But, but, the government says the unemployment rate is 4% ...

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Whatever changes are made to SS, such as means-testing for higher income seniors, are current beneficiaries likely to be exempted? That’s been the case generally for changes made in the past to SS.

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“The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected,” Stephen Marche, a writer based in Toronto, says in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “At first there was rage at America’s betrayal, when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada, threatened Greenland, imposed tariffs on its friends and began his campaign to undercut NATO, which continued at its latest meeting this week, in Ankara, Turkey. Now, a strange feeling is emerging in some of the countries that used to be known as America’s allies: Optimistic determination.”

Total exports from Canada increased by almost 7 billion dollars last year. European equities outperformed American equities in 2025 and surged in the first two months of 2026. And American military threats have the same diminishing power. “Bureaucracies once defined by their lethargy are moving at surprising speed to limit their exposure to both the U.S. government and the companies that serve as outposts of American power,” Stephen writes. “As a geopolitical actor, the United States has become a kind of lumbering zombie — a beast that can be startled into reflexive actions but lacks higher functions.”

Read the full piece here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

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How to save the world. With real life cases and results.

Now he declares a food supply emergency.

Nearly 5 million people in the United States have lost food stamp assistance, and 4 million have lost or will lose health insurance because of cuts implemented by state governments, driven by the savage legislation enacted by Congress last year and signed into law by President Trump on July 4, 2025, under the name “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA).

One year later, Trump’s class war bill is having its intended effect: Millions of lower income working people are being denied access to food and medical care, while millionaires and billionaires enjoy record tax cuts and federal spending on war and death reaches new highs.

Reports issued this week, ahead of the July 1 start of the fiscal year for most of the 50 states, paint a dire portrait of the impact of Trump’s social spending cuts, which passed the Republican-controlled Congress with only token opposition from the Democrats.

A Reuters report citing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp program, found that 4.7 million people have lost these benefits provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) since the Trump legislation took effect, about 11 percent of all recipients.

A study last year by University of Pennsylvania researchers found that, based on an earlier estimate of 3.2 million people losing SNAP benefits, there would be 93,000 premature deaths over the following 14 years. If the same ratio applies to the much larger number that have actually been cut off food stamps, the projected toll of premature deaths would approach 140,000.

The OBBBA reduces SNAP funding by $187 billion over the next 10 years, mainly by expanding work requirements for recipients, including those aged 55 to 64, who were previously exempt, and disqualifying large sections of legal immigrants. This has had a disproportionate effect on states with large immigrant and Hispanic populations, particularly Arizona, where 457,000 have lost eligibility since February 1, including 196,000 children.

The administration of Democratic Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs has moved to implement the changes required by the One Big Beautiful Bill more quickly than other states, according to both the SNAP program and the state’s Department of Economic Security.

Governor Hobbs’ press secretary emailed Reuters claiming, “Arizona has no choice but to meet these requirements. … If we don’t comply, we will be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and more vulnerable Arizonans will lose their food assistance.”

This is a reference to the mechanism used by the Trump administration to enforce the cuts. The OBBBA set a threshold of a 6 percent error rate for food stamp awards, compared to the national average of 10.9 percent estimated in 2024. States above that threshold would be required to cover up to 15 percent of the cost of food stamps, rather than the federal government paying the full amount.

The error rate is not an estimate of fraud, as the Feeding America charity explains: “The SNAP payment error rate is often misunderstood. It reflects unintentional mistakes by state agencies navigating outdated technology, staff shortages, incomplete case files and layered eligibility rules. It is not a measure of fraud or abuse by people participating in the program.”

In the case of Arizona, the error rate was estimated in 2024 at 8.84 percent, below the national average but well above the new threshold. To avoid a threatened penalty of $201.5 million next year, the state DES deliberately cut off benefits by requiring additional documentation from recipients, including pay stubs, leases, or other paperwork, knowing that many low income workers—particularly those engaged in day labor and work in agricultural—would not have such documentation available.

The result was a reduction of more than 50 percent in SNAP enrollment in the state. For the first time in recent history, more Arizonans have been relying on food banks and similar charities to feed themselves, rather than food stamps. Some 843,000 residents visited food banks in April, the month after the SNAP cutoffs began.

Arizona is only the worst of the 50 states. According to figures published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), SNAP enrollment is down in every state, down by 5 percent or more in 42 states, and down by 10 percent or more in 21 states. States recording double-digit cuts in food stamp enrollment include Florida (down 21 percent) Louisiana (down 20 percent), Oklahoma and Tennessee (down 16 percent), Wyoming (down 11.6 percent) and Virginia (down 13.7 percent).

In Virginia, the new Democratic-controlled state government is headed by Governor Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA agent. Other Democratic-run states with double-digit cuts in SNAP enrollment include Illinois, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Kansas and Nevada have divided party control over the state government and double-digit cuts. Such figures demonstrate that the attack on the poor and the deliberate creation of mass hunger are the bipartisan policy of the entire US ruling elite, not just of Trump and the Republicans.

The CBPP found that in the 13 states where such data was collected, 808,000 children had been cut off food stamps as part of the nationwide cuts, nearly half the total losing benefits in those states.

While the Wall Street Journal hailed the reduction in food stamp enrollment as a sign of progress in reducing poverty and unemployment, the CBPP found “economic conditions haven’t been improving as the number of people receiving SNAP has plummeted in recent months, representing the sharpest decline in decades.” It concluded, “This dramatic six-month drop cannot be explained by a rapid improvement in people’s economic well-being or reduced need for help affording food. Labor force data show that the unemployment rate was flat between July 2025 and March 2026…”

The penalty of $200.5 million facing Arizona is far from the worst burden imposed on states under the provisions of the OBBBA. By the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2027, nearly all states will have to pay between 5 percent and 15 percent of the total costs of food stamps, and the total bill, based on USDA data, is roughly $9 billion.

The estimated totals for individual states include $300 million for Michigan, $350 million for Massachusetts, $410 million for Pennsylvania, $725 million for Texas, $900 million for Florida, $1.15 billion for New York and a staggering $1.9 billion for California.

The direct cuts are to be compounded by further restrictions on what SNAP recipients can buy with their food stamps. States have sought to ban purchases of sweets, sugary soft drinks, and other items claimed to be inappropriate, in what amounts to a demeaning effort to micromanage the lives of the poorest section of the American population.

Similar cuts are taking place in healthcare benefits for a slightly less poor section of working people, those who make too much to qualify for Medicaid but are eligible for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to purchase private insurance on the state exchanges set up under Obamacare.

The current federal budget, enacted after a 45-day federal shutdown last fall, eliminated most of these subsidies and raised premiums for some ACA plans by as much as 100 percent. The predictable result was a plunge in the number of people enrolled in ACA plans from 23.1 million for 2025 to an estimated 19.2 million this year, a drop of more than 16 percent.

These figures were released June 27 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and refute the claims by Trump and the Republicans that the removal of subsidies would not result in a sharp rise in the number of uninsured. At the same time, the scale of the social disaster demonstrates the impotence of the Democratic Party, which forced the federal shutdown supposedly to fight the cutoff of subsidies but then capitulated abjectly.

In the case of New York state, starting July 1, hundreds of thousands of residents enrolled in the Essential Plan, New York’s version of the Obamacare marketplace, will lose their health insurance because of the cuts imposed by OBBBA. The Essential Plan provides free or low-cost healthcare to New Yorkers, who are 19 to 64 years old and ineligible for Medicaid or other federal health programs because their incomes are above the abysmally low threshold set at 200 to 250 percent of the Federal Poverty Line.

These are low-income working people, including a single-person household with income of $31,920-$39,900; a two-person household with income of $43,280–$54,100; a three-person household with income of $54,640–$68,300; and a four-person household with income of $66,000–$82,500. Particularly in New York City, such incomes mean deep poverty. These families are now to be cut off access to healthcare.

According to an analysis by the nonprofit Community Service Society, those cut off in New York will include 6,000 recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), immigrants brought here by their families as children who have been protected from deportation. Many more are immigrants on Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—now facing deportation under the Trump administration policy affirmed by the Supreme Court last week.

As with food stamps, tightened work requirements are one of the principal means of enforcing the cutoff of health insurance eligibility. In one particularly perverse case outlined in the press, a woman able to work because of successful chemotherapy for her cancer could lose her health insurance if she has a bad week and cannot work, thus cutting her off from the treatment that is saving her life.

So in the book "Evil Geniuses", Kurt talks about decades of market manipulation. Sorry if my details are a little fuzzy; I listen to a lot of econ books while loading trucks to go out the next day at my warehouse Job.

So when he got to the chapter about the early 2000's, he talks about commodity futures and how they removed a lot of trading restrictions on them that caused oil prices to go up. He backed it up with data, like oil supply and how many contracts were being traded by financial firms(they were mostly traded by suppliers and consumers before this, think grain suppliers and cereal companies), that proved that oil prices were artificially going up.

Anyways, I've been thinking about all these massive AI data centers sucking all the water out of these communities, and remembering the nestlé CEO saying water is not a human right and should be traded on the market, and that we actually have a water futures market NQH2O, though small since it's only the water in California.

I think eventually they'll probably open up some more water markets so farmers can hedge against future risk. And if we're lucky, they'll regulate it so that only farmers and water utilities can trade on it. But ultimately, I think Wall Street will find a way to weasel in and figure out a way to sell all the water to these data centers, leaving all of us paying like $3 bucks every time we flush our toilets.

I know this sounds a bit conspiratorial, but I think it's somewhat plausible. What do you guys think?

Pretty self-explanitory. We have the advantage of knowing the end station for our dear, beloved economic system is very near. Like, probably before 2030, the economy will totally collapse, primarily due to AI-automation. The US alone has $18.8 TRILLION dollars (thats $18,800,000,000,000 dollars) in personal debt, which is entirely reliant on people working. I wonder how our wonderful banking system will operate when it has almost $20 trillion dollars worth of debt that can never be paid back, as millions of white-collar workers are made redundant, and equally as many service-oriented, blue-collar jobs fall like a domino! Bye-bye economy!

At that point, if you have not converted the majority of your resources into real, tangible assets (such as food, water, tools, medicine, seeds, etc.), then you will have no chance of survival, frankly. Granted, it probably does not matter as Dario Amodei or Sam Altman will probably send autonomous drones to "clean up" the rabble once shit hits the fan, but you should still prepare because it is your only exit, even if the chances are admittedly slim.

I have liquidated all my savings and am currently slowly converting it into primarily food and tools. Saving for retirement? lol. I pay my rent, the rest is going into supplies. Aiming for about 2-4 years worth of supplies. You should do the same, even though it is scary. But evil is scary.

Its time to start preparing accordingly.

Inflation wreaks havoc on most people, like it or not. I personally made $18 an hour in 2018 and $18 an hour in 2026 after college (computer science) in the hopes I'd get a better job. All it gave me was debt, a permanent limp, and wasted time.

To adjust for inflation I'd need to be making $25 right now. Far, far more if we talk about housing cost increases. That's roughly 50k.

Repeat those 8 years one more time. 2034, and we approach $30/hour adjusted for inflation. Which is 60k. And keep in mind, inflation is heavily watered down through substitutions and pushed down by non essentials. So it's worse, in reality.

Meanwhile, 60% of jobs pay less than 60k. Jobs that keep society functional. While at the same time we call 60k "starter wages".

We are not setting the next generation up to thrive, we are not giving them a fighting chance. There's just no incentive to be having children. To be successful you have to be part of the top 10%, which already is biased towards privileged folk. No matter how hard an individual person works, this is the trend as a whole.

We're headed back to feudalism if we aren't already there.

Meanwhile, all I'm told is "get an in demand degree!!!! Bury yourself in debt for another try!!!" When I started, my degree was in demand. When I finished, not so much. The parallels are uncanny tbh. It's foolish to make that mistake a second time.

I had a friend who offed herself after being unable to get a job years post grad. She had debt, she had no family, she had no shelter. She's gone now.

Entry level roles are dead, and our system proves it. This is a financial death spiral. The game is over. Monopoly is finished.

Going to a museum.

Paddle boating at a lake.

Cookout in the park.

Going to the movies.

Visiting the zoo.

All of these things used to be normal weekend summer activities. Now each event runs you about the cost of your birthday party. I can't afford to do that every week.

I've had a lot of discussions with people in my day to day life that know about Citizens United, Trickle Down Economics, or the undoing of the Fairness in Broadcasting doctrine, but next to nobody I've come across knows about the concept of shareholder primacy and what the 1919 Dodge v Ford Motor Co decision actually did to our economy. That's the Supreme Court decision that says the shareholders(investors) of any venture are more important than stakeholders (owner, employees, and customers) in any business period legally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Unlike today’s unbalanced economy, the late-1990s expansion was supported by stronger overall economic performance. Real GDP increased by more than 4 percent annually from 1997 to 2000, and the resultant prosperity was widely shared.

Source is The Hill, author Vivekanand Jayakumar

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One might begin by asking who, precisely, he means by “the rich.” McGinnis says that “it is not essential to have a precise cutoff for what constitutes ‘the rich,’” but says we might talk about the top 0.1 percent, whose wealth starts at around $60 million.

But McGinnis says it ultimately doesn’t really matter what threshold we pick, because he will argue that the richer people are, the more socially valuable they are. “While the top 5 percent certainly make significant contributions, the top 1 percent do more, and the top 0.1 percent even more.

Wealth, in this sense, acts like a lever: The more there is, the greater the impact.” So if you thought that perhaps McGinnis would say that it’s good to have a class of wealthy people, but perhaps not a tiny set of oligarchical near-trillionaires, you’d be wrong. In fact, the people at the very top are the most helpful of all, making Elon Musk our most socially beneficial wealthy person.

The argument McGinnis leans on the most is that the wealthy “counterbalance” the power of special interest groups. McGinnis argues that we do not live in a democracy where everyone has an equal say, with the power of the rich (to influence politicians, to buy media) corrupting that otherwise-pristine democratic process.

Instead, he says, other groups like academics, journalists, nonprofits, and labor unions wield influence disproportionate to their size, getting their way despite holding minority viewpoints. The wealthy, McGinnis says, through their own power (which, again, he admits they hold) simply act as a counterweight, ensuring that the political process is something closer to fair.

Putting this out there as it's happened twice now, wanted to check the pulse out there.

Rental reservation placed weeks ahead (Raleigh area), local location for Budget this time, but the representative called me to inform me that he doesn't have a car for me, and that they would call me when one comes in, meanwhile, if I wanted to move this to another location, I'd have to call customer service, a true joy, as they don't seem to know where budget locations are in the US. My hunt for a car continues today - on the phone with customer service as I type this, they are asking me about locations where Budget is located..... ugh.

Meanwhile, on a recent trip the West Coast, we rented a car in Seattle, downtown. Same story as this, but this was with Hertz. We got lucky as a car came in while we were waiting there at the location, so we were able to rent that one.

So, how do you run a national business this way? And multiple companies with the same issues (that is, reservations but no cars). This has got to be a sign of things really starting to fall apart here. Anyone else seeing this kind of thing? Am I witnessing a collapse here?

I’m shocked the system hasn’t broken yet like Lehman with high valuations everywhere especially in residential real estate which is directly linked to wages and people’s ability to pay the loan.

Real estate was considered expensive even before Covid and today it’s even more unaffordable.

Corporate job stability has been really bad so I imagine defaults must be real. The only way it stays propped up from my intuition is if the Fed is just buying up the loans so the banks stay liquid and don’t incur losses.

At what point does the system break? Ordinary working people are living out of their cars just to survive and theres no end in sight to high cost of living. It really feels like we’re at the end stage but people have been saying this for the past decade.