A blurry photo of a receipt exposed a huge government lie this week. We have the data and they cannot gaslight us. It began when somebody's daughter found a Walmart receipt last week.

June 2006. 79 items. $161.87. A full cart of groceries, the kind that used to disappear into a normal week without anyone thinking about it. She was mortified.

Twelve million people looked at the 20-year-old receipt she posted on social media and felt something. I posted it at the bottom of this email (it’s loooong).

Run the numbers. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI, prices are about 65% higher today than in 2006, which means that $161.87 cart “should” come out to roughly 267 dollars in 2026. Go to Walmart tonight. Go load up the same cart of groceries. You’re looking at a bill closer to $400. The government has cooked their own numbers. There is a $100+ gap between what they are telling you life should cost and what it actually costs to feed a family.

I did my own version of this last weekend. Stood in front of the ground beef at my regular store, the same 80/20 I've bought for years, and it rang up at $7.73 a pound. In January 2020 that was $3.89. I’m not hallucinating budget-dreams of 2006. I'm describing the meat case from this Saturday. I can’t remember the last time I loaded up a cart full of more than 40 items, let alone 79. We buy less and we buy in bulk to try and survive the crunch.

Keep that receipt in the back of your mind. Now let me show you what the banks are seeing.

Start with what the lenders can see, because they can see everything.

Credit-card balances 90 or more days delinquent just hit 13.1%. Worst since 2011. Student loans at 10.3%. Auto loans at 5.6%, and that one's a record for the series. The New York Fed put these numbers out on May 12 and they are not estimates or vibes. Even their public facing numbers can’t cover up all of the past-due bills accumulating.

Go down market and it gets worse. Subprime auto borrowers 60 or more days behind hit 6.9% in January, the worst reading in the 32-year history of the data. Prime borrowers are at half a percent; a tenfold gap. The bottom half of the country is defaulting on their car loans while the top half can refinance the house at a better rate.

“Dr.J - you’re depressing me for no reason, what are you getting at?” Patience my friend, here you go:

Every single time the numbers looked like this before, in 1991, in 2009, in 2011, it was because people lost their jobs. Mass layoffs → mass delinquency. This is not rocket science, you lose your income then you can no longer afford to pay for shit. Just normal realities of a capitalist society.

Hold up a sec, unemployment right now is, let me double check that, yeah, 4.2%. These are employed people! They have the job! They have the paycheck! People aren’t out of work, they’re just not getting paid enough to afford ordinary things.

Here’s why the mainstream media won’t report on this accurately (they must shill the Fed’s propaganda). The Fed's own headline that week was that delinquency transition rates "held steady." New delinquencies actually ticked down, 8.7% to 8.6%. So the official read is "steady, nothing to see here."

Look closely at the words, transition, new. They measures the flow, the rate at which new people fall in, and it ignores the stock, the pile of people already drowning, which just hit a 15-year high. The headline says “all good here” while they hide the bodies from public view. Same green-cell theater as last week.

And this is why no recession alarm goes off. The official "we're in it now" trigger, watches unemployment. Nothing here gets fixed by a hiring rebound, because the job was never the problem. The paycheck is the problem.

But at least the economy is producing record wealth!

So who got the wealth? I don’t see the record wealth in my 401k or bank statements do you?

Labor's share of GDP, the slice of everything the country produces that actually goes to the people who do the work, fell to 51.4% in the third quarter of 2025. The lowest since records began in 1947. In 1980 it was 58%. Meanwhile corporate profits' share is running around 12%, against a postwar average of 7.3%. We were used to getting a smaller piece of the pie but now we’re being given crumbs at best.

This is the income statement of the AI buildout. The margins and the capex get booked at the top of the K. The $4.50 gas and the 29% APR get paid at the bottom. Same economy, two completely different ledgers.

And the bottom ledger is getting worse in real time. Real average hourly earnings just printed -0.7% year over year, the biggest drop in over three years. May CPI came in at 4.2%, back over 4 for the first time since 2023. Energy up 23.5%. Gasoline up 40.5%, because the Strait of Hormuz disruption did exactly what disruptions there always do.

Then there's the meat case I was standing in front of. Ground beef hit a record $6.90 a pound, up 77% from $3.89 in January 2020. And this one isn't a margin grab you can pin on a CEO. The US cattle herd is down to 86.2 million head, the smallest since 1951. That's a real supply problem, and it is bipartisanly unfixable on any timeline that helps you this year.

Add it up. The Iran conflict put roughly 40% on gas in a matter of months and flipped inflation back over 4. That's a war tax nobody voted on (can someone explain why exactly we gave Israel ~$12 billion last year?) and it landed on the 80% of the country with no savings buffer and a record debt-service load already stacked on top.

But at least the people we elected are laser-focused on the problem.

On May 12, somebody asked Donald Trump a simple question. Gas is up 28% in two months. Does the financial pressure on regular Americans factor into wanting an Iran deal?

His answer: "Not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans' financial situation."

I don’t expect that a modern president cares much about the American people but I do expect a redirect, word salad, or other confusion technique. Instead, a sitting president, asked point blank whether your grocery bill crosses his mind, said “nah lol not really”. Out loud. On the record. Five months before a midterm.

This is the most radioactive sentence of the entire cycle and almost nobody clipped it. It should be in a hundred attack ads by November. Instead it slid off the timeline in an afternoon, because the same machine that can't measure the receipt also can't hold onto the one quote that explains everything.

So let me hold onto it for you. The man running the country, presiding over the smallest cattle herd since 1951 and the lowest labor share since 1947, was handed a microphone and told you, to your face, that he does not think about your financial situation. If you believe nothing else the president says, believe this! Something just tells me he’s not lying about that one.

We have some more real numbers from normal people. University of Michigan consumer sentiment came in at 44.8 for final May. The lowest in the survey's roughly 75-year history. Lower than 2008, when the banks were actually failing. Lower than the 2022 inflation spike. 57% of people brought up prices on their own, unprompted.

People keep calling the mood a "vibecession," like it's a feelings problem, like everybody just needs to cheer up and look at the stock market. The average American is a powder keg of righteous rage, I’m honored to help put real numbers to that rage because every other media outlet is gaslighting us. Sentiment is the only instrument still telling the truth about our current situation.

How does this get worse? Look at Belfast. Look at Texas. Look at Munich nearly 100 years ago. People are docile when they can provide for their families without unreasonable strain. When ordinary people feel like they’re getting a raw deal, and that deal can’t be renegotiated by political means, the rage has to flow somewhere, even if illogical. We have seen many factories burn already and I’m wondering what other horrors lie in store for us as the summer heats up.

But at least when households crack, a hot labor market always rides in to save them. That's how every one of these episodes ended before!

We’re not going to bounce back.

Every delinquency wave in modern history ended the same way. The labor market got tight, employers had to compete for workers, wages got bid up, and people climbed back out of the hole. That's the rescue mechanism. It has bailed out the American household every single time since the war.

That mechanism is being dismantled on purpose, and they're telling you why.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 97,006 announced US job cuts in May, the highest May since 2020. And for the third straight month, the number one stated reason was "AI" (everyone working at large tech companies know that this really stands for Actually Indians, i.e. offshoring and increasing H-1B petitions). 38,579 cuts, 40% of the total, the highest monthly AI figure ever recorded. Employers can do this with impunity now so they don’t even need to lie to you like they used to. They can just put it right smack dab in the middle of the press release: we are cutting you, and we are doing it to feed the new yacht machine.

Look at where it's landing. Information-sector payrolls have now fallen for 16 straight months, down to the lowest level since March 2021. Over that same stretch, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta committed roughly $725 billion to AI infrastructure. They are spending three-quarters of a trillion dollars building the thing they're firing you to pay for. The wage growth that ends credit crunches doesn't get to happen, because the people who would do the bidding-up are too busy writing capex checks.

Intuit announced it was cutting 17% of its workforce, framed it all around AI transformation, the future, efficiency. Then the CEO went on CNBC and said the cuts had "nothing to do with AI." WTF? Both of those statements can't be true at the same time. In reality it doesn’t even matter which one is true. "AI" has become an accountability laundromat. You run the layoff through it, and the dirty motive, juicing the margin, comes out the other side clean and futuristic.

Here's the stat that exposes the whole con. Careerminds surveyed 600 HR professionals who ran AI-justified layoffs. Two-thirds are already rehiring those exact roles. Gartner expects half of all "AI layoffs" to get quietly reversed under new job titles by 2027. They fired you, discovered the machine couldn't do your job, tried to sponsor an H-1B or offshore that job to India, realized that this didn’t produce the same results, then rehired you at half your salary. Opendoor is literally doing this right now. Their CEO Kaz Nejatian, who I had the honor of working with during my time at Shopify, fired 250 of their Indian workers and announced that the company would be going all-in on American talent. Somehow I doubt those American hires are going to command the same salaries they did just a few years ago for the same positions they were laid off from.

So the rescue mechanism isn't coming. Not this cycle. The wage rebound that ended every prior credit crunch is what the AI buildout is preventing.

If you are a white-collar worker reading this and feeling the floor get soft, you are not being paranoid. You're reading the same data I am. That's why I built the White-Collar Layoff Survival Manual, the plan I'd want in hand before the press release has my name on it, not after. It drops midweek, and subscribers get it at 50% off. Watch your inbox in a couple of days. If this section described your job, that manual is for you.

Last week I told you everything is fake and expensive. This week the proof showed up in the credit data, and it's a new type of broke that has never existed before. Employed and poor simultaneously.

Record profits and a record-low labor share fund the AI buildout. The buildout justifies the layoffs. The layoffs kill the wage growth that has ended every credit crunch since 1945. The “war” shock lands on households that have no buffer left to absorb it. And the dashboards measure the flow while ignoring the stock (intentionally), so officially they can say “nothing is happening, you must have imagined it.”

And truly, nothing is happening in response to the situation that officially does not exist. The sentiment number is the worst in 75 years. The receipt in your hand just out-measured the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The president just told you he doesn’t really give a shit, quit whining.

You are not crazy. You are delinquent on schedule. The system is performing exactly as it was redesigned to perform, and the wrinkled receipt in your pocket is a more honest instrument than anything the government will publish this year. Save those artifacts of the past and publish them widely, we need more because they’re rewriting history in realtime to support their narrative.

A country that can't keep groceries under control for the people who do its work doesn't need a sentiment survey to tell it the myth is dead.

I fix problems when I see them. It’s what’s made me so successful as an engineer especially at tech startups. The media is a problem.

Not just CNN but Dwarkesh (Peter Thiel shadow money), MTS (Andreesen Horowitz funded), and TBPN (Sam Altman’s latest purchase).

I want to fix that so I’m turning my YouTube channel into a media company. Not just me. Researchers. Other shows and hosts. A studio. Travel budget. Just a few problems, one of which being funding. I’ve started a weekly series where I’ll be opening my channel’s books to you, getting in touch with angel investors, and giving you a peek behind the curtain of how companies get funding (it’s easier than you think).

The reason I’m being open about this is twofold:

I can’t do this alone though. If you know angel investors/VC firms/etc. who would be open to interviews about how the process works please send their details over to [email protected] I have a sizable list of folks mostly from the Anduril-diaspora but would like a wider variety of “types” for viewers.

Until next week,

Dr.J