(2025-11-16) Green Are You An American

Michael Green: Are You An American? I’m going to spend two minutes on markets and then I’ll climb the Substack soapbox…

On markets, 2025 has been an adventure. While equities have once again ruled the day, they have done so with high volatility; adjusted for volatility (and assuming a 4.5% financing rate to add leverage), high yield has been the place to be. Hedged variants have done even better:

The December rate cut is now firmly in question, as I had suggested might happen due to misconceptions around seasonal inflation adjustments.

My GUT thinks Powell and his increasingly fractious cat herd will take a “safety cut” regardless, leaving less interest income for the wealthy while solving little for those who need credit access.

Meanwhile, while equity markets look short-term vulnerable with the S&P500 dipping below the 50-day moving average for the second time in the past week

On a longer term basis, I am watching the increasing volatility of intraday movements even as “close-close” volatility remains muted. The latter is important for systematic strategies like volatility control, which are now adding back to positions trimmed in October. The former, intraday, is important because there are limits to market makers book depth; should intraday volatility continue to rise, the risks of a “break” in continuous pricing grows.

This past week Twitter went mad(der).

A simple tweet from a “right-wing influencer” noting that 1950s working-class men could afford houses, families, and dignity triggered a thousand nearly identical mocking responses. Not debate—choreographed ridicule.
The crime? Remembering that Americans once owned things.

Then came @vrexec (an “American in Europe” according to his sparse bio) with a “reasonable” detailed explanation, pointing to a modest New Jersey Cape at $600-700K as proof the American Dream still lives. Just save $150,000 for a down payment. Maybe join the military. Work hard for 5-10 years. Stop being entitled. His longform tweet is worth reading in detail (emphasis is mine):

This is where my mother grew up with 6 siblings and 3 dogs. Irish Catholic family in the 1950s northern New Jersey suburbs.

You think this house is gross and that you deserve better? Why is that? You think you are entitled to a sprawling place like the ones on HGTV

This house and many around it are still there, structurally unchanged since the original construction. They are selling for $600-700K. Roughly $4,500/month all-in including property taxes.

Many in the younger generation are emotionally unfit for adulthood because they have not experienced any true hardship. (Generation Y)

I think there are two things going on.

One is the social engineering. I say that loosely because I am not a conspiracy theorist.

But there really was an effort, even if well-intentioned, to demonize trades, self-employment, and working with your hands in favor of a knowledge professional class that would outsource all physical hardship and labor.

This produced a generation and a half that does not understand basic mechanics, the physical world, or how to get by on their own.

It also spawned this crazy belief that children should always be better off than their parents. Absolutely not. The word “should” is dangerous. Our children have better opportunities, but not guaranteed outcomes by default.

young people today have an order of magnitude more to be excited about and to do than even Gen X let alone the Boomers.

The second thing is the deinstitutionalization of sick and demented people in the US as a result of Reagan era policies. (mental illness)

It created a distinct lack of safety for the Gen X and boomer generation to let their kids go explore the world on their own. (this wasn't real, this was a fake moral panic, cf free-range kids)

Both of these factors produced a fundamentally fearful generation of young people... which automatically translates to a desire to be near their “mommy and daddy”.

There is nothing wrong with this house and neighborhood

But if you simply despise the aesthetic or maybe want more for less, then you have to move to a less developed part of the US or the world and help that area develop and grow through your efforts and your new roots.

His thread ends with the ultimate loyalty test: “Are you an American?”

The timing is not accidental.

In November 2025, Zohran Mamdani wins the election in NYC, running on material politics—public housing, rent control, actual affordability—rather than the vibes-based identity liberalism the Democratic establishment has used for decades to avoid economic issues.

This terrifies everyone who relies on the pretense that scarcity is natural.

The elite response (primarily liberal, but conservatives chimed in as well) was immediate and predictable: Not that these demands are wrong. Not that they’re unrealistic. But that they’re un-American.

How the Mockery Machine Works

• Start with a legitimate grievance (housing is unaffordable)
• Exaggerate it to absurdity (janitors demanding mansions)
• Treat the absurd version as the real claim
• Blame the claimant for “entitlement”
• Reframe the original grievance as un-American

The Participation Trophy Generation Gets the Bill

Kennedy’s 1962 call—”ask not what your country can do for you”—came after the state massively expanded opportunity: the GI Bill, subsidized mortgages, public universities, highways. The ask followed the give.
Today’s version perverts this completely: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask why you think you deserve anything at all.”

FDR understood something our current elites pretend to forget. In 1944, he warned: “True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

The mockery campaign is playing with fire. By making economic security seem un-American, they’re creating exactly the conditions FDR warned against—a precarious population primed for extremism. (precarity)

This is especially cruel when aimed at Millennials and Gen Z—the generations trained from childhood to believe they were special, expressive, and destined for meaningful work.

They obeyed every instruction:
And now the same system tells them that wanting a home—the very baseline of adult stability—makes them spoiled and un-American.

The suggestion that young Americans should join the military to maybe afford a starter home isn’t motivational. It’s feudal.

The Mathematics of Impossibility

The quoted thread suggests the New Jersey home is affordable if you’re willing to compromise on HGTV aesthetics, so let’s do what the author avoided:

The punch line: Annual housing cost exceeds total take-home income for this “modest” home.

But here’s what was buried entirely—property taxes alone tell the story of systematic extraction.

In 1955... leaving $1,970 in “surplus above subsistence”—money for everything beyond bare survival. Property tax on that $12,000 house? About $264/year.
That’s 13% of the surplus.

Today, that truck driver makes $65,000 gross ($48,100 after tax). The poverty line for a family of four is $31,812, leaving $16,288 in surplus.
Property tax on that same house? $10,700/year.
That’s 66% of the surplus.

You cannot “bootstrap” your way out of property taxes consuming two-thirds of your surplus above subsistence. Calling that impossibility a character test isn’t inspiration—it’s gaslighting.

The Two-Party Ownership Suppression System

Both arrive at Schwab’s endpoint: You’ll own nothing. Only the emotional framing differs: The right is told to be angry and applaud as anti-Semites rise to power. The left is told to be grateful and applaud as anti-Semites rise to power. At least there’s a unifying theme!

Subscriptionized Civic Membership Environment (SuCME for short)

The new American social contract is not ownership—it’s obligation:

The Dangerous Simplicity of the Original Tweet

The original tweet expressed something subversive in its simplicity:
1950s: One working-class income → house + family + dignity
2025: Two incomes → rent + no kids + debt

No ideology. Just math. And math is dangerous because it proves the decline is real—not imagined, not nostalgic, not entitled. Real.

This happened through decades of bad management and weak choices:

• Zoning laws that restricted housing supply
• Tax policies that shifted burdens from capital to labor
• Educational credentialism that created artificial scarcity
• Healthcare costs allowed to spiral unchecked
• Financial deregulation that turned homes into speculative assets

This was drift—a society too weak to maintain what it built, too captured to correct course, too proud to admit decline.

If Democrats embraced Mamdani’s material platform nationally—public housing, rent stabilization, taxing property wealth—they would win elections everywhere.
But it would destroy the donor class. So instead: mock, belittle, and culturally stigmatize material expectation itself.

“You’ve never had it so good” is both gaslighting and a threat.

Be grateful. Because we can take even this away—we showed you during Covid-19.

Remember? Essential workers and non-essential workers. Permission to leave your house. Closed playgrounds. Arrested paddleboarders. Small businesses destroyed while Amazon thrived. Two years of “temporary” emergency powers that revealed just how temporary all your freedoms really are.

Orwell saw this dynamic clearly. In Animal Farm, the windmill is promised as liberation—electric light, warm water, leisure. But every iteration becomes another profit center for the pigs, another burden for the workers.
"the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness, he said, lay in working hard and living frugally.

We were promised the information revolution would democratize knowledge. Instead, it concentrated wealth. We were promised the gig economy would free us. Instead, it removed protections. We were promised technology would reduce work. Instead, we work more for less. We were promised education would guarantee prosperity. Instead, it guaranteed debt.

When VEO asks, “Are you American?” he’s asking an Orwellian question:
Will you accept that the windmill wasn’t built for you?

In “Pandora’s Ledger,” I argued that hope functions as an option—a financial instrument with measurable value. Today’s coordinated mockery campaign proves the establishment knows this. They’re desperately trying to mark that option to zero, to convince you it expired worthless.

The components I outlined—lowering strikes through effective education, widening tails through bankruptcy reform, protecting floors through Social Security and tax reform, and reclaiming investment for local communities—aren’t utopian dreams. They’re mechanical adjustments to a rigged game.

The real question isn’t “Are you American?”
It’s: What kind of America are you willing to accept?

But some Americans remember the original promises. Remember when the windmill was supposed to generate power, not extract it. Remember when technology was supposed to liberate, not surveil. Remember when citizenship meant building toward abundance, not managing decline.
That memory is dangerous. Because once you remember the promises, you might start asking where the power went.

Over the past few weeks, I have begun seeking out candidates for the 2026 elections that represent REAL reform; and I care not whether they are Republican or Democrat. Many of these candidates will not have the support of the political establishment, and I’m asking you to join me in elevating their chances.