On top of that, later in the week, I took on a special project to help out a overseas radio station by creating a video recording of a short Irish story I wrote several years ago. It took all of a half day and into the early evening to make the recording, and edit it to send to the station manager. He loves it by the way. I got an email from him today. Maybe I can do more and maybe make a little pocket change from that? We'll see. I'll try and add the video at the end of this blog post for anyone interested in watching it. It's about 18 minutes long, with pictures for the children.

My wife has become concerned about the amount of small loans I have had to take on over the last few months. One was the new hybrid Ford truck I traded my fully paid for, older Ford truck in for. At the time, we each thought it was a good idea as we wanted to downsize and I needed something we can tow behind our RV motor home. The other was the semi-emergency loan I had to take on to put a roof on my house unexpectedly last spring.

I didn't tell her that my new, must have this year, office computer will be paid for over the next couple of months on an interest free Dell promotion program. She thinks I'm paying cash and I didn't tell her otherwise. I may have mentioned in a previous post, that the computer companies are in a panic because the chip war between the U.S. and China is causing all computer prices to go up severely because the price of the memory chips is going way up now. If you are thinking about buying or replacing an old computer, now is the time to do it before the prices get too out of hand or the tech bubble finally collapses and everything tech related crashes.

I'm more worried about that right now. Elon Musk and his new SpaceX IPO is making the American stock markets go crazy with speculators who think Musk is the best thing since sliced butter. The stock prices for SpaceX have already started tanking so I don't think it will be much longer before the con falls apart and these wannabe Musk fanboys lose their shirts, along with a lot of other things.

I don't think AI is going anywhere but all of the extra ordinary stock evaluation is long over due for a major correction. I think we're headed for another 2008, only worse this time because Trump is in charge and he's clueless on how to handle anything like that, along with his favourite ass kissers, Lutnick and Bessent.

The American economy is already on the cliff edge and it won't take much to push it over the edge. This, so called, K shaped economy, where the wealthiest will make out like bandits and the rest of us will have to suffer the consequences of high inflation and massive layoffs. I'm retired so I'm rather immune to layoffs but not the higher inflation. We all will suffer under that.

My wife and I have been discussing our bill situation this week because she became worried that we had borrowed too much this year. I had to agree with her but this has been an extraordinary year for us. I can't blame it all on the circumstances that befell us this year. Our woes date back to four years ago when I took my then, older RV trailer to a local RV shop to get the annual inspection and some work done to the potable water system.

I knew the old girl had been through a lot and while we were there, I thought about taking a look around at maybe upgrading while we were waiting for the repairs to get finished. At the time, I wanted a better pull behind RV trailer, which would have been a lot less expensive with my trade in but nooo, my wife didn't want another trailer this time.

She wanted a motor home with a bathroom that she could just get up and go when she wanted, rather than have to wait until I could stop somewhere safely. I tried to tell her then, how expensive they were but, with her not so great English skills, she didn't understand the cost difference. All she knew was that I could afford a hundred and thirty thousand dollar motor home and she wouldn't have to wait for a rest area anymore. It's now my fault because I failed to get her to understand what we were going to be paying for at the time.

Don't get me wrong. We like our motor home and we have had some great trips with it so far. We're planning on many more in the future, if the economy doesn't totally collapse. But four years later, my dear wife has finally realised the amount of money we financed for this motor home, versus the cost difference if she would have just let me find a luxury pull behind RV trailer for about thirty thousand dollars, minus my trade in at the time. Oh well. What's done is done.

It's not that I'm in financial trouble but, with everything that has come up since last fall, I'm at the very end of my financial rope. Whatever else we have to do for the next five years will have to be paid for with cash, unless it's a real emergency. I will be watching my budget real close for the next several years to see if I can squeeze some extra cash to pay down on some of these loans as quickly as I can. I have a timeline of 2031 or sooner right now. Let's hope the American economy will hang on long enough for me to see that through.

It's being predicted in some media corners that the United States only has until about 2032 before it all comes undone because of it's fiscal problems and global warming major weather events that will destroy a lot of the already crumbling infrastructure across the country.

Trump has gutted FEMA, along with most of the rest of the social services departments in the federal government. I suspect it's because he wants that money for himself. He's working on more ways to funnel that money into places that will personally benefit himself and his kids.

I'm waiting for the final hammer to fall and the government collapses under it's own fiscal deficits. In other words, they default on all of their bond loans to other countries. I want to have most of my small loans paid off by then so we can ride out the storm. I don't want to lose my house. If I had to default on anything, it would be the RV loan. I could live without that if I had to give it to the bank in default. I hope it doesn't come to that. If I thought I could sell it, I would give it some serious thought but I can't yet.

In the meantime. I'm watching the U.S. government like a hawk with everything that's going on. I watch the economic and financial podcasts I like every day to try and stay ahead of what I know is coming for everyone. I'm not talking about the U.S. mainstream media as they're totally useless now. Even my favourite, MSNow, is falling behind. They used to be pretty good at reporting things but I find the overseas news from the middle east and Russia to be more reliable than anything I can find in the U.S. Sometimes, something leaks out that makes it to the U.S. media platforms but it seems MSNow isn't catching things until the next day anymore and I don't trust any of the others to broadcast the news without bias, either out of fealty to the king or out of fear of retribution.

What I am seeing when I look toward the future horizon, is the majority of the world moving away from investing in the U.S. anymore. They're already starting to slow down on buying T-bills and bonds, and in some major countries, like China, they're selling off their U.S. bonds and replacing them with their national currencies. That and the world is slowly working back to having gold as the reserve currency as it once was before Nixon upended everything back in 1973. Some notable economists are predicting that the U.S. will not longer be the lone superpower by 2032. China is moving quickly up the peer competitor ladder, turning the global economy into a multi-polar world and the U.S. is rapidly losing the ability to do anything about it.

Once the dollar loses most of its value as the world's reserve currency, a lot of things will change with regard to the U.S. standard of living that we've enjoyed for decades. The poorer will get poorer and the middle class will shrink to a very small percentage. All of those rich oligarchs will either go down with the ship or bail to another country and I bet you can guess what they will do, if they have to make a choice. Loyalty to the American people will be the last thing on their minds. Along with quite a few politicians.

I don't know what that might look like but I can hazard an educated guess. Mass hysteria amongst the wealthy, and a revolt in the streets of mass proportion against the politicians who let it happen. Britain is starting to go through some of that right now. Americans are now where near as polite as the British when it comes to revolts so anything like that in the U.S. may get pretty violent before a new government is elected.

Once the money runs out, there are likely to be quite a few job vacancies in congress and they will have to be filled by a very angry constituency.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're not there yet. A lot hinges on what happens this November. If Trump and company disrupt the elections to the point where the states can't elect any representatives without a lot of contention, then democracy as we know it will be finished. Which is Trump's point. That's what he wants. He wants to be able to point a finger at the states and yell about rigged elections some more. He has never, and I suspect will never, get over the loss of the 2020 election and he is going to do whatever it takes, even breaking the law, to make sure he never loses another election, ever, as long as he's in charge. And his latest claim to a reporter that he doesn't have any limits on his presidential power tells you how he thinks.

Then there is the question of Israel. Which is another nail in the Trump coffin. It's beginning to look like Israel may start looking for alternative funding sources just in case Trump decides to pull the plug on military support over this war in Lebanon. They won't find it in Europe anymore. Britain might give them a little bit but no one in the world can replace the amounts that the U.S. has been giving them for decades. Israel is probably weighing its options right now on whether to give Trump the middle finger or negotiate a lasting ceasefire with Hezbollah, at the behest of Trump and Iran. The far right wingers from the settler factions are all for thumbing their noses at Trump without thinking things through. But the more pragmatic Israelis, like Netenyahu, are thinking about the consequences of such an action. They're actually asking themselves, "What if"? They already know the answer but are probably trying to figure out how to manuever the U.S. without starting a civil war in Israel.

I don't know about all of you but all of this is making me a little more nervous than my usual military paranoia. There are millions of Americans who depend on the government to remain financially stable and it is far from that anymore. We're watching the MAGA factions work at trying to steal the next elections in November and a lot of people are getting very antsy about that. I'm one of them. I've seen firsthand what happens to a country when the government collapses. Some of us older folks know what happened when the old soviet union collapsed in the early 1990's. They recovered but look at what kind of government they have now? That could be us in a couple of years. I don't want to have to go through anything like that.

I talked about the spoiled Americans in my last podcast last week, and I meant every word of it. Americans have been spoiled since the 1950's and if they lose that sense of economic exceptionalism, all hell will break loose in the country and it will get violent. If it got bad enough, we could very well lose the current style of government we have now for something a lot worse than the one we have now under Trump. He's a buffoon with no clue on how to run a country. What if he were to be replaced with someone who does know what their doing and we end up with an American Putin?

Think about that for a minute. While you're doing that, I want to wish everyone a happy summer solstice, when the days start getting shorter from here on out. It's now time for me to spend some quality time with my family tonight. I'll be back in a few days with something else that's on my mind. With all that's going on, I'm sure there will be plenty to talk about. Until then, Sláinte