Chapter 1 of this series (Editions 1-7) diagnosed America against its three founding promises - Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Chapter 2 widens the lens to the global forces every nation is navigating. This edition surveys five global trends that act as kindling to the world’s unhappiness and inequity tinderbox described in our last edition.

Key Takeaway - The World is Highly Flammable

Edition 8 demonstrated the precarious position we are in with global productivity slowing down and wealth rapidly concentrating in the hands of the few - 56,000 people holding as much wealth as the over 3 billion people in the bottom 50% of humanity. This situation, history tells us, precedes major wealth-leveling events (war, plague, revolution, state collapse).

This Edition 9 looks at five other global trends - ‘kindling’ that could amplify the fuel that is global inequity - that are accumulating around that fuel at the same time. These are:

1. The Highest Debt Levels in Human History. Global debt has reached $251 trillion, more than double the value of everything the world produces in a year, and the IMF now dates a fiscal wall, global government debt crossing 100% of GDP for the first time since World War II, to 2029 (International Monetary Fund, 2025 Global Debt Monitor; IMF, Fiscal Monitor, April 2026). The world is on track to reach its highest debt levels in history in just a few years.

2. The Largest Forced Migration in Human History. A record 117.8 million people are living in forced displacement worldwide, the highest total UNHCR has ever recorded (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2026).

3. The Highest Concentration of Strategic Supply. China holds the largest reserves and refines approximately 90% of the world’s rare earths, the ore and the finished material both pass through the same strained shipping lanes as everything else in world trade, and 90% of the chip supply behind every AI strategy runs through a single company on a politically contested island.

4. Weakening Pandemic Preparedness. The international system built to catch a pandemic early has been quietly defunded even as bird flu keeps finding new human hosts, and the next pandemic may not spare the working-age population the way COVID-19 did.

5. Backsliding of the World’s Democracies. In capitals from Nairobi to Tbilisi to Belgrade, governments are testing how much force their own citizens will tolerate, and the data shows this is not confined to one country or one ideology.

1. The Highest Debt Levels in Human History

Total global debt, public and private combined, now stands at roughly $251 trillion, just above 235% of world gross domestic product (GDP; International Monetary Fund, 2025 Global Debt Monitor). Governments and companies borrowed $25 trillion from the markets in 2024 alone, about 10% of the total principal and triple what was raised in 2007.

Across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, member governments’ interest bills now exceed their defence budgets (OECD Global Debt Report). The United Nations counts 3.3 billion people, well over a third of humanity, living in countries that spend more on debt interest each year than on education or health (UN Trade and Development, A World of Debt).

Global debt, at a glance:

• Total global debt (public + private): $251 trillion (~235% of world GDP)

• New borrowing added in 2024: $25 trillion

• World economic growth (nominal, with inflation): ~7% a year

• Projected debt-to-GDP by 2031: World ~102%; US ~142%; China ~127%

Assessing the Debt Service

Governments, companies and households currently pay an average of roughly 4.7% a year in interest to borrow, blended across all types of debt (International Monetary Fund, Fiscal Monitor, April 2026). The world economy is growing faster than that, around 7% including inflation, so for now growth is marginally outpacing the interest bill and the existing debt is not technically getting worse relative to the size of the economy.

But the world also keeps adding new debt each year - roughly $25 trillion more in 2024 alone. Counting that new borrowing too, the growth needed just to stop the debt pile from growing faster than the economy jumps to around 15%, roughly double what the world is actually managing (and as we reviewed in the last edition the rate of growth is only going to slow down).

Actually paying the $251 trillion off (the principal, not just the interest) is a different scale of problem. Spread the full amount over 100 years and the world would need to set aside close to $12 trillion every year: about 11% of everything the world produces annually, more than most countries collect in total tax revenue in a year.

Using the historical record of how often governments and companies default, the $251 trillion is really worth closer to $170 trillion today, a 32% gap between debt on the books and its risk-weighted value (Moody’s, Corporate Default and Recovery Rates; European Investment Bank, Default and Recovery Statistics, 1984-2023). Over an extended repayment period, the odds that at least one large, material default happens somewhere in this pile of debt land between 65% and 80%.

Assessing the Ability to Pay

Just as households earning a good income still cannot put 100% of their after-tax pay toward their mortgage, governments face the same challenge at a larger scale and with less flexibility. How much discretionary income a government has to work with in the first place varies enormously.

Nordic governments collect roughly half their GDP in revenue; the largest European economies collect a little less; the US, UK and Canada collect closer to 30% to 40%; sub-Saharan African governments average closer to 20%; and the poorest countries collect as little as 11% to 15% (International Monetary Fund, Fiscal Monitor, April 2026).

Whatever the top-line number, most of this income is already spoken for before debt reduction ever enters the conversation. In the US, for example, only 13.2% of the current total US federal budget is discretionary after defence spending is considered:

Mandatory spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and income support) consumes about 66% of the federal budget on its own, and interest on the existing debt takes a further 7.6%. That leaves roughly 26% classified as discretionary, and close to half of that goes to defence (Tax Policy Center, 2026).

What is actually free to redirect toward debt principal in public funds is a very small discretionary envelope. So even in a year when growth technically outruns the interest bill, there is very little genuinely discretionary income sitting anywhere in the system to apply toward the $251 trillion itself. In fact, as the growth rate of borrowing shows (the $25 trillion added in 2024), governments are, on the whole, significantly outspending their discretionary budgets.

The global debt cycle has been partly compensated for decades by population growth and a population structure with more givers to the public purse (working age) than takers (retirement and social services). For the first time in many developed countries, that population pyramid has inverted. By 2035, every major economy, rich and developing alike, will have a shrinking share of working-age people (International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, April 2025). Purely because of aging, the IMF expects the world economy to grow about one percentage point slower per year through 2050 than it did before the pandemic, right as the income and interest picture described above is already getting tighter.

That tightening is not a future projection. It is already in the data. Global government interest payments have climbed from 2% of GDP to nearly 3% of GDP in just the last four years (IMF, Fiscal Monitor, April 2026). In the world’s poorest countries, the ones with the least room to absorb it, interest already consumes close to 15% of total government revenue, up more than 5 percentage points since 2015 (IMF, Fiscal Monitor, April 2026).

The Forecast on Balance

Global government debt itself is now on a path to cross 100% of GDP by 2029, a level seen only once before, in the direct aftermath of the Second World War.

The IMF projects it keeps climbing to roughly 102% of GDP by 2031, pulled disproportionately by the world’s two largest economies: the US, projected near 142%, and China, projected near 127% (IMF, Fiscal Monitor, April 2026). The IMF’s own language is unusually blunt for an institution that tends toward caution: “the window for orderly fiscal adjustment is narrowing,” and what the Fund calls the global fiscal gap, the cushion between what governments raise and what they need to spend, has narrowed from more than 1% of GDP a decade ago to near zero today (IMF, Fiscal Monitor, April 2026, Policy Conclusions).

Put the three pieces together and the wall for a debt crisis has a rough timeline. Growth is covering the interest bill today, but only barely, and only on the interest, not the new borrowing layered on top of it or the principal itself. Governments already have little genuinely spare income to redirect toward the debt even if they wanted to. And the demographic and fiscal trends working against both of those facts are not reversing, they are accelerating, on a timeline the IMF now measures in single-digit years rather than decades.

Who actually holds this debt will matter if that wall is reached. In the US, the clearest documented example, about two-thirds of government debt is owed to Americans themselves, through banks, pension funds, insurers and directly to savers, not foreign governments (Congressional Research Service, May 2025).

2. The Largest Forced Migration in Human History

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees counted 117.8 million people in forced displacement in its 2026 count, roughly one in every 70 humans alive (UNHCR, 2026). That total breaks down into:

• 41.6 million refugees

• 68.7 million people displaced inside their own country

• 9 million people still waiting on an asylum decision

(UNHCR, Figures at a Glance, 2026). For the first time in a decade that figure had recently fallen, by about 4%, driven by large-scale returns from some of the world’s biggest displacement crises. New conflicts have largely erased that progress. Climate pressure is also adding a second current, moving beneath the conflict-driven numbers rather than alongside them: shifting rainfall, prolonged drought, and extreme heat are displacing people well outside any war zone.

The Trend in Migration

Ten years ago, the same count stood at 65.6 million, or about one in every 113 people alive (UNHCR, Global Trends 2016). The total has nearly doubled in a decade, and it has grown faster than the world’s population has, which is why the ratio has worsened even though the raw growth understates it. It is fair to call today’s figure the highest level of forced displacement UNHCR has recorded since it began tracking the number in 1951; the crisis first passed the post-World War II high of roughly 50 million in 2014 and has not gone back below it since (UNHCR, 2014 Global Trends report).

Where Humans are Migrating From, and Where They Are Going

Seven in ten refugees come from just six countries. Those ten countries account for roughly three-quarters of the world’s refugees (UNHCR Global Trends 2026; UNHCR Venezuela Situation Summary 2024; World Vision, 2026).

Top 10 countries of origin:

• Venezuela: ~6.9 million (~17% of global total)

• Ukraine: ~5.9 million (~14%)

• Syria: ~4.9 million (~12%)

• Afghanistan: ~3.7 million (~9%)

• Sudan: ~2.8 million (~7%)

• South Sudan: ~2.4 million (~6%)

• Myanmar: ~1.5 million (~4%)

• DR Congo: ~1.2 million (~3%)

• Somalia: ~0.9 million (~2%)

• Central African Republic: ~0.7 million (~2%)

Venezuela’s figure includes people UNHCR tracks as “other people in need of international protection” rather than under the strict 1951 Convention refugee definition, but the agency folds them into its headline refugee count, and this piece follows that convention.

Almost none of these migrants are moving toward wealthy countries in significant numbers: roughly two-thirds of all refugees remain in a country neighboring the one they fled (UNHCR, 2026).

Top 10 host countries:

• Colombia: ~2.8 million (~7% of global total)

• Germany: ~2.7 million (~6%)

• Turkey: ~2.7 million (~6%)

• Iran: ~2.5 million (~6%)

• Uganda: ~1.9 million (~5%)

• Pakistan: ~1.6 million (~4%)

• Chad: ~1.4 million (~3%)

• Bangladesh: ~1.1 million (~3%)

• Ethiopia: ~1.0 million (~2%)

• Poland: ~1.0 million (~2%)

Those ten host countries add up to less than half the global total, roughly 45% (UNHCR mid-2025 data via Mappr; World Vision, 2026). Refugees leave from a small, predictable set of crisis countries, but once displaced they scatter across dozens of host countries rather than pooling in a handful of destinations.

This is overwhelmingly a story of poorer countries absorbing the people fleeing crises in their own region, not a story of migration toward the rich world: UNHCR estimates 68% of the world’s refugees are hosted in low- and middle-income countries, against just 29% in high-income ones (UNHCR, Refugee Hosting Metrics, 2026). Where a formal burden-sharing system exists, in UNHCR’s resettlement program, it remains small relative to need: only about 8% of the 2.4 million people identified as needing resettlement in 2024 actually received it (UNHCR, 2026).

The implication is a mismatch between where the burden falls and where the capacity to carry it sits. The countries doing the most hosting are frequently the same kind of countries showing up elsewhere in this edition as fiscally stretched or newly fragile themselves - Uganda, Chad, Pakistan and Colombia are developing economies absorbing another country’s crisis on top of their own, not wealthy nations with slack capacity to spare. Wealthy nations, despite dominating the political debate over migration, carry a comparatively small share of the actual load.

3. The Highest Concentration of Strategic Supply

The importance of global supply chains has become clearer in recent months, with global trade wars combining with shipping lanes disrupted in the Strait of Hormuz. Export controls tightening through late 2025 have driven up prices for many imports, contributing to what some are calling an “affordability crisis.”

The export-control pattern is largely political leverage, but that leverage reaches resources for everything from critical infrastructure to defence supply to cutting-edge technology to everyday consumables. The same pattern is clear across categories of critical supply: raw materials, technology, and food. In each case, a handful of countries, sometimes a single company, control a critical step in the global supply chain.

Minerals

The global mineral supply is largely concentrated in China, especially once refining is counted: almost all rare earth ore tonnage is refined in China (roughly 90%) regardless of where it was unearthed. The mineral supply chain runs through three separate stages: reserves (minerals in the ground), mining production (extracting them), and refinement (preparing the ore for industrial use).

• Reserves: China holds the largest known rare earth reserves in the world, an estimated 44 million tonnes, or about 48% of the global total. Brazil holds the second-largest, an estimated 21 million tonnes, close to a quarter of the world’s known deposits, more than India, Australia, Russia and Vietnam combined. China and Brazil together sit on more than 71% of the world’s known reserves (US Geological Survey data via World Population Review, 2026).

• Mining: China accounts for roughly 69% of actual rare earth mine production, with the United States a distant second at about 12% and Myanmar third at around 8%; together the top three countries produce close to 90% of the world’s raw material (US Geological Survey data via World Population Review, 2024).

• Refinement: China refines approximately 90% of the world’s rare earth elements, alongside 80% of the world’s tungsten and 60% of its antimony (Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Economic Security, 2026; rare earth supply chain analysis, 2026).

• Consumption: The demand side is more scattered than the supply side. Japan accounted for roughly 53% of global rare earth metal imports in 2024, driven by its electronics and precision-manufacturing industries, with Malaysia a distant second at about 27.5% (Statista, 2024 trade data).

Despite holding the world’s second-largest mineral deposits, Brazil barely registers in the mining numbers at all: the ore is there, but the mines, refineries and investment needed to bring it out of the ground are not. Owning a resource and controlling it turn out to be two different things.

Food

Modern agriculture supply depends less on where food is produced than on the inputs that power large industrial farms. Global agricultural supply relies heavily on two fertiliser inputs that are just as concentrated as rare earth minerals: phosphate and potash.

• Phosphate: Morocco holds an estimated 70% of the world’s phosphate rock reserves, the key ingredient in phosphate fertiliser, though China, the United States and Russia currently do more of the actual mining (US Geological Survey data via Discovery Alert, 2025).

• Potash: the other pillar of modern fertiliser is concentrated on the production side instead. Canada, Russia and Belarus together produce about 43% of the world’s supply, and Belarusian and Russian potash exports have already been disrupted once, by sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (US Geological Survey, 2026; World Population Review, 2026).

Technology

A 2026 Council on Foreign Relations task force identifies artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biotechnology as the three foundational technologies most contested in the current era of great-power competition, worth an estimated $29 trillion in annual economic value by 2040 (CFR, U.S. Economic Security, 2026). All three run on the same physical supply constraint: advanced semiconductors.

One company, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, alone controls roughly 72% of the global contract chip-manufacturing market, more than ten times the share of its nearest competitor (TrendForce, Q1 2026 foundry revenue data). It holds an even more dominant position at the leading edge, the sub-5-nanometer nodes used in the most advanced AI chips, where Samsung and Intel are only beginning to reach comparable yields at meaningful scale.

That concentration sits at the centre of an ongoing dispute between China and Taiwan over the island’s political status, one that has periodically escalated with military exercises and heightened rhetoric on both sides through 2025 and 2026. Were that dispute to resolve in China’s favour, it would gain control of most of the world’s supply chain, both critical minerals and advanced chip production, for every AI, quantum and biotech strategy built on current supply.

Shipping

Whatever gets mined, produced or grown has to move to wherever it ends up for consumption, and that movement runs largely through the same small set of maritime chokepoints. None of these chokepoints has closed outright, but all of them are more fragile than at most points in recent history.

Four are particularly material:

• Strait of Malacca: ~25% of global maritime oil flows (23.2 million barrels a day in the first half of 2025); separately estimated to carry about a quarter of all globally traded goods by volume

• Bab-el-Mandeb / Suez Canal: ~12% of global maritime trade

• Strait of Hormuz: ~25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade, ~34% of global crude oil trade, roughly 20 million barrels a day

• Panama Canal: ~5% of global container trade, ~46% of US East Coast-to-East Asia container trade

(BCG, These Four Chokepoints Are Threatening Global Trade, 2024.) A single voyage often passes through more than one of these chokepoints, so the shares above should not be read as additive.

The Strait of Malacca is not currently disrupted, but it is the single busiest chokepoint on Earth, and the same corridor carries Persian Gulf oil alongside Taiwanese, Chinese, South Korean and Japanese chip and electronics trade (Malay Mail via Refinitiv/Vortexa data, 2026; Mappr, 2026).

Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have left shipping traffic through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait still 40-60% below its pre-crisis baseline more than two years on: quarterly tonnage down 51-64% from 2023 levels since January 2024, container-ship transits down 86% in Q4 2025 versus 2023, and overall traffic still 60% below its 2023 baseline as of early 2026 (Lloyd’s List Intelligence; gCaptain, 2026). Vessels have been forced around Africa routinely, at substantial added cost and transit time.

The Strait of Hormuz is not currently blocked, but it is periodically threatened amid tensions between the US and Iran. There is no comparable bypass route, so a real disruption here would be a larger single-point shock than the Red Sea has been (International Energy Agency, 2026).

Rerouting away from a periodically threatened Strait of Hormuz has pushed additional pressure onto the Panama Canal, where transits and tonnage were actually up 5.2% and 7.2% year-over-year through the first nine months of fiscal year 2026. The canal has itself tightened draft restrictions repeatedly through 2026 as Gatun Lake water levels fall with a strengthening El Nino (Panama Canal Authority; S&P Global Market Intelligence, April 2026; gCaptain, 2026).

The Turkish Straits and Danish Straits, the only routes out of the Black Sea and Baltic Sea respectively, carry a smaller share of global tonnage but matter disproportionately for the food and fertiliser chokepoints described above, since they are the export route for both Ukrainian grain and Russian and Belarusian potash.

4. Weakening Pandemic Preparedness

Documented human behavior, hoarding, mob violence, the ordinary rules of civic life stripping away, has repeated across centuries whenever disease or famine has struck hard enough. During the Black Death, for example, more than 200 Jewish communities across Europe were destroyed between 1348 and 1351 amid false accusations that Jews had poisoned the wells (Erfurt massacre historical record; Times of Israel, 2020).

Five centuries later, cholera epidemics in Russia and Britain triggered riots in which mobs, convinced doctors and officials were poisoning victims or harvesting bodies for dissection, attacked hospitals, police and physicians directly. Liverpool saw eight separate riots in the summer of 1832 (Wikipedia, Cholera Riots). Fear of disease, historically, has been enough on its own to break the rules a society otherwise lives by.

COVID Learnings

The World Health Organisation estimates COVID-19 caused between 13.3 million and 16.6 million excess deaths worldwide in 2020 and 2021 (WHO, 2022). The global economy contracted 4.4% in 2020, the sharpest single-year global downturn since the Great Depression (International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, 2021). On the positive side, vaccines were developed and distributed at a pace with no historical precedent, and the international surveillance system that first flagged the virus, however imperfectly, mostly worked as designed.

Perhaps the part that came down to luck was who the virus affected most. In the United States, people 65 and older made up about 80% of COVID-19 deaths in the pandemic’s first year and closer to 90% by 2023, despite being only 16% of the population (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2020; CIDRAP/CDC data brief, 2023). Children and working-age adults were, comparatively, largely spared. The people who staff factories, offices and supply chains mostly did not get mortally sick, so the economic engine did not stop completely, even as supply chains strained on the goods side.

That age pattern is not a law of pandemics. The 1918 influenza pandemic had a third mortality peak, driven by a young immune system overreacting to the virus and by secondary bacterial pneumonia, layered on top of the usual toll among infants and the elderly. A pandemic with 1918’s age profile and COVID’s speed of global spread would likely not leave the workforce standing, and there is no rule of epidemiology that guarantees the next one skews old the way COVID did.

Current threats

Bird flu is the threat currently being watched most closely. Since 1997, H5N1 has infected more than 1,000 people across 25 countries with a cumulative case fatality rate near 48%, roughly a hundred times higher than COVID-19’s (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, 2026 surveillance data). It has not yet gained the ability to spread easily between people. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recorded just 12 human H5N1 infections across three countries between August 2025 and June 2026, three of them fatal, all traced to direct contact with infected birds (CDC, 2026).

Public health researchers are also watching several other threats at once heading into the back half of 2026: cholera outbreaks tied to conflict zones, up 50% from 2023 to 2024 across 60 countries; climate-driven arboviruses like dengue, which doubled to 14.4 million cases in the warmest year on record; and Marburg virus disease, recently detected in Guinea, Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia as deforestation increases contact between humans and the bats that carry it (Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, 2026).

What’s Next

The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board’s 2026 report found that international financing dedicated to pandemic preparedness has fallen back to 2009 levels, erasing nearly two decades of fiscal scaling (GPMB, 2026). The OECD separately projects total global foreign aid will fall 6.9% in 2026, its lowest level since 2014, with bilateral aid for health and population programs alone dropping 29% to 46% from 2024 levels, a loss of $5 billion to $8 billion (OECD, ODA Projections for 2026 and the Near-Term, June 2026).

Within that global retrenchment, the United States has been the single largest driver:

• US contributions to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations ($100 million, fiscal year 2024) and the Pandemic Fund ($250 million, fiscal year 2024) were canceled or suspended in 2025.

• The international outbreak-response staff at the US Agency for International Development fell from roughly 50 people to six, before the agency itself was dissolved in July 2025.

• Official development assistance for global health fell 9% in 2024, with further drops of 9% to 17% projected, cutting critical health services by as much as 70% in some low-income countries (World Health Organisation data, cited in Gavi, 2026).

The International Pandemic Preparedness Secretariat considers diagnostics the weakest link in the system: the next pathogen, “Disease X,” could plausibly emerge from any of roughly 25 known viral families, and the tools to identify it quickly are largely what has been defunded (Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, 2026). Health misinformation compounds the problem rather than sitting apart from it: AI-generated deepfakes are already accelerating false claims about vaccine safety, and roughly a third of young adults now say they distrust routine childhood vaccination (Edelman Trust Barometer, cited in Gavi, 2026).

As of this writing, the United States is in the middle of its largest recorded cyclosporiasis outbreak, a diarrhoea-inducing parasite traced to contaminated iceberg lettuce, with 9,481 confirmed cases across 17 states, at least 398 hospitalisations and two deaths as of mid-August 2026 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Cyclospora Outbreak Investigation, August 2026). It took weeks to trace the source, in part because federal reporting for this parasite quietly shifted from mandatory to voluntary in July 2025. Nobody forecast this specific outbreak, and that is worth considering: the worst pathogen or contamination event that actually arrives is usually the one nobody saw coming.

5. Backsliding of the World’s Democracies

Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2026 report found 54 countries declined in political rights and civil liberties over the past year against just 35 that improved, and just 21% of the world’s population now lives in a country rated “Free,” down from 46% two decades ago (Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026).

The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2026 found nearly a quarter of the world’s countries experiencing active democratic backsliding in 2025, against only 18 nations, about one in ten, moving the other direction (V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026).

• Countries that declined in freedom, past year: 54 (Freedom House, 2026)

• Countries that improved, past year: 35 (Freedom House, 2026)

• World population living in “Free” countries: 21% (down from 46% two decades ago) (Freedom House, 2026)

• Countries actively backsliding, 2025: About 1 in 4 (V-Dem Institute, 2026)

• Countries democratizing, 2025: 18 (10%) (V-Dem Institute, 2026)

• US Liberal Democracy Index, one-year change: -24% (V-Dem Institute, 2026)

• US global democracy rank, of 179 countries: Fell from 20th to 51st (V-Dem Institute, 2026)

This is not confined to one country, one region, or one ideology. Six of the ten nations V-Dem newly classified as ‘autocratising’ in 2025 are in Europe or North America: Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, the United Kingdom and the United States (V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026, Table 2).

These trends are as much a symptom of the times as an accelerant. Pressure on public finances, mounting public liabilities, and gaps in social protection are driving a questioning of government authority that often gets met with an authoritative response:

• Kenyan police have killed at least 60 protesters since 2024.

• Georgia has used a “foreign agents” law to imprison demonstrators for multi-year terms.

• Serbian student protests have drawn hundreds of thousands of participants and hundreds of detentions since a fatal 2024 infrastructure collapse.

(Al Jazeera, 2026; Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026.)

A stressed population under fiscal, migratory, resource, supply, and health pressure is a population governments have every incentive to manage rather than represent, and the data now shows several dozen of them, across every region and every ideology, moving in that direction.

On Top of the Fuel, the Kindling has Been Laid

Edition 8 documented the fuel: a stalling pie, ownership concentrating at the top, a majority able to feel the gap between what the economy produces and what actually reaches them. This edition has documented five separate piles of kindling stacking beside that fuel, at the same time:

• A $251 trillion global debt with a fiscal wall now dated to 2029 rather than some indefinite future.

• A global migration of 117.8 million people displaced, the highest total on record.

• A highly concentrated and volatile supply chain, from mineral deposits to shipping lanes to chip fabrication.

• A pandemic early-warning system stripped of the people and funding that ran it, waiting on a pathogen that may not spare the workforce the way the last one did.

• A wave of democratic backsliding running through dozens of countries with nothing else in common.

Next edition, Chapter 2 continues: the spark - how artificial intelligence has industrialised the disinformation economy.

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This week we open a new Chapter in the Great American Path series: Chapter 1 (Editions 1-7) diagnosed America against its three founding promises - Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness. Chapter 2 will widen the lens to the global forces every nation is now navigating which will impact on America's ability to adapt its policies and maintain a position of leadership in the world.

The Key Takeaway - The World is Rich, but Most People are Poor

The global economy now produces roughly $210 trillion a year in purchasing-power terms (IMF World Economic Outlook, April 2026). Divide it by the people who actually generate it - the world’s roughly 3.6 billion workers (ILO modeled estimate) - and it comes to about $58,000 per worker per year: $29 of output for every hour worked on Earth. On average, a two-earner household produces roughly $116,000 in its name.

Based on these figures, it would seem that humanity has largely solved the issue of production - having enough for everyone to go around.

Unfortunately, however, what humanity has not solved is distribution. In fact, while the pie is not shrinking, to many people alive today it feels like it is because the typical slice of the pie has stopped growing.

The poorer 50% of humanity - 2.8 billion adults - captures only 2% of global wealth. The richest tenth captures 75% respectively (World Inequality Report 2026). The top 1% alone earns two and a half times as much as the entire bottom half of the species combined.

In 2025, the world’s wealth managers watched average wealth jump 10.8% while median wealth fell in most of the 56 markets they track (UBS Global Wealth Report 2026). American median household income in 2024 was effectively flat on income in 2019 (US Census Bureau), while British real pay still sits around its 2008 level (TUC/ONS analysis).

The distance between the top-line growth rate and median growth numbers is the heart of this Chapter’s first global trend - the gap between on one hand a global economy that has never produced more and on the other hand global citizens of even “wealthy” nations who feel like they are barely making it financially.

This global phenomenon is a critical context for the sentiment of humanity right now, policies and the political landscape, and ultimately America’s chances for a turnaround. If history is any guide, then this scenario is a dangerous place for the world to be in.

The Hockey Stick Innovation Built

For most of the modern era, the world economy did almost nothing. Total global output in year 1 CE was about $248 billion in today’s international dollars (Maddison Project Database 2023, via Our World in Data) - the whole of humanity, every farm, forge, and market on Earth, producing far less in a year than the personal fortune of the world’s richest person today.

By 1820 - after the Renaissance, the printing press, gunpowder, and the rise and fall of several global empires - the world economy had crawled to $1.6 trillion. That result is equivalent to eighteen centuries at a compound annual growth rate in the global economy of just 0.1% or world output doubling about once every 700 years.

Then the Industrial Revolution lit the growth fuse, and the global economy grew to $12 trillion at a rate of 1.5% a year from 1820 to 1950. This was followed by 3.7% a year in the 75 years since (doubling every 19 years) with the global economy reaching $175 trillion by 2024.

We currently output at roughly $210 trillion in purchasing-power terms which is about $58,000 a year for every member of the world’s workforce and $25,600 for every human being alive. At the current rate humanity now adds an entire pre-industrial world economy to the books - everything our species built from the Romans to Napoleon - every four months!

In the history of humanity, it is clear that growth of this kind is not normal. It is an eighteen-century flatline followed by a two-century miracle. Almost everything we associate with modern life happened on the vertical part of that line since the Second World War: longevity roughly doubled, mass literacy, mass vaccination, electricity, mass sanitation, and comfort reaching billions - under the longest stretch of great-power peace in modern history.

The Innovation Engine Is Slowing Down

The driver of the productivity engine that made the line so vertical since industrialisation, and particularly since WWII is innovation to get more output from the same people and capital. The rate of that innovation has been unfortunately slowing at the frontier for decades.

That is not to say that the world economy is not still expanding. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects 3.1% global growth for 2026 and 3.2% for 2027 (assuming that the Middle East conflict stays limited in duration and scope).

However, the growth that remains in future years is uncertain. That wave was ridden first by Western Europe, North America, and Japan, then the East Asian tigers, then post-1990 China and Eastern Europe. In July 2026 alone the World Bank moved six countries up an income band and none down (World Bank country classifications, July 2026). The share of the world’s economies classified as low-income has fallen from 30% in 1987 to 11% today.

The rest of the global growth is concentrated in a few remaining countries - the two biggest engines of China and India are still mid-climb. China sits just below the high-income threshold, and India has further to go. The key point is that there is no third wave of comparable scale queued up behind them.

The frontier economies, meanwhile, are the ones whose engines have gone quiet. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s June 2026 productivity compendium reports that the median member country grew output per hour worked just 0.4% in 2024, against a 1.8-2.0% median in 2001-07. The pace of improvement has roughly halved.

Furthermore, multi-factor productivity - an economic measure of how efficiently inputs such as labour and raw materials are turned into productive outputs - was negative in 14 of 21 OECD countries in 2024, averaging -0.3% across them in 2023-24, versus +1.5% in 2000-07. In the United States, one widely used measure shows market-economy total factor productivity rising 14% over 1995-2007 and just 2% over 2007-2019 (Fernald, Inklaar & Ruzic, 2025).

Recent “rich-world” growth has come almost entirely from adding workers, not from getting better at anything. Driving growth from population alone can be problematic - immigration is not always welcome as we have seen in the US and birth rates are hard to sustain.

Additionally, in these markets, growth is increasingly leveraged - total global debt (public plus private) stands at roughly $251 trillion, just above 235% of world GDP (International Monetary Fund, 2025 Global Debt Monitor).

In the US, total GDP grew by $1.4T in nominal terms from 2024 to 2025 while total comparable debt grew by $6.5T (Federal Reserve, Financial Accounts of the United States, Z.1). $6.5T of additional debt implies roughly $250-325B of additional annual interest expense for the US, assuming an average funding cost of 4-5%. Therefore, for every $1 of debt the US returned roughly $0.17 to $0.18 or ~17-18% net return after interest last year. By comparison, similar net returns were closer to 60% or $0.60 per $1 of debt in the post-war period.

We Stopped Feeding the Innovation Engine

So why is innovation on the decline? Two contributory reasons are clear:

First - ideas are getting harder to find.

Research productivity is declining sharply in almost every industry, product, and firm (Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and Webb, American Economic Review, 2020). The great one-off transformations (transportation, electrification, sanitation, antibiotics, the internal combustion engine…) cannot be repeated, and their successors are increasingly expensive increments.

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel claimed back in 1965 that the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a computer chip doubles every year (commonly known as Moore’s Law). This was revised in 1975 to be every two years. Maintaining that pace today now takes more than 18 times the researchers it took in the early 1970s (Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen & Webb, 2020).

The claimed next productivity engine is of course artificial intelligence, but the outlook for productivity is at best mixed. The IMF’s April 2026 economic outlook treats AI-driven productivity gains as explicitly two-sided - listing a reassessment of AI productivity expectations as an overall downside risk to the global economy.

What AI has already demonstrably done (as documented in Week 4 of this series) is to start trimming the entry-level rungs off the career ladder. The most careful measurement to date (Stanford Digital Economy Lab, November 2025) finds early-career workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations suffered a 16% relative employment decline, even as experienced worker employment held - for now.

Second - We stopped putting as much fuel into our innovation engine.

The United States federal government funded research and development (R&D) worth 1.86% of GDP in 1964. This contribution accounted for two-thirds of all American research. By 2022 that figure was 0.63% of GDP, and the federal share had fallen to 18% of research funding (National Science Foundation).

Public funding for R&D - the kind of patient capital that grows the pie for everyone - has been in retreat for sixty years. Week 7 documented examples from the current chapter of policy cuts: roughly $3 billion cut from NIH and NSF research grants while $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts were cancelled.

Business R&D filled the headline gap such that total US R&D actually hit a record 3.43% of GDP. However, business funding tends to concentrate on near-term commercial development priorities (like weight-loss drugs), not the longer term science that produced the transistor, the first moon landing, the internet, and mRNA vaccines.

Fusion technology is an interesting test case for public funding - while private investors continue to invest at a record level ($14.24 billion cumulative investment into fusion companies so far, Fusion Industry Association, July 2026) the fusion industry itself says that private capital alone is insufficient. Fusion technology - the promise of limitless energy for all - is the classic case for public co-investment that is not currently forthcoming.

So where did the public money go instead?

The first is world military expenditure which hit $2,887 billion in 2025 (up 41% in real terms over the past decade) and 2.5% of global GDP (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

The second is public debt service. Governments and companies borrowed $25 trillion from the markets in 2024 - triple what they raised in 2007. Across the OECD, governments’ interest bills now exceed their defence budgets (OECD Global Debt Report). In fact, the United Nations counts 3.3 billion people - well over a third of humanity - living in countries that spend more on debt interest than on either education or health (UNCTAD, A World of Debt).

Meanwhile, the Remaining Pie Is Divided Unequally

As quoted in the summary above, the World Inequality Report 2026 shows the distribution of wealth with the top 10% of adults - about 560 million people - receiving 53% of global income and controlling 75% of total wealth. The top 1% alone holds 37% of global wealth (on the World Inequality Database methodology - private wealth-manager estimates run higher still).

The bottom half of humanity - 2.8 billion adults - captures 8% of income and controls only 2% of wealth. Just to further highlight this imbalance, at the very peak the top 0.001% - roughly 56,000 individuals - own more than the bottom 2.8 billion adults combined!

These two observations are both true at the same time:

Global wealth is still rising: personal wealth grew 10.8% in dollar terms in 2025, the fastest pace since 2017 (UBS Global Wealth Report 2026); the world minted nearly one million new dollar-millionaires in the year - more than 2,600 a day (and almost half of them American), the share of adults with less than $10,000 to their name has fallen from almost 75% in 2000 to just over 41% today, and convergence between nations is happening in terms of overall wealth per capita.

Ownership of this productive pie is consolidating. The number of US listed companies peaked at more than 6,500 in 1997 and stands near 4,700 today (Meketa, 2024, CRSP data) - down by more than a quarter even as their combined value grew nearly six-fold to $60 trillion. This means we have fewer, far bigger companies. More than 85% of US companies with revenues above $100 million are now privately held, and buyout funds worldwide sit on roughly 32,000 unsold portfolio companies worth $3.8 trillion (Bain Global Private Equity Report 2026).

Within what remains public, ownership has institutionalised: institutions held 6.1% of US corporate equity in 1950 and 65% by 2017 (Bebchuk & Hirst, NBER Working Paper 25914, 2019). The Big Three index managers - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street - quadrupled their combined average stake in S&P 500 companies from 5.2% in 1998 to 20.5% in 2017 (about 22% by 2021), casting roughly a quarter of the votes at those companies. The United Kingdom by comparison moved even faster: individuals held 54% of UK quoted shares in 1963; they hold 11.6% today, while overseas investors hold a record 58.8% (ONS, Ownership of UK Quoted Shares: 2024).

Global wealth distribution is worse than ever: the UBS Global Wealth Report 2026 leads with the warning that there is “a growing divergence between average wealth and median outcomes” - the average wealth rose while the median fell in most of the 56 markets it tracks. The scale of this gap is stark - the average adult held $84,700 in 2023; while the median adult held only $8,700, a ratio of ten to one (2023 edition; later editions publish only regional splits).

Meanwhile, while perishable consumer goods are generally getting “cheaper” every year (e.g. flat-screen televisions, cars, phones…) in real terms, the basics of life are becoming more expensive. The cleanest verified measure to illustrate this is related to housing. The OECD tracks house prices against incomes relative to each country’s own long-run average, indexed at 100 (OECD Analytical House Prices Database). The latest readings: Australia 154, Canada 145, Portugal 143, the Netherlands 141, Spain 127, New Zealand 125, the United Kingdom 116, the United States 113. Everything above 100 means housing is less affordable than that country’s own historical norm.

The salaried majority is being squeezed from several directions at once - housing, verified above, is one of the largest of them. Taxes are next. The average OECD tax wedge on a single worker reached 35.1% of labour costs in 2025 (OECD Taxing Wages 2026) - the highest since 2016, rising for a third consecutive year, up in 24 member countries. The United Kingdom posted the largest increase in the entire OECD (+2.45 points).

The consequence is quiet but profound: the median citizen gets less, affordability diminished, and taxes on income (vs. assets) increases. The route for most members of the human race to owning a piece of the engine is closing down and wealth is consolidating in the hands of fewer institutions and individuals.

What Comes Next - The Historical Perspective

A stagnating slice, concentrated ownership, and an unhappy majority - history has run this configuration before and it usually does not end well.

The Stanford historian Walter Scheidel audited every major compression of inequality in recorded history for The Great Leveler (2017). His finding was direct and clear: “Inequality never dies peacefully.” Across thousands of years, only four forces - he calls them the Four Horsemen - have ever significantly narrowed the gap between rich and poor:

1. Mass-mobilization warfare,

2. Transformative revolution,

3. State collapse, and

4. Catastrophic plague.

The last century highlights this historical arc. Before the First World War, the top 10% owned roughly 93% of the wealth in Britain - a historical high - and about 85% in France (World Inequality Report 2018, Garbinti-Goupille-Lebret-Piketty; Alvaredo-Atkinson-Morelli). Two world wars, a depression, and the subsequent policy revolution compressed those shares to 47% and 50% by the early 1980s. Then, from about 1980, the concentration of wealth returned and by the 2020s it was back to c.60% in both countries.

In England, it is estimated (Shrubsole, Who Owns England?, 2019) that roughly half of England’s property is still owned by less than 1% of its population which means this cycle is institutionalised, much of it in aristocratic estates unbroken for centuries. The estimate is contested because England has never conducted a full land census, and the gaps in the registry are themselves part of the story.

In the United States today, the Federal Reserve’s own distributional accounts put the top 10% of households at 68% of net worth, the top 1% alone at 32% (up from 23% when the series began in 1989) - while the bottom half of the country holds 2.5% of the wealth and carries more than half of its consumer credit (Federal Reserve, Distributional Financial Accounts, 2026:Q1).

(Note: The World Inequality Database’s broader method reads a few points higher; the direction is identical. Week 6 of this series cited a top-10% figure of 79%, drawn from the OECD Wealth Distribution Database - a differently constructed, survey-based series that reads consistently higher than the Fed’s own national-accounts-based method for the US; both are legitimate, commonly used estimates, and this piece uses the Fed’s series throughout for internal consistency.)

The case studies behind Scheidel’s “horsemen” are prominent in every history book from the rise and fall of Rome to the aristocracy of late 18th Century France and Russia where the top-10% income share was crushed to 20-25% by revolution (Novokmet, Piketty & Zucman, 2017). And when the violence ends, the cycle of concentration begins again - repeating itself over and over.

In contrast, peaceful reform has rarely managed to rebalance the ledger with one important “partial exception” - America’s Progressive Era and New Deal. These are the closest examples in modern history where reform has “managed” to do a horseman’s work: the top marginal income tax rate went from 7% at the income tax’s birth in 1913 to 94% in 1944 and stayed above 90% into the 1960s (Tax Policy Center / Tax Foundation historical rate tables), alongside estate taxation and trust-busting - and the mid-century Great Compression followed, without a revolution.

It took the pressure of depression and world war to force the policy debate and choices which to this day are vilified by many in America as too ‘socialist’. My own late maternal grandfather collected medallions from the US Mint commemorating every US President since Washington, but he refused to include Franklin Roosevelt because of the New Deal.

But at least the policies were democratically chosen, legislated, and peaceful - and they resulted in the development of the largest middle class in history.

One important consideration is that the historical trigger for correction was generally not absolute poverty. Instead, revolutions have repeatedly come from relative deprivation - a population watching aggregate wealth visibly grow while their own share stalls. Which is a precise description of a world where average wealth rises 10.8% in a year while the median falls.

Why This Matters, and Who This is Really For

Here is where this series can be useful for the person who counts themselves among the top 1%. You own assets, hold equity, control capital and have high earning potential. You probably read the scorecard from our first Chapter and privately concluded that whatever is failing, it is not failing you.

This Chapter is for you, more than anyone. Because the evidence above adds up to a specific proposition. The pie is vast; the engine growing it is stalling; the shares are concentrating; the majority can feel it; and every historical society that reached this configuration had its inequality corrected - by design (rarely), or (most likely) by one of history’s ‘four horsemen’.

There is a peaceful exit ramp on record: reform, made early, by the people with the most to lose from the alternative. From this vantage point The Progressive Era and the New Deal can be seen less as charity and more as a successful insurance policy for the prevailing owners of capital.

The urgency of everything this series has argued - fixing health costs that bankrupt families, student debt that forecloses careers, minimum guarantees on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and a fair contribution from the controllers of capital instead of stacking the pyramid on the salaried middle - is as much in the self-interest of everyone with something to keep as it is a plea from “below.”

Next edition, Chapter 2 continues: The Kindling - A stressed population under fiscal, migratory, resource, supply, and health pressure is a population governments have every incentive to manage rather than represent.

If this landed, share it - especially with someone who “has it all.”

The Key Takeaway

There is little evidence to suggest that America is ‘greater’ on any of the objective dimensions of Life, Liberty, or the Pursuit of Happiness eighteen months into a dominant Republican party controlling three branches of Federal government and Trump as President.

Two things in that time have moved unequivocally south on the MAGA 2.0 scorecard:

1. 🔴 Our national debt and affordability driven by tax and trade policy, deficit-financed spending from Congress and the Executive funding DHS and Department of War escalating activities, and

2. 🔴 Our Democracy rating and trust of our own government linked to separation-of-powers questions, Executive self-dealing, and a lack of independent action and closures in the Legislative branch.

The Federal Chessboard, July 2026

The three-branch system of government was developed to ensure a system of checks and balances in the Federal Government from revolutionaries who were looking to set up a Republic free from monarchy:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” - James Madison, Federalist No. 47 (1788)

Today, the three branches are all majority controlled by the Republican party, with Trump the party leader running the Executive. The Legislature leans Republican albeit with slim majorities, and six of the sitting Supreme Court bench were appointed by Republicans (three by Trump in his first term).

The Cabinet:

• Vice President JD Vance

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio (confirmed 99-0)

• Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (confirmed 52-48)

• Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth (confirmed 51-50, Vance breaking the tie)

• Attorney General Pam Bondi - fired April 2, 2026; Todd Blanche remains Acting AG, unconfirmed.

• Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem - fired March 5, 2026; replaced by Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).

• Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard - resigned May 22, 2026; acting successor Bill Pulte also remains FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency) Director.

• Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer - resigned April 20, 2026 amid a misconduct probe; replaced by Keith Sonderling.

The Senate and House:

The Senate leans Republican, 53-47, under Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) - unchanged since January 2025. The House leans Republican more narrowly - 217-214, plus one independent and three vacancies, under Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) - widely called the narrowest House majority in nearly a century.

The Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court is unchanged since the start of the term - the same nine justices:

• Chief Justice John Roberts - George W. Bush, 2005.

• Clarence Thomas - George H.W. Bush, 1991.

• Samuel Alito - George W. Bush, 2006.

• Sonia Sotomayor - Barack Obama, 2009.

• Elena Kagan - Barack Obama, 2010.

• Neil Gorsuch - Donald Trump (first term), 2017.

• Brett Kavanaugh - Donald Trump (first term), 2018.

• Amy Coney Barrett - Donald Trump (first term), 2020.

• Ketanji Brown Jackson - Joe Biden, 2022.

The Changing Tides of Federal Policy

Eighteen months in, the federal government has produced roughly 269 executive orders, 100 new laws, and dozens of major court rulings. Five overall policy shifts dominate the narrative for what has changed since Day 1 of Trump’s second term as President:

I. Executive power expanding into war and trade decisions Congress used to control.

The President has unilaterally withdrawn from longstanding international treaties including the Paris Agreement (only 1 of 4 nations exempt) and participation in the World Health Organisation, threatened Greenland, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally, with a forcible takeover, initiated several rounds of military strikes on Iran in 2025 and 2026 (killing Iran’s political leader), started an open-ended Venezuela military ‘campaign’ (forcibly extracting and indicting Venezuela’s President), and implemented a sweeping and chaotic tariff regime (much of which has been struck down as unconstitutional).

The underlying casualty figures from these executive actions are disputed across sources - the Pentagon says 13 U.S. dead in Iran, independent trackers say 15; Iranian deaths range from ~3,600 documented to 6,000+ in U.S./Israeli estimates; Venezuela’s toll ranges 75-100 depending on source.

Each of these actions were all set by executive order rather than new congressional authorization. The shift in activity extends beyond foreign policy with the Administration pushing to federalize the National Guard in four U.S. cities and largely taking control of law enforcement in Washington, D.C.

The shift is clear when looking at the volume of executive orders compared to legislation in the same time period vs. previous presidencies:

Figure: Executive orders vs. public laws enacted, first 18 months in office, by presidency

Trump has issued ~269 executive orders through early July 2026 - more than his entire first term (220 over four years), and well ahead of recent first-year totals. By comparison, Congress enacted just 72 public laws in all of 2025 - the fewest first-session total of the last five comparable Congresses (Biden 81, Trump’s first term 117, Bush 136, Clinton 210) - and the count stood at 100 through June 2026, still the lowest 18-month output of any recent presidency (Trump’s first term 200, Biden 159, Obama 201, Bush 199).

Congress was also shut down for 123 of its first 537 days, across three shutdowns (43, 4, and 76 days). No prior president accumulated more than ~56 cumulative shutdown days across an entire term (Carter’s record, broken October 2025); this Congress passed that within 18 months, and its 76-day shutdown is the longest in U.S. history.

And while the Federal courts have pushed back on Executive overreaching (tariffs struck down twice, all four Guard deployments blocked, a record number of nationwide injunctions and shadow-docket emergency rulings), the Supreme Court has since curtailed the Federal judiciary powers to intervene on Executive authority - limiting lower Federal Courts from issuing injunctions beyond the actual parties in the case under review (Trump v. CASA, Inc. decided June 27, 2025, 6-3, opinion by Justice Barrett).

Perhaps the most distracting trend highlighting the shift to attempted Executive dominance is the pursuit by Trump and his administration of self-aggrandising passion projects using taxpayer funds - this includes (among quite a few notable examples) the East Wing ballroom demolition in October 2025, that tripled in cost to $600M with about $307M reportedly taxpayer-funded despite claims of full private funding, and Trump attempting to settle with his own Department of Justice (DOJ) to the tune of $10B, which courts voided in July 2026 - and renaming everything from the Kennedy Center, to the Gulf of Mexico and the Department of Defense.

II. DOGE and the downsizing of the federal workforce.

A dedicated agency - the Department of Government Efficiency - was created by executive order with an 18-month sunset, and by the time that charter expired in July 2026, it had produced a net 256,000-employee decline across 22 agencies alongside real disruption: unresolved Treasury data-security gaps and an open probe into DOGE’s access to Social Security data on over 300 million Americans.

The scale of the shift is real - a quarter-million-plus reduction in federal staffing is a structural change to how the government operates, especially considering the cuts were not evenly applied and in some cases significant institutional knowledge was displaced (e.g. all 17 sitting members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were removed in June 2025). Homeland Security’s staffing fell less than 1%, while the Department of Education’s dropped more than 45%.

The impact is largely contested. DOGE’s 18-month charter expired July 4, 2026 “without ceremony.” Musk was never its formal administrator and left in May 2025. Its self-reported savings claim grew from $55B to $215B. Politico found only $1.4B of a $32.7B “verifiable” slice could be substantiated. Independent estimates suggest the cuts cost the government money overall: the Partnership for Public Service put the net cost to taxpayers in DOGE’s first 100 days at about $135B, and the Yale Budget Lab put lost IRS revenue over ten years at $597.8B. So whether this shift saved money or cost it is still an open argument.

Figure: DOGE’s self-reported savings claim vs. independently verifiable and net-cost estimates

Additionally, all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies and officers in the Federal Government were eradicated by Executive Order, and subsequently the Administration applied significant pressure on contractors and institutions receiving government funding (including Universities) to abandon DEI initiatives. This has had a ripple effect into the private sector - McKinsey and LeanIn.Org’s Women in the Workplace 2025 report found a decade of incremental workplace-diversity progress was stalled or reversed in 2025.

III. Immigration enforcement moving from policy to infrastructure.

On Day 1 of his second term, Trump declared a border national emergency, restarted “Remain in Mexico” and expanded fast-track removals, and tried to restrict birthright citizenship by executive order - a move blocked within days and ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2026.

The government’s war on immigration has built up across multiple stages since with a $70B funding boost for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) through 2029 (a congressional analysis found ~$2.2B in Pentagon funds redirected to immigration enforcement), and new mandatory-detention rules under the Laken Riley Act. Unlike the war-powers pattern, most of this held up in court and is now built into the machinery of government.

DHS claimed “over 2 million” illegal immigrants have been removed or self-deported, which was later revised to 605,000-622,000. TRAC’s independent count from ICE’s own data was 329,018 removals for FY2025 (up ~7% above FY2024), while Axios cites 442,637 removals for the same timeframe.

Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights documented 52 deaths in ICE custody from January 2025 through early June 2026 (39 in year one alone), the highest annual total since ICE’s 2003 founding and roughly four times the Biden-era custody mortality rate.

Separate from detention deaths, at least nine fatal shootings by ICE or CBP agents during field operations have been documented since March 2025, most prominently the January 2026 killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, plus two more in July 2026 alone - Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston (July 7) and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine (July 13).

While DHS claims on their own efficacy may not fully reconcile to independent review, it appears true that border crossings are confirmed at a 50-year low: 237,538 in FY2025, down sharply from a 2022 record of 2,206,436.

This is one contributing factor to U.S. net migration being on track for its first net negative year in 50 years:

Figure: U.S. net migration by year

IV. Fiscal policy, via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

This is the single biggest rewrite of who pays and who gets what: extending the 2017 tax rates, raising the SALT (State and Local Tax) deduction cap to $40,000 (a benefit concentrated among higher earners), cutting Medicaid 12% with new work requirements, and raising the debt ceiling by $5T. It’s the one action in the whole period that moved the needle on both taxation and spending at the same time, and it’s a direct contributor to the debt now sitting at $39T and a 5.9% deficit.

Figure: federal budget deficit by fiscal year, FY22-FY26

The Department of War’s budget jumped sharply this cycle. The FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorizes $890.6B in national defense spending, up modestly (~$7B) from FY2025’s $883.7B topline, continuing a run of steady annual increases (FY2024 was $824.5B). But that annual NDAA figure understates the real jump: OBBBA added a separate $156.2B in reconciliation defense spending on top of it, pushing combined FY2026 defense-related spending to roughly $1.04-1.05 trillion - a reported 17%-plus year-over-year increase and the largest nominal U.S. defense budget on record. At about 3.4% of GDP it’s still below Cold War and post-9/11-era shares of the economy.

Figure: Dept. of War appropriations by fiscal year, FY22-FY26

Tariffs rose in stages through 2025: 25% on Canada/Mexico and 10% on China in February; 25% on steel/aluminum in March; a 10% baseline plus higher country rates from April 2 (”Liberation Day”); China peaked at 145% before a Geneva deal cut it to 30% in May; steel/aluminum doubled to 50% in June. After the Supreme Court struck the original tariffs down (Feb 2026), a replacement universal tariff followed - and was itself ruled unlawful in May 2026, under appeal.

New deals were struck with the UK (10% on the first 100,000 cars/year), EU (15% ceiling, $600B investment/$750B energy pledges), Japan (15%, $550B investment), Vietnam (20%/40% transshipment), and a China truce cutting the fentanyl tariff to 10%. USMCA’s (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement) July 2026 review saw the U.S. decline a 16-year renewal; the deal runs to 2036 regardless. Effective rate estimates: Yale Budget Lab 11.8% (April 2026), Tax Foundation 7.7% (2025, vs. 2.4% pre-2025).

The impact of the trade agenda according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is an estimated net effect at roughly $2T added to the national trade deficit over ten years.

V. Defunding health and overturning established scientific consensus.

In September 2025, Trump and Secretary Kennedy publicly asserted that acetaminophen (Tylenol) use during pregnancy causes autism. FDA (Food and Drug Administration)’s own announcement acknowledged “a causal relationship has not been established and there are contrary studies,” and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and the American Academy of Pediatrics continued recommending it as safe, with no autism link.

In January 2026, HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released new dietary guidelines promoting saturated fats like butter and beef tallow over seed oils and reworking MyPlate, changes nutrition scientists at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and outlets like STAT said lack evidentiary support and, in some cases, involved drafters with industry ties.

Separately, Kennedy directed the CDC to stop recommending community water fluoridation (April 2025, opposed by the American Dental Association) and HHS canceled roughly $500M in mRNA vaccine research contracts (August 2025). Taken together with the overhaul of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP, the CDC’s outside panel of vaccine experts) and related vaccine-schedule changes, this is a sustained pattern of specific federal health guidance moving against the documented consensus position of the relevant scientific and medical associations.

Impacts are hard to quantify today, but the re-emergence of preventable diseases such as measles in the U.S. seems to substantiate the risk of anti-vaccination policies under Trump and Kennedy.

Figure: confirmed U.S. measles cases, by calendar year, through 2026

On funding, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) terminated or froze roughly 3,800 grants in 2025, cutting about $3B in research money (NIH’s share alone around $2.3B), while the administration’s proposed FY2026 budget cut CDC funding 53% versus FY2024 and eliminated 61 CDC programs. Separately, about $12B in already-approved COVID-era public health grants were clawed back earlier in 2025.

The sharpest fight has potentially been over public insurance funding: the Affordable Care Act (ACA)’s enhanced premium tax credits expired December 31, 2025 with no extension, pushing average marketplace premium payments up 114% (from $888 to $1,904 a year); the 43-day October-November 2025 government shutdown was fought specifically over this, ending only with a promised future vote on the subsidies, not a guaranteed extension.

Combined with OBBBA’s projected $793B in federal Medicaid cuts over ten years (CBO estimates 10.3 million fewer Medicaid enrolees), the CBO projects roughly 16 million more Americans uninsured by 2034 across all these changes together.

The ‘Great America’ Tests Applied

The three acid tests that make America great:

• Life: Can every American actually live a full, healthy life - without being financially ruined for the privilege?

• Liberty: Does this expand or restrict the freedom of ordinary Americans to think, speak, move, work, and choose - or does it concentrate that power in fewer hands?

• Pursuit of Happiness: Are the conditions of a flourishing life - meaning, community, mental health, and security - actually available to ordinary Americans?

Full details on the scorecard were covered in our Week 6 post: The State of the Union in Red, Amber and Green

Five shifts, one scorecard - the Week 6 dashboard, applied:

I. Executive power over war and trade. Iran struck twice, Venezuela’s president extracted, Greenland threatened, treaties exited, tariffs rewritten by decree - and not one of these decisions passed through the branch of government the Constitution assigned them to. The damage lands where the scorecard keeps its democracy and security measures - the Pursuit of Happiness. Trust in government already sits at 22%. The Liberal Democracy Index reads 0.57, the lowest since 1965. And Trump v. CASA stripped the judiciary of its best tool for checking any of this nationwide. Washington, D.C.’s National Guard mission remains under federal control, extended through the end of 2026, even though courts blocked the same push into four other cities and the administration dropped it, for now.

Then apply the Life test: the Iran campaign has killed at least 13 U.S. service members and wounded hundreds more, with independent trackers putting the toll as high as 15 killed and 540 wounded. On the Iranian side, human rights monitors document at least 3,600 dead, both military and civilian, while U.S. and Israeli military estimates run higher. The Venezuela operation killed no U.S. troops but wounded seven; on the other side, at least 81 people died, mostly Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel, along with two civilians.

🔴 Scores Red on Life (U.S. troops killed and wounded across two overseas campaigns, thousands of foreign deaths alongside them) and 🔴 Red on the Pursuit of Happiness - specifically the trust and democracy-index needles, both at multi-decade lows and both still moving the wrong way.

II. DOGE and the federal workforce. The boldest efficiency program in modern government wound down on July 4, 2026 with no ceremony, no administrator of record, and no auditable ledger. Its savings claim grew from $55B to $215B; Politico could verify $1.4B of the $32.7B it checked; two independent estimates ($135B net cost in the first 100 days, $597.8B in lost IRS revenue over ten years) suggest taxpayers paid for the privilege.

What the scorecard registers is different from what the press releases claimed: 256,000 experienced workers pushed into a labor market where entry-level hiring has collapsed and graduate underemployment already runs 40.5% - a direct hit on Liberty’s work-and-mobility measures - plus one more flagship program whose books don’t balance, which is precisely how a country ends up trusting its government 22% of the time.

🟠 Scores Amber on Liberty (work and mobility, in the worst market for it in years) and 🟠 Amber on the Pursuit of Happiness (trust: the numbers were the whole argument, and the numbers didn’t survive an audit).

III. Immigration enforcement as infrastructure. Border crossings at a 50-year low, net migration about to go negative for the first time in half a century. This is the one shift in five that delivered its promised number, but at a significant cost.

Then apply the Life test: 52 deaths in ICE detention since January 2025 - the highest rate in the agency’s 23-year existence, roughly four times the rate under the previous administration - plus at least nine fatal field shootings, including Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, in Minneapolis, and two more just this month in Houston and Maine. The Pursuit of Happiness test asks whether communities feel secure. A neighborhood where an enforcement operation can end with a nurse shot dead does not.

🔴 Scores Red on Life (custody deaths at an all-time-high rate) and 🔴 Red on the Pursuit of Happiness (security delivered as a statistic, experienced as fear).

IV. Fiscal policy, via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. On the dimension of Liberty, the One bill extends the 2017 tax rates and lifts the SALT cap to $40,000, concentrating the gains at the top of a distribution where the top 10% already hold 79% of the wealth, while cutting Medicaid 12% at the bottom - and finances both with a $5T debt-ceiling raise. Every dollar of the $39T national debt is deferred taxation on the young, the same cohort already carrying $1.87T in student loans. On the Life side, the Medicaid cut flows straight into the scorecard’s medical-debt measure, which already touches 41% of American households.

🔴 Scores Red on Life (coverage and medical debt) and 🔴 Red on Liberty (affordability and who inherits the bill - the two things our definition of Liberty is actually made of).

V. Health policy vs. scientific consensus. Measles was declared eliminated in America in 2000. It is killing Americans again - three deaths, the first since 2015, with cases at a quarter-century high and kindergarten vaccination coverage now below the herd-immunity line. That is the Life test failing in its most literal form, in a country whose avoidable-mortality rate (217 per 100k) already runs 50% above the OECD average. Then the money: premiums up 114% after the ACA subsidies lapsed, roughly $3B cut from NIH and CDC research, 16 million more projected uninsured by 2034 - stacked onto a baseline where a family premium costs $26,993 and 41% of households carry medical debt. And when federal guidance contradicts the pediatricians, the obstetricians, and the dentists in the same news cycle, that 22% trust figure stops looking like a floor.

🔴 Scores Red on Life (avoidable deaths and medical cost, the two things the test was written to catch) and 🔴 Red on the Pursuit of Happiness (trust in the institutions supposed to keep you alive).

Now step back and look at the whole board. Week 6 scored America against 37 measures and found all three tests failing before any of this was graded. So the fair question for Trump’s MAGA was never whether it generated activity - 269 executive orders in eighteen months, more than the entire first term, settles that - but whether any of it moved the needles already in the red. The dashboard answers. The needles that moved furthest are the national debt ($39T), the democracy index (0.57), and trust in government (22%) - all three in the wrong direction. And the needles that explain why America stopped feeling great in the first place - life expectancy ranked 46th in the world, $1.87T in student debt, just 27% still believing in the American Dream - were not improved by the large volume of activity.

That is the scorecard’s verdict on eighteen months of MAGA in Trump’s second term: the loudest government in history - America drifting further from great.

Sources

• American Presidency Project/Pew Research (EO counts); National Archives, Congress.gov, GovTrack, CRFB (shutdown data); CRS (injunctions); Ballotpedia/Steve Vladeck (shadow docket); SCOTUSblog “By the Numbers”

• Trump v. CASA; Learning Resources v. Trump/Trump v. V.O.S. Selections; CBO Monthly Budget Review: June 2026; U.S. Court of International Trade ruling, May 2026; Trump v. Barbara; EO 14160; Trump v. Illinois; Portland/Memphis/LA Guard rulings

• HHS restructuring announcement (March 2025); American Academy of Pediatrics v. Kennedy, No. 1:25-cv-11916 (D. Mass.)

• Executive Orders 14151, 14158, 14160, 14165, 14172, 14173, 14347, 14398

• American Federation of Teachers v. U.S. Dept. of Education; NADOHE v. Trump; Harvard litigation (D. Mass., Sept. 2025) and DOJ suit (March 2026)

• GAO-25-107397; GAO-26-108583, -108131, -108774

• DHS/ICE statements; TRAC (Syracuse Univ.); Axios; CBP data via Pew Research

• Partnership for Public Service; Yale Budget Lab; Tax Foundation; USTR/White House trade fact sheets

• H.R. 1/P.L. 119-21; P.L. 119-60; H.R. 4; S. 2; H.R. 6644; H.R. 7296; H.R. 1089/S. 440 - congress.gov roll-call records

• J.G.G. v. Trump; National TPS Alliance v. Noem; Las Americas/Luna Gutierrez v. Noem; D.V.D. v. DHS; Make the Road New York v. Noem; Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo; SSA v. AFSCME; U.S. DOGE Service v. CREW; CREW v. U.S. DOGE Service; Public Citizen v. Trump

• Pentagon IG report on Signal disclosure (Dec. 2025); transgender-troops litigation; NYT press-credentialing ruling (March 2026)

• Operation Midnight Hammer reporting; War Powers Resolution votes; CRS R48887 (2026 Iran conflict)

• WaPo/USA Today (East Wing costs); NPR (Rose Garden); PBS/NBC/CNN (Reflecting Pool); CNBC, Stars and Stripes, PBS, CRS IN12643 (Greenland)

• Home Rule Act Section 740; DC AG litigation over the Guard deployment

• CDC, Measles Cases and Outbreaks; CDC SchoolVaxView (measles chart); BEA/Census Bureau, U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services (trade chart); Human Rights Watch/Physicians for Human Rights (ICE custody deaths)

• Wikipedia, List of shootings by U.S. immigration agents in the second Trump administration; CNN, Houston Public Media, Boston Globe, Washington Post (Houston and Biddeford, Maine fatal ICE shootings, July 2026)

• Week 6 baseline (”The State of the Union in Red, Amber and Green,” July 2026) - source for the three acid tests and all 37 KPIs referenced throughout

Five weeks ago, I put out a challenge: America is broken, both parties know it, and neither has the courage or incentive to fix it. The Great American Path was my attempt to start a different conversation - grounded in data, evidence, and loyalty to no tribe.

There was a clear recognition that MAGA had struck an important note in the American psyche, but that the “G” in MAGA had not been well defined. The framework was there - universal rights guaranteed since our nation’s foundations: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - the American Dream.

Five weeks on, we’ve walked through each pillar - Life (Week 3), Liberty (Week 4), Pursuit of Happiness (Week 5) - with facts, no mud-slinging. We have our baseline.

The MAGA 2.0 Baseline - America, mid-2026

Three founding promises. Three red sections. That is the honest State of the Union.

The scorecard is not a verdict that America is poor, weak, or finished. Every red gauge sits above a country that still leads the world in wealth, and still gives more freely than most nations on Earth. The resources are here. The generosity is here. What’s failing is the accountability between citizen and state that decides where all that capacity gets pointed.

A Scorecard For the People, By the People

Just a few lines before Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, the Declaration of Independence laid out the accountability principle: governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” Self-government means a way to hold government accountable - not a government left to grade its own homework. That accountability needs a scorecard.

America has never had that framework. The State of the Union is a mood (or perhaps more accurately a political sales pitch), not an accounting. So here is the version no speechwriter would hand a President: the founding promises rendered as measures, each with a live reading.

🔴 Red = failing against peer nations, trend flat or worsening. 🟠 Amber = mixed, or failing but improving. 🟢 Green = America leads, or holds its own.

Each section reads the same way: the one-line verdict, the outcomes it produces, the costs it extracts, and some of the indicators that drive it. Every instrument benchmarks against the best-performing peer plus the US’s peer rank where one exists.

SECTION 1 - LIFE 🔴

Can every American actually live a full, healthy life - without being financially ruined for the privilege?

One line: We pay double and die younger. The extra $7,600 per person per year buys 3.7 fewer years of life (10 fewer years of healthy life) - a gap that did not exist in 1980 and was built by policy since.

Section verdict: FAILING.

Outcomes

Costs

Other Indicators

SECTION 2 - LIBERTY 🔴

Does this expand or restrict the freedom of ordinary Americans to think, speak, move, work, and choose - or does it concentrate that power in fewer hands?

One line: The odds a child out-earns their parents have fallen from 92% to 50% since 1940 - and getting on the ladder now costs the country’s graduates $1.87T in debt, at federal rates of up to 8.94% before a career even starts.

Section verdict: FAILING.

Outcomes

Costs

Other Indicators

SECTION 3 - PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS 🔴

Are the conditions of a flourishing life - meaning, community, mental health, and security - actually available to ordinary Americans?

One line: Every driver of a flourishing life is failing except one: Americans still help each other at near world-leading rates. The instinct is intact. The institutions around it have collapsed.

Section verdict: FAILING.

Outcomes

Costs

Other Indicators

Why the Scorecard Stays Red: The Locks on Change

Here is the uncomfortable part. Every red gauge on this dashboard has a known fix in the form of a benchmark country or peer that is doing it better - I have named some of them each week. So why is the scorecard so red, and why are the trends going in the wrong direction for Americans? The system meant to act on the answers is jammed. A number of locks hold the status quo in place, holding back America’s ability to change and adapt over time.

1. The separation of powers has broken down. The founders’ design assumed three branches that check and cooperate. What we have is gridlock as the default and rule-by-executive-order as the workaround - a system that can block anything and build almost nothing.

2. The two-party system forecloses the exit. A binary duopoly turns every question into a team sport, and primaries reward the loudest 15%, not the workable centre. The framework in this series is neither left nor right precisely because the two lanes on offer can’t deliver it.

3. Public debt is now a straitjacket. Past $39 trillion - and while the level (~122% of GDP) sits mid-pack in the G7, the trajectory is the outlier: the largest budget deficit in the G7 (5.9% of GDP) and the fastest-growing debt of any G7 nation, against a Germany that runs near-balanced at 65%. Interest now crowds out investment, and the fiscal room to build the fixes shrinks every year the debt compounds - a lock the last forty years bolted on for us.

4. Government runs on the wrong incentives. Unlike the private sector, public institutions face no competitive pressure to get cheaper or better; budgets reward spending, not outcomes. A system with no productivity discipline cannot reform itself into one.

5. Capture: the status quo has paid lobbyists. The sectors that profit from red gauges - healthcare spent over $700M on lobbying in a single cycle - fund the machine to keep the gauges red. Reform threatens revenue, so reform gets bought off.

6. Electoral short-termism. Two- and four-year cycles can’t finance thirty-year problems. The payoff for fixing mobility, health, or debt lands long after the officials who’d pay the political cost have left office.

7. Media incentives reward sensation over signal. This isn’t a case against journalists - it’s a business model problem. Attention-based media is paid per click and per outrage, not per accuracy, so a slow-moving, data-heavy scorecard like this one competes for airtime against whatever spikes engagement fastest. Polarised coverage sells; a shared, boring set of facts doesn’t - and that makes it harder for any of the other locks to be seen clearly, let alone opened.

That is the real agenda - not another party platform, but the operating model behind the scorecard.

The Path Forward

This dashboard is now the touchstone. From today, every issue this publication takes on - healthcare, housing, tax, guns, immigration, AI, work ... - gets scored as a move on one of these gauges. Does the policy turn a red light amber? Does it protect the green one? If a proposal can’t be plotted on this screen, why are we talking about it?

But the gauges and the locks together point at one conclusion Week 5 left on the table: a country this far into the red across health, debt, trust, community, and mental health at once is producing exactly what its design is built to produce.

We don’t expect the model that produced these readings to repair itself. Next week, we turn the dashboard on Washington itself: which current government policies are moving these gauges toward green, which are holding them red, and what that means heading into the midterms.

For now, the baseline is set. Pin it to the wall. We measure everything from here.

If this landed, share it. MAGA 2.0 and the scorecard belongs to everyone.

Sources

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics; OECD, Health at a Glance 2025 (life expectancy: 79.0 vs 82.7 yrs; 46th globally)

• World Health Organization, Global Health Observatory; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Global Burden of Disease Study 2023 (healthy life expectancy: US 63.9 yrs vs Singapore 73.6)

• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, National Health Expenditure Data 2024 ($15,474/capita; 17.2% of GDP)

• OECD, Health at a Glance 2025 (admin waste 34.2%, $760-935B; avoidable mortality 217/100k vs OECD avg 145)

• Kaiser Family Foundation, Employer Health Benefits Survey 2025 and KFF Medical Debt Survey (family premium $26,993; medical debt ~41%/100M); UK Government, National Insurance rates 2026/27; Australian Taxation Office, Medicare Levy 2026-27 (premium comparator)

• The Commonwealth Fund, Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System (maternal mortality >80% preventable, 22.3/100k vs Norway 0)

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (obesity 40.3%)

• Forbes Advisor / GoodRx Research, Medical Crowdfunding Report (~$750M/yr)

• Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Household Debt and Credit Report 2025 (student debt $1.87T); U.S. Department of Education, Federal Student Aid Interest Rates 2025-26 (loan rates up to 8.94%)

• OECD, Education at a Glance 2025; OECD Affordable Housing Database (higher-ed spend ~$36k/student vs Germany/Finland; renters cost-burdened 50.3%)

• Raj Chetty et al., “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940,” Science (2017, updated 2024); Chetty et al., “The Scandinavian Fantasy,” NBER Working Paper (92%→50% mobility; Denmark rank correlation 0.18 vs US 0.34)

• OECD Wealth Distribution Database; World Inequality Database, WID.world (top 10% wealth share 79% vs OECD 52%; income share 47% vs 34% in 1980, vs 36% Europe)

• Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Underemployment Report 2024; Green & Henseke, “Should Governments of OECD Countries Worry About Graduate Underemployment?”, Oxford Review of Economic Policy (underemployment 40.5% vs Germany ~16%)

• McKinsey & Company, The State of Organizations 2024/Generative AI and the Future of Work; Adzuna/Institute of Student Employers, UK Graduate Market Report; LinkedIn Economic Graph, Indeed Hiring Lab, Eures (entry-level hiring collapse, US and UK/EU)

• World Bank, Labor Force Total; Trading Economics, Labor Force Statistics (apprenticeships ~600k/0.3% of US workforce vs Germany 1.3M/~3.0%)

• National Center for Education Statistics / National Assessment Governing Board, The Nation’s Report Card 2024 (12th-grade reading lowest in 30+ years; math lowest since NAEP tracking began in 2005); OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Volume I (US math 465 vs OECD average 472, ranked 26th of ~81 - a rank driven partly by other countries’ scores falling faster, not a genuine US improvement)

• OECD, Education at a Glance 2025 (tertiary attainment, ages 25-34: US 51% vs South Korea 70%, Canada 67%, OECD average 47%); OECD, Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) 2023 (US adult numeracy ranked 25th of 31, scores falling since 2017 - including among tertiary-educated adults)

• Helliwell, Layard, Sachs et al., World Happiness Report 2024, Chapter 2: “Happiness of the Younger, the Older, and Those In Between” (rank 23rd overall; under-30s 62nd, Lithuania 1st; over-60s 10th, Denmark 1st)

• Charities Aid Foundation, World Giving Index 2024, built on Gallup World Poll data (generosity 6th of 142, down from 1st in 2019; Indonesia 1st)

• Pew Research Center, Public Trust in Government Survey 2025 (trust in government 22%)

• Cigna, Loneliness Index 2025 (57%); Survey Center on American Life, American Perspectives Survey (no close friends 3%→17%)

• V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026 (Liberal Democracy Index 0.57, lowest since 1965, vs Denmark 0.883)

• Remote.com, Life-Work Balance Index 2025 (59th of 60)

• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) 2024 (61.5M with mental illness, half untreated); World Health Organization, World Mental Health Survey Initiative (35-50% treatment gap is typical for high-income peers)

• Treatment Advocacy Center, “Going, Going, Gone: Trends and Consequences of Eliminating State Psychiatric Beds” (state psychiatric beds -96% since 1955); OECD, Health at a Glance (total psychiatric beds: US ~35/100k vs OECD median ~64/100k; Japan highest at ~258/100k, reflecting historic over-institutionalization, not a target; psychiatrist density comparable to OECD average)

• World Happiness Report 2023, Statistical Appendix, Table 1 (freedom to make life choices factor score: US 0.644 vs Belize 1.018 and Finland 0.986; US ranks roughly 110th of 147 countries measured)

• ABC News/Ipsos Poll, American Dream Survey (belief 27%, down from 50% in 2010)

• Trust for America’s Health, Pain in the Nation 2024; Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, 2020 (deaths of despair; US roughly double the UK/Sweden/Australia rate among comparable demographics)

• U.S. Department of the Treasury, Debt to the Penny (national debt >$39T)

• Congressional Budget Office, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2025 to 2035 (FY2025 deficit 5.9% of GDP, largest in G7)

• International Monetary Fund, Fiscal Monitor 2025 (fastest-growing G7 debt; gross debt ~122% of GDP, mid-G7, vs Germany ~65%)

United States Declaration of Independence, 1776 (opening section quote)

Week 5 of The Great American Path - a series stress-testing MAGA 2.0 against the three founding promises: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Week 3 measured the health cost of American Life. Week 4 measured the debt machine that cages Liberty. This week: whether the Pursuit of Happiness is still real - and for whom.

When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration, he inherited a phrase from Locke and the Enlightenment tradition: “Life, Liberty, and Property.” He crossed out Property and wrote Pursuit of Happiness.

That one edit was a philosophical claim. America’s promise was not the protection of what you already owned, but the freedom to go after something better. Not property as a destination - pursuit as a right.

A note on where Pursuit of Happiness sits. The three promises build on one another:

• Life asks whether the system keeps you alive and healthy. Week 3 said no - twice the cost of peer nations, three to four fewer years of life.

• Liberty asks whether you are free of the economic shackles that make real choice impossible. Week 4 said no - $1.77T in student debt, a 40-year break-even, and no bankruptcy exit.

• Pursuit of Happiness asks the question that sits on top of both: once you have your health and your footing, can you actually build a life worth living? Purpose, community, mental health, safety, belonging, identity.

It is Maslow’s hierarchy written into the founding document - and Pursuit of Happiness is the hardest to reduce to a single policy fight.

The Pursuit of Happiness Acid Test: Are the conditions of a genuinely flourishing life - purpose, community, mental health, safety, and the freedom to be who you are - actually available to ordinary Americans? All of them - not just the ones the system was built for.

The Headline: America Is Falling - With One Real Exception

The World Happiness Report 2026 - built on Gallup World Poll data across 147 countries - is the most comprehensive external read on how well a nation delivers happiness. The United States ranks 23rd, scoring 6.816 against Finland’s 7.764 - down from around 13th a decade ago, a slide of more than ten places since 2016. The US now sits below Mexico, Costa Rica, and - for the first time - the UAE and Saudi Arabia. GDP rose over the same period. Happiness fell.

And it isn’t one index having a bad year. Two other independent measures land in the same place. Gallup’s own life-evaluation tracker finds just 48% of Americans now “thriving” - about 27 million fewer than in 2021, and the first sustained dip below half since the depths of the pandemic.

Harvard’s Global Flourishing Study - 200,000 people across 22 countries - ranks the US 15th, behind Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines on the dimensions of a good life that money doesn’t buy. (Japan, richer than most nations above it, sits near the bottom: long hours, thin connection, little meaning - the cautionary version of where the US is heading.) Three independent datasets, one verdict.

The World Happiness Report explains national wellbeing through six drivers: income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and freedom from corruption. This series has already judged two of them. Income - Liberty’s terrain - is the one driver on which the US leads its peers, yet it is hollowed out by a distribution that renders the average almost meaningless for the bottom half (Week 4). Healthy life expectancy - Life’s terrain - is a clear failure: 79.0 years against a peer average of 82.7, a 3.7-year gap, despite roughly double the spending (Week 3).

That leaves four. On one, America sits firmly in the world’s leading pack - credit where it’s due. The US ranks 6th of 142 countries on the global generosity index, and held first place for a full decade (2009-2018). Americans help strangers, volunteer, and donate at world-leading rates - proof that the instinct to flourish together is intact even as the institutions around it fail. On a second driver, freedom to make life choices, Americans still report reasonable personal freedom; the data shows no collapse.

The damage is concentrated in the last two. On social support, 1 in 5 young American adults say they have no one to count on. On freedom from corruption - the trust that institutions will treat you fairly - just 22% of Americans trust the federal government, and the US ranks dead last in the G7 on institutional trust. These two failures don’t stay contained. They cascade into a crisis of purpose, mental health, and safety that the six drivers don’t even try to measure.

Whose Happiness? Flourishing Is Not Equally Distributed

The national average hides a second story: the Pursuit of Happiness is unevenly distributed - sharply by age, and across racial and identity lines. The breakdown is not just a map of inequality - it is a map of who the system was designed to serve.

By age, the pattern is starkly generational:

• Under 30: assessed on its under-30s alone, the United States would rank 62nd of 143 countries. Life evaluations among under-25s have fallen 0.86 points on a 10-point scale in two decades - even as young people grew happier in 85 of the 136 countries measured.

• Older Americans: the US keeps the promise here, performing comparably to its peers. The age-happiness curve has inverted - under-25s are now less happy than the over-60s, a reversal with no precedent in the data.

The country that wrote the Pursuit of Happiness into its founding charter is delivering it for the old and breaking it for the young.

Figure 1: US Happiness Rank by Age vs Peers (chart-happiness-by-age.png) Source: World Happiness Report 2026; Gallup World Poll

Across groups, the gaps are just as stark - and they fall hardest on those the system was not built for. Black and Native Americans bear the compounded weight of Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness failures: Native American life expectancy has fallen to 67.8 years - the lowest of any US group, nearly a decade below white Americans - and Native Americans have the highest suicide rate of any race (35 per 100,000 among men). Black Americans live about five years less than white Americans (72.8 vs 77.5).

LGBTQ+ Americans, especially the young, report depression and anxiety at two to three times the rate of their peers, and more than 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+ - most rejected by their own families, the most basic unit of belonging withheld by the people meant to provide it. Inclusion is not a side issue: the countries at the top of the happiness rankings - Iceland, Norway, Sweden - also top the Williams Institute’s Global Acceptance Index for LGBTI inclusion across 175 countries. Flourishing and inclusion rise together.

There is one bright counter-current. Hispanic and Latino Americans report higher life satisfaction than wealthier groups despite lower average income - the “Hispanic paradox,” carried by strong family bonds, multigenerational households, and dense community networks. A lower-income community out-flourishing a richer one supports the idea that community is a wellbeing asset the data can see. Where belonging is strong, flourishing survives economic pressure. Where it collapses, it doesn’t.

Driver One Failing: Social Support - The Infrastructure of Belonging Has Been Dismantled

Of the four remaining drivers, social support is where America has fallen furthest. In 2023 the US Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on an epidemic of loneliness - the kind of intervention once reserved for tobacco and HIV/AIDS:

• 37% of adults report moderate-to-severe loneliness, and 1 in 5 young adults has no one to count on for support.

• The mortality risk of social disconnection rivals smoking 15 cigarettes a day - a larger risk than obesity.

• Time spent in person with friends has fallen from roughly an hour a day two decades ago to about 20 minutes.

• The share of Americans with no close friends has risen from 3% in 1990 to 17% today - a fivefold jump for men, tenfold for women.

• Roughly 1 in 4 Americans now eat all their daily meals alone - up 53% since 2003, and nearly doubled among under-25s. The WHR finds shared meals as predictive of life satisfaction as employment or income. We have gone, in Robert Putnam’s phrase, from bowling alone to eating alone.

Third places have collapsed. Church membership has fallen from 73% in 1937 to 47% in 2020 - below half for the first time on record, and just 36% among millennials. Union membership has dropped from 35% in the 1950s to about 10%. Civic bodies - Rotary, the Elks, the VFW, local leagues - have lost most of their members, and analysts expect roughly 15,000 US retail closures in 2025 alone, thinning the cafes and storefronts where people once crossed paths. These weren’t social conveniences; they were the physical plant of mutual aid, shared ritual, and regular human contact, and nothing has replaced them.

The built environment makes contact optional. The US is the most car-dependent developed nation on Earth - Americans drive roughly twice as many road miles per person each year as people in France, Germany, or the UK. When the suburb requires a car for everything, the spontaneous encounter - the “weak ties” that research links to daily happiness and belonging (Sandstrom & Dunn, 2014) - simply doesn’t happen.

Intimacy is declining too. Stable partnership is among the strongest predictors of wellbeing in the literature - married adults are roughly twice as likely to call themselves “very happy” as never-married adults (GSS) - and it is in retreat. The General Social Survey documents a “sex recession”: the share of adults aged 18-64 having sex at least weekly has fallen from 55% in 1990 to 37% in 2024, and among 18- to 29-year-olds the share reporting no sex at all in the past year has doubled - from 12% in 2010 to 24% in 2024. Median age at first marriage has reached 28 for women and 30 for men, the highest on record, and a growing share never marry. None of this is a verdict on how anyone should live - it is an observation about infrastructure. The conditions that make intimacy possible are eroding: the share of young adults living with a partner fell from 42% to 32% in a single decade, and average time spent socializing in person dropped from nearly 13 hours a week in 2010 to about 5 in 2024. The third places where people met have closed, the security to commit is harder to reach, and the time connection requires has been eaten by precarious work and screens.

No institution matters more to happiness than family. It is the single biggest source of meaning Americans name - 77% put family first (APA, 2025) - and roughly two-thirds of US households are family households (Census). Whatever else has frayed, this is the foundation most lives are still built on.

Which is why severing it does such damage. Policies that break families apart without due process - immigration raids that separate parents from US-citizen children and uproot mixed-status families built over decades - attack the most foundational unit of belonging that exists. The exposed population is large: roughly 5.9 million US-citizen children live with an undocumented parent, and more than 22 million people live in mixed-status households. In 2025 alone, enforcement drove over 600,000 deportations (plus an estimated 1.9 million further departures), pushing US net migration negative for the first time in half a century. The chronic fear and family breakdown this produces are precisely what the science of wellbeing flags as catastrophic. This is a Pursuit of Happiness argument before it is anything else: a country that calls family a founding institution should be deeply uncomfortable using family separation as a tool, wherever it stands on enforcement.

Driver Two Failing: Trust - The Belief That the System Will Treat You Fairly

The WHR’s sixth driver, freedom from corruption, is really a measure of trust: the confidence that the institutions meant to serve you are not rigged against you. On that measure, the US is in freefall:

• Just 22% of Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing - below 30% every year since 2007, down from a 1964 peak near 75%.

• The US ranks last in the G7 on trust in its national government, its elections, its judiciary, and its military.

• Trust in the medical system has fallen from ~80% to 36%; trust in Congress sits at 10%, and in TV news at 11%.

• 69% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with how democracy is working (Pew, March 2026), and the US posted its lowest democracy rating since 1965 on the V-Dem index - below every other G7 nation.

Trust is not a soft virtue in the wellbeing data; the report finds the absence of corruption among the strongest reducers of negative emotion. When people stop believing the system is fair, they don’t merely disengage from politics - they lose one of the documented foundations of a settled, flourishing life. That same loss of faith resurfaces, measured directly, in the belief data later in this piece.

The Cascade: What the Collapse Produces

When social support and trust give way, the damage shows up in three conditions the index never measures but that decide whether a life is actually worth living: purpose, mental health, and safety. On all three, America is failing.

Purpose: Two in Three Working Without It

Only 31% of US workers are engaged at work - a 10-year low, down from a 36% peak in 2020. Dig into why, and the meaning deficit is stark:

• Just 18% of workers say their job has a purpose they personally believe in; 45% say they work purely to collect a paycheck (Gallup/Stand Together, 2025).

• For the first time on record, more US workers are struggling than thriving - only 51% rate their lives well enough to count as thriving.

• Job-market optimism has collapsed: 70% of workers called it a good time to find a quality job in 2022; by late 2025, just 28% did.

And the structural backdrop is unique among rich nations. The US is the only OECD country that guarantees zero days of paid vacation and zero weeks of paid parental leave, and it ranks 59th of 60 on the Global Life-Work Balance Index. Americans work 456 more hours a year than Germans - eleven extra weeks - for less rest and less security.

This is a meaning problem, not mainly a wages one. Gallup’s research is consistent: engagement is driven more by autonomy, development, and the sense that one’s work matters than by pay. Jefferson’s word was pursuit - the going-after, not the arrival. Work experienced as purely transactional is work in which the pursuit has been switched off. 83% of Americans call “freedom of choice in how to live” the most important part of the American Dream; fewer than one in three feel it at work.

Figure 2: Worker Engagement Trend, 2000-2024 (chart-engagement.png) Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2025

Mental Health: The System Fails at Prevention and at Treatment

61.5 million American adults - about 1 in 5 - live with a mental illness, and nearly half (29.5 million) receive no treatment at all (SAMHSA, 2024). The system is failing on both sides of the ledger: it neither prevents the crisis nor treats it.

Prevention. Mental illness is largely downstream of the failures already named, and the dose-response links are well documented. Adults in food-insecure households are about 2.7 times more likely to be depressed; people in problem debt are roughly three times as likely to have depression, anxiety, or stress - and about half of those with problem debt also live with a mental illness; the often-lonely are about 2.3 times more likely to develop new-onset depression. Financial worry is now the single largest source of stress Americans report (APA, 2025). The implication runs one way: reduce those upstream shocks and you reduce the illness they produce - which is what high-happiness countries do, pairing universal healthcare (no medical bankruptcy), debt-free education (no debt trap), and stronger social infrastructure (less isolation).

Treatment. But prevention is no justice for the 61.5 million who are ill today, and the treatment system is in structural collapse. In 1955 the US had 340 public psychiatric beds per 100,000 people; today it has fewer than 12 - a 96% collapse. Deinstitutionalization promised community mental health centers as the replacement; they were never adequately funded. The result: the three largest mental-health providers in America are now the Los Angeles County Jail, Rikers Island, and Cook County Jail. The country incarcerated its mental health crisis instead of treating it. The access barriers compound:

• 40% of Americans live in a federally designated mental-health provider shortage area, and roughly 29% of US counties have no psychiatrist at all.

• Insurers deny mental-health claims at 2.5 times the rate of comparable medical ones - and in May 2025 the federal government announced it would stop enforcing the parity rule meant to prevent exactly that.

• A therapy session runs $200-$400 and is often out-of-network.

The economist Richard Layard, drawing on longitudinal data from over 100,000 people in four countries, found that mental illness is a bigger cause of human misery than poverty, unemployment, or physical illness - yet it receives a fraction of the resources. His other conclusive finding: a standard course of evidence-based therapy lifts about half of patients into recovery and, through lower physical-health and lost-work costs, roughly pays for itself - among the highest-return investments a government can make.

Figure 3: The Divergence - Beds Down, Illness Up (chart-bed-illness-divergence.png) Source: Treatment Advocacy Center; SAMHSA NSDUH; OECD Health Statistics 2024

Safety: Fear Forecloses Flourishing

You cannot pursue purpose, build community, or tend to your mental health while afraid. Week 3 set out the physical failures - gun deaths at 12.8 per 100,000, more than ten times the peer average; road deaths at three times the European rate. The toll compounds:

• Deaths of despair - overdoses, alcohol, and suicide - rose 142% between 2002 and 2022, from 74,000 to 207,827 a year. (2024 brought the first real decline in 25 years, -16% - progress now threatened by federal grant cuts.)

• Gun suicides hit a record 27,593 in 2024 - 62% of all gun deaths - even as homicides fell.

• Three to four women are killed by an intimate partner every day, and a gun in the home multiplies the risk of domestic homicide by 500%.

Chronic exposure to this violence produces ambient fear that forecloses flourishing: in high-violence US neighborhoods, PTSD rates rival those of combat veterans - one Atlanta study found 30.8% of inner-city patients met criteria for current PTSD (Grady Trauma Project).

But safety in the Pursuit of Happiness sense is broader than physical danger:

• Identity safety - the freedom to be who you are without fear of violence or institutional hostility - is conditional for LGBTQ+ Americans, racial minorities, and immigrants in the current climate, a chronic psychological tax with measurable cost.

• Economic safety - knowing one medical bill or job loss won’t destroy everything - is where Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness meet: the financial floor of Liberty is also the psychological precondition without which Pursuit of Happiness cannot begin. It is why 8-12 million Americans a year now run a GoFundMe to cover medical bills, and fewer than one in eight reaches its goal - a private charity lottery standing in for the public safety net other rich nations take for granted.

What America Now Believes

Belief in the American Dream has moved decisively, and recently. In 2010, 50% of Americans said the Dream was real; by 2024, just 27% - halved in fourteen years (ABC News/Ipsos). 52% now say it was once real but no longer is. Among 18- to 29-year-olds the collapse is steeper still - from 56% in 2010 to just 21% in 2024.

And it isn’t only the Dream as an idea - it’s the near future too. In late 2025, Gallup’s measure of personal optimism (the share of Americans who expect a high-quality life five years out) fell to its lowest level since the question began in 2008 - down about 9 points (to roughly 59%), or some 24 million fewer optimists than in 2020.

Figure 4: Belief That the American Dream Is Real, 2010-2024 (chart-american-dream-belief.png) Source: ABC News/Ipsos, January 2024

Here is the distinction that matters: 83% of Americans still call freedom of choice in how to live the most important part of the Dream. The aspiration is intact. What people have lost faith in is the delivery - the belief that if they do their part, the conditions for flourishing will meet them halfway. People who abandon the idea disengage. People who keep the idea but lose faith in the system get angry.

The Verdict

Pursuit of Happiness: Are the conditions of a genuinely flourishing life - purpose, community, mental health, safety, and the freedom to be who you are - available to all Americans?

Measured against the World Happiness Report’s own drivers and the conditions they cascade into:

• Generosity - 6th of 142 worldwide; first for a full decade. The one America still keeps.

• Social support - 1 in 5 young adults with no one to count on; 37% lonely; 1 in 4 eating every meal alone. Failing.

• Trust - 22% trust in government; last in the G7; democracy rating at a 60-year low. Failing.

• Purpose - 31% engaged at work; only 18% find their work meaningful. Failing.

• Mental health - 61.5 million ill, nearly half untreated; psychiatric capacity down 96%. Failing.

• Safety - ten times the peer gun-death rate; a record 27,593 gun suicides; identity safety conditional. Failing.

• Equal access - flourishing stratified by age, race, and sexuality. Failing.

• Hope - belief the American Dream is real has halved to 27% since 2010 (just 21% among the young), and optimism about the future sits at a record low. Failing.

Jefferson changed one word and made a promise to everyone. America still has the generosity to keep it - the instinct is intact and close to world-leading. What it has lost is the social fabric and the institutional trust that turn that generosity into a flourishing life. And the data says we’ve been withdrawing both.

What It Would Actually Take

The interventions that move these numbers are already running in other countries. None require new ideology; several only require recovering what America once had.

Rebuild community infrastructure. Some of the most-used free public spaces America still has - libraries (1.2 billion visits a year, now doubling as internet access points, job-help desks, and warming and cooling centers), community centers, parks, and youth programs - are the physical plant of belonging, and they are starved of funds. The Nordic nations - which hold five of the top six places in the world happiness rankings - devote more than a quarter of GDP to public social support; the US funds public childcare and early education at just 0.27% of GDP, roughly a fifth of the Nordic share. Channel the generosity Americans already show as individuals into the shared infrastructure that sustains it.

Address the religion void honestly. Church membership has fallen from 73% to 47% in a lifetime; no policy can or should reverse that. But what religion did for its members - gathering, ritual, mutual aid, rites of passage, a framework of meaning - still needs doing. Invest in secular institutions that perform those functions. The happiest countries are not more religious - they are more connected by other means: only about 3% of Danes attend a weekly service, among the lowest rates on Earth, yet Denmark also posts the world’s highest social trust (74% say most people can be trusted).

Make belonging a policy priority, not a culture war. The deprivations are specific and fixable. For LGBTQ+ Americans: federal anti-discrimination protections, school anti-bullying infrastructure, and homeless-youth provision. For Black and Native communities: targeted investment in maternal health, community mental health, and reservation infrastructure - to close gaps as stark as a decade of life expectancy. These are high-return wellbeing investments in populations whose potential the country is currently writing off.

Mental health: prevent upstream, fund treatment. Reform the Life and Liberty conditions that generate illness, and rebuild the community treatment infrastructure dismantled in the 1960s - with insurance parity that has teeth (and is actually enforced) and enough trained workers to close the 40%-shortage gap. Sequential, not either/or: prevent what you can, treat what you cannot.

Design for human contact. Zoning reform, walkable mixed-use development, and transit are community policies as much as economic ones. The Netherlands - now the 7th-happiest country in the world - didn’t become a cycling nation by accident; it built for it. Places designed for encounter produce more of it.

Rebuild trust through due process. Enforcement that separates families and operates without adequate recourse corrodes exactly the institutional trust the WHR identifies as a driver of wellbeing - and inflicts direct damage on millions, citizens included. A country serious about the Pursuit of Happiness for all takes this seriously, not as a partisan position but as a human one.

Invest in purpose at work. Worker voice, profit-sharing, paid leave, flexible-working rights, and skills development all move engagement. The UK’s four-day-week trials found no productivity loss and clear wellbeing gains. Standard fare in the countries that top the rankings - and a direct answer to a nation working eleven more weeks a year than Germany for less security.

The MAGA 2.0 Scorecard - Week 5 Running Total

Three tests. Three failing grades. One country that still has the resources, the tradition, the generosity - and, just about, the will - to pass all three.

None of this is small. Taken together it amounts to a different settlement between citizen and state - and that raises a harder question than any single policy on this list. The operating model that produced these outcomes is unlikely to be the one that reverses them. A country this far off the mark across health, debt, community, trust, and mental health at once is not failing at the margins; it is producing what its design is built to produce. So the deepest item here is also the most uncomfortable: a fundamental look at how government itself is organised - what it is built to optimise for, and whether it can still execute change at this scale. We should not expect the model that delivered these results to repair itself.

The baseline is now set: three founding promises, three failing grades. Next week we pull the full scorecard together and face the harder question - not which policies, but whether America’s operating model and its finances can actually deliver a turnaround of this scale.

If this landed, share it. The test belongs to everyone.

Sources

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21. The Trevor Project. “2023 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health.” https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2023/

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23. Oldenburg, R. The Great Good Place. Da Capo Press, 1989.

24. OECD. Social Expenditure Database & Health Statistics 2024. https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm

25. General Social Survey (GSS) / NORC. “Sexual Frequency and Partnership Trends.”

https://gss.norc.org/

1. Chetty, R. et al. “The Fading American Dream.” Science, 2016. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617

2. Gallup. “Americans’ Life Ratings Slump to Five-Year Low” (Life Evaluation / Thriving Index). 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/658778/americans-life-ratings-slump-five-year-low.aspx

3. VanderWeele, T. et al. “The Global Flourishing Study: Study Profile and Initial Results.” Nature Mental Health, 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-025-00423-5

4. Survey Center on American Life / AEI. “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss.” 2024. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/

5. AmeriCorps / US Census Bureau. “Civic Engagement and Volunteering, 2023.” https://americorps.gov/newsroom/research

6. Health Affairs Scholar. “Medical crowdfunding on GoFundMe.” 2024. https://academic.oup.com/healthaffairsscholar

7. Flores, A.R. “Social Acceptance of LGBTI People in 175 Countries and Locations.” Williams Institute, UCLA, 2021. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/global-acceptance-index-lgbt/

8. CDC / NCHS. “Life Expectancy by Race and Hispanic Origin, United States, 2022.” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/life-expectancy.htm

9. CDC. “Disparities in Suicide” (American Indian/Alaska Native highest rate). https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/disparities-in-suicide.html

10. Frontier Group / FHWA. “Americans Drive the Most” (vehicle-miles per capita vs peer nations). https://frontiergroup.org/resources/fact-file-americans-drive-most/

11. Sandstrom, G. M., & Dunn, E. W. “Social Interactions and Well-Being: The Surprising Power of Weak Ties.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2014. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167214529799

12. Institute for Family Studies / General Social Survey. “Marriage and Happiness.” https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey

13. Institute for Family Studies / GSS. “The Sex Recession” (weekly sex 55%->37%; 18-29 sexlessness 12%->24%, 2024). https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-sex-recession-the-share-of-americans-having-regular-sex-keeps-dropping

14. American Psychological Association. “Stress in America 2025” (family the top source of meaning, 77%). https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stress-in-america/2025/

15. American Immigration Council. “U.S. Citizen Children Impacted by Immigration Enforcement.” https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/us-citizen-children-impacted-immigration-enforcement/

16. Brookings. “Macroeconomic Implications of Immigration Flows in 2025 and 2026.” January 2026. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/macroeconomic-implications-of-immigration-flows-in-2025-and-2026-january-2026-update/

17. US Census Bureau. “America’s Families and Living Arrangements.” https://www.census.gov/topics/families/families-and-households.html

18. Pourmotabbed, A. et al. “Food insecurity and mental health: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” Public Health Nutrition, 2023 (depression odds ~2.7x). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/food-insecurity-and-mental-health-a-systematic-review-and-metaanalysis/CB76D90D879907A6050DCAE2AD4F07EE

19. Mental Health Foundation / Royal College of Psychiatrists. “Debt and Mental Health” (~3x risk; ~half of problem-debt adults have a mental illness). https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/explore-mental-health/a-z-topics/debt-and-mental-health

20. McKinlay, A. et al. “Loneliness and the onset of new mental health problems in the general population.” Soc Psychiatry Psychiatr Epidemiol, 2022 (new-onset depression aOR ~2.33). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-022-02261-7

21. Clark, A., Fleche, S., Layard, R., Powdthavee, N. & Ward, G. The Origins of Happiness. Princeton University Press, 2018 (mental illness the largest single cause of misery; therapy roughly cost-neutral). https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691177892/the-origins-of-happiness

22. Gillespie / Ressler et al., Grady Trauma Project. “Trauma exposure and PTSD symptoms in inner-city civilians.” 2016 (30.8% met current PTSD criteria). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5107154/

23. Institute of Museum and Library Services. “Public Libraries Survey” (~1.2 billion annual visits; libraries as community hubs). https://www.imls.gov/research-evaluation/surveys/public-libraries-survey-pls

24. Pew Research Center / World Values Survey. “Nordic religiosity and social trust” (Denmark ~3% weekly worship - among the world’s lowest; ~74% say most people can be trusted - among the world’s highest).

Liberty: Does this expand or restrict the freedom of ordinary Americans to think, speak, move, work, and choose - or does it concentrate that power in fewer hands?

Debtors’ prison is perhaps the best known example of a failure to preserve the right to Liberty during the 18th Century. It was a feature of early American life. People who couldn’t repay debts were jailed indefinitely, not for a crime, but simply for being broke. Robert Morris - signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, and the chief financier of the Revolution - spent three and a half years in Philadelphia’s Prune Street debtors’ prison between 1798 and 1801. Congress passed the first federal Bankruptcy Act in 1800 largely to get him out.

The country spent the next three decades arguing its way out of the practice. Federal imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1833 - 57 years after the Declaration. The premise that finally won the argument was simple: a person should not be permanently trapped by a debt they cannot repay. Indefinite bondage to creditors was incompatible with the liberty the country claimed to stand for.

Then Congress changed it. In 1976, student loans were made non-dischargeable in bankruptcy for the first time. In 2005, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act tightened this further - making student debt the one major category of consumer debt in America that bankruptcy cannot touch. You can walk away from a failed business, a medical catastrophe, a collapsed mortgage. You cannot walk away from a student loan.

It took America 57 years from its founding to abolish debtors’ prison. It took one act of Congress to rebuild it - this time with an interest rate attached. Because here’s what we actually know about liberty in America in 2026: your freedom to choose a career, change a career, or enter any field that requires credentials is largely determined by whether your family had money when you were 18. That is not liberty. That is inherited advantage wearing liberty’s clothes.

The Bottom Line on US Education

The United States spends more per student on education than almost any other country in the world. According to OECD data, the US spends approximately $36,000 per tertiary student per year (including core instruction, research, and ancillary services) - compared to roughly $17,000 in Germany, $16,000 in France, and $14,000 in Finland.

We spend twice as much. And what do we get for it? A generation entering the workforce more credentialed and more indebted than any in history - and less able to find work that uses either

Figure 1: Annual tertiary education spend per student - US $36K vs OECD peers averaging ~$17K · Source: OECD Education at a Glance 2024

• $1.77 trillion in outstanding student loan debt - more than auto loans, more than credit card debt (Federal Reserve, 2024)

• 41.5% of recent college graduates working in jobs that don’t require a degree (NY Fed, Q1 2026)

• The class of 2025 is facing the toughest graduate job market since the pandemic, with AI eliminating the entry-level roles that used to be the first rung (Fortune, 2025)

The spending gap would be defensible if the outcomes justified it. They don’t. Three metrics - all measuring what happens after the money is spent on tertiary education - tell the story.

1. Graduate unemployment: Among 25-64 year-olds holding tertiary qualifications, 17% of US degree-holders are not in employment - compared to 14% across the OECD (OECD EAG, 2025). A country spending approximately 2.5 times the OECD per-student average should not be producing a higher share of non-employed graduates than the OECD mean. That is not a labour market anomaly. It is a return on a failed investment. And the trend is moving in the wrong direction: the US once sat modestly above the OECD average on this measure. That advantage has been fully eroded.

2. Graduate underemployment: 41.5% of recent US college graduates (aged 22-27) are working in jobs that don’t require a degree (NY Fed, Q1 2026). Across the EU, the equivalent overqualification rate for all tertiary-educated workers averages just 21% (Eurostat, 2024). Even for young European workers in the 25-34 bracket, the rate sits closer to 25% - still 16 percentage points below the US figure for new graduates. Finland and Denmark rank among the lowest in Europe on this measure.

Figure 2: Graduate underemployment rate (graduates in jobs not requiring a degree), aged 22-27 · US: 41.5% flat since 2017; EU avg: ~21% · Source: NY Fed Q1 2026; Eurostat EU-LFS 2024

3. Young people falling through entirely: 14% of Americans aged 18-24 are NEET - Not in Employment, Education or Training (OECD EAG, 2024). That matches the OECD average exactly. Finland manages 12.5%. The Netherlands - with university tuition of just €2,601/year and a robust vocational system - achieves just 5%, the lowest in the OECD. A country spending $36,000 per student per year should not be producing NEET rates at the OECD mean.

Look familiar? This is the same pattern we saw last week with healthcare: the most expensive system in the world, producing outcomes that trail our peers.

The Debt Machine

The average federal student loan rate for 2025-26 is 6.39% for undergraduates, 7.94% for graduate students, and 8.94% for PLUS loans (parent and graduate borrowers). These are not subprime mortgage rates. These are the rates a government charges its own citizens to get an education.

Figure 3: Government student loan interest rates, 2025-26 - US undergraduate 6.39%, graduate 7.94%, PLUS 8.94%; UK ~2.5%; Germany, Australia, Denmark: free or zero-interest · Source: US Dept of Education; SLC; BMBF; StudyAssist; SU

Federal loans account for 92% of all student debt - 44.6 million borrowers, $1.73 trillion outstanding. Private loans make up the remaining 8% (~$140 billion), generally with interest rates ranging from 8-18%.

Figure 4: Total US student loan debt outstanding, 2006-2024 - $0.48T to $1.77T · Source: Federal Reserve G.19 Consumer Credit Report 2024

By comparison, in the US today, someone with a 700+ credit history can access unsecured loans from 4.5% variable to 5.5% fixed, but the most in need demographic - students just starting on the career path **lack the credit history to secure these loans. Federal loans are the only realistic option for the vast majority. The students least able to afford risk carry the most of it.

Compare that to Germany, where the main state student support system (BaföG) charges zero interest on its loans - total repayment is capped at €10,010 regardless of how much was borrowed - and where the vast majority of students pay no tuition at all, only a semester administrative fee of roughly €200-350 (~$220-390).

In Denmark, Finland, and Norway, tuition is free. Danish students receive a state stipend of approximately $1,000/month (SU grant) while studying - the government pays them to learn, not the reverse.

In Australia, tuition is government-subsidised and repaid through the tax system only once a graduate earns above a threshold - and the repayment rate is indexed to income, not to market interest. There is no accruing interest in the traditional sense.

The US chose a different design rooted in free market capitalism without a safety net. It chose to fund higher education through a debt market at commercial rates - and then to make that debt uniquely non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, a protection almost no other type of debt has. You can walk away from a failed business. You cannot walk away from a student loan. The risk of the investment sits entirely with the borrower, not the lender, not the institution, not the government.

The result: a family earning $60,000 per year cannot realistically fund four years at a private university without taking on debt that will follow their child into their 40s. That is not a scholarship problem. It is a system design problem.

The Return That Isn’t

The standard defence of this system is that a college degree is worth it - that graduates still earn significantly more than non-graduates over a lifetime, so the debt is rational.

That argument is eroding fast. And it was never uniform.

The overall premium: At the median, a bachelor’s degree holder earns a nominal premium of roughly $640,000-$700,000 over a high school diploma holder over the full course of their career. The math: a bachelor’s degree holder earns approximately $1.28 million in lifetime career earnings (2018 dollars), compared to $580,000-$640,000 for a high school diploma holder (Hamilton Project, 2020). So, at the median today, a degree pays back over the lifetime (though in discounted cash flow terms over 50 years or so, only marginally so). But that median statistic conceals enormous variation by field.

Lifetime Earnings by Degree Field:

Source: Hamilton Project / Brookings, 2020. †Nominal Net Return = lifetime earnings minus HS baseline ($610K) and tuition ($144K). NPV Net Return (3%) discounts all cashflows to age 18; see end-note.

Approximately 1 in 4 bachelor’s degree programs produces a negative financial return on investment - concentrated heavily in arts, humanities, and social work at private institutions (FREOPP, 2021). Graduates in arts, humanities, human services, and early childhood education, the lifetime nominal earnings premium over a high school diploma narrows to roughly $130,000-$200,000 across a 40-year career - approximately $3,250-$5,000 per year in additional income. Against $29,560 in average debt at 6.53% interest, that margin is thin and negative in NPV terms. The debt is real. Even a marginal premium is not guaranteed.

41.5% of recent graduates are underemployed - working in roles that don’t require a degree (New York Fed, Q1 2026) - in fields like communications, criminal justice, and the liberal arts, underemployment rates run above 50%. Graduates are not just failing to get jobs; they’re also failing to get jobs that use what they paid to learn.

The AI Layer: Compounding the Crisis in Real Time

Meanwhile, the entry-level jobs that historically served as the bridge - research assistant, junior analyst, paralegal, junior copywriter, entry-level coder, data entry, customer service management - are being automated at scale. AI is not a future threat to entry-level employment. It is a present one. The numbers are specific and they are stark:

• Big tech entry-level hiring fell to just 7% of new hires in 2024 - a 25% drop from 2023 and more than 50% below pre-pandemic levels (Rest of World, 2025)

• Startup graduate hiring collapsed from 30% of new hires in 2019 to under 6% in 2024 (IntuitionLabs, 2025)

• Software developers aged 22-25 saw a near-20% decline in employment versus their late-2022 peak (Stanford Digital Economy Lab, 2025)

• Tech job postings on Indeed are down 36% from early 2020 levels as of mid-2025 (Indeed Hiring Lab, 2025)

• 51% of organisations surveyed by McKinsey in 2025 reported that generative AI was actively reducing their need for entry-level workers (McKinsey, 2025)

The class of 2025 is not competing with their peers for these roles. They are competing with AI tools that don’t need benefits, breaks, or onboarding. CNBC described it plainly in September 2025: “AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It’s the end of the career ladder as we know it.” The rungs that previous generations used to climb - the grunt work that built skills, networks, and track records - are gone before this cohort reaches them.

And the job that remains - the job that’s resistant to automation, that pays well, that offers upward mobility - increasingly goes to the candidate with the internal referral. The back-door network is not a perk. In 2025, it is increasingly the door. Industry hiring data consistently shows that referred candidates are 4x more likely to be hired. A first-generation graduate from a state school, carrying $35,000 in debt, does not arrive with the same network as a legacy admit from a private university whose parent plays golf with the hiring manager. That gap in social capital is not narrowing over time. It is compounding as demand outstrips supply for new graduate jobs.

Education That Isn’t Keeping Pace

Here is what the market actually wants in 2025, and what a four-year degree mostly doesn’t teach:

• Prompt engineering and AI tool integration - the fundamental literacy of the new economy

• Digital marketing and analytics - skills that can be self-taught in months via platforms like Google, Meta, HubSpot, or Coursera

• Cloud infrastructure basics - AWS, Azure, GCP certifications that take weeks and cost hundreds, not tens of thousands

• Coding fundamentals - accessible via bootcamps ($10,000-15,000, 12-16 weeks) with comparable employment outcomes to CS degrees in many markets

• Trade and technical skills - HVAC, electrical, plumbing, welding - fields with chronic labour shortages and six-figure earning potential that cannot be outsourced or automated

The institutions that are actually delivering workforce-ready skills in 2025 are not primarily four-year universities. They are community colleges, online platforms (Coursera, edX, LinkedIn Learning), coding bootcamps, apprenticeship programmes, and - most efficiently - self-directed learners using free YouTube content and free-tier software tools. A motivated 22-year-old with a laptop can acquire skills that are marketable within 12 months, at a fraction of the cost of a degree, without the debt, but this is not accepted by most Americans as a respected alternative to a University degree with a negative RoI and low likelihood to guarantee a distinct career pathway.

The system has not caught up to this reality. The credential still carries enormous weight with employers - which means the debt is still extracted - but the education itself is often not the most efficient route to the skills the market actually values.

The Employer Has Left the Building

Historically, employers invested in workforce development. Companies like IBM, GE, and AT&T ran internal universities. Apprenticeship pipelines were common in manufacturing, construction, and finance.

That model largely ended in the 1980s and 1990s as companies offloaded training costs onto workers and the public education system. Today, while 92% of US employers technically offer some tuition reimbursement benefit, only 2% of eligible employees use it - largely because the programmes are designed around reimbursement after the fact (which requires liquidity) rather than upfront payment, and because workers are often unaware the benefit exists at all (InStride, 2024).

The effective result is that the cost of becoming qualified for a job is almost entirely borne by the individual - before they have income from that job, before they know if they’ll get the job, and before they know if the qualification will remain relevant by the time they get there.

In Germany and Denmark, apprenticeship models are structured nationally - employers co-fund vocational training as a matter of standard practice, not optional generosity. The government, the employer, and the student share the cost. In the US, the student bears almost all of it.

Figure 5: Apprenticeship completers per 100,000 workers - US: 59; UK: 618; Germany: 913 (15× more per worker) · Source: US DoL FY2021; BIBB/OECD 2024; UK ESFA 2023

The public sector has made the same retreat. State funding per full-time student at public universities fell 26% in real terms between 2008 and 2020 - cuts made during the financial crisis that were never fully restored (CBPP, 2021). The Pell Grant, the federal government’s primary tool for supporting low-income students, covered 79% of average public university tuition in 1975-76. By 2023-24 it covers just 27% (College Board, 2024). And federal investment in adult worker retraining has fallen from approximately $6 billion in the late 1970s (CETA programme, in 2021 dollars) to around $1.6 billion today under WIOA - a real-terms cut of more than 70% in the programme most directly responsible for helping displaced workers re-enter the workforce (EPI / Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2022). When both the employer and the state withdraw from the cost of workforce development, the bill does not disappear. It lands on the individual.

The Consolidation

The end state of this system - tuition funded by debt, returns uncertain, entry-level pathways automated, employer investment withdrawn - is not merely individual hardship, but structural consolidation of capital.

Since 1975, the share of US national income flowing to workers has fallen from approximately 62.3% to 56.8% (Penn World Table / FRED, 2023). At current GDP, that 5.5 percentage point decrease represents roughly $1.5-2 trillion per year that flows to capital owners instead of workers. The EPI State of Working America data shows that between 1979 and the early 2020s, US worker productivity grew approximately 65% while median hourly compensation grew only about 17% in real terms. The gap - roughly 48 percentage points of productivity growth - flowed to capital owners, not workers.

When AI eliminates an entry-level job, two things happen simultaneously: the company captures the productivity gain from the worker it didn’t hire, and the worker who would have held that job loses a career stepping stone. The capital owner benefits immediately. The displaced worker - or the graduate who never got the rung to climb - has no claim on that gain.

A live example of this is unfolding in the music industry where traditionally 70% of royalties are distributed to artists, and 30% to platforms like Spotify. While this is already controversial, the situation is becoming much worse with AI. Spotify and other platforms are highly incentivised to develop wholly owned AI artists because an owned AI artist gets no royalties - 100% of the profits go to the platform. This is covered with a nice data foundation in this Youtube post worth a watch and a mention:

The result is an American economy increasingly sorted into two classes: those who own assets that generate income while they sleep, and those who depend entirely on the next pay check. The old middle class - homeowners with savings, small business owners, skilled workers with defined benefit pensions - was an ownership class. That class is shrinking.

So who are the capital owners? The top 10% of American households own approximately 87-89% of all corporate equities, including pension and retirement accounts. The bottom 50% own approximately 1-2% (Fed DFA, Q4 2025). The top 1% alone holds 31.9% of all household wealth. The top 0.1% holds 14.5%.

Who Owns America?

Lorenz curve: cumulative share of total wealth vs. share of population, richest left - 2025 - Source: Fed DFA, Q4 2025

Figure 6: Distribution of US household wealth - top 10% hold 87-89% of equities; top 1% holds 31.9% of all wealth; top 0.1% holds 14.5% · Source: Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, Q4 2025

The student debt system accelerates this bifurcation between the 10% who ‘have’ and everyone else directly. A graduate carrying $334/month in loan payments for 10 years is not accumulating equity in that decade. They are servicing a debt that was the price of entry to a job market that may or may not have paid off. Their classmate from a wealthy family graduated debt-free, invested the equivalent of those payments, and started their 30s with a decade of compounding behind them.

Data: Penn World Table 11.0, FRED Series LABSHPUSA156NRUG; Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts Q4 2025; EPI State of Working America Data Library.

What Works - Two Models

Switzerland: Around two-thirds of Swiss young people choose the dual VET (Vocational Education and Training) pathway over an academic university track - not because they couldn’t gain admission, but because the pathway is designed to be respected, well-paid, and career-defining. Approximately 240 federally recognised professions - from polymechanics and banking to IT systems engineering and healthcare - are delivered through a combination of in-company training and vocational school. Swiss employers invest approximately CHF 5.5 billion annually in apprenticeship training, treating workforce development as a business investment, not optional generosity. Apprentices earn wages from day one. Youth unemployment: consistently around 3.5% (OECD, 2024). University fees for domestic students run approximately CHF 1,000 per year - less than the cost of a single month at many US private universities. Most VET graduates carry no meaningful debt. Switzerland has built a GDP per capita of approximately $98,000 - among the world’s highest - on a workforce that is predominantly vocationally trained. The lesson is not that university is wrong. It is that a country can build extraordinary economic performance without making debt the price of entry.

Denmark: Free tuition plus a state education grant (SU) of approximately $1,000/month, available to all qualifying students regardless of family income. The system is funded through general taxation. Denmark consistently ranks among the world’s most competitive economies and most productive workforces (IMD, 2024). The investment in education is understood as national infrastructure, not personal consumption.

Both countries produce highly educated, highly employable workforces. Neither country has concluded that the way to fund this is to lend 22-year-olds money at 8.94% and make the debt immune to bankruptcy discharge.

The Fix - Brief Version

Three structural changes would shift the trajectory:

1. Income-contingent repayment as the default. No graduate should repay student debt while earning below median income. Payments should scale to income and debt should be discharged after a fixed period - the Australian model, adapted for the US. Cost to the federal government: meaningful but offset by reduced default rates and economic stimulus from disposable income freed from debt service.

2. A national apprenticeship framework.

The United States produced approximately 96,915 registered apprenticeship graduates in FY 2021 - roughly 59 per 100,000 workers (US Dept of Labor, 2021). Germany‘s dual vocational system produces approximately 420,000 apprenticeship completers per year from a workforce of 46 million - roughly 913 per 100,000 workers, approximately 15 times more per worker than the United States (BIBB / OECD, 2024). The UK produces approximately 618 per 100,000. Finland routes 65% of its upper-secondary students through vocational tracks. The US routes fewer than 1% through registered apprenticeships. This is not a marginal gap.

In total, the whole US apprenticeship infrastructure serves only 600,000 workers annually - compared to 1.3 million in Germany, a country with a quarter of the US population. Scaling this with federal co-investment and employer tax incentives would create workforce-ready graduates who earn while they learn, emerge without debt, and enter roles where employers already have a stake in their success.

3. Federal and private sector investment in community colleges and vocational pathways.

Free community college was proposed and partially passed in diluted form. It should be the floor, not the ceiling. Vocational training for trades and digital skills should be federally subsidised at the same level as university education. A welder and a lawyer both need training. The state should not treat one as a public good and the other as a private investment.

When a company deploys AI to eliminate entry-level roles, it captures the productivity gain immediately. The workers - or the graduates who would have filled those roles - bear the entire cost of retraining, relocation, and re-entry into a transformed labour market. That is not a market outcome. It is a transfer of wealth from workers to capital owners, enabled by a policy vacuum. There is an option - Make the companies that benefit from AI displacement pay for the retraining of the Americans it displaces.

Several models exist for doing this differently:

• Singapore’s SkillsFuture programme provides every adult citizen over 25 with an individual learning account, topped up by the government, to fund continuous training. The 2025 Budget added S$4,000 specifically for mid-career workers aged 40 and above - those most vulnerable to automation displacement. Employers receive a separate S$10,000 enterprise credit to co-fund workforce transformation. Government and companies share the cost. (Singapore Budget, 2025)

• The CHIPS Act conditional model: The US has already demonstrated it can attach workforce development conditions to federal investment. Companies receiving CHIPS Act semiconductor subsidies must commit to apprenticeship programmes and prevailing wages. This is the template: if you benefit from federal infrastructure or market access, you fund the workforce that makes it possible.

• A Portable Retraining Account (PRA): Modelled on SkillsFuture, every American worker could hold a portable training credit - funded by a levy on companies whose automation investment crosses defined thresholds. The ILO and OECD have called for exactly this. The EU Parliament passed a non-binding resolution on a “robot tax” in 2017. No major economy has enacted it as law yet. The US could lead.

The argument against this - that it will slow AI adoption - assumes that the productivity gains from automation flow back to society broadly. They don’t. They flow to shareholders. The question is not whether retraining needs to be funded. The question is who pays. Right now, the answer is: the people who got displaced.

The Acid Test - Applied

The freedom to choose your profession - genuinely, regardless of your parents’ income or their contacts - is not a left or right value. It is the founding promise. The data says we are failing it.

Liberty: Does this expand or restrict the freedom of ordinary Americans to think, speak, move, work, and choose - or does it concentrate that power in fewer hands?

Apply it to a system (one of the only ones in the developed world) that charges 8.94% interest on the loan a first-generation student needs to enter a profession.

Apply it to a job market where 41.5% of recent graduates are underemployed - and the remaining good jobs increasingly flow through networks the indebted generation wasn’t born into.

Apply it to an AI economy that is eliminating the entry-level on-ramps before the students who borrowed $40,000 to reach them have even graduated.

The degree-return table is real. The apprenticeship gap is 15 times. Forty-one and a half percent of graduates underemployed, flat for eight years. These are not market anomalies. They are the predictable outputs of a system designed to extract debt, not build careers.

As a baseline today of greatness, the scorecard on ‘liberty’ isn’t even close.

Next week: Pursuit of Happiness - what it actually means to chase happiness in 2026, and whether the conditions for it are available to ordinary Americans.

If this landed, share it. The test belongs to everyone.

Sources

1. OECD Education at a Glance 2024 - Spending per student

2. Federal Reserve - Student Loan Debt Outstanding 2024

3. New York Fed - Labour Market Outcomes for Recent College Graduates (underemployment 41.5%, Q1 2026)

4. ELFI / Dept of Education - Federal Student Loan Interest Rates 2025-26

5. German Federal Ministry of Education - BaföG overview (interest-free, €10,010 cap)

6. InStride / IFEBP - Education Benefits Survey 2024 (92% offer, 2% utilise)

7. Yahoo Finance / Fortune - Class of 2025 faces toughest job market since pandemic

8. OECD - Apprenticeship in Germany, dual system overview

9. US Dept of Labor - Registered Apprenticeship national results

10. IMD World Competitiveness Rankings 2024 - Denmark

11. MarketBeat / Rest of World - AI decreasing entry-level hiring at big tech

12. Rezi AI / IntuitionLabs - The Crisis of Entry-Level Labor in the Age of AI

13. Stanford Digital Economy Lab / Brynjolfsson - Software developers 22-25, ~20% employment decline (ADP payroll data, 2025)

14. McKinsey - 51% of organizations report GenAI reducing entry-level need (2025)

15. CNBC - “AI is not just ending entry-level jobs” (September 2025)

16. Indeed Hiring Lab - Tech job postings down 36% from early 2020

17. US Constitution Article I Section 8 - Bankruptcy powers

18. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789

19. OECD Education at a Glance 2025, Indicator A3 - Graduate Employment Rates by Education Level

20. Broady & Hershbein, “Major Decisions: What Graduates Earn Over Their Lifetimes,” Hamilton Project / Brookings, October 2020

21. NCES, “Loans for Undergraduate Students and Debt for Bachelor’s Degree Recipients,” Condition of Education 2023 - B&B:16/20 Longitudinal Study

22. College Board, Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2025

23. Jantti et al. (2006), “American Exceptionalism in a New Light,” IZA Discussion Paper No. 1938

24. WEF Global Social Mobility Index 2020

25. Penn World Table 11.0 via FRED, Labor Share of GDP - Series LABSHPUSA156NRUG

26. Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA), Q4 2025

27. EPI State of Working America Data Library

28. US Department of Labor, ETA, FY 2021 Apprenticeship Data and Statistics

29. BIBB, Datenreport zum Berufsbildungsbericht 2024

30. OECD Education at a Glance 2024, Indicator A2 - Share of NEETs among Young Adults

31. Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), “Is College Worth It?” 2021

32. Singapore Budget 2025 - SkillsFuture Level-Up Programme

33. Baum & Looney, “Who Owes the Most in Student Loans: New Data from the Fed,” Brookings 2020

Eurostat EU Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) 2024 - Overqualification Rates by Educational Attainment

Methodology note - NPV Net Return (degree returns table): Figures apply a 3% real discount rate to nominal lifetime earnings in 2018 constant dollars, discounted to age 18. Degree holders assumed to begin earning at 22 (43-year career to 65); HS diploma earners at 18 (47-year career). NPV deduction per degree: HS baseline lifetime NPV $323K + PV of 4 years’ foregone HS wages $48K + PV of 4-year tuition $134K = $505K total. Earnings modelled flat in real terms (no career earnings curve), which modestly understates STEM returns and modestly overstates humanities returns. Implied HS annual wage ($12,979) reflects the Georgetown CEW median across all HS-only workers including part-time, not full-time median. If the Georgetown / Hamilton Project source figures are themselves already discounted present values, the NPV returns shown here overstate the reduction (double-counting). We treat source figures as undiscounted nominal totals. The flip to negative for lower-earning degree fields is robust across reasonable discount rate and career-length assumptions.

Quick Recap: The ‘L.L.P.’ Framework for Greatness and Our Acid Tests

The Great American Path holds that a truly great America must deliver on three foundational promises — the same three its founders named. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Not as slogans. As measurable outcomes.

America is great when Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are real, in practice, universally for everyone.

Last week we published an acid test for each — a single question that cuts through the noise and tells you whether a policy, a politician, or a party is actually on the side of greatness:

Life: Does this make the average American live longer, healthier, and freer from financial ruin when they get sick?

Liberty: Does this expand or restrict the freedom of ordinary Americans to think, speak, move, work, and choose — or does it concentrate that power in fewer hands?

Pursuit of Happiness: Does this give more Americans a genuine shot at economic security and upward mobility — or does it entrench advantage for those who already have it?

Today we go deep on Life.

The Paradox That Should End the Debate

The United States spends more on healthcare per person than any other nation on Earth - and gets some of the worst health outcomes in the developed world.

In 2023, the US spent $14,570 per capita on healthcare. The OECD average among peer nations was roughly $6,500–$7,500. We spend nearly twice as much as Germany, France, Canada, or the UK.

And yet:

• The US ranks 46th in the world for life expectancy - behind Cuba, Slovenia, and Chile.

• US life expectancy is 78.4 years (2023, CDC). The OECD peer average is approximately 82–83 years.

  • Japan: 84.3 years. Switzerland: 84.0 years. Australia: 83.5 years. Spain: 83.3 years.

  • That is a 3.6 to 5-year gap compared to our nearest peers.

The standard response from defenders of the status quo is: “Our care is just better - we treat the sickest patients.” But that explanation has been tested and found wanting. Commonwealth Fund analyses consistently show the US ranks last or near-last among 11 high-income nations on healthcare outcomes, access, equity, and efficiency - despite the highest spending.

So what is the culprit? The answer is several compounding factors.

Part 1: What’s Killing Americans Earlier

Avoidable Deaths: The Uniquely American Killers

The US does not have a standard of healthcare problem. It has a preventable death problem.

Gun violence: The US gun death rate is approximately 12.8 per 100,000 people (CDC, 2021). The average among peer nations is under 1 per 100,000 - more than a 10× gap. Gun deaths claim roughly 45,000 Americans per year (Commonwealth Fund).

Opioid and drug overdoses: Deaths from drug overdoses peaked at 111,029 in 2022 (CDC) - roughly 5–7 times higher than comparable countries. This is a policy failure as much as a public health one, rooted in pharmaceutical industry impunity, inadequate mental health infrastructure, and criminalisation over treatment.

Road deaths: The US traffic fatality rate is 12.8 per 100,000 - roughly 3× the rate in Germany, France, or the UK (OECD, 2022). About 42,000 Americans die on roads each year. Underinvestment in public transit, pedestrian infrastructure, and road safety standards is the primary driver.

Combined, these three causes account for an estimated 2–3 years of the US life expectancy shortfall. None require better hospitals. All require political will.

The Chronic Disease Crisis

Even before a single American gets sick enough to see a doctor, the baseline health of the population is in crisis.

Obesity - estimated life expectancy impact: ~1–2 years

• 40.3% of US adults are obese; a further 31.7% are overweight - nearly three in four overweight or obese. (CDC, NHANES 2017–2020)

• By comparison: Japan 4.5%, France 17%, Germany 22%, Canada 27%, UK 28%.

• The National Academies estimates high obesity rates account for 30–42% of the entire US longevity shortfall versus peers. Obesity reduces life expectancy at age 50 by approximately 1.5–1.85 years on average - and up to 14 years for severely obese individuals. (PNAS 2018; NCI)

Diabetes - estimated life expectancy impact: ~1–2 years

• Not entirely unrelated; 38.4 million Americans (11.6%) have diabetes; a further 97.6 million have prediabetes. (CDC, 2024)

• US diabetes prevalence is roughly double that of France, Norway, and Japan.

• A type 2 diagnosis at age 40 reduces life expectancy by approximately 10 years; at 50, by 6 years. (PMC, 2022)

Cardiovascular disease - estimated life expectancy impact: ~1 year

• Also not entirely unrelated, heart disease claims 702,880 Americans per year (CDC, 2022).

• The US age-adjusted cardiovascular mortality rate reached 454.5 per 100,000 in 2022 - roughly double the rate in France. France and the UK achieved five-fold declines in cardiovascular deaths since 1950; the US managed only four-fold. (Harvard G20 CVD Report 2024; PMC 2022)

Mental health - estimated life expectancy impact: up to 2 years

• 21% of US adults experience a mental illness each year; only 47% receive treatment. (NIMH, 2022)

• A 2024 Commonwealth Fund study found the US has higher rates of unmet mental health need and cost-related barriers than any comparison country - with 45% of US adults in emotional distress also facing financial or housing insecurity, versus only 16–19% in the UK, France, and Germany.

• US suicide rates have risen from 10.8 per 100,000 in 2003 to 14.1 in 2023 - the largest increase of any OECD country over that period, while 12 of 16 peer nations saw rates decline. (OECD Society at a Glance 2024; CDC)

• People with serious mental illness lose an estimated 10–20 years of life compared to the general population. (The Lancet, 2023)

• Suicide claims approximately 49,500 Americans per year - more than gun homicides.

The Unaffordable Country

For the average American, even when they are able to get treatment, the bill can be debilitating.

• Emergency room visit: Average cost $2,200–$3,000 for a basic visit. A serious visit: $10,000–$30,000+. (Peterson-KFF)

• Childbirth: Average hospital birth costs $18,865 in the US (FAIR Health, 2022). In the UK, Germany, or France: near zero out-of-pocket.

• Insulin: Approximately $274 per vial in the US. In Canada: $32. In Germany: $11. The RAND Corporation found the US pays 9.7× more for branded pharmaceuticals than 32 comparison countries.

• Administrative waste: The US spends approximately $760–$935 billion annually on healthcare administration - 34.2% of total expenditure (JAMA). Canada’s single-payer system spends roughly 12%. Per capita: US $2,497 vs Canada $551, France $389, Germany $493. (Himmelstein et al., NEJM 2020)

• 100 million Americans - roughly 41% of adults - carry medical debt. It is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States. (KFF, 2022)

The Policy Moment Making It Worse

Current policy is deepening the preventable disease crisis in America:

CDC and NIH cuts: Proposed NIH cuts of up to $18 billion and DOGE-era reductions to public health infrastructure will be measured in avoidable lives not saved.

Vaccine hesitancy mainstreamed: With RFK Jr. leading HHS, measles has returned and childhood vaccination rates are under pressure - with long-term consequences expected to continue compounding over the next decade.

Medicaid cuts: Cutting Medicaid reduces treatment access for millions with mental health and substance use disorders. The opioid crisis doesn’t end when you cut treatment funding. It accelerates.

GoFundMe as shadow healthcare: As an inadequate backstop to insufficient public funds for healthcare, Americans launch an estimated 500,000 medical crowdfunding campaigns per year, raising over $650 million annually. This is not charity. It is rationing. (JAMA Internal Medicine)

The Flywheel of Failure

The system perpetuates itself through six interlocking mechanisms:

• Opaque pricing - Hospital “chargemaster” prices bear no relationship to actual cost. The same procedure can run $500 at one facility and $12,000 at another; market forces cannot operate when patients cannot compare prices.

• Pharma monopoly rents - The US does not negotiate drug prices at scale. The IRA started - but covers only a fraction of drugs and is under political attack.

• Insurer profit-imperative - The top five US health insurers reported combined profits of over $35 billion in 2022 - generated through healthcare margins and administrative complexity.

• Political entrenchment - The healthcare sector spent over $700 million on lobbying in the 2022 cycle alone. The healthcare lobby is a machine designed to produce exactly this outcome.

• The employer trap - Tying insurance to employment locks workers in jobs, suppresses entrepreneurship, and strips coverage at the most vulnerable moments of the lives of the unemployed.

• 30% overhead, worst outcomes - Every dollar trapped in this flywheel is a dollar not spent on care. The system hits the uninsured, the low-income, and the chronically ill hardest - compounding inequality rather than reducing it.

Part 2: Proof It Can Work - Two Models Worth Studying

You don’t have to imagine a better system. It already exists — in dozens of countries, running right now, covering everyone, for longer lives, with better health outcomes, at half the cost.

Case Study 01

Germany - The Original Blueprint

Germany built the world’s first national health insurance system in 1883 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck - and it still outperforms the United States on almost every measure, over 140 years later.

• 99.9% coverage - 89% through statutory health insurance, ~10% through regulated private insurance, less than 0.1% uninsured

• Life expectancy: 81.1 years - nearly 3 years more than the US

• Per-capita spending: ~$9,365 (PPP) - still $5,000 less per person than the US

• Preventable mortality: 129 per 100,000 - below the OECD average of 145 and far below the US average of 217 (OECD Health at a Glance 2025)

How it works: Mandatory employer-employee payroll contributions (~7.3% each) flow into ~100 competing non-profit sickness funds (Krankenkassen). Premiums are income-based, not risk-based. The principle: you pay according to your means, you receive according to your need.

Why it’s relevant to the US: Germany is an employer-contribution system, just like the US. The architecture - payroll deductions, employer co-payment, competing private insurers within a regulated framework - is not alien to American experience. The difference is that Germany’s system covers everyone, bans risk-based pricing, and caps administrative overhead. The result: 3 more years of life at $5,000 less per year.

Case Study 02

The Netherlands - The Modern Refinement

Built on the Bismarck tradition and refined for the 21st century - using fully regulated private insurance - the Netherlands achieves even lower costs with comparable outcomes.

• 99.9% coverage through mandatory private insurance

• Life expectancy: 81.6 years - 3+ years more than the US

• Per-capita spending: ~$7,000 - less than half the US figure

• Ranked 4th in the World Index of Healthcare Innovation; among the shortest specialist wait times in Europe

How it works: Every resident purchases from a private insurer - but insurers must accept all applicants, cannot charge based on health status, and compete on quality. The government sets covered benefits, negotiates drug prices centrally, and subsidises premiums for lower-income households.

What both countries prove: The mechanism matters less than the rules. Regulated private insurance can work. Employer contributions can work. What has never worked anywhere is letting insurers profit from denying care, pharma set prices without negotiation, and hospitals charge whatever the market will bear. The US has chosen the one arrangement every other wealthy democracy rejected.

Part 3: The Fix - And How America Pays For It

The US does not need to nationalise healthcare. It needs to break the flywheel. Based on the learnings from other nations leading in the Life Test, three structural changes would do it. Then we address the question every reasonable person asks: can we actually afford this?

Change 1: Drug Price Negotiation - For Everything

The US government funds the care of over 145 million Americans through Medicare and Medicaid. It should negotiate drug prices the way every other wealthy government does. The IRA’s limited start should be expanded to cover all drugs purchased with public funds.

The IRA’s initial drug negotiations - covering just 10 drugs in the first round - were scored by the CBO to save approximately $98 billion over 10 years. Extended to full negotiation across all Medicare drugs, independent estimates project savings of $500 billion or more over 10 years. (CBO; Commonwealth Fund extrapolations)

Net cost to implement: near zero. Net saving to the federal government: potentially $50 billion per year once fully scaled. This is not a spending item. It is a revenue raiser in the form of a decision to stop overpaying.

Change 2: A Public Insurance Option

Every American should be able to buy into a public insurance plan - Medicare-equivalent coverage available to any individual or employer at cost. This does not eliminate private insurance. It provides competition that forces private insurers to cut overhead and improve quality, or lose customers.

A public option covering the currently uninsured and those who opt in is estimated to cost the federal government approximately $150–$400 billion over 10 years in net new spending, depending on design - primarily premium subsidies for lower-income enrollees. (CBO analysis of various public option bills, 2019–2021) That cost is substantially offset by reduced uncompensated care costs, lower Medicaid emergency spending, and the downstream economic gains from a healthier, more mobile workforce.

Change 3: Investment in Healthcare Workforce and Public Health Literacy

The trend analysis shows that the US is not on an improvement trajectory in most categories when it comes to cost of healthcare and outcomes.

America faces a projected shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036 (AAMC), and a larger shortage of nurses, mental health professionals, and primary care providers in rural and low-income communities.

Fixing this requires: expanded medical school capacity, student debt relief tied to service in underserved areas, investment in community health workers and nursing education, and investment in public health literacy - so Americans can make informed decisions about diet, prevention, vaccination, and when to seek care.

Estimated 10-year cost of a serious workforce and public health literacy investment: approximately $80–150 billion - covering expanded GME funding, targeted loan forgiveness, community health worker programmes, and public health education infrastructure.

A healthy nation starts in schools and communities, not emergency rooms.

In total, implementing all three changes would cost the federal government an estimated $230–$550 billion over 10 years in gross new spending - with drug price negotiation savings of $500 billion or more partially or fully offsetting that figure. The net cost range, depending on programme design, is broadly cost-neutral to a meaningful net saving - while covering tens of millions more Americans and adding years to the average American life.

This is not a utopian number. It is what it costs to stop being an outlier.

America Already Has the Money

Can America afford this? The US spends approximately $4.5 trillion per year on healthcare. If the US matched Germany’s per-capita cost of ~$9,365, it would spend roughly $3.1 trillion — saving over $1.4 trillion per year while covering everyone and living nearly three years longer. Match the Netherlands and the saving exceeds $2.4 trillion annually.

The problem is not that America spends too little. It is that America wastes more on healthcare than most countries spend in total - and has little to show for it in comparison.

Conclusion: The Acid Test for ‘Life’

Let’s go back to where we started:

Life: Does this make the average American live longer, healthier, and freer from financial ruin when they get sick?

Apply that test to current US healthcare policy. Apply it to the decision to cut Medicaid. Apply it to defunding the CDC and mainstreaming vaccine disinformation. Apply it to a pharmaceutical pricing system that makes insulin unaffordable for the country that invented insulin.

The answers are not ambiguous.

MAGA 2.0 does not accept the premise that America must choose between being great and keeping its people alive and well. The data shows we already spend enough - more than enough. The question is not resources. It is will and policy choice.

A great country does not crowdfund chemotherapy. A great country does not rank 46th in life expectancy while spending first on healthcare. A great country treats the health of its people as a universal foundation - not an afterthought. In America, we have work to do.

Next week: Liberty - what it actually means to be free in 2026, how education and power over speech, movement, and opportunity is concentrating in fewer hands, and what restoring it would take.

If this resonated with you, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you haven’t already - subscribe. We’re just getting started.

Sources & References

1. CDC – US Life Expectancy Data 2023: cdc.gov

2. OECD Health Statistics 2023: oecd.org

3. Commonwealth Fund – Mirror, Mirror 2023: commonwealthfund.org

4. CDC – Gun Violence Statistics: cdc.gov

5. CDC – Drug Overdose Deaths 2022: cdc.gov

6. OECD – Road Safety Annual Report 2023: itf-oecd.org

7. CDC – Adult Obesity Facts: cdc.gov

8. CDC – National Diabetes Statistics Report 2024: cdc.gov

9. American Diabetes Association – Economic Costs of Diabetes 2024: diabetesjournals.org

10. RAND Corporation – International Drug Price Comparison 2021: rand.org

11. Himmelstein et al. – Administrative Spending US vs Canada (NEJM 2020): nejm.org

12. Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker – ER Costs: healthsystemtracker.org

13. KFF – Medical Debt Survey 2022: kff.org

14. JAMA Internal Medicine – Medical Crowdfunding Analysis: jamanetwork.com

15. AAMC – Physician Shortage Projections 2036: aamc.org

16. Commonwealth Fund – Netherlands Health System Profile: commonwealthfund.org

17. NPR – Senate ICE/CBP Enforcement Bill, June 2026: npr.org

18. CBO – Inflation Reduction Act Drug Pricing Provisions: cbo.gov

19. Harvard T.H. Chan – State of Cardiovascular Disease in G20+ Countries (2024): hsph.harvard.edu

20. PMC – Cardiovascular Mortality Gap, US vs High Life Expectancy Countries: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

21. PNAS – Role of Obesity in Slow US Mortality Improvement: pnas.org

22. NCI – Extreme Obesity May Shorten Life Expectancy Up to 14 Years: cancer.gov

23. National Academies – Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity (Role of Obesity): nationalacademies.org

24. PMC – Lifetime Risk and Years of Life Lost from Diabetes in the US: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

25. The Lancet / eClinicalMedicine – Life Expectancy in People with Mental Disorders (2023): thelancet.com

26. OECD Health at a Glance 2025 – Germany: oecd.org

27. World Health Systems Facts – Germany Health System Overview: healthsystemsfacts.org

28. The Lancet – Statutory Health Insurance in Germany: 135 Years of Solidarity: thelancet.com

29. Commonwealth Fund – Mental Health Needs in the US vs Nine Other Countries (2024): commonwealthfund.org

30. OECD – Society at a Glance 2024, Suicides: oecd.org

31. CDC – Changes in Suicide Rates in the US, 2022 to 2023: cdc.gov

But a critique is cheap. Anyone can point at what’s broken. The harder question - the one this publication actually exists to answer - is the one buried inside the most successful political slogan of the modern era:

Make America Great Again... but what does “great” mean?

Nobody ever defined it. That wasn’t an accident. An undefined “great” is politically perfect - it’s a blank canvas onto which every voter paints their own private nostalgia. Great like 1955, or 1965, or 1985, or whenever your family’s story peaked. A slogan that means everything to everyone wins elections. It just can’t govern, because you cannot deliver what you never defined, and you cannot be held accountable to a standard that doesn’t exist.

So before this publication takes on healthcare, education, immigration, taxes, or anything else, I want to define the scorecard for ‘Great’ or at least the framework to which we will add over time. This will be the North Star for the Great American Path if you will.

The Framework Was Written in 1776

Here’s the fun part: America already has a timeless North Star - a definition of greatness. It’s in the second sentence of the founding document, and every American can recite it.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

We treat those six words as poetry - something carved on monuments and read aloud on the Fourth of July. I want to suggest we treat them as something far more practical: a design brief. A specification. The founders weren’t writing a mood; they were writing the purpose of the government they were about to build. And they were unusually precise about the terms: these rights are self-evident, universal, and unalienable.

Not “for some.” Not “if the market permits.” Not “for those who can afford the deductible.” Universal and unalienable.

That gives us a working definition that requires no new ideology, no imported “ism,” nothing that needs inventing:

America is great when Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness are real, in practice, universally for everyone.

And the beautiful thing about a definition is that you can measure against it.

The Three Pillars of ‘Great’

If those founding words are a specification, then each one implies a test. Here is how we are scoring - and the first honest readings.

1. The Life Test

Can every American actually live a full, healthy life - without being financially ruined for the privilege?

“Life” comes first in the founding sentence for a reason: every other right depends on it. A right to life that ends at a hospital billing department is not unalienable; it’s a subscription service.

The current reading is best understood as a transaction. America pays $15,474 per person, per year for healthcare. The average across comparable wealthy nations is $7,860. That’s not a premium for excellence — it is double the price, every year, for every man, woman, and child. Run it over a lifetime and the overspend compounds to roughly $600,000 per person - call it $2.4 million for a family of four on average - versus what a German or Dutch family pays for their system.

And here is the part that should end the “that’s just how America is” shrug: it wasn’t always like this. In 1970, the US spent 6.0% of its GDP on health; the peer-nation average was 4.9% - on this measure, America and its peers were essentially the same country. The US stayed on pace until about 1980, then split from the pack and never looked back: 17.2% of GDP today against 11.2% for the peers. The gap didn’t exist within living memory, which means it isn’t geography, culture, or destiny. It’s a set of policy choices, made over forty years, that other nations declined to make.

And what does the extra money buy? 3.7 fewer years of life. An American baby born today can expect 79.0 years; a baby born in a peer nation, 82.7. We pay double and die younger. The household version of the same transaction: the average employer family insurance premium just hit $26,993 a year - the price of a new car, every year, before anyone gets sick - and the CDC’s own review found that more than 80% of US maternal deaths are preventable. No other developed country asks its citizens to accept this trade, because no other developed country’s citizens would.

2. The Liberty Test

Does every American have a genuine, open path to choose what they’ll make of their life?

Liberty is the most contested word in American politics, so let me be precise about what I mean. Liberty is not merely the absence of chains - it’s the presence of genuine choice. A young person born into a community with failing schools, no affordable training, and no route into a trade or profession can vote, speak, and assemble freely. But they cannot enter the life those rights are supposed to make possible. Their liberty is a cage with the door painted green.

The current reading - and this may be the most important number in this entire post: an American born in 1940 had a 92% chance of earning more than their parents. An American born in 1984 has a coin flip - 50%. That single statistic, from Raj Chetty’s landmark Stanford/Harvard research, is the American Dream measured directly, and it has been cut nearly in half within living memory.

Has it recovered since? No. The measurement runs thirty years behind by necessity - you can’t compare someone’s earnings to their parents’ until they’ve had a career - but Chetty’s team extended the analysis in 2024 to Americans born through 1992, and found the dream still fading: the earnings gap between children of high-income and low-income parents widened by a further 30%. The United States is now the least economically mobile of its wealthy peers; a child’s odds of rising out of the income bracket they were born into are roughly three times better in Denmark. If “again” means anything, it means this line on this chart - and it has been going the wrong way for eighty years, with no turn in sight.

The mechanics of the cage are familiar: Americans hold roughly $1.8 trillion in student debt - the price of admission to opportunity - while Germany’s apprenticeship system moves young people into well-paid skilled careers with zero debt, largely funded voluntarily by employers because it makes them money. There is no law of nature that says opportunity must cost six figures. It’s a design choice - someone else’s design.

3. The Pursuit of Happiness Test

Are the conditions of a flourishing life - purpose, community, mental health, safety - actually available to ordinary people?

This is potentially the most misread of the three. The founders did not mean a right to pleasure. “The pursuit of happiness” in 1776 meant the right to build a life of purpose, dignity, and connection - and modern wellbeing research, from Kahneman onward, has confirmed the founders’ instinct about what that requires: stable relationships, community, meaningful work, mental health, financial security, and freedom from fear.

The current reading is best seen as a gradient, because the national average hides the real story. Break the World Happiness Report’s rankings down by age and America splits into two different countries. Americans 60 and over rank 10th in the world - among the happiest people on earth. Americans 45–59 rank 17th. Americans 30–44 rank 42nd. And Americans under 30 rank 62nd - behind dozens of far poorer countries. A decade ago, young Americans were roughly as happy as their grandparents; today, the generations that built their lives under the old social contract are flourishing, while the generation inheriting the current one ranks behind most of the developed world. America has become a great country to grow old in - and a hard one to be young in.

The word for this is mortgaged. The generations who got debt-free degrees, affordable starter homes, and pensions then presided over the policies that priced all three out of reach - and the bill landed on their grandchildren. Today half of American renters (50.3% - a record) spend more than 30% of their income on housing, young workers carry the $1.8 trillion student-debt balance from the Liberty test above, and the national debt that funded the last forty years of tax cuts and spending - now past $39 trillion - compounds against the very cohort that ranks 62nd in happiness. The age gradient on this chart isn’t a mystery of psychology. It’s a balance sheet.

The drivers aren’t mysterious. 57% of Americans report being lonely (Cigna, 2025). The share of Americans belonging to a church, synagogue, or mosque - for most of US history the default infrastructure of community - has fallen from 70% in 2000 to 47%, with nothing built to replace it. The richest country in human history is producing some of the loneliest, unhappiest young people in the developed world. That is a greatness problem by any definition.

One Ground Rule Before We Start

When I begin applying these tests to specific issues in the coming weeks, some readers will reach for a familiar word: socialist. So let me set the ground rule now, because it’s the heart of this whole framework.

I believe capitalism is the most powerful system ever devised for creating wealth and driving innovation. I want more of it where it matter - including in the many American markets currently rigged by lobbying and subsidy. The federal government hands fossil fuel companies tens of billions in direct subsidies. It pays billions to prop up the corn syrup and sugar supply chains that public health researchers link to the obesity crisis. That isn’t a free market. It’s a protection racket with a flag on it, and a serious definition of greatness ends it.

But capitalism has one known, well-documented failure mode: it breaks when the customer can’t walk away. Markets work through choice - and when the alternative to “buying” is death, ignorance, or violence, there is no choice, so there is no market. There is only extraction. That’s not a left-wing opinion; it’s been textbook economics since the 1960s, and healthcare is its textbook case.

So the rule for everything that follows is simple: the right tool for the right problem. Capitalism where markets genuinely work - and more vigorously than we have it now. Public guarantees where markets demonstrably fail. Transparency and accountability everywhere. If you think that rule sounds neither left nor right, you’ve understood it correctly. The founders didn’t write a party platform either.

The Path Forward

Over the next few weeks and months we will continue to unpick the Tests and add to their definitions - it is too simplistic to boil them down to one or two aspects or guarantees e.g. for Life longevity or cost of care. There are other lenses to apply including, for example, America’s rate of preventable death, violent crime rates and quality of life earned. When held up as a mirror to policy choices, I believe our decisions will become clearer and more objective with these Tests well defined. Here’s what this framework changes, practically.

From now on, every issue this publication covers gets scored against the three tests - openly, with sourced numbers, comparing America against the countries doing it best. Healthcare against the Life test. Education and opportunity against the Liberty test. Wellbeing, community, and safety against the Pursuit of Happiness test. Where America passes, I’ll say so. Where it fails, I’ll show the gap - and a specific, costed way to close it, usually borrowed shamelessly from a country that already has.

That’s the difference between this and commentary. Commentary tells you what’s wrong. A scoreboard tells you what winning looks like.

Next week: the Life test, in full. America spends more on healthcare than any nation on earth. I’ll show you exactly what we get for it - and what other countries get for half the money.

A question before you go, and I read every reply: Which of the three tests does America fail worst - Life, Liberty, or the Pursuit of Happiness? Tell me in the comments. The answers will shape the order I take these on.

If this framework is useful, share it with one person who’s tired of both parties. That’s how this grows.

Sources for this post: CMS National Health Expenditure 2024 final ($15,474/capita); Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker (peer average $7,860; life expectancy 79.0 vs 82.7); KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey 2025 ($26,993 premium); CDC maternal mortality preventability analysis (2023); Chetty et al., The Fading American Dream (Science, 2017) and Changing Opportunity (NBER w32697, 2024); OECD intergenerational mobility data; Federal Reserve / Dept. of Education student debt data (Q1 2026); World Happiness Report / Gallup World Poll (age-group rankings: under-30 62nd, 30–44 42nd, 45–59 17th, 60+ 10th); Cigna Loneliness Survey 2025; Gallup congregation membership series.

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Something happened to me watching American politics from the outside.

I watched a country I love — the country that invented itself from scratch, that absorbed the world’s tired and poor and turned them into engineers and artists and Presidents — start to eat itself. Slowly at first. Then faster. And I noticed that the loudest voices in the debate — the ones with the microphones, the donors, the cable news contracts — had almost nothing useful to say about it.

The right offered nostalgia dressed up as policy. The left offered grievance dressed up as virtue. And the 70% of Americans who just wanted someone to tell them the truth — to say yes, things are genuinely broken, and here is what we could actually do about it — got nothing.

This publication exists because I think that’s a solvable problem.

The Data Is Damning

Let me start with some numbers, because numbers are harder to spin than rhetoric.

America spends $15,474 per person on healthcare — nearly double what any other wealthy country spends. In return, Americans live shorter lives, lose more mothers in childbirth, and are more likely to go bankrupt from a hospital bill than citizens of any comparable nation.

The United States is ranked 24th in the world for wellbeing — its lowest position ever, according to the 2025 World Happiness Report. It sits just above Kosovo and Lithuania.

The federal debt is on course to hit $54 trillion by 2034, with interest alone crossing $1 trillion in 2026 for the first time in history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that, on the current path, America will spend more on interest payments than on defence within a decade.

Americans work 456 more hours per year than Germans — the equivalent of eleven and a half extra weeks. America is the only wealthy country on earth that guarantees zero days of paid vacation by federal law. Zero.

69% of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the state of democracy, according to Pew Research in April 2026. The country’s democracy score on the V-Dem index has fallen to its lowest level since 1965.

I could go on. The manifesto I’ve spent the last year writing has fifty-four of these statistics. Every single one of them is sourced. Every single one of them points to the same conclusion: something is systemically broken, and the political system that created these outcomes is not going to fix them on its own.

The situation we are in is not the result of one American presidency, it is the result of a broken system of governance that hasn’t adapted since its founding in the 1700s to keep pace with the modern world.

What MAGA Got Right — And What It Got Disastrously Wrong

Here’s the thing about the phrase “Make America Great Again” that nobody wants to say out loud: it named a real feeling that galvanised more than just the core of Trump’s base.

Millions of Americans do feel that something has been lost. That the economy stopped working for them. That their communities hollowed out. That the institutions they were told to trust — government, media, healthcare, education — delivered less and less while asking for more and more.

That feeling is legitimate. The data supports it.

What MAGA got catastrophically wrong was the definition of ‘Great’ and the root cause of their dystopia. The problem is not immigrants. The problem is not a globalist conspiracy. The problem is not that America became too kind or too inclusive. The problem is a political economy that has systematically transferred wealth upward to a few owners of capital, a tax system that charges nurses more relative to their means than billionaires, a healthcare system that functions as an extraction machine, and a two-party duopoly that has every incentive to inflame division and no incentive to solve anything.

MAGA 2.0 is the idea that we take the legitimate anger and disappointment — the real grief about what’s been lost — and point it at the real causes. Not at each other.

What This Publication Is

This isn’t a political party. It’s a conversation — the one I wish American politics was having.

Every week, I’ll publish a deep-dive into one of the defining issues of our time. Healthcare. Education. Tax. Immigration. Work. Gun violence. National debt. Democracy itself. Each piece will be grounded in evidence, comparative (what do countries that actually solved this problem do differently?), and specific — ending with a concrete path forward, not just a diagnosis.

I’ll also publish regular sharper, shorter takes on something in the news to illustrate the theory playing out day to day in our lives as Americans, a statistic that deserves more attention, or a political moment that reveals something important about where we are.

I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’m not a centrist who thinks the answer is always somewhere between the two broken options on offer. I have strong views, and I’ll argue for them. But I’ll argue from evidence, not from tribe.

If you voted for Trump and you’re wondering whether there’s something better. If you voted for Biden and you can’t shake the feeling that the party has lost the plot. If you’ve never voted because you can’t see the point. This is for you.

The America I Believe Is Possible

I believe America can have a healthcare system that doesn’t bankrupt families. I believe it can fund its schools without student debt that follows people for thirty years. I believe it can secure its borders and welcome immigrants — because those aren’t contradictions, they just require honesty. I believe it can tax fairly, spend wisely, and reduce a debt that is, in the most literal sense, a bill we’re sending our children.

I believe America can do all of this because other countries have already done most of it. This isn’t a utopian project. It’s a reading comprehension project. The answers exist. The political will to act on them doesn’t — yet.

Building that political will is the purpose of this publication.

One Ask

If you’ve read this far, you’ve already told me something. You’re looking for a different kind of political conversation. So is everyone who subscribes to this.

Please share this post with one person who feels the same. Not the loudest political person you know — the quietest one. The friend who’s stopped watching the news because it’s too depressing. The family member who says “they’re all the same.” The colleague who just wants someone to tell them the truth.

Those are the people this is for. And when enough of them find each other, something changes.

Welcome to The Great American Path. Let’s get to work.

Stan is a concerned citizen, lawyer, former legislative staff member, business man and entrepreneur who grew up in the shadow of Washington DC.