The Inner Monologue

There is a strange sickness in the American mind — a kind of economic hypochondria. Despite towering skyscrapers, trillion-dollar tech firms, and a gross domestic product per person higher than the average citizen earns in a year, the United States walks around insisting it’s broke. Politicians wail that we can’t afford healthcare. News anchors ask who will pay for bridges and schools. Families are told to tighten belts so billionaires can loosen theirs. It’s the story of the richest poor country on Earth.

A Nation of Imagined Poverty

At over $85,000 per person, America’s GDP per capita is one of the highest on the planet — more than Germany, the U.K., Japan, or South Korea. By global standards, every American should be basking in abundance. Yet most of us don’t feel rich. We feel squeezed, anxious, and one misfortune away from ruin.

How can a country this wealthy believe it’s destitute?

Part of the answer lies in how we measure wealth versus how we experience it. GDP per capita is an average — and averages lie. They flatten the landscape of inequality until it looks deceptively level. A handful of billionaires pull the curve skyward while half the country struggles to pay rent. The arithmetic of abundance conceals the psychology of deprivation.

But the larger issue isn’t math. It’s narrative. America tells itself a story of scarcity because it serves powerful interests for us to believe it.

The Gospel of Austerity

For half a century, both major parties have preached the same sermon: the nation can’t afford to care. We’re told that Medicare, student debt relief, or green infrastructure would “bankrupt the country.” Yet when the Pentagon wants a trillion-dollar fighter jet that can’t fly in the rain, or when the banking system implodes under its own greed, the Treasury never runs dry.

There’s always money for missiles, tax cuts, and corporate rescues — never for insulin, libraries, or daycare. The supposed fiscal prudence is selective, moral rather than mathematical. Helping people is a luxury. Helping markets is a necessity.

This is the alchemy of American politics: turn wealth into poverty and fear into obedience. Convince citizens that public good equals private loss. Make them believe the government is their enemy, not their instrument. The “broke nation” narrative becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — a population so convinced it can’t afford progress that it stops demanding it.

The Middle Class Mirage

The irony is that this illusion of poverty persists even among the comfortable. The middle class — once America’s pride — now measures success by survival. Owning a home feels like a miracle. Sending a child to college requires a decade of debt. Medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the wealthiest nation ever to exist.

Every generation since the 1980s has been told that “there’s just no money left” for the things that once defined American civilization: affordable education, stable employment, dignified retirement. And because most people live paycheck to paycheck, they assume the nation must too.

The result is an economy where the average citizen feels poor in a land of superlatives — where the richest one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, and yet we still debate whether we can afford to feed schoolchildren.

This is not poverty. This is distribution by design.

The Politics of Despair

The myth of national bankruptcy is the perfect political weapon. It transforms democracy into triage. Every election becomes a grim choice between who to save and who to sacrifice. Should we fix bridges or pay teachers? Should we fund veterans or healthcare? The answer, we are told, is never “both.”

A population that believes its country is broke will accept anything — crumbling infrastructure, privatized prisons, gig-economy serfdom — as the price of realism. They’ll call it “living within our means.” They’ll cheer as their own public assets are sold off because they’ve been taught that government ownership is wasteful and private ownership is efficient.

In truth, this is not efficiency; it’s enclosure. The commons have been fenced off and rented back to the people who built them.

How the Rich Stay Rich by Pretending We’re Poor

There is no deeper magic than convincing the majority that prosperity is impossible. Corporations and politicians wield this illusion like a weapon. They say raising wages will cause inflation, taxing billionaires will collapse investment, and healthcare for all will destroy freedom. Every solution is framed as apocalypse.

This fear keeps workers compliant and voters divided. It ensures that “austerity” is permanent while luxury yachts multiply. It’s a con so old it’s biblical: convince the slaves that heaven rewards suffering and the masters are chosen by God. In modern form, it’s called the free market.

But markets are not gods. They are tools — and they can be retooled.

The Great Unlearning

To break the spell, Americans must unlearn the myth that national wealth is a zero-sum game. The U.S. does not lack resources; it lacks courage. Every great public project in history — the New Deal, the interstate highways, the moon landing — was once denounced as unaffordable. Each proved that collective investment creates collective strength.

Today, we face new frontiers just as daunting: climate collapse, automation, inequality, aging populations. Solving them will not bankrupt us. Inaction will. The question is not whether we can afford to act — it’s whether we can afford to keep pretending we can’t.

The money exists. The talent exists. The only thing in short supply is belief.

From Scarcity to Stewardship

Imagine reframing the American dream not as accumulation but as stewardship — the idea that the purpose of wealth is to make life more livable, not merely more profitable. That kind of cultural shift would terrify Wall Street and electrify Main Street. It would mean measuring success not by GDP but by well-being: health, education, clean air, leisure, trust.

If America’s GDP per capita truly reflected its people’s dignity, it would be a land without hunger, without fear of illness, without the despair that hides behind “GoFundMe” pleas for survival. That future isn’t utopian. It’s arithmetic — if we dare to divide differently.

The Moral of the Balance Sheet

The truth is simple but heretical: the United States is not broke. Its citizens have been made to feel broke so that a tiny minority can remain unimaginably rich. Poverty here is political theater, performed to justify inaction.

We are a nation hypnotized by the illusion of scarcity — a self-inflicted blindness that lets billionaires hoard abundance while teachers buy their own chalk. And every time we ask, “But how will we pay for it?” we reinforce the bars of that gilded cage.

Reclaiming the Possible

To believe in America’s poverty is to surrender its potential. To believe in its abundance is to reclaim it. We are not a poor nation. We are a nation taught to think poor, act poor, and vote poor — for the comfort of the already wealthy.

The richest poor country on Earth doesn’t need more money. It needs a new story.