Tag: finance

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”

– Will and Ariel Durant, The Story Of Civilization

Enemy Within

How does a superpower die?

Does it come from the blinding kill shot of a hypersonic missile streaking through the sky? Or, perhaps, a rogue cyberattack that mortally destroys the national power grid?

Will the end of America come with foreign tanks rolling through New York or a massive, coordinated amphibious attack on Los Angeles?

These dramatic scenarios make for captivating conjecture. But they’re highly unlikely. If you look at the autopsy reports of the world’s greatest empires, the ultimate cause of death is rarely a sudden, overwhelming external blow.

Long before the barbarians breached the gates of Rome, the Roman denarius had been systematically devalued into a glorified copper token to fund a bloated bureaucracy. This was characterized by widespread domestic corruption and endless military expansion.

So, too, long before the British Empire reluctantly packed up its global flags, it realized the staggering cost of multiple wars had left it financially bankrupt, structurally hollowed out, and entirely dependent on American loans.

Great civilizations don’t usually get slaughtered by their rivals. They commit slow, sophisticated, economically optimized suicide.

As we move through 2026, the United States is following a well-worn, dangerous path. But it’s traversing it at a speed and scale that would leave ancient Rome in the dust.

The reality that no politician will publicly admit is that America’s out-of-control federal spending and its monstrous, multi-trillion-dollar financial system are doing far more structural damage to the country’s long-term survival than any foreign adversary ever could.

By burying the nation in unpayable debt, Congress is willingly destroying America from the inside. Hence, the greatest threat to our future lies not across the ocean, but directly within our own borders.

Act Of War

Let’s talk about the ghastly numbers. They’re often ignored by the general population because our brains are hardwired to glaze over when we start talking about trillions. Here we’ll break them down for you.

Right now, the official U.S. national debt has blown past $39 trillion. To put that into perspective, if you spent one dollar every single second, it would take you about 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion. America owes 39 of those.

But the real issue isn’t just the total balance on Washington’s credit card. It’s the cost of keeping the account active. The yield on a 30-year Treasury bond recently climbed above 5 percent for the first time in nearly 20 years. Yet today’s balance is much larger than it was 20 years ago. When you owe $39 trillion, even a tiny uptick in interest rates transforms your budget into an insurmountable nightmare.

America is currently burning through roughly $3 billion every single day just to pay the interest on its existing debt.

Think about that for a second. Before a single pothole is filled, before a single soldier is paid, before a single school lunch is funded, or a Medicare claim is processed, $3 billion dollars vanishes into thin air every 24 hours. It doesn’t buy new equipment, it doesn’t rebuild infrastructure, and it doesn’t help struggling families. It’s purely the cost of treading water.

Instead of investing in the future, we’re paying for the profligacy of the past.

If a foreign nation managed to sabotage the U.S. economy so severely that it drained $3 billion a day out of the federal Treasury, it would be viewed as an act of war. We would mobilize the military.

Yet, because this bleeding is caused by our own fiscal policy, we pretend it isn’t happening and go back to scrolling on our phones.

Vicious Doom Loop

The entire American lifestyle – and by extension, the global economy – is built on the singular, fragile assumption that the rest of the world will always want to buy American debt. For decades, this was a safe bet. Treasuries were considered risk free in terms of default.

The U.S. dollar, while under threat of the U.S. government’s making, remains king of the global financial system – for now. When global chaos hits, investors run to U.S. Treasuries like a safe harbor in a storm. This exorbitant privilege allowed Washington to spend money it didn’t have without facing immediate consequences.

But that privilege resulted in a dangerous lack of discipline and created a catastrophic level of arrogance. Politicians on both sides of the aisle began treating the national debt like a meaningless artifact. To Congress, and as elaborated by the late Dick Cheney, “deficits don’t matter.”

Unfortunately, the mathematics of debt do matter. And right now, the system is locked into a vicious, mechanical doom loop. Here’s how it works…

Every month, while you pay your bills, live within your means, and balance your personal finance books, the Treasury issues mountains of new debt just to pay off the old debt that’s maturing. All the while, it’s borrowing more to cover current overspending. Yet, because the market is getting flooded with U.S. bonds, investors are demanding higher yields.

Higher yields mean refinancing becomes more expensive. More expensive refinancing creates even larger deficits. Larger deficits require issuing even more bonds.

The financial system is, in effect, cannibalizing itself to stay alive. No enemy army could design a more effective trap to paralyze the American financial system.

When an enemy attacks, the damage is obvious. Buildings fall, smoke rises, and the country rallies together. But when financial decay sets in the destruction is deceptive. For many people, the cause is unclear.

Inside Job

Over the decades, American leaders assumed the world had no choice but to use the dollar. Where else were they going to go?

But our adversaries and allies alike have watched this fiscal train wreck unfold and are methodically diversifying their reserves. They realize that a superpower running a $39 trillion deficit is a precarious foundation for the global economy.

Central banks around the world have accelerated their gold purchases to historic levels. Countries like China have been systematically reducing their holdings of long-term U.S. Treasuries.

It’s not a sudden boycott of the dollar. Rather, it’s a slow calculated diversification. As the rest of the world lightens up on their purchases of U.S. debt, the Federal Reserve becomes the buyer of last resort. That means creating credit out of thin air to buy U.S. Treasuries. This is a formula for runaway inflation. The type that has destroyed countless currencies throughout history.

To be clear, Fed asset purchases have been occurring for much of the 21st century. So, too, have U.S. government policies of dollar debasement. This sophisticated state-sponsored suicide takes place in ongoing Congressional hearings, mundane Treasury auctions, continuous debt ceiling increases, pretend government shutdowns, and carefully scripted statements by the Fed using concocted syntaxes that are designed to keep people from panicking.

As America closes in on its 250-year anniversary it’s being drained of its capital. The government continues to borrow tomorrow’s prosperity to pay for today’s political promises. All the while, the people watch the infrastructure of the nation’s cities crumble as $3 billion a day is directed to service interest payments. The currency buys less and less every year, forcing citizens onto an endless economic hamster wheel.

Alas, it hasn’t taken an enemy to destroy America. Our politicians have already done the job for them.

Sincerely,

MN Gordon
for Economic Prism

Authored by Charles Ma via RealClearPolicy,

American cities need bold renewal. What we need is a “MadeCity” vision – a vision for intentionally crafting or “making” cities that emphasize the enduring higher order potential within people.

Beginning to plan and build such cities as part of America’s upcoming 250th anniversary is a fitting way to extend John Winthrop’s vision for America as a “City on a Hill.” A MadeCity is a living monument to faith, freedom, and entrepreneurship – the very ideals that turned a collection of colonies into the greatest nation on earth.

Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, is the ideal place to begin. Transforming the District into a true MadeCity would restore Americans’ faith in their country and give the world a renewed beacon of hope. It would remind citizens of the Founders’ deep faith and worship that sustained them through the Revolution and the creation of a new republic. The arts would play a central role, turning our capital into a place of inspiration and reverence rather than just a sterile bureaucracy. Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and families would drive the transformation, proving that America is not destined to be a nation of elites and dependents, but of creators and builders with shared vision and purpose.

As Proverbs reminds us, “Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint.” Today, too many Americans feel hopeless, taught to rely on government instead of cultivating motivated citizenship. Proper education can change that. We must teach young people the truth: America is the greatest nation on earth – a superpower of liberty, economic freedom, and human flourishing. Our most valuable currency is not dollars but our youth, talent, and leadership.

The Founders – Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington – were men of faith who thought and built on a grand scale. They were entrepreneurs and visionaries as much as statesmen. Franklin revolutionized printing and invention. Washington built a thriving business at Mount Vernon. They and countless others created vibrant cities – New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore – and inspired the rise of Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond. Their greatest fear was that future generations would fail to keep the republic they sacrificed to establish. Franklin’s warning rings loud today: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Yet too often our current leaders and builders operate with short-term, accountant-style thinking – applying band-aids when visionary, long-term transformation is required. Mayors and politicians focus on the next election cycle instead of monuments that will stand for centuries. We went to the Moon with courage and faith. Reaching Mars – and rebuilding our cities – demands the same spirit.

Government has an important constitutional role, but it cannot replace the human drive to create. Our $39 trillion national debt is sustainable only because the world retains confidence in America’s future growth and productivity. That confidence must be earned, not assumed. True wealth is not created by trading stocks or relying on today’s tech giants alone. It is built by bold minds who invent, manufacture, and construct – the same spirit that produced the iPhone, the assembly line, and the great American cities of the past.

Post-World War II Europe offers a powerful lesson. Nations rebuilt with purpose, drawing on faith and resolve to rise from ruins. America, never defeated, has even greater potential. Washington, D.C., is perfectly positioned to lead a new revolution in urban building – one grounded in faith-based entrepreneurship that honors the “Great Experiment” our Founders began.

We are a nation born in courage, not caution. Our builders must stop fearing failure and start believing again in the possibility of creating the next great American cities. Families need inspiration. Communities need purpose. The next generation needs to see living proof that the American Dream is alive and being built – not managed or regulated into mediocrity.

MadeCities are the answer. They are places where we create the conscious arrangements that make living irresistible and remarkably fruitful, where a quantum currency is realized through specified complexity and manifold beauty. Just as living organisms thrive as the result of the intelligent design and coordination of their many diverse parts, MadeCities promote human flourishing as a consequence of the integrated design of their different essential elements and institutions, whether residential, recreational, commercial, cultural, legal or religious. Indeed, a living and thriving city depends on the intelligent design and planning of its founders inspired by the Way, Truth, and Life of God the Creator.

Here is a bold framework: “How might we create cities that grow in the favor of both God and Man?” A living city where we as citizens are living stones, feeding on living waters, responding to a living God. This is what made America unstoppable and MadeCity’s core Movement.

Ryan Higgins, a descendant of one of the founding families in the U.S. said the following about our nation’s amazing history: “In 1623, my 13th great grandfather fled a tyrannical government and risked life and limb to come to the New World because he knew the recipe to human flourishing could not be found in a King. As a man of deep faith, Richard Higgins knew the only Hope worth fighting for was a civilization rooted in God, with a heavy emphasis on family and community. Made City is taking that same mindset into 2026 and beyond” and “our current concrete jungles across the US have lost hope, creativity and community. The result is clear to see; isolation, record levels of depression, anxiety and mental health issues.” Higgins is correct to point out that what we have been doing for decades is not working.

Washington DC is the place to start. I hope to play a role in continuing America’s tradition of faith-driven entrepreneurship and in helping build the next City on a Hill. America cannot remain the land of the free unless it is also the home of the brave, the innovative and the bold.

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Disney is asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to declare the daytime talk show “The View” a “bona fide news” program to bypass the federal equal opportunities law, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced May 22.

The show, co-hosted by Joy Behar, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Haines, Sunny Hostin, and Ana Navarro, has come under scrutiny in recent years for its programming that heavily favored progressive guests and commentary.

In February, Carr told reporters the agency was investigating whether the show violated the federal “equal time” requirements for political candidates.

The equal time rule requires broadcast radio and television stations to give comparable airtime to legally qualified political candidates.

In May, Disney-owned TV stations KTRK-TV, Houston, Texas, and American Broadcasting Companies (ABC) filed a request with the agency to exempt the show.

“The companies … suggest in their Petition that they believe the federal equal opportunities statute itself would not survive First Amendment scrutiny today or at least if it is applied today to ‘The View’ would not survive any such review,” the FCC stated in a public notice issued May 22. “The companies also point to a letter from an FCC staffer from 2002 in support of their argument that ‘The View’ qualifies as bona fide news.”

If FCC commissioners exempt “The View” from the equal time rule, the program would be allowed to continue having almost exclusively left-leaning politicians and guests on to discuss political issues.

“Disney argues that The View qualifies as ‘bona fide news’ under the law, comparing itself to Meet The Press or Face The Nation,” Carr posted on X. “Therefore, Disney argues, it can have one partisan candidate for office on The View while denying equal opportunities to all others.”

Under the law, television shows don’t qualify as news shows if their content is based on partisan purposes, such as if they intend to harm someone’s candidacy for office, Carr said.

The FCC has opened public comment on the request, allowing written comments until June 22, before commissioners consider the request.

Stations can petition the FCC to seek exemptions from the rule for bona fide news programming.

Congress created exemptions for two news programs, “Meet the Press” and “Face The Nation,” in 1959 by passing an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, because of the traditional question-and-answer formats used.

Congress passed the equal time rule to prevent media gatekeepers from deciding the outcomes of elections, Carr said.

“The law, even when it applies, does not prohibit anyone from having any candidate appear on any show,” Carr said. “Rather, Congress intended it to empower voters with more information and encourage more speech.”

In April, the FCC ordered an early review of license renewals for Disney’s ABC television stations as part of an ongoing investigation into whether the company and its stations were following federal communications laws and rules.

One of the most frustrating aspects of contemporary conversations about politics and public policy is how often the deleterious effects of terrible programs – local, state and federal – are brushed aside with distracting and even deceitful claims that the intentions behind the policies were “compassionate.” This is an utterly wrongheaded analysis for many reasons. Laws, public policies, and government programs should be evaluated by their results, not by the state of mind of their advocates or sponsors.

The weaponization of compassion has launched a de facto competition of who can be thought to be the most “compassionate” or, at least, not thought to be uncompassionate. The result of this arms race has been chaos, destruction, and depravity.

It’s easy to lose sight of just how often this pernicious dynamic takes place, so it’s worthwhile to point out a few of the disastrous policies that were promoted, and in some cases continue to be promoted, as being “compassionate” and to call them out for the societally corrosive lies they are.

1. It wasn’t “compassionate” to close our mental hospitals. The impulse was understandable; plenty of those facilities were substandard. But the results were catastrophic. Until fairly recently in this country’s history, the “homeless” population consisted largely of small numbers of unattached males who drifted from place to place seeking work. But since the 1980s, the homeless population of the United States has exploded. Nearly three-quarters of a million people are homeless, and the number jumped 18 percent from 2023 to 2024. California has 187,000 of the country’s homeless; more than 70,000 are in Los Angeles County alone.

2. It isn’t “compassionate,” nor is it respect for “individual autonomy” or “dignity,” to leave the homeless to live as they do. Homeless encampments are hotbeds of filth, including human urine and feces, crime and diseases like leptospirosis, typhus, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and even plague. Across the country, cities are dealing with the economic impact of shuttered stores and declining downtowns attributable to the presence of ever-growing numbers of homeless.

3. It isn’t “compassionate” to hand out needles or create places where addicts can use drugs. Leaving aside what should be an obvious argument that we shouldn’t be encouraging, much less facilitating, the use of dangerous drugs, two-thirds of America’s homeless have a diagnosed mental health illness. A third have a serious substance abuse problem. Approximately half suffer with both. Open-air drug use exacerbates those problems and creates others.

4. It isn’t “compassionate,” or “equitable,” for that matter, to eliminate teaching math, giving grades, standardized tests, advanced academic programs for gifted students or graduation requirements, or to lower entrance qualifications for college and graduate school. It punishes high-achieving students and sends the message to lower-performing students that they aren’t capable of meeting basic standards. That, then, undermines public confidence in the graduates of our high schools, colleges, and professional schools.

5. It wasn’t “compassionate” to stop enforcing our immigration laws.

6. It isn’t “compassionate” to allow violent criminals back on the streets.

7. It isn’t “compassionate” to subject children and teenagers with gender dysphoria, and other emotional disorders, to permanent alteration of their bodies with medical and surgical interventions before they are old enough to understand the implications of those decisions.

None of these decisions have had beneficial impacts on their intended populations. Worse still, they are all deeply destructive to other individuals, groups, and society at large. Everyone affected should be able to protest the consequences of these failed policies without getting smeared with the false accusation that they “lack compassion.”

Another reason to eliminate “compassion” as a basis for public policy, which we’re seeing daily with painful clarity, is that these policies end up being vehicles for massive fraud. Anyone can set up a 501c3 nonprofit, claim to be working for a charitable purpose, and deceive donors into giving money that does little but line the CEOs’ pockets. And when government grants are involved, there is little oversight, take Minnesota, for example, and more incentive for grift, bribery, and payback in the form of pouring money into the campaign coffers of politicians who hold the grants’ pursestrings. What we end up with is a situation where neither the nonprofits nor the politicians have an incentive to solve the underlying problems, since they’re getting rich from their continued existence.

Why has the United States become a nation where “compassion” trumps all other considerations?

Scholars like Helen Andrews argue that the emphasis on “compassion” over logic and methodical analysis is a function of what she calls “the great feminization.” Women, Andrews claims, are hardwired to be maternal, and thus more likely to be persuaded by something that tugs at their empathy than by that which appeals to their reason.

I’m not so sure. First, women have functioning brains, and they are certainly intellectually capable of dispassionate analysis. Second, an awful lot of men seem to be just as hornswoggled by appeals to their “compassion” as are misguided women. And third, I don’t understand how it is “feminine” or “maternal” to witness the collapse of huge sections of our cities into third-world slums; or to know that drugs are pouring into the country, children are being trafficked for sex, and young women are being raped and murdered because the borders are unenforced; or to see people stabbed to death on public transportation, pushed in front of trains or run down by crazed lunatics at Christmas parades because criminals aren’t incarcerated; or to watch as multiple generations of disadvantaged minorities struggle because of schools with weak disciplinary and academic standards; or to want children and emotionally troubled teens to be chemically castrated or surgically sterilized before they’re old enough to drive a car, drink a beer, or understand the concepts of sexual satisfaction, fathering, giving birth to or nursing a child, none of which they will experience if they are “transitioned.”

None of this is “compassionate.” It’s objectively irrational. It’s wantonly destructive. It is the deliberate disregard of monumental, systemic, catastrophic failure, the evidence of which is irrefutable. There’s something seriously wrong with anyone who continues to defend these policies and programs, and I’m not persuaded that it’s a matter of chromosomal biology or evolution.

I don’t profess to have a complete solution. But a good start would be to demand meaningful metrics when we discuss proposed and existing policies and programs. What matters isn’t “compassion”; it’s consequences.

Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A never-ending flood of content generated by artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet and the way people engage with information faster than ever.

From news summaries to social media posts to academic research, the sheer volume of machine-assisted materials has been correlated with a spike in “cognitive offloading” – a phenomenon in which people outsource critical thinking and verification to automated systems.

A 2025 analysis of how AI tools affect cognitive offloading showed a “significant negative correlation” between frequent use of AI tools and the ability to think critically in people across age groups and educational backgrounds. The researchers at the SBS Swiss Business School found that younger age groups exhibited a higher amount of dependence on AI models and lower critical thinking scores.

What’s more troubling is a Pangram/YouGov study in May that found only 55 percent of participants, all of whom were Gen Zers aged 18 to 28, were able to identify fake or misleading AI-generated material. That number is lower in older age groups, which means half or fewer of adults over the age of 28 were confident in their ability to spot AI content online.

“AI-generated posts and comments can distort public perception, especially when volume is mistaken for credibility,” Javi Pérez, an editor of AI-assisted consumer education websites, told The Epoch Times.

“If a user sees dozens of similar posts about a product, trend, political claim, health issue, or financial topic, they may assume there is broad agreement.”

‘Confident Sameness’

Pérez said consumers need to beware as AI content increases the volume of what he called “confident sameness” online.

“Many articles and posts now repeat similar structures, similar advice, and similar phrasing. For casual readers, this can create the impression that a topic has more consensus or certainty than it really does, because they keep seeing the same ideas repeated across many sources,” Pérez said.

“The risk is that people stop knowing which content has been checked. In fields like finance, health, law, education, or news, readers need to know whether claims were reviewed against primary sources, updated recently, and edited by someone accountable.”

AI strategy consultant Armand Cucciniello III told The Epoch Times that AI-generated content is changing not only how we consume information, but also how quickly we process and trust it.

“We’re moving from deliberate reading toward rapid skimming of polished summaries, commentary, short-form videos, and AI-assisted content designed for speed and engagement,” he said.

As someone who has worked in the “U.S. national security landscape,” Cucciniello said one of his biggest concerns is that AI systems “can unintentionally amplify large volumes of inaccurate or deliberately manipulated content simply through repetition and scale.”

He also believes the high volume of AI-generated content is creating real pressure on public trust.

“When readers encounter nearly identical phrasing or interpretations across multiple sources, it’s natural to question whether the information was independently reported or simply repackaged,” he said.

Carl Stroud, a public relations expert and chief storyteller at the Smoking Gun Agency, has also witnessed AI content take a toll on the public.

“The fundamental audience need has not changed: People want to trust what they are reading,” Stroud told The Epoch Times. “What has changed is how much harder that judgment has become.

“AI-generated content, aggregation, and low-quality slop have made the information environment noisier, flatter, and more confusing, so audiences are now trying to work out whether they are reading original reporting, rehashed content, or something that should never have been published in the first place.”

Beyond social media and academia, few industries have been hit as hard with AI-generated misinformation as the news. Stroud, who has spent two decades within UK media circles, editing, and journalism, said he’s seeing the AI content churn create fatigue among readers searching for accurate information.

“Fatigue is dangerous because when people feel overwhelmed, they either disengage or become easier to mislead,” he said.

Losing Touch

Ashutosh Khulbe, founder of RawPickAI, tests AI tools for a living – about three to four new ones every week.

“What I notice most in my corner of the internet is that everything sounds the same now. Like, eerily the same,” he told The Epoch Times. “I’d guess 70 to 80 [percent] of ‘best AI tools’ articles are AI-generated at this point.

“It creates this weird feedback loop where AI writes reviews based on what other AI already wrote, readers assume there’s a consensus, and the actual experience of using these tools gets buried.”

He said he tested one writing tool that had hundreds of positive reviews online yet was unusable at the free tier. “You couldn’t even finish a paragraph before hitting the limit. But good luck finding that info in a Google search,” he said.

Khulbe is especially bothered by the way information distortion is affecting the public.

“AI content skews relentlessly positive because it’s trained on marketing pages and affiliate reviews. Nobody’s training models on ‘I tried this for two weeks, and it sucked.’ So the negative signal just disappears from the internet,” he said.

The effects of the AI content boom can now be seen in what some are calling “AI psychosis,” or a disconnect from reality. While not a clinical diagnosis, the term has become a popular catch-all phrase to describe when AI reinforces an unusual, fixed, or even delusional perception of something in the real world.

People with mental health conditions could be predisposed to developing “AI psychosis,” but it’s also not limited to that population, according to Dr. Ragy Girgis, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

“The phenomenon of AI psychosis is quantitatively new and could be very dangerous, but qualitatively it’s very similar to what’s been happening for decades now since the advent of the internet,” Girgis said during an interview with the National Academy of Medicine in March.