The Great American Strip-Mining: How the Fed and Political Class Are Bleeding the Middle Class Dry

ACT I: The Theater of Monetary Lies Forget the media soap opera of “Trump vs. Powell.” The two are locked in a kabuki act worthy of Nixon and Burns back in the early '70s—another tragic chapter in America's long-running farce of monetary independence. The central bank postures like a stern guardian of sound money, while quietly handing out more candy to Wall Street every time the lights dim. At this year’s Jackson Hole Monetary Bacchanalia—where the unelected elites of the Fed gather to toast their failures—Powell dared to describe current monetary policy as “restrictive.” Then, with the other side of his mouth, he muttered about “adjusting the stance” due to “risks.” Translation: Prepare for another injection of counterfeit capital. And just like that, the odds of a September rate cut jumped to 81% overnight. The so-called “market” responded like a trained seal. But here’s the truth: It doesn’t matter whether Powell cuts rates this month or next. He’s already lost the plot—and the inflation genie isn’t going back in the bottle. ACT II: The Money Flood and the Everything Bubble Let’s talk numbers—the kind that actually matter. CAPE Ratio? Back near dot-com bubble levels. Margin debt? All-time high. Junk bond spreads? Tighter than a noose, rewarding idiocy with cheap capital. Treasury yields? Functionally zero after inflation. Uncle Sam is printing garbage, and the world is buying it out of habit and fear. And what does this financial orgy mean for the average American? It means they can’t afford a damn thing. Home-price-to-income ratio: 7.5x – highest in history. Average first-time homebuyer age: 38 – a full decade older than in 1985. Median family savings: $8,000 – barely enough for a transmission repair, let alone a retirement. While asset holders get rich off fake money, the bottom 80% are being evicted from the American Dream—one mortgage rejection and grocery bill at a time. ACT III: Inflation is the Tax That Doesn’t Ask Permission The media plays dumb. The Fed pretends inflation is “transitory,” then “sticky,” then “moderating.” But CPI has been above target for five straight years. And that’s the watered-down, politically whitewashed CPI. Reality is worse: Eggs: +6.8% annually Beef: +5.0% Health insurance: +5.0% Rent: +4.1% Home prices: +4.2% All while real wages crawl along at a pathetic 0.7% growth per year. Inflation isn’t some mystical economic phenomenon. It’s theft. A silent tax. And it always hits the middle class hardest—those who earn too much for government handouts, but too little to play the asset game. You’re not crazy for feeling like you’re falling behind. You’re just watching your purchasing power disintegrate, one central bank press release at a time. ACT IV: The Leverage Trap With saving impossible, Americans are borrowing just to tread water. And the system encourages it. When debt is cheap and your money buys less every year, you either go into the casino or you starve. What follows is financial suicide at scale: Mom-and-pop investors throwing life savings into “syndicated” apartment deals—only to see their equity wiped out by rising interest rates. Retail speculators YOLOing into tech stocks or crypto on margin, praying to catch a bull wave that never comes. Families mortgaging their future for one final vacation while hoping the car doesn’t break down next month. There are no bailouts for these people. No “systemic risk” labels for Joe Sixpack. When these people lose everything, it’s called “market forces.” When BlackRock loses, it’s called a national emergency. ACT V: The Long, Slow Robbery Let’s dispense with the fantasy that a collapse is coming. The collapse is already here. It’s not a stock market crash. It’s not a Lehman Brothers redux. It’s a decades-long attrition war against the American middle class. And it’s being waged not with tanks, but with spreadsheets, interest rate policy, and semantic gymnastics. This is what the end of an empire really looks like: not fire and fury, but inflated grocery bills, $2,500 rent for 800 square feet, and a childless 40-year-old couple living paycheck to paycheck in a house they don’t own. And what rises in its place? A parasitic surveillance state A banking cartel tied at the hip to federal deficit junkies A culture that mocks thrift and reveres leverage A populace sedated with screens, meds, and false hope This isn’t a mistake. It’s the design. ACT VI: Britain Shows the Future Remember Britain? Once the industrial powerhouse of the globe? Now a servile bureaucratic husk, endlessly wrangling over energy rationing and speech laws? America is Britain, just 30 years behind. The middle class is being bled out not with a sword, but with a spreadsheet and a smirk. And the Fed is complicit. Every rate cut, every liquidity injection, every inflationary policy benefits the same crowd: the asset rich, the debt-addicted state, and the globalist financiers with zero loyalty to any flag. FINAL ACT: It’s Not Coming. It’s Here. The scouring of the middle class is not theoretical. It’s visible. Tangible. Palpable. It’s the 35-year-old man delivering Uber Eats with a bachelor’s in finance. It’s the woman working two jobs just to afford childcare. It’s the married couple living in an 800 sq. ft. apartment waiting for a housing crash that may never come. It’s you, wondering how we got here while politicians and Fed chairs lie to your face with a smile. And the worst part? It was all preventable. It was all intentional. Call It What It Is This is a controlled demolition of the middle class to benefit the political and financial aristocracy. It is the ultimate Ponzi scheme—where your labor funds their bonuses, your taxes service their debts, and your children inherit nothing but inflated dollars and broken promises. It’s time to stop calling this incompetence. It’s economic warfare.

The Great American Strip-Mining: How the Fed and Political Class Are Bleeding the Middle Class Dry

Bill Brocius Sep 16

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