It’s the same thing that has happened in other ‘too expensive to pay for directly’ areas of life - health insurance, higher education, housing. Near as I can t

It’s the same thing that has happened in other ‘too expensive to pay for directly’ areas of life - health insurance, higher education, housing. Near as I can tell, the US has gone through several phases of the economy post WW2 - the first, enjoying the benefits of everyone else’s economy being mangled which lasted up until the late 60’s/early 70’s. Then the phase of ‘okay we’ll share, but with the Dollar’, when most economies in the West had started rebuild/re-industrialize, but were still not ‘fully’ recovered - and there was a Cold War to fight. When that ran out of steam (coincidentally around when the iron curtain fell), that then switched to leverage, leverage, leverage around the 90’s - that also really ramped up on exploiting the vast quantities of undeveloped labor in the rest of the world, using free trade agreements and the like. We financialized everything to the max. Now the US seems to be going into a depressed phase, where the credit cards are starting to get maxed out, and there isn’t any obvious leverage anymore to ‘get rich quick’. We have massive bills due for Boomer retirements too. On top of that, almost all the major structural advantages the US has had have mostly faded. Other economies are well developed now (compared to the huge differences before), outsourcing isn’t as cheap anymore. Previously leveraged assets have been juiced for leverage already so much (where previously there was very little!), value there has mostly faded, and now interest payments are high enough relative to income they are a major economic drag. In many cases, payments on interest (or things like health insurance copays!) are now exceeding the original costs of just paying directly for the thing. The difference now goes to Capital. Sounds like it’s time for a bankruptcy/inflate our way out of it cycle? Or a major world war again?