Not Trump Lies. Not Dem Spin. Not UniParty
Pettifoggery. Not Wall Street Cons…… Just Fierce
Focus On The Facts.

Dear Reader,

The ballgame is still changing. And faster than the UniParty will admit.

Public debt is now past $40 trillion and climbing. The 10-year Treasury is back well above 5%. The 30-year is at a 24-year high. Net interest already ran about $1 trillion last year—3.2% of GDP—and under anything but a CBO fairy tale it is headed for several trillion a year. That is not a talking point. It is arithmetic.

Neither party will face it.

The Democrats remain what they have been for decades: the party of more spending, more programs, more regulation. The Republicans, having abandoned the old-time religion of balanced budgets, now treat a 17–18% of GDP tax take as holy writ while refusing to cut the Warfare State or two-thirds of the Welfare State. The result is a fiscal doom loop: more debt, higher rates, more interest, still more debt. Plug realistic real yields into the baseline and you do not get a “soft landing.” You get deficits measured in the tens of trillions and a debt stock that would dwarf today’s world GDP.

Wall Street cheers anyway. Record stock prices are sold as proof the economy is “strong.” Contra Corner does not buy it. Household savings are scraped to the floor. Most families have no liquid buffer. Businesses are leveraged to the gills. Outside the AI cap-ex boom, real domestic investment is flat. Main Street is still digesting a 36% jump in the cost of living since 2017. The Fed spent three decades printing, suppressing rates, and juicing asset prices for the top slice of owners. That party is over the minute real buyers—not the central bank—have to absorb the Treasury’s flood of paper.

The same filter applies to the rest of the official story. Forever wars have not made the homeland safer; they have built a trillion-dollar empire with almost no oversight. Tariff-taxes and industrial-policy slogans do not repeal monetary inflation or a collapsed national savings rate. Partisan noise on the Hill is mostly incumbency protection. We take it with a grain of salt.

That is the mission of David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

Five days a week we put facts, charts, history, and primary data through a simple screen: personal liberty, free-market capitalism, sound money, non-intervention abroad, and constitutionally limited government at home. What survives is an unvarnished picture of the Washington–Wall Street axis—the Warfare State, the Bailout State, Bubble Finance, and Beltway banditry.

The vantage point is not a cable-news panel. It is 50 years on both ends of the Acela Corridor: Congressman, Reagan’s budget director, Salomon and Blackstone, private equity, six books, and daily Contra Corner commentary since 2014. We also use AI the way it is actually useful—to mine the series, build the tables, and cut the memes down to the numbers.

Most of that work sits behind the paywall. Once a week we drop it so you can see the method in the open. If the free piece you just read is the kind of accounting you cannot get from the networks or the party shops, the daily file is the rest of the case.

What you get

• Five missives a week on the data, the markets, the Fed, the budget, and the next foreign adventure
• Charts that show what headlines bury: debt dynamics, real yields, savings absorption, valuations, inflation guts
• A 12-year archive, not a reset every election cycle
• No sacred cows: GOP fiscal sin, Dem spend-a-thons, lockdown precedents, climate alarmism, corporate welfare, and the casino on Wall Street all get the same audit

$1 a day. Annual is the cheapest way to do it; monthly if you want an off-ramp. That is less than a coffee for a framework you can use when the next shock hits.

The 30-year party of false prosperity—easy money, cheap debt, financialization, and promises that ignore arithmetic—is winding down. Bubbles burst. Speculators get carried out. Easy-money wealth evaporates. You do not need another sermon about who to vote for. You need the books opened.

Start here. Then buckle up.

David A. Stockman
David Stockman’s Contra Corner

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