Free Republic

Some estimates suggest that half of all white-collar jobs will disappear as artificial intelligence advances. How will older white-collar workers displaced in the AI revolution fare? Our recent book, “American Idle: Late-Career Job Loss in a Neoliberal Era,” summarizes interviews we conducted with 62 baby boomers who lost their white-collar jobs during another unemployment crisis: the 2008 Great Recession and its sluggish recovery. Statistics show that workers over age 50 experienced the highest rates of long-term joblessness. Their layoffs also coincided with a precarious stage of the life course: “too young to retire but too old to start all over,”...

Partisan bickering overshadows real questions about taxes and the size of America’s government.As the partial government shutdown enters its second week, neither party is leveling with the American people about the hard choices required to get federal spending off a fiscally ruinous trajectory.President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats used covid-19 to justify chasing the mirage of a European-style welfare state without raising the necessary taxes to pay for it. Now, prodded by the left, party leaders have shut down the government in a bid to permanently extend what was sold in 2021 as emergency subsidies to help people struggling during...

@SenRandPaul I joined @LlamasNBC on @NBCNews and made it clear: I refuse to add $2 trillion more to the debt, no matter which party demands it. Republicans and Democrats both flip-flop for politics. I won't back endless deficits or Biden-era spending levels.

Roughly 42% of younger working Americans — spanning Gen Z, millennials and Gen X — report having no spare savings after covering their basic living expenses, according to the analysis, which surveyed about 3,600 workers and 1,500 retirees. Among those just getting by, about three-quarters said they are struggling to save for retirement, the survey found. The share of U.S. workers in this precarious financial position has grown significantly since 1997, when 31% lived paycheck to paycheck, according to Goldman. The investment bank projects that figure could climb to well over half of Americans by 2033 as essentials like housing...

@RonPaul President Trump is considering "stimulus" checks (again). We should all remember the last time that President Trump sent out "stimulus" checks. It was the "CARES Act," which ignited the massive inflation that we're still suffering from today. How can a government that has no money, that racks up record deficits, be in a position to give out "rebates" anyway? They're not. Tariffs revenues (that Americans overwhelmingly pay) don't put the government into the black, and capable of giving "rebates." The government is way in the red. That means the "stimulus" checks will have to come from the Fed counterfeiting...

The Trump administration is planning to roll out the first tranche of bailout payments for farmers in the coming weeks, likely using billions of dollars in funding from an internal USDA account, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. But it won’t be enough: USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation fund — which President Donald Trump previously tapped to provide $28 billion in farm aid during his first-term trade war with China — has just $4 billion left in the account. Trump officials, including those at the Treasury Department, are looking at how to tap tariff receipts or other...

President Trump said Thursday he’s still weighing the idea of giving Americans up to $2,000 in rebates derived from the revenues his tariff agenda has generated. Trump’s proposal to share some of the hundreds of billions of dollars the federal government has collected since he slapped foreign nations with steep levies in April comes as the Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments in a case next month that will decide whether the president has the power to impose such sweeping global tariffs. “They’re just starting to kick in,” Trump said of the tariffs in an interview with One America...

THE PENTAGON — Shockwaves have rippled across Washington in recent days following surprise orders from Secretary of Defense (and also War and also Pew Pew) Pete Hegseth that the entirety of U.S. military leadership would muster aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico on Tuesday.“This gathering is of the highest secrecy and importance to our national security,” said Hegseth, “which is why I have ordered every general- or flag-grade officer assemble at a highly secure location on Tuesday, September 30, at 12:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, 10 digit grid 0033566203 on your Quantico 1:50,0000 special if you’ve got one. All hands, no...

The National Debt IssueAmerica’s national debt is a ticking time bomb, exploding right under our noses. As of September 2025, the gross national debt has ballooned past $37 trillion, a staggering figure that’s not just numbers on a ledger but a crushing burden on every hardworking American. Interest payments alone are gobbling up 17% of federal spending, sucking the life out of our economy like a vampire at a blood bank.But here’s the good news: President Donald J. Trump, in his triumphant return to the White House, is unleashing a crypto revolution that’s poised to slay this debt dragon. These...

Global debt hit a record high of $337.7 trillion at the end of the second quarter, driven by easing global financial conditions, a softer U.S. dollar and a more accommodative stance from major central banks, a quarterly report showed on Thursday. The Institute of International Finance, a financial services trade group, said that global debt rose over $21 trillion in the first half of the year to $337.7 trillion. China, France, the United States, Germany, Britain, and Japan recorded the largest increases in debt levels in U.S. dollar terms, though some of that was due to a waning dollar, the...

It is sadly humorous to me, but not surprising, that Elizabeth Guevara, writing for Investopedia, can only seem to offer one solution for young people considering college, now that there is a cap on available federal student loans. From a new article via Yahoo Finance: New Student Loan Limits May Force More Borrowers to Take Out Private LoansThe ‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’ will restrict the amount of federal student loans available to college students next year. Students may have to take out riskier private loans to cover the rest of their schooling. The average medical graduate student will not be...

Debt Is the New Chains: A Warning for Young People About Modern Financial Traps Imagine being forced to work for years just to pay off a debt. Not because you chose the job, but because you had no other way out. This was the life of an indentured servant—a person who signed a contract to work for several years without pay in exchange for something they needed, like passage to America back in the 1600s or 1700s. It sounded like a fair trade. But the truth was, once you signed that contract, your freedom was gone. You were stuck working...

The threat of a U.S. government shutdown surged on Friday, as the U.S. Senate rejected a short-term funding bill to keep federal agencies operating after September 30 and then left town for a week-long break. The lawmakers voted 44-48 to defeat a stopgap spending bill that would have kept federal agencies operating at current funding levels through November 21. The measure faced near universal opposition from Democrats, who demanded increased healthcare funding. Republicans said they could vote again on September 29, just a day before funding is due to expire, when senators return from a break.

Many Americans love the feeling of driving a new car, but the price of that thrill is pushing household budgets to the edge. Auto loan delinquencies are spiraling, the nation now owes a staggering $1.66 trillion in auto loans, and some figures show scary similarities to the period right before the 2008 financial crash. That’s according to a new report titled “Driven to Default: The Economy-Wide Risks of Rising Auto Loan Delinquencies” from the Consumer Federation of America (CFA). It describes auto finance in the US as being “at breaking point,” and criticizes Congress and the country’s federal watchdogs for...

The federal government's budget deficit reached $2 trillion for the current fiscal year as the deficit has widened by nearly $100 billion from last year. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its monthly budget update for August, which showed the deficit reached $1.989 trillion in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2025. That amounts to a $92 billion increase in the deficit when compared with the first 11 months of fiscal year 2024. Overall, federal spending was up by $391 billion from a year ago, an increase of 5%, while tax receipts rose $299 billion, or 7%, in...

Less than 1 percent of Democrats say they are satisfied with the direction of the country, according to a new Gallup poll. Why It Matters This is the lowest level of satisfaction among Democrats in at least 25 years, according to Gallup's polling, and it comes at a time when Republican satisfaction is near record high levels. The polling shows that Democrats' satisfaction with the direction of the country quickly dropped after President Donald Trump, a Republican, returned to office in January, while GOP supporters' satisfaction spiked. According to Gallup, 31 percent of Americans currently say they are satisfied with...

More older student loan borrowers are struggling to pay their monthly bill, as the Trump administration ramps up its collection efforts. Nearly 1 in 5 — or roughly 18% — of student loan borrowers who are 50 and older became “seriously delinquent,” or 90 days or more late on their payments, in the second quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The rate for that age group was closer to 10% in 2019. For comparison, closer to 8% of student loan borrowers between the ages of 18 and 29 became seriously delinquent during that time...

If you thought the Trump Administration was finished making cuts to government spending, think again. No other institution on earth can spend money like the U.S. government—the effort by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to get spending under control and cut waste has never happened on this level before. On Sunday, the DOGE team announced another round of major cuts, nearly $2B worth: Contracts Update!Over the last 5 days, agencies terminated 163 wasteful contracts with a ceiling value of $1.9B and savings of $647M, including, a $35M USAID contract to “acquire contractor support to establish and manage a flexible,...

The student debt crisis isn’t a natural market phenomenon; it’s the predictable result of decades of government interference. Since 1980, average tuition and fees have increased by 1,200 percent, while consumer price inflation has risen only 236 percent over the same period. This massive increase has left students and families struggling to keep up, often forcing them to take on substantial debt just to attend college. Today, over 42.7 million Americans owe a combined $1.69 trillion in federal student loan debt. A combination of federal policies, including subsidized loans, government grants, bloated university budgets, and a complete lack of accountability,...

S&P Global on Monday affirmed its 'AA+' credit rating on the U.S., saying the revenue from President Donald Trump's tariffs will offset the fiscal hit from his recent tax-cut and spending bill. Trump signed the massive package of tax-cut and spending bill, dubbed the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act', into law in July. The bill, which delivered new tax breaks, also made Trump's 2017 tax cuts permanent. "Amid the rise in effective tariff rates, we expect meaningful tariff revenue to generally offset weaker fiscal outcomes that might otherwise be associated with the recent fiscal legislation, which contains both cuts and...