About The Project
The Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
In 2033, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund will run out of money25. This is not a prediction. It is statutory law written into Title 42 of the United States Code. When the fund depletes, federal law mandates automatic 21% benefit cuts to more than 70 million Americans26.
By 2027, 15 months from now, federal net interest costs will exceed all non-defense discretionary spending combined2. The government will spend more servicing debt than funding infrastructure, education, scientific research, courts, national parks, and federal operations combined. Interest payments will consume 22.2% of federal revenue by 20357, transforming debt service into what functions as a third entitlement program that buys nothing and builds nothing.
These numbers come from Congressional Budget Office projections1, Social Security Administration actuarial reports25, and official government publications that anyone can verify. This is not fringe economics or partisan scaremongering. This is what the government's own numbers show when you actually read them.
The Mathematical Certainty
What This Project Does
This book and companion website exist to synthesize official government data that policymakers, economists, and financial professionals see but cannot publicly discuss in its full implications. Every claim is documented. Every number is cited. Every projection comes from Congressional Budget Office reports, Social Security Administration actuarial tables, Federal Reserve research, or peer-reviewed academic studies.
The analysis is non-partisan because the crisis is non-partisan. Both parties created this through decades of rational short-term decisions. Both parties face identical incentives preventing reform. Neither can fix it alone. Both will likely choose delay over action until crisis forces adjustment under worst possible conditions.
The goal is not convincing you the world is ending. The goal is providing frameworks for understanding visible deterioration that has already begun1 and will accelerate over the next decade. By 2040, American society will look fundamentally different. Geographic stratification will determine quality of life more than income. Your ZIP code will matter more than any other single factor in determining whether you live in functional or failed America.
Why a Website, Not Just a Book?
Economic analysis fails when readers cannot verify claims or when complexity creates barriers to understanding. Traditional books force a choice: rigorous documentation that bogs down narrative, or accessible writing that sacrifices precision.
This website solves that problem. Every citation is clickable, linking directly to source documents. Hover over any superscript number to see the full citation. Click to access the original CBO report, SSA actuarial table, or Federal Reserve analysis. The book maintains authority and pace. The website ensures no reader gets lost and every skeptic can verify.
The interactive timeline breaks down the 2025-2040+ period into digestible sections, each with expandable details showing exactly how fiscal stress transmits into economic crisis, municipal bankruptcies, and geographic stratification. You can explore as deep as you want without losing the narrative thread.
Why No One Is Talking About This
If this analysis is accurate, you should be hearing about it constantly. On the news. In political debates. From financial advisors. From economists. The 2033 Social Security deadline is statutory law. The interest cost explosion is already happening1. The convergence is almost guaranteed.
You are not hearing about it. That silence is not evidence the crisis is not real. Every actor with access to this data faces rational incentives for remaining quiet. What emerges is not conspiracy but coordination-free collective silence: individually sensible behavior producing collectively catastrophic outcomes.
The Nash Equilibrium of Silence
Every actor individually optimizing for career survival, business revenue, or electoral success produces collective silence even though many individuals recognize the crisis. No coordination is necessary. The incentive structure ensures silence emerges spontaneously.
Breaking silence carries maximum cost—career destruction, business loss, electoral defeat—while providing minimal benefit. Being right years before vindication arrives offers no protection from immediate consequences. Maintaining silence preserves relationships and career prospects while avoiding personal responsibility for warnings others ignore.
The equilibrium is stable until crisis makes silence impossible. Politicians optimize for re-election within 2-6 year cycles while crisis operates on 8-30 year timelines. Media optimizes for engagement. Experts optimize for reputation. Advisors optimize for liability protection. Each choice is individually rational. Collectively, they guarantee collision.
What the Elites Are Doing Quietly
While public discourse suggests manageable challenges requiring modest adjustments, elite behavior tells a different story. Billionaire ownership of U.S. farmland increased 30% since 2018[28?]. Private equity investment in farmland more than doubled between 2020 and 2023, rising from $7.5 billion to $16.6 billion[29?].
The U.S. private security market grew 50% between 2014 and 2022, reaching $33 billion in annual revenue31—during a period of declining violent crime rates nationally. High-net-worth individuals are actively pursuing citizenship and residency by investment programs that provide political optionality and exit strategies[32?].
These behaviors collectively represent defensive capital allocation by informed actors. They are hedging inflation through tangible assets, securing physical protection, obtaining alternative citizenships, relocating wealth to perceived safe havens. Each action individually appears rational. Collectively, they signal tail risk assessment fundamentally at odds with public complacency.
The Data: Every Number, Every Source
This analysis is built on a foundation of meticulous documentation. Every projection comes from official government sources or peer-reviewed academic research. There is no speculation. There are no conspiracy theories. This is synthesis of publicly available data that anyone can verify.
Primary Sources: Government Data
How the Citation System Works
Every claim in this project is cited to specific source documents. Hover over any superscript number to see the full citation. Click the number to access the original source directly. The citations link to:
- CBO reports with specific table and page numbers
- SSA actuarial tables showing Trust Fund projections
- Federal Reserve research papers
- Academic studies in peer-reviewed journals
- Government agency data and historical records
This is not "trust me, I'm an economist." This is "here's the government's own data, verify it yourself." The synthesis is original. The interpretation is subjective. The underlying data is objective and verifiable. Reasonable people can disagree about implications while agreeing on facts.
Interactive Timeline: See How It Unfolds
The timeline page breaks down the 2025-2040+ period into five sections, each showing how specific mechanisms transmit fiscal stress into economic crisis:
- 2025-2027: Interest costs begin crowding out government capacity (already happening1)
- 2028-2033: Multiple crises converge as fiscal space collapses
- 2033: The statutory collision—Social Security Trust Fund depletion25
- 2033-2040: Economic crisis cascades into municipal bankruptcies and geographic stratification
- 2040+: Four possible endgames based on choices made during crisis period
Each section includes expandable details, visual aids showing key data points, and citations to source documents. You can explore as deep as needed without losing the narrative thread.
Sample: What Proper Citation Looks Like
Claim: Net interest costs exceed defense spending in 20251.
Hover over the citation to see: "Congressional Budget Office, 'The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2025 to 2035,' February 2025, Table 1-3"
Click the citation to go directly to the CBO report, where Table 1-3 shows net interest ($970 billion) exceeding defense spending ($957 billion) in fiscal year 2025.
This level of precision applies to every factual claim in the project. If a number cannot be verified in official sources, it is not included. The analysis is falsifiable: anyone can check the citations and determine whether the sources support the claims.
About the Author: Karina Vunnam
I am a Stanford-trained economist who writes to solve problems, not to become famous. My background includes international experience across different economic systems—born in Mumbai, adopted at age 7, raised across Singapore and the US—providing comparative perspective on why certain institutional arrangements produce specific outcomes.
This project represents years of research examining how individually rational decisions create collectively dysfunctional outcomes. The fiscal crisis is the largest-scale example: every politician making rational short-term choices for electoral survival produces long-term catastrophe no single actor can prevent.
My unique position allows candor that institutional economists cannot provide. I have no political position to protect, no institutional funding to lose, no financial products to sell, no partisan agenda to advance. Just someone who read the Congressional Budget Office reports, worked through the arithmetic, understood the political economy preventing solutions, and concluded this information needs to be public despite every structural incentive suppressing it.
I maintain strict intellectual independence, updating understanding as new evidence emerges and explicitly avoiding tribal positioning. This analysis is non-partisan because partisan framing would undermine credibility and prevent reaching audiences who most need to understand what is coming.
Why I Wrote This
I wrote this for my husband, who is exactly the kind of skeptical, analytically rigorous person this analysis targets. Smart, successful, grounded in reality. Dismisses preppers, gold bugs, conspiracy theorists. Needs official sources and rigorous analysis. Will act if convinced but requires overwhelming evidence.
When 2033 arrives and automatic Social Security cuts hit26, when infrastructure cascades fail, when geographic stratification becomes undeniable, there needs to be documentation showing this was visible in official government projections, this was mathematically certain given current policy, this was preventable through painful but feasible reforms, and the political system chose inaction despite clear warnings.
I desperately hope future readers find this book comically overwrought because reality proved more resilient than analysis suggested. But I cannot stake my family's future on hope when evidence points toward crisis. The responsible choice is preparation for the trajectories that evidence projects while hoping for outcomes evidence suggests are unlikely.