American

Class Structure

Investment Class: Income from investments

Oligarchs: The top .001% of the world’s society able to rig the structures of power to serve their private interests.

New Nobility: The super-wealthy class (.01%) just below the Oligarchs they have the means to serve their private interests via lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Upper Caste: The technocratic professional class that manages the Status Quo for the upper classes. This includes wealthy entrepreneurs and owners of enterprises: rich but not rich enough to rig the structures of power to serve their private interests.

Salary Class: Salary with benefits

The Deep State:  An unelected, unaccountable, wielding state power.

Upper Caste:  Technocratic professional class that manages the Status Quo for the upper classes. This includes wealthy entrepreneurs and owners of enterprises: rich but not rich enough to rig the structures of power to serve their private interests.

State Controllers: Well-paid government administrators with ironclad job security and power.

Middle Class: Wage-earners and salaried employees, owners of traditional sources of financial security: primary assets are family home and 401K-Roth IRA retirement funds, however due to high levels of debt; many qualify as debt-serfs / wage-slaves despite their ownership of middle-class status signifiers.

Wage Class: Hourly wage with little or no benefits.

Mobile Creatives: Self-employed independents, entrepreneurial sole proprietors with adaptive skills collaborating with other Creatives rather than have employees, majority having full or part-time conventional jobs.  Their credo is trust my network, not the corporation or the state.

Working Poor: Households with earned income; insufficient to secure the basics of middle class life as many qualify for social welfare programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Due to high debt, many qualify as debt-serfs / wage-slaves.

Gig Economy Precariat: Supplementing insecure employment (limited hours and zero benefits) with gig work, combining cash work and juggling several delivery / eBay sales / rideshare gigs. The difference between precariat’s and Mobile Creatives is precariat’s are in survival mode (high debt and unreliable income) unable to acquire assets (stocks, bonds, real estate).

Welfare Class: Income from welfare programs

State Dependents: labeled as poor those with cash from black-market/criminal derived income often live better than the working poor, due to generous social welfare benefits.

Working Poor: Households with earned income; insufficient to secure the basics of middle class life as many qualify for social welfare programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Due to high debt, many qualify as debt-serfs / wage-slaves.

Gig Economy Precariat: Supplementing insecure employment (limited hours and zero benefits) with gig work, combining cash work and juggling several delivery / eBay sales / rideshare gigs. The difference between precariat’s and Mobile Creatives is precariat’s are in survival mode (high debt and unreliable income) unable to acquire assets (stocks, bonds, real estate).

 

Social Security

Or

Social Insecurity?

DYI Comment:

The potato will soon be hotter and hotter as the trust funds run out of IOU’s to pay current level of benefits within approximately 76 months from now.  To be blunt Social Security was designed from day one back in 1935 as simply a regressive tax with its excess dollars to be spent on other programs.  The trust fund created in 1983 to pay for the Boomer generation (along with the tax increase) was/is no different since the non marketable Treasury certificates are nothing more than fiction as a method of keeping track of funds going into general revenues of the Federal government.

From day one Social Security was never a stand alone program, never to be off budget (no matter what BS politicians’ state) and to never be a sovereign wealth fund creating an actual defined benefit retirement program.  It is a transfer program (benefits paid out) paid by Social Security taxes, and when deficits arrive paid by income taxes and/or Federal borrowing.  Simply put Social Security is no different from any monetary transfer program including welfare.

Fixing the Social Security Ponzi

Peter St Onge

Jul 17, 2026

Trump wants to convert Social Security from a Congressional slush fund into real assets you own, like an IRA or 401k.

The difference could mean $60 trillion dollars for the American people — more than the national debt.

This matters because social security is going bankrupt, with trustees saying we’ve got just 6 years until benefits are cut up to 25%. Because Congress pissed away every social security dollar on recreational wars and NGO grants, leaving social security the mother of Ponzis with an estimated $29 trillion of unfunded liabilities.

Two Ways to Plug a Ponzi

Democrats’ solution -- naturally -- is tax hikes and cutting off wealthier people who paid most of the social security taxes, Trump wants to shift it towards the 401k and IRA models where you actually invest the money -- and keep it.

That model has generated nearly $30 trillion of assets in IRA’s and 401k’s -- compared to $29 trillion of debt in social security.

Now the details are still coming since Trump accounts for kids were just launched, which seed $1,000 into essentially an IRA for kiddos, to which you can contribute another $5,000 per year.

That may not sound like much, but if you’d done that for today’s 18 year old they’d have $409,000 dollars -- not a bad way to start out.

In fact its enough to buy a house with cash to start a family. And it shows the power of compounding money rather than handing it to Congress to waste.

More important, starting with $409,000 gives young voters a stake in the free-market system Democratic Socialists are currently trying to replace with bread lines.

Trump Accounts for Grownups

Trump wants to do something similar for the grownups modeled on Australia’s superannuation system where social security taxes go into an account you own and invest like IRA’s and 401k’s.

The idea is it would work like Social Security, but instead of taking your money for Congress to spend the money would go into your account.

In Australia it’s built up over $4 trillion Australian -- in US terms about $45 trillion US.

Translated per American household, that would be about $350,000 in assets instead of $200,000 of social security debt.

If this sounds like a lot, consider if social security was run like a 401k or IRA, replacing social security’s 1.5% returns with 4.5% from a 50/50 stock/bond portfolio (4.5%) or full stock portfolio (7%) the average social security check today would go from $2,084 to between $7,960 (stocks and bonds) and $23,615 per month.

That’s the average check.

Put differently, Congress has effectively stolen between 74% and 88% of your social security dollars. And will keep stealing it until we get private accounts.

DYI Comment:

The national debt continues to expand from an ever out-of-control Congressional/Presidential spending spree(s).  In the not too distant future the interest payments maintaining the national debt will require additional taxes (individual and corporate) in order to reduce the need for monetization (inflation) by the Federal Reserve. 

Social Security IMO is highly likely going to be tapped once again for revenue generation by removing the caps (or at least expanding the threshold significantly).  This will once again allow Congress and Presidents to kick-the-can down the road postponing benefits cuts for Social Security and bringing in excess dollars reducing the deficits.

Financial War Report:

What's in Your Wallet?

Data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances shows a stark gap between the majority of savers and those with high-balance retirement accounts: 

$0 to $9,999: 58.4% 


$10,000 to $99,999: 20.5%
 
$100,000 to $499,999: 13.9%
 
$500,000 to $999,999: 4.0%
 
$1 million or more: 3.2% 

Bubble

News!

Stock markets can be valued, and because they can be valued, the long-term risks involved in holding stocks vary from time to time. 

When stocks are cheap these risks are small, but when they are expensive the risks become very great indeed. 

In current conditions, the risks in holding stocks are too great to make them sensible investments. 

This approach is completely different than claiming that it is possible to know when the stock market has hit a peak or a trough.

 

All that the ability to value stocks provides is the ability to assess when holding them becomes too risky. 

On every occasion in the past that we can find, when a stock market has become as overvalued as Wall Street was at the end of the twentieth century, the consequences have been extremely bad for the economy as well as for investors.

– Andrew Smithers & Steven Wright, Valuing Wall Street, March 2000

July 15, 2026

The current level of stock market valuations remains – easily – the most speculative extreme in U.S. financial history, beyond both the 1929 and 2000 extremes. Our baseline estimate is that the S&P 500 has a material risk of losing something on the order of 75% over the completion of this cycle, a view that’s shared by GMO’s Jeremy Grantham. We can narrow that baseline estimate to a loss of about 55% if we assume that the robust profit margins of the past decade are permanent.

John P. Hussman, Ph.D.
President, Hussman Investment Trust

July 2026