Ever since the COVID “Great Reset,” the American economy has functioned like a silent depression for two-thirds of households and most businesses. Washington pumped out biblical levels of spending and easy money, and a cycle of debt, high prices, and stagnation has crushed consumers.

Meanwhile, a handful of well-connected corporations — propped up by cheap credit, regulatory favors, and asset bubbles — keep the stock market afloat, creating the illusion of growth. The result is an economy that looks healthy on paper but feels like collapse on Main Street.

Enough. A nation cannot live on financial tricks and asset bubbles forever. Let the recession come.

The time has come to let it crash. No more bailouts. No more “too big to fail.” If we want a free-market recovery built on broad opportunity and wage-based wealth, we must let the bubbles burst.

The silent depression

Americans live under record-high prices for food, fuel, rent, and electricity. College graduates face the worst job market in decades. Payroll data shows just 1,494 new jobs were added in August — the weakest since the 2008 crash. Layoffs are up 38.5% this year.

For graduates, the outlook is even worse. Fortune reports that 58% of recent grads still can’t land a job or internship. Forty percent of the unemployed last year never even got an interview. One in five job seekers remained unemployed for 10 months or more.

Those already employed are struggling to make ends meet. Thirty-seven percent of workers have tapped retirement accounts for hardship withdrawals or loans. Personal spending, adjusted for inflation, fell 0.15% in the first half of 2025 — the sharpest decline since the financial crisis.

Families are drowning in debt. Household debt sits at $18.39 trillion, up $600 billion in one year. Student loans total $1.64 trillion, with more than 10% delinquent. Credit card debt has hit $1.21 trillion, with average APRs over 22%. Auto loans stretch to seven years for one in five new vehicles. Nearly half of renters now spend more than 30% of their income on housing.

A stock market built on sand

You’d expect Wall Street to slump alongside Main Street. Instead, the S&P 500 posts records. Why? Because 10 mega-cap tech stocks make up 40% of its total market cap. Strip them out, and the picture darkens.

More than 450 large companies filed for bankruptcy in the first half of 2025, the most since the Great Recession. Manufacturing has lost 78,000 jobs. Construction spending has fallen in seven of the past 11 months. Small caps fare even worse: 43% of Russell 2000 firms are unprofitable.

AI hype fuels the illusion. Nvidia’s data center revenue — half of it from just three shaky firms — drives much of the market. The S&P’s price-to-book ratio now tops the dot-com bubble. This is not sustainable growth; it’s speculation on steroids.

The housing bubble must pop

Housing has become the last pillar propping up the economy. Thanks to years of near-zero rates, federal subsidies, and trillions in mortgage-backed securities, the housing market ballooned to $55 trillion — $20 trillion more than in 2020.

But affordability is gone. The frozen market now shows cracks as prices fall in half the country. This is the moment to let it reset. Instead of lowering lending standards or declaring housing “emergencies,” the Trump administration should allow prices to match real wages.

Americans can’t keep using housing as a savings account or demanding 25% annual stock returns while complaining about inequality. You can’t have both free markets and endless asset bubbles.

RELATED: No peace without steel: Why our factories must roar again

Photo by sdlgzps via Getty Images

Stop feeding the beast

Wall Street already salivates over another round of stimulus to keep the AI bubble inflated. Evercore ISI predicts the S&P could hit 9,000 by 2026, even while warning this could become the “biggest bubble ever.” By then, the economy would be addicted to corporate welfare, and taxpayers would foot the bill for the richest companies in history.

Enough. A nation cannot live on financial tricks and asset bubbles forever. Let the recession come. Let the bubbles burst. Only then can America rebuild a market economy rooted in work, savings, and production — not in debt and fantasy.

Won’t somebody finally stand up and shout stop?

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, National debt, Broken families, Recession, Economy, Main street, Wall street, Stock market, Assets, Inflation, Interest rates, Jobs, Unemployment, Layoffs 

Among those who loved, respected, and were grateful to Charlie Kirk for everything he did is BlazeTV host Alex Stein — who in a rare moment appears to be all out of jokes.

“People don’t understand that Charlie Kirk could have canceled me a million times. A million times. I did some very boneheaded things. And he always stuck with me, even when I was not representing Turning Point in the best light,” Stein says through tears on “Prime Time with Alex Stein.”

“I am having trouble right now finding anything positive about this situation because I know there’s people out there, and it’s very true that Charlie’s legacy will live on forever, but the world is significantly worse today without Charlie Kirk than it was yesterday,” he continues.

“And Charlie had my back so much, and he didn’t have any motivation other than he actually believed in the First Amendment. He believed in the Second Amendment. He believed in the whole entire Constitution,” he adds.

While Stein says that everyone he has met in politics “has some sort of skeleton in their closet,” Kirk was “the closest thing to perfection when it comes to a human being and following God’s commandments and defending the Constitution.”

“There’s no better example in the entire universe than Charlie Kirk. And when you are perfect like that and when you don’t have skeletons in your closet and you cannot be blackmailed, they will publicly execute you in front of thousands of people, and they will make you scared on purpose,” Stein says.

Kirk was a husband and a father to two children, the founder of Turning Point USA, and only 31 years old.

“When you’re a 31-year-old man, father, that has accomplished more than 99.9% of the population, and you’re brutally murdered in front of your wife and two kids, that is a sick world that not even the most sinister Hollywood scriptwriter would write and produce,” Stein says.

“And that’s the current reality in which we live in. And nothing feels real. Me sitting here and saying Charlie Kirk is dead does not feel real,” he continues.

Not only is his death devastating to those who loved him, listened to him, were inspired by him — but Stein believes this will have a “ripple effect on society” that the leftists cheering on his death do not understand.

“Charlie Kirk would have been president of the United States of America,” he says, adding, “No doubt in my mind.”

Want more from Alex Stein?

To enjoy more of Alex’s culture jamming, comedic monologues, skits, and street segments, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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The Old Timer lives to rock his chair another day. In the latest of Cracker Barrel’s many reversals, the company assured customers the old interiors were here to stay. The physical has triumphed over the digital, the “realer” country store representation retained over gray-washed abstraction, and America is quite pleased. The country has managed to hold onto a facsimile of its tangible past, and this is not nothing.

Or is it?

We are nostalgic for being able to engage in the present sufficiently that we create memories.

The controversy over the Cracker Barrel logo reflects a new mood of victory on the resurgent New Right. A sense of humiliation felt over a decade of brands going woke has been replaced by a feeling of power that this pattern is being reversed. But what is the real meaning of this kind of social media activism? Is it really a victory, or rather a victory lap?

Pessimistically, one might say concern over corporate iconography testifies to a form of nostalgia shading into what writer Mark Fisher called Disneyfication. Analyzing Philip K. Dick’s novel “Time Out of Joint,” Fisher quotes Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”: “the peculiar ache of nostalgia that ‘Time Out Of Joint’ engenders, a nostalgia for the present, which Dick achieves by constellating stereotypical images of the decade he was writing at the end of: ‘President Eisenhower’s stroke; Main Street, U.S.A.; Marilyn Monroe; a world of neighbors and PTAs; small retail stores (the produce trucked in from outside); favorite television programs; mild flirtations with the housewife next door; game shows and contests; sputniks directly revolving overhead, mere blinking lights in the firmament, hard to distinguish from airliners or flying saucers.'”

Cracker Barrel, though presenting itself as a portal to some bygone poultry farmer’s smoking lounge, now actually offers “a nostalgia for the present.” It offers this via immediacy, personal memory, and normalcy.

RELATED: Cracker Barrel caves even further to anti-rebrand outrage

Photo by Bloomberg / Contributor via Getty Images

The optimistic perspective on this Disneyfication? Digitality is defined in a sense by its lack of presentness. Time-stamped posts position the viewer in an exact relationship to the past, old thoughts bombarded constantly by new ones. One is constantly aware that they have missed something and always reminded they are about to miss even more (or encounter and quickly forget). Cracker Barrel, as a restaurant primarily reserved for family gatherings and social affairs, necessitates that one wipe his blue-light bleary eyes and look up. This immediacy separates it from the YouTube-fare of many other chains and accordingly sees us clinging to it all the more.

Presentness is a requirement to actually engage with the past. Our digital moments seldom become memories, and even more infrequently, memories we bother revisiting. By virtue of Cracker Barrel being an accessible space with an architecture of interaction (wall-items to discuss, games to play, widely palatable food, et cetera), it enables fond family-memory formation. We are nostalgic for being able to engage in the present sufficiently that we create memories.

America is now packed to the gills with all forms of unfamiliar tongues, peoples, and pastimes. Cracker Barrel stands out as a shelter with which the present can be fully enjoyed, removing the diner from recriminations over a Main Street now unrecognizable and inuring us against the tornadic spasms of culture outside its thick double doors. It is a bubble, which, in its wobbly fragility, serves as a funhouse mirror, reflecting a present that could be simple, light, and normal. Inside this sudsy salon is a miniature Target clad in kitsch, a menu that does not embarrass you to order from, and an encampment wherein deleterious social change seems to vanish. It answers a prayer that the country, right now, could be so clean-cut and corralled.

The New Right’s push to retain spaces like Cracker Barrel may blossom into a proper creative drive. Perhaps this is not actually required — it may just need to keep clutching the rocking chair tightly. As many feel their professional and personal lives slipping into the virtual, culturally designated “real world” oases will abound. But the simulacra of these spaces will proliferate, too. Perhaps the restaurant is a welcome reprieve from screen-world. In fact, it may be the definitive escape from the digital world. Or maybe it is just the digital world at an earlier stage of development, repackaged as a comforting and familiar experience.

​Tech, Cracker barrel 

Disney still prints money, but creatively it feels like a company on borrowed time. Marvel and Star Wars once powered revenues, yet a collapse in quality and a relentless release schedule have dulled both brands. The animation studio that set the global standard now leans on sequels and live-action remakes.

Worse, Disney struck a devil’s bargain by cultivating the “Disney adult.” By chasing the childless consumer, the company bought short-term profits while starving its future. At this rate, the company will have no next generation to buy into its nostalgia-based market.

Disney once sold childhood to children and, by doing so, sold a future to parents. By pivoting to the childless super-consumer, it sold out both.

Walt Disney’s dominance came from talent and timing. He had a gift for stories that delighted children and amused their parents. He also built in an era when mass media suddenly reached every living room, the postwar baby boom swelled the audience, and families had disposable income for the first time. Walt converted that moment into a network of theme parks that became rites of passage. In America, childhood meant Disney, and Disney meant childhood.

The empire grew after Walt’s death. Parks multiplied. The company expanded into television, music, sports, and games. Disney stretched its reach to older kids and teens, building an ecosystem where a child could live almost entirely inside one brand. That was the genius: Every formative memory wore a set of mouse ears, and nostalgia was guaranteed on the back end.

But invention is hard. Replicating Walt’s spark isn’t a system you can scale. Disney wanted every demographic and every dollar. Children had been the untapped market, but kids don’t control income; parents do. Marketing directly to adults looked unrealistic — until executives realized nostalgia could do the work.

Nostalgia as strip mine

Nostalgia feels like striking gold. You don’t need to create; you need to repackage. Decades of artistry built so much goodwill that the faintest echo could trigger warm feelings: a musical cue, a costume redesign, a cameo. For young adults who discovered the world is harsher than childhood promised, revisiting Disney’s stories and parks delivered comfort on demand.

That same generation had fewer children, often none. The old route — enchant the kids to unlock the parents’ wallets — narrowed. Disney pivoted. Sequels, reboots, and remakes pushed out originality. Marvel briefly rescued the strategy, but social justice sermons plus a firehose of content burned out the audience. Lucasfilm looked like another bottomless mine, yet once the initial excitement faded, fans saw the studio couldn’t craft new myths. The product kept coming; the magic didn’t.

From children’s parks to adult playgrounds

The parks followed the money. Regular attendance became a status symbol among young adults eager to flaunt luxury consumption online. Disney obliged, hiking prices and layering on exclusive experiences squarely aimed at childless visitors with cash to burn. Elite dining clubs, after-hours parties, and “premium” line-skipping converted nostalgia into a subscription lifestyle. Even Walt’s no-alcohol rule vanished. Spaces designed for families became curated playgrounds for nostalgic adults.

Nothing exposed this shift like the Star Wars hotel. The Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser promised full immersion — actors in character, missions, staged set pieces, and themed cabins — at an eye-watering starting price of $5,500 for two nights for two people, but often much more. Families had no chance. The corridors filled with adults paying thousands for a few days of role-play and an Instagram dump. When the novelty faded and the numbers stopped working, Disney shuttered it.

RELATED: Disney’s woke ‘Snow White’ on life support

Photo by Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic

Eating the seed corn

For a while, the nostalgia economy worked. Remakes still posted strong weekends. Parks extracted more revenue per guest. But the company stopped enchanting children. Re-skinning “Beauty and the Beast” or “Aladdin” keeps cash flowing for a season; it plants nothing for the future. You can only harvest memories if children are making new ones now. Disney has been eating seed corn instead of planting for tomorrow.

That creative retreat shows up in the audience. The company trains adults to consume experiences rather than build households. Disney adults don’t just buy tickets and merch; many postpone or abandon the basics of civilization — marriage, kids, a home — so they can keep chasing the next “exclusive.” Some even treat continuing their bloodline as evil. Disney is not solely to blame for this wider phenomenon, but it reinforces it and profits from it.

None of this means Disney’s executives are uniquely foolish. They followed the incentives. The audience that most reliably spends money was the one you made last generation: the kid who grew up inside Disney’s ecosystem and never left it. Social media turned that audience into free marketing. Wall Street demanded predictable growth, and nostalgia delivered on time. The trap is that nostalgia always cannibalizes tomorrow to feed today.

The moral is bigger than one company. A civilization that feeds on recycled memory while sneering at renewal is a civilization drifting toward hospice. Disney once sold childhood to children and, by doing so, sold a future to parents. By pivoting to the childless super-consumer, it sold out both.

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, Disney, Disney remake, Live action remake, Woke hollywood, Nostalgia, Marvel, Star wars, Children, Galactic starcruiser, Snow white, Marriage, Family, Entertainment