Description
Every 80 Years, Washington Takes Your Savings. 1780: soldiers' pay. 1862: workers' wages. 1933: savers' gold. Each time America hit its once-a-lifetime crisis, Washington rewrote the money, and the people holding the old promises paid.
Now the budget office says the debt breaks its 1946 record in 2030, the year a 1997 forecast picked for the next climax. We went to the statutes, court records and the Fed's own data.
Archive film: Universal Newsreel, Prelinger Archives, the Fed and the FDR Library (public domain). Stock: Pexels. Maps: © MapTiler © OpenStreetMap. Original score.