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Some people are cheering like Canada just won something. Dr. Ian Lee just explained why that cheer is expensive. The new 50 percent hit is a slice of the economy. About five percent of what we sell south. That slice still gets crushed. No American buyer pays a 50...

54,387 views • 7 days ago •via X (Twitter)

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Nine percent of Americans have confidence in Congress. Sixty-seven percent have confidence in small business. That gap is the whole story, and it has nothing to do with left and right. Look at who Americans still trust. Small business at 67. The military at 61. The police at 45. Every one of them builds something or protects someone. A small business makes a product and dies if nobody wants it. A soldier defends a country. A cop shows up when you call. They get judged on whether the job actually got done. Now look at the bottom. Congress at 9. Television news at 14. Newspapers at 17. One defrauds you. The other lies to you about it. Neither builds anything. Neither protects anyone. And neither one is ever punished for being wrong. That is not an opinion. Here is what Congress presides over. The GAO estimates the federal government loses between 233 and 521 billion dollars every single year to fraud. Not waste. Fraud. Improper payments have hit roughly 3 trillion dollars since 2003. Last year alone was 186 billion. Congress has not balanced a budget since 2001. Nine percent is not cynicism. It is an accurate grade. Gallup started asking this question in 1973, during Watergate, with a president on his way to resigning. Congress scored 42 percent that year. In 2014 it hit 7, the lowest reading Gallup has ever recorded for any American institution. Watergate was a scandal. This is a business model. The press sits right next to them for the same reason. Thirty-four percent of Americans say they have no trust in the news media at all. Twenty-eight percent say they have a great deal or a fair amount. Americans have not lost faith in their country. They still trust the man who fixes the engine. The sergeant. The woman who owns the shop. They stopped trusting the people who take from them and lie about where it went. That is not cynicism. That is a country that can still tell the difference.

Sovey

68,327 views • 1 month ago

Most people read the dollar exactly backwards. A rising dollar looks like strength. Strong America, good economy, the Fed doing its job. A falling dollar looks like weakness. Inflation, debasement, the end of dollar dominance. It is the other way around. A rising dollar usually means global funding is tightening. The world is short of dollars and scrambling to find them. That is not strength. That is stress. Think of a hurricane coming and everyone rushing to buy bottled water. The price spikes. That does not mean the water got stronger. It means people are scared and desperate. The dollar works the same way. When it surges against everything at once, it is telling you dollars are getting scarce, not that America is winning. That is why the dollar spikes in crises. The 1997 Asian crisis. 2008. The 2015 emerging market squeeze. March 2020. The 2024 carry trade blow up. The pattern is not random. None of this is really about the Fed or money printing. The dollar's exchange value is mechanical. It runs on the eurodollar system, the offshore dollar funding made of bank balance sheets, collateral, repo, and swaps. The biggest driver is dealer balance sheets. When dealers expand, dollars flow and the world feels calm. When they pull back, dollars get scarce and the dollar climbs. And this is the part everyone gets wrong. When foreign central banks sell US treasuries, the headlines scream that they are dumping America. They are not. They are using their reserves exactly as designed. When their markets are short of dollars, they sell treasuries to supply them. Sell treasuries, the dollar goes up. That is stress, not rejection. Which is why the dollar doom story keeps failing. They said QE would destroy the dollar after 2008. They said the deficits would collapse it. It never happened, because the problem was never too many dollars. It was not enough usable ones in the right places. So when someone tells you a strong dollar means America is strong, be careful. The strongest looking dollar is often the biggest warning sign. And a falling dollar is usually just the storm passing.

Jeffrey P. Snider

103,944 views • 2 months ago

Elon Musk just told you exactly how America avoids collapse. Thirty-five trillion dollars. That is not a talking point. It is a countdown. Every empire in history that hit this number did the same thing. It took what it needed by force. Musk: “And then she go full Genghis Khan. Which you can’t really do.” Conquest is off the table. Austerity is a fantasy. Politicians keep pretending you can fix a thirty-five trillion dollar wound with a line item. Trim a budget here. Raise a tax there. They are bailing out a sinking carrier with a coffee mug. So what happens when an empire cannot conquer and cannot cut its way to solvency? It dies. Every single time. No exceptions in four thousand years of recorded history. Unless it breaks the equation entirely. Musk: “I came to the conclusion that the only way to get us out of the debt crisis and to prevent America from going bankrupt is AI and robotics.” That is not a tech prediction. That is a survival diagnosis. He is not pitching a product. He is reading you the autopsy before the body drops. Human labor has a hard ceiling. A biological one. People sleep. People get sick. People age. Populations grow slowly. You cannot outrun thirty-five trillion dollars with bodies that need rest. The math will never close. Musk: “We need to grow the economy at a rate that allows us to pay off our debt.” That rate does not exist in a human-powered economy. It has never existed. No civilization in history has ever grown fast enough to outpace debt like this. Not with human hands. Not with human hours. Not with any policy ever written. So the only variable left to change is the labor itself. Replace the muscle with the machine. Replace the brain with compute. The ceiling vanishes. Production stops sleeping. Output costs collapse to the price of electricity. Growth goes from linear to vertical. That is not automation. That is the biggest economic reset since industrialization. The entire national conversation around AI has been wrong. They tell you robots are coming for your job. Musk is telling you the robots are the only reason your currency might still be worth something in twenty years. America is not building AI to replace the workforce. It is building AI because the alternative is becoming the first superpower in modern history to go bankrupt in peacetime. That is not an opinion. That is arithmetic.

Dustin

89,969 views • 4 months ago

Elon Musk just used a joke to perform an autopsy on the American economy. Two economists go for a hike. They find a pile of shit. One pays the other $100 to eat it. They keep walking. Find another pile. The second economist pays $100 back to eat that one. They stop. Neither man gained a dollar. Both ate shit for nothing. But on paper they just generated $200 in GDP. Musk: “That basically would count as a job. This is to illustrate the absurdity of economics.” That is not a punchline. That is the operating system of the federal government. Every time a politician celebrates “record job creation” this is what they are describing. Not output. Not value. Not progress. Motion. The entire bureaucratic machine exists to manufacture friction and then invoice for it. Compliance layers built to justify the next compliance layer. Oversight committees that produce nothing but the need for more oversight. Consulting firms hired to audit the work of other consulting firms. Trillions circulating through systems that have never produced a single thing you can hold in your hands. But the GDP number ticks up. So everyone applauds. The shit gets eaten. The scoreboard moves. Nobody asks what actually got built. This is why Washington treats AI like a five alarm fire. AI does not play the friction game. It does not form a committee. It does not schedule a review. It does not file 400 pages of paperwork no one will ever read. It just solves the problem. And that is the one thing the machine cannot survive. The government does not tax results. It taxes the process. The longer the process, the deeper the cut. AI compresses a ten day workflow into seconds. There is nothing left to bill. Nothing left to tax. Nothing left to skim. So they will spend the next decade warning you that AI threatens the economy. What they will never say is what it actually threatens. The illusion that activity equals progress. The $200 economy where both men ate shit and called it a job. The machines are not coming for your purpose. They are coming to prove that half the economy never had one.

Dustin

1,159,680 views • 4 months ago