Billionaire investor Ron Baron explained the silent math destroying your wealth:
Your money loses 4 to 5% of its purchasing power every single year. The economy grinds higher at roughly 2%. That is a relentless 7% headwind against you, annually.
What that really means. Prices double every 10 to 12 years. Your savings are cut in half in real terms within about 15 years. Cash sitting idle is not safe, it is decaying.
The system is structurally engineered to punish savers and force capital into risk just to survive.
Milton Friedman's greatest regret.
The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.
Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.
Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.
This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.
Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.
Jeff Bezos: "If people want me to pay more billions, then let's have that debate, but don't pretend that that's gonna solve the problem. You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not gonna help that teacher in Queens.... Airbnb isn't causing high rents. What's really causing high rent is government intervention."
Some classic Chevy Chase lines from Fletch, which is 41 today.
Under the laughs, it’s a tight, well-built detective story: drug trafficking, murder-for-hire, and a film-noir backbone; just brighter, with punchy one-liners.
Might rent it tonight. I’ll charge it to the Underhills.
The max one can pay into social security per year is $10,453.20.
If you did that every year from age 18 until retirement, the max you’ll get from SS is $4,873 /month.
If you put it into an S&P index fund instead, you would receive $32,583 per month.
Social Security is a scam.
First time ever?
Today on the KFT, both Ben Martin and Carson Young both made an albatross on the same par 5. (Not in the same group).
Also both Young and Martin- Born in SC, both went Clemson in SC, both live in SC, and the event this wk…in SC of course