United States | News & Politics

They could afford it, they'd just rather spend that money on cops and surveillance to crush unrest rather than social programs that would avoid it in the first place.

It's basically inertia, American economy has a massive stock of national wealth and trust. For decades, inflows like tax revenue and productive innovation filled the stock faster than outflows like debt and war spending drained it. And thanks to that, there's a massive amount of resilience that's been built up over many decades. Now the outflow is outpacing the inflow, but the existing stock is so large that we're not seeing any catastrophic effects yet. A huge country can absorb a lot of pain before anything visibly changes. The US still has strong buffers like deep capital markets, the dollar’s reserve status, and a large domestic economy. Each successive mistake chips away at these buffers, and when the stock finally runs dry, the system will tip fast. The economy won't collapse tomorrow, but it is living off stored up capital rather than current productive inflows. The damage is masked by the size of our existing stocks. Once those are gone, the real crash comes.

A lot, because there's too many vassal countries propping up the US economy.
They will going down first, like East Germany before the USSR.

when the bubble pops it's going to be epic

It's control. If you were trying to set up a massive 1984 nanny state, you would be doing the same thing. Collect all the data you can, encrypted or not. Finish working on quantum computers that can break basically all standard encryption, or just set up the infrastructure to make them faster. Then task all the LLM compute you can spare to identifying dissenters and destroying / isolating / marginalizing them, meanwhile anchoring and growing your base of support. Datacenters are at the heart of all of this.