Stomach Bugs and Systemic Debt

How demographics are driving America’s long-term fiscal illness

(A sneak preview of the front page of tomorrow’s New York Times…)

“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”

~ Thomas Jefferson, from his private letters (1807)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina…

There is no doubt about it, dear reader, we live in extraordinary times. What other age, pray tell, competes with ours for bunkum, claptrap and sheer, unabashed lunacy?

In what other era could you open the newspaper and read such utter nonsense and piffle as we are treated to daily in (to choose but one of myriad, similarly dishonorable mastheads) The New York Times?

Here, a smattering of “all the news that’s fit to print,” just from this morning’s edition…

The Roller Skater Trying to Reframe the History of Farmer’s Rights

Help! I Might be a Trad Wife!

I’m Disabled. My Sex Life Is Amazing.

And our personal favorite for the day…

First Girls’ Polo Team Breaks With Tradition, But Keeps The Goat Carcass (from the perennially popular Kyrgyzstan Dispatch supplement)

There’s also the steady feed of buzzword-laced content – stories of rampant racism, flagrant bigotry and ubiquitous oppression – now standard features in publications ferociously devoted to splicing together every imaginable minority in the apparent hope of creating Dr. Frankenstein’s ultimate intersectionalized victim.

And yet, as pressing as these stories undoubtedly are, the reader will search in vain for such dedicated coverage of, say, the federal debt. We dropped the words into the NYT’s nifty search bar… and were promptly taken to a story published… back in early May. Before that, there was a single story published in March, a lone article in April and one more from back in January, when the debt was a “mere” $38 trillion.

Naturally, none of the coverage appeared on the paper’s front page. And yet, unlike the inspired world of Kyrgyzstani goat carcasses, the national debt – and, specifically, the interest repayments on it – is something that directly impacts the lives of everyday workers, savers and retirees from sea to shining sea.

In today’s Note, guest essayist MN Gordon addresses two stories… one you have likely seen covered (ahem…) ad nauseam in the mainstream press… and one which gets too few column inches. You’ll know which is which when you read them, below…

As always, if you’d like to see more of Mr. Gordon’s fine work, do be sure to check out his Economic Prism website, right here. We have no financial arrangement with our long time contributor and do not benefit from featuring his writing... other than that we simply enjoy what he has to say and hope you do, too.

Cheers,

Joel

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Stomach Bugs and Systemic Debt
by MN Gordon, founder Economic Prism

If it’s not a bizarre new geopolitical crisis, it’s a terrifying headline about the safety of our food supply.

This, no doubt, is an age of constant, low-grade dread. Every time you open your phone, there’s a fresh, steaming pile of bad news waiting to greet you.

But while the mainstream media loves to keep your anxiety levels on a gentle simmer, we prefer to look at the bigger picture. The absurdity of modern life is what we’re after.

Lately, two seemingly unrelated outbreaks have been competing for the spotlight. There’s a microscopic parasite making its way through America’s salad bowls. A healthy lunch has suddenly turned into poison.

At the same time, there’s a massive, systemic failure quietly brewing in Washington. One that’s growing so rapidly it makes a stomach bug look like a walk in the park. While one threatens to disrupt your digestive tract for a week, the other quietly promises to derail the economic security of several generations.

In truth, both of these crises suffer from the exact same fundamental problem. A complete failure of basic hygiene. Whether we’re talking about food safety or fiscal responsibility, ignoring the fundamentals eventually catches up to you. And when it does, the results are always messy, painful, and incredibly hard to clean up.

How is it that a nation seemingly obsessed with clean living managed to let both its fresh produce and its national checkbook rot from the inside out?

Today, we are diving headfirst into two of the most uncomfortable, stomach-churning epidemics sweeping across the nation. One of them is currently lingering on your unwashed spinach. The other is eating away at the very foundations of your financial future.

Explosive Diarrhea

Many strange and unpleasant things are being reported these days. We don’t know if they are really new. But the way they are reported makes them sound new and nasty.

Without question, explosive diarrhea has been around since Adam bit the apple. However, this new description for a stomach bug, like using polar vortex or heat dome to describe winter or summer weather, makes it sound especially alarming.

If you’ve somehow missed the many headlines, there’s a disease spreading across the USA that’s being reported to cause explosive diarrhea. This disease stems from a stomach parasite that is hiding in contaminated food.

Cyclospora cayetanensis is the microscopic parasite behind the outbreak. The infection it causes is formally called cyclosporiasis, and nasty is an understatement. We’ll spare you the ghastly details. From what we gather, unlike your standard 24-hour stomach bug, this uninvited guest can hijack your gut for weeks, sometimes teasing you by fading away only to make a miserable, unexpected comeback.

Right now, the epicenter of this outbreak is the Midwest, with Michigan getting hit the hardest by a massive surge that has shattered its typical caseload. Major spikes are also popping up in Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Texas. In total, health officials have tracked cases across more than 30 states. They’re all tied to people eating contaminated food without ever leaving the country.

The parasite hitches a ride on fresh, raw produce – things like raspberries, basil, cilantro, and spinach. Because it is incredibly sticky, it thrives in the tiny cervices of your favorite summer greens, making it tough to spot and even tougher to dislodge.

Certainly, this sounds awful. But we’re confident it’s controllable and will soon disappear from the reporting cycle. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for explosive debt…

Explosive Debt

If you think a microscopic stomach parasite hijacking your gut for a few weeks is a nightmare, that’s small potatoes compared to what’s currently hijacking the entire U.S. economy. Uncle Sam is suffering from a severe, long-term case of fiscal loose-stooled spending, and the symptoms are getting impossible to ignore.

Just like that pesky Cyclospora bug quietly hitching a ride into thirty different states, the federal government’s borrowing habits have ballooned into a massive, raging outbreak. For the fiscal year of 2026 alone, the federal deficit has already clocked in at just under $1.4 trillion. To put that in perspective, the first nine months of this fiscal year have exceeded the massive borrowing levels of 2025, which sat at $1.3 trillion for the exact same period.

At the time of this writing, the total U.S. national debt is sitting at a mind-numbing $39.4 trillion. To keep the lights on, the U.S. Treasury is forced to borrow roughly $155 billion every single month. That breaks down to a casual $39 billion a week. But here is where the true, gut-wrenching cramping kicks in. The interest.

Like any maxed-out credit card or bad payday loan, this debt carries a punishing premium. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently published its latest monthly budget review, and the diagnosis is grim.

Net interest on public debt for this fiscal year has officially smacked against the $857 billion mark. That means the U.S. government is burning through roughly $23.8 billion a week just to service the interest on what it already owes.

That is a 13 percent spike – about $100 billion more – than the interest paid out during the same timeframe last year. The culprit? A heavier total debt burden mixed with stubbornly high long-term interest rates.

Debt Monster Demographics

To visualize just how bloated this financial symptom has become, consider this. America’s interest payments alone are now $20 billion larger than the combined budgets of the Department of Defense, Commerce, Homeland Security, Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, and the U.S. Coronavirus Refundable Credits scheme.

We are spending more on the mere privilege of owing money than we are on national defense, homeland security, and education put together. But this insatiable monster isn’t the result of contaminated raspberries or cilantro. Rather, it’s the result of entitlements and a demographic reality tightly wedged into the very fabric of the country.

The American population is aging fast. The median age in the U.S. edged up to 39.4 in 2025. And with an older population comes a skyrocketing demand on government purse strings.

Social Security benefits shot up by $62 billion – a 5 percent jump – due to a wave of new beneficiaries and higher average payouts. Medicare outlays surged by $58 billion (an 8 percent climb), and rising costs per enrollee drove Medicaid spending up by $49 billion (a 10 percent increase).

This is a structural trend that isn’t going to vanish like a summer flu bug. It is embedding itself deeper into the system every single day. And while health officials can easily tell you to scrub your melons to avoid a parasite, there is no simple solution to address a $39.4 trillion – and growing – debt problem.

At this point, no amount of hygiene will save us from the impending fiscal purge. When this mega debt bubble finally bursts, a ruined gut will be the absolute least of our collective worries.

Regards,

MN Gordon, Founder of Economic Prism

Joel’s Note: At $39.4 trillion and counting, the national debt clock appears to have a date with destiny. At this rate, it is expected to top the psychological $40 trillion mark by the end of 2026.

For perspective, that’s roughly $117,000 per man, woman and gender non-binary citizen in America… or about a quarter-million dollars per taxpayer.

Of course, the looming threshold will have ripple effects throughout both the US and world economy, not to mention stocks, precious metals, crypto, etc. Out of interest, which do you expect to see first…

Unlike the aforementioned articles in The New York Times (must reads, all of them), today’s Notes From the End of the World article is not behind a paywall.

Feel free to share it or, if you’re feeling generous and are able to do so, to support our work by becoming a Notes member, below. At just 19 cents per day, we reckon it’s worth at least one goat carcass story.