How 24 Years of Post-9/11 Fiscal Fantasy Led to Trump’s Hidden Tax on Working Families
I’ve had a personal connection to 9/11 for 24 years. As many know, I lived 2 blocks away from the Twin Towers when they were attacked. My building was shaken so hard that I fell out of bed when the second plane hit. I’ve told the rest of that story many times. So, today I won’t repeat it here – although if you’re interested in hearing it – let me know and I’ll post it in the comments.
What I do want to bring light to is the legacy of 9/11 – one that I haven’t seen anyone else talk about. While the conspiracy theories about who was actually behind what happened that day have been going strong for 2 decades, the actual conspiracy has been unfolding right in front of our eyes this entire time. And its effects have been felt by every single American – and everyone on the planet.
The biggest heist in American history happened in broad daylight, and most people don’t even realize they were robbed. Over the past 2 decades, the US spent roughly $8 trillion on wars without asking taxpayers to write a check. Instead, the Federal Reserve just printed the money, and now everyone under 40 is stuck holding the bill in the form of housing they can’t afford and debt that follows them to the grave.
Here’s how you rob an entire generation without them noticing: Never raise taxes, always print money, and make sure the inflation hits after the politicians who caused it are long gone.
After 9/11, America decided to play world police in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a dozen other countries. But instead of doing what previous generations did during wartime – raise taxes or sell war bonds – Washington chose the sneakiest option possible. They had the Fed create money out of thin air through quantitative easing, essentially running the printing press at full speed while telling everyone it was “unconventional monetary policy.”
Quantitative easing is when the Federal Reserve prints money to buy government bonds, essentially allowing Washington to spend without raising taxes or cutting other programs. It’s a way for politicians to fund spending without the political pain of honest taxation.
The Fed’s printing press became Washington’s ATM. Need money for wars? Print it. Banking crisis? Print more. Each time, the bill got passed to anyone holding dollars while the people who owned stocks and real estate got richer.
The Fed’s balance sheet exploded from under $1 trillion in 2007 to nearly $7 trillion by 2025. When you flood the economy with that much newly created money, basic monetary understanding tells you what happens next – inflation. And not the gentle, predictable kind that economists like, but the vicious type that destroys purchasing power and creates asset bubbles.
The rich loved this arrangement because all that printed money had to go somewhere, and it went straight into financial assets. Stock portfolios doubled, real estate skyrocketed, and anyone who owned appreciating assets got richer while doing absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, young people trying to start their careers got crushed by the very inflation that made their bosses wealthy. The costs got kicked down to the next generation while current voters enjoyed the illusion of free wars.
This is the story of trickle up economics.
Now, don’t misread this – I am not saying that any of this was a grand scheme. It was death by a thousand cuts – meaning it can be traced through dozens of decisions made by our leaders that were aimed at fixing things in the short term with little recognition of the long term fall out – what some may call “kick the can” politics. And both parties and every president since Carter has contributed to it.
If you want to understand how we ended up in an economy where houses cost a million dollars, rent eats half your paycheck, and debt feels like a life sentence, you don’t need a PhD. You just need to follow the bread crumbs from the 1980s to now. It’s not complicated. It’s just decades of choices that piled up until regular people were left holding the bag.
Start in the Reagan era. Taxes got slashed, rules got loosened, and for the first time companies were given a legal green light to buy back their own stock. That little move turned out to be huge. Instead of investing profits in workers or new products, corporations started spending billions buying their own shares to pump stock prices and reward executives. Deficits rose, inequality widened, and the culture of corporate self-dealing became normal. The bill for those tax cuts? Kicked down to future generations.
The 1990s looked great on paper, but underneath, the foundation was cracking. The economy was booming, unemployment was low, and for a hot second we even had budget surpluses. But Congress was quietly dismantling the safeguards that had kept the financial system stable since the Great Depression. In 1999, they finally tore down the last pieces of Glass-Steagall – the law that had kept banks from gambling with your money since 1933. They also let financial derivatives run wild with no oversight. On top of that, America threw the door wide open to globalization by locking in permanent trade with China and then helping them join the WTO. That hollowed out U.S. manufacturing towns while Wall Street popped champagne. Each deregulation kicked the risks down to the next crisis.
Then came 9/11. The Fed slammed interest rates down to keep markets calm, and America launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were charged straight to the national credit card. No new taxes, no war bonds, just debt. Cheap money flowed everywhere. Housing prices started inflating like a balloon at a kid’s birthday party. Banks handed out mortgages to anyone with a pulse, then sliced them into financial products and sold them around the world. By 2007, the balloon popped. Lehman Brothers collapsed, AIG needed a bailout, and the financial system nearly took the global economy down with it. The bill for financial deregulation came due, and taxpayers got stuck with it.
That’s when the Fed pulled a rabbit out of the hat – quantitative easing. The Fed’s printing press became the solution to every crisis. They bought trillions of dollars in Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities to keep interest rates at rock bottom. The Fed’s balance sheet went from under $1 trillion in 2007 to nearly $5 trillion by the mid-2010s. This juiced stocks, boosted housing prices, and made the wealthy even wealthier. But if you were just trying to buy your first house or pay off student loans, you were stuck paying inflated prices with stagnant wages. The costs of the bailout got kicked down to anyone who didn’t already own assets.
Fast forward to the 2020s. COVID hits, the Fed doubles down on QE at a scale nobody had ever seen before, and Congress drops trillions in pandemic aid. It worked in the short term – the economy bounced back fast – but by 2022 inflation peaked at 9.1 percent. Groceries, gas, rent, everything shot up. To cool it off, the Fed slammed the brakes, hiking interest rates up to 5.25-5.50 percent. Now mortgages are unaffordable, credit card interest is crushing families, and the U.S. government itself is buried under record interest costs on its debt. Another crisis, another bill kicked down to working families.
So here we are. Forty years of deregulation, stock buybacks, tax cuts, globalization, cheap credit, trillion-dollar wars, and money printing have left us in an economy where owning a home feels like winning the lottery and younger generations are saddled with debt they didn’t ask for. This wasn’t random. It was a series of deliberate choices that benefited the top and pushed costs down the line. If you’re under 40 and wondering why everything feels rigged – it’s because it is.
For anyone born after 1990, this rigged economy isn’t a departure from normal – it IS normal. They’ve never known a world where college was affordable or houses were within reach. They’ve only experienced an economy designed to extract wealth from their generation to pay for decades of political cowardice.
This explains why younger Americans are flirting with socialism in ways that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. Recent polls show 51 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 view socialism positively, compared to just 45 percent who view capitalism favorably. Two-thirds of young people say they’d prefer to live in a socialist economic system. When capitalism becomes synonymous with inherited wealth, corporate greed, and housing you can’t afford, why wouldn’t you look for alternatives?
The irony is delicious. The same government that spent decades warning about the dangers of socialism created the exact conditions that make socialism appealing to an entire generation. When you rig the economy so thoroughly that hard work doesn’t lead to homeownership, stable careers, or basic economic security, you shouldn’t be surprised when people start questioning the whole system.
The establishment response has been predictably tone-deaf – dismiss young people as naive or claim they’ll “grow out of” socialist ideas as they get older. But the data shows this isn’t a phase. There’s no meaningful difference between the economic attitudes of people in their late teens and those in their early 40s. When the game is rigged, changing the players doesn’t fix the problem.
What we’re witnessing is the entirely predictable result of empire-building financed through monetary manipulation. Instead of asking Americans to sacrifice for their wars through higher taxes, politicians chose the politically expedient path of hidden taxation through inflation. They exported the costs of military adventurism to future generations while current voters enjoyed the illusion of free wars.
But wait – it gets worse.
The national credit card is maxed out, and Trump’s administration is trying the same old tricks with a dangerous twist – funding tax cuts for the rich by imposing massive hidden taxes on working families through tariffs.
Trump’s tariffs now tax imports at 18.6 percent – the highest level since the Great Depression. This is the inevitable endgame of 24 years of fiscal irresponsibility. The wealthy keep their low tax rates – corporate taxes sit at 21 percent, down from 35 percent – while everyone else gets hammered by what’s essentially a nationwide sales tax on imports. Meanwhile, the administration cuts programs that help struggling families while extending tax cuts that give the top 1 percent massive windfalls. It’s the same pattern that’s played out since 9/11: kick the costs down to people who can’t fight back.
The Federal Reserve can’t print money anymore without triggering runaway inflation, so they need new mechanisms to extract resources from working families. Tariffs are just the latest tool in the same wealth transfer scheme that’s been running since 9/11.
None of this is conspiracy theory – it’s basic arithmetic traceable through 24 years of federal spending. Spend trillions on wars and tax cuts for the wealthy, borrow to cover the difference, and when borrowing becomes impossible, extract the money from working families through hidden taxes.
The crazy part is that this is all from breaking rules and regulations we once had in place – that actually worked. Has anyone thought about just saying – “Hey. We fucked up!” and putting tthem back in place? Hell nah!
Look. No matter what the stock market says – when you hammer working families with higher costs while cutting assistance, consumer spending drops and recession follows. The Penn Wharton Budget Model projects Trump’s tariffs alone will reduce GDP by 8 percent and wages by 7 percent.
We’ve reached a decision point Washington hasn’t faced since 9/11 changed everything. The old playbook of borrowing and money-printing has hit its limits. We can keep riding this system until it collapses, or we can finally make the people who benefited from 24 years of policy favoritism pay their fair share.
The choice is stark: either working families keep getting crushed by hidden taxes to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, or we demand that the people who got rich off this grift start paying the bills they helped create. Twenty-four years after I fell out of bed to the sound of America changing forever, it’s time to stop kicking the can and start making the people who broke the system fix it.
The only way to solve all of this is a general strike.
https://generalstrikeus.com/
I never ask this – but if you agree – please share this message.
#ratcclips
Would love to hear the rest of the story.
Shared! And yes, share your 9/11 story.