Category: What Is Wrong With Us?

Deep Thoughts

April 15, 2026

LIVING THE DREAM: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH SONG 2

We say it like it’s a fact. Greatest country on earth. Number one. Living the dream. But when you actually look at the data — the rankings, the numbers, the verified receipts — the scoreboard tells a different story. Living the Dream is the second Enough Is Enough protest song.

Broken By Design

Divided We Fall

January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 10: When Freedom Means Control

I was raised on a fairly standard American small-government instinct. Don’t tread on me. The government that governs least governs best. Local control. Keep Washington out of your business. I grew up with that as background music, and a lot of it I still mostly agree with. I prefer that decisions about my kid’s school…

Do Unto Others

January 30, 2026

Do Unto Others Part 5: What This Means for Democracy

Part 5 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → This is the last installment of the series, and I want to do something I have been putting off for the previous four pieces — actually try to land the question of what all of it means. Quick recap of what…

Passing The Buck

March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More Part 15: How We Get There

Part 15 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This is the final installment. The last fourteen installments have been an attempt to describe a structural problem. This one is supposed to be the part where the writer describes how to fix it. I want to start…

All Political

June 2, 2026

What Happens When We Make it Almost Impossible to Follow the Law

I was listening to BBC Newshour the other day. A Democratic senator was trying to talk about immigration, and the reporter kept pushing the same question: these people broke the law to get here, so why should they be allowed to stay? You could hear the senator stumble. He couldn’t find the answer. And the…
May 26, 2026

Activist, Deactivist, and the Fox Guarding the Henhouse

A new format: my unfiltered gut take on the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling and the partisan-gerrymandering racket, followed by a fact-check of every claim I made. Bias up top. The check at the bottom.
May 18, 2026

ProLife / ProChoice / ProReason?

A federal appeals court just ordered the FDA to require in-person dispensing of mifepristone — the pill used in roughly 60% of abortions in this country — and it applied that ruling nationwide at the request of one state. Louisiana sued, the Fifth Circuit said sure, and now everybody from California to Vermont is supposed…
May 14, 2026

Gonna Party Like It’s 1999

A new US party structure, by way of Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the Nordics. Three things need to change if we want a country that actually moves instead of just performing motion for the cameras: The first two are arguments for another day. This one is about the third — because the two-party…
May 11, 2026

US Against Them : Enough is Enough

The third song in the Enough Is Enough campaign. It’s not red vs. blue. It’s about the people on top who need us fighting each other so we don’t notice them.
May 3, 2026

Union Strong: The Only Thing Standing Between Us and the Bottom

I’m not a union guy in the way you might picture a union guy. I’ve complained about unions. I’ve worked around them because the budget demanded it. I’ve watched strong-arm tactics that embarrassed everyone involved. I’ve sat in a production office calculating how much cheaper everything would be if we just went non-union. And I…
April 26, 2026

The Upside Down

We are living in the Stranger Things Upside Down. Same country, wrong version of it. I used to think Trump Derangement Syndrome existed on both sides. People so blinded by their feelings about one man that they couldn’t think straight. I had some sympathy for that framing, honestly, because I knew people on both ends…
April 19, 2026

PARTY OF ONE : ENOUGH IS ENOUGH SONG 3

Here’s something nobody in either party wants you to think about too hard: they cash the same checks. Not the same voters. Not the same rhetoric. Not the same culture war. But the same donors, the same bundlers, the same checks written before the election and collected after. The red team and the blue team…
April 15, 2026

LIVING THE DREAM: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH SONG 2

We say it like it’s a fact. Greatest country on earth. Number one. Living the dream. But when you actually look at the data — the rankings, the numbers, the verified receipts — the scoreboard tells a different story. Living the Dream is the second Enough Is Enough protest song.
April 13, 2026

Strait of Hormuz: The Board Game Edition

Like most people, I’ve been watching this story with a mix of disbelief and exhaustion that is quickly becoming the default setting for following American foreign policy. I want to be upfront. I’m not a foreign policy expert. I don’t pretend to understand all the moving parts and I’m genuinely open to the possibility that…
April 8, 2026

Drowning in It

There’s a moment every four to five weeks that snaps me back to reality. I load up the car, drive to our local transfer station, hand Dan a coupon, and drop off a single 44-gallon bag of trash. One bag. And I think — okay, we’re doing our part. We compost, we recycle obsessively, we…
April 7, 2026

The Peace President Needs to Fund His Wars Instead of our Health and Child Care. So Democrats Talk About Crayons?

Sort of an Opinion piece but not really, it’s just this country is batshit off the rails. You seriously could not make up how out of touch these people are. WTF Is Wrong With Us? No Seriously… Let me set the full scene, because context is everything here. IHere is everything you need to know…
March 31, 2026

Angry Old Extremely Religious Christian White Man Yelling from His Porch Syndrome

What finally broke my brain was the sequence. The Epstein files dropped. The same movement that built itself on QAnon, on “protect the children,” on Democrats running pedophile rings out of pizza basements — the moral foundation that supposedly separated them from the godless left — went quiet. Or shifted. Or decided that maybe context…
March 28, 2026

Are We About to Come Full Circle on Who We Trust?

I was driving to yet another baseball tournament Saturday morning, half-awake, NPR on in the background, when a story about AI disinformation in the Iran conflict completely hijacked my brain for the next forty-five minutes. The segment was trying to walk through which images were fake and which weren’t. Iranian state TV had broadcast AI-generated…
March 24, 2026

Is the Iran War America’s Biggest Self-Own of Self-Owns?

Three and a half weeks in. Twenty-four days of US and Israeli strikes on Iran, oil at $112 a barrel, thirteen American soldiers dead, the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, and the administration now scrambling to lift sanctions on the very country we’re bombing — just to keep gas prices from completely destroying what’s left…
March 20, 2026

WTF Is Up With MTG?

Something happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene and I’m still not sure how to file it. Six months ago she was the most reliably deranged member of Congress. She’d stalked a teenage school shooting survivor through the Capitol on video. She’d endorsed online conspiracy theories I genuinely do not want to type out in detail on…
March 18, 2026

What’s Wrong With the Democrats. What’s Wrong With the Republicans. It Doesn’t Matter.

Neither One Will Deliver for You. Let me start with something that should be obvious but somehow never gets said out loud. Neither party won the last election. The other party just lost it more. That distinction sounds like splitting hairs until you realize it explains almost everything broken about American politics for the last…
March 17, 2026

How an Angry Old MacDonald Became a Protest Song

It started with a question: What is actually wrong with this country, and why do we seem so far apart? The division felt real. The anger felt real. But when you actually looked at the polling data, something didn’t add up. Americans agree on almost everything that matters. Healthcare. Wages. Campaign finance reform. Taxing the…
March 13, 2026

The Metric System Makes Sense to Everyone

When I was a kid, we started learning the metric system in school. There was an actual plan. America was going to join the rest of the world and switch from the imperial system — the one built on the length of some king’s foot — to a logical base-ten system that scientists, engineers, and…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 1: The Impossible Math

Part 1 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. A few years ago I started keeping a list. It began with a conversation at the field after one of Henry’s games. A guy I have known for a decade — coaches another team, runs a small landscaping…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: The Complete 15-Part Series

A 15-part series on how costs got shifted off corporations and government and onto individual workers — and what it would take to reverse it. Start here.
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 2: The Baseline Shift

Part 2 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Part 1 I walked through the math on one specific case — a nurse making $77,000 a year, doing everything right, with $625 a month left after mandatory expenses. The argument was that the math has gotten…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 3: Banking Fees

Part 3 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Parts 1 and 2 I walked through the picture: the math on a typical American household has tightened over fifty years even as productivity has climbed, and several specific costs — housing, healthcare, higher education, transportation, retirement…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less. Part 4: Credit Cards

Part 4 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. Part 3 looked at the overdraft side of consumer banking. This one looks at the other side of the same relationship — the credit card. Most of the largest credit card issuers in the United States are also…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make LessPart 5: The Auto Trap

Part 5 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The first four installments traced cost shifts inside relatively well-defined transactions — wages versus productivity, employer-to-worker benefit transfers, overdraft fees, credit card interest. This one is harder, because the cost being passed to households is built into the…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make LessPart 6: Food Monopolies

Part 6 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This series has been working its way through the categories of household spending where the cost has been quietly shifted away from corporate balance sheets and onto households. Food is one of the larger ones, and one of…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 7: Phone and Internet

Part 7 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about phone and internet service, which has become the cleanest example in modern American life of what happens when a utility-style market is allowed to deregulate into an oligopoly. It is the most unavoidable monthly…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 8: Insurance

Part 8 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. On the morning of December 4, 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot and killed on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan on his way to his company’s annual investor day. The bullet casings recovered at the…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 9: Death, Taxes, and Everything In Between

Part 9 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about all the other fees: the ones below the line on the bills I have already written about, the surcharges and convenience charges and service fees and resort fees and processing fees that have become…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 10: The Compound Effect

Part 10 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This series has spent nine installments going category by category through the structural changes that have shifted costs from corporate balance sheets onto American households over the last fifty years. Each installment looked at one slice of the…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 11: Who Profits?

Part 11 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The ten installments before this one traced where the money goes — the categories where household spending has grown, the mechanisms by which it has grown, and the structural reasons for the growth. This one is about who…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 12: The Bipartisan Consensus

Part 12 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The previous installment looked at where the money goes. This one looks at why the political system has not redirected it, which is a question I find harder to answer in a tidy way than the structural-economics questions…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 13: How We Got Here

Part 13 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The structural picture this series has been building was assembled over roughly fifty years, through a sequence of policy changes that, taken individually, were always defensible on some narrow technical or ideological ground, and that taken together added…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More Part 14: What We Could Have Instead

Part 14 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The previous thirteen installments have been an attempt to describe the structure of cost-shifting in American economic life and to trace how that structure was built. This one looks at what other developed countries do, partly because the…
March 3, 2026

Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More Part 15: How We Get There

Part 15 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This is the final installment. The last fourteen installments have been an attempt to describe a structural problem. This one is supposed to be the part where the writer describes how to fix it. I want to start…
February 18, 2026

Americans Agree on Almost Everything—We Just Don’t Realize It

I scroll Instagram mostly because I have to. Crooked Number lives there and you can’t sell baseball mom shirts to an empty room, so I spend more time on it than I’d choose. Which means most of what I see is algorithm-served noise I didn’t ask for. One of those infographics floated past the other…
January 30, 2026

Do Unto Others: The Complete 5-Part Series

A 5-part series on transactional empathy, asymmetric hypocrisy, and what democracy requires that we’re no longer providing. Start here.
January 30, 2026

Do Unto Others Part 1: When Empathy Becomes Transactional

Part 1 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → The way I’d planned to start this was with a list of names. Then I tried it and it read like an indictment, which isn’t what I’m going for. Let me back up. What got me writing this was noticing, over…
January 30, 2026

Do Unto Others Part 2: “My Own Morality”

Part 2 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In the New York Times interview published January 8, 2026, Trump was asked whether anything constrained his power on the global stage. He answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can…
January 30, 2026

Do Unto Others Part 3: Both Sides Are Hypocrites

Part 3 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → Last installment I said I’d take up the question you hear at every Little League snack bar and every Thanksgiving table the second you start documenting things one party has actually done. But Democrats do this too. The asymmetry isn’t real,…
January 30, 2026

Do Unto Others Part 4: Flooding the Zone

Part 4 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In 2018, Steve Bannon gave an interview to Michael Lewis. It was during Trump’s first State of the Union, and Lewis was writing for Bloomberg. Asked about the Trump media strategy, the line that came out — and that has been…
January 30, 2026

Do Unto Others Part 5: What This Means for Democracy

Part 5 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → This is the last installment of the series, and I want to do something I have been putting off for the previous four pieces — actually try to land the question of what all of it means. Quick recap of what…
January 29, 2026

Term Limits: I Was For Them Until I Wasn’t

Honest opener: I used to think term limits were obviously a good idea. Get rid of the lifers, drain the swamp, fresh blood, problem solved. It polls at 87% support for a reason — pretty much everybody across the political spectrum looks at Congress and goes “yeah, these people should go home.” I was in…
January 29, 2026

Vote FOR Something: An Honest Look at Voting Reform

The last time I felt good about a vote I cast for president, I was probably in college and the candidate was probably losing. Every election since has been damage control. I’m not voting for somebody, I’m voting against the other guy because my kids have to live in whatever country the next four years…
January 28, 2026

The Argument Over Alex Pretti Is Bait. Don’t Take It.

By the time I started writing this, the videos of Alex Pretti’s last few minutes had been on my phone for three days and the argument about what they showed had hardened along the exact lines you’d predict. Half my feed saw a peaceful citizen being murdered by federal agents in his own neighborhood. The…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall: The Complete 10-Part Series

A 10-part series on the culture war as a business model — and what the data actually shows on the issues it sells you. Start here.
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 1: The Culture War

This is going to be a ten-part series. Part 1 is the framing post — the thing about the culture war machine that explains the rest. Let me start where I live. I write this blog from a town in the Hudson Valley with a population under six thousand. I spent twenty-five years working in…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 2: What Happens After the Laws Change

I’ll be honest about where I’m coming from on this one. I thought about abortion the way a lot of people think about it — abstractly — until I didn’t. I had pregnancy scares as a young person, the kind that focus your attention in a hurry. Later I watched my wife actually carry our…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 3: What the Data Actually Shows About Guns

I have two boys in school. I coach travel baseball through Crooked Number, which means I spend a lot of weekends at fields full of other people’s kids. Both of those facts mean I have done, more than once, the thing parents in this country now do: walked into a school or a stadium or…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 4: CRT, DEI, and Trans Rights

I spent most of my career inside the cable TV business, including a stretch at LOGO — Viacom’s LGBTQ-focused network, which launched in 2005 — and then at Bravo, whose audience and programming have skewed heavily LGBTQ for a long time. I later ran creative operations at Universal Kids. So I’ve watched the corporate diversity…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 5: Public Media

I’m an NPR listener. Have been for years. Morning Edition while I make coffee. All Things Considered if I’m in the truck at five. WNYC out of New York carries it most days for me up here in the Hudson Valley. The voices are familiar in a way commercial radio voices never quite are, because…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 6: Immigration

I live in Gardiner, New York — population under six thousand, surrounded on every side by Hudson Valley farms. If you’ve spent any time up here in late summer or early fall, you’ve eaten an apple, drunk a wine, or watched a sunset over a hayfield that exists because of immigrant labor. Some of it…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 7: Climate Change

I put a heat pump in my house last year. Bosch 5-ton, replaced an oil-fired system that came with the place. I’m not telling you that to flex green credentials — I’m telling you that because the math finally penciled out, the technology has gotten genuinely good, and the federal tax credits at the time…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 8: Voter Fraud

I’ve voted in every election I’ve been eligible to vote in since I turned 18. That’s a stretch of decades that covers multiple states — I spent most of my adult life voting in New York City before moving up to Gardiner — and a fair number of polling places, school gyms, library basements, and…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 9: Cancel Culture

I spent twenty-five years inside cable television. Bravo, Oxygen, Universal Kids, LOGO, VH1, Sci-Fi, Viacom Brand, R/GA’s broadcast division. I sat through a lot of internal conversations about what we could put on the air, what advertisers would tolerate, what affiliates would carry, what regulators might object to, and what the actual audience would respond…
January 23, 2026

Divided We Fall Part 10: When Freedom Means Control

I was raised on a fairly standard American small-government instinct. Don’t tread on me. The government that governs least governs best. Local control. Keep Washington out of your business. I grew up with that as background music, and a lot of it I still mostly agree with. I prefer that decisions about my kid’s school…
January 20, 2026

Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other

Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist. We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said some version of it. I know I have. And every time it happens, somebody wins — but it’s not you, and it’s not the person on the other end of it. Americans are more polarized than at any…
January 19, 2026

Mamdani Madness

So Zohran Mamdani was sworn in on January 1st as New York City’s first Muslim mayor and first democratic socialist mayor, and the outrage machine on both sides has been in full swing. Michael Rapaport, less than a week into Mamdani’s tenure, posted an Instagram announcement that he’s running for mayor in 2029 to save…
January 3, 2026

Make America Great Again — Compared To When?

I want to put this one in my own words because I had it backwards for a while. The first time I really thought about the slogan, I assumed the argument was about the again part — what year are we trying to get back to, what did “great” mean then, who was it great…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon By Design: The Complete 25-Part Series

A 25-part series on how American life got rigged against the bottom 90% — system by system, with receipts.
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 1: USA! USA! USA!

The first time I really clocked the USA chant in the wild was at a NASCAR race. Flags everywhere — not just flying, but as bandanas, t-shirts, full Stars-and-Stripes jeans, patches sewn onto things that did not previously have patches. (Aside: the U.S. Flag Code technically prohibits using the flag as clothing, bedding, or drapery.…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking: How Language is Weaponized to Keep Us Fighting Each Other Instead of Those in Power

The Words That Switch Off Your Brain BrokeCon by Design, Part 2. Part 1 showed where America actually ranks. This one is the inoculation before we follow the money. How this post came about I was working on the next piece in the series — the one that traces who profits from America’s failures —…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 3: Follow the Money: How the System is Rigged Against 90% of Us.

This is Part 3 in a series. Part 1 ran the numbers — America comes out near the bottom of every developed-world ranking that matters and near the top of every one that doesn’t. Part 2 walked through how language gets weaponized to keep you from noticing. This one is just accounting. Now That You…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 4: The Healthcare Trap: What Congress Gets vs. What You Get (And Why That Matters)

This is Part 4 of BrokeCon by Design. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money Back in Part 3 we ran the receipts: Americans pay around $13,500 per person for healthcare and rank 36th in the world on life expectancy. First…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 5: Employer-Based Health Insurance: Modern Serfdom

This is Part 5 in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4: The Healthcare Trap: What Congress Gets vs. What You Get Imagine your…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 6A: Healthcare Solutions That Actually Work (And Why We’re Told They Won’t)

This is Part 6A in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4: The Healthcare Trap | Part 5: Employer-Based Health Insurance: Modern Serfdom Part…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 6B: How Universal Healthcare Would Save American Business (And Why Some Fight It Anyway)

Part 6A laid out the three honest paths to fixing this — Medicare for All, a public option, or a Swiss-style regulated multi-payer — and closed by pointing out who else is paying for the current setup besides you and your family: American business. This is that post. For about twenty-five years I worked at…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 7: The Housing Trap: How Zoning Laws and Investment Firms Stole the American Dream

This is Part 7 in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4–6: Healthcare Series The median first-time homebuyer in the 1980s was 29 years old. In 2025 it’s 40 — a…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 8: The Education and Childcare Cliff: $1.8 Trillion in Debt + The Childcare Crisis That Starts It All

The story we still tell about student debt is wrong. It’s not a young person’s problem. The fastest-growing segment of borrowers is over 60, and roughly 452,000 of them are in default and receiving Social Security checks — checks that can be garnished by up to 15%, leaving a $750 monthly floor that was set…
December 29, 2025

Why I Started Writing About Politics

We’ve gotten a little off track from what we normally write about here — travel adventures, home projects where mistakes are inevitably made, the odd obsessions. So I figured I should explain what happened. I’ve been concerned about the direction and polarization of this country for a while. I consider myself open-minded and not on…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 9: Immobility Nightmare: How Three Failed Systems Killed the American Dream

The Door Is Already Locked Say you’re thirty-two. You have an idea for a business. Maybe a good one, maybe not, but you want to find out. So you sit down and run the numbers. The first thing that kills it is the healthcare math. Your employer pays most of your premium right now. Walk…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 10: The Incarceration Industry: How We Built a System That Profits From Failure

You Don’t Get Out Say you did eighteen months. Drug offense, low-level, the kind that gets you four years in some states and twenty in others depending on which side of which line you were on when the cops showed up. You served your time. Today is the day you get out. Now find an…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 11: The Military-Industrial Complex: $968 Billion in Wealth Extraction

There’s a food pantry on a base near you. There’s a food pantry on most of them. Operation Homefront, the Armed Services YMCA, the local Feeding America affiliate, sometimes the chaplain’s office running a closet out of a side room. The volunteers know which weeks are bad — paydays, PCS moves, deployment gaps that didn’t…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 12: The US Political System: The Republican and Democrat Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice

Watch the floor of either chamber on a December afternoon when the National Defense Authorization Act comes up for a vote. The bill is 1,800 pages long and nobody has read all of it. The members who will speak against it are mostly junior, mostly from safe districts, and mostly not on Armed Services. The…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 13: U.S. Politics: Not Functioning As Founders Intended—And How We Can Fix It

Two Yeas A senator from Wyoming and a senator from California vote yes on the same bill. Roll call vote. Two yeas. The clerk records them as equivalent. Nobody on the floor notes the difference. Nobody is supposed to. The Wyoming senator represents about 588,000 people — somewhere between the populations of Milwaukee and El…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 14: Rooting For The Wrong Team – How Culture Wars Keep Us Fighting While They Rob Us Blind

Two days after the killing, in the second week of September 2025, an X account with more than half a million followers reposted a screenshot of a private Facebook post written by a woman who had taken a new job earlier that month. The post was about the killing. The account’s followers contacted her employer.…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 15: In Whose God Do We Trust?

Caring Well In October 2019, the man who ran the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm sat on stage at a conference his agency had organized about how Christian institutions handle credible allegations of sexual abuse. The conference was called Caring Well. The man was Russell Moore, president since 2013 of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 16: In Our Greed We Trust

Every June for the better part of two decades, nearly eight hundred people have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a four-day conference called Acton University. They are not, mostly, the people you would picture. They are seminarians and parish priests, evangelical pastors and Catholic deacons, divinity students, a scattering of business owners, and a…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 17: The Systemic Theft Of Our Retirement

On December 9, 1963, the Studebaker Corporation announced it was closing its main automobile plant in South Bend, Indiana. The company had been building things to ride in since before there were engines to put in them — wagons, in the 1850s — and for the people on the line the pension was not a…
December 29, 2025

BrokeCon by Design Part 18: The Rigged Tax Code

On October 22, 1986, Ronald Reagan stood on the South Lawn of the White House and signed a tax bill that did something the United States had not done before and has not done since. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 took the top rate on money you make by owning things — long-term capital…