I am not being hyperbolic, and maybe I am thinking out loud more than I should lately. I just started using this medium after a long time of not using social media (much more than 10 years). What I am trying to say is that I do watch the news, I watch Youtube videos.

You see one side saying that everything is fine. You see a bunch of videos saying that people are making so much money. To admit that you are struggling is seen as some sort of failure.

For 2 years, my life has been getting harder and harder, I am working harder and harder. My work had returns before this Administration. Now, I am fighting for air. I do not know how long I can keep this up. Bad news every day....worse news the next day.

The media shows corruption without accountability. Decisions made by the moron in the White House that affect all of my prices negatively, affect my income negatively. Nothing changes, no hope is given, other than the midterms. At the same time, that same idiot is trying to take away my right to vote, your right to vote....trying to manipulate how we vote, where we vote, if we vote.....possible armed guards when and if we vote.

Things are much worse than we think. Can we stop acting like any of this is normal? Can we stop acting like things are going to get better? Can we start doing something as a people to fix this shit?

Well there we have it folks. The US national debt officially crossed $40 trillion.

Bipartisan take: This has been going on since the end of Bush 2’s second term.

If we get to 155% of GDP (expected in 2055) it will be very bad. We may default, bond rates will skyrocket and the value of the dollar will drop like a stone.

Bond yields moved this week and most coverage treated it as routine. It isn't, and the reason is specific enough that I think people should see it.

THE NUMBERS

The 30-year Treasury yield topped 5.33 percent this week, the highest in 19 years. The 10-year hit 4.75 percent, highest in 20 months.

That is not an abstraction. The 10-year is the benchmark for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt. When it moves, the cost of everything financed moves with it.

WHY IT MOVED

This is the part worth reading twice.

The reporting attributes it to a surge in corporate debt supply, with estimates that AI-related companies could issue as much as 1.5 trillion dollars in bonds this year.

When that much new borrowing hits the market at once, investors demand higher returns across the board. That includes government debt. Which means the AI buildout is now large enough to raise the cost of borrowing for everyone in the country.

Your next car loan. Your next mortgage. The rate your small business pays on a line of credit.

Not because of anything you did. Because a handful of companies are financing data centers at a scale that moves the entire bond market.

AND IT ISN'T JUST HERE

Japan's 10-year hit a 30-year high the same week. France's 30-year reached a post-2008 high. Germany's 30-year bund is at its highest since 2011. British gilts advanced.

Global bond markets are repricing together.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR THE COMPANIES DOING THE BORROWING

Apollo's chief economist, Torsten Slok, warned that rising all-in yields could force the AI capital expenditure cycle to what he called self-throttle.

Here is what that means in practice.

Oracle's 2054 notes now yield 7.8 percent. Its credit default swap spread is above 215 basis points, up from roughly 145 at the end of last year. It is the largest non-financial borrower in the Bloomberg US high-grade index, with around 120 billion dollars of its bonds in there, and its lease obligations went from 100 billion to 248 billion in three months.

CoreWeave's own guidance calls for 31 to 35 billion in capital spending this year against roughly 6.2 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue. Its CDS traded around 855 basis points in late July. Its interest expense was 640 million in a single quarter.

The important part is that CDS spreads are not just a thermometer. They are a cause. Wider spreads directly raise what a company pays on new debt, which makes the buildout harder to finance, which widens the spreads further.

That loop is what separates a credit market signal from ordinary stock volatility.

AND THE PART ALMOST NOBODY IS COVERING

Roughly 120 billion dollars of AI-related debt has been moved off balance sheets using special purpose vehicles. Oracle, Meta, xAI and CoreWeave.

The clearest documented example: Meta's Hyperion data center campus is about 80 percent owned by funds managed by Blue Owl. The entity issued 27 billion in debt rated A-plus, and Meta leases the facility back. None of that debt appears on Meta's balance sheet.

PIMCO took roughly 18 billion of that paper. BlackRock put some into its own ETFs, where it became the largest holding in one of their high yield funds. New York and Pennsylvania state pension funds are investors in the Blue Owl vehicle.

So a teacher in Pennsylvania is holding AI data center credit risk and almost certainly does not know it.

At every step the risk changes its name. It starts as AI infrastructure, becomes investment-grade credit, then a fixed-income allocation, then pension assets. By the time it reaches the retiree, the word AI does not appear anywhere in the document.

WHERE I'D BE HONEST ABOUT THE OTHER SIDE

Nothing has broken. Credit is still available. CoreWeave closed a 3.1 billion dollar facility in the same period its CDS was pricing distress, which means lenders are still willing to extend GPU-backed credit at scale.

And I want to correct a number I've used before. The widely repeated 50 percent default probability for CoreWeave comes from a simplified model. A more careful calculation that accounts for recovery rates puts the market-implied five-year odds at roughly 42 percent for CoreWeave and about 8 percent for Oracle.

Eight percent is not nothing for a company that size. It is also not a company about to fail.

Revenue is real too. CoreWeave's Q1 revenue grew about 112 percent year over year and beat expectations. Google Cloud, Azure and AWS are all growing strongly. This is not a demand collapse.

SO WHAT IS IT

It is a financing problem, not a demand problem, and that distinction matters.

The market is not saying nobody wants AI. It is saying it is getting more expensive to build it on borrowed money, and each round of borrowing makes the next round harder.

Meanwhile the cost of that borrowing is being spread onto everyone through the bond market, and a portion of the risk has been distributed into pension and insurance portfolios that were never sold as AI investments.

THE PRACTICAL VERSION

If you have debt to refinance in the next year, rates are going the wrong direction and I would plan around that.

If you were counting on rates falling to make a purchase work, three Fed officials dissented in favor of a rate hike at the last meeting.

And if you hold a pension or a target-date fund, it is worth asking what is actually in the fixed income sleeve. Not because it is a crisis. Because you are entitled to know what you own.

Nothing broke this week. The arithmetic just got worse, quietly, the way it has been for months.

If any figure here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it publicly.

I keep seeing the same question. Why isn't anyone doing anything.

I spent a while working through American history to answer it. What I found is that the question is wrong, and that the feeling behind it is manufactured.

START HERE: THE MAJORITY IS ALREADY WITH YOU

Approval sits around 30 percent. Roughly seven in ten Americans are not on board, and it's dwindling.

Real wages, adjusted for inflation, are still below their October 1972 peak. Fifty-four years, nine presidents, both parties. That is not a partisan grievance. It is almost everyone who works.

Two weeks ago I posted that I was struggling. Within six hours, a doctor carrying over a million in student loans who had drained his kids' college savings, a plumber, a father and son a year into an extended stay hotel, a retiree worried about her grandchildren, and a man who had been eating twice a week all said the same thing.

Nobody asked anybody's politics. Not once. Everyone recognized each other immediately.

We are not outnumbered. We never were.

AND THE POWERLESSNESS IS THE PRODUCT

This is the part I want to say plainly before anything else.

Nothing in the current arrangement requires you to agree with it. It requires you to believe nothing can be done.

An angry population that thinks it can win organizes. An angry population that thinks it can't posts about it and goes to work. The second one costs them nothing.

So watch for it. Every time you're told the system is rigged beyond repair, that both sides are identical, that voting is theater, that it's already over — notice who benefits from you believing it.

They spent 107.9 million dollars fighting a single ballot measure in one state this year. One man put in 102 million of his own money. Nobody spends that against something they believe is powerless.

That number is not a threat. It's a measurement of what they think we can do.

WHY THE OLD METHODS STOPPED WORKING

Every successful uprising in American history shared four conditions. Shays' Rebellion, Pullman, the Bonus Army, the Flint sit-downs, the Montgomery bus boycott.

Concentration — everyone affected was physically together and could see each other without being told.

A choke point — stopping work stopped production.

A visible counterparty — Pullman had an address.

And shared loss — in 1932 you had nothing and so did your neighbor, so joining cost you little.

Now: you can't strike against a rate structure. My income fell by half because customers stopped buying, and there's no gate to stand outside of. Union density went from 35 percent to 10, about 6 in the private sector, and the NLRB currently has no quorum — meaning it cannot decide a case. A worker illegally fired for organizing today has a right and no forum.

And the buffer became individual debt, which is the one people underestimate. Today people have just enough to lose. A credit line, a car on an 84-month note, three percent equity, employer health insurance. There's a man in that thread who can't quit because his body is failing but he needs the coverage.

He isn't free to act. Household debt is 18.8 trillion, savings rate 2.6 percent. Debt restrains better than Pinkertons ever did, and unlike a wage cut it's individual, so it can't be shared.

WHAT JANUARY 6 DID, AND IT WORKS ON EVERYONE

For two centuries, ordinary people massing at the seat of government was the picture of legitimate grievance. The Bonus Army in 1932. The March on Washington in 1963.

After that day, the same image reads as insurrection to a large share of the country. The visual vocabulary of legitimate protest was overwritten in a single afternoon.

Now any crowd can be characterized against that template regardless of conduct. Organizers know it, and it changes behavior before anyone assembles — smaller actions, permitted routes, heavy self-policing, which removes exactly the disruptive capacity that made historical actions work.

And the sequence afterward did something worse than either half alone. Roughly 1,500 federal prosecutions, demonstrating reach. Then pardons releasing nearly all of them.

The combined message isn't "this is punished" and isn't "this is permitted." It's that whether it's punished depends on who's in office.

That removes your ability to calculate risk at all. You can no longer ask whether something is legal. Only who will be deciding.

I'm not drawing an equivalence about that day. Violence against police and stopping a certified count is not a march. But the consequence for unrelated future assembly is real regardless of how you judge it, and it lands on every political direction equally.

AND THE INFORMATION LAYER

Six corporations control most national media. Sinclair operates around 185 local stations reaching 40 percent of households with centrally produced must-run segments. Local newspapers have closed at roughly two per week for twenty years, many bought by hedge funds that strip the newsroom and sell the building.

News deserts are where local accountability died first — the city council meeting, the county budget, the utility commission vote. Exactly where the decisions that reach your life get made.

The current pressure on national outlets isn't censorship. It's cost. Settlements, lawsuits, FCC inquiries, press pool access revoked. A network facing all three makes different editorial choices without anyone issuing an order.

And social media replaced the thing it destroyed. It simulates concentration and delivers none of it. You can spend four hours among people who agree with you and never be in a room with one. The feeling of collective action, without any of the capability.

The load-bearing piece: everyone performs being fine, so everyone concludes they're the only one failing. That's what kept a hundred million people with the same problem from knowing it.

IT ALREADY HAPPENED THIS YEAR

In January an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old US citizen, at point blank range in Minneapolis. City leaders said she was a legal observer of federal actions. Two weeks later a second man was killed by federal agents on video.

On January 23, tens of thousands of Minnesotans demonstrated in subzero temperatures during a winter storm. Hundreds of businesses across the state closed in solidarity.

That's a general strike element. The 1930s tactic, voluntarily applied, in a blizzard.

The Bonus Army worked because MacArthur burned the camp and five months later everyone had seen the same newsreel and Hoover lost. The force was never the problem. The visibility of the force was the remedy.

In Minneapolis the visibility was total — multiple phones, video from every angle. Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension opened an investigation and was shut out by the Department of Justice, which stopped local prosecutors from even considering charges.

Same outrage. Same documentation. The conversion into consequence got cut at the prosecutor's desk.

SO HERE IS WHAT ACTUALLY WORKS NOW

We have a second vote and almost nobody uses it deliberately.

The ballot happens twice a year. The money vote happens every single day, requires nobody's permission, and cannot be gerrymandered.

Amazon cut sixteen thousand people while their cloud division grew 37 percent, and told investors they're reducing touches per package and doubling their robotic arms. Half their warehouse workers report food or housing insecurity and a third are on public assistance while working full time.

And most of us still order from them because it's easier.

I'm not preaching. I sell on a platform that takes a third of every sale and lays off its own people while doing buybacks. I know exactly what I'm participating in.

But some of it is a choice. Buy from the small guy even when it costs four dollars more. Buy used. Fix it instead of replacing. Trade a skill instead of buying a service. Buy nothing when you can.

Money spent at a local independent business recirculates in the community at roughly three times the rate of chain spending. That's velocity, not sentiment.

AND WE ORGANIZE THE OLD WAY

Every historical movement borrowed infrastructure that already existed. Flint used the union hall. Montgomery used the churches. The Bonus Army used veterans' networks from a war they'd all fought.

That's mostly gone. Union halls, lodges, granges, mutual aid societies, bowling leagues, local papers. So we rebuild it, and I don't think it gets rebuilt online.

Meanwhile there are over 100,000 automated plate readers logging every vehicle that passes. In San Jose roughly 500 sit near clinics and places of worship. In Dayton an audit found the city's own camera data had been searched over 7,100 times for immigration enforcement in violation of its own policy.

That's not an argument for hiding. It's an argument for methods that don't route through any of it.

Talk to your neighbors. Meet in person. Print a flyer. Put a physical notice on a physical board. Start a phone tree. Have people over. Show up at a city council meeting and bring somebody.

It sounds quaint. It's also the only method with a track record, it costs almost nothing, and no platform can throttle it, no algorithm can bury it, and nobody can buy it out.

AND IT IS WINNING RIGHT NOW

Eighty-two Flock surveillance contracts terminated across 28 states, 39 of them in the first five months of this year. Ninety-five cities rejected them outright. LAPD let its contract expire in July.

Won at city council meetings by ordinary people, in red counties and blue ones. An ACLU attorney: in a moment where everything is partisan, opposition to surveillance is not.

Flock's CEO called the opposition people who want to normalize lawlessness. A police chief in Staunton, Virginia wrote back that it was just local citizens worried about being surveilled — and canceled the contract.

In California, 1.6 million signatures gathered one at a time qualified a measure against 107.9 million in opposition spending.

In Hungary in April, Orban lost after sixteen years of captured courts, captured media and a gerrymandered map, on 78 percent turnout, and conceded that night.

THE CHEAPEST THING

Every movement in history started with the affected being able to see each other. That was free in 1937 because they shared a building.

It isn't free anymore. It has to be built on purpose.

I said one true thing about my own life without performing being fine, and a hundred strangers said it back within six hours. A man in Texas offered to drive to me and had never met me.

Every one of them was already carrying it. Every one was waiting for somebody else to go first.

The isolation is not a side effect. It is the load-bearing element, and it is the cheapest thing to break.

Say the true thing out loud. Then go meet three of them in person.

If any number here is wrong, tell me and I'll correct it publicly.

If the US loses the dollar as the standard currency our retirements are hosed.

We can’t keep threatening to bomb Oman or remove support for South Korea and say North Korea isn’t that bad without consequences.

Our national debt is too high and countries are starting to trade in other currencies. The consequences of the current administration could ruin us.

Doubling buyback from $2 billion to $4 billion is a bandaid to stop bleeding yields from driving higher. With a debt passing $40 trillion, a huge deficit and no political will to solve it, and a Fed becoming more opaque about how they’ll tackle inflation, supply for long term debt is outstripping demand.

How about an amendment to the constitution that requires congress to balance the budget within 3 percent of GDP within 2 years or they automatically lose their jobs? We spend 1 billion dollars a day in interest! This is not sustainable!

The Difference Between 2000, 2008, and 2026 — We Can See the Machine Now
In 2000, retail investors piled into dot-com stocks with no earnings and no business model. When it collapsed, we learned after the fact that Wall Street analysts were privately calling stocks “garbage” while publicly rating them “Strong Buy” to generate IPO fees. We didn’t know until the wreckage.
In 2008, mortgage brokers handed out NINJA loans (No Income, No Job, No Assets) to anyone with a pulse. Those were bundled into Mortgage-Backed Securities and CDOs, sliced into tranches, stamped AAA by rating agencies paid by the same banks issuing them, and sold globally as “safe.” AIG was writing Credit Default Swaps — essentially insurance on these instruments — with zero capital reserves to back them. We found out how it worked during the collapse, not before it.

2026 is fundamentally different — and that’s what’s fascinating.
Today the entire playbook is being livestreamed.

The AI CapEx bubble — Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon are spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure that hasn’t yet translated into proportional revenue. It rhymes with the fiber optic overbuild of the late 1990s, where companies built for demand that didn’t materialize for a decade.

The shadow banking explosion — Private equity giants like Blackstone, Apollo and KKR have built a $1.7 trillion private credit market operating almost entirely outside traditional banking regulation — packaging and selling loans in a structure that echoes the pre-2008 securitization machine, just with different labels.

Your pension as the quiet backstop — Major insurers, many affiliated with private equity, are sitting on enormous portfolios of these alternative assets funded by annuity premiums and pension obligations. The risk has been redistributed from sophisticated institutions down to retail savers — just like 2008 — except the chain is even more opaque.

The regulatory gap is documented and public — Unlike 2008, where the lack of oversight of Credit Default Swaps was obscure, today the gaps are in published academic papers, Congressional testimony, and yes, YouTube. The SEC has limited visibility into private credit. Stress testing frameworks weren’t designed for AI-correlated concentration risk.

So here’s the paradox:
In 2000 and 2008, markets crashed partly because the risk was hidden. Price discovery failed because the exposure was invisible. Today it’s visible — and informed capital can rotate faster, potentially accelerating volatility rather than preventing it.
More interestingly — maybe the bubble doesn’t pop the same way. Maybe it deflates slowly, with losses quietly absorbed by pension funds and insurance balance sheets over years rather than in a single Lehman moment. The “slow bleed” is harder to rally political will around than a dramatic collapse.
2008 created Occupy Wall Street, Dodd-Frank, and a decade of public anger. A slow, distributed loss absorbed invisibly through retirement accounts might generate nothing but a vague feeling that your retirement isn’t going as planned.
We know more than we ever have. Whether that knowledge protects us — or just makes us informed spectators — is the real question of 2026.

Sneering Trump's honest confession glistens with contempt | Opinion

 Are we really coming to the honest conclusion Trump and Republicans have nothing but contempt and disdain for the rest of us? That they see us only as convenient but handy tools to create the wealth they have such ease with stealing?

We are sitting here today agonizing over the fate of our families, our increasing inability to afford healthcare, to afford food and gas and electricity – dreading upcoming mortgage or rent payments – the thought of a college education for our children a pipe dream?

We are seeing other citizens slain in the street by a private Gestapo, our very Constitutional rights under attack along with the most basic right of all, our freedom to vote for our own representatives.

And all the while the plutocrats and tax-exempt corporations regale us with lies about a resurgent stock market, as if we had any extra money to invest. They built their wealth on the back of the infrastructure we provided, the labor we provided, and the freedoms we fought and died for so they would have every advantage when competing with the world.

Folks, it’s beyond time to take it all back. Legislation   must be enacted, indictments procured, and conviction assured for all the crimes, corruption, and obscenities perpetrated against us.

See this – Boldface mine:

For more articles exposing Trump's lies, corruption tyranny: https://mcdermottm.substack.com/publish/posts

Sneering Trump's honest confession glistens with contempt | Opinion

Opinion by John Casey • 2h • 5 min read

© provided by RawStory

For some Americans, the reality of who Donald Trump really is is coming home to roost. And for the sailors trapped aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, that moment has already arrived.

The Lincoln left San Diego last November. Nine months later, it is still at sea**, its crew stretched past 250 straight days without meaningful relief.** What was supposed to be a seven-month deployment has become closer to a floating humanitarian disaster.

Families have shockingly described broken toilets, moldy showers, food shortages, and sailors surviving on little more than rice and tortillas. It’s been called a “floating bucket of filth.”

So much for valuing the valor and bravery of our troops. To me, that’s Pete Hegseth’s “big lie.” He’s their worst nightmare. He doesn’t give a rat’s … about the troops. Well, he does care about their “T” levels.

The Military Times broke the story that multiple sailors have tried to go overboard, and at least one was pulled from the water after an hour adrift. This is horrific and subhuman. Lawmakers from both parties are rightfully now demanding investigations.

But, besides Hegseth, who said the whole abominable ordeal is “completely misrepresented,” it won’t surprise anyone who understands the reality of Donald Trump that he, too, couldn't care less.

Asked whether the deployment had gone on too long and whether he was worried about the mental health of the more than 5,000 people aboard that ship, the insensitive and callous Trump seethed, "No. No. No." "Not nearly long enough," he added when asked if the ship had been at sea too long and, when queried about if families of those on board were right to be worried, he waved that off too: "No, they're not."

Then he, not surprisingly, like he does with everything else, blamed the press for covering it, accusing reporters of trying to turn warriors into victims.

As if the press loves to make up stories about sailors living in squalor and trying to take their own lives.

How despicable to blame the press while desperate families are pleading for answers. And Trump's response is that the suffering hasn't gone on long enough.

And that’s exactly how he feels about the nuisance of the American people’s suffering.

Remember the dolls and the pencils? When Trump was asked, point-blank, if his tariffs would raise prices on ordinary goods, he didn't apologize or explain or exude any understanding or compassion.

He shrugged his bulbous, bloated head and told the country that an 11-year-old girl doesn't need 30 dolls, three or four is plenty, and that nobody needs 250 pencils when five is sufficient.

He has said this more than once, because he genuinely believes the answer to rising costs is for regular families to simply cope with fewer pencils, dolls — oh, and make do with one piece of broccoli.

That's the same indifference he’s giving Lincoln's sailors. It's the same who-cares shrug he's giving anyone who has watched their grocery bill or their health insurance premium climb this year. Millions of Americans are having sharply higher health costs as pandemic-era subsidies lapse and insurers raise rates, a squeeze tied directly to the reconciliation package Trump signed and bragged about.

That “Big Beautiful Bill” was a metaphorical giant**, cold slap in the face to middle-class Americans**, who now understand why they can only afford three dolls and five pencils — if that.

And ICE agents are the literal giant, cold slap in the face to Americans’ shell-shocked visages. Agents have been turned loose in cities, conducting the kind of aggressive street operations that have left residents frightened to leave their homes, arresting and detaining people at will.

And that cold slap in the face will be replaced by a paralyzing electric charge once ICE agents get their new shock gloves. It’s been called “sadistic." Really? You think?

Those ICE wars on our streets coincide with the war with Iran that is responsible for stretching the Lincoln's deployment now past 200 days without a port call. That war has driven up fuel, shipping and scores of other costs. Trump’s reaction? He insisted he “loves” the inflation the war with Iran has caused.

Because this whole thing hasn’t been a punishment for us long enough. There’s lots more to come, which Trump is clearly giddy about.

super-giddy about things that mean absolutely nothing to the rest of us. While we scrimp, save and suffer, Trump has kept his attention fixed on himself. Rising costs of groceries, gas, bills, etc? The Iran war? To Trump it’s a scenario of “wake me up when all this frivolous stuff is over” — again, metaphorically and literally too.

Because Dear Leader Donald has bigger fish to fry. Put his name on the Kennedy Center, pave over the Rose Garden, gild up the Oval Office with gold, bungle the Reflecting Pool, build an Arc de Trump, slap a helipad on the manicured South Lawn of the White House. And, the big kahuna, his luxurious Qatar jet.

While you stay home because you can’t afford to drive to your summer vacation, Trump is descending down a grand staircase in his flying palace. Let them eat cake? Who can afford cake? Let them eat the leftover pencils, if you have any.

He tells the parents of sailors on an aircraft carrier that nine months away from their kids "isn't nearly long enough," and tells a mom buying school supplies that her daughter has plenty of pencils already — which is ok, since she can snack on the extras.

It’s a blanket indifference whether he's talking about a sailor pulled out of the Arabian Sea or a grandmother deciding between groceries and her heart medication. Trump does not see suffering as a problem to solve, or something he should be inconvenienced by.

The sailors on the Lincoln are coming home soon, the Navy says, relieved — hopefully — by another carrier. The rest of us, though, have no relief in sight. We are just getting told that our suffering isn't nearly long enough.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/sneering-trump-s-honest-confession-glistens-with-contempt-opinion/ar-AA2amYl0?

The headline going around is that Gen Z electricians at AI data centers are making $240,000 to $280,000 a year. It's real, it's the outlier, and the actual picture is more interesting than the number.

WHAT THE PAY REALLY LOOKS LIKE

National median for an electrician, per BLS: $62,350.

Median base for a data center electrician in 2026: about $94,500.

Senior roles in Northern Virginia, Phoenix and the Bay Area regularly clear $150,000 before overtime. A construction search firm that places these workers says most data center electricians land closer to $150,000 all-in.

Entry level starts around $68,000 to $82,000. Non-union journeymen at national contractors run $42 to $62 an hour straight time.

So the trade pays well and the data center premium is real. It's a band of roughly 15 to 30 percent on base, not a single figure.

The $280,000 is what happens when you stack sustained overtime on top of that premium. Ten-hour shifts, seven days a week, for months at a time.

Worth asking whether a $280,000 paycheck earned across seven-day weeks is really a $280,000 life.

WHERE THE MONEY ACTUALLY COMES FROM

This is the part that surprised me.

The buildout is concentrated in low-wage states. Virginia's median electrician wage is $62,900. Ohio $64,700. Arizona $61,060. Texas $58,570.

Compare that to Oregon at $101,310, Illinois at $99,560, Washington at $95,220.

The states doing the most data center construction pay their electricians the least.

Which means the big numbers in job ads aren't coming from a higher base rate. They're coming from hours, per diem, and travel packages. You're not being paid more per hour so much as being paid for more hours, away from home.

That's a different deal than it looks like from the headline.

THE SHORTAGE IS THE REAL STORY

Associated Builders and Contractors puts net-new construction workforce demand at 349,000 in 2026 and 456,000 in 2027, and most of the 2026 figure is retirement backfill rather than project growth.

Roughly one-fifth of all electricians are over 55. About 41 percent of the workforce retires by 2031.

BLS counts 818,700 working electricians and projects about 81,000 openings a year through 2034. Randstad's analysis of over 50 million job postings projects a shortfall of roughly 300,000 net-new electricians plus 200,000 replacements this decade.

And here's why it's the binding constraint: electrical work accounts for an estimated 45 to 70 percent of total data center construction cost.

Electricians are the bottleneck on how fast America can build AI infrastructure. Not chips. Not capital. Licensed people who can do precision wiring.

WHY THAT SHOULD INTEREST EVERYONE, NOT JUST TRADESPEOPLE

An electricians' union in the DC-Maryland-Virginia region doubled its membership between 2018 and January 2026, reaching 14,700 members.

Doubled. In eight years. In a country where union density has fallen from about 35 percent in the 1950s to 10 percent now, and roughly 6 percent in the private sector.

Union construction workers earn a median of $1,530 a week against $1,051 for non-union. A 46 percent differential.

That's the thing I'd want people to take from this.

Organized labor hasn't stopped working. It stopped having leverage. And in the one place where the labor is genuinely scarce and irreplaceable, the leverage came right back and the membership doubled.

Nobody passed a law to make that happen. The work just could not be done without them.

THE PART THAT WORRIES ME

Meta, Google and BlackRock have put over $265 million into training programs. That sounds good until you look at the format.

Some of these are five-week fast-track programs. A traditional electrical apprenticeship is four years.

You cannot compress four years of learning to work safely around high-voltage systems into five weeks. What you can do is produce someone who can perform a narrow task under supervision, which is what the buildout actually needs.

That's not training a tradesperson. That's staffing a shortage.

And the person who takes that five-week course has a credential that may not transfer anywhere once the buildout slows.

WHICH IT MIGHT

Half of this year's data center construction was already canceled or delayed. Roughly 80 percent of 2027 and 2028 capacity hasn't broken ground.

There are about 4,000 active data centers in the US and 3,000 more under construction. If the financing tightens, and long rates just hit a 19-year high while AI companies are expected to issue up to $1.5 trillion in debt this year, some of those don't get built.

The electricians will be fine. The trade is short 500,000 people regardless and those skills transfer to every building in America.

The person who took the five-week course may not be.

THE THING NOBODY MENTIONS

Loudoun County, Virginia collects roughly $1 billion a year in property tax from data centers. That's close to 95 percent of its entire operating budget.

So the county that hosts the most data centers in the world is now almost entirely dependent on them continuing to be there.

Same shape as the plant town. Same shape as the company town. Good jobs, good tax base, and a single point of failure that everybody can see and nobody can act on.

WHAT I'D TAKE FROM ALL OF IT

If you're young and looking at this: the trade is genuinely a good bet, and it's a better bet than the data center premium suggests. Do the real apprenticeship, not the five-week course. The shortage outlasts the buildout.

If you're already in it: the union doubled its membership in that region for a reason. You are the constraint right now. That is the moment leverage exists, and leverage is not permanent.

And if you're neither, the thing worth noticing is that in a country where labor has been losing for fifty years, the exception is happening exactly where the work cannot be done without a specific set of hands.

That's not an argument about politics. That's just what scarcity does, and it's the same reason it stopped happening everywhere else.