Rigged: How America Built a System to Rob Its Own Children

The personal is always political, especially when it comes to your bank account

I need to tell you about a conversation that fucked me up.

My nephew came home from school and told me about this kid in his class—thirteen years old, Black, asked about his future plans. The kid’s response?

“Man, I ain’t even tryna move out when I grow up. I’m just gonna stay at home and help my mama and grandma out. That’s it.”

Now, before you start with your think pieces about “kids these days” and their lack of ambition, let me stop you right there. This kid isn’t lazy. This kid isn’t unmotivated. This kid has done the math, and the math is fucking brutal.

Let’s Talk Numbers, Because Numbers Don’t Lie

Here’s a fun fact that should make you uncomfortable: In 1971, if you worked minimum wage for 40 hours, you could buy 1.57 ounces of gold with your weekly paycheck.

Today, that same amount of gold is worth $5,800.

To have the same purchasing power as minimum wage in 1971, you’d need to make $145 an hour today. The current federal minimum wage? $7.25.

Let me say this again, louder for the people in the back: Young people today have lost 95% of their purchasing power compared to their grandparents.

And just since January of this year, the dollar has lost another 10% of its value against other major currencies. So that 13-year-old? His impossible situation gets worse every single month.

But sure, let’s keep telling kids they just need to work harder.

The Great American Scam

What happened? Oh, just a little thing called Nixon taking us off the gold standard in 1971. You know, that moment when America basically said, “Fuck it, money is whatever we say it is now.”

This wasn’t some inevitable economic evolution. This was a choice. A choice that benefited people who already owned assets—real estate, stocks, businesses—at the expense of everyone who worked for wages.

If you owned a house in 1971, congratulations! Your mortgage payments stayed the same while your home value exploded. If you were just entering the workforce? Well, sucks to be you. Your wages would never keep up with the cost of everything else.

This is what we call a wealth transfer, and it’s been happening for over fifty years. From young to old. From workers to asset owners. From the many to the few.

The Generations: A Study in Economic Privilege

Let’s be honest about what each generation inherited:

Baby Boomers (The Winners):

• Bought houses for 2-3x their annual salary
• Got pensions that actually meant something
• Worked jobs where one income could support a family
• Built wealth while their fixed-rate mortgages became cheaper to pay off
• Benefited from the transition period when the scam was just getting started

Gen X (The Forgotten):

• Watched the middle class disappear in real time
• First generation to see pensions replaced by 401(k)s (aka “your retirement is your problem now”)
• Graduated into recessions, worked through more recessions
• Too young to benefit from cheap housing, too old to give up on homeownership entirely
• The canary in the coal mine that nobody listened to

Millennials and Gen Z (The Fucked):

• Studio apartments in suburban New Jersey cost $2,200+ per month
• College degrees that guarantee debt, not prosperity
• Gig economy jobs with no benefits
• Homeownership rates that would be laughable if they weren’t tragic
• Blamed for “killing” industries they can’t afford to patronize

That 13-year-old has looked at this landscape and made the most rational decision available to him: opt out.

The Gaslighting Campaign

Here’s what really pisses me off: the way we talk about young people’s economic struggles. We’ve created an entire vocabulary designed to shame them for responding rationally to an irrational system.

“Failure to launch.” “Boomerang kids.” “Snowflakes who can’t handle the real world.”

No. These are survival strategies in an economy designed to extract their wealth before they even earn it.

When a 13-year-old says he wants to stay home and help his grandmother, he’s not being lazy. He’s being strategic. He’s choosing family and community over a system that offers him debt in exchange for dreams.

He’s refusing to play a game where the house always wins.

Why This Is About More Than Money

Of course, this isn’t just about economics. It never is. When you systematically destroy economic opportunity, you don’t do it equally. You do it to the people who already have the least power to fight back.

That kid who wants to stay home with his grandmother? He’s not just facing the general economic impossibility that affects all young people. He’s facing that impossibility while also navigating systems designed to criminalize his existence, undervalue his intelligence, and limit his opportunities based on what he looks like.

Here’s another number that’ll fuck up your day: Black workers with identical education and experience to their white counterparts earn about 80 cents for every dollar white workers make. So even if that 13-year-old beats the odds, gets the degree, lands the job—he’s still starting with a 20% penalty just for existing while Black.

But wait, there’s more! Black men are incarcerated at nearly 5 times the rate of white men. One in three Black boys born today can expect to be imprisoned at some point in their lives. So that kid isn’t just calculating the impossible math of minimum wage and studio apartments—he’s calculating the very real possibility that the system will literally cage him before he gets a chance to fail economically.

Think about that for a minute. This 13-year-old is making life plans while knowing that statistically, he’s more likely to see the inside of a prison cell than the inside of a boardroom, regardless of his choices, his character, or his potential.

When you combine economic extraction with racial oppression and mass incarceration, you get a level of structural violence that would be breathtaking if it weren’t so predictable. That kid isn’t just facing a rigged economic game—he’s facing a rigged economic game where he’s forced to play with a 20% wage penalty while dodging a criminal justice system designed to remove him from the game entirely.

The same policies that destroyed purchasing power for all young people hit Black families harder because Black families had less generational wealth to cushion the blow. Less likely to own homes that appreciated. More likely to work jobs that paid wages rather than generating equity. More likely to have family members removed from the workforce through incarceration. And even when they did everything “right”—got the education, the experience, the credentials—they still got paid less for the same work.

So when that kid looks at the math and decides to opt out, he’s not just calculating the impossible cost of studio apartments and student loans. He’s calculating the cost of being systematically undervalued for his entire working life while navigating systems designed to destroy that life entirely.

Bitcoin: The Plot Twist Nobody Saw Coming

Here’s where things get interesting, and where I probably lose some of you.

I’m not a crypto bro. I don’t give a shit about “diamond hands” or whatever the fuck people are saying on Reddit these days. But I do care about systems that concentrate power and systems that distribute it.

Bitcoin is simply money that can’t be printed into oblivion. Twenty-one million coins, ever. That’s it. No central bank can decide to create more to solve whatever crisis rich people have created this time.

When that 13-year-old learns about Bitcoin, he won’t see a get-rich-quick scheme. He’ll see something revolutionary: money that holds its value. Money that can’t be debased by politicians or central bankers. Money that rewards saving instead of punishing it.

For the first time in his life, the math might actually work in his favor.

The Choice We’re Not Talking About

We have a choice to make, and it’s not the choice we’re having in political debates.

The choice isn’t between capitalism and socialism, or left and right, or any of the other false dichotomies we use to avoid dealing with reality.

The choice is between a monetary system designed to extract wealth from workers and a monetary system designed to preserve the value of work.

Between a system where your grandmother’s savings lose value every year and a system where savings actually grow.

Between a system that punishes young people for being born into the wrong economy and a system that gives them a chance.

What We Owe That Kid

That 13-year-old who’s given up on leaving home? We owe him honesty.

We owe him an acknowledgment that the economic game is rigged and has been for fifty years.

We owe him alternatives to a system that demands he go into debt to chase dreams in a rigged market.

We owe him the truth about money—that it’s not a force of nature but a human invention, and that better inventions are possible.

Most of all, we owe him the chance to build wealth instead of just transferring it to people who already have more than they need.

The Bottom Line

I started “All Of Us Can Bitcoin” not because I think cryptocurrency is magic, but because I think that kid deserves better than the economic prison we’ve built for him.

He deserves money that can’t be printed away. He deserves a system where his labor has value and his savings grow. He deserves the same opportunities his great-grandparents had to build wealth through work.

That’s not too much to ask. That’s the bare minimum we owe the next generation.

The kid has already done the math and found the current system wanting. The question is: are we ready to do the math with him and build something better?

Or are we going to keep gaslighting him about avocado toast and bootstrap pulling while his future gets stolen in real time?

Because honestly? That kid’s grandmother raised him right. He knows bullshit when he sees it. And he’s seeing a lot of it.

This isn’t financial advice. This is a reality check. The system is rigged, the math is brutal, and the kids aren’t stupid. They’re just honest about what we’ve done to them. All of us can Bitcoin. All of us can choose systems that work for workers instead of against them. The question is: will we do it while it still matters?