How To Rig a Whole-ass Economy

We work full-time to afford rent. We have insurance and can't afford healthcare. It's not an accident—it's by design. Let's have a look at how it's done.

We’re not crazy. We’re not failing. We’re being sucked dry economically, socially, and morally.

We work full-time, maybe more. Maybe we went to college, maybe we didn’t. Maybe we’re in an office, maybe we work with our hands. Doesn’t matter. We show up, we do the work, and we’re still one bad month away from disaster. Our rent eats half our paychecks. Healthcare is a gamble we can’t afford. Buying a home is beginning to feel like winning the lottery. And every time we point out how impossible it feels, someone tells us it’s our own fault. This breeds righteous anger.

We keep looking for someone to unrig our system. Reagan sold optimism. Obama sold hope. Bernie sold revolution. Trump sold revenge. The public keeps upgrading the level of risk because nothing changes at the structural level.

The system isn’t failing. It’s rigged. It’s succeeding—for the people who designed to serve. That just isn’t me and you. You and I saw our wealth flowing our famlies to the Musks of the world. $79 trillion transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1% since 1975.

That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because CEOs, politicians, and Wall Street executives rewired the economy—legally, quietly, intentionally—to move money upward.

They pulled off four moves. Once we see them, then maybe we can fix them.

We Built It, Gave it Away, Now We Rent It Back

Almost every breakthrough technology that defines the modern economy was funded by us. Our tax dollars. Government labs. Public universities.

DARPA invented the internet, GPS, touchscreens, voice recognition, lithium-ion batteries, neural networks. NASA spent sixty years perfecting rocket engineering, satellite systems, materials science. The NSF and DOE funded the research behind artificial intelligence, parallel processing, the chip architectures that power everything.

We paid to build the science. They privatized the profits.

Nvidia is worth $5 trillion—built on decades of government-funded GPU research. Jensen Huang is worth $127 billion. Google’s core algorithm came from an NSF-funded grant that Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to build their company. The mRNA vaccine platform Moderna used? NIH and DARPA funding—100% public money. Moderna patented it, privatized it, made billions while we paid again for the vaccines.

Elon Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. SpaceX has received over $20 billion in government contracts since 2008, plus access to NASA facilities, decades of NASA research, and engineers trained in government programs. We paid to invent rockets, satellite technology, space systems. Musk monetizes it and calls himself a genius.

Then there’s Tesla. The company sells about 4% of the world’s cars. Yet it’s valued at $1.4 trillion—higher than the next 26 largest car companies combined. Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, Ford, Honda, GM, Ferrari, Hyundai, Kia, Nissan, and the rest of the global auto industry that actually builds 96% of the cars people drive.

One company with 4% market share worth more than 26 companies that build everything else. That’s not capitalism rewarding innovation. That’s financial speculation built on government-funded battery research, government subsidies, regulatory credits, and $465 million in DOE loans.

The pharmaceutical industry runs the same scam. NIH funds the research. Pfizer, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson patent the results and charge us $100,000 a year for cancer drugs we already paid to develop.

Looting Became the Preferred Business Model

Stock buybacks weren’t “controversial.” They were straight-up illegal for most of U.S. history—treated the same way we treat insider trading—because everyone understood it was a way for executives to loot their own companies.

That didn’t change until 1982, when Reagan’s SEC chair John Shad—a former Wall Street investment banker—rewrote the rules and handed corporate America the legal right to siphon profits away from workers and into stock-price inflation schemes.

Overnight, CEOs stopped building things and started cannibalizing their own companies. Not to innovate. Not to expand. But to trigger their own bonuses by artificially juicing the stock price.

One rule change turned the American corporation from an engine of production into an ATM for the wealthy.

From 2010 to 2020, U.S. corporations spent 93% of their profits on buybacks and dividends. Not on workers. Not on research. On pumping stock prices.

The 100 lowest-paying companies in the S&P 500 spent $522 billion on stock buybacks from 2019 to 2023. Half a trillion dollars that could have gone to workers went to inflating stock prices.

Take Lowe’s. Between 2019 and 2023, they spent $42.6 billion buying back stock. Their median worker made $32,626. They could have given every employee a $30,000 bonus five years in a row. Instead, CEO Marvin Ellison used company money to reduce shares, inflate earnings per share, and trigger his own bonus.

Private equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo take it further. They buy companies with borrowed money, load them with debt to pay themselves dividends, cut staff, slash quality, extract cash, then sell or let the business collapse. Healthcare companies owned by private equity have higher mortality rates but they’re more profitable.

What used to be called theft is now called financial engineering. We build the companies. They loot them. We lose our jobs when they collapse.

Wages Weren’t Enough, Wall Street Provided Debt Instead

When wages flatlined, they didn’t fix wages—they just handed us credit cards and called it a solution.

Instead of raising pay, they turned basic survival into a line of credit. Can’t afford college? Take loans from Sallie Mae and Navient that you can’t discharge in bankruptcy. Can’t afford a home? Sign 30 years of your future away to Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Can’t afford a car? Here’s an 84-month loan—seven years of payments for a depreciating asset, now used by 19.8% of new car buyers. Can’t afford groceries? Credit card from Chase or Citi at 27% APR.

Prior to the 80’s and Marquette National Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp loan rates were capped mostly below 10%.
In the founding father’s days interest was capped at 6-8%.

The American Dream didn’t get more affordable. Big Banks and Big Finance just made credit easier for us to get and charged us what would have been illegal interest rates.

From 1975 to today, worker productivity kept rising. Wages didn’t. So instead of paying us more, the system let us borrow more—and Wall Street charged us interest for access to the life we used to be able to afford outright.

We work harder. They lend us money. We pay them interest forever. Essentially renting and never truly owning.

They Rigged the Dashboard to Hide the Decline

They didn’t just rig the economy. They rigged the numbers we use to measure it.

Government inflation data uses “hedonic adjustment”—a statistical trick where if a car costs $12,000 more but has a better touchscreen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics pretends the price didn’t rise—it just “increased in quality.”

There is no cheap car anymore. But according to official statistics, inflation is fine because the expensive cars are nicer.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis says productivity is up while wages stagnate—because they count profits flowing to AI, automation, and overseas factories as “American output,” even though the gains don’t reach us.

They say GDP is growing—even when what’s growing is just prices, not output. They say unemployment is low—but leave out the 5-7 million people who stopped looking for work.

The numbers aren’t wrong. They’re engineered.

The Result: $79 Trillion Upward

$79 trillion transferred from the bottom 90% to the top 1% since 1975. If wages had kept pace with productivity, the median worker would be making $92,000 a year today. Instead we’re making half that.

That’s not just inequality it’s legalized robbery.

The Political Fallout

Want to know how we got Trump twice? Why Bernie almost won twice? Why people are flirting with strongman politics and “burn it all down” energy?

Because for fifty years, both parties protected the rigging.

Ronald Reagan broke the unions and deregulated Wall Street. Bill Clinton signed NAFTA and repealed Glass-Steagall. George W. Bush privatized Medicare Part D and cut taxes for the rich. Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street while millions of us lost our homes. Donald Trump ran on draining the swamp, then filled his cabinet with Goldman Sachs executives like Steve Mnuchin and Gary Cohn and cut corporate taxes to 21%. Joe Biden kept most of Trump’s tariffs and did nothing to reverse the extraction. (I talk more about that here.)

Democrats offer means-tested tax credits. Republicans offer tax cuts for the rich and rage at immigrants. Neither addresses the $79 trillion theft.

We’re not irrational. We’re working harder than our parents did and falling further behind. We have insurance and still go bankrupt from medical bills. We do everything right and still drown in debt. And nobody offers a solution that would actually change the system.

So people are looking at strongmen. Authoritarians. Anyone who promises to break something. Because the current system is breaking us.

Where It’s Left Us

We are the richest nation in human history. We produce trillionaires like Elon Musk from research we paid for. We have the capacity to guarantee everyone healthcare, housing, education, and a decent life.

And yet right now, the federal government has been shut down for 40 days—the longest shutdown in American history—because Republicans and Democrats are fighting over whether to extend health insurance subsidies for 24 million Americans and whether to fund SNAP benefits that feed 42 million people.

Air traffic controllers working without pay. Veterans’ benefits delayed. Federal workers missing mortgage payments.

Not because we ran out of money. But because the people who looted $79 trillion—the CEOs, the hedge fund managers, the private equity executives—would rather starve the government than accept responsibility.

Meanwhile, UnitedHealth Group—run by CEO Andrew Witty—made over $400 billion in 2024. About 75%—$220.6 billion—came from managing our Medicare and Medicaid. Our money. Funneled through a private corporation that makes more when we get less care.

This is what a rigged economy looks like.

Once we see how the rigging works, we can’t unsee it.

Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Huang took what we built—DARPA technology, NIH research, NASA innovation—and turned it into private fortunes while charging us for access.

Reagan, Clinton, and Wall Street changed the rules to favor capital over labor. Legalized stock buybacks in 1982. Signed trade deals like NAFTA, CAFTA and PNTR that shipped our jobs overseas. Destroyed our unions. Made private equity extraction legal.

Corporate America shifted from production to extraction. Companies like Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Apple don’t invest in building—they load up with debt, buy back stock.

Politicians and economists rigged the measurements. The Bureau of Labor Statistics manipulates inflation. The Commerce Department counts rising prices as growth. The Federal Reserve celebrates unemployment numbers that exclude millions of us.

And they convinced us it’s our fault.

The pattern is clear: We build it together. They loot it. We rent it back forever.

We’re not struggling because we’re lazy. We’re struggling because they rigged the system to extract wealth from us at every turn.

The rigging isn’t hidden. It’s in the 1982 SEC rule change. In the tax code that favors capital gains over wages. In the patents on drugs we paid to develop. In the trillion-dollar valuations built on our research. In the 40-day shutdown over food and healthcare.

We’re looking now. Once we see it, we can’t pretend it’s normal. It was built. Which means it can be torn down and rebuilt.

This isn’t about despair. This is about finally seeing the thing clearly enough to fight it.

That’s a different essay. One about how we unrig an economy designed to extract wealth from workers. One about what only a government willing to fight private capital can actually do.

That’s coming Tuesday.