Overview

Seventeen trillion dollars. That is what American households now owe-and it did not happen by accident. The debt that defines modern American life was built. Not by market forces. Not by natural economic evolution. By specific decisions, made by specific institutions, designed to serve specific interests at the expense of the people who carry the debt. The Debt Machine traces the deliberate construction of a system that converted America from a nation of producers and savers into a nation of borrowers. It names the decisions. It identifies the beneficiaries. And it exposes the operational reality beneath the prosperity America was sold. Inside, you will discover: How a single 1978 Supreme Court decision quietly eliminated the usury laws that had protected borrowers for centuries-and opened the door to credit card rates above 20 percent Why the savings rate collapsed to zero, and how interest rate policy, the tax code, and a deliberate cultural campaign engineered it How the mortgage was transformed from a wealth-building tool into a financial instrument that produced the largest destruction of household wealth since the Depression Why student debt is the only category of consumer debt that can almost never be discharged in bankruptcy-and who lobbied to make it that way How the medical billing apparatus converts illness into financial catastrophe in the only wealthy nation on earth that allows it Why the Federal Reserve's ""neutral"" interest rate decisions are among the most powerful wealth-redistribution mechanisms in the economy How your credit score functions as a control system that rewards debt and punishes saving Why corporations borrowed trillions-not to build, but to inflate their own stock prices How the 2008 collapse was foreseeable, foreseen, and followed by almost no prosecutions How debt itself disciplines the population into compliance, keeping workers from quitting, organizing, or pushing back This is not a book about personal finance tips. It is an investigation into how the system was assembled, piece by piece, through legislation, court rulings, regulatory decisions, and institutional design-and how every piece serves the institutions that profit from perpetual debt. The debt you carry is not simply your own doing. It is your individual experience of a system constructed to produce exactly the burden you feel. The most important truth in these pages is also the most hopeful: the debt economy is not inevitable. It was built. And anything that was built can be understood-and changed. Grounded entirely in the public record-federal statutes, court decisions, Federal Reserve data, congressional testimony, and institutional reports-this is the book that makes the invisible architecture of American debt visible at last. If you have ever sensed that the rules were rigged but couldn't say exactly how-this book explains it.

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