The Tsunamis Are Coming—Our Heads Are in the Sand

Instead of building the capacity to absorb these hits, we're privatizing away the tools we'd need to respond. This isn't about left vs. right—it's about ownership.

We can see the tsunamis coming years in advance. We know they'll cause massive damage. Instead of preparing, we're sticking our heads in the sand.

The healthcare tsunami is the most visible. We're projected to spend $77 trillion over the next ten years—2025 to 2035—on a system that delivers worse outcomes than countries spending half as much. An economic death spiral consuming more and more of everything we produce while giving us less and less in return.

The AI tsunami promises to displace millions of jobs over the next decade. The timeline is clear. Which industries will be hit first. Which workers are most vulnerable. And what are we doing about it? Nothing.

Our infrastructure tsunami is already hitting. Roads crumbling, bridges failing, power grids that can't handle basic demand. We pay three times what other countries spend per mile of rail or highway and take five times longer to complete projects. Meanwhile, China has built entire new energy grids and transformed their manufacturing capacity while we spend a decade debating permits for a single rail line.

The housing tsunami has been building for years. Skyrocketing rents, impossible home prices, an entire generation priced out of the basic American promise that work should provide shelter. We're not constructing enough housing, and what we do build costs more per unit than almost any developed nation.

Then there's the affordability tsunami: wages flat, costs rising, the basic math of survival falling apart. The push toward privatization of everything, the steady erosion of what a day's work can buy. Basic necessities require more and more hours of labor while quality deteriorates.

The climate tsunami might be the most urgent of all. We need radical, rapid transformation of our energy systems, and we can see other countries creating the future while we fight over the past. China is installing more renewable energy capacity than the rest of the world combined. The majority of their new energy production is renewable—wind, solar, geothermal. Yes, they're still burning coal, but they're investing heavily in the technologies that will replace it. They're building high-speed mag-rail that travels faster than airplanes while we can't manage to complete a single rail line without decade-long delays.

They're creating the Jetsons while we're fighting over who gets to rule during the Flintstones era of America. We're letting the technological revolution pass us by. We're constructing more sailing ships after petroleum was discovered.

Then there's the democracy tsunami. Most elections decided in primaries. Congressional districts gerrymandered into solid red or blue strongholds. A patchwork of voting dates and registration requirements that makes national mobilization nearly impossible. People already know democracy is broken, so when politicians scream about "saving democracy," the response is: what democracy?

The crazy thing is we're not just failing to rise to the occasion—we're actively shrinking from it. We're not meeting our generational duty. We're running from it.

Look at what we're actually doing. Take NOAA. Instead of fixing the agency, we're dismantling it piece by piece. Creating alternatives. Making space for private weather services to step in and monetize what used to be a public good. It's the NASA playbook all over again—we didn't stop needing space exploration when we gutted NASA, we just handed it over to billionaires like Musk and Bezos who now control critical infrastructure for massive profits.

We act like SpaceX and Blue Origin are our only options. We put a man on the moon. We developed the technology, trained the scientists, funded the research. The moon shot generated GPS, satellite communications, materials science—economic spinoffs worth trillions. And it was ours. Now we hand the innovation pipeline to billionaires and let them capture the value from publicly-funded breakthroughs.

This is a choice between collective action through government or letting neurotic billionaires profit in the private sector for their own enrichment.

At some point soon you're going to need a subscription to a weather balloon service to know what the temperature is or what precipitation is coming. We're giving up all the things we constructed as a nation, continuing to privatize them, and refusing to create more.

So how are we responding to these tsunamis? We're seeing two categories of response, and both are inadequate.

First, there's the austerity crowd. Their solution to the healthcare cost tsunami is to cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, cut Social Security, raise retirement ages. Their answer to every crisis is to deny people access to things—healthcare, housing, education—and hope charities and churches pick up the pieces. They seem to believe there should be no floor other than what private charity provides.

Then there's the Democratic establishment, whose message is defend, protect, hold the line. Keep what we have. Don't transition to something affordable or effective. Despite spending more on healthcare than any other nation while getting worse results. Despite infrastructure spending that produces the least per dollar in the developed world. Despite housing costs pricing out the middle class.

Both responses miss the fundamental point: you can't cut your way out of a supply crisis, and you can't defend your way out of a failing system.

There's an underlying theme running through all these tsunamis that cuts to the heart of everything: who owns the productive capacity?

Who owns the AI systems that are about to reshape our economy? Are they tools for the public good—or private empires in the making? Who owns the healthcare system that's consuming more and more of our national wealth while delivering diminishing results? Is it fully operated by private individuals and massive corporations, or is it something where we decide we must lubricate the gears of capitalism with public competition?

This goes beyond who pays for what—it's about who creates what, who delivers the services we need. Who constructs the seawalls to absorb these tsunamis, and who develops the mechanisms to avoid them altogether?

If AI and robotics eventually replace the need for a huge part of our workforce, then we're going to have to have a system that allows us to share in the prosperity of that system, lest we end up in some sci-fi dystopian future where the machines work for the owners while everyone else starves.

This isn't a side issue. It's the core of the crisis.

The power to solve these crises exists. We have the resources, the technology, the workforce. What we lack is the will to create the capacity to absorb these hits or avoid them altogether through shared ownership of the solutions.

Instead of developing capacity, we're pretending the waves aren't coming.

Healthcare costs spiraling out of control? The most powerful tool to bring down prices is public competition. When private insurers and hospital systems can't deliver value at a reasonable price, the state steps in to provide alternatives. Not just Medicare for All—which only changes who writes the checks—but public hospitals, public medical schools, public drug manufacturing. Expand the supply. Train more doctors and nurses. Manufacture medication at cost. Own the productive capacity that delivers care.

AI displacement heading our way? Establish retraining programs now. Invest in sectors that complement rather than compete with automation. Create new models of work and income distribution before millions lose their livelihoods. But more fundamentally: ensure public ownership of AI systems that will reshape our economy. If robots are going to do the work, then we, the public, need to own the robots.

The housing crisis? Private developers won't construct affordable housing, so public entities should. Other countries do this now. We act like we're helpless.

Infrastructure decay? Stop funneling money to the same extractive contractors who've been failing for decades. Develop public capacity to deliver projects on time and on budget. Own the means of creating what we need.

Democracy broken by gerrymandering? Propose a nationwide ban on partisan redistricting. Federal oversight of election systems. Automatic registration. Unified primary dates. Make participation easier, not harder.

Climate emergency demanding immediate transformation? Stop subsidizing fossil fuel companies and establish public renewable energy systems. Manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage at scale. Create the green infrastructure the private sector won't because it threatens their existing investments. Own the energy systems that power our future.

Josh Hawley calls these ideas "socialist," but they're thoroughly American. Into the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s we had significant public ownership in healthcare, energy, transportation, manufacturing. The government competed directly with private industry and often delivered better results at lower cost.

Something more fundamental is happening here. We're falling behind the rest of the industrialized world in our ability to produce things we need. China took the American system of public investment in infrastructure, education, and industrial capacity—they're running with it while we've abandoned it.

No serious proposals to fix housing by creating new cities—intentionally, strategically, at scale. No massive public investment in manufacturing capacity. No government stepping in to rebuild industries that private enterprise has abandoned or destroyed.

Instead, we're trying to remodel our existing hotel while it sits on the shore and the tsunamis approach. We have time to relocate, to rebuild, to construct seawalls. We sit with our heads in the sand, acting like the future is out of our hands—like our destiny was decided somewhere else by someone else.

The question is whether we'll pull our heads out of the sand in time.