong.

The reality is that, of course, some industries and vocations go away. But advances in technology have never led to sustained, long-term, widespread unemployment.

New industries emerge. New skills become valuable. The economy adapts. And the overall standard of living goes up.

But all along the way, there are always the self-interested evangelists insisting that THIS time is different. THIS technology is uniquely disruptive.

Yes, AI is obviously a massive advancement. It’s going to reshape industries. And plenty of businesses that exist today won’t survive the transition. That’s the nature of progress.

But the idea that we’re all going to be starving in the streets because a chatbot can draft a legal brief or scan code for security bugs is ludicrous.

Technology always makes people more prosperous and better off. It might not be crystal clear right now exactly how that plays out with AI. Early stages of a technology boom are never clear.

But the notion that one person’s viral essay could wipe trillions from global financial markets is peak paranoia.

The Luddites were wrong in 1811. The AI doomsayers will be wrong today.

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You could wake up in the morning to the pleasant sound of celebratory gunfire… then artfully dodge landmines left behind by not one, but two different superpower invasions on your way to witness the day’s beheading.

You could cap off the afternoon spelunking through mountain caves where you might bump into actual jihadists, then end the day with with a stroll through a war-torn city’s desperate poverty.

If this sounds ideal to you, then you’re in luck! The Taliban now offers an investment visa for foreigners to obtain residency in Afghanistan.

This is a real thing; earlier this month, Afghanistan’s Economic Commission approved a proposal to offer foreign investors residency permits of up to ten years. Put your money into Afghan mining, construction, or energy, and you too can call Kabul home.

Sure, the banking system is cut off from the international financial network, US sanctions make it effectively illegal for Western companies to operate there, and girls aren’t allowed to attend school past sixth grade. The roads, power grid, and water systems are barely functional. And the country has been at war, in some form, for over forty years.

Any takers?

Fortunately the world is a big place, and there are plenty of other options besides Afghanistan.

And while we poke fun at the Taliban, the core concept of obtaining residency in another country is one of the smartest things you can do to give yourself a Plan B.

The logic is simple. If your home country feels like an increasingly unfamiliar place— as a lot of people in the West feel right now— then it makes sense to have a backup… a place you can go, legally, on your own terms, even if borders close or things get weird.

We saw this play out during COVID. When governments around the world slammed their borders shut in 2020. Tourists were locked out— flights canceled, entry denied.

But people who had established legal residency in a foreign country still had the right to enter and stay, just like citizens.

Families who had taken that step years earlier found that they had options— another place to leave the chaos, work remotely from their second home, and wait out the insanity on their own terms.

Those who hadn’t were stuck wherever they happened to be, subject to whatever restrictions their local governments decided to impose.

That distinction— tourist versus legal resident— became the difference between freedom and lockdown. Overnight. And this might matter again.

But a second residency isn’t about crises and pandemics..

A lot of people start by simply finding a place they enjoy. They visit somewhere on vacation — Costa Rica, Portugal, Malaysia, wherever— and they love it. They go back a few times. Eventually they start looking at property. Maybe they buy a place and rent it out when they’re not using it.

Over time, they realize they’ve built something more than a vacation spot. They’ve got a home in a country where life is slower, the food is better, and their money goes a lot further.

And that last part matters more than most people think.

The cost of living in much of the world is a fraction of what it is in the West. A couple living on Social Security and a modest level of savings— money that barely covers the basics in most American cities — can live extremely well in dozens of countries.

We’re talking beachfront property, hired help, great healthcare, and money left over at the end of the month.

There are plenty of ways to obtain residency abroad. In some countries, you can become a legal resident by purchasing property— something that you might want to do anyhow.

In Panama, you can become a legal resident by purchasing property for roughly $300,000 — and that buys you genuinely nice real estate in a country where property prices can be $100 to $200 per square foot.

In Europe, countries like Portugal and Greece have set up formal programs specifically designed to attract foreign capital in exchange for residency rights.

There are also plenty of countries that don’t even require an investment— where simply demonstrating you have a pension (like Social Security) is enough to qualify.

Other places (like Australia or New Zealand) are looking strictly at skill needs, so younger people with valuable work experience can obtain residency.

Everyone’s situation is different. For some people it’s a beachfront villa in Central America. For others it’s a flat in Lisbon. For others it’s a farm in New Zealand. The world is full of options.

The point is that none of this is radical. It’s not about fleeing. It’s about having the option to go somewhere you actually enjoy — somewhere you might already vacation — and having the legal right to stay there indefinitely if you ever need to.

It’s the same logic as any insurance policy. You don’t buy fire insurance because you want your house to burn down. You buy it because you’d rather not find out the hard way that you needed it.

That’s what a Plan B is about.

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It was a system built on trust— and for a long time, it worked, because Germany was a fundamentally law-abiding society.

That system has been fraying over the last several years as Germany aggressively imported millions of migrants who don’t respect the law.

The most egregious example took place earlier this month, when a train conductor asked a passenger— a 26-year old migrant— for his ticket.

Not only did the passenger not have a ticket, but he beat the conductor so severely that the man died of his injuries the next morning.

The government’s response is extraordinary. Rather than establish law and order and rain holy hell upon the criminals, Deutsche Bahn— which is owned by the German government— has told conductors to NOT approach passengers who present a “high risk of escalation.”

In short, the new policy is— if someone looks dangerous, don’t bother checking their ticket.

Meanwhile, ordinary passengers— the ones who actually follow the rules— will continue to be checked (and punished) if they’re caught without valid fare.

The same logic already governs retail theft across much of Germany.

Shoplifting hit record levels in 2024— roughly €3 billion in losses— and according to industry data, 98% of retail theft goes unreported to police. Retailers have largely given up because prosecutors rarely pursue the cases.

Moreover, employees who do try to intervene face increasingly aggressive and violent offenders… which is why retail stores have instructed staff to not intervene.

We’ve seen the same type of policy in the US.

Last August in Charlotte, North Carolina, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee named Iryna Zarutska was sitting on a light rail train when a man behind her pulled out a knife and stabbed her to death.

The killer— DeCarlos Brown Jr.— had 14 prior arrests including armed robbery and had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. His own mother had tried to have him involuntarily committed. Seven months earlier, a magistrate “judge” named Teresa Stokes released him without bond— on nothing more than a written promise to appear.

I put “judge” in quotes because Ms. Stokes had never graduated from law school, nor passed the bar in any state. She wasn’t qualified to adjudicate a traffic ticket, let alone violent crime.

At least there was outrage in America over Zarutska’s violent slaying. But in Germany, the response to a train conductor being beaten to death was to tell other train conductors to stop doing their jobs.

And this isn’t some isolated lapse in judgment. It’s a pattern that runs through practically every layer of German governance.

Start with free speech. The Alternative for Germany party (the AfD) won 20.8% of the vote in last year’s federal election, and current polls put them at 25-27%— neck and neck with the governing party.

The AfD’s surge in popularity is literally BECAUSE of the lawlessness and criminality that’s rampaging across the  country.

But rather than admit their policies have been catastrophic failures… and reverse course… the German establishment’s response was to classify the entire AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor”. They even authorized the domestic intelligence agency to wiretap and spy on AfD members.

Politicians have also filed hundreds of criminal complaints against citizens who criticized them online. Robert Habeck, the former deputy chancellor from the Green Party, personally filed 805 complaints. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock filed 513.

The government frequently conducts early-morning raids on citizens’ homes over social media posts— they literally call them “Action Days Against Hate.” Ironically, one man received a suspended prison sentence for posting a meme that said a politician “hates freedom of speech.” You can’t make this stuff up.

A 2024 study by The Future of Free Speech found that 99.7% of content deleted on Facebook under Germany’s censorship law was perfectly legal speech.

Rather than asking why millions of Germans are angry— the economy in its longest downturn since reunification, 120,000 manufacturing jobs lost in a single year, rising violent crime— the government’s answer is to label them extremists, censor their speech, and try to ban the party they vote for.

Then there’s German energy policy.

Remember, this is the same government that lectured the entire world on climate change while shutting down all 17 of its nuclear power plants— the last three in April 2023, during an energy crisis.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany imported 55-65% of its natural gas from Russia.

When Russia cut the gas in 2022, Germany frantically restarted more than 20 coal-fired power plants and imported 42 million tonnes of coal, including a 278% surge from southern Africa.

They bulldozed an entire village called Lutzerath (in South Africa) to expand a coal mine, dragging 6,000 protesters away.

The country that wagged its finger at the West over carbon emissions ended up with a dirtier power grid than China’s.

And having shut down its own perfectly clean nuclear plants, Germany became a net electricity importer for the first time, buying power from France’s nuclear grid.

Under German law, if a bartender overserves a customer who then causes a fatal car crash, the bartender can be prosecuted for negligent homicide. Courts have ruled that by serving the alcohol, the bartender becomes legally responsible for the danger they created.

But a government that shuts down its own energy supply, censors its own citizens, and tells law enforcement to look the other way when criminals get aggressive? Apparently no such accountability applies.

And the same goes for the US, where if there was any justice, Teresa Stokes would be in prison for the negligent homicide of Iryna Zarutska.

It’s worth paying close attention, because Germany may be one of the worst offenders, but it isn’t the only Western nation making these choices.

That’s how you build a lowest-common-denominator society— by catering every policy to benefit the worst people in it.

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You can see the effect in the city’s population numbers: in 2018, roughly 8.4 million people lived in the five boroughs. Today, the population is barely above that level— basically a less than 1% population increase in 7+ years.

But while New York’s population has remained flat, the city government’s spending has BALLOONED— from $85 billion in 2018 to a massive $127 billion (based on Zohran Mamdani’s proposed budget.)

Think about it: that’s a nearly 50% increase in government spending, even though the population is almost exactly the same.

In other words, per-capita spending is up roughly 50% in seven years.

This raises some obvious questions: given the surge in per-capita spending, are New Yorkers 50% better off? Are the streets 50% cleaner? Are the schools 50% better? Is the subway 50% safer?

Of course not. Quite the opposite.

Since 2019, major felonies in New York City are up 30%. Felony assaults are up 42%. Robberies are up 24%. Car theft has nearly tripled. Shoplifting has doubled.

Rat complaints are up 19%. The homeless shelter population has exploded 50%.

Ambulance response times to life-threatening emergencies have nearly doubled, from six minutes to over eleven. The share of New Yorkers who feel safe on the subway has been cut in half.

Roughly half of New York City public school students still can’t read or do math at grade level.

In short, New York’s leaders managed to spend almost 50% more money, yet deliver worse and worse results… so city residents have received a negative return on their tax dollars.

Now, if you were running a business and discovered that costs had risen 50% with zero improvement in output, the first thing you’d do is audit your spending… and then probably fire at least half of your management team. The failure is so blindingly obvious it’s not even debatable.

But that’s not how government works.

To be fair, Mayor Mamdani did recently acknowledge that New York City faces a “fiscal crisis at the scale of the Great Recession.” He even ordered every city agency to appoint a “Chief Savings Officer” to root out waste and inefficiency.

(That sounds a lot like DOGE to me. But whereas the entire establishment joined forces to chase Elon Musk out of town for trying to save taxpayer money at the federal level, the socialist Mamdani is being celebrated for his economic genius.)

Sadly, Mamdani’s commitment to fiscal discipline did not last very long. Because rather than actually cut spending, the new mayor has reached for the oldest trick in the book: tax the rich.

Mamdani recently testified before New York State lawmakers that “the wealthiest individuals and most profitable corporations should contribute a little bit more so that everyone can live lives of dignity.”

Bear in mind that New York City spending is up 50% since 2018, yet the rats are 19% worse. Sounds like a “life of dignity” to me!!

Obviously Mamdani is completely delusional.

The top 1% of taxpayers in New Yorker already fund the vast majority of the city’s tax revenue.  So the idea that this group “isn’t paying enough” ignores the single most predictable consequence in all of tax policy: wealthy people move.

New York State has hemorrhaged $111 billion in adjusted gross income to interstate migration over the past decade.

That’s not just people leaving—it’s the majority of their tax base walking out the door, mostly to places like Florida and Texas that charge no state income tax.

This is what makes Mamdani’s approach so spectacularly wrong on multiple levels.

First, he’s ignoring the most obvious problem—spending. If the city’s budget had simply kept pace with population growth and inflation since 2018, New York wouldn’t have a fiscal gap at all. But no one in City Hall is even entertaining that conversation.

Second, he’s actively making the problem worse by threatening the city’s biggest taxpayers. His proposed 2% income tax hike on millionaires sounds great at a rally. But a significant chunk of those millionaires will simply change their address to Miami and take their tax revenue with them.

Third—and this is the part they never say out loud until it’s too late—when the wealthy leave and the budget gap remains, there’s only one lever left: raise taxes on the middle class.

And that’s exactly what’s already happening.

Mamdani has threatened a 9.5% property tax increase as a “last resort” if Albany doesn’t approve his wealth tax. That increase would hit over 3 million residential property owners—including the guy who can barely afford his 400-square-foot rat-infested studio apartment in Queens.

Meanwhile, New York’s combined state and local corporate tax rate already sits at 17.44%—nearly as high as the entire 21% federal corporate tax rate. Businesses in New York effectively face a combined rate approaching 40%. And Mamdani wants to raise it further.

Even if he gets everything he’s asking for, he’ll only accelerate the city’s decline.

More wealthy residents will flee. More businesses will relocate. The budget gap will grow. And the property tax hike will come anyway—paid for by the middle class.

This is the playbook. Politicians talk a big game about soaking the wealthy, but they always end up soaking the middle class. The wealthy have options. The middle class have fewer. Their money is the easiest to grab.

And New York City is a perfect microcosm of what’s coming at the federal level.

The Congressional Budget Office just projected $24.4 trillion in cumulative deficits over the next decade. Federal spending has surged from $4.4 trillion in 2019 to over $7 trillion today—a 59% increase.

I imagine very few people believe that America is 59% better off than it was in 2019.

But once again, rather than demolish rampant fraud and make much-needed reforms, i.e. Congress actually does its job, instead it’s the same voices from the Left howling that Americans aren’t being taxed enough.

New York is ground zero in this experiment gone wrong. And the city’s voters are about to get exactly what they asked for— middle class pain brought on by the false promise of a socialist utopia.

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Also as usual, practically no one in Congress is paying attention.

America’s elected representatives are focused on everything else— virtue signaling, trying to keep illegal immigrants in the country, launching lawsuits against government spending cuts, and generally pretending the country isn’t hemorrhaging cash.

The entire institution is ignoring what is easily the most important issue facing the United States.

America’s future debt crisis is no longer a doom and gloom prediction. It’s arithmetic. And the CBO explains it all very clearly.

According to the CBO, the federal government will spend $7.4 trillion this fiscal year 2026… while collecting only $5.6 trillion in revenue. That’s yet another $1.8 trillion deficit this year.

They further project that annual deficits will exceed $3 trillion by the mid-2030s… and that the cumulative deficit over the next decade will reach a combined total of $24.4 trillion. That’s completely insane.

Remember, there are three major categories of federal spending: mandatory spending, discretionary spending, and interest on the national debt.

Even today, interest on the national debt already exceeds military spending. But according to the CBO’s own projections, the interest problem will become much worse.

By 2036, interest on the debt will be roughly equal to ALL discretionary spending combined, i.e. servicing the debt will cost as much as every soldier, every national park, every air traffic controller.

But as staggering as those interest figures are, they’re dwarfed by mandatory spending— which is where the real fiscal catastrophe lives.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone will cost nearly $50 trillion over the next decade.

Income security programs (like “SNAP”, aka food stamps), veterans’ benefits, and federal retirement obligations, tack on another $8 trillion in mandatory spending.

That is a staggering sum of money. It averages out to nearly $6 trillion per year in mandatory spending over the next decade.

Just last week we talked about how the government shed roughly 270,000 federal employees over the past year; it was the largest peacetime federal workforce reduction in American history according to the Cato Institute.

Trimming the size of government was obviously the right thing to do. Unfortunately it didn’t significantly reduce the budget deficit. The government still ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2025 and is expecting another $1.9 trillion this year.

This proves that, while cutting federal workers is helpful, it simply doesn’t move the needle on the deficit problem.

You could literally eliminate ALL discretionary spending— shut down the military, close every national park, fire every border patrol officer, end airport security entirely— and by next year, you would still have a massive budget deficit.

This should have been an easy problem to solve.

Just consider that, in fiscal year 2025, the government collected a total of $5.2 trillion in tax revenue. But as recently as 2019, total federal spending was $4.4 trillion.

So if Congress had simply managed to hold spending steady at 2019 levels, the government would have posted an $800 billion surplus last year.

And even if you adjust for inflation, they would have roughly broken even in 2025— they wouldn’t have even had to make any cuts to balance the budget.

Instead, they just kept piling on. More spending, more entitlements. And very few people in Congress seem to care.

To make matters worse, the CBO’s projections are based on some fairly unrealistic assumptions.

They forecast, for example, that inflation will fall to 2% and remain there for most of the next ten years.

To be polite, that assumption is wildly optimistic and borderline naive.

Think about it— the government will need to borrow $24 trillion over the next decade. That’s a ridiculous sum of money to have to borrow. And who’s going to lend it to them?

Foreign countries are already backing off— many central banks around the world have already been reducing their Treasury purchases (and opting to buy gold instead).

And the US economy doesn’t generate enough private savings (i.e. corporate profits, individual savings) to support that level of government borrowing.

The only remaining lender is the Federal Reserve… which will almost certainly have to step in and print vast sums of money for the government to borrow.

All of that new money, of course, will drive inflation higher. We all saw this firsthand during the pandemic— the Federal Reserve created roughly $5 trillion out of thin air, and the result was 9% inflation.

How much inflation would there be if they have to create $10 or $20 trillion over the next decade? It will probably be more than 2%.

Foreign countries have already figured this out. They can see the discord, the chaos, the ignorance, the complete lack of fiscal responsibility in Congress. And that’s why they’ve been diversifying away from the US dollar— reducing or eliminating their Treasury purchases.

Gold has been the biggest beneficiary of that shift: foreign governments and central banks are trading their dollars for real assets, pushing prices up to record levels.

And this CBO report demonstrates why gold could go much, much higher from here as foreign governments and central banks continue this trend of diversifying away from the dollar.

It’s also why we think that companies in the gold business— mining companies, royalty companies, gold service businesses— are poised to continue performing extremely well.

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Kramp wasn’t a bad farmer. It was actually the government’s fault: during World War I, the US government had urged farmers to plant as much as they could to feed the troops and war-torn Europe.

Families like the Kramps borrowed money and used the loan proceeds to expand production. But then the war ended; European agriculture recovered, and demand for US agriculture vanished. But the American farmers’ debts didn’t.

By the early 1930s, wheat that had sold for $2 a bushel during the war was going for 25 cents. Nearly 750,000 farms went bankrupt between 1930 and 1935.

These weren’t giant agribusinesses. They were small, family farms.

Kramp, at least, got lucky. On January 26th 1933, his assets were up for bankruptcy auction… and Kramp’s neighbors showed up to bid a combined total of $14. Then they handed everything back to him so that he could keep his property.

But most farmers weren’t so lucky, and they lost everything.

That’s why, a few months later, Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. The idea was to pay farmers to reduce production, prop up crop prices, and keep family farmers on their lands.

The original budget was $100 million— about $2.5 billion in today’s dollars— and it was supposed to be a temporary measure.

That was 93 years ago.

But, big surprise, the “temporary” program never went away. And the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 evolved into the modern farm bill— a sprawling piece of legislation that Congress renews every five years, now costing roughly $1.5 trillion per decade.

More importantly, the struggling family farmers it was meant to protect have been replaced by massive agricultural conglomerates.

For example, they receive billions to grow corn. And that subsidized corn flows into the processed food supply— much of it as high-fructose corn syrup which ends up in practically everything Americans eat and drink.

The modern farm bill then funds SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps) for more than 40 million people.

Ironically, soft drinks— full of that high fructose corn syrup— are the single largest category of SNAP purchases.

Processed foods have fueled epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The United States spends nearly $5 trillion per year on healthcare, with the government picking up roughly two-thirds of the tab through Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs.

So taxpayers subsidize Big Ag’s corn production. Then further subsidize the purchase of junk food made from that corn. Then further subsidize the medical care for Americans who become unhealthy from all of that processed food.

This is what I’d call the government spending spiral— a self-reinforcing doom loop where each dollar spent justifies even more spending.

And this isn’t even the most corrosive layer of the spending spiral… because at every step, the industries involved— agricultural conglomerates, food manufacturers, healthcare providers, insurance companies— lobby Congress to keep the money flowing.

PepsiCo alone spent $2.8 million last year lobbying to keep their highly processed junk food eligible for food stamps.

You can see the pattern— these companies benefit from ample taxpayer funded subsidies, then recycle a portion of those proceeds back into the political machine to prop up the candidates who vote in favor of those subsidies.

This is why Congress— with an approval rating under 15%— somehow maintains a 90%+ reelection rate for incumbents: their campaigns are funded by the very graft that they vote for!

The federal government now spends roughly $7 trillion per year— roughly double from ten years ago.

What exactly did Americans get for the extra trillions in government spending? Are roads smoother? Schools better? Healthcare more affordable?

None of the above. In fact, despite a 100% increase in spending, schools, healthcare, and infrastructure have all become worse.

It’s truly staggering how much all of this spending is creating a drag on the US economy.

But it works both ways: cutting spending and eliminating subsidies reverses the spiral and moves things in the right direction.

Last week we told you that RFK Jr. helped to eliminate junk food subsidies in several states. And Pepsi— suddenly devoid of a government teet to suckle— responded by slashing prices to make up that lost revenue.

In other words, they cut subsidies and prices fell. Immediately.

It’s amazing to think how a “temporary” farm program from 1933 is still costing American taxpayers 93 years later.

Just imagine what would happen if the spiral ran the other way.

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According to the Cato Institute, that was the largest peacetime federal workforce reduction EVER.

More than 150,000 employees took the “Fork in the Road” buyout offer to resign or retire. Tens of thousands more were laid off outright. Entire offices were emptied. Agencies that had been growing for decades shrank to staffing levels not seen since 2014.

And yet, despite historic federal layoffs, government spending went UP last year.

The federal government spent $7 trillion in Fiscal Year 2025— roughly $300 billion more than the year before. Bear in mind, 2025 was the year that DOGE was supposed to take a chainsaw to the budget and cut spending.

This is not a failure of DOGE. It’s a revelation about the actual problem.

The total federal payroll— every salary, every benefit, for every civilian federal employee (excluding the military)— comes to about $336 billion a year— less than 5% of total federal spending.

In other words, you could fire every federal employee tomorrow— every bureaucrat, every regulator, every paper-pusher in Washington— and 95% of the spending would continue as if nothing happened.

That’s because around 60% of the budget is mandatory spending— Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid— programs that pay out automatically based on laws that were passed decades ago. Congress doesn’t vote on these expenditures each year. The checks just go out.

Then there’s interest on the national debt, which in total runs about $1.2 trillion per year. It’s the second-largest line item in the entire federal budget, bigger than Medicare, bigger than national defense.

(The government uses a lower number called “net” interest; they exclude hundreds of billions in interest owed to Social Security and military retirees. But unless they plan on screwing those people over, that interest still has to be paid. So, we use the “gross” interest number and not “net” interest).

All of these obligations grow automatically, every year, regardless of who’s in charge or how many people show up to work.

Social Security alone grew by over $100 billion last year. Interest payments grew by another nearly $100 billion. Those two-line items, by themselves, swallowed more than the entire savings DOGE could theoretically achieve by cutting the workforce.

In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, more than 80% of projected spending growth over the next decade comes from Social Security, federal healthcare programs, and interest on the debt.

This is the structural problem nobody in Washington wants to talk about honestly: America’s deficit problem isn’t exclusively because of bad decisions today. It’s a failure to address bad decisions made years ago… decades ago– commitments that are baked into law, growing on autopilot, funded by borrowing roughly $2 trillion every year.

In an ideal world, Congress would address these entitlement programs directly. They are, after all, the biggest driver of the problem. But reforming Social Security or Medicare is the political third rail— nobody wants to touch it.

But there are other ways to move the needle as well.

The $38+ trillion national debt is manageable as long as the economy grows faster than the debt— which right now is not happening. But America still has absurdly strong economic potential to make that happen.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly stated that roughly 10% of the entire federal budget— about $600 billion per year— is outright fraud. Not waste. Not inefficiency. Fraud. And much of that fraud is within entitlement programs— the welfare fraud that came to light in Minnesota, the hundreds of billions in Medicare and Medicaid fraud that have been documented for years.

So, reducing fraud would be extremely helpful. Stop paying criminals!! It shouldn’t be that hard.

Then they can take a hatchet to the regulatory maze that strangles productivity; this would substantially reduce the deficit and boost real economic growth— putting America in striking distance of growing the economy faster than the debt.

To its credit, DOGE proved that the federal government could function with far fewer employees.

After the historic reduction in federal employees, services didn’t collapse. The IRS still processed returns. Air traffic controllers still showed up. The essential machinery of government kept running with 9% fewer people.

That confirms what many have long suspected: a significant portion of federal workers exist to justify their own existence.

But DOGE also proved something far more uncomfortable. Whenever the executive branch tries to go beyond workforce cuts and tackle the spending itself— even fraudulent spending— someone files a lawsuit, and a judge issues an injunction.

Federal judges blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury payment systems. A coalition of 20 state attorneys general sued to halt layoffs at over a dozen agencies. Even relatively modest cuts were tied up in litigation for months.

The legal system functions as a ratchet: spending can go up easily, but it almost never comes down.

Ultimately, the spending trajectory won’t change until Congress decides to root out fraud, cut spending across the board, and stop obstructing economic growth.

But Congress won’t act until voters force them to do so— which, based on the current state of American politics, isn’t happening anytime soon.

The window to fix this relatively painlessly is still open. But it’s narrowing. Within seven years, Social Security’s trust funds will be exhausted, and the national debt will exceed $50 trillion. At that point, the math won’t just be uncomfortable. It will be unavoidable.

We can hope they figure it out. But hope isn’t a strategy. And that’s what a good Plan B is all about— ensuring your family’s financial future doesn’t depend on Congress suddenly discovering fiscal discipline after decades of proving they have none.

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“The main thing I’m thinking about,” he said, “is how do we make sure we take all this money— you know it’s $1.2 trillion— and actually deliver $1.2 trillion dollars worth of value. . .”

Ah yes, the classic investment strategy—shoot for a 0% return on investment.

But Pete proceeded to fail at even that—for example, the $7.5 billion electric vehicle charging program, which promised 500,000 stations by 2030, has built fewer than 100 after nearly four years.

What makes this worse is that obviously American didn’t have an extra $1.2 trillion lying around. It borrowed the money, adding even more to the debt.

Debt alone isn’t a bad thing if it used to fund investments that create more value than they consume—generate a positive return on investment (via GDP growth) that exceeds the cost of capital.

Yet governments routinely fail to do this. That’s why their debt-to-GDP ratios (easily the MOST important metric of responsible spending) are getting WORSE each year.

Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 260%. Greece, even after years of bailouts and austerity, is still at 150%. Italy sits around 140%.

The United States has crossed 120% and keeps climbing.

And no one seems to care. Congress is completely ignoring the national debt’s ticking time bomb… Instead, America should be leading the way— providing an example to the rest of the world what fiscal restraint and responsible governance looks like.

That’s why it’s so pathetic to see other countries get this right. And the latest example comes from India.

At 56%, India’s debt-to-GDP (the size of its national debt relative to the size of its economy) is less than HALF of the US level.

Yet India’s government is serious about bringing it down.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented their newest budget last week, with the specific goal to bring India’s debt-to-GDP down to 50% over the next five years.

And in order to do that, they’re investing in various sectors where they feel they can generate a strong, positive return— boosting both economic growth and tax revenue.

This includes spending on roads, ports, railways, and other “hard” infrastructure.

By comparison, “infrastructure” in the Biden-era bill was defined as anything which pushed their woke, green dream, from anti-racism to wasteful subsidies.

India is also trying to make smart investments in higher tech infrastructure.

Semiconductors and rare earth minerals are two sectors currently dominated by China—and critical to everything from smartphones to military equipment. So India is proposing to build domestic capacity in both, to ensure they’re not dependent on a geopolitical rival for essential resources.

Their data center play is even more targeted; India is offering tax holidays through 2047 for foreign cloud companies that build facilities there.

Google alone has already committed $15 billion for a data center in southern India.

Compare this to how America spends its borrowed money.

$200 million for “gender equity programs” in Pakistan. $100 billion on Leftist legal graft in California alone—$25 billion on homeless programs without reducing the number of homeless, $33 billion on DEI initiatives and green subsidies. $40 million to help queer and transgender people stop smoking.

And this isn’t even part of the 10% of the federal budget—roughly $600 billion per year—Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated is lost to outright fraud.

But the worst part is the trajectory.

India’s debt-to-GDP is projected to drop significantly over the next several years—mostly due to spending restraint and their investments in growth.

The US, by comparison, can’t seem to stop spending money. Congress keeps spending more, refuses to rein in obvious fraud, and fails to eliminate pointless regulations.

India is also being prudent about uncertainty; they don’t know what the tariff situation is going to look like later this year or next year. So they rationally acknowledged the uncertainty… and refrained from making additional tax cuts.

There are two ways to bring down a debt-to-GDP ratio. You can slash spending. Or you can hold spending steady and focus on growth.

India chose the second path. One can argue whether that’s optimal. But at least they sat down, examined their situation, set a goal, and mapped out what they believe is the best path to get there.

To be clear, India still has plenty of challenges. Their economy is projected to slow as tariffs take effect. They need more private investment. Poverty remains widespread.

And, let’s not be naive: political corruption and graft exist everywhere, including and especially in India.

But they’re at least approaching their fiscal situation rationally. They’ve identified strategic sectors and created incentives so that the private sector can flourish. They’ve prioritized infrastructure that compounds growth. They’ve set measurable targets and are making progress toward them.

This is not radical. It should be the bare minimum for any government to simply put their country on a responsible long term trajectory.

Yet in the United States, with all its advantages—reserve currency status, abundant natural resources, the most innovative companies on Earth—the government can’t manage the basics.

The national debt stands at $38.6 trillion and climbs by roughly $2 trillion every year. Interest payments alone now exceed military spending. Tax revenue covers mandatory entitlements—Social Security, Medicare—plus interest on the debt. That’s it.

Everything else, from the military to national parks, runs on borrowed money.

This is obviously unsustainable.

But it’s not cause for panic. It’s arithmetic.

When debt-to-GDP ratios climb past the point of no return, the playbook is predictable because it’s happened over and over again throughout history. Governments inflate their way out. The currency loses purchasing power.

And real assets— precious metals, energy, agriculture, industrial metals— hold value regardless of what politicians do to the dollar.

Companies that produce these real assets are primed to do extremely well.

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But last week— after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got 18 states to ban SNAP purchases of products like soda, candy, and processed snacks— PepsiCo announced price cuts of up to 15% on Doritos, Lay’s, Tostitos, and other Frito-Lay products.

The company’s official explanation was “affordability.” CEO Ramon Laguarta cited low-income consumers are switching to store brands.

But the timing tells the real story.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program— food stamps— is a $100 billion per year program serving roughly 42 million Americans. And according to the USDA’s own data, about 20 cents of every SNAP dollar goes to sweetened beverages, candy, salty snacks, and sugar.

In fact soft drinks alone are the single largest category of SNAP purchases.

And, until last week, products from Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division were in 7.2% of all shopping trips paid for with SNAP (i.e. taxpayer-funded) benefits.

So when the government stopped subsidizing demand for their products, PepsiCo had to do something they hadn’t needed to do in years: compete.

This is what the free market does— it forces companies to be more efficient, cut prices, and pass savings on to their customers.

But here’s the thing— this is one company, one product line, one government program.

Zoom out and you can see just how much of price inflation in our daily lives is due directly to government spending— before we even get into monetary policy like printing money.

When a guaranteed buyer shows up with a bottomless wallet, prices go up.

Just look at college tuition. In 1965, Congress passed the Higher Education Act and began backing student loans with federal dollars.

Since then, tuition has risen roughly three times faster than inflation. A year at a private university that cost $2,800 in 1963 now costs over $85,000.

The New York Federal Reserve studied this directly and found that for every dollar increase in subsidized student loans, tuition rose by up to 60 cents.

The mechanism is simple: when the government guarantees the tuition money, universities raise prices… simply because they can.

Healthcare is even worse.

Before Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965, the government’s share of healthcare spending was about 31%. Today it’s roughly 64%. Medicaid spending alone has grown from $13 billion in 1975 to over $900 billion today.

And— shocker— healthcare prices have risen dramatically over the same period. The US now spends nearly $5 trillion per year on healthcare, far more per capita than any other developed country, with outcomes that are often worse.

The pattern is the same everywhere you look: the government shows up with money. Prices rise to absorb it. The subsidy becomes permanent. The industry restructures itself around the guaranteed revenue. And then anyone who suggests pulling back the money is accused of “cutting” a vital service.

Now consider the scale of this in America today.

Federal spending has risen from about 18% of GDP in the 1990s to nearly 24% today. That means almost a quarter of the entire American economy is government money.

Of this, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has publicly estimated that 10% of the federal budget— roughly $600 billion per year— is lost to outright fraud of the Somali daycare type in Minnesota.

Then there’s the legal graft. California alone received roughly $100 billion in federal grants over the past few years for DEI initiatives that produced nothing except more government jobs and campaign contributions.

So how much of America’s economic output is actually real?

How much is just government money making a round trip— borrow more debt, hand it out through some boondoggle program where it is spent at a PepsiCo subsidiary, counted as “economic activity,” making people obese… then more money spent on healthcare to keep them alive and paying enough taxes for the government to be able to pay interest on the debt…

It’s absurd when you think about it. We don’t have a precise answer. But the Pepsi story gives us a clue. The moment the government stopped subsidizing one small corner of the economy, prices dropped by 15% within a week.

RFK didn’t regulate PepsiCo. He didn’t cap prices. He didn’t launch an antitrust investigation. He simply stopped the government from funneling taxpayer dollars into unhealthy food… and the market corrected overnight.

Now imagine what would happen if the government stopped subsidizing entire industries— the defense contractors billing $10,000 for a toilet seat, the universities charging $85,000 for a degree in gender studies, the healthcare system where nobody can tell you what anything costs.

We might finally find out how much of this economy is real.

And that, frankly, is what makes it so hard to fix. Because so many peoples’ livelihoods now depend on the government gravy train.

But this trajectory has an expiration date. The federal government borrows $2 trillion a year to keep it all going. Interest on that debt already exceeds $1 trillion annually— more than the entire military budget— and it’s growing faster than any other line item.

If rates stay elevated because inflation won’t come down, the cost of servicing the debt crowds out everything else.

If the government responds by printing money to cover the gap, inflation gets worse.

And it makes sense to have a Plan B that doesn’t depend on Washington finding fiscal discipline before the math catches up with them.

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From a financial perspective, each Seahawks player will take home $178,000—payment for that particular game.

Now, given that the Superbowl was played in California—and the players earned money playing in the game— it’s reasonable for the state of California to tax that specific income.

But that’s not the way California looks at it.

Instead, the state will go back in time, all the way to the start of the NFL season in September, and take their ‘fair share’ of the players’ ENTIRE salaries over the entire season.

This is what’s known as the state’s “jock tax,” in which they tax non-resident professional athletes based on the number of “duty days” they spend in the state—traveling, practicing, attending meetings, or playing in a game.

Both teams arrived in California last Sunday, so each player will log at least eight duty days in the state just for the Super Bowl.

They then divide those California duty days over the entire season, and you end up with a percentage. If a player spends, say, 7% of his duty days in California over the season, then the state claims the right to tax 7% of his entire annual salary— at California’s top marginal rate of 13.3%!

This is pretty crazy given that the players only earned $178,000 for that game. But in the case of Seattle quarterback Sam Darnold, he’ll end up owing Gavin Newsom roughly $249,000 in state taxes this year.

In other words, Sam Darnold will LOSE over $70,000.

I doubt anyone will shed any tears over this (including Darnold). But it’s perfectly consistent with California’s general attitude: dig into absolutely everything they can get their hands on and take as much as humanly possible.

Sam Darnold didn’t have a choice about the venue. But a growing number of people and businesses who are free to choose whether or not to remain in California are getting the hell out.

California has recorded a net loss of residents for six consecutive years— roughly 216,000 people in 2025 alone. Since 2019, more than 200 major businesses have relocated out of the state, including Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Charles Schwab, and Chevron.

Even Hollywood is crumbling; on-location film and TV production in Los Angeles hit its lowest level since the pandemic shutdown— down 16.1% in 2025—with 42,000 entertainment jobs vanishing in just two years. Production has scattered to Georgia, the UK, Canada, and Australia, where tax incentives are far more generous. California now ranks sixth among preferred filming locations.

And California’s response is almost comically predictable. Rather than examine why people and businesses keep leaving, they propose ever more medieval measures to squeeze those who remain— or punish those who try to go.

There’s a ballot measure in the works for a “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires, retroactive to January 1, 2026. Exit tax proposals have been floated to penalize wealthy residents who dare to leave.

And how does California spend all this money they confiscate?

The state budget is a nearly $500 billion—one of the largest in the country. Yet they can’t manage to make ends meet. Ever. And they squander it on some of the most insane programs.

Over the past five years, the state has poured $24 billion into homelessness programs— and a state audit found they didn’t even bother to track whether the spending reduced homelessness.

(Homelessness actually got worse.)

The state’s high-speed rail project, now more than 15 years behind schedule, has burned through $15 billion without laying a single mile of high-speed track. The latest cost estimate to complete the project has ballooned to as much as $128 billion.

Meanwhile, California is spending an estimated $9.5 billion this year alone on healthcare— for illegal immigrants through Medi-Cal.

And rather than cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, Governor Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta launched an online portal where Californians can report federal ICE agents for “misconduct”— essentially using tax dollars to help obstruct immigration enforcement.

Crazy that this man—Gavin Newsom—is the current front-runner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. He is THE standard bearer for the political Left.

Housing is unaffordable. Crime has surged. Unemployment is above the national average. Businesses and billionaires are fleeing.

His only real policy is to confiscate as much as possible from productive people, waste it on obscene levels of misspending, and then gaslight everyone about what a spectacular job he’s doing.

Now he wants to do for the entire country what he’s done to California.

And if that happens, there will be no Texas or Florida to escape to. The jock tax mentality— reach into every pocket, stake a claim on everything, punish anyone who tries to leave—becomes national policy.

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Here’s a wrap-up of some of the most absurd stories from the week in case you missed them:

Vogue’s butt-fluffing piece of Gavin Newsom 

“Let’s get this out of the way,” the article begins. “He is embarrassingly handsome, his hair seasoned with silver, at ease with his own eminence.”

Is she writing about George Clooney? Brad Pitt? David Beckham? Idris Elba?

No. That’s Vogue magazine’s take on Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, which goes on to describe the  governor as “lithe, ardent, energetic, a glimmer of optimism in his eye; Kennedy-esque.”

I would quote more, but I just had breakfast, and it usually tastes better on the way down.

Hilariously, the author actually describes herself as a “journalist”, because this sort of butt-fluffing propaganda puff piece is what actually passes as journalism for the Left.

And I do mean Left: the author’s Twitter/X bio proudly displays the “workers of the world unite” hashtag to her fellow comrades.

Never mind that California is a complete disaster with one of the worst poverty rates , highest homeless rates, and state budget deficits in the nation.  Businesses and individuals are fleeing. But, hey, at least the guy has a very Presidential head of hair.

I wonder who at Vogue got promised the job of White House Press Secretary…

Jolly Ole’ England’s countryside is too white

The British government has launched a new initiative to make the its countryside “less white.” And what better use of taxpayer resources could there be?

Authorities overseeing protected rural areas—including the Chilterns, Cotswolds, and Surrey Hills—have published plans designed to attract more ethnic minorities.

The Chilterns, for example, about halfway between London and Oxford, has promised to recruit Muslims from nearby Luton. City officials plan to to launch outreach programs, engage in diverse (non-white) hiring, and provide marketing materials in “community languages” (i.e. not English).

Traditional rural pubs have also been flagged as problematic.

Muslims from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds reported that pubs—with their alcohol and limited food options—contributed to “a feeling of being unwelcome.”

Another study concluded that the number of dogs in the English countryside also contributes to Muslims feeling unwelcome. So new guidance urges that dogs be kept on shorter leads, or locked inside, because apparently Muslims don’t like dogs.

Then they went on TV (which Brits have to pay a mandatory license fee) to brag about what a wonderful idea this is.

Serious request: if anyone can explain how this makes any sense, I would really love to know. Because to me this just looks like cultural suicide.

Three Cheers For Lawlessness

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson attended the Grammys on Sunday night because she was nominated for her audio book.

Unsurprisingly, the ceremony devolved into a Leftist political rally. Artists wore “ICE out” pins and took turns signaling their virtue.

Singer Billie Eilish used her acceptance speech to declare that “no one is illegal on stolen land” before shouting “f*kk ICE” from the stage. The crowd erupted in approval.

Justice Jackson—a lifelong judge, sworn to uphold the Constitution—stood and applauded alongside the mob.

This is a sitting Supreme Court Justice, publicly celebrating calls to dismantle a federal law enforcement agency.

ICE enforces immigration law. Jackson’s job is to interpret and uphold that law. Standing ovations for “f*kk the law” would seem to conflict with her sworn oath.

She could have stayed seated. She could have kept a neutral expression, the way judges are supposed to when legal matters might come before them. Instead, she practically shouted from the rooftops that she is NOT an impartial, rational judge.

When Socialists Can’t Print Money, They Discover Math

Zohran Mamdani—a card-carrying Democratic Socialist—ran for mayor of New York City promising $6 billion in free childcare, government-run grocery stores, free buses, a $30 minimum wage, and rent freezes for two million tenants.

Apparently he didn’t bother looking into New York City’s finances (which are available to the public) until AFTER he was elected and inaugurated.

Reality is suddenly crashing down on the new Mayor; and earlier this week he announced that the city faces “fiscal crisis at the scale of the Great Recession.”

Duh. Perhaps he should have studied up on New York’s desperate financial situation before promising oodles of free stuff to voters who were ignorant enough to believe him.

Ironically, the Mayor proposed “looking inward into savings and efficiencies” and has ordered every city agency to appoint a “Chief Savings Officer” to root out waste.

Sounds a lot like DOGE to me. But whereas the entire establishment joined forces to chase Elon out of town for trying to save taxpayer money, the socialist Mamdani is being celebrated for his economic genius.

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He was bright, ambitious, and lucky. His uncle Alonso was a bishop with powerful connections who had climbed the ranks of the Catholic Church.

Uncle Alonso leaned on those powerful connections in the year 1455 when he was elected Pope Callixtus III.

The new Pope was considered pious and personally austere— well respected by all. But he was even more committed to the most important cause of all: ensuring his family’s power and legacy.

So, one of the Pope’s first official acts was to promote his nephew Rodrigo (now 25-years old) to be a Cardinal.

Rodrigo did not share his Uncle’s piety. In fact the new Cardinal was a known womanizer, spending the next several decades collecting mistresses and fathering at least seven children.

Given the family’s power, Rodrigo didn’t even bother denying his transgressions; rather than keep his bastards in the shadows, Rodrigo publicly acknowledged his illegitimate children, including sons Cesare and Giovanni, and a daughter, Lucrezia.

None of this stopped his rise to power, either.

By 1492, Rodrigo had been named Vice-Chancellor of the Catholic Church — effectively the second most powerful man in Christendom.

His Uncle had long since passed away at that point, and several Popes had come and gone in the interim. So when Pope Innocent VIII died in August 1492, Rodrigo saw an opportunity to orchestrate the most openly corrupt papal election in history.

Rodrigo bought the papacy outright, distributing silver, castles, and lucrative church offices to every cardinal whose vote he needed.

And it worked. Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI.

His corruption and depravity would make “Borgia” one of the most infamous names in Europe.

One of his illegitimate sons, Cesare (aged just seventeen) was made a cardinal. Another son Giovanni was made Duke of Gandía. Daughter Lucrezia, just twelve, was betrothed to a nobleman whose alliance Rodrigo needed.

The blatant nepotism was scandalous, but that was barely the tip of the iceberg.

In 1497, Giovanni’s body was fished from the Tiber River with nine stab wounds; suspicion fell immediately on his brother Cesare, the Cardinal. Rodrigo shut down any investigation into the murder.

The following year, Cesare renounced his position as Cardinal and took command of his murdered brother’s armies.

And with daddy’s money, Cesare conquered city after city across central Italy, slaughtering rivals with a ruthlessness that impressed none other than Niccolò Machiavelli, a Florentine diplomat at the time.

Machiavelli was sent to observe Cesare’s campaigns firsthand. Years later, he’d use Cesare as his model ruler in The Prince.

Meanwhile, Lucrezia’s second husband was strangled in his bed – almost certainly on Cesare’s orders – after he’d outlived his usefulness.

Rumors of incest between Lucrezia and her father and brothers circulated as well; they were never proven, but the family scandals were so widespread and well-documented that even the most salacious accusations seemed plausible.

One reliable account of Borgia depravity comes from Johann Burchard, the Vatican’s official master of ceremonies, who  kept meticulous diaries of papal events.

On October 30, 1501, he recorded what became known as the “Ballet of the Chestnuts,” in which fifty courtesans were invited to a banquet that devolved into a sort of ‘sex Olympics’.

Prizes were awarded to the men who could have sex with the most women— all while Pope Alexander VI watched alongside his children.

This was supposed to be the holiest man on the planet… who inscribed policy that told all of medieval Europe how to live, how to worship, how to be moral.

Instead, the Borgias murdered, bribed, betrayed. They turned the Vatican into a brothel and the papacy into a weapon. They even had their own signature poison for their enemies.

(Rodrigo was not shy about having critics and detractors executed for heresy.)

And yet, even as depraved and corrupt as the Borgias were, they were never accused of child sex trafficking.

No… that level of evil has been reserved for modern sleazeballs. Because the more of these Epstein files that are released, the more it appears that every major institution, from government to academia to big business, is overrun with evil, disgusting perverts who, at a minimum, knowingly associated with a convicted pedo… and at worse, may have participated themselves.

Among them—

Larry Summers — former US Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard, i.e. the institution that became the epicenter of the social justice movement that now tells the rest of America how to think about race, gender, and morality.

Noam Chomsky, the man who spent fifty years as the intellectual godfather of the American left, lecturing the world about power, ethics, and imperialism.

Bill Gates, who has wagged his finger at the world for everything from vaccines to carbon emissions.

The people involved have tried everything to make this story go away. I’m sure they hoped Epstein’s “suicide” would close the case and all would be forgotten.

Think about all the ways in which our attention has been hijacked since Epstein’s death. COVID, George Floyd, BLM riots, January 6th, Ukraine, immigration, Gaza, political prosecutions… every possible distraction imaginable.

And the Epstein story still won’t die.

This is extraordinary given that America is so deeply fractured on EVERY other issue… except this one.

It turns out that people actually do care— that Americans, whether Left, Right, or Center, want to know if their leaders are depraved pedos.

From the angriest MAGA voter in fentanyl country to the wokest, purple-haired activist in San Francisco, they/them agree on exactly one thing: it is outrageous that some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world were raping kids. And none of them has gone to prison for it.

This isn’t going away. It’s going to get worse. We haven’t even scratched the surface of the rot. And you can’t rebuild trust until you cut all of it out.

Fourteen years after Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI) died, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed his complaints about corruption to the door of a church in Germany. And within a generation, the Reformation had torn the old order apart.

It will eventually get better. But this is step 1 in the recovery process: admitting there’s a problem.

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Now (as you probably know), the price of gold has just dropped by $1,000 in only a matter of days. Silver’s decline was even more violent.

Much ink has already been spilled over this, suggesting that “the gold bubble has burst”. Naturally we have a different view.

It started on Thursday when the White House announced that Kevin Warsh would be nominated as the next Federal Reserve Chairman.

Warsh is known to be ‘hawkish’, prompting speculation that he would keep rates higher to combat inflation. A lot of people obviously viewed this as bad for gold, prompting an unprecedented wave of selling.

So is that it? Is the precious metals boom over?

Not by a long shot.

Again, I don’t say that because of any fanaticism over precious metals. I don’t fall in love with any asset.

But I do understand the big picture story driving gold prices, and that story hasn’t changed.

(Note: we’re going to focus on gold in this article and leave silver for another time, since silver has different factors at play.)

The first thing that’s important to remember is the reason WHY gold reached such heights over the past few years: foreign central banks.

Central banks have always purchased gold as a strategic reserve asset; this is nothing new. In fact, in 2018 and 2019, before Covid upended the world, central bank gold purchases totaled roughly 650 metric tons.

By 2022, however, central banks started purchasing a LOT more gold— roughly 1,000 metric tons per year, a 50% increase over the long-term average.

The same thing happened in 2023. And again in 2024.

Those extra central bank gold purchases caused a surge in demand… and gold prices roughly doubled in price over that three-year period.

So what was so special about 2022 that prompted central banks to start buying more gold?

Simple. It was the start of a long-term trend of foreign countries losing faith in the US government.

They watched Joe Biden shake hands with thin air. They witnessed the humiliating debacle in Afghanistan. They observed rising US budget deficits and a national debt spiraling out of control. They saw inflation rising.

All of these events made foreign governments and central banks question how much they wanted to keep buying Treasury bonds.

But the real watershed moment came after the invasion of Ukraine.

The US government’s response was to freeze Russian assets; Congress then soon passed the REPO Act, giving the President authority to seize Russian sovereign reserves.

This sent shockwaves through foreign governments around the world. Suddenly they felt like their money was no longer safe in America— that the US government could freeze their reserve assets without warning.

I’m not arguing whether this was right or wrong from a moral perspective. But from a practical standpoint, though, it had an obvious consequence: foreign countries wanted to start diversifying their reserve assets away from US dollars and from the United States.

And in their efforts to diversify away from the dollar, gold became the easiest strategic reserve asset for those foreign central banks to buy.

Again, the trend continued throughout 2023 and 2024.

2024 was particularly interesting because the gold price was clearly surging— almost exclusively due to foreign central bank demand.

Yet, despite gold’s obvious rise, individual investors weren’t having any of it. In fact, in 2024, gold ETF saw net OUTFLOWS totaling MINUS 2.9 metric tons. This means that individual investors were net sellers of gold, even as foreign central banks were buying by the ton.

2025 became the year gold went parabolic, rising to $4,500 by year end.

But the key growth driver in 2025 was not central banks. In fact, foreign central banks dialed back their purchases to around 800 metric tons last year—still more than normal, but less than the record 1,100 tons from 2024.

Individual investor demand made up the difference in a big way. Net ETF inflows swung from minus 2.9 tons to plus 801 tons. That’s a massive turnaround. On top of that, there was significantly more demand for gold bars and coins.

Bottom line, much of gold’s very recent parabolic price move is because small (and large) investors piled in. Those investors are now dumping their gold because they’re spooked about Kevin Warsh.

Our readers should not be surprised by this pullback; we’ve been talking about the possibility of a short-term shakeout for some time.

And while I’m not smart enough to know what’s going to happen next week or next month, it’s clear that the real story (i.e. foreign governments and central banks losing confidence in the United States Congress) has not gone away.

Think about it— America is deeply divided. The Federal Reserve is in crisis. The US government has shut down for the second time in four months. The national debt keeps rising (now $38.6 trillion). And hardly anyone in Congress seems to care.

Do you think all of this makes foreign governments and central banks want to hold more of their reserve assets in the US, or less?

We think the answer is clearly less, and hence the trend that began in 2022 will likely continue.

Foreign governments and central banks are sitting on $10+ trillion in foreign reserves— most of that parked in US dollars.

Their “extra” gold purchases since 2022 (i.e. they amount of gold they bought each year above the historic average) only totals around $100 billion, i.e. roughly ONE PERCENT of their reserves.

Would it be so crazy to assume that they might want to diversify TWO percent? Or maybe 5%? If so, there could be a LOT more money coming in to gold.

And if a mere 1% of foreign reserves cause the gold price to skyrocket, how high will the gold price go if they park 5% or more?

Again, this isn’t something that’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s a long-term trend. But the point is that the story hasn’t changed.

Remember that in the early 1970s, the gold price increased 5x for similar reasons— US deficits and fiscal woes. But gold peaked in 1975, then fell by a whopping 40%.

A lot of people thought the gold boom was over. But it wasn’t. Again, the story hadn’t changed.

And shortly after, gold resumed its rise, climbing another 8x. It took the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980— someone who was serious about restoring fiscal order— for the trend to finally stop.

I don’t know how far gold might fall. But I do know the fundamental story hasn’t changed.

Source

She killed a deal for Amazon to buy iRobot— maker of the popular Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. And as a result, iRobot filed for bankruptcy and got scooped up for peanuts by a Chinese rival.

All of that US intellectual property, not to mention mountains of personal data on iRobot’s US consumers, was handed over to the Chinese… courtesy of America’s favorite Cherokee warrior.

Bear in mind that Warren is a trained lawyer and spent nearly two decades as a professor at Harvard Law School (albeit as a DEI hire thanks to her fake Native American claims).

So Warren isn’t just an idiot. She’s a highly educated idiot… who spent twenty years training future highly educated idiots.

Warren is directly responsible for hundreds of her own voters losing their jobs, not to mention the breach of US consumer data that is now in the hands of China. But, hey, that’s just another Tuesday for Lizzie.

Sadly this highly educated inspired idiot is not an outlier in the United States Congress. Overall the level of incompetence for America’s average politician is staggering:

The botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the Navy ships colliding, the cybersecurity breaches, the FDIC partying while banks went under, the Federal Reserve also failing to notice unrealized bank losses, the bridges collapsing, trains derailing, the FAA mistakes (all despite a trillion dollars in extra infrastructure funds), just to name a few examples.

Or there’s the Pentagon failing every audit, the CDC’s incoherent COVID guidance, the VA hospital failures, the IRS targeting scandals, FEMA’s horrendous disaster responses, and Social Security trust funds racing toward insolvency while Congress does nothing.

There’s also the soaring cost of health insurance despite the “Affordable Care Act”, the Secret Service failures, the EPA poisoning a Colorado river with toxic mine waste, hundreds of billions in COVID relief funds fraud, the TSA failing 95% of its own security tests, the F-35 program running $183 billion over budget, and the baby formula shortage caused by FDA bureaucracy.

This laundry list doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg of extremely embarrassing government failures… just over the past few years.

The biggest problem that America needs to solve is its $2 trillion yearly deficits, which just keep piling on to the $38.6 trillion US national debt. The interest bill alone now exceeds $1 trillion.

Congress, however, seems to understand nothing about debt. Or finance. Or business. Or pretty much anything economic.

In fact, many members of Congress are financially illiterate.

Remember Rep. Jamaal Bowman— the guy who pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol in order to delay a vote that would have prevented a government shutdown?

This is the same person who demanded the federal government pay at least $14 trillion in reparations to black people.

When asked how the government would fund this, Bowman had a simple answer— Congress would “spend it into existence.”

One can only marvel at this guy’s grasp of economics. He has no clue that the government has to take money from hardworking people and businesses; he seems to think that he can just lift his countenance upon the Treasury, and, poof, let there be money.

Oh, and by the way—before entering Congress, Bowman was a teacher. Just like Lizzie Warren. He also founded a public middle school in the Bronx where just 26% of students are proficient in math, and only 31% can read at their grade level.

Bowman has managed to fail American children at every level.

This matters, because representative democracy was designed to function with a well-educated populace.

At some point, you have to ask yourself, does America even still have the tools to solve this deficit problem?

In theory, America has self-correcting mechanisms: elections, courts, a free press, educated voters.

But every one of those mechanisms has been compromised.

Start with voters. Congress has an approval rating that hovers under 20%. Yet incumbents are reelected over 90% of the time.

Activist journalists lie, deceive, and call it “news”—reinforced by social media algorithms telling people what to be outraged about.

Meanwhile, people like Alex Soros have figured out that you can funnel a few million dollars into state and local races, prop up the least-capable candidates, and destroy America one city at a time.

Ultra-woke city councils now drive out businesses and taxpayers. District attorneys refuse to prosecute criminals. Judges put violent thugs back on the street to slit throats and light women on fire.

Then there’s the immigration feedback loop. Bring in millions of illegals. Pay for their housing and healthcare through massive, taxpayer-funded fraud. Let the illegals vote.

And then, of course, file lawsuits against anyone who tries to verify citizenship or clean up the voter rolls. Scream “racism”. Rely on activist judges to block every attempt at reform.

The foot soldiers of this destruction are self-loathing white liberals who’ve been taught that America is irredeemably racist. They’re useful (and often highly-educated) idiots—cheering on their own demographic and economic decline as a moral victory.

In theory, the fixes should be relatively easy— at least to start with low hanging fruit. Eliminate fraud from the budget. Cut business-strangling regulations. Reform an immigration system that literally everyone agrees is broken.

America has an incredibly dynamic economy, deep capital pools, and some of the most abundant resources on our planet.

And yet, year after year, very little reform happens. Whenever someone tries to make a difference (whether the President, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk), they get sued, blocked, stymied, or shot.

Look, I’m not a doom-and-gloomer. I believe the long-term future is quite bright. AI will likely unleash a productivity boom unlike anything we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution. Nuclear energy should bring down the cost of everything.

American ingenuity and entrepreneurship are a robust backstop.

This is not the end of the world, nor the end of America.

But I’m afraid that voters (the remaining legitimate ones) won’t wake up until there’s a serious rough patch— a financial reckoning that forces changes to these rotting systems—because clearly nothing else will.

Source

You might be familiar with iRobot; they are the maker of the robotic “Roomba” vacuum cleaner, and Amazon wanted to buy it for more than $1 billion.

Well, Lizzie Warren wasn’t having any of that. She wrote a hysterical letter to the Federal Trade Commission claiming the deal would “harm consumers,” as if we helpless little people would somehow suffer grievous bodily injury if Amazon bought a vacuum cleaner company.

She was terrified that Amazon might use the Roomba’s mapping technology to harvest consumer data— giving the company “eyes and ears” inside people’s homes.

Well duh. Of course Amazon was planning on doing that, just like they do with all sorts of other consumer devices.

But Amazon already has billions of Alexa-enabled appliances in homes across America. I’m not sure how Roomba would have been any different.

Personally I don’t use any of that stuff; I prefer my privacy. But I don’t think it should be up to Lizze Warren to decide what’s good or not good for American consumers.

But that didn’t matter. She blocked the deal, and Amazon walked away. NICE JOB LIZZIE!

That’s where our story ended when I first wrote about it two years ago… However things have recently become a lot more interesting.

Without Amazon’s deep pockets to support them, iRobot fell on hard times. So, thanks to Sen. Warren, iRobot had to lay off about one-third of its workforce.

The company then announced it would conserve cash by shifting “non-core engineering functions to lower-cost regions” overseas. But even outsourcing American jobs couldn’t save the company.

So, on December 14, 2025, after 35 years in business, iRobot filed for bankruptcy. And according to court records, it appears that the company will be taken over by a Chinese company called Picea.

Think about that: Elizabeth Warren killed the deal because she didn’t want Amazon— an American company— to own Roomba’s data on American households.

But instead it will be a CHINESE company who owns Roomba’s data on American households.

Remember, Roomba vacuums create a map of the insides of people’s homes. It knows the footprint of your house or your business. It knows where your bedroom is. It knows where your kids sleep. Where the walls are, the outlets, the furniture. It knows your home’s Wi-Fi network— the SSIDs, the connected devices. This thing roams freely through every room of your house.

The Roomba is a device you voluntarily connect to your home network. And unless you’re hardcore about network security, you’ve essentially invited a foreign-controlled device to sit on your network and wander around your house.

Is China all that interested in what’s going on inside the average American household? Maybe not. But one thing we’ve learned about the Chinese government is that, when it comes to data, more is always better. They vacuum up everything they can and figure out how to use it later.

They might not yet understand what kind of insights the data will give them, or how it might be weaponized, but Roomba represents yet another treasure trove of data on Americans.

CONGRATULATIONS LIZZIE WARREN. In your heroic efforts to “protect” American consumers from Amazon, you have destroyed people’s jobs… plus delivered the household data of tens of millions of Americas directly into the hands of the Chinese.

Perhaps even more absurd than this epic failure of protecting American data is that iRobot was headquartered in the picturesque town of Bedford… in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Warren is a United States Senator… from Massachusetts.

This is how she chose to “represent” her constituents— by personally destroying a 35-year-old Massachusetts employer, wiping out hundreds of Massachusetts jobs, and delivering the entire company to China on a silver platter.

Forget espionage. Forget hacking. Forget the spy balloons. China just needs to wait for Elizabeth Warren to destroy another American company and gift-wrap it for Beijing. Xi Jinping must be in stitches.

Is it any wonder that the US economy can barely manage to grow at 2.5%?

America is on a horrendous fiscal trajectory. Averting disaster requires encouraging productivity, cutting red tape, and being friendly to both large and small businesses.

But we keep getting the opposite. People like Elizabeth Warren keep getting elected, and they keep making the country worse.

As long as that remains the standard, we should not expect a miraculous recovery of US finances, the US dollar, nor the US economy.

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He founded a construction company—Kongō Gumi—that would go on to build some of Japan’s most iconic Buddhist temples. And, somewhat miraculously, the company stayed within the same family for over fourteen centuries.

That’s roughly 40 generations. The company lived through the rise and fall of the samurai, the Meiji Restoration, two World Wars, and the atomic bomb.

But in 2006, after 1,428 years of continuous operation, Kongō Gumi went bankrupt.

Japan experienced a legendary financial bubble in the 1980s; asset prices exploded. And, like many Japanese companies during that decade, Kongo Gumi borrowed heavily to invest in real estate.

But eventually the bubble burst. Asset prices crashed. And all that remained was the debt… which Kongō Gumi could not repay.

The world’s oldest company— which had survived 1400+ years of war, natural disaster, and literally even two nuclear strikes, was undone by too much debt.

It’s a powerful reminder: it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been around. What matters is your current financial reality. History doesn’t protect you from math.

And this same principle applies to sovereign nations.

Japan has the worst debt-to-GDP ratio on the planet—256%— more than double the United States.

But, like the US, the Japanese government has gotten away with this insane debt level for a long time.

Part of the reason was that their central bank (the BOJ) held interest rates at near zero so that the government could borrow at almost no cost.

If interest rates are 0%, in theory you could borrow unlimited quantities of money without any consequences… but ONLY as long as interest rates remain at zero.

Unfortunately for Japan, the bond market looks like it has finally had enough.

On January 19th, Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi announced a 21.3 trillion yen (about $140 billion) stimulus package. The bond market’s response was immediate… and visceral.

Within days, Japan’s 40-year government bond yield soared to 4.24%—a record high, and the first time a Japanese sovereign maturity has breached 4% in over three decades.

The 30-year yield surged to nearly 4%. Even Japan’s 10-year government bond hit 2.38%, the highest since 1999.

Higher rates are a five-alarm fire for any heavily-indebted country. And we’ve seen this movie before.

In October 2022, British Prime Minister Liz Truss announced a tax-cut plan that would have resulted in a higher budget deficit.

The bond market wasn’t having any of that. Government bond yields skyrocketed, and the British pound plummeted.

It was so bad that the Bank of England had to launch emergency interventions, and the Prime Minister resigned after just 49 days in office— the shortest tenure in British history.

You can probably see the pattern. Bond markets first revolted in Britain, the world’s sixth largest economy. Now it’s revolting in Japan, the world’s fourth largest economy.

How long until bond markets start to revolt against the world’s largest economy?

Billionaire investor Ken Griffin connected these dots explicitly when he said last week, “What happened in Japan is a very important message to the [US] House and to the Senate. . . You need to get our fiscal house in order.”

We’ve been saying this for years: politicians in Congress think that, because America is the largest economy with the world’s reserve currency, the rules don’t apply to them… and that they can run endless, outrageously high deficits without any consequence.

This is completely delusional.

If the US doesn’t get its fiscal house in order, the dollar won’t be the world’s reserve currency for much longer. In many respects this shift is already happening.

Just look at China: right before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, China held less than $500 billion of US government bonds— roughly 5% of the total US national debt at the time.

By 2011, just three years later, they had increased their holdings to $1.3 trillion—nearly 10% of total US government debt.

But China has been selling off its Treasury holdings rapidly over the past two years. They’ve cut their position by roughly 50%, down to about $682 billion, or less than 2% of the national debt.

To be clear, I’m not rooting for China to own a larger share of the US national debt. I’m rooting for a lower national debt.

But that ultimately requires Congress to be sensible and realistic.

And it’s not like cutting the deficit is some impossible task.

A 23-year old YouTuber was able to singlehandedly uncover billions of dollars of fraud in just one city. All Congress has to do is stop it.

But they are unwilling to do so.

With such unserious, low IQ politicians in Congress, foreign governments and central banks are thinking twice about investing in US Treasury bonds. Many (like China) are selling and starting to diversify in other asset classes… including gold.

In fact, rising demand from governments and central banks around the world has been one of the key drivers in gold’s rising price.

But it’s not just central banks anymore. Pension funds and insurance companies have been increasing their gold allocations as a long-term asset.

And this makes sense. Pension funds and insurance companies traditionally invest in very long–term bonds (like the 30-year) because they have to match their assets to long-term policy liabilities (like life insurance).

Clearly these companies are worried that after adjusting for taxes and inflation, owning US government bonds for THREE DECADES is simply too risky. So they’re turning to gold instead.

I don’t know where gold prices are going today, tomorrow, or next month. But the long-term trend is pretty clear: as long as Congress continues to be unserious about fixing the deficit, gold will keep going higher.

And that means companies in the real asset (especially gold) business are primed to do extremely well.

Source

The process was overly bureaucratic and cumbersome… and there is ample room to reform it. But the federal government’s general goal was to make sure that (1) my wife wasn’t a criminal and (2) she wouldn’t be a burden to the state.

We had to prove that she had a clean record and no communicable diseases. I also had to demonstrate the financial means to support her so that she wouldn’t end up on food stamps.

Again, the process was flawed. But the overall objectives were sound.

That’s why I’ve always been so mystified at how the US treats those who enter the country illegally.

My wife, who came the legal way, had to be upstanding and self-sufficient. Those who come illegally are given free healthcare, free housing, and all sorts of other gimmes, courtesy of the taxpayer.

There also doesn’t seem to be much interest in whether a migrant is a violent criminal, drug pusher, human trafficker, or fraudster.

ICE has long said that their deportation operations across the country are targeting “the worst of the worst”, i.e. migrants who are hardcore criminals… and that seems sensible.

But it’s hard to know what the actual results are. There’s so much noise from all sides– most of them anecdotes (which are frequently made up).

There are stories of law-abiding residents who were brought to America as babies and lived in the US for decades, ripped from their homes and deported. But there are stories of scumbag murdering rapists being shipped away.

I think some actual data would be helpful in “taking down the temperature”.

For example, how many arrested migrants have been incarcerated, charged, or at least connected to crime (beyond immigration violations)? How many legal residents or citizens were mistakenly arrested? And how much money is being spent?

Such data would help voters understand the real costs versus benefits of the ICE raids.

All that said, however, I still don’t understand what compels someone to insert themselves with a deadly or potentially deadly weapon (whether vehicle or a loaded handgun) into the middle of a law enforcement operation.

Are they honestly risking their lives to save illegals from deportation? If so, why don’t they also form “watch networks” and disrupt local police drug busts?

Perhaps it’s because the law enforcement in this case is federal. But that doesn’t make sense either, given that plenty of federal agents (FBI, DHS, DEA, etc.) operate and arrest criminals in the state every single day.

The only answer I can come up with is because they hate Trump. Every action or reaction is guided by intense anger and a need to “resist”, rather than a rational analysis of pros and cons.

“Leadership”, and I use that term very loosely, encourages this irrational behavior. They rage-bait their supporters and encourage them to “put your bodies on the line”, in the words of Minnesota’s lieutenant governor.

Her reasoning was that Donald Trump is “literally taking away health care from your neighbors, stealing food off of the table from seniors and from children”, which is a fanatical level of deceit.

(Naturally she fails to mention in her video that said “neighbor” may be an illegal whose health care is part of a massive fraud ring.)

They’ve even told kids to participate. Schools are shutting down. Students are walking out. And, bizarrely, educators actually support this.

In the Minneapolis / St. Paul area alone, multiple high schools have staged walkouts. Among them, Roosevelt Senior High has a math proficiency of just 27% and reading proficiency of just 32%. At Faribault Senior High, it’s 10% and 32%. At Humboldt High it’s just 9% and 24%.

These kids can barely read. Yet they’re being encouraged to skip school to support people who are in the country illegally.

What exactly is the goal? I can empathize with certain concerns– living in a neighborhood where federal agents might inadvertently kick down my door would be stressful. I also appreciate cases where law-abiding people have been living in the US for decades and know no other home.

But it’s clear to me that the Left just wants illegals in the country.

More migrants mean more federal money, which means more fraud for their allies, more slush funds to buy elections. And it means more votes to keep them in power.

And that’s all they really care about– remaining in power. They clearly don’t care about their constituents.

If they did, they’d fix the schools and encourage the kids to stay in class instead of protest. They’d incarcerate violent criminals instead of releasing them loose onto the streets and giving them the right to vote. They’d improve public services instead of giving so much money away to migrants. They’d end the fraud.

But they won’t do any of that. They just want to stay in power.

And the realpolitik is that the Left needs useful idiots to martyr themselves, because, whenever someone dies, it turns up the heat on the President to pull ICE out… so their status quo continues. That’s why they won’t tell people to stop disrupting federal agents. More chaos is good for the Left.

Minneapolis was already a fraudulent mess before ICE got there. That’s part of the reason they deployed there to begin with.

But it’s an even bigger mess now… and it doesn’t look like there’s a good way out.

The crazy thing is that, barely a year ago, the Left was in tatters after the 2024 election.

Today the Left is once again emboldened… and they believe that if they protest loudly enough, if they “resist” forcefully enough, if they cause enough chaos, then they’ll get their way.

And that strikes me as an incredibly dangerous outcome.

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I had just completed a couple of tours in Middle East, so, for me, Europe felt like the pinnacle of civilization.

Twenty years later the continent is completely unrecognizable. Britain has adopted Orwellian laws that threaten citizens with jail time who complain about migrant criminals. The English flag has been declared a symbol of racism.

Germany shut down all its nuclear power plants in the name of climate change. They replaced reliable nuclear energy with solar panels—in a country where the sun barely shines—then watched energy prices explode and industrial competitiveness collapse.

European governments spend billions housing migrants while their native populations struggle to afford basic necessities.

These failed policies— migration, social justice, climate, economic priorities— all started at the World Economic Forum—where a bunch of people who thought they were smarter than everyone else set out to remake the world in their own image.

They weren’t shy about stating their goals.

Klaus Schwab, the WEF Founder, even published a book entitled The Great Reset, arguing that the pandemic presented a “unique window of opportunity” for global elites to reshape “the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models and the management of a global commons.”

He openly bragged about how many global leaders went through his personal Hitler youth program—known as the Young Global Leaders.

(In 2017, Schwab boasted that “what we are very proud of… is that we penetrate the cabinets” of governments around the world.)

Justin Trudeau-Castro is perhaps the most famous Schwabian acolyte; he spent the better part of a decade completely overturning any sensible economic policy in Canada for the sake of this green fantasy, woke leftist agenda.

The proof of the damage is obvious. The gap between Canadian and American GDP per capita widened by 144 percent during Trudeau-Castro’s time in office. The OECD now projects Canada will rank dead last among developed nations in per-capita GDP growth through 2060.

Europe isn’t much better. Today, Mississippi—the poorest state in America—has a higher per-capita GDP than France, Italy, and the UK. It’s within spitting distance of Germany.

There’s literally no way to defend any of these policies; they’ve ALL been abject failures. All of them.

Yet the Davos crowd continued flying to Switzerland on private jets each year to cook up more bad ideas… including telling the peasants to eat bugs and own nothing.

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock (which manages $14 trillion worth of global assets), sits on the WEF Board of Trustees. He’s spent years using his control of other people’s money to force “woke” ESG policies on the business world.

This week, Fink hosted an exclusive dinner at Davos. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was the final speaker, and he gave the crowd a reality check.

Lutnick pointed out that European economies are lagging behind America precisely because of failed ESG policies, and then called their net-zero targets delusional.

He said specifically, “Why would Europe agree to be net zero in 2030 when they don’t make a battery? They don’t make a battery! So if they go 2030, they are deciding to be subservient to China [which makes all the batteries.]”

Lutnick is right. Europe is essentially trading the carbon emissions of oil and gas for the environmental devastation of cobalt and lithium mining—much of it done with child labor in the Congo.

So is the world really better off? At best it’s debatable. But now Europe will be completely dependent on China (who, again, makes all the batteries) for their energy security.

The room didn’t want to hear it. ECB President Christine Lagarde stormed out of the room mid-speech. Former Vice President Al Gore started booing from the audience. Fink cut the dinner short before dessert was even served.

These are the people who fancy themselves the adults in the room.

California Governor Gavin Newsom showed up to Davos to trash-talk the sitting US President on foreign soil. He urged European leaders to “develop a backbone” and “punch [Trump] in the face.”

Then he pulled out red kneepads—a gag about world leaders “kneeling” to America, and bragged about how successful he is.

This is the Governor of California—a state with the highest poverty rate in the US, a mass exodus of businesses and residents, catastrophic wildfires from mismanagement, high-speed rail to nowhere, and a homelessness crisis that has exploded despite billions in spending.

Bizarrely, Alex Soros praised Newsom as “the real star” of Davos.

The younger Soros, of course, has never accomplished anything in his life; instead he’s used his father’s money to finance radical political candidates and woke priorities.

A lot of people probably never heard him speak before this week’s Davos event. Yet when they put Alex Soros on stage and the family scion opened his mouth, his word salads were so incomprehensible that he makes Kamala Harris look like Winston Churchill by comparison.

I hate to indulge in schadenfreude, but this year at Davos, the left was made out to be the mockery they are.

Trump. Elon. Lutnick. Ken Griffin. Speaker after speaker stood up and told the Left, to their faces… at their own conference, that they’ve been catastrophic failures.

For years, the Davos crowd hijacked any sense of reason in government and corporate boardrooms around the world. They insisted the only thing that mattered was what’s swinging between your legs or the melanin in your skin.

They repeated platitudes endlessly—”Diversity is our strength” as they actively destroyed their own countries, made them less prosperous, and less safe.

Now they’ve been told to their faces that they’re a joke. And there’s nothing they can do about it, because it’s true—and everyone is finally admitting it out loud.

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Carved into the stone, in Latin, is an inscription that translates to: “Ummidia Quadratilla, daughter of Caius, built the amphitheatre and temple for the people of Casinum at her expense.”

Ummidia Quadratilla was a wealthy Roman businesswoman who funded multiple public works, all out of her own pocket. Her name was carved in stone for eternity. When she died, she was respected enough that the younger Pliny wrote admiringly about her.

The Romans (and Greeks before them) called this practice euergetes—wealthy citizens funding infrastructure projects in exchange for public recognition. Rich people actually competed with one another to see who could give more since public generosity elevated one’s status.

The most generous would have parades thrown in their honor— though naturally they would have to pay for the parade.

Today’s attitudes towards taxpayers are entirely different. Politicians are constantly inventing new ways to extract more and more from people, and then publicly shame the people who pay the most money.

They call their biggest tax payers “greedy” for following the very tax code that politicians write, and then demand they pay their “fair share” without ever defining how much that is.

In tax year 2022 (the most recent data that the IRS has published), the top 0.001% of taxpayers in America paid, on average, nearly $60 million each. The top 0.0001% (about 150 people) paid in the hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars each.

(By comparison, the average taxpayer contributes about $7,333.)

You’d think that politicians would be grateful and supportive of people who write such enormous checks to the government. I mean, they ought to name an aircraft carrier for someone who consistently pays billion-dollar tax bills.

Yet, again, politicians vilify and shame them. This is a bizarre, almost cannibalistic approach. Any private business would treat its top customers with respect and dignity. At a minimum they wouldn’t vilify the individuals who pay the most money.

But guess what? Successful people are extremely mobile. It’s 2026, not 1026. No one is a medieval serf anymore, tied to the land.

California is learning this lesson the hard way. The state already has one of the highest income tax rates in America—13.3% at the top bracket.

Wealthy people have long tolerated California’s high income taxes as the price they pay for living in a place with great weather.

Yet now California voters are considering a ballot measure to impose a “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires—a levy on their total assets, retroactive to January 1, 2026.

And that was finally enough. Billionaires are getting out of Dodge, because they’re not dumb enough to think that this tax will be a “one-time” thing.

The United Kingdom is experiencing something similar.

For over 200 years, the UK had a “non-dom” regime that allowed wealthy foreigners living in Britain to avoid UK taxes on their overseas income. It was one of the few things remaining in recent years which made Britain attractive to international wealth.

In March 2024, the Conservative government announced they would abolish it. The Labour government confirmed the change after winning the July election, and the regime officially ended in April 2025.

The mere announcement triggered an exodus. Over 10,000 millionaires left the UK in 2024, and thousands more followed in 2025.

They brought their money with them. No more big spending, no more employees, no more economic activity.

So what does a desperate government do when the wealthy flee?

They tax everything that’s nailed down.

Here’s a great example: Britain’s Labour government recently announced plans to double the tax rate on local bars and pubs.

These establishments are already being squeezed from every direction. The government charges duty on beer, plus VAT, plus special taxes on every pint sold.

Now the Labour government is raising those tax rates by 30 to 70%, starting this April.

The response? Over 1,000 pubs have banned Labour MPs from their establishments. Prime Minister Keir Starmer got barred from one of his local pubs in London. Signs reading “No Labour MPs” are appearing in windows across the country.

But I wouldn’t count on this changing anything. Remember, the UK government couldn’t even be bothered to investigate the years-long grooming gang scandal until public outrage forced Prime Minister Starmer’s hand—he’d initially dismissed calls for an inquiry as a ‘far-right bandwagon.’

It’s all so insulting.

Bear in mind that the British government is re housing 36,000 asylum seekers in hotels at £145 per night—all at taxpayer expense.

Plus, local councils spent £52 million on diversity and inclusion officers over the past three years. Britain is still sending foreign aid to India—a country with its own space program.

Meanwhile 10 million pensioners, i.e. actual British people, lost their winter fuel payments so that the government could save £1.5 billion.

It really boggles the mind. Before raising taxes, shouldn’t governments examine how they’re spending the money they already take in?

The fundamental problem is that government programs, once created, are almost impossible to end. There’s never an honest reckoning; spending just keeps rising, forcing governments to keep searching for new revenue.

Naturally they always want to tax the rich… But eventually “the rich” skip town, so the government starts taxing every that can’t relocate. Pubs. Property. Small businesses. The middle class.

This is why tax mitigation is part of any sensible Plan B.

It’s not unpatriotic to expect the government to spend money wisely. Any rational person—not even as a Plan B, but as a Plan A—should explore legal means to minimize their tax burden.

That could mean moving from a high-tax state like California or New York to a no-income-tax state like Texas or Florida.

Maximizing retirement account contributions—a self-directed Solo 401(k) alone lets you shelter up to $69,000 per year.

For Americans willing to live abroad, the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion can shield up to $132,900 from federal taxes.

Banning politicians from the local pub might feel good. But the most rational way to respond— when the government isn’t even willing to stop funding outright fraud— is to follow the rules of their own tax code to minimize the amount of your money that they’ll waste.

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That’s because the firm’s founder, Ian Bremmer, is a CNN and MSNBC regular. His chairman, Cliff Kupchan, is a former Clinton State Department official. They’re about as establishment (i.e. leftist) as it gets.

This year’s report warns of a looming crisis in America: breakdown of trust, institutional decay, the end of predictability.

But it’s absurd for these guys— both of whom have been part of the Washington establishment for decades— to suddenly sound the alarm about America’s problems. They were complicit in burning the place down.

Bremmer is the founding chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk.

For years, his firm advised Fortune 500 companies into ridiculous DEI initiatives and the “stakeholder capitalism” agenda that the Davos crowd championed.

Eurasia Group’s clients included Goldman Sachs, Citi, and Bank of America—the same firms that spent the last decade pushing ESG mandates and hiring quotas.

With this guidance, firms like Goldman refused to take companies public unless they had “diverse” board members. Citi and BofA each committed over a billion dollars of their shareholders’ money to “equity” initiatives.

Corporate America spent a decade prioritizing progressive causes over competence—and Eurasia Group was one of the top cheerleaders of the movement.

In 2018, Bremmer even wrote a book called “Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism”—explaining how globalism left workers behind. The political class ignored them, and voter  backlash was inevitable. His proposed solution? More of the same globalist Davos playbook that caused the problem.

Then in 2021, he published an article with the headline, “Bring on the Vaccine Mandate!” Yes, he actually included the exclamation mark.

So, forgive me if I can’t take Bremmer seriously when he laments the decline of America. This is someone who spent years advocating for exactly the kind of top-down, elite-knows-best policies that eroded public trust in the first place.

He understands that America is burning— because people like him helped light the fire.

This reminds me a lot of Janet Yellen’s sudden concern about the US government’s finances.

We talked about this a bit already, but I’m afraid I understated Yellen’s role.

Earlier this month, the former Fed Chair and Treasury Secretary warned that US finances are in worse shape than most third-world countries.

Yet if there is one single person who is MOST responsible for the dire state of US finances, it is Janet Yellen.

Yellen spent most of the past THREE DECADES in the most senior, most powerful economic policy roles that one could achieve.

She was a Federal Reserve Bank President. A member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Vice Chair of the Fed. Chair of the  Fed. Head of the Council of Economic Advisors. The United States Secretary of the Treasury.

There is literally NO ONE in modern history who has spent more time at the helm of American economic policy than Janet Yellen. Her fingerprints are on everything.

And suddenly she’s sounding the alarm?

When she served as Fed Chair from 2014 to 2018, she kept interest rates near zero—enabling the cheap borrowing that fueled the government’s debt binge.

When she served as Treasury Secretary from 2021 to 2025, the national debt exploded from $27.8 trillion to over $36 trillion. That’s more than $8 trillion in new debt on her watch.

She even fumbled the ball when it came to debt issuance; under Yellen, the Treasury Department issued predominantly short-term debt rather than long-term debt.

Interest rates were at record lows; she had the opportunity to lock-in those record low borrowing costs for 10, 20, and 30 years. Instead she kept right on issuing ultra-short term debt.

That decision alone will cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions in additional interest costs as those Treasury notes now have to be refinanced at higher rates.

She has now been out of office for precisely twelve months. And suddenly she’s warning about fiscal crises and America’s unsustainable debt.

Is she honestly trying to pretend that America’s finances were just fine until January 20, 2025? That all of these gargantuan problems just suddenly appeared over the last twelve months?

It’s completely ludicrous. Yet we see this pattern everywhere—at the highest levels of government, at Davos advising corporations, and of course in the media.

Jake Tapper recently wrote a bestselling book exposing the government cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

Tapper was part of the cover-up!!! Yet he points the fingers at others who didn’t tell the truth.

And as we speak, some of the worst scum of the earth are in Davos at the World Economic Forum— lamenting the sorry state of the world which they helped to forge.

It’s like the arsonists are screaming “fire” in a crowded theater.

How does this possibly get resolved? I’m really not sure.

One would hope that voters would wake up and stop sending illiterate criminals to represent them in Congress… or stop electing used car salesmen like Gavin Newsom to wreck their states.

And yet voters get their news from people like Tapper. Politicians get funded by Goldman, Citi, and Bank of America—the same banks that take their marching orders from WEF advisors.

The Treasury and Fed are run by people like Yellen—who rotate between government and collecting millions from Wall Street in “speaking fees.”

Not to mention the guys who destroy their cities and states, import illegal voters, and bribe them with taxpayer funds— then denounce anyone who uncovers the fraud as “racist”.

So how likely is it that American democracy self-corrects this dumpster fire before there’s a major debt crisis?

I don’t know. There are so many permutations and unknowns… plus plenty of trends to be optimistic about. But it certainly helps to have a Plan B.

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In recent remarks at the American Economic Association, she told the audience that US finances are in worse shape than most third-world countries.

She said specifically that America’s “needed belt tightening is significant—larger than in most programs supported by the International Monetary Fund.”

Let that sink in for a minute. Remember, the International Monetary Fund provides emergency bailout funding for countries who are on the verge of bankruptcy.

And naturally this IMF funding comes with strings attached: recipient countries are required to cut spending and tighten their belts.

Greece is the classic example of what happens when the IMF shows up.

By 2010, Greek debt had spiraled to 130% of GDP and climbing. No one was willing to lend them money anymore… forcing the IMF to swoop in with a “rescue” package that came with brutal strings attached.

Pensions were slashed by 40%. Public sector wages were frozen, then cut. Over 150,000 government workers were laid off. State assets—airports, ports, utilities—were sold off at fire-sale prices to foreign investors.

Greece’s economy contracted by 25%. Youth unemployment hit 60%. An entire generation was hollowed out.

Argentina has been through the IMF wringer multiple times; in fact in in 2018, Argentina received the largest bailout in IMF history: $57 billion.

The conditions? Currency controls. Spending freezes. Slashed subsidies. Inflation still ripped past 50%. Poverty rates surged past 40%. The middle class was gutted. (These conditions are what ultimately led to the election of Javier Milei).

Sri Lanka is the most recent cautionary tale.

In 2022, after years of fiscal mismanagement, the country defaulted on its debt. The IMF demanded fuel subsidy cuts, electricity price hikes, and tax increases. Inflation hit 70%. Riots erupted, culminating in protesters storming the Presidential palace.

Pakistan, Egypt, Ukraine, Ecuador, Zambia—the list goes on. Whenever the IMF shows up, a nation loses its sovereignty. Foreign bureaucrats start dictating your tax rates, your spending priorities, your pension formulas.

And here’s Janet Yellen—former Fed Chair, former Treasury Secretary—calmly, academically stating that America needs a bigger fiscal adjustment than most of these countries that the IMF bailed out.

She said the quiet part out loud (though coincidentally failed to admit that she was complicit in engineering this crisis).

Now, there are several critical differences between the US versus Greece, Sri Lanka, etc.

The US has a highly robust and productive economy with far more growth potential.

America also possesses (for now) the world’s reserve currency.

If Sri Lanka runs out of money, they have no choice but to accept whatever terms the IMF dictates. But the US has the luxury of ‘printing’ its own money to finance the deficit.

And that’s exactly what’s happening: the Federal Reserve has quietly started buying Treasuries again—expanding reserves and injecting money into a system where inflation is already climbing.

The problem is, ‘printing’ money  only works as long as the world keeps accepting dollars. Foreign creditors need to trust they’ll be paid back—and that the dollars they receive will still be worth something.

When that confidence erodes, they start to diversify into other assets. And we’re seeing that play out now.

Central banks around the world have been aggressively dumping US dollars and buying gold—hence why the gold price surged over 60% last year. Foreign central bankers are not waiting around to see how America’s debt challenge plays out.

The US government is running out of time to demonstrate to the world that they are serious about cutting spending. And it’s not like there isn’t plenty of fat to trim.

Yet nothing ever happens. Just look at the Minnesota welfare fraud as an example: you’d think the entire country would be united against stopping the fraud.

Instead, apologists have downplayed it. They call critics “racist” and claim that there’s plenty of fraud elsewhere, so why is everyone so focused on Minnesota daycare facilities..?

The President tried to cut funding, and he immediately got sued. Then some activist masquerading as a federal judge ruled against the President, ensuring that the fraud would keep flowing.

If there is to be any change, it’s ultimately going to come down to Congress and its extremely cumbersome appropriations process.

Bear in mind, we’re talking about an institution that can’t even agree to a basic budget without threatening a full-blown government shutdown. So I wouldn’t hold my breath that they’re going to suddenly cut out fraudulent spending.

Yet while it’s doubtful that Congress will suddenly grow a brain, a conscience, and a backbone, it is still possible that you as an individual can sidestep the risks.

Real assets—precious metals, energy, agriculture, productive businesses—hold value regardless of what politicians do to the dollar. And if fiscal instability finally forces the reckoning Yellen warned about, these are the assets that benefit most.

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The former Vice President—who spent years warning Americans that “our oceans are warming” and “sea levels are rising”—has apparently decided the beaches of California are safe enough to bet $8 million on.

During her 2019 presidential primary campaign, Harris was emphatic: “Extreme weather is destroying our communities.” At a 2023 speech at the University of Miami, she doubled down: “To live in a coastal community is to live on the front lines of the climate crisis.”

Maybe she’s planning to become a martyr for the cause. Or maybe she has always been full of shit.

But the climate hypocrisy is really just the appetizer.

This is the same Kamala Harris who spent years positioning herself as a champion of “the little guy”—railing against wealthy Americans, supporting tax hikes on “the rich,” and suggesting that billionaires weren’t paying their “fair share.”

During the 2020 campaign, she endorsed wealth taxes and proposed dramatic increases on capital gains. She talked about “equity” and “economic justice” while lecturing Americans about the obscenity of accumulated wealth.

And now she’s living in an $8.2 million oceanfront mansion.

There’s nothing wrong with being wealthy (although there is something suspect about the amount of wealth “public servants” with modest salaries seem to accumulate).

There’s also nothing wrong with buying a beach house. But there’s something deeply wrong with spending a political career demonizing wealth and then quietly collecting the spoils.

But this is routine on the left.

Janet Yellen, who served as Fed Chair from 2014 to 2018 then Treasury Secretary from 2021 until January 2025, is now warning America about the unsustainable trajectory of the national debt.

She warned about “fiscal dominance,” which might sound like a central banker’s kink, but is actually a technical term for when government debt gets so large that the central bank is effectively forced to keep interest rates low and print money to manage it, rather than focusing on inflation.

This is exactly what we have been saying would happen for years— the Fed forced to prioritize lower rates and money printing, despite elevated inflation, just to keep the government solvent and able to service its debt.

The comments were made at the American Economic Association meeting earlier this month, where Yellen also warned that the debt is heading toward 150% of GDP.

She lamented that “The overall federal deficit is roughly 6% of GDP. That level has never before been realized except during wars and recessions… The needed belt tightening is significant.”

This is rich.

When Yellen served as Fed Chair from 2014 to 2018, she kept interest rates near zero, enabling the cheap borrowing that fueled the debt binge.

She then served as Treasury Secretary from 2021 to 2025, presiding over the national debt exploding from roughly $27.8 trillion to over $36 trillion.

That’s more than $8 trillion in new debt on her watch. So who exactly is she lecturing?

She even completely ignored the most responsible way to continue behaving fiscally irresponsibly— locking-in low long term interest rates.

Yellen’s Treasury department issued predominantly short-term debt instead of 10-year or 30-year bonds when yields were below 1%. That decision alone will cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions in additional interest costs as those debts roll over at higher rates.

Let’s not forget that people like Harris and Yellen are enabled by an entire apparatus of legacy media propping up their narratives, and conveniently ignoring stories which conflict.

But this week, one of the worst offenders, the New York Times, saw the light!

The paper published a review of a book about how the “clean energy” supply chain involves horrific mining conditions. Child labor in Congo’s cobalt mines. Environmental destruction in Indonesia’s nickel operations. Human exploitation fueling the electric vehicle revolution.

Imagine my shock!

The book, The Elements of Power by Nicolas Niarchos, traces the lithium-ion battery supply chain. The Times called it a “revelation of the human costs of mining the minerals on which those batteries depend.”

A revelation? In 2026?

This is the same New York Times that spent the last two decades cheerleading every EV mandate, solar subsidy, and fossil fuel restriction. The same paper that treated anyone questioning the “green transition” as a climate denier or industry shill.

It’s hard to believe the New York Times just discovered six-year-olds working in Congolese cobalt mines. This isn’t new information—it’s been documented for years. So either the paper of record is so naive they’re not equipped to report the news, or they’ve been deliberately ignoring the ugly side of “clean” energy to fit the narrative.

If the Times had bothered to report honestly on these supply chains for the past 20 years—instead of breathlessly promoting every green initiative as morally unimpeachable—perhaps America wouldn’t have abandoned nuclear power, the cleanest and most efficient energy source known to man.

Nuclear doesn’t require child labor in the Congo. It doesn’t devastate Indonesian rain forests. It doesn’t depend on supply chains controlled by adversarial nations.

But nuclear was left for dead because the same people now “discovering” dirty clean energy spent decades pretending solar panels and EV batteries appeared through immaculate conception.

It’s not that these people are stupid. It’s that the rules they preach are for you, not for them.

This is why we’ve been saying for years that you cannot rely on the same people creating these problems to solve them.

Unfortunately, voters show little appetite for making the changes needed to fix any of it. Which is exactly why—beyond just pointing out these problems—we’ve spent over a decade talking about the one solution you can actually control: having a personal Plan B.

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Then came the Peronists.

Juan Perón rose to power in the 1940s and built a political machine fueled by populist spending, nationalization, and currency manipulation. The country rotted—yet somehow the Peronists stayed in power for decades.

By the 2000s, Argentina had become a cautionary tale. The peso collapsed in 2001. The country defaulted on over $100 billion in sovereign debt. Unemployment soared past 20%. Banks froze accounts. Savings evaporated overnight.

Yet, bizarrely, Argentines continued electing the same corrupt Peronists that had created the mess.

For nearly two more decades, they suffered through chronic inflation and social decline. By late 2023, annual inflation had hit 211%. Monthly inflation was running at double digits.

Only then did Argentines finally decide to go in a different direction.

They elected Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding libertarian economist who promised to abolish the central bank and slash government spending. Voters were desperate enough to try something totally new after over two decades at rock bottom.

And it took being at rock bottom for voters in Argentina to finally wake up and prioritize their own prosperity.

The US is not in such a dire situation. Not yet. But it’s clear that America’s fiscal trajectory is really bad. The national debt is $38.4 trillion as of this morning— an increase of $2.3 trillion in the last 12 months.

Remaining on this path will almost certainly result in higher long-term inflation and reduced prosperity across the board. So you’d think that improving this imbalance would be a top priority in Congress.

It’s also, conceptually, quite easy. Fraud, waste, and legal graft are blatant. According to the Treasury Secretary, just eliminating criminal fraud would cut 10% of the budget, or around $600 billion per year.

But there’s just almost no political will in Congress to do this— to even reduce criminal fraud.

Furthermore, politicians and economists believe that just 2% economic growth in the US is good enough.

This is absurd. The US economy should be growing at 4% or more with everything going for it—the world’s reserve currency, abundant natural resources, the most innovative companies on Earth.

Tackling bureaucratic bloat would also fix a lot of problems. There are simply WAY too many laws and regulations on the books that make it more difficult to produce.

And that’s the key: more prosperity requires higher productivity, especially given the massive federal debt. It’s not rocket science.

Together, modest budget cuts and regulatory reform would power enough productivity growth to bring the debt into line, reduce inflation, and protect the dollar’s reserve status.

The solution is so obvious… so why aren’t they doing it?

Well, for starters, anytime the executive branch tries to do anything—unwind regulations, eliminate fraud, etc.—they get sued in federal court.

Then some activist masquerading as a judge issues an injunction or overturns the executive order.

Just days ago, for example, a federal judge blocked the administration’s attempts to cut $10 billion in government funds to fraudulent daycare and healthcare facilities.

Ultimately if spending and regulatory cuts are going to be able to survive activist judges, then Congress will need to make the changes legislatively. That’s what the Constitution requires.

Yet there’s hardly anyone in Congress who takes these problems seriously… and at the moment, voters don’t seem to care enough to vote for candidates who will tackle these challenges in good faith.

Not to mention, huge blocs of American voters have proven themselves to be masochists.

Look at cities like Chicago and New York City or states like California; these places have been making residents’ lives worse for decades. Yet voters keep electing the same people who created the problems. Either the elections are rigged, or the voters are braindead—or some combination of both.

This would suggest that the US, at least for the time being, will remain on its unsustainable path.

Argentina suffered under the same failed party, year after year, watching things get worse until they finally said “enough.” But the US has something Argentina didn’t: the ability to blame the other side.

When you flip-flop between two parties every 4-8 years, each side can point fingers at the opposition. The pendulum always provides a convenient scapegoat for each side to blame.

There’s never a moment of collective accountability. The debt just keeps growing.

So I just don’t see American voters having their Argentina moment.

But given that, in just seven years, Social Security’s trust funds will be out of money and the national debt will exceed $50 trillion. At that point, the window for relatively easy and painless solutions will likely be closed.

By the time voters demand real change, it will almost certainly be too late to avoid serious financial consequences.

That’s why it’s so important to have a Plan B.

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The Grimaldi bank had loaned Philip quite a sum of money, and the Italian bankers already knew that the king’s finances were on shaky ground. So when they opened the royal letter, it probably wasn’t much of a surprise: King Philip II of Spain was suspending all debt payments. Effective immediately.

Amazingly, this was Philip’s third bankruptcy in less than two decades—he’d already defaulted in 1557 and 1560.

Bear in mind that Spain wasn’t some struggling backwater in the 1500s; this was the richest nation on Earth.

Spanish galleons transported 180 tonnes of silver annually from the Americas. The empire spanned four continents. Its army was Europe’s most feared military force.

Yet the King couldn’t pay his bills.

Philip’s treasury officials knew exactly what needed to be done: cut spending on endless wars, reform the tax system, reduce royal court expenses, stop borrowing at rates up to 40%.

But all of that was politically impossible. There were too many entrenched interests. Spain’s nobility controlled parliament, so naturally they refused to pass any new taxes (as they would be the ones paying!)

The Church owned vast estates and wielded enormous influence… so touching Church revenues was out of the question.

Military spending was non-negotiable— there were simply too many foreign powers threatening the empire, not to mention war in the Netherlands, skirmishes with the Ottomans, brewing conflict with England.

Every constituency had a reason why their particular spending was essential. Every reform threatened someone’s interests. So nothing changed.

They could have made reforms voluntarily. But it was easier to simply keep borrowing and make the problem worse every year.

Thing is, this approach of kicking the can down the road only lasts for so long… because, sooner or later, the creditors stop lending more money.

Why would they? Why would Italy’s Grimaldi bank keep sending money to Philip knowing that he would not pay them? No lender wants to sink money into a financial black hole.

What often happens in these situations is that foreign creditors do come back to the table. But not as bankers or lenders or bond investors.

No. Once a nation defaults (or is on the brink of default), creditors come back when they can essentially take control of the government… when they can oversee and approve expenses, tax revenues, and even legislation.

We’ve seen this multiple times even in the 21st century. In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, many European nations (like Greece) were forced into ‘austerity’ programs whereby their domestic economic agenda was dictated by foreign creditors.

In 2022, the British Prime Minister was forced to resign because the bond market didn’t like her tax plan.

All of this ultimately constitutes a loss of sovereignty.

The same thing happened to Spain in the 1500s; suddenly Italian bankers had veto power over Spanish military campaigns… meaning that Philip was a king in name only, and the Spanish Empire ultimately became a subsidiary of the banks.

Within 100 years, Spain had gone from dominant superpower to a weak, second-tier player—economically exhausted and militarily overextended.

Spain had everything needed to remain a great power: vast resources, global trade networks, military strength, and smart administrators who understood what needed to be done.

What it lacked was the political will to make changes before a crisis forced those choices upon them, in a way entirely outside their control.

A similar trend is taking place in America today… though, again, it’s not too late.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently stated that he believes up to 10%—roughly $600 billion—of the US government budget is fraud. Not waste. Not inefficiency. Fraud of the sort that recently came to light in Minnesota.

And that’s not even counting the ‘legitimate graft’—the type we wrote about last week in California, where Gavin Newsom has given away nearly $100 billion to pointless Leftist initiatives.

The US still has absurdly strong economic potential. The key to reining in this future debt crisis is to cut spending, i.e. freeze the budget in place and spend the same amount of money more wisely. Stop the bleeding.

On top of that, take a hatchet to America’s bureaucratic regulatory maze. If 10% of the US budget is fraud, I’d expect at least 25% (and probably much more) of the United States Code of Federal Regulations is outright destructive.

Those two things would boost real economic growth, generate more tax revenue, substantially reduce the deficit, and bring inflation under control.

There are many paths forward, and a number of creative ways to make this happen. The problem is time. The window is still open. America still has agency over how this plays out.

But actually doing it requires political will that has been absent for decades.

And that’s the point. Staying on this trajectory—the one they’ve been on for years—is a guaranteed problem.

There are signs that some powerful people want off this ride. The fact that Bessent is even talking about $600 billion in fraud publicly is notable.

But if that doesn’t translate into action—it ultimately comes down to Congress finding the will and the courage to freeze spending… or voters becoming smart enough to elect representatives who will get the job done.

We’ve been hearing over and over again for the past several years about various ‘threats to democracy’. The legacy media seems to always be howling that some politician or some legislation is a threat to democracy.

Realistically, the biggest threat to American democracy is actually the US national debt.

Because if voters don’t wake up and demand that their Congressional representatives fix this problem, then sooner or later the bond market is going to be calling the shots— tax policy, defense spending, Social Security— voters’ wishes be damned.

And that’s about as far from ‘democracy’ as it gets.

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Walz is the guy who allowed billions in fraud to flow through Minnesota social programs. He and his party import the worst third world scum for the sole purpose of padding a voting bloc to keep themselves in power.

They have utterly vanquished their school systems, encouraged an entire generation to be gender-confused, rewritten American history, facilitated violent criminals to walk the streets. . .

And they’re the ones that are angry?

Governor Walz took to the microphone this week and announced: “I feel your anger. I am angry.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey eloquently ordered ICE agents to “get the f*** out of Minneapolis.”

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar says ICE is “terrorizing” communities.

All of this fury is directed at federal agents who were in Minneapolis focused on arresting rapists, pedophiles, and murderers who are in the country illegally.

That includes people like Abdikani Noor Ibrahim, a registered sex offender from Somalia with seventeen prior convictions. Or Tomas Espin Tapia, wanted in Ecuador for murder and sexual assault.

Yet these people roam the streets because of Walz and Frey’s sanctuary city policies and lenient judicial system.

On January 7, 2026, a ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good.

It goes without saying that the death of a US citizen by a US federal agent on US soil is horrific. So are the circumstances that led to the shooting.

Six months earlier, Agent Ross was in Minneapolis attempting to arrest an illegal migrant who had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor.

The migrant was in his vehicle when Ross tried to make the arrest. Rather than submit, the migrant hit the gas with Ross’s arm stuck in the window, dragging him more than 100 yards.

Ross was sent back to Minneapolis to arrest more criminals. But this time he wasn’t just facing criminals. He was facing a coordinated network of activists whose mission was to disrupt his work.

The network is called ICE Watch. Their stated mission: “documenting and resisting ICE.” Track agents. Film them. Badger them. Dox them. Increase stress and tension. Surround them. Whistle to warn targets. Block vehicles. Coordinate in daily chat groups. Escalate.

I’ve been to 122 countries. I have literally never been any other place in the world where protesters feel entitled to directly interfere with law enforcement operations.

Again, I’m not happy that anyone got shot. And the Twitterverse is already full of people analyzing the video, frame-by-frame, to figure out who is at fault.

There should obviously be an investigation. And if Agent Ross is charged with a crime, I sincerely hope the jury can remain impartial, listen to the facts, and reach an objective decision… though I think that’s about as likely as Donald Trump getting a fair trial in Manhattan.

Here’s what I do know: Renee Good was a 37-year-old mother of three. Her 6-year-old son is now an orphan—he lost his father in 2023.

I also have two young children. They are my top priority. I imagine anyone with children feels the same way.

So I’m completely mystified — why would anyone, especially the parent of a young child, choose to insert herself between armed federal agents on one side, and a suspected illegal migrant rapist on the other.

I struggle to understand the calculus. Where was the upside? Put yourself in harm’s way so that some suspected criminals might remain free? It’s bewildering.

Renee Good is absolutely a victim. She’s a victim of the leftist mental disease that infected her.

Her ex-husband says she “never participated in a protest” in all the years he knew her.

But when Trump won in 2024, she and her new partner “fled” to Canada. But that didn’t last long, and when they came back, they enrolled her 6-year-old at a K-5 charter school whose stated mission is “involving children in political and social activism.”

This is where she met the ICE Watch network. And now she’s dead.

Good’s wife was heard sobbing at the scene, stating on video “I made her come down here. It’s my fault.” An ICE agent shot her. But leftist ideology put them both in that position.

The left has a truly deranged set of priorities.

We’re talking about people who defended Hamas terrorists. People who go from “No Kings” protests to supporting a Latin American dictator in a matter of months.

People who cheered Charlie Kirk’s assassination. People who burn American flags and march the streets chanting “Death to America” and “Death to ICE”. People who encouraged million of migrants to enter the country illegally by offering tremendous taxpayer benefits.

And now they spend their brain power and productive capacity designing apps to prevent authorities from arresting criminals.

It’s easy to beat up on California or New York. But Minnesota? This should be a sane Midwestern place. Instead, it’s the epicenter of leftist militancy.

This is where Somali immigrants set up shop to defraud US taxpayers of billions of dollars. It’s where one of the most radical leftists in Congress, Ilhan Omar, was elected.

It was the epicenter of the Black Lives Matters riots of 2020, and now the anti-ICE protests.

This isn’t going away. The social division and unrest is only going to escalate. More so given that this is an election year, and these same “angry” politicians will stoke whatever divisions they can to stay in power.

And that’s all they care about— remaining in power. So they’ll continue to stir emotion, whip up hatred, and radicalize foot soldiers who will put themselves in harm’s way… and even get killed.

Tim Walz is angry. But it’s rational Americans— regardless of political affiliation— who should be angry: angry that the people destroying America act like they’re the victims when their own policies produce the chaos.

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This scandal is a case study in government incompetence— over 90 people charged with bilking at least hundreds of millions from programs meant to feed low-income children, with much of the fraud centered in Minnesota’s Somali community.

And those are just the ones that were prosecuted.

Court records show defendants spent the money on lakefront property and luxury cars

And when some Minnesota officials finally tried to stop the fraud in 2021, one of the programs— “Feeding Our Future”— sued the state for racial discrimination.

A Leftist judge ordered the payments to resume and held the Department of Education in contempt— fining them $47,500.

Minnesota officials under Governor Tim Walz’s watch retaliated against the whistleblowers and attempted to hide it all from federal investigators.

And I am so grateful to Tim Walz for all of this.

Walz is such a corrupt buffoon, he thought people were too stupid or ambivalent to ever notice the massive fraud taking place… or to put the pieces together and realize how the Left has imported countless migrants into the country and showered them with taxpayer funds, all to keep their party in power.

But taxpayers did notice. And they do care.

The larger problem is that it’s not just Walz and Minnesota.

And that outright fraud may be the smaller issue.

“Legal graft” in America is a far bigger problem, completely dwarfing the outright fraud.

California, for example, has a state website listing thousands of government grants that have been awarded over the past few years totaling nearly $100 billion.

This is taxpayer money, most of it coming from the federal government. And, unsurprisingly, the majority of this money has been squandered or funneled to leftist political groups.

$25 billion was spent on programs for the homeless, averaging $133,629 per homeless person.

In theory that should have been enough to build each homeless person his/her own small, permanent dwelling. And yet California still has a massive homeless problem.

Keep in mind, this is just federal grants going to California’s homeless problem; the state spent additional funds on the problem, bringing the total even higher.

Another $33 billion was allocated on DEI, identity nonsense, climate fantasies, and intersectionality.

For example, $38 million of taxpayer money was allocated by California’s Department of Industrial Relations to change the demographic makeup of the construction workforce using equity and non-binary inclusion as metrics.

Among the program’s many generous benefits, each newly recruited non-binary construction apprentice can receive up to $10,000 in direct stipends for childcare costs. It’s shocking that any new construction workers wouldn’t identify as non-binary with that kind of incentive.

This is part of “Expanding Registered Apprenticeship in California,” or “ERiCA”—a $25 million initiative doling out grants to promote “equity, inclusion, and access” in the construction trades.

Organizations are given tax dollars to hire DEI consultants and host workshops; one grantee, for instance, received $493,000 to design “insight training” for workers—mandatory anti-harassment sessions to “dismantle barriers” and “foster belonging.”

Another group got paid to create “peer ambassador” programs— where people are hired to find more people to receive free taxpayer money.

Yes, tax dollars are funding some Californian’s job convincing non-binary individuals they belong in a construction apprenticeship. While other tax dollars are spent pulling the actual workers off jobs and into PowerPoints on microaggressions.

California’s Department of Public Health spent nearly $40 million to help queer and transgender people stop smoking. I guess heterosexuals should just choke on their tobacco and die.

Similarly, the same department spent $20 million on Alzheimer’s research— but only for LGBTQ cohorts.

The list literally goes on and on… and we haven’t even scratched the surface of state Medicaid boondoggles, like transgender breast augmentation and feminizing surgeries, courtesy of the taxpayer.

And yet every single one of these programs is completely legal. In fact, far from hiding in shame, California built a website to brag about how effectively they dole out this money.

In Minnesota, the Somalis had to go through the trouble of setting up fake daycare facilities and phony autism clinics to get their hands on those federal dollars. In California, the state gives the money away to anyone who claims to be non-binary.

But again, this isn’t just taking place in California. Or Minnesota. Fraud and graft are everywhere.

And much of it is federally funded.

There is absolutely no way you could argue there isn’t room for 10% cuts to the federal government, across the board, including entitlements.

Think about it: $100 billion in federal tax dollars handed over to just one state— and that’s not even all the money California received— just the published grants.

Multiply that by 50 states. Then add the money that stays at the federal level: Medicare billing fraud, Social Security checks going to dead people, wasteful defense spending, rampant welfare and food stamp fraud.

I hope this gives DOGE a second wind. Maybe people will finally realize that Elon was right all along; he wasn’t exaggerating… if anything, he was understating the amount of fraud, waste, and abuse.

Given the very public fraud cases that are now front-and-center, combined with the absurd chorus of politicians who are closing ranks and defending that very fraud, it should be plainly obvious that the federal government could cut its annual budget by AT LEAST 10% without any loss of service.

Cutting 10% doesn’t mean you won’t be able to get a passport, or that the FBI can’t catch criminals, or that the military won’t be ready for war.

We’re talking about a slight reduction in fraud and legal graft that serves no purpose beyond enriching political allies and justifying bureaucratic empires.

To be fair, when the President hears about these things, he tries to shut down funding. And then he gets sued.

Ultimately solving this problem will come down to Congress. They have to be willing to do this. And for the most part, they aren’t. Too many of their constituents and donors make money off this graft, and a portion of the funds end up as campaign contributions.

If you’ve ever wondered why Congress— which has an approval rating of less than 15%— somehow maintains a 90%+ re-election rate for incumbents, this is why. It’s because of the fraud and the legal graft.

It’s not going to stop until the remaining legitimate voters make more responsible choices about who should be representing them in Congress.

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Little Turtle was the war chief of the Miami nation, one of the Algonquian-speaking tribes in the Great Lakes region, and he had made a name for himself fighting against the United States during the Revolutionary War.

(At one point he literally butchered his captives after a lopsided battle.)

More than a century before, Little Turtle’s people had waged a long war against the Iroquois over control of the land in what is today Indiana and western Ohio. So, when the American Revolution was over, he continued fighting against settlers that he felt were encroaching on his tribe’s territory.

Roughly 1500 American settlers were killed between 1784 and 1789. And when it finally became clear to the US government in 1790 that the violence would not stop, they sent an expedition under the command of General Josiah Harmar to fight the Miami.

Little Turtle was ready. And on October 21 at the Battle of Kekionga in northeastern Indiana, Little Turtle vanquished American forces.

In terms of casualty percentages, it was one of the worst defeats in US history. More importantly, given how small America’s military was at the time, the defeat became a national security nightmare. The US essentially didn’t have an Army after the battle.

In response, Congress passed a series of laws known as the “Militia Acts”, which, among other things, federalized state militias for use by the federal government.

But the new laws also gave the President sweeping authority to take command of these forces under certain circumstances, including invasion or threat of invasion “from any foreign nation or Indian tribe”.

Fast forward more than two centuries, and these Militia Acts are among the foundational legal arguments in favor of the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela over the weekend.

Now, tremendous amounts of ink have already been spilled over Venezuela in the past 48-hours.

What I found so interesting, however, is that most of the legacy media articles, not to mention social media commentary, devolved into typical ignorant tribalism, i.e. people are frequently for/against something based on whether or not they’re for/against the person doing it.

In this case, the Left is predictably howling that the President’s use of the military was illegal and unconstitutional– an assertion that is being repeated and reposted by millions of people.

These same people who protested against “no kings” are now raging in defense of a dictator. They imported millions of illegals and enabled billions in fraud in order to win votes, yet they’re upset because they think the military strike was against the law.

I find this fascinating, because the vast majority of Americans (including many who serve in Congress) have never once read the Constitution and wouldn’t know the difference between Article I and a hole in the ground.

Yet in their expert opinions they have deemed this “unconstitutional”. Just like the ICE raids, Presidential use of the national guard, etc.

Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive power to declare war. Yet “war” has never actually been defined. Do air strikes and Delta Force raids constitute war? If so, then nearly every military conflict waged in US history is illegal and unconstitutional.

Joe Biden struck Syria in 2021. Obama struck Libya in 2011. Bush junior interred suspected terrorists at Gitmo. Bill Clinton sent troops and dropped bombs all over the world. Bush senior invaded Panama. Reagan invaded Grenada. . .

This history goes back to the early days of the Republic.

Yet the Supreme Court has always stayed out of it because they view the definition of “war” in Article I as more of a political argument than a legal one. In other words, it should be up to the voters, not a panel of unelected judges.

So, does what happened this weekend constitute “war”, and hence fall under the exclusive authority of Congress?

Or does it fall under the sweeping powers provided to the President under Article II (as Commander-in-Chief), combined with numerous legislative acts ranging from the militia bills in the 1790s to the War Powers Resolution of 1973…?

Naturally these questions aren’t actually being debated. The legacy media simply devolves into “Orange Man Bad” without bothering to examine the facts or the actual merits of the decision.

And there’s plenty of merit. Many of our readers know that I predicted this a couple of years ago– that the US would essentially make Venezuela the 51st state in order to tap its vast oil reserves.

We’ll discuss this more later in the week, but given declining US shale production, oil supply is clearly a strategic benefit to the United States. So is toppling a global drug cartel.

At the moment there are a lot of people on the Left complaining that the world is now less stable, more dangerous, etc. as a result of this weekend’s military strike.

They said the same thing after the US airstrike in Iran several month ago– that the world would plunge into chaos and danger because of unilateral US aggression.

They were wrong. And I argued back then that the world was actually less inclined to war as a result of the Iran strikes. I believe the same to be true today.

As I explained months ago, the airstrikes against Iran pitted US military technology (F-35s) against Chinese military technology (air defense systems, etc.). And China got embarrassed.

This weekend, a joint force (i.e. Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.) destroyed high value targets in Venezuela while the most elite special operations forces in the world extracted a dictator, with minimal casualties, and it was all over in a couple of hours.

That’s an astonishing military achievement (not to mention the CIA’s success in providing the necessary intelligence).

Conducting any large-scale joint operation is REALLY hard to do. The sheer amount of interservice coordination, i.e. Navy fighter jets talking to Air Force bombers talking to the commandos on the ground– everyone being in sync, on schedule, and hitting their objectives with surgical precision– is extremely difficult.

Doing so in a heavily populated area adds an even higher degree of difficulty.

And yet the US military pulled this off almost flawlessly.

After several years of embarrassments for the military– from the withdrawal from Afghanistan to Joe Biden’s transgender admirals, to the lowering of physical fitness standards, to countless DEI initiatives– this weekend’s actions in Venezuela prove to the rest of the world that the US military is back.

After witnessing these precision strikes, there is not a leader in the world– not Xi, not Putin, not the second coming of Little Turtle– who would even think about conflict with America.

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Think back to August 2019—your expectations and outlook at the time. How wildly different did the next five years turn out to be?

This was before COVID, before 9% inflation, before interest rates exploded and housing prices skyrocketed, before $2 trillion annual deficits became normal and Washington added another $15 trillion to the national debt.

The world has changed dramatically in just six years.

The trend was there before. It was just harder to see. But now, it has accelerated.

This article isn’t about overnight collapse or financial apocalypse. It’s about how great powers—like Rome, or Renaissance Italy—fall slowly. They decay from within: through arrogance, mismanagement, overspending, and the belief that their dominance is permanent. Eventually, reality catches up.

As we wrote back then, “It would be utterly foolish to presume that this will never happen again… to believe that THIS time is different.”

And that’s why, after all these years, the core of our philosophy remains: having a rational Plan B matters.

Not because collapse is coming tomorrow—but because decline, left unchecked, adds up over time.

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Italy was the world’s superpower TWICE. They screwed it up both times

In 750 BC, according to ancient legend, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus founded a tiny hilltop settlement in central Italy.

Romulus slew his brother for violating a magical superstition, and then named their new city after himself: Rome.

And for the first several centuries of its existence, Rome was nothing special. It was one of many minor kingdoms on a peninsula controlled by the Etruscan civilization… and existed at a time when Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta were the dominant superpowers.

Rome’s status began to rise dramatically after Alexander the Great died in 323 BC and left a void of power in the Mediterranean.

But it took until 146 BC, when Roman general Scipio Aemilanus vanquished Carthage in the final siege of the Punic Wars, for Rome to become the clear, undisputed superpower of the known world.

The city’s dominance lasted for nearly 500 years until Roman emperor Constantine the Great moved the capital city to modern-day Turkey in the 4th century AD.

In that time, Rome surpassed even ancient Greece as the most advanced civilization in the history of the world up to that point.

From their vast road networks to the famed aqueducts, ancient Rome’s engineering works were unsurpassed in Europe for more than 1,000 years.

Their architecture and military tactics were copied for centuries.

Their rule of law is still widely used in many modern legal codes to this day.

And the system of government they created has been emulated throughout the world countless times.

During the time of Augustus in the early 1^st century AD, it would have been impossible to imagine a world in which Rome wasn’t the dominant superpower.

And yet the managed to screw it up.

Weak leadership, ridiculous overspending, excessive warfare, currency debasement, idiotic trade policies, price controls, etc. all contributed to the gradual decline of Rome’s wealth and power.

Eventually all of Italy was conquered by invading barbarian tribes, and the grandeur of ancient Rome was relegated to the history books.

Then something interesting happened.

Nearly 1,000 years later, when there was yet another void of economic power in the Mediterranean, a handful of Italian city-states began to emerge as regional leaders.

The movement started in Venice, where the city took steps to enshrine economic freedom and create an economy where anyone who worked hard and took risks had the chance to become prosperous.

This was a radical concept in medieval Europe, when most of the continent was stagnating under the remarkably foolish Feudal System, in which peasants had few rights and zero prospects for growth.

Venice was truly the America of its day– a shining beacon of freedom and opportunity that attracted hard-working, talented people from all over the world.

In time, other Italian city-states like Florence, Genoa, and Pisa also rose to prominence, and Italy once again had become the center of wealth and power in Europe.

Similarly, it would have been nearly impossible for one of the powerful banking families of Florence living during the time of Cosimo de Medici in the early 1400s to imagine a time when they weren’t the dominant superpower.

And yet they managed to screw it up as well.

This is history’s constant lesson: no one… no country, no empire, no ruler… is entitled to the top spot forever.

Wealth and power are constantly changing. And the most pompous superpowers invariably believe that they’re going to last forever. They simply cannot imagine a world where they’re not #1.

Italy is very unique in this sense because it was the dominant superpower TWO times in its history– the first with Ancient Rome, and the second during the early Renaissance.

Both times they were eclipsed by other rising powers, in large part from their own mistakes and stupidity.

The world has seen so many superpowers in its history– from Ancient Egypt to the Ottoman Empire to the Mongols to the Soviet Union.

Every single one of them eventually faded… and sometimes rather chaotically.

It would be utterly foolish to presume that this will never happen again… to believe that THIS time is different.

It’s never different.

But it would be equally foolish (and paranoid) to believe that some great historical reset is going to take place tomorrow morning. Or that the world’s dominant superpower is going to ‘collapse’ overnight.

These things take time. Decay is a slow process.

But it never hurts to take sensible steps to protect yourself from what may come.

As an example, if you happen to be living in a country that has accumulated the largest mountain of government debt in the history of the world, you might not want to keep 100% of your wealth and savings there.

If your central bank is INSOLVENT on a mark-to-market basis, you might not want to keep 100% of your savings denominated in its currency.

If your home country is highly litigious where some of the most ridiculously frivolous lawsuits can cost millions, you might not want to keep all of your assets there.

If your government routinely snuffs out its most basic, enshrined freedoms under the guise of safety and security, you might consider options for a second citizenship based on your ancestry.

If Bolshevik politicians who hate individual success are rising to power and calling for absurd tax rates, you might want to start thinking about legal ways to reduce your tax bill.

Each of these ideas makes sense, no matter what happens (or doesn’t happen) next.

You certainly won’t be worse off lowering your tax bill, or making it more difficult for people to sue you, or taking steps to inflation-proof your savings.

But if the decay accelerates, these are potentially game-changing solutions.

And that’s what a good “Plan B” is all about.

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I was in Oxford (before it became the woke capital of British academia), watching a Shakespeare play that referenced ducats—and it kicked off a deeper reflection on the stable value of gold over centuries.

I argued then that the value of money—and the fate of reserve currencies—rises and falls with the strength and credibility of the nations behind them. And the US dollar, abused by both Congress and the Federal Reserve, was already on the same path as the many failed reserve currencies that came before it.

I said that central banks and foreign governments wouldn’t tolerate endless debasement forever—and would eventually start abandoning the dollar and returning to real stores of value like gold.

At the time, that was a nascent trend. Now, 13 years later, it’s in full swing.

Over just the past 18 to 24 months, the shift has accelerated dramatically—central banks dumping Treasurys, hoarding gold, and actively pushing toward a post-dollar world.

Earlier this week we flashed-back to 2022 when we showed how reserve currency privilege has allowed the US to behave recklessly for decades, and 2023 when we said that $2,000 gold was just the beginning.

As I wrote back in 2012, “over time, the US government will no longer be able to export the most deleterious effects of its monetary policy to destitute people in developing countries. The negative consequences will remain in the US, once and for all.”

That’s exactly what we’re seeing unfold now.

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Why dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?

August 9, 2012
Oxford, England

Oxford is about an hour west of London by train, and if you’ve never been, I highly recommend it. On a per-capita basis, it’s one of the most cultured cities in the world, right up there with Vienna, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Chicago, Budapest, and Austin.

Walking down Cornmarket Street on a beautiful summer day, it’s common to pass opera singers and concert pianists plying their trade for crowds of tourists (which have become increasingly Chinese over the past few summers…)

Yesterday evening I attended an outstanding performance of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; if you’re unfamiliar with the play, the story is about a young Venetian nobleman named Bassanio who needs 3,000 gold ducats to woo a beautiful heiress. Having squandered his wealth, Bassanio approaches his friend Antonio for a loan.

Antonio is cash poor but asset rich, so he arranges to borrow the sum that his friend requires from a local Shylock. The Shylock agrees on the condition that he collects a pound of Antonio’s flesh in the event of default.

Needless to say, Antonio’s fortunes turn for the worst and he defaults on the debt owed – 3,000 ducats. The play climaxes with a court scene in which the Shylock seeks to enforce his bond and collect the pound of flesh from Antonio. (“Why dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?”)

In the middle of the performance, I got curious about the sum. How much is 3,000 ducats in today’s money? A quick check on my phone gave me the answer.

A ducat’s weight is roughly 3.5 grams, or .11 troy ounces of gold weight… so 3,000 ducats is roughly $530,000 at today’s gold price.

In the context of the play, this amount makes sense; in other words, if one were to write an updated version of the play to today’s standards, substituting half a million dollars for 3,000 ducats would definitely fit the plot.

It’s an interesting example of how well gold has held its value; the play is over 400 years old, written decades before the first colonists arrived to the New World, and centuries before the introduction of the US dollar.

During this time, the gold ducat coin was an internationally accepted medium of exchange, widely used in trade across Europe, the colonies, and the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century.

The ducat began circulating in earnest in the late 1200s, so the coin’s status as a global reserve standard lasted nearly three-quarters of a millennium… a remarkable track record! Before the ducat, the Byzantine solidus gold coin held that status for the previous 800-years.

The reason for such unparalleled longevity is simple — throughout the centuries, these coins maintained their gold weight, and hence the purchasing power for those who held them. When governments began playing games and debasing the coins, they were quickly dropped as an international standard.

It’s the same story with the US dollar today. Foreigners have been paying close attention as the Federal Reserve has printed trillions of new dollars and violated its most sacred charter to preserve the value of the currency.

It’s bad enough that the dollar is merely a worthless piece of paper. The rest of the world begrudgingly submitted to this standard, trusting that the US would not abuse its authority to debase the currency.

As it turned out, this trust was severely misplaced, and the trillions of new dollars have helped create highly inflationary conditions in just about every developing country on the planet, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Botswana.

Today, the calls to end this standard and displace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency are growing louder by the day. The market is already test driving China’s renminbi (RMB) as a viable alternative, and we can see signs of this all the time.

The latest evidence includes the floating of RMB 500 million ($80 million USD) worth of bonds to African central banks; ANZ bank’s RMB 1 billion ($160 million USD) bond issuance in London; British retailer Debenhams PLC agreement to trade and settle transactions with its Chinese supplier in RMB; and more. All of this has happened within the last 10-days.

Then there’s the re-rise of gold. Central banks around the world from Turkey to Mongolia to South Korea to Kazakhstan to Argentina have been buying gold in record amounts in what appears to be a long, slow trend of gold re-monetization.

History’s lesson is quite simple — when the issuing authority of the world’s reserve currency engages in wanton debasement, the market seeks an alternative. This time is not different, and the dollar will suffer the same fate.

This will likely happen gradually rather than suddenly; over time, the US government will no longer be able to export the most deleterious effects of its monetary policy to destitute people in developing countries. The negative consequences will remain in the US, once and for all.

The sensible course of action is to plan for this trend by trading out paper currency for real assets like precious metals and productive land that will hold their value over time.

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