Honestly

There’s an old saying about holes: when you find yourself in one, the first rule is to stop digging. But America, stubborn and addicted to its own mythology, has spent the last half-century convinced that if we just dig a little deeper, we’ll eventually strike gold. Instead, we’re suffocating under the weight of our own bullshit.

And yet, here we are. In a recession—or teetering on the edge of one—depending on whose carefully sanitized economic analysis you believe. Consumer confidence is collapsing, layoffs are stacking up, and inflation, once declared under control, is creeping back into the picture. The economy isn’t “transitioning” or “adjusting” or whatever soothing euphemism officials are using this week. It’s broken, and it’s broken for the same reason we’ve broken almost everything else: the inability to be vulnerable.

We have spent generations avoiding the hard truths about ourselves, doubling down on bad decisions rather than admitting we were wrong. The economic devastation we’re experiencing now is just the natural consequence of that mindset. The economy, after all, is just a reflection of our collective priorities. And for decades, those priorities have been to win at all costs, even when the cost was our own future.

America was once a country that made things. There was a time when steel came from Pittsburgh, cars came from Detroit, and the working class had jobs that paid enough to raise a family. Then we got greedy. Rather than face the challenge of maintaining a sustainable workforce—one that paid fair wages, provided benefits, and invested in future generations—we took the easy way out. We sent our factories overseas, lured by the siren song of cheap labor and bigger corporate profits. It was a slow drain at first, but by the time the 1990s rolled around, entire industries had been gutted.

Steel? Gone. Textiles? Gone. Electronics? Forget about it. The logic was always the same: American labor was too expensive, and global trade was the future. And sure, that worked—for a while. The stock market soared, CEOs got rich, and consumers got cheap products at Walmart. But what we traded away was something much bigger: stability.

Now, fast forward to today. The Trump administration, desperate to reverse decades of bad decisions with a blunt instrument, has slapped massive tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. Twenty-five percent on Canadian and Mexican imports, 20% on Chinese goods. The idea is to force companies to bring production back home, but here’s the problem—there’s nothing left to bring it back to.

We don’t have the infrastructure. We don’t have the skilled workforce. We don’t even have the supply chains. Decades of gutting our own manufacturing base have left us completely incapable of winning a trade war. And yet, like an aging prizefighter swinging wildly in the dark, we keep trying. The tariffs aren’t going to fix the problem—they’re just going to make everything more expensive while our trading partners retaliate.

Meanwhile, the people at the top keep getting richer while the rest of the country falls apart. It’s been this way for decades. The great trickle-down experiment, one of the biggest con jobs in history, promised that if we just let the rich get richer, everyone would benefit. And what actually happened? The rich got richer, and everyone else got left behind.

The banks got bailed out in 2008 while regular Americans lost their homes. Corporations got lifelines during COVID while workers were told to survive on one-time stimulus checks. And now, as inflation and layoffs creep back into the picture, the response from those in power is to protect the interests of the wealthy while the rest of the country is told to brace for “necessary adjustments.”

What adjustments, exactly? Higher prices? Lower wages? More job insecurity? The reality is that we’re already in a recession—we just haven’t admitted it yet.

Consumer confidence is tanking, and for good reason. The economy runs on trust—trust that wages will keep up with inflation, that jobs will be stable, that investing in a home won’t become a financial death sentence. Right now, that trust is gone. For the past two years, Wall Street has been booming while regular people have been drowning. The S&P 500 keeps hitting record highs, but for whom? For the average American, wages haven’t kept up with rising costs. Groceries are more expensive. Housing is unattainable. Jobs that once provided security are being slashed.

And yet, the people in charge keep telling us everything is fine. The economy is strong, inflation is temporary, just wait it out business as usual. But no amount of spin can hide the reality: people are struggling. Layoffs in tech, manufacturing slowdowns, and rising credit card debt all point to the same conclusion—this isn't temporary. This is the result of decades of economic denial catching up with us.

At the heart of all of this—our failed trade policies, our wealth concentration, our hollowed-out economy—is one fundamental problem: we are incapable of admitting when we’re wrong. Being vulnerable, admitting failure, is something we are culturally and economically allergic to. From corporate boardrooms to government offices, the instinct is always to double down rather than acknowledge mistakes.

People who feel like they can’t be vulnerable react with defensiveness, aggression, or complete detachment. The same thing happens on a national scale. We could have admitted decades ago that outsourcing manufacturing was a mistake. We could have acknowledged that trickle-down economics doesn’t work. We could have confronted the fact that wealth hoarding destroys economies. But instead, we made up new justifications, passed the blame, and kept pretending.

And now, we’re here.

So what happens next? Can we fix this? Maybe. But it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to happen if we keep doing the same things. Slapping tariffs on our biggest trading partners without a plan to rebuild manufacturing is economic suicide. Continuing to funnel wealth to the top while people struggle to afford basic necessities is unsustainable.

If we really want to turn things around, we have to do something radical: be honest. That means admitting we screwed up. Admitting that we need massive investments in domestic industry, not just temporary Band-Aids. Admitting that an economy built on stock market highs doesn’t mean a damn thing if the majority of people are worse off. Admitting that wealth hoarding is the real economic poison—not the minimum wage, not "entitlements," not immigration.

But if history is any guide, we won’t do any of that. We’ll keep pretending, keep doubling down, and keep waiting for things to magically fix themselves. We all know the definition of insanity, doing the same thing expecting a different result.