For decades the media has repeated the same number like it’s gospel: The national debt number!
Today’s headline: “The national debt is about $39 trillion.” But is it really? Or are they all hiding the fact that this is all one giant fuckling ponzi scheme?
The Truth is:
That’s the number on the Treasury clock.
That’s the number politicians argue about.
That’s the number the financial media pretends is the full story.
But even establishment economists are starting to admit something most Americans were never meant to understand.
That number is a fantasy.
In a recent interview with Fortune, University of Pennsylvania economist Kent Smetters, who directs the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the real debt picture looks very different.
“What we call implicit obligations are twice the size of explicit obligations,” Smetters said.
Those implicit obligations are the promises buried inside programs like Social Security and Medicare.
If you count them, he argues, the real number is not $39 trillion.
It’s closer to $100 trillion.
And that’s coming from someone inside the system.
The reality is even worse.
The Official Debt Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg
The number politicians like to cite — roughly $39 trillion — is what economists call explicit debt.
That’s the money the federal government has legally borrowed through Treasury bonds and bills.
But the government has made massive promises it hasn’t funded.
These are called unfunded liabilities.
They include things like:
• Social Security benefits
• Medicare
• Veterans benefits
• Federal pensions
• Government healthcare commitments
These programs promise trillions in future payments with no money set aside to pay for them.
According to the Treasury’s own Financial Report of the United States Government, the 75-year unfunded shortfall is already over $73 trillion.
But that estimate only looks 75 years out.
Stretch the timeline further — which economists often do when measuring long-term obligations — and many fiscal analysts place the real number well above:
$200 trillion.
In other words, the $100 trillion estimate being discussed now may still be conservative. Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, a former advisor to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, has spent decades studying what he calls fiscal gap accounting.
His conclusion is far more alarming.
Kotlikoff has estimated the true long-term fiscal gap of the United States at roughly:
$220 trillion.
That figure represents the present value difference between all future government spending promises and expected revenue.
Kotlikoff has been blunt about what that means.
“The U.S. is bankrupt.”
His argument is simple.
When governments make promises they cannot fund, those promises are still real liabilities — even if politicians choose not to count them.
The Government’s Accounting Rules Were Designed to Hide It
Smetters says the real problem isn’t just the size of the debt.
It’s the way Washington hides it.
Federal accounting rules treat future entitlement promises differently from borrowed money. Politicians can promise trillions in benefits decades into the future, and those obligations never appear on the official debt ledger.
As Smetters explained:
“They reduced these explicit liabilities, but it actually increased implicit liabilities by even more.”
The result is a massive accounting trick.
Politicians shift obligations from the column the public sees to the column that stays hidden.
Smetters calls it a “shell game.”
But let’s be honest about what it actually is.
It’s a Ponzi system run by the government.
Social Security Is the Center of the House of Cards
Social Security operates on what’s called a pay-as-you-go system.
That means the money coming out today is funded by workers paying into the system today.
It was designed in the 1930s when there were over 40 workers supporting every retiree.
Today there are about 2.8 workers per retiree.
And that number keeps dropping.
The Social Security trust fund is now projected to be depleted around 2032.
At that point, by law, benefits would automatically drop to about 84% of promised payments unless Congress intervenes.
Politicians know this.
They also know voters would revolt if they admitted how broken the system really is.
So they kick the can down the road and hope someone else deals with the fallout.
Most “Rich People” Aren’t Rich the Way You Think
Here’s another piece of the puzzle most Americans never understand.
The wealthy operate under an entirely different financial system.
Average people live off income.
They work.
They earn money.
They pay taxes on it.
The wealthy live off debt.
Instead of selling assets and paying taxes, they borrow against them.
Stocks.
Real estate.
Businesses.
Banks lend them money using those assets as collateral.
That borrowed money is often tax-free.
So while the average American is taxed on every dollar earned, the ultra-wealthy can live for decades spending borrowed money while their assets continue growing.
It’s a completely different set of rules.
And it’s the same system the federal government is using.
Borrow forever.
Hope growth outruns the debt.
Pretend the bill will never come due.
The Debt Bomb Has Already Been Triggered
Last year we wrote about this when the national debt crossed $36 trillion.
Now it’s approaching $39 trillion.
That increase happened in barely a year.
Back then the numbers looked like this:
• $108,000 of federal debt per person
• $273,000 per household
• $4.8 billion added to the debt every single day
Those numbers have only gotten worse.
And again — that’s before counting the true liabilities buried in entitlement programs.
The AI Tsunami: When Job Loss Collides With a Debt System Already on the Edge
While Washington is pretending the debt crisis is manageable, another force is quietly building that could make the entire situation far worse: artificial intelligence.
This new wave of AI isn’t just about writing emails or summarizing documents. What’s emerging now is agentic AI — systems that can take a goal, break it into steps, use tools, test results, and keep iterating until the job is done. In other words, we’re moving from simple automation to full task replacement across large parts of white-collar work.
The layoffs have already begun. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that 54,836 job cuts in 2025 were directly tied to AI, with more already appearing in early 2026. Even global leaders are warning about the speed of the shift. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva recently warned that AI is hitting the labor market “like a tsunami.”
Now combine that with the debt problem we just discussed. Programs like Social Security and Medicare depend on millions of workers paying taxes into the system. But if AI replaces large portions of the workforce, that tax base shrinks right when government spending is exploding.
And the people building these systems aren’t exactly hiding where they want this to go. At the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman openly described a future where “intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
Think about that for a second.
Machines trained on humanity’s knowledge… replacing human workers… while the companies running those systems charge people for access to “intelligence” itself.
If you want to see how deep that rabbit hole goes, read They Built the Matrix, We Walked In: OpenAI Wants to Charge You to Think, where I break down exactly how that system of dependency is being built.
What Happens When the System Finally Breaks
Debt-driven systems rarely collapse gradually.
They snap.
The stages are predictable:
Currency devaluation
Runaway inflation
Bank failures
Supply chain disruptions
Food shortages
Civil unrest
Government overreach
When the financial system cracks, the effects spread far beyond Wall Street.
Your grocery store doesn’t keep months of food in the back.
Most stores have about 72 hours of inventory.
Once panic buying starts, shelves empty fast.
Cities — where millions rely on daily deliveries — are the first places to feel it.
The People Who Will Suffer First
Urban populations dependent on supply chains.
People with no savings.
Families relying entirely on government benefits.
Anyone who assumes the system will keep functioning the way it always has.
History shows what happens next.
Look at:
Argentina
Venezuela
Lebanon
Sri Lanka
Each collapse looked impossible right up until the moment it happened.
Even establishment economists are now admitting the official debt numbers are misleading.
The $39 trillion figure Americans hear about every day isn’t the real story.
The true obligations of the United States government may already exceed $100 trillion.
And if you count the full long-term liabilities buried inside entitlement programs, the real number could easily be $200 trillion or more.
That’s not a small accounting error.
That’s a system built on promises that cannot be kept.
And systems like that don’t last forever.
The only real question is when the reset begins.
Are you Prepared for an Economic Collapse?
In many ways it is already here, and millions of American families are already living the nightmare. This economic crisis is not to be taken lightly, it is one of the biggest threats we face. Don’t wait for the mainstream media to tell you how bad it is, take action now to protect yourself and your loved ones.
We advise reading our article on Preparing for an Economic Collapse. We talk about the history of economic collapses, list the steps you need to take, and talk about what will most likely happen when the banking system goes down. You can read the article here.
Be Prepared to Feed Yourself when the Collapse Hits!
Grocery Options that ship right to your Home:
If you’re smart, you’ll stop waiting and start getting ready. This guide—The Ultimate Situational Survival Guide—gives you the hard skills and real strategies you’re going to need. It doesn’t sugarcoat anything. It’s about surviving natural disasters, civil unrest, terrorist attacks, and straight-up societal collapse.
Read the full article here
