Common Sense - Red State Finance

Making six figures and still feel broke? You're not imagining it. The Federal Reserve's 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances found almost 20% of families are behind on a loan payment, up from about 12% in 2022 and the highest share since the 2010 survey. G...

Is America in decline? Cole and Savannah skip the shouting and hand out a 50-year report card. Four subjects, real numbers: • Education: we spend more than $15,000 per student, so why are math scores back to around 1990? • Culture: how Americans' trust...

Diesel is six bucks a gallon in a lot of places, and the internet has about forty theories why. Cole and Savannah put on the tinfoil hats, then take them off. Fact or fairytale: • Does Washington fight wars to protect the petrodollar? • Is somebody squ...

The people building AI keep telling you it might end the world. Then they go right back to selling it. Cole and Savannah sort out what's real, what's hype, and what it means for your paycheck: • The doom headlines: AI agents, "internet takeover" warnin...

Washington says the K-shaped economy is over. Cole and Savannah check the receipts. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says we're in a "C-shaped" economy now. So why is first class sold out while the drive-thru is empty? This week: • What the K-shaped ec...

Dana and Anthony ask the big, uncomfortable one this week: is America in long-term decline? No cable news shouting. No doom-scrolling. Just an honest audit of the last 50 years across four pillars: Education: Reading and math scores back at 1990s level...

On this week's episode, Dana and Anthony strap on their tin-foil hats and dive into the wild world of geopolitical conspiracy theories, high-stakes energy games, and why a gallon of diesel costs an absolute fortune. Is the U.S. government starting fore...

This week, Dana and Anthony take on a question that sounds like a bad sci-fi trailer but is now a real debate in boardrooms and Congress: is AI actually going to end us? Anthropic's own CEO just published an essay warning that swarms of AI agents could...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on national TV and declared the K-shaped economy dead. In its place? A "C-shaped economy," where lower-wage workers are supposedly catching up to everyone else. Dana and Anthony aren't buying it. This week they dig...

This week Dana and Anthony dig into one of the strangest moves coming out of the U.S. Treasury: the government is running a $1 trillion checking account straight into the bond market to buy back its own debt. What we cover: Why the Treasury is maxing o...

The Exorbitant Trap: Why Wall Street Loves the Dollar and Main Street Pays the Bill On this week's episode, Dana and Anthony dissect a financial flex that America has held over the world for nearly a century: King Dollar's reign as the global reserve c...

Dana and Anthony take on corporate America's favorite daydream this week: the four-day workweek. Are three-day weekends actually coming, or is this just another white-collar fantasy that never touches an hourly wage? They dig into the real numbers, Ice...

Dana and Anthony go after one of Wall Street's favorite sacred cows this week: the capital gains tax. What happens if Uncle Sam scraps it entirely tomorrow? Does the economy take off, freeing up billions in capital that's currently just sitting there? ...

This week, Dana and Anthony pick apart the wildest financial story of the summer: a 24-year-old former OpenAI researcher who turned a single essay into a hedge fund worth tens of billions of dollars, then watched most of it disappear in about a month. ...

This week, Dana and Anthony look at the new backbone of the American economy: splitting a $12 carton of eggs into four "interest-free" payments. Buy Now, Pay Later started as a way for college kids to buy sneakers they couldn't afford yet. It's now a f...

This week's episode asks the question every index fund investor is quietly avoiding: what happens when Silicon Valley's favorite money-burning machine finally runs out of fuel? Tech giants now make up 35% of the S&P 500 — the same nosebleed concentrati...

Is Fort Knox Empty, or Just Playing Dumb? Anthony and Dana tackle America's favorite conspiracy theory this week: is the gold actually in Fort Knox, or did somebody swap it out for gold-painted bricks decades ago? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went ...

Are world leaders running their countries, or just auditioning for a global franchise of the Trump show? This week, we take apart the populist wave sweeping the planet, from Javier Milei's chainsaw economics in Argentina to Daniel Noboa's iron-fist cra...

Gold used to back every dollar in your pocket. Then, in 1971, Nixon cut the cord and the dollar became a promise instead of a receipt. Half a century later, the question keeps coming back: was that a mistake? Gold bugs say fiat money is why your grocer...

You used to be able to argue with someone and still shake hands after. Now? Two headlines and a notification later, half the country can't finish a debate without rage-quitting. This episode is about how that happened — outrage sells, nuance doesn't, a...

Trump’s second term has already done one thing very well: expose who was never prepared for him to come back. In this episode, we give an honest review of Trump’s second term so far. The wins, the mistakes, the media meltdowns, the market reaction, and...

Grab your emotional support blanket, because we are here to reveal what buying a home actually costs over 30 years — and spoiler alert, the number is so jaw-dropping you'll want to lie down on a floor you definitely don't own. In this debut episode, ou...