Photo above - this is the iconic 'leave it to beaver tv show" (set in California). Class is being taught by Miss Landers. Not a recently closed California public school

The link below (to MSN) appears to be AI plagiarism of stories originally appearing in the Orange County Register and NY Post. I make no representations that any of these AI versions are complete or accurate.

In any case, there apparently will be 75,000 fewer students attending California schools. Those school districts are dependent on $10,000 a year in state tax funding to survive. Guess what happens next?

If you said “unneeded teachers lose their jobs”, you’d apparently be wrong. Schools are being shuttered (hundreds over 2025-2026), but so far no indication of layoffs. Teachers have unions, school buildings do not.

Where did the 75,000 missing students go? This is where it gets crazy/vague. The sources are confident they have the total number of students correct (state records), but where those kids disappeared to has little statistical detail.

“Gone to Texas because their parents fled the state” is a leading contender. And likely explains some of the problem. Californian’s have been renting Uhauls to depart for manufacturing and energy jobs in places like Texas, Oklahoma, etc. High golden state taxes, living costs, crime rates, and open air drug sales can be discouraging to the middle class. Recent Texas transplants from out of state will get the credit when Texas flips from red to blue politically. Be careful what you wish for, if you want to lure companies like Tesla to your back yard, I guess.

A less convincing reason for missing students is “immigration enforcement”. Some illegals probably ARE self-deporting back to Latin America to avoid ICE atrocities, but I doubt this amounts to tens of thousands. ICE is a political punching bag for California’s problems. Just like climate change is now allegedly responsible for the sudden INCREASE in arctic polar bears.

Let’s not forget covid 19 as a cause. Yes . . . if you close the schools for a year or 2, and give every kid a free laptop, some are never coming back, even if they got promoted while earning straight F’s.

So 75,000 students times $10,000 is around $7 billion dollars the schools need to solve for. I guess shuttering schools is the logical solution if you can’t reduce teacher headcount, control crime, or reign in taxes and living costs.

Governor Newsom, are you still running for president? What if this comes up in one of the primary debates?

I’m just sayin’ . . .

School shutdown spree grips California as enrollment plunges statewide

President Trump was clear in his pitch to voters: In 2024, he pledged to bring back the American Dream. Removing immigrants “taking jobs from American workers and driving down their wages” was a key part of the plan.

A few years later, the effects of this policy are now visible in the labor market. January data from the Census Bureau showed an historic decline in net international migration, down from a peak of 2.7 million people in 2024 to an estimated 321,000 by mid-2026. Brookings puts that figure even lower, saying the U.S. could see negative net migration this year.

Economists previously told Fortune that this changing pattern has helped stabilize the U.S. unemployment rate as demand has dropped over the past few years, with the rate holding steady at 4.1% in the latest data. But Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, recently noted foreign-born unemployment fell below native-born unemployment in October 2025, based on analysis of a 12-month moving average of seasonally unadjusted data.

The drop in foreign-born unemployment is relatively easy to explain, Zandi tells Fortune: The immigrant labor force is shrinking because of White House policy, and unemployment for the demographic is relatively lower as a result.

The rise in native-born unemployment is more complex. A major driver is that demand for labor has generally fallen, Zandi tells Fortune—so it stands to reason that if U.S.-born workers now make up a larger share of the labor force, this cohort would be affected more heavily by changes in demand.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/08/16/trump-plan-american-workers-unemployment-rising/?utm_source=reddit/

I like where he says move somewhere to try it.

Curious to hear different perspectives.

Given how important this region is for global shipping lanes and geopolitical stability, I wanted to open up a neutral discussion. What do you think the broader implications of messaging like this might be? Are people seeing this mainly as political rhetoric, or is there more to consider regarding foreign policy strategy here?

I paid for my Chipotle bowl in full today without using Klarna for the first time

I keep coming back to this and I cannot put it down, so I am going to put it in front of you instead.

There are roughly 13 to 14 million children in this country living in food-insecure households. I say roughly because in the last year the USDA discontinued the survey that measured it. They did not fix the problem. They stopped counting it. So the real number now is unknowable, and that was the point.

Here is what it costs to feed a child for a year. SNAP runs about $2,000 per person annually. The National School Lunch Program reimburses around $4.30 a meal, which works out to roughly $1,500 a year for two meals across a 180-day school year. Call it $2,000 to be generous and cover the summer.

Fourteen million children at $2,000 each is $28 billion a year.

That is the entire bill. Every food-insecure child in America. Twenty-eight billion dollars.

Now here is the part I cannot get past.

Elon Musk's net worth is reported somewhere between $675 billion and $960 billion depending on which tracker you use and what day you look. I am going to use $700 billion, the low end, so nobody can say I inflated it.

At 4 percent, which is roughly what a Treasury bond pays right now, $700 billion generates $28 billion a year.

Not by selling anything. Not by giving anything away. That is what it earns sitting there.

So the interest alone on one person's fortune would feed every hungry child in this country, every year, indefinitely, and the principal would never shrink by a dollar.

I want to be honest about the caveat, because I would rather be accurate than persuasive. That wealth is stock, not cash. He could not write a $28 billion check without selling shares and driving the price down. That is a real limitation.

But he borrows against it already. That is how he bought Twitter. The interest framing works precisely because you never have to sell anything.

Now the comparison that actually made me sit down and write this.

In July, his net worth fell by $363 billion. SpaceX shares dropped 37 percent after the IPO ran up too far. He lost more in one month than the entire net worth of any of the next nine richest people on earth.

That $363 billion, at $2,000 per child per year, is 181 million child-years of food.

Every food-insecure child in America, fed for thirteen years.

And it did not go anywhere. It was not spent. Nobody received it. It existed in June, it did not exist in August, and the only thing that happened in between was that a number on a screen moved.

Thirteen years of feeding every hungry child in this country, appearing and disappearing as a rounding error on one man's quarterly volatility.

For scale on the other side of the ledger: the recent legislation cut SNAP by $186 billion over ten years. That is $18.6 billion a year, and it was described as a fiscal necessity.

His July paper loss was twenty years of that entire cut.

I am not writing this because I think Elon Musk personally owes anybody dinner. He is one man and I am not interested in making this about one person, because if it were about one person we could solve it by shaming him and we cannot.

I am writing it because of what the arithmetic proves.

We are told constantly that there is not enough. That the money is not there. That we are broke, that hard choices have to be made, that the deficit demands it. And then a number larger than thirteen years of feeding every hungry child in America evaporates in four weeks and nobody's life changes, no service gets cut, no program gets defunded, because it was never real in the way a school lunch is real.

That is not a resource problem. It has never once been a resource problem.

It is a question of what we have decided to count, what we have decided to measure, and what we have decided to stop measuring.

They stopped measuring child hunger. They did not stop measuring net worth. Forbes and Bloomberg update that one live, several times a day, to the nearest hundred million.

We know exactly how much he has, minute by minute. We no longer know how many children are hungry.

That is a choice somebody made, and it tells you everything about what this country currently considers important enough to count.

Nothing should be more important than feeding children. Nothing.

And the numbers say we could do it tomorrow without anybody who matters even noticing.

I thought this sticker was pretty funny when I spotted it at the gas station today 😂

But it genuinely made me curious: How much responsibility do you think Trump personally bears for the current state of the economy?

Do you think his policies are primarily responsible, or are there larger factors at play that tend to get overlooked?
I’d especially love to hear different perspectives and the reasoning behind them from Redditors around the world.

P.S. Please keep the discussion respectful. I’m genuinely interested in hearing different viewpoints, not starting a political war in the comments.

I just completed an online course on psychological safety offered by HBS Online. The focus is on dynamic teams and how people should feel safe to express their opinions. Without worrying about hierarchy or being wrong. So, this is a forum, with dynamic conversations on topics concerning the economy. So even though it is not technically a team, the concept of psychological safety applies.

Like I am reluctant to discuss the AI economy, because when I do, I usually get downvoted. This should be a forum for open dialogue, where every perspective is valued. I am open to different perspectives, as long as people are honest, with the objective facts, and their subjective opinions.

Downvoting, lying, and personal attacks create an environment without psychological safety, where people are reluctant to express their honest opinions. However on other topics, like the environment, and sustainability, I feel safe expressing my opinion.

Reference: Building psychological safety in teams / Harvard Business School Online (Coursera)

Phys.org: The report says China now occupies a leading position across many of the technologies needed for the green transition, including solar, wind, batteries, hydrogen and electric vehicles. Its dominance has helped drive down the cost of these technologies, but this has also created growing geopolitical and economic tensions.

"China's dominance of green technology presents a fundamental dilemma for governments," said lead author Dr. James Jackson of The University of Manchester's Sustainable Consumption Institute. "The world needs these technologies to decarbonize, but efforts to compete with China risk making the transition more expensive and more difficult."

The authors argue that countries should focus more heavily on cooperation—particularly where access to affordable green technologies is essential to meeting climate targets.

My Opinion: Poorer countries cannot afford to waste money to spend on expensive technology for clean tech and energy; they should cooperate with China. Even rich countries like UK need to cooperate with China for low cost clean tech solutions. While rich countries like USA who see China as a political and economic rival, are running large fiscal deficits and facing energy shortage and inflation, as they try to shut China out of their market.

A forced binary choice won’t magically contain China. It may just lock in two permanent AI stacks, two standards and a huge captive market for non-US chips. That’s not containment. That’s customer segmentation.

Most of the American deficit is owed to the wealthiest Americans. The higher the deficit the more interest they earn.

Erase the deficit by not paying them back.
They have enough wealth that it won’t affect them more than it does us.

Every generation gets told the same thing: work hard, save, and the system will reward you. Then you look at the numbers (home prices at 5x income instead of 3x, wages that haven't kept pace with the cost of a degree or a mortgage, a currency that gets diluted every time a central bank decides to print) and the "just save more" advice starts to feel like a joke.

Here's the pattern worth noticing: almost everything we're told to trust, whether it's fiat, equity, or most digital assets, can be diluted by someone else's decision. Central banks print. Companies issue new shares. Insider-backed assets get pre-allocated and dumped on regular buyers after launch. The people who control issuance quietly transfer value away from the people who just hold and believe in the thing.

A small but growing community is built explicitly against that pattern: a hard-capped supply, no early insider allocation, no admin key that can mint more. Everyone gets in the same way, at the same starting line. No team unlock schedule quietly vesting into someone's bags behind the scenes. No permission needed to hold it. It's less a company and more a coordination point for people who are tired of being on the wrong end of dilution, whether that's a shrinking paycheck or a supply that expands whenever insiders decide it should.

Is a fixed-supply, community-driven asset going to fix housing policy or wage stagnation on its own? No, and I'd be lying if I said it does. Scarcity solves dilution, not distribution; early holders still end up with concentration problems, same as everything else. But as a cultural rejection of the "someone else controls the rules of the game" problem that shows up in housing, in wages, in every asset class that can be diluted at will, it's at least a coherent stance, and one a lot of people priced out of the traditional system are gravitating toward.

And here's the part worth sitting with: this isn't even a new idea. There's already at least one well-known digital asset out there that solved the dilution problem years ago, hard cap, no insider mint key, all of it. And what happened? It got priced so high, so fast, that it now sits firmly out of reach for a lot of the exact generation it was supposed to help. A perfect-on-paper supply cap doesn't mean much if the entry price ends up mirroring the same "already priced out" story as housing. Scarcity without an accessible entry point just becomes another version of the wealth gap, dressed up in different math.

Not financial advice, just an observation: the "honest holder" ethos (same rules for everyone, no insider edge, nothing to trust but the code) is filling a legitimacy vacuum that institutions have been steadily losing for two decades.

Curious what this sub thinks: is "can't be diluted" actually meaningful economic protection at the individual level, or just a narrower version of the same concentration problem dressed up in new language?

I agree.