Looking at China and comparisons I’ve seen made, someone stated – quite probably – that industrial output in the U.S. has remained flat for the last 20-25 years. By all appearances, we make numbers. We create data, dog-walking apps, and interest value for hedge funds and owners of entities that do not make anything. The last innovation was the iPhone. GDP has only gone up because the Fed has been printing money for decades to fund investment, and to buy shit with debt from abroad, and that foreign money is returned to the U.S. in further investments because the dollar is the global reserve currency, but also, in effect, raising the value of stock prices without actually raising the value of what publicly-traded corporations actually make and do – because they don’t make anything. Then there’s the entire tech industry, which is currently “adding value” to pretend there’s growth by adding AI to everything even though AI is actually losing all of these companies money, OpenAI is losing obscene amounts of money, and products AI is added to are getting objectively worse.

Meanwhile, the Australian version of the RAND Corporation released a report a month ago that China is dominating like 95% of all innovation, and specifically industries related to or critical for security and defense. The U.S. just did a takesie-backsie with Australia when it turned out that, Oops, we can barely build enough replacement submarines for ourselves. We certainly can’t build three more for them. So, in the one area where were are bigger than everyone else, we’re treading water.

The only beneficiaries of this economy are parasitic rent-seekers and shareholders. Everyone else is hustling to get by in permanent-PT work.

Fun fact: a new national benefits dashboard was released on Thursday. Nationally, there was a massive drop in unemployment insurance continuing claims and money paid in August/September. Since the unemployment numbers have remained steady, and no one suddenly hired half a million new workers, this can only be explained by the commensurate spike in new claims in March. In other words, a shitload of UI claims were exhausted at the end of summer. So the money flowing into the economy from UI benefits paying rent, food, medicine, etc. is 75% gone now. And that’s just UI. It’s not the best measurement of discretionary spending, but it’s a useful measure of economic health. A lot of those people don’t vote, but the ones who do … Who do you think they blame?