My One Digital Hope for Next Year...

Call me naive, but a man can wish on what technology could do for his family and country.

Dear Fellow Expat:

This morning, Scott Dunn and I released our 2025 market outlook.

We started with a goal to get this to two or three pages. But we didn’t have time.

So, it turned into something longer than Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

We did create a cheat sheet for the impatient.

We covered what we expect and don’t expect… the things we hope for and don’t want… and the investments we love and the trades we don’t.

But I didn’t have the chance to cover the one thing I wished for in America.

We Have to End the Grift

I continue to ask… why do we work so hard for something that another man can print…

This morning, Politico (one of the most naive publications in American history) published a report about the Inflation Reduction Act as part of a broad series on the $1.6 TRILLION spent by the Biden Administration on who knows what...

To their surprise, they can’t find about $42 billion allocated for high-speed internet deployed under this administration.

How did the Biden administration spend $42 billion to hook up rural areas to the internet… they didn’t get a single household done?

Could it be… you utterly incompetent journalists… that it’s all by design?

All you have to do is look for the pattern, fellas.

They spent $7.5 billion on an EV charging station network - and only got eight done in a few years. EIGHT. After the shame came to the Transportation Department, they did get around to doing work - all 42 added in seven months.

They had promised 500,000 stations when they passed the Inflation Reduction Act.

They’re suggesting we’ll get to 42,000 by the “end of the decade.” Yet, all the money’s been allocated… funny how that happens.

The money went somewhere… because the problem is what gets these people paid… and the solution is never what they’re trying actually to accomplish. In a few years, I assure you they’ll push for another $4 trillion to fight climate change, even though they already did that multiple times. Then they’ll give it to politically aligned causes.

Look to California as the prime example of this taxpayer gouging.

It’s been 21 years since Gavin Newsom declared that homelessness would be eliminated from San Francisco over 10 years. People who are working on the problem are still making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year… yet homelessness is on the rise.

Corruption corrodes public trust. When I see that the Pentagon is missing tens of billions of dollars, I don’t believe for a moment that it got lost. It was taken somewhere.

It was grift.

I refuse to believe that, at the government level, stupidity could ever outpace malice.

Journalists in D.C. are shocked… SHOCKED… that there is something off here.

But they don’t question because they want to fit in. They want to go to cocktail parties. They want to be invited to the White House for an Easter Egg roll. They can’t fathom the idea of pursuing truth, and potentially being ostracized for pursuing justice would be a worthy thing to fill the hollowness that haunts their beings.

There is a Solution

In the nuclear family, transparency is key. If I spend a few thousand dollars on who knows what… all of that information is clearly available in the household's finances: credit cards… bank statements… digital wallets, and more.

Unless I go out of my way to intentionally mask those actions, while that might seem easy to do at first, it weighs on the trust of the family… and eventually finds its way into the disinfecting sunlight.

I can’t understand why it’s impossible to disclose every public ledger for the life of me. Not because I need to do the accounting but because the visibility is clear.

Blockchain and digitalization, by default, solve this problem. I don’t need to know everyone receiving money from the government - but if we digitize everything… I can see where that money is at any point in the chain. It’s not like this is an original idea.

Booz Allen Hamilton, which relies on government consulting contracts, outlines this here.

Do you see where I’m going?

Why are journalists tracking money down… when they could demand to see where the money started and where it’s sitting right now? Are they incapable of rational thought? Or are they trying to justify their jobs?

Yeah, it’s a pipe dream because power corrupts. And because it goes against the underlying design of our system - to mask where money goes and why.

I hope that someone is brave enough to force such action. Maybe we will get that from people with so much money that they don’t need more from the government.

If the government steals a plane or hundreds of tonnes of wheat, it’s pretty easy to detect something significant and potentially track it. But an opaque system of finance needs disinfectant.

If anything, I’m naive enough to push for it.

It’s the pursuit of truth and the demand for accountability. If journalists won’t do it… maybe the technology will.

That’s a worthy one-candle wish at the start of a new year.

Stay positive,

Garrett Baldwin

Secretary of Foolishness