But that is only a part of the story. A larger refund does not necessarily mean that you came out ahead. For many Americans, it just means you paid more somewhere else.

When Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill last year, they promised to keep more money in the pockets of everyday Americans. They described it as the largest tax cut in history, and that’s where the spin begins. It was not the largest tax cut in history. It was mostly an extension of the 2017 tax cuts that were set to expire, with smaller additions layered on top.

Those extra tax cuts were gimmicks, designed to create talking points for elections instead of any meaningful change.

Take the “no tax on tips” provision. It sounds nice, but only about 2.5% of US workers are tipped workers. Of those, nearly 40% earn too little to pay federal income tax, which means the policy does nothing for them. And anyone who does get the benefit still pays payroll and state taxes on their tips.

“No tax on overtime” is a similar situation. Only around 15% of US workers qualify for overtime pay, and only 6% regularly work it. Roughly 90% of Americans will never benefit from this provision. And, like tips, overtime pay is still subject to payroll and state taxes.

While those income tax changes did increase the average refund by about $350, other taxes took that money away.

Last year, tariffs, an additional tax on goods, cost the average household $1,000. That more than offsets the increase in refunds. Unlike income taxes, which are structured to place a larger burden on higher earners, tariffs are regressive. Lower-income households spend a larger share of their income on goods, so they feel the impact more directly. These combined policies mean people are falling behind, not getting ahead.

That tradeoff is no accident. Analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that these policy changes “will increase taxes for most Americans, significantly expand income inequality, and add trillions to the national debt, while delivering substantial tax cuts to high-income households, corporations, and foreign investors.” Middle-income households are projected to pay $900 more in taxes this year, while the very wealthy will receive massive cuts.

There is a pattern to the design of these tax changes. The provisions aimed at the working and middle-class Americans are minor and temporary. The tax breaks on tips and overtime expire in 2028. This is what happened with the 2017 tax law as well, where individual tax cuts were made to expire while corporate tax cuts were made permanent. This approach, over the last several decades, has created major compounding benefits for those at the top, while doing nothing but saddling everyone else with higher national debt. Since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect in 2018, the national debt has nearly doubled, going from $20 trillion to $39 trillion today.

If the goal were to genuinely help low and middle-income earners, there are easy, effective solutions that would apply to everyone. Expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit would provide direct benefits to workers across a broad range of incomes. Unlike deductions, tax credits can increase refunds even for those who do not owe federal income tax, making them far more effective for lower-income households than narrowly targeted tax exclusions.

Raising the federal minimum wage would also have a wider and more lasting impact. It has not increased since 2009 and no longer reflects the cost of living in any state. Research continues to show that higher minimum wages can raise earnings without significant job losses. A recent UC Berkeley study found that a $20 minimum wage for fast-food workers in California had only a minimal effect on prices, increasing the price of a $4 menu item by just 6 cents, while raising wages and without causing job losses. Policies like these improve the lives of tens of millions of workers rather than a small subset.

There is also a larger issue lurking behind all of this. Tax cuts aren’t free. They reduce government revenue, and when they are not offset, they drive deficits higher. Those deficits are used later to justify cuts to programs that lower-income households rely on, including food assistance and healthcare. At the same time, other areas of spending, such as the military, continue to grow, shifting the balance of who benefits and who bears the cost.

Tax cuts sound great. They’re easy to sell because they promise more money in your pocket. But the truth is that unless you’re already wealthy, these tax cuts are little more than a temporary distraction that does nothing to improve your life. They are more than offset by higher costs elsewhere. Most Americans are left paying more overall, while receiving fewer benefits in return.

https://itep.org/new-from-itep-trump-tax-policies-raise-costs-for-most-americans-while-delivering-trillion-dollar-benefits-to-the-wealthy/

https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/working-papers/effects-of-a-20-minimum-wage-evidence-from-granular-data-on-wages-employment-and-prices/

The case they make is built on misinformation, bad logic, and a misunderstanding of how the alliance actually works. Leaving NATO would not make America stronger or richer. It would weaken American power, reduce our influence, and make the world more dangerous in ways that would ultimately find their way to our shores.

The new grievance from some conservatives is that NATO countries did not join the United States in its war against Iran. But NATO is a defensive alliance. Its core principle is Article 5: an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all. That clause has been invoked exactly one time in NATO’s history, after the United States was attacked on 9/11.

NATO nations do not have an obligation to join fellow members in wars they start, such as when the US and Israel launched a bombing campaign against Iran at the end of February. In past conflicts, NATO members have sometimes joined the United States through separate coalitions and prior coordination outside of the alliance. Trump did not coordinate with, or even inform, other NATO nations about the attack against Iran beforehand. This war also followed recently after the US had threatened to invade and take over Greenland, which is a territory of Denmark, a fellow NATO ally.

Another false narrative is that the United States has paid trillions of dollars to NATO while other countries freeload. That is false. The “trillions” people cite are really total U.S. defense spending, which is fully separate from NATO’s common budgets. NATO’s common-funded budgets are much smaller, up to about $6.2 billion for 2026. Under NATO’s current cost-share formula, the United States and Germany each pay 15% of those common budgets. In other words, America and Germany pay the same share toward NATO, even though the U.S. economy is six times larger than Germany’s. That alone tells you America’s burden is not what critics claim.

Anti-NATO arguments take U.S. military spending, pretend it is money handed over to NATO, and then claim America is being robbed. But if the United States left NATO tomorrow, that would not eliminate the U.S. defense budget. America would still maintain its military and, based on the budget requests coming out of DC, would continue massively increasing that spending. Leaving NATO wouldn’t save America money. It would leave the United States with the same massive military costs and fewer allies helping extend American power.

The last misleading point concerns defense spending as a share of GDP. NATO has long had a guideline that members should spend at least 2% of GDP on defense, but it is a guideline, not a legally binding requirement for dues payments. Even so, all NATO members met or exceeded that 2% benchmark in 2025. At the top was Poland at 4.48% of GDP. The United States ranked seventh at 3.22%. NATO’s new target is 5% by 2035. Some nations are almost at that spending level, but not the US, leaving little room for complaining.

With the misinformation cleared up, let’s discuss the ways NATO benefits the United States.

First, NATO multiplies American power. The U.S. does not have to maintain global leadership alone because it works through an alliance of 32 countries, sharing planning, infrastructure, logistics, and intelligence. American power extends farther because of allied bases, militaries, and coordination. NATO also helps create a much broader intelligence picture through consultations, intelligence-sharing, and joint threat assessment. That makes the U.S. stronger than it would be on its own.

Second, NATO lowers the cost of American world leadership. The alliance allows the United States to share burdens with other wealthy democracies rather than trying to deter threats on its own. European allies and Canada have increased defense spending sharply in recent years. NATO says its combined defense spending reached more than $574 billion in 2025, and the U.S. share of total alliance defense spending has fallen as other members have increased theirs. That is what burden-sharing looks like.

Third, NATO has real economic value. The alliance has preserved a stable Europe, and stable allies make better trade partners and better places for investment than a continent shaped by insecurity and conflict. Allied defense spending also feeds back into the United States. SIPRI found that 58% of major arms imports by NATO’s European members in 2021–2025 came from the United States. NATO is not a weapons sales program, but allied military spending often supports the American industrial base.

Fourth, NATO helps prevent the kind of major war that the United States would get dragged into. That is one of the alliance’s core purposes. NATO was created not only to deter outside threats but also to help prevent renewed instability and militarism in Europe. That stability has been one of the great strategic bargains in modern history. It gave the United States a more secure Atlantic world, more reliable allies, and a much stronger position from which to project influence globally.

Fifth, NATO makes American diplomacy more effective. Sanctions, coordinated pressure, and deterrence carry more weight when they are backed by a bloc of major allies rather than by Washington acting alone. It is one reason adversaries like Russia benefit when Americans start talking themselves into abandoning the alliance.

Contrary to the complaints, US involvement in NATO is not charity requiring other nations to be beholden to everything we demand of them. It is one of the clearest examples of the United States gaining more from an alliance than it pays into it. America gets greater military reach, extensive intelligence networks, stronger trade relationships, decisive diplomacy, and a stable, prosperous Europe. In return, it pays a modest share of NATO’s common budgets while maintaining a defense budget it would keep without the alliance.

If the United States left NATO, it would be an unforced error. America would lose influence, creating an opening for Russia and China to expand theirs. The United States became the leader of the Western world not by isolating itself, but by building institutions and alliances that amplified its strength. Abandoning NATO would mean giving away one of America’s greatest strategic advantages.

https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-flows-jump-nearly-10-cent-european-demand-soars

“It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.

You can’t do it on a federal level. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

He followed that up by releasing a budget request that seeks to raise military spending by around $500 billion in 2027, bringing it to a total of $1.5 trillion, while also adding more money for immigration detention on top of the previous large increases for ICE and CBP.

At the same time, the budget calls for major cuts to renewable energy programs, climate research, NASA, agriculture, housing, health programs, education research, civil rights enforcement in education, and housing assistance programs, including cutting a program that helps people in need pay for home heating. AmeriCorps would be eliminated. Rental assistance would be weakened and capped for many adults. Homelessness programs would be cut so deeply that as many as 170,000 people could be at risk of losing their homes.

Budgets are moral documents, and this one shows that the President’s priorities are all wrong. Near limitless spending on waging foreign wars while cutting programs that are needed to address the struggles of unaffordable housing, healthcare, and childcare.

Social Security exists because the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare of the nation. That understanding was once much clearer in American politics. Over time, it has been pushed aside in favor of a much narrower vision of government, one that treats support for the workers who grow our food, build our houses, and fix our cars as excess but rarely asks the same questions about ever-expanding military spending.

That shift has had consequences.

The minimum wage was left to decay into a poverty wage. Social Security was allowed to weaken, and its reserves to run dry. Healthcare funding has been cut so far that hospitals have shut down. The meager $6 a day for food assistance has faced cuts even as living costs soared. Meanwhile, there has been no serious movement to restrain the growth of defense spending. This year, military spending rose above $1 trillion. Now the president wants to pile another half trillion on top of that, while the Pentagon prepares to ask for an additional $200 billion to cover the costs of the new war in Iran.

Even more maddening is that many of the programs we’re told our nation can’t afford would save the country money.

Hospital administrative costs have exploded and, in 2023, were twice the cost of the care provided to patients. Administrative costs for health insurance almost doubled over the past decade, reaching $131 billion in 2024. A system built around universal coverage allows for lower overhead and stronger price negotiation. The result is healthcare that costs less, covers more people, improves outcomes, and reduces wait times. There is no practical reason to prevent this, but there are political ones.

Profit-making in healthcare depends on preserving the current system. Insurance companies have donated almost $500 million to political campaigns over the past five years, and the broader healthcare industry spent roughly $1 billion lobbying Congress in 2025 alone. Politicians are paid to not support the people.

We see similar issues in education.

One of the clearest ways to lower costs for families while improving long-term outcomes is universal Pre-K. It allows more parents to work. It reduces dependence on federal aid over time and improves children's life outcomes. All of which results in the program paying for itself over time.

The solutions to reduce hardship, expand opportunity, and lower long-term public costs are not mysteries. They have been known for decades. But billions of dollars are spent to block them, and that effort has been so effective that many Americans now accept as fact the idea that the federal government cannot do what it clearly can, and absolutely should.

What America could do for its citizens, the prosperity it could create, makes this military spending even harder to defend.

The proposed $500 billion increase in spending could fund:

• Universal Pre-K for 3 and 4-year-olds

• Universal low-cost childcare for 0-2 year olds

• Federal paid parental leave program

• Free school lunches and breakfasts for all

• Free College, Trade Schools, and Apprenticeships

Altogether, those investments would total roughly $183 billion to $233 billion a year. That is less than half of the proposed increase to military spending. Even covering last year’s $160 billion Social Security Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance trust fund deficit would still keep the total below the increase in spending.

Money is not being withheld because the country cannot afford to improve people’s lives. It is being directed elsewhere, often wastefully.

The federal government can spend far better to support the country than it does today. It can invest in families, wages, housing, food, retirement security, and education. It can strengthen the floor beneath ordinary people instead of pouring ever more money into war.

There are larger reforms worth debating, including whether the many different support programs should be replaced with something simpler and more direct. There are also easier steps that should have happened long ago, such as raising the federal minimum wage over the next five years until it reaches a truly livable level.

But those conversations won’t happen if we keep pretending that caring for the general welfare of the nation is somehow outside the role of the federal government, when it is specifically defined in our Constitution in the same clause, even the same sentence, as providing for the common defense.

The country is not protected when families cannot afford childcare. It is not protected when people lose housing assistance, when hospitals shut down, when children go hungry, or when workers are paid wages that keep them in poverty. National security goes far beyond missiles, drones, and guns. True national security requires a thriving, prosperous public.

It is time to stop spending trillions of dollars on unnecessary wars and start investing in America’s workers and families. Most importantly, we need a Congress that understands this, and if they refuse to listen, that is what the midterms are for.

Workers are trapped.

Savings are falling. Credit card debt is at record highs. Hardship withdrawals from retirement accounts are on the rise. For the first time in Gallup’s survey history, struggling workers outnumbered thriving ones.

The problem isn’t just that life has become more expensive. It is that the economy isn’t offering a path to something better. America needs a plan to turn this around.

China faced a version of this problem a decade ago.

By 2015, its economic growth was slowing. Debt was rising. Lower-end manufacturing was moving to even cheaper labor markets. And China depended heavily on imports for critical high-tech components. The model that had powered China’s rise was no longer enough to carry it forward.

China’s leaders recognized that its economy needed to change. Part of the inspiration came from other countries’ efforts to modernize, including Germany’s Industry 4.0 initiative, which aimed to drive a modern industrial revolution. China moved in the same direction, launching the Made in China 2025 initiative.

Its purpose was to shift China away from relying mainly on export-driven industry using low-cost labor and toward innovation, advanced manufacturing, and domestic strength in future-focused technologies. The targeted sectors included robotics, aerospace, electric vehicles, biotech, advanced information technology, rail, and new energy equipment.

A decade later, China is now the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. It controls a large share of battery supply chains. It dominates solar panel production and has rapidly expanded renewable energy across its own grid. It built the world’s largest high-speed rail network and exports rail and infrastructure systems across the globe. It has also become a major force in industrial robotics and commercial drones.

China still has weaknesses. It relies on foreign components in parts of aerospace and trails the United States in the most advanced microchips. But it made major gains across many of the industries most likely to shape the global economy in the decades ahead.

When a country expands into growing higher-value industries, it creates more room for skilled jobs, stronger supplier networks, and better wages. It generates upward mobility. Workers move into sectors with rising demand rather than being left to compete for shrinking opportunities in industries facing decline.

That is what American workers are missing right now. The United States is facing its own version of this choice, but instead of building a consistent long-term strategy, the government has wasted years on half-measures, trade wars, and political fights over technologies that are moving forward with or without us.

The slogan “drill, drill, drill” has led to a refocusing on fossil fuels at a time when they are becoming the industries of the past. Coal has already declined significantly. Oil demand is declining in advanced economies and will begin declining globally within a few years. Natural gas is expected to plateau soon after. Fossil fuels remain a significant part of the economy, but their importance will fade further with each passing year.

America needs a strategy that is clear, practical, and focused on where the world is headed. That means investment in rare-earth mineral processing, batteries, robotics, advanced manufacturing, renewables, electric vehicles, and biotech. It means rebuilding domestic supplier networks instead of waiting until a crisis exposes how dependent we have become on rivals and adversaries.

These investments also need to survive changes in political power. America had opportunities in solar, and opportunities to move earlier and more aggressively in energy storage and supply chains. Treating electric vehicles, renewable energy, and other emerging industries as partisan symbols does not stop those markets from growing. It simply means more of the jobs, expertise, and production will be elsewhere.

That is why the most important investment is in American workers.

As jobs in older technology continue to decline, newer, better-paying jobs will require different skills, certifications, and training. If America wants workers to move into the future economy, then it has to build the bridge to get there.

Offer free training to workers displaced by industrial change. Expand apprenticeships. Partner with employers and community colleges. Create clear pathways into technical and skilled careers for younger workers trying to find their place and for older workers whose industries are fading beneath them.

Investment in future industries is not just about beating China. It is about whether workers will have access to the kinds of jobs that can support the American Dream.

This requires building an economy that creates new opportunities instead of forcing people to cling to the scraps of the past. It means stronger wages, more resilience, and reducing dependence on the rest of the world for critical technologies. It means choosing to compete in the markets of the future instead of trying to squeeze a few more years out of the past.

The United States still has the talent, capital, and workforce to achieve this. What it lacks is focus. If we want American workers to share in that prosperous future, we need to invest in it.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/703280/worker-thriving-declines-job-market-pessimism-grows.aspx

Prices have risen sharply in recent weeks following the conflict with Iran. Regular gas is approaching $4 a gallon nationwide, while diesel is already above $5.

If you drive about an hour each day, you’ll spend roughly $3,000 a year on gas at $4 a gallon. That’s an increase of almost $1,000 compared to before the recent spike. It may not seem like a crisis on its own, but gas is an unavoidable necessity that is deeply tied to the rest of the economy.

Let’s start with the basics.

Financial experts generally recommend keeping total transportation costs between 10–15% of take-home pay. That includes gas, insurance, loan payments, maintenance, and repairs.

The median personal income is around $45,000. At $3,000 a year, gas alone can approach 10% of take-home pay for many households. At the same time, automotive maintenance and repair costs have been rising faster than wages in recent years, putting additional pressure on already tight budgets.

The burden is not evenly distributed. Roughly half of all workers fall below the median income, and those who live in suburban and rural areas often drive longer distances and have fewer transportation options, so higher gas prices take up a larger share of their income.

Unlike many other expenses, fuel costs are difficult to reduce in the short term. Most people can’t quickly change where they live, how far they commute, or what kind of vehicle they drive.

These rising gas prices are happening at a time when a large share of full-time workers struggle to consistently cover basic costs like housing, food, healthcare, and transportation. The Urban Institute finds that almost half of American households lack enough income to reach long-term financial stability.

We can see this strain in the data.

Total outstanding credit card debt has continued to rise since the pandemic, reaching a record $1.28 trillion at the end of 2025. Personal savings rates have fallen from 7.5% in 2019 to around 3.5% today. Hardship withdrawals from retirement accounts have also reached record highs, 3x higher than pre-pandemic levels.

The Federal Reserve has found that a large share of Americans would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense, meaning that the only way to afford an additional $1,000 in gas costs is to take on more debt or draw more from savings and retirement accounts.

That is the direct impact of higher gas prices. The indirect effects are even broader as higher fuel costs raise the price of nearly everything.

Raw materials have to be transported to factories. Finished goods move from warehouses to stores, then to consumers. Each step depends on transportation, much of it powered by diesel.

When fuel costs rise, those increases compound across the supply chain. Even products that don’t rely directly on oil become more expensive as transportation costs feed into final prices.

And the timing adds additional pressure.

Wholesale inflation data for last month came in higher than expected. These costs often show up in consumer prices in the months that follow, and those figures were measured before the recent increase in fuel prices.

These higher prices haven’t been felt by consumers yet, but they will be soon enough, and that will impact the broader economy.

The United States is largely a consumer-driven economy, relying on consistent spending to sustain growth. As essential costs like gas rise, households adjust by cutting back elsewhere.

Consumer sentiment is already low, lower than during the pandemic, with many expecting economic conditions to worsen throughout the year. That expectation alone can slow spending.

The economy has become increasingly uneven. Higher-income households account for a growing share of total consumer spending, while many lower- and middle-income households face tighter financial constraints. That imbalance can become more pronounced when costs rise, forcing those with less flexibility to pull back their spending more quickly.

How much does a $1 increase in the price of gas matter?

In a strong economy with broad income growth and financial stability, the impact is manageable. But in an economy where many households are already stretched, savings are limited, and spending is increasingly concentrated among a select few, the effects will be significant.

Rising gas prices don’t just increase one expense. They expose the struggles of millions of Americans and how sensitive the broader economy has become to even modest increases in everyday costs.

https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/credit-card-debt-statistics/

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/americans-retirement-accounts-hardship-withdrawals-new-highs/

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-savings-and-investments.htm#:~:text=Among%20the%2037%20percent%20of,from%2011%20percent%20in%202021.

Trump presents himself as a figure of strength. To much of the world, he looks increasingly weak and desperate. These aren’t isolated incidents. They are a pattern.

On February 28th, U.S. and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran aimed at eliminating its leadership and degrading its military. Trump did not consult key allies or seek congressional approval, as required by the Constitution, continuing a series of unilateral decision-making that has marred much of his presidency.

The initial announcement of the attack and the following press conferences showed overconfidence. Previous actions, including earlier strikes on Iran and the successful removal of Venezuela’s leader, reinforced the administration’s belief that escalation would be limited and manageable.

Iran did not fold. It retaliated.

It struck U.S. bases. It struck Israel. It struck oil infrastructure. And it moved to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint that carries roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices surged past $100 a barrel. Gas prices jumped. Markets dropped. Iran cannot match the United States militarily, but it can disrupt the global economy.

Disruption of the Strait of Hormuz is one of the most widely discussed outcomes in any conflict with Iran. Yet the administration appeared caught off guard. In response, Trump turned to the same allies he hadn’t consulted before starting the war. The same ones in an alliance he had threatened to abandon. The same ones he had just hit with tariffs.

He asked them to send forces to help reopen the Strait and even announced that a coalition would step in to deal with Iran before any of those nations responded.

Then they declined.

One after another, each nation refused to send help. They didn’t start this war, and they had no interest in joining it. NATO is a defensive alliance, not an offensive one, and the United States had not been a reliable partner in the lead-up to the conflict. There was no reason for them to get involved.

Trump responded by insisting he didn’t need their help anyway. That pattern—acting alone, then seeking support, then dismissing it when it doesn’t go his way—has become a defining feature of his presidency.

Ukraine has developed impressive capabilities to counter Iranian-style drone warfare during Russia’s invasion. Last year, it offered to share that expertise with the United States and warned about the growing risk of drone-driven conflicts.

The administration declined.

After Iranian drone attacks killed seven U.S. servicemembers and forced costly defensive responses, the United States turned back and asked Ukraine for the help that was previously refused.

Even as the United States was seeking assistance from Ukraine, Trump was escalating tensions with its leadership.

Trump has been frustrated with Zelenskyy since failing to deliver on his promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Instead of directing that frustration at Russia, which launched the unprovoked invasion, he has repeatedly criticized Ukraine for refusing to accept a deal that would have required giving up territory and weakening its position against future attacks.

That tension spilled over again, with Trump publicly dismissing Ukraine’s help, even as its expertise could save American lives. Dismiss the risk, reject the help, then scramble when the consequences arrive. The cycle repeats.

American weakness isn’t limited to conflicts abroad.

Over the past year, tariffs imposed on allies and trading partners have weighed on economic growth. Job creation hasn’t just stalled; it has reversed, with thousands of jobs lost over the past 10 months instead of millions created. Manufacturing has declined. Farm bankruptcies have increased. GDP growth has slowed to just 0.7% in the most recent quarter.

The combination of war-driven market disruptions and a self-inflicted economic slowdown has turned an economy that was once the envy of the world into a case study in what not to do.

Domestically, the limits of Trump’s power have become more visible.

Courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration. They have blocked major policies, declared key tariffs illegal, and stopped attempts to use government power for political retaliation. Even the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for New Jersey was removed by the courts for unlawfully serving by bypassing Senate confirmation.

Even within his own party, Trump has struggled to push through priorities, including the SAVE Act, despite Republican control of Congress. Lawmakers are increasingly wary of being tied too closely to an administration that is losing ground politically.

Since Trump took office, Democrats have flipped seats across the country, and the midterms are shaping up to be a significant blowback to the GOP, with a loss of the House majority all but guaranteed.

There is a lesson to be learned in all of this. Strength is not defined by acting alone. It is defined by outcomes, by alliances, and by the ability to shape events without losing control of them. This requires not just military force, but soft power and cooperation.

Trump set out to project dominance on the world stage. Instead, he has exposed how limited his power is and how easily his demands can be resisted.

The world is watching. And what it sees is not strength.

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/10/us-ukraine-anti-drone-offer

Those days are coming to an end.

Oil demand in highly developed nations peaked twenty years ago. Demand in developing nations is expected to peak in just a few years. Oil is becoming a commodity of the past, and America is stuck thinking about energy as if it were still 1975.

Unlike other fossil fuels, oil isn’t primarily used to generate electricity for homes and businesses. It is used mostly in transportation, accounting for about two-thirds of demand. Cars and light trucks make up the largest share of that demand, and they are also experiencing disruptive change.

The United States has been relatively slow to adopt electric vehicles. They account for about 10% of new car sales. Europe has moved faster at roughly 22%, while China has gone all in, with around half of the new vehicles sold being electric. This trend is expected to accelerate worldwide.

Electric vehicles are already reshaping oil markets. Analysts estimate that every one million EVs on the road reduces oil demand by roughly 15,000 barrels per day. Over 20 million new EVs were sold last year.

If all road vehicles in the United States were to transition to electric, US oil demand could fall by roughly 40%. That will take decades, but the steady shift from gasoline and diesel to electric vehicles will continue to reduce oil consumption, just as it has already in parts of Europe and Japan.

Most of the remaining growth in global oil demand now comes from developing economies. Those nations are already embracing electric vehicles, with sales in 2024 doubling from the year before.

After transportation, the next largest uses of oil are petrochemicals and plastics. Most plastics today are not recycled, but new chemical technologies aim to change that. Researchers are also developing plant-based plastics made from materials such as corn, sugarcane, and even algae. Some petrochemical production has already shifted from oil to natural gas.

In other words, alternatives are emerging across nearly every major use of oil, and the largest sources of demand are also seeing the fastest change.

America may be moving away from oil more slowly than some other nations, but global demand still determines the health of the American oil industry. Oil is a globally traded commodity, so supply and demand in other parts of the world influence prices everywhere. There is also another complication: not all crude oil is the same.

The United States produces more oil than it consumes, but much of that production is light sweet crude. Most American refineries are designed to process heavier crude oil. As a result, the U.S. exports large amounts of the oil it produces while importing the types its refineries require. That means America cannot insulate itself from global oil markets simply by producing more oil domestically.

Changing demand and a prolonged period of relatively low prices have made new drilling investments less attractive. Bringing a new rig online can take years, and with long-term demand projections becoming more uncertain, companies are hesitant to commit billions of dollars to new production.

During the shale boom of the 2010s, American oil companies collectively lost hundreds of billions of dollars chasing growth. Today, many companies are prioritizing shareholder returns over aggressive drilling expansion.

Despite campaign promises to “drill, drill, drill,” there are actually fewer oil rigs operating today than when Trump took office. Companies have instead focused on improving technology to increase output from existing wells while older rigs are retired.

The administration opened land in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling bids last year and in Alaska’s Cook Inlet this year. Neither effort attracted a single bid.

The United States even launched a military operation that removed Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, from power, a move closely tied to the country’s massive oil reserves. Yet American corporations have shown little interest in doing business there. Exxon told the president that Venezuelan oil was “uninvestable.”

America’s continued obsession with oil reflects an economic mindset stuck decades in the past.

The broader fossil fuel era is beginning to wind down. Coal use in the United States has already declined dramatically. Global oil demand will plateau within a few years. Natural gas will remain important for longer, but even that market faces growing competition as renewable energy becomes the cheapest source of new electricity generation.

If the United States wants to remain the world’s leading economic power, it must lead the industries that will dominate the next generation of global markets:

• Renewable energy

• Electric vehicles

• Batteries and energy storage

• Robotics and automation

• Rare earth minerals

China has invested heavily in these industries for years and now holds leading global positions in solar panels, battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, and rare-earth processing. If America waits too long to compete in these markets, catching up will become far more difficult and expensive.

It is time for America to invest in the industries of the future rather than chasing those of the past.

The United States, alongside Israel, launched coordinated attacks across Iran, striking numerous sites and killing its leader. The Secretary of Defense said, “The United States is prevailing in this war.” Trump warned that American lives may be lost because “that often happens in war.”

Other Republicans are taking a different stance. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said, “We are not at war right now. We’re four days into a very specific, clear mission.” Senator Markwayne Mullin said, “This isn’t a war. We haven’t declared war.”

The debate over whether to call this a war reflects a deeper problem: the Trump administration has offered a series of shifting explanations for why the United States attacked Iran, what the objective is, and how long this conflict could last.

Only Congress has the power to take our nation to war. Admitting this is a war would also mean admitting that Trump violated the Constitution when he started this conflict.

By calling it a special military action, Republicans hope to rely on the War Powers Act, which allows the President to use military force in some cases without first obtaining permission from Congress. But a critical requirement of the War Powers Act is that there must be an immediate threat posed to the United States or its interests.

There wasn’t one.

Iran was in negotiations with the United States about its nuclear program. There had been no attacks from Iran since the ceasefire following the previous strikes by the United States and Israel in June—strikes that Trump said had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. By that account, the nuclear program couldn’t be an imminent threat either. And Iran doesn’t possess ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.

The Trump administration has been tripping over itself trying to explain its justification for this war.

Initially, reporters were briefed that intelligence felt there was an imminent threat of attacks against US bases in the Middle East. Then Marco Rubio briefed the press:

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Those comments immediately set off a firestorm. The idea that America went to war not because of any imminent danger, but because an ally was determined to strike Iran amid ongoing negotiations, created outrage.

The Trump administration attempted to backpeddle, with Trump saying that it wasn’t because of Israel:

“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. They were going to attack. If we didn’t do it, they would have attacked first. I felt strongly about that.”

Rubio was sent back out in front of reporters to change his position. He now said that Israel did not force Trump’s hand and that these attacks needed to happen because Iran was hiding behind its ballistic missile program.

The administration hasn’t given a convincing response to the goal of this war. We were told it was about regime change, only to be told it wasn’t. They said it was because of the risk of Iran getting a nuclear weapon, only to admit that Iran wasn’t even working on a weapon. The most recent reasoning given is that Iran’s missile programs, nuclear program, and navy must all be destroyed to bring security to the region.

While the administration struggles to explain why the war began, the consequences are already here. Iran retaliated. Six US servicemembers have been killed. Others were seriously wounded.

There have been deaths in Kuwait, Israel, the UAE, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Iran. Cargo ships and oil facilities have been attacked. Multiple US bases have been hit. Protesters rushed the US embassy in Pakistan, leaving more than 20 dead.

The death toll has passed 1,000. At least 100 of those killed were Iranian girls when an elementary school was struck on the first day of the war.

Even the timeline is unclear. At first, we were told the war might last two or three days. Then a week. Then four to five weeks. Then maybe eight. Most recently, Trump said the United States has the supplies to fight forever.

This came as questions were raised about the stockpiles of missile interceptors. These advanced weapons have been sent to Ukraine, were used in June during Iran’s retaliatory strikes after its facilities were bombed, and are being used today. Supplies are not infinite, and these missiles are not cheap. While the US has military dominance over Iran, the question is whether we’d have the supplies needed for another war, and if being involved in this conflict emboldens adversaries elsewhere, such as with China and its desire to retake Taiwan.

That is what this war has brought more than anything else: confusion. Why did we go to war while negotiations were ongoing, Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon, and there was no imminent threat? Why wasn’t this war debated in public as the Constitution intends and voted on by Congress like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were? What is the goal of this war? What does victory look like, and how long will it take?

The administration cannot clearly explain why the war started, what the objective is, or how long it will last, yet the bombs are falling anyway, and Americans are largely against it.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/mike-johnson-trump-war-iran-b2931950.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/03/trump-israel-iran-war

The rising tension comes just eight months after the US and Israel bombed Iran’s underground nuclear facilities. Trump insisted that the strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities and dismissed reports that the attack only set back the nuclear program by a few months.

US special envoy Steve Witkoff now says that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bombmaking materials.” It is important to understand what that actually means.

To field a viable nuclear weapon requires three separate elements: uranium enriched to weapons-grade levels, a device capable of triggering a nuclear explosion, and a delivery system such as a ballistic missile. While all related, these steps are distinct. When officials say that Iran is “a week away,” they are referring to the time needed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, not the time required to design and deploy an operational nuclear weapon.

Enrichment Explained

After the last strikes, you may have heard the term “centrifuge”. Centrifuges are machines used to enrich uranium by increasing the percentage of Uranium-235. Natural uranium is mostly Uranium-238, with less than 1% U-235. Nuclear power plants require enrichment at 3-5%. Nuclear weapons require higher levels, typically at least 90%.

Iran is currently enriching uranium to 60%. Israel and the United States see this as a threat. Enriching uranium to this level requires significant technological capability, but once that threshold is reached, moving from 60% to 90% can be achieved relatively quickly. Enrichment alone does not mean a bomb is being built, and Iran is intentionally stopping at 60% when they could go further. They argue that their program is defensive, intended to show its capability and deter attacks. This level of enrichment is also reversible, should an agreement be reached.

In 2015, the United States, Europe, and Iran agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The deal limited Iran’s enrichment to below 4% and allowed for inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, sanctions against Iran were eased.

In 2018, President Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement and reinstated harsh sanctions. Iran initially stayed within compliance after the US withdrew before gradually escalating its enrichment program to just under 20%, the limit for when it becomes classified as highly enriched uranium.

In 2021, Iran’s centrifuges were sabotaged for the second time in less than a year during efforts to revive the JCPOA nuclear deal. In response, Iran increased enrichment to 60%, sending a message about their capabilities. Iran then reduced the production rate substantially, another sign that the move was more for show than the intent of creating a weapon. Iran kept production rates low until 2025. Following more failed attempts to revive the nuclear deal and additional attacks on its program, Iran ramped up production once again.

Each step in enrichment has followed a breakdown in negotiations or a direct action against its program.

US intelligence assessments have repeatedly stated that Iran has not made the political decision to build a nuclear weapon. The concern is about how little time would be needed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, not evidence of any active weapons assembly program.

Delivery Systems and Deterrence

Iran possesses one of the world’s largest stockpiles of ballistic missiles. Though none are believed capable of reaching the United States, it does have missiles that can reach Israel, which it considers to be a primary adversary. Following the June attacks, Iran launched a barrage of missiles against Israel, enough to overwhelm the nation’s missile defense systems and land several strikes. The scale of the retaliation appeared intended to demonstrate its capability without triggering a full-scale war.

That fits with Iran’s broader strategic goals.

Nuclear weapons change how countries are treated. North Korea is an oppressive regime that openly threatens the United States, yet it has not faced a direct military strike in the way Iran has. North Korea has nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The cost of attacking it is unpredictable and could be catastrophic.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is another example of how nuclear status shapes global responses. Russia is a nuclear power. NATO and the United States provided substantial support to Ukraine but imposed limits on how those weapons could be used, and have carefully avoided direct confrontation with Russian forces. The risk of nuclear escalation, no matter how unlikely, influences every decision.

Ukraine once inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It agreed to transfer those weapons to Russia in exchange for security assurances from the US and Russia under the Budapest Memorandum. Decades later, Ukraine was invaded by one of the countries meant to provide it security, while the US was slow, careful, and measured in its response.

Why This Matters

Iran is an oppressive regime with a long record of human rights abuses and support for militant proxies. There are legitimate concerns about its behavior in the region. But the current standoff is not primarily about whether Iran would immediately use a nuclear weapon. It is about leverage. Once a country crosses the nuclear threshold, even if it never fires a shot, it becomes harder to restrain or attack.

The world has demonstrated that countries with nuclear weapons operate under a different set of constraints than those without them. Iran’s enrichment program, especially at 60%, signals that it wants to gain that extra leverage.

If Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, other regional powers such as Saudi Arabia could pursue similar capabilities, triggering an arms race. That is the core of the conflict: how possession, or near-possession of a nuclear weapon, reshapes the balance of power in the region.

https://www.sipri.org/commentary/essay/2021/why-iran-producing-60-cent-enriched-uranium

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-dramatically-increasing-enrichment-near-bomb-grade-iaea-chief-2024-12-06/

I will break it down section by section.

Jobs

The job market came to a screeching halt last year, shifting from 120,000 jobs being created each month in 2024 to just 15,000 in 2025 for a total of 181,000 across the full year.

Companies laid off 1.2 million workers, an increase of over 50% from the year before and the highest amount since 2020. The unemployment rate increased from 4.0% to 4.4% from January 2025 to December, and the labor participation rate decreased.

Blue-collar workers were hit especially hard, with a net loss of 108,000 manufacturing jobs, along with losses in other sectors such as mining, transportation, and warehousing, totaling over 160,000 blue-collar jobs lost.

Wages

The lowest earners saw their real wages, wages adjusted for inflation, decline in 2025. This means they had less money to spend than before, and it is a sharp reversal from the several years prior, when that same group saw its wages rise faster than everyone else's.

The average real wages for all workers increased by 1.5%, but that is against headline inflation. Key areas of spending, such as healthcare, food, electricity, heating, and automotive repairs, rose faster than average inflation, creating a strain on the middle class.

One way we can see this is by looking at the personal savings rate, which is how much people put into savings after paying their expenses. It decreased from 5.1% in January 2025 to 3.5% in November. One-third of Americans reported having less emergency savings than they did the year before.

We can also see the impact on debt, with total outstanding credit card debt reaching a record high of $1.28 trillion. A LendingTree survey found that one-quarter of buy now, pay later loans were used for groceries, and that over 40% of borrowers had paid at least one buy now, pay later loan late in the past year.

Taxes

While real wages were stagnant or declining, America is set to get some relief with its tax returns this year. The average of early tax returns so far has increased from $2,065 to $2,290, a 11% increase of $225. While refunds do provide temporary relief, broader tax changes shifted in ways that hurt lower- and middle-income earners. That was seen in the tax known as tariffs.

The average household paid $1,000 in tariffs last year, and that amount is expected to increase to $1,300 this year. The government needs taxes. We have a massive deficit. So when you hear that income taxes are being reduced, they have to be offset by either more debt or higher taxes outside of income.

In this case, the top 1% received the largest tax breaks, while working- and middle-class Americans are paying for it through tariffs.

Income taxes are progressive, meaning the more you make, the more they impact you. Tariffs are regressive, meaning the lower your income, the bigger the burden. This is a bad shift for hard-working Americans.

Tariffs

Tariffs were intended to do three things, according to the current administration: generate revenue to reduce income taxes, reduce the trade deficit, and create US jobs, particularly in manufacturing.

American consumers are paying 90% of the tariff cost, and, as we discussed above, that burden is heaviest on the lowest earners. The trade deficit was $900 billion in 2024. It is still $900 billion in 2025. Tariffs failed to reduce it because they were applied to food America doesn’t grow and products America doesn’t make. There weren’t any alternatives to switch to, and companies can’t spin up new factories that quickly. Manufacturing didn’t attempt to take on this production, as 108,000 manufacturing jobs were lost last year.

Tariffs failed to achieve the administration’s goals, but did exactly what economists said they would.

The economic drag from tariffs was bad, and now the legal foundation for them has collapsed. The Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s implementation of many of the tariffs was illegal. Whether this will result in refunds, or tariffs applied through other means, or Congress finally voting on tariffs is yet to be seen. That means more uncertainty for the year ahead, and uncertainty is bad for the economy.

Uncertainty means companies delay hiring, as we saw last year with the almost non-existent job growth. Investments are put on hold, and purchasing slows, stalling supply chains. When companies can’t reliably plan for the future, workers and the economy take the hit.

Federal Impact

Gross Domestic Product growth saw major swings across the year, with an initial decrease in the first quarter as companies rushed to import as many products as they could afford to get ahead of tariffs, followed by big gains in quarters when companies imported little while relying on their inventory stockpiles. When all of that settled, the fourth quarter saw a small 1.3% growth, resulting in a 2.3% GDP growth for the full year compared to 2.8% in 2024 and 2.9% in 2023.

The US economy slowed down.

The deficit remained at $1.8 trillion, the same as in 2024, but the national debt increased to $2.2 trillion, reflecting changes in interest costs and Treasury cash management.

Conclusion

2025 saw a significant economic slowdown, and tariffs played a major role in that, both directly through the price increases businesses and consumers had to deal with and indirectly through the continued uncertainty as tariffs were declared, adjusted, reversed, and declared again.

The lower your earnings, the more you were affected by this economy, with the lowest earners seeing their buying power decline and their emergency savings deplete, while the middle class struggled to stay afloat, saving less and increasing their reliance on debt to get by.

America is not on the right track. A course correction is desperately needed because if we continue down this path, 2026 will not be any better. The only way that happens is if Congress looks at the data and decides to end the trade war tariffs and invest in our nation and its workers.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/working-class-people-struggle-to-find-opportunities-in-trumps-economy/

https://www.lendingtree.com/personal/buy-now-pay-later-loan-statistics/

https://www.bea.gov/

Without them, the national debt would be past the breaking point, the population would be shrinking, and Social Security would have run out of money long ago.

The Cato Institute is a Libertarian think tank that recently analyzed the economic impact of immigrants from 1994 through 2023. They found that immigrants paid more in taxes than they received in government benefits every single year.

This is true for both legal and undocumented immigrants and doesn’t account for indirect economic effects such as productivity growth, increased demand, and reductions in debt spending. Meaning that the full positive impact is much greater.

Immigrants are more likely to be working age and employed than native-born Americans. They fill critical worker shortages, increase tax revenue, and use fewer benefits, while the native born population is getting older and increasingly relying on those benefits.

The math goes even further. Without immigrants, US debt-to-GDP would have already exceeded 200 percent, a threshold that makes paying even just the interest on that debt untenable, creating a crisis of rising interest rates, skyrocketing debt, and a weakening dollar that spirals out of control. Immigrants reduced deficits by one-third over the past 30 years.

Undocumented immigrants pay billions into Social Security despite being unable to claim those benefits. This has kept the system funded for citizens at a time when it is rapidly exhausting past surpluses. When those surpluses are used up, benefits will decrease significantly, something that would have happened years ago without these immigrants.

This is why mass deportation efforts don’t solve economic problems; they create them. We are spending hundreds of billions to decrease output, shrink the tax base, and reduce funds for important benefits like Social Security. Amid the scaled-up deportation efforts last year, native unemployment rates increased while labor participation rates decreased, and only 181,000 jobs were created over the year, compared to 2024, when over 100,000 jobs were created each month.

The focus of deportation efforts should be on dangerous criminals instead of farmhands, factory workers, and day laborers. Over 70% of people detained by ICE last year had no criminal convictions. The reason so few detainees have convictions is that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens. This was made clear when large numbers of migrants arrived between 2022 and 2024, and national crime rates continued to decline rapidly. Legal immigrants also commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

Immigrants are critical to our nation’s prosperity. America’s birth rate is far below the replacement rate. Without immigration, the population would have been shrinking since the 1970s. A shrinking population means there are fewer workers, fewer consumers, and a strain on federal programs. It would be devastating to the US economy, which relies on consumer spending for 70% of GDP, and on the constant influx of new workers to support those who have aged out of the workforce and onto Social Security and Medicare. Japan is already facing this problem, and sells more diapers for adults than for babies. That means fewer workers supporting more retirees, causing increased pressure on public services.

The United States is currently falling 1.1 million births short each year of what is needed to maintain its population. Legal immigration fills 800,000 of the gap annually. The rest is filled by undocumented immigrants. Even if birth rates increased tomorrow, it would take two decades before those children entered the workforce. America will rely on immigrants to stabilize our population for at least the next 20 years, likely much longer, and has been doing so for the past 50 years.

Those immigrants have a higher rate of creating small businesses, have a disproportionately high share of patents and startups, and fill over half of the jobs in key areas like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, textiles, elder care, and hospitality. They aren’t taking our jobs. They’re creating them and filling gaps that native born Americans are not.

None of this means America should have open borders, but we do need to fix our immigration system. A country that depends on immigrant labor while forcing millions to live and work without legal status has built a system that is both economically and morally unstable.

If we want strong economic growth, financial security, and greater prosperity, then our immigration system needs to match reality. Caps on legal immigration must be raised to reflect the country's needs. Work visas should be easier to obtain in industries facing shortages. There needs to be a pathway to citizenship for long-term, law-abiding, hard-working undocumented immigrants.

It’s easy to say that they shouldn’t have come here illegally, but the truth is America needed them to, and didn’t provide a legal pathway for them to come here “the right way.” Over half of the undocumented immigrants living in America have been here for over a decade, and both political parties have failed to address the issue. Crossing the border is a civil offense. Punishing someone for it 20 years later, when they’ve spurred on our economy, paid for our benefits, and made a life for themselves here, is a cop-out. The blame lies with politicians and broken policies, not immigrants.

America has always been a nation of immigrants. We can have strong borders, stringent but fair asylum rules, and still welcome immigrants who will make our nation greater while building a better life for themselves.

America fails without immigrants, so we must not fail them.

https://www.cato.org/white-paper/immigrants-recent-effects-government-budgets-1994-2023

Job gains are a good thing, but it is important to keep this in context.

This report is an early estimate. These numbers will be revised multiple times in the coming year. Sometimes revisions go up. Sometimes they go down. We won’t know for a while where January truly lands.

What we do know is that the same report included major revisions to 2025 and late 2024, and they were ugly.

Instead of meaningful growth, all of last year — 2025 — saw just 181,000 jobs added in total. That’s about 15,000 per month. For comparison, the 2015-2019 average was roughly 190,000 per month. From 2021 to 2024, the average was around 235,000. And in 2024, with today’s revisions, over 100,000 jobs were created per month.

From over 100,000 jobs per month to 15,000 in one year. The job market has stagnated.

Beyond The Headline Number

A healthy job market isn’t defined by a single monthly figure. It shows up as:

• Low unemployment

• More job openings than job seekers

• Wages rising faster than costs

Last year, we moved in the opposite direction.

Unemployment rose from 4.0% to 4.3%. The number of unemployed Americans climbed from 6.9 million to 7.4 million. By the end of the year, there were more unemployed workers than job openings.

Hiring slowed. Job switching disappeared. Layoffs shot up to 1.1 million over the course of the year, a 54% increase from the year before and the highest since the peak of the pandemic in 2020. This is what a weak and slowing job market looks like.

Wages “Beat Inflation” — But That’s Not the Whole Story

On paper, average wages grew slightly faster than overall inflation in 2025. That sounds encouraging. But averages can hide a lot.

Low-wage workers saw their real wages, wages adjusted for inflation, fall by 0.3%. That’s a hard reversal from 2019 to 2024, where those workers saw their wages rise faster than any other group.

The other 90% of workers saw roughly a 1% real wage gain. But that figure is measured against overall inflation, which includes categories that don’t weigh equally on working families.

Prices that rose faster than average inflation last year included:

• Food

• Electricity

• Home heating

• Housing

• Healthcare

• Auto repair and maintenance

When everyday expenses outpace your wage gains, it doesn’t matter that televisions cost less.

People don’t experience “core CPI.” They feel the pinch of grocery receipts and rent increases. That disconnect is why, no matter how often Trump calls affordability a hoax, the American people are upset at how poorly he has handled the economy.

Where the Jobs Are — and Aren’t

The January gain of 130,000 jobs followed the trend of the past year, in which almost all the jobs created were in private education and healthcare. Outside of that, the broader job market was contracting. Manufacturing has now lost jobs for nine straight months, a slide that began after tariffs were enacted on “Liberation Day.”

Blue-collar workers have taken the brunt of this change, with over 100,000 jobs in manufacturing, construction, and other blue-collar industries lost in 2025.

So while the headline number looks alright, life tells a different story. Growth is limited, and losses are concentrated in sectors that matter deeply to working-class communities.

A Two-Speed Economy

One area is strong: asset markets. The stock market continues to climb. Corporate profits remain at record highs. Wealthy households, which hold the majority of financial assets, are benefiting greatly.

Consumer spending has increasingly relied on the top 10% of earners, who own 90% of all stocks. Their investment gains give them room to keep spending. The rest of America is cutting back and relying more on debt to get by. Credit card balances now exceed $1.2 trillion.

A relatively small share of Americans is doing extremely well. Most others are fighting hard to tread water, and some are slipping beneath the surface.

Should We Celebrate 130,000?

Even if January holds at 130,000 jobs after revisions, it’s hard to call that impressive.

It follows a year that averaged 15,000 per month. It trails the job creation seen in the pre-pandemic expansion, the post-pandemic recovery, and the return to normalcy. And, worst of all, it is heavily concentrated in just two sectors.

This is mediocrity dressed up as momentum.

What Would Actually Improve The Job Market

There is a clear, straightforward way to defrost the job market and turn the economy around.

Invest in America.

• Invest in domestic manufacturing rather than disrupting supply chains with unpredictable tariffs

• Expand infrastructure and clean energy projects that create high-wage jobs

• Support emerging technologies without igniting trade wars that raise consumer costs

• Strengthen labor markets instead of relying on stock markets to drive spending

Trade wars raise costs for businesses and consumers. They suppress domestic investment and slow hiring in industries that depend on global markets. The way to make America’s economy stronger isn’t to try to hurt other nations’ economies; It is to invest in our own to make it more competitive.

The Underlying Problem

Correcting our course isn’t hard, but there is one major hurdle: admitting mistakes.

Tariffs were a mistake. Ignoring the warning signs is another. Calling people’s affordability struggles a hoax only deepens the problem. Cutting investment in future industries makes recovery harder.

Mistakes happen, but unless we admit them and address them, we can't expect the economy to return to firing on all cylinders and bring prosperity to the nation.

https://www.epi.org/blog/low-wage-workers-faced-worsening-affordability-in-2025/

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

So why has a federal voter ID law become so controversial? Because popularity alone does not make a policy workable, constitutional, or just.

To understand why, we need to start with an important fact that has been deliberately lied about for years.

America Does Not Have a Voter Fraud Problem

Despite relentless claims to the contrary, the United States does not have a voter fraud problem. This has been examined repeatedly from every ideological angle, and it simply is not happening.

After the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies filed dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud. They were dismissed, over 50 of them in total, due to a lack of evidence. Recounts were conducted. Audits followed. Investigations at the state and federal levels reached the same conclusion again and again: the election was secure.

Even the Heritage Foundation, one of the most conservative think tanks in the country and a central player in Project 2025, maintains a database tracking voter fraud. Looking at 50 years of data, it found so few cases of non-citizens registering to vote, voting, or attempting to vote that it averaged less than one per year, and only 10 cases of in-person voter impersonation nationwide, out of hundreds of millions of votes.

Other investigations tell the same story. The Brennan Center found voter fraud rates as low as 0.0003%. A Department of Justice review of past elections found fraud at a rate so low as to be effectively nonexistent.

America does not have a voter fraud problem. It has a sore loser problem. And this matters because voter ID laws are being justified as a solution to a problem that does not exist.

Voter ID Laws Create More Harm Than Security

When fraud is vanishingly rare, adding new voter ID laws only makes it harder for legitimate voters to cast their ballots.

Even judges who once supported these laws have acknowledged this fact. Former conservative judge Richard Posner, who upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, later reversed his position and stated that strict voter ID requirements are now widely understood as tools of voter suppression rather than fraud prevention.

And that is exactly how voter ID laws are being used.

Republican lawmakers in multiple states have pushed to ban student IDs as valid voter identification. Indiana, Idaho, Arizona, North Carolina, and New Hampshire are among them. This has nothing to do with security. It is because the majority of students vote Democratic.

Politics has become an exercise in blocking opposition from voting rather than trying to win them over. It is a terrible game to be playing with our democracy.

That trend worsens with the SAVE Act.

The SAVE Act Goes Far Beyond Voter ID

The House Republican SAVE Act does not simply require a photo ID to vote. It imposes strict documentation requirements for registering or updating voter registration, which millions of Americans do not have easy access to.

Under the bill, acceptable documents include:

• A U.S. passport

• A military ID paired with proof of U.S. birth

• A government ID that lists place of birth or citizenship, which almost none do

• A birth certificate paired with a government photo ID

For the vast majority of Americans, this effectively means a passport or a birth certificate would be required.

Roughly half of American adults do not have a passport. Around one in ten lacks easy access to a birth certificate. Many birth certificates do not match current legal names due to marriage or other name changes, and the bill does not clearly allow name-change certificates to resolve that mismatch.

Others lost their birth certificates to fires, floods, or decades-old clerical errors. Some were born in eras where recordkeeping was inconsistent or outright discriminatory. None of that makes them less American.

The SAVE Act does not strengthen democracy—it weakens it.

“Just Use a Driver’s License”

When these issues are raised, defenders of voter ID laws often pivot to a simpler claim: just require a driver’s license.

That sounds reasonable until you look at who doesn’t have one.

Millions of Americans do not drive. Many urban residents rely on public transportation. There are elderly Americans who stopped driving but remain politically engaged. And some low-income Americans simply can’t afford to drive. Driver’s license ownership varies significantly by race, income, age, and geography.

If voter identification is the true goal, the solution is clear.

Universal Free Identification

If the federal government wanted voter ID without suppressing voter turnout, it would provide every eligible citizen with a universal, free, government-issued photo ID.

That could be as simple as a Social Security photo ID, issued automatically, free of charge, and usable nationwide. Nearly all Americans already have a Social Security number, and the government gives out Social Security cards, just not with a photo. Most of the infrastructure already exists.

Anything less turns voter ID into an undue burden.

Legal and Constitutional Problems

The 24th Amendment explicitly bans poll taxes, or a fee to vote. Courts have been inconsistent in their interpretation of how that applies to costs associated with obtaining identification, but the amendment's principle is clear. Voting cannot be conditioned on payment.

Beyond cost, there is another constitutional issue.

While Congress has authority over the time, place, and manner of federal elections, voter qualifications are reserved to the states. Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution, the Seventeenth Amendment, and the Tenth Amendment all reinforce that balance.

The SAVE Act would face immediate constitutional challenges, with strong arguments that it exceeds federal authority by imposing voter qualification requirements rather than election procedures.

It is difficult to imagine this bill surviving judicial review.

What Voters Actually Want

Polls do show support for voter ID. They also show strong support for measures that make it easier for citizens to vote, not harder.

Americans consistently support:

• Early voting

• Universal access to mail-in voting

• Automatic voter registration

• Same-day registration

• Making Election Day a national holiday

• Restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences

Those who tout the polling on voter ID as a reason for their suppressive legislation routinely ignore those other results, and often specifically undermine any efforts to enact them.

The Real Choice

Democracy is not about making voting harder for people you disagree with. It is about ensuring every citizen can participate equally. If election security is the goal, then voter protection must come first. Free IDs. Automatic registration. Transparent processes.

Restrictive voter ID and registration laws tip the scales by excluding voters instead of working to win them over.

Everyone deserves a voice and a vote.

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/analysis-heritage-foundations-database-undermines-claims-recent-voter

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-election-fraud-in-the-united-states-not-very/

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-courts-have-dismissed-multiple-lawsuits-of-alleged-electoral-fraud-p-idUSKBN2AF1FQ/

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/22/majority-of-americans-continue-to-back-expanded-early-voting-voting-by-mail-voter-id/

Pretti’s killing was different.

The footage was unmistakable. Agents threw him to the ground, beat him repeatedly, and then shot him while he was on his knees, posing no threat to anyone. After he collapsed, they fired several more rounds into his body.

The video was so disturbingly clear that the administration's best attempts to lie about the situation were drowned out by outrage from every corner of the nation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a relatively new agency, created in 2003 by consolidating immigration and customs enforcement functions under the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration enforcement is split between two agencies: ICE and Customs and Border Protection.

That division matters because while public outrage has focused on ICE, CBP has been just as violent and just as lawless. Their operations blur together under DHS, especially with the current administration, where accountability disappears entirely.

Renee Good was killed by ICE.
Alex Pretti was killed by CBP.
Different uniforms. Same brutality.

Abolishing ICE alone would not stop the abuse. CBP is conducting the same raids, using the same tactics, and operating under the same leadership. The militarization, flashbangs, tear gas, eagerness to escalate, and willingness to fire weapons at unarmed citizens are approved from the top.

Donald Trump placed Kristi Noem in charge of the Department of Homeland Security. Before her nomination, Noem published a personal memoir, which included an account of how she was angry at the behavior of her 14-month-old dog, so she took it down to a gravel pit and shot it to death. In that moment, she remembered how much she disliked one of her goats, so she went and grabbed it, dragged it to the gravel pit, and then killed it too. A mindset where deadly force is the first response, not the last resort.

That cruelty is paired with corruption. As governor of South Dakota, Noem funneled money from a nonprofit into her personal company without disclosing it. She misused taxpayer funds to renovate the governor’s mansion with luxury additions and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal travel. When her daughter was denied a real estate license, Noem summoned officials to pressure them, and the denial was reversed days later.

This is the person now overseeing federal law enforcement agencies with virtually unchecked power.

Every time one of these incidents occurs, DHS rushes out a statement blaming the victim. ICE or CBP agents are always described as being “threatened” or “forced to defend themselves,” regardless of what the evidence shows.

In Pretti’s case, multiple camera angles show agents escalating the encounter, assaulting him, disarming him of a legal firearm he never touched, and then shooting him repeatedly. Noem still falsely claimed Pretti was brandishing a weapon and attacking agents.

When Marimar Martinez was shot five times during Operation Midway Blitz, officials claimed she rammed an agent’s vehicle. Once the case reached court and evidence was produced, it became clear that the agents initiated the confrontation. The charges were dropped.

This is not an anomaly. It happens over and over again.

Of the 30 non-immigration federal cases brought in Chicago from that same operation, half have already been dismissed. The pattern is consistent. Blame the victim immediately and hope the story moves on before the truth catches up.

This works because accountability is nearly nonexistent. Federal agents operate behind layers of secrecy, internal investigations, and levels of immunity that make prosecution rare even when evidence is undeniable. Without real consequences, escalation becomes routine.

Despite all of this, defenders insist that this brutality is necessary to remove violent criminals who supposedly flooded the country under Biden.

The data tells a different story.

• Undocumented immigrants commit crimes at less than half the rate of U.S. citizens.

• Roughly 14 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, not the 20 million or more repeatedly claimed. In 2024, eight in ten had lived here for over a decade. Less of an invasion and more of a long-term immigration issue that Congress has refused to address.

• Nearly three-quarters of people held in ICE detention have no criminal convictions at all. Most of the rest were convicted of minor offenses, such as traffic violations.

• Arrests increasingly occur outside immigration courts, creating a Catch-22 where following the law gets you detained and avoiding court makes you here illegally.

• ICE custody and enforcement operations saw 32 deaths in 2025, the deadliest year on record. In 2026, at least eight people have already died during ICE and CBP operations

This is quota-driven policing. Agents are incentivized to grab whoever is easiest, not whoever is most dangerous. Daily arrest targets forces’ recklessness over investigation, and guarantees that mistakes, abuses, and deaths will continue.

When federal agents conduct warrantless raids, shoot citizens, lie about it afterward, and face no consequences, the Constitution itself is under threat. Trump has already discussed using ICE agents at polling places to intimidate voters. That is not law enforcement. It is authoritarianism.

Abolishing ICE is unlikely with this Congress, and even if it happened, CBP would continue the same operations under a different name. Real change requires accountability at the top.

Kristi Noem must be removed, and MAGA politicians must lose their majority in the midterms. Until that happens, Congress must block funding for illegal and brutal operations.

This violence cannot be normalized. History shows it will only get worse until we stop it.

https://www.commoncause.org/articles/top-5-most-corrupt-and-alarming-things-you-need-to-know-about-kristi-noem/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/28/deaths-ice-2026-

It can happen to any one of us.

A medical emergency can spiral into crushing debt, job loss, and financial ruin almost overnight. In the United States, medical debt remains the leading cause of personal bankruptcy.

For millions, the damage happens even earlier. Treatable conditions become debilitating because care is delayed or avoided altogether. People skip doctor visits, prescriptions, and procedures not because they want to, but because they cannot afford them. By the time they finally seek help, the costs are far higher and the outcomes much worse.

Accessible quality healthcare is the cornerstone of a healthy, productive, and prosperous society. A cornerstone that has been missing from America for far too long.

The Problem

We are told that America’s fully for-profit healthcare system delivers better outcomes because it encourages competition and innovation.

It does not.

By nearly every meaningful measure, the United States performs worse than peer nations that provide universal healthcare. Americans experience longer wait times, worse outcomes, and shorter lifespans, while paying far more.

• Two-thirds of U.S. personal bankruptcies are tied to medical debt

• Twenty-seven million Americans are uninsured, a number expected to rise now that affordability subsidies expired

• The U.S. ranks around 50th globally in life expectancy

• Infant and maternal mortality rates are the worst in the developed world

• Americans spend roughly 40 percent more per person on healthcare than the next highest-spending nation, and more than double the OECD average

This is the result of a system designed to extract profit at every step.

Costs rise because healthcare companies maximize revenue through administrative complexity, claim denials, narrow networks, and opaque pricing. Care is fragmented across insurers, each with its own rules, paperwork, and incentives to delay or deny treatment.

The result is the worst of all worlds: higher costs, worse health, and millions without care.

The Solution

There is a reason every other developed nation has implemented universal healthcare.

It works.

Universal healthcare is not one specific system. Single-payer is one model, used in countries like Canada and the United Kingdom. Multipayer systems, like those in Germany and Japan, rely on tightly regulated insurers with standardized benefits and centralized administration.

Both approaches deliver better outcomes than the American system because they share the same core features:

• Universal coverage

• Price negotiation

• Care based on medical need, not profit incentives

• Simplified administration

In the U.S., administrative costs consume a far larger share of healthcare spending than in other nations. Universal systems dramatically reduce this waste by standardizing billing and claims processing. Even multipayer systems route claims through centralized platforms to eliminate inefficiency.

Administration is only part of the problem.

Medical services themselves cost far more in the U.S. Inpatient and outpatient care costs over $8,000 per person annually, compared to under $3,600 in peer nations. A bypass surgery costs roughly $75,000 in the U.S., compared with $42,000 in Australia. MRIs cost several times more. Knee replacements routinely cost tens of thousands more.

Universal healthcare works because governments negotiate prices on behalf of the public. Providers still earn profits, but not through unchecked price inflation. Care becomes predictable, efficient, and affordable.

The Economic Case

Universal healthcare would save the United States hundreds of billions of dollars each year while improving outcomes and reducing wait times. It would also unlock another economic benefit that rarely receives enough attention.

When healthcare is tied to employment, workers stay trapped in jobs they cannot leave. Universal healthcare allows people to change careers, start businesses, retrain, or retire without fear of losing coverage. Entrepreneurship rises. Productivity improves. Even wages increase.

Healthcare becomes a shared public good instead of a personal liability.

When we can honestly say that universal healthcare would cost less, work better, and make the nation healthier, refusing to implement it is not rational. It is greed and stubbornness.

America does not need to choose between compassion and efficiency.

Healthcare for All delivers both.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/excess-administrative-costs-burden-u-s-health-care-system/

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022

https://www.pgpf.org/article/why-are-americans-paying-more-for-healthcare/

That’s what we tell people who enter it with no money, no means, and increasingly no opportunity. A child born into poverty is expected to compete in the same economy as someone with tutors, elite schools, and family wealth. Then we fault them for struggling in a system designed to reward those who already have advantages.

Would you put someone in a canoe without a paddle and tell them to make their way upstream? So why do we expect people without a stable foundation, without education, security, or opportunity, to succeed? And dismiss them when they stumble?

If we want a society where people can stand on their own, we have to give them something solid to stand on and a clear path forward.

Social Security for All secures the foundation.

Education for All creates the path.

Start at the Beginning

When people think of education as a path to a better job or financial security, they often focus on college or trade schools. Those are important, but success does not begin at eighteen. It starts much earlier, with Universal Pre-K.

Access to quality Pre-K improves high school graduation rates and college enrollment. It even reduces the need for special education. All children benefit, but the greatest gains are among those facing the highest risks of poverty.

A nationwide universal Pre-K program for four-year-olds would cost about $20 billion per year, according to Penn Wharton. Congress increased the defense budget by $150 billion this year alone. Finding $20 billion to give millions of children a better start should not be controversial.

This is not charity. Universal Pre-K pays for itself over time by reducing future education costs, increasing wages, and allowing more parents to work. It is an investment that delivers returns to the entire country.

Universal Pre-K pays dividends.

ZIP Codes Shouldn’t Determine Success

Let’s look at two students who attended the same quality Pre-K program. They have a step up over those who didn’t attend Pre-K, but now they’re moving on to the next stage of education.

One enters an elementary school with small class sizes, counselors, updated textbooks, modern lesson plans, and experienced staff. When the student struggles, there are tutors. When their family has a setback, the school can help.

The other enters a school with outdated materials, overcrowded classrooms, chronic staff shortages, and constant teacher turnover. There is no counselor. No tutor. No buffer when something goes wrong.

The gap between the two students’ progress becomes visible almost immediately. By middle school, it is structural. By high school, their futures appear miles apart, even though their journeys began in the same place.

Today, the quality of a child’s education is largely determined by where they live and how much money their family has. That is not only unfair but also economically reckless.

Quality K–12 education raises wages, reduces unemployment, lowers crime, decreases reliance on assistance programs, and improves long-term health outcomes. By not spending on education, the government ends up spending more on addressing the damage caused by underfunding.

The Department of Education plays a critical role here by partially funding schools, researching effective teaching methods, and supporting states in improving outcomes. States like Louisiana and Alabama have used federal support to rapidly improve student performance.

An important factor in those improvements was the additional funding provided to address the educational disruptions caused by COVID. That funding ended in 2024. Without increased support going forward, many schools will struggle to make the same necessary changes.

The Department of Education needs to be funded more, not less. States control curricula, but the federal government can help ensure that every child, regardless of ZIP code, has a real chance to succeed.

The Final Link

Graduating from high school improves wages. But earnings rise much more when people gain trade skills, complete apprenticeships, or earn a college degree.

Free college and job training extend the benefits of Pre-K and K–12 education. Education works as a system. When we focus on only one part, people fall behind in the next. When we support the entire system, opportunity compounds.

A robust federal program covering college and job training would cost up to $75 billion per year, depending on scope. Add universal Pre-K and targeted K–12 support, and the total still falls short of the increase to the military budget this year.

Job training matters not just for first careers, but for transitions when industries decline, technology changes, or AI displaces workers through no fault of their own. Training allows people to remain productive and self-sustaining in an ever-changing world.

Quality education reduces not just poverty and crime, but some of the most expensive government costs later in life, including financial assistance, incarceration, emergency healthcare, and child welfare interventions.

Even by conservative estimates, free college and job training would begin fully offsetting their costs within a decade through higher tax revenues and reduced government spending, recovering $10–20 billion per year early on and eventually producing an economic windfall. The same is true for Universal Pre-K and sustained investments in K–12 education.

Education is the most reliable investment America can make.

The Bigger Picture

Social Security for All can be achieved with what we already spend on assistance today. Education for All can be afforded now and pays for itself over time.

It costs America nothing to help people this way. It costs us enormously not to.

We cannot demand that people succeed on their own while denying them the tools to do so. When they are given those tools, they don’t just improve their own lives. They strengthen the entire nation.

https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2022/6/2/total-cost-of-universal-pre-k

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-cost-of-inaction-on-universal-preschool/

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1461/RAND_RR1461.pdf

For decades, Americans have been told that this suffering is inevitable — that helping people costs too much, that the budget is too tight, and that we simply can’t afford security for everyone.

Meanwhile, Congress increases the military budget year after year to over $1 trillion without hesitation, hands out corporate welfare freely, and grants endless tax cuts to the billionaires who need them the least. All of it drives the national debt so high that we now pay $1 trillion each year just to service it, not reduce it. The contradiction is impossible to ignore: we always find the money — just not for the hardworking people who keep the nation running.

Even when the government attempts to do the right thing, it overcomplicates solutions to the point of failure. There are dozens of overlapping programs trying to solve the same problem: making sure everyone can meet their basic needs.

People are divided by age, income, injury, family status, and job history, so the government can micromanage who qualifies for how much — and how they’re allowed to spend it. A nightmare of bureaucracy that causes millions to fall through the gaps.

Fragmented programs make it easier for politicians to claim credit without delivering results, for lobbyists to carve out exceptions, and for officials to quietly cut benefits without taking responsibility. A simple system that works leaves little room for political theater and demands accountability.

One program has the right idea.

What Social Security Gets Right

Social Security is simple, universal, and earned. It provides a basic income, rewards people for working, and does not add to the national debt.

The problem is that we limit Social Security to retirees and people with disabilities, while everyone else is pushed into a labyrinth of temporary, overly complex programs. We provide Social Security universally in retirement to millionaires and modest teachers alike, yet fail to make it robust enough to provide stability for those who need it the most.

The fix is to expand Social Security, so it’s there for everyone whenever they need it — and to eliminate the government bloat that makes many programs so richly ineffective.

We can do all of this without spending more than we do today.

How Social Security for All Would Work

Once you earn enough to support yourself, you pay income tax on the money you earn above that. If you don’t make enough to support yourself, the government pays you to ensure you can cover your basic needs.

This is known as a negative income tax. Below a certain threshold, the government pays you; above that threshold, you pay the government.

Under this system:

• Every adult American is guaranteed $12,000 per year

• For every $2 you earn, your benefit is reduced by $1 — it always pays to work

• If you earn $18,000, your benefit is reduced by $9,000, meaning the government pays you $3,000, bringing your total income to $21,000

• Payments are delivered monthly through the IRS

• Once you earn $24,000, the benefit phases out completely, and normal taxes apply

This creates a solid floor, no matter how challenging life becomes, while retaining a strong incentive to work. Simple and effective.

But we need one more critical improvement.

Contribution Builds Security

Everyone should be rewarded for paying into the system that ensures society’s basic needs are met, and everyone should be able to retire after decades of hard work.

Today’s Social Security formula attempts to do this, but it is so complicated that most people have no idea how their benefits are calculated. It looks at wages across decades, selects subsets, applies adjustment formulas, and then modifies everything again based on retirement age.

Worse, it only helps you when you retire.

If someone has a difficult year at 40 — after paying into the system for 20 years — Social Security offers no support at all.

We can do better.

Everyone starts with a Contribution Bonus of 1.0. For every year you earn enough to pay income tax without receiving Social Security For All benefits, your Contribution Bonus increases by 0.1. That bonus multiplies your guaranteed income.

If you pay income taxes for 20 years, your Contribution Bonus rises to 3.0. You are now guaranteed $36,000 if you fall on hard times. Your benefit does not phase out until you earn $72,000, meaning even part-time work can make a meaningful difference in getting back on your feet.

The longer you support the system, the more secure your future becomes.

It’s about trust.

You contribute to your country knowing that it will be there for you in return — not just at retirement, and not only after tragedy. Whenever life throws you an unexpected challenge or opportunity, you have enough security to regroup, adapt, and move forward. That promise is what turns a safety net into the foundation of American prosperity.

One Program, Not Dozens

Government is very good at adding programs — and very bad at retiring them. New laws, new rules, and ever-expanding bureaucracy create complexity for its own sake, when the goal should always be simplicity and efficiency. We don’t need two dozen programs to do what one well-designed system can do better.

Under this system:

• Social Security For All replaces the Earned Income Tax Credit

• Federal and military pensions fold into Social Security

• Unemployment insurance becomes unnecessary — income loss is covered automatically

• SNAP, TANF, and housing assistance are replaced with cash that people can use for what they need most

• Disability benefits are handled by adjusting the Contribution Bonus higher

• Public and military service earn bonuses faster, rewarding service

• Child Tax Credits are converted into larger bonuses for people with dependents, ensuring help reaches those who need it most

No micromanagement. No endless paperwork. Just one system with one goal: ensuring no one falls below a basic standard of living while rewarding those who carry the system forward.

The Bottom Line

Making sure every American can meet their basic needs does not cost more than what we already spend. Doing so rewards us with less bureaucracy, less waste, and a system that addresses the root causes of hardship instead of reacting after the damage is done.

A society that expects people to stand on their own must give them something solid to stand on. We already have the money.

The only thing missing is the will to fix a system that no longer works.

A fair shot.
That’s all most people are asking for — a fair shot at the American Dream.

They aren’t asking to become billionaires or for free handouts. They’re asking for something far more modest: the ability to afford a home, raise a family, take an occasional vacation, and retire with dignity after a lifetime of honest work.

That promise once defined America.
It no longer does.

Today, inequality grows while wages stagnate. Poverty persists even among people who work full-time. Debt hangs over millions, waiting to trap anyone who gets sick, loses a job, or falls behind. CEOs now earn more in minutes than many workers will earn in their entire lives, and more than 750,000 Americans are homeless while over 15 million homes sit vacant — kept empty to preserve profits rather than house people.

This didn’t happen by accident.

Over decades, political decisions hollowed out labor power, rewrote tax rules to favor the wealthy, and turned basic necessities into profit centers. Culture wars were deliberately inflamed to distract from the reality that the economy increasingly works for those at the top — and against everyone else.

Instead of confronting that reality, we blame the poor for being poor. We scrutinize how someone spends six dollars in food assistance while ignoring rampant waste, fraud, and abuse in trillion-dollar budgets. We demand “personal responsibility” from workers while excusing corporate greed, monopoly power, and systemic exploitation.

Nowhere is this clearer than in how we spend our money.

In 2025, the U.S. defense budget was $850 billion. It rose to $1 trillion in 2026, and the president is now pushing for $1.5 trillion in 2027. Meanwhile, extending healthcare subsidies for 20 million Americans costs roughly $25 billion per year. Free school lunches for all children cost about $11 billion. Housing the homeless costs roughly $10 billion. A federal paid parental leave program would cost between $10 and $20 billion annually. Even fully free college tuition would cost around $75 billion per year.

Together, these programs cost less than the most recent defense budget increase — and only a fraction of what is now being proposed.

So when people ask, “How are we going to pay for it?” the honest answer is simple: with the budget we already have.

Budgets are moral documents. They reveal priorities. When a government cuts food assistance and healthcare, slashes taxes for billionaires, and expands military spending, it isn’t managing an inevitability — it’s making a choice.

We could dramatically reduce poverty, ensure healthcare for all, expand access to housing, and create real opportunity through education and job training today without spending more overall. Life does not need to be this hard.

There is nothing wrong with success. If you’ve made it, congratulations. But when a CEO increases their wealth by millions of dollars every hour while employees rely on food assistance to survive — and pay a higher effective tax rate than that CEO — something is deeply broken.

After working for forty years, Americans are told retirement must be delayed because Social Security is “running out of money.” Yet a firefighter pays a payroll tax rate dozens of times higher than a billionaire, while that billionaire deducts private jets and yachts as business expenses.

Corporations spent more than $400 million last year fighting unionization, while nearly half of all full-time workers still do not earn a livable wage. The federal minimum wage remains $7.25 — unchanged for fifteen years — as families are forced to rely on credit cards and buy-now-pay-later loans just to survive. Total credit-card debt now exceeds $1.1 trillion.

At the same time, corporations spend over $4 billion each year lobbying Congress — more than sixty times what is spent advocating for workers. That influence shapes policy, weakens enforcement, enables monopolies, and even eliminates public services. It’s why companies like H&R Block and TurboTax successfully lobbied to shut down a free government tax-filing system, forcing Americans to keep paying private firms to do something the government should provide in the first place.

This cannot continue.

The middle class is being hollowed out. The working class is surviving on debt and assistance. The economy is increasingly propped up by luxury consumption at the top rather than stability at the bottom.

The solution isn’t radical. It’s foundational.

A society that expects people to stand on their own must give them something solid to stand on. Fair wages for honest work. Public investments that expand opportunity instead of debt. Economic security that makes independence possible.

None of this requires drastic increases in spending. It requires choosing people over profit, stability over scarcity, and the future over short-term gain. The question isn’t whether we can afford to give everyone a fair shot — it’s whether we’re willing to.

Today in Minneapolis, ICE agents exited their vehicles to approach the stopped car of a 37-year-old woman. Videos recorded by bystanders did not show her posing an immediate threat to them.

The woman backed her vehicle up, then appeared to turn it away from officers and attempted to leave the scene. One agent tried to force open the driver’s side door. Another agent fired at least two shots — one at the front of the vehicle and at least one more through the driver’s side window. She was struck in the head and died at the scene.

The Department of Homeland Security quickly released a statement in an apparent effort to control the narrative:

“Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.

An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots.

He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers.

The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries.

This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.

This is an evolving situation, and we will give the public more information as soon as it becomes available.”

President Trump echoed this account, claiming that a woman screaming during the incident was a paid agitator, that the driver had “run over” an ICE agent, and that the incident was the fault of the radical left.

The problem for DHS and Trump is that multiple people filmed the entire encounter.

What those videos show is starkly different:

• There were no rioters.

• Reviewing multiple recordings, the driver appears to turn the vehicle away from agents rather than toward them, undermining DHS’s claim that officers were under immediate threat.

• No footage shows any agents injured. The agent who fired the shots remains upright and moves unimpeded immediately afterward.

• The woman was killed during the encounter — an outcome now under investigation amid serious questions about the agent’s use of force.

This incident fits a broader pattern. ICE has increasingly engaged in what can only be described as thuggish behavior, including repeated cases in which agents fired on vehicles under circumstances later undermined by recorded evidence. In multiple documented instances, DHS issued rapid public statements that failed to align with what cameras later revealed.

In October of last year, Border Patrol agents claimed that Marimar Martinez attempted to ram their vehicle, resulting in Martinez being shot multiple times. DHS described the incident this way:

“After striking the agents’ vehicle, the defendants’ vehicles boxed in the agents’ vehicle, the complaint states. The agent was unable to move his vehicle and exited the car, at which point he fired approximately five shots from his service weapon at Martinez, the complaint states.”

Body-camera footage described in court filings told a different story. The video showed Border Patrol agents turning their vehicle toward Martinez’s car, contradicting claims that she initiated the collision — a discrepancy so significant that federal prosecutors later dropped the charges. After the shooting, the officer involved sent a message to colleagues that read: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”

In another vehicle-related incident, ICE agents approached Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez shortly after he dropped his 3-year-old son off at daycare. The agents were not wearing body cameras, but nearby surveillance footage captured the encounter, and responding local police officers later recorded body-camera video.

DHS claimed:

“ICE officers conducted a vehicle stop to arrest Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. He refused to follow law enforcement’s commands and drove his car at law enforcement officers. One of the ICE officers was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.”

Surveillance footage and police body-camera video later raised serious questions about that account. Officers parked at an angle in front of Gonzalez’s vehicle and approached from both sides. As in the Minneapolis case, they attempted to force open his door. Gonzalez backed up slightly. An officer reached into the partially open driver’s window, and when Gonzalez drove forward, the officer was pulled with him. Two shots were fired, and Gonzalez was killed.

Contrary to DHS’s statement, police body-camera footage recorded after the shooting shows the officer saying he had been “dragged a little bit” and that his injuries were “nothing major.”

Law-enforcement experts cited by NBC News have described these tactics as reckless. Officers are trained not to block vehicles at angles and never to reach into moving cars precisely because doing so can result in being dragged or seriously injured.

ICE agents’ tactics repeatedly escalate encounters instead of de-escalating them, undermining the basic purpose of law enforcement: community safety. Firing on fleeing vehicles turns those cars into uncontrolled hazards that can injure or kill bystanders.

Axios has documented a broader pattern of false or misleading DHS statements, linking video evidence and court records that later contradicted official claims. Among them:

• DHS commander Greg Bovino initially claimed he was struck by a rock before deploying tear gas; he later admitted he was hit after throwing the gas.

• DHS alleged protesters were firing artillery-style fireworks at agents; body-camera footage showed the explosions came from DHS flashbang grenades.

• Protester Cole Sheridan was charged with assaulting Bovino, only for video to later show that Sheridan was the one assaulted; the charges were dropped.

Axios identified 12 DHS claims during a single operation that were later contradicted by video or court findings. Reporting on other DHS operations has uncovered similar discrepancies.

This pattern of aggressive federal policing reflects leadership that has repeatedly endorsed violence as a political tool. Trump deployed the National Guard in multiple cities as a form of intimidation. During his first presidency, reports emerged that he asked why immigrants crossing the border couldn’t be shot in the legs. In response to the George Floyd protests, he declared, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Former officials, including Mark Esper, have said Trump questioned why protesters could not simply be shot. And when he lost the election, he incited supporters to attack the Capitol.

This is what the early stages of tyranny look like. If it is not confronted loudly and unwaveringly, the United States risks beginning to resemble authoritarian systems like Russia — where violence is used against dissenters and elections are manipulated to maintain power.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chicago-woman-shot-border-patrol-marimar-martinez-charges-dismissed-rcna244979

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/09/28/ice-officers-chicago-shooting-dhs-video/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/federal-prosecutors-ask-court-drop-indictment-woman-shot-during-deportation-2025-11-20/

https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2025/12/08/dhs-claims-contradicted-video-court

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/02/trump-call-violence-presidency

This isn’t about drugs or saving American lives. It isn’t about sham elections or upholding democracy. It is about the control of natural resources, a common theme in Trump’s global bullying.

It Was Never About Drugs

Contrary to the ongoing narrative by the Trump administration as they excuse away the murder of over 115 people on boats off the coast of Venezuela, this isn’t about drugs. Venezuela does not traffic in fentanyl, the leading cause of overdose deaths in the US.

Fentanyl is manufactured by Mexican drug cartels using chemicals from China and is smuggled across the border primarily by US citizens. Yet the US didn’t launch attacks against Mexican cartels or the Chinese factories producing precursor chemicals; it attacked Venezuela.

An investigation conducted by New York Times journalists of the wreckage of one of the earliest strikes against boats near Venezuela found no trace of fentanyl, only what appeared to be marijuana, a drug legal in 40 of the 50 US states.

It also doesn’t take a dozen warships, amphibious assault vehicles, spy planes, bombers, F-35 fighter jets, Osprey transport aircraft, helicopters, and 15,000 troops to fight drug smugglers. Those are the forces used to run blockades, conduct tactical strikes, or invade.

It Isn’t About Democracy

Last night, those forces conducted a military operation around Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, with at least seven blasts reported. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife had been living on a military base where US forces descended in a rapid assault to capture the leader and whisk him away to the USS Iwo Jima, which is now on its way back to the US.

While the US government is still putting out messages about Maduro being a narco-terrorist, one of the supporting arguments is that Maduro is the illegitimate President due to corruption during the last election. Much of the world has long agreed that the previous Venezuelan election was a sham and that Maduro should not hold power, but that doesn’t create justification for a military operation into a sovereign nation to abduct its leader, without congressional or UN approval.

If a sham election is enough justification for an attack, why hasn’t the United States launched an operation into Moscow to apprehend Vladimir Putin, who has rigged numerous elections and committed atrocious war crimes? Instead, Trump invited Putin to US soil and had US military forces down on their knees to roll out a red carpet for the tyrant. Kim Jong Un is another brutal authoritarian leader who violently cracks down on any dissent in North Korea and does not allow his people to freely vote for new leaders. America hasn’t sent forces into Pyongyang to dispose of North Korea’s regime. Instead, Trump has praised Kim for ruling with an iron fist.

It Is About Natural Resources

When you wash away the lies about America’s attacks on Venezuela, you’re left with the fact that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on the planet, and Trump wants the US to control them. That is also why the US began seizing oil tankers near Venezuela, with Trump’s excuse that Venezuela somehow stole its own oil from America.

US oil companies used to dominate Venezuela's oil reserves until the mid-1970s, when then-President Perez nationalized its oil industry, pushing many companies out. Some US companies remained, although more were pushed out in the early 2000s, leaving only Chevron, which had agreed to renegotiations that left it with a minority stake in a few projects.

Trump has been focused on securing US control of natural resources around the globe since he returned to office. Soon after taking office, Trump began pushing Ukraine toward a joint venture with the US to mine its vast rare-earth elements, including one of the world’s largest lithium deposits, an element used in modern batteries, if Ukraine wanted to continue to receive US support to fight off the Russian invasion.

After increasing tensions with Saudi Arabia, including threats to impose tariffs or block oil imports from the nation, Trump walked away with a deal under which the American company MP Materials, whose largest shareholder is the US government, will control half of Saudi Arabia's rare-earth refineries.

Trump has routinely talked about taking over Greenland, even though the nation has no interest in being American and is a territory of Denmark, a NATO ally. There are two reasons Trump wants control of Greenland. The first is that its location provides a key strategic position for ships traveling through the Arctic, a standard shipping and military transportation route. America has had a strategic agreement with Greenland since 1951, allowing the US to maintain bases in the country and to travel freely between them. The other reason is that Greenland has several large deposits of critical rare-earth minerals.

Why Focus on Natural Resources

While the world is shifting to renewable energy sources, oil is still king. America is already the largest producer of oil and one of the largest exporters, along with Saudi Arabia and Russia, but OPEC+ remains a significant influencer of world oil prices. Controlling Venezuela’s vast oil reserves will tilt the balance of power more toward the US.

China controls 70% of the world’s rare-earth mineral mining and 90% of refining and production. That means all countries that produce high-tech products rely heavily on China. There is now a scramble to develop new sources of rare-earth minerals and establish production outside China. America wants control of those supplies.

America has its own large reserves of rare earth minerals, but they remain largely untouched, and we lack the facilities to process what we do mine, meaning that we ship what we dig up to other countries. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that China undercut processing prices for decades, which drove US companies out of the market. The second is that opening a new mine in the US takes decades. The permitting process alone can take up to 10 years compared to 2 years in peer nations like Canada and Australia.

The US is looking to close this gap on rare earth mineral mining, refining, and production by utilizing the Defense Production Act to spur American development, and, as has become clear with Venezuela, by returning to imperialism to take what we want by using our massive military and economic power to bully or even attack smaller countries.

A far cry from the inward turn of isolationism that Trump had campaigned on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/world/americas/trump-boat-strikes-gulf-of-venezuela-wreckage.html

https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-us-explosions-caracas-ca712a67aaefc30b1831f5bf0b50665e

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-and-mbs-unveil-u-s-saudi-ventures-on-rare-earth-minerals-and-nuclear-energy

https://www.cfr.org/article/us-critical-minerals-dilemma-what-know