This week, we continue our series on the American Dream. It feels like the right conversation to have as America marks its 250th birthday — a moment to celebrate our country's extraordinary achievements and reflect on one of its defining ideals. (If you’re new here, Solving For is a weekly newsletter examining one pressing problem at a time — what it is, why it happened, and what credible solutions might look like.)

Last week, we looked at the problem. The data showed that upward mobility has weakened dramatically over the past half century.

This week, we turn to how we got here — the context and forces at work. Next week, we'll explore ways forward.

You can read or listen to every Solving For series — narrated by me — at solvingfor.io. Click the article voiceover at the top of this page to listen to this story.

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David Leonhardt had a question.

The New York Times writer wanted to know: did American children still end up better off than their parents?

He put it to Raj Chetty, then a young economist. Chetty was one of a handful of researchers given access to a massive database of anonymized IRS records that had long been off-limits. But the records only went back to the early 1990s. Nowhere near enough to compare one generation against the next.

Chetty said he and his colleagues would see what they could do.

Their answer: pair decades-old census records with the newer tax data. Track what a child’s household earned while they were growing up. Then find that same child’s income as an adult. Adjust for inflation. Repeat it for millions of families.

It was detective work in the social sciences. He had two sets of records nobody had cross-referenced at this scale, and a hunch that combining them could reveal something new.

The method worked.

What it uncovered laid bare one of the defining challenges facing America today.

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For children born in 1940, roughly nine in 10 grew up to earn more than their parents. For children born in 1984, only about half did.

Put differently, what was once a near certainty had become little better than a coin flip.

The findings were published in Science in 2017. Leonhardt would later tell the story in his 2023 book, “Ours Was the Shining Future.”

The numbers are worth sitting with, especially this week.

America was founded on the radical idea that opportunity — not birth — should determine a person’s future. Yet as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, the evidence is that birth circumstances have become more predictive of where Americans end up.

Progress has been America’s “lingua franca,” Leonhardt wrote in his book. The U.S. origin story is about throwing off a great power, then eclipsing every other one that came after. Defeating fascism and communism. Putting a man on the moon. Creating the internet. Perhaps most impressive of all, building a massive middle class.

That spirit hasn’t disappeared. America remains the world’s leading engine of entrepreneurship, attracting 64 percent of global startup funding in 2025, up from 56 percent the year before. The country continues to invent, build, and generate enormous wealth. What it no longer does as reliably is spread opportunity broadly enough to ensure that the next generation does better than the last.

Chetty's longitudinal study quantified that shift. It showed that one of America’s defining promises had been interrupted.

The question was why?

Rungs on the Ladder Disappeared

The American Dream has not disappeared. We all know people who represent it, or are on their way to achieving it. But over decades, the Dream has been weakened by powerful forces. Five stand out.

After World War II, the American economy produced something unusual in human history: millions of workers without college degrees could still climb into the middle class. Manufacturing, construction, clerical work and skilled trades provided stable, middle-income jobs that allowed Americans to buy a home, raise a family, and expect their children to do even better. They were the rungs on the ladder.

Starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 2000s, many of those rungs disappeared.

Two forces removed them. The first was technology. Computers and automation didn’t simply replace workers — they replaced specific kinds of work. Routine tasks, whether performed on assembly lines or in back offices, were the most vulnerable. What grew instead were jobs at the top and bottom of the labor market: high-skill work requiring education, and low-paying service work that could not easily be automated. The middle hollowed out. Labor economists call this phenomenon job polarization: the rungs didn’t just get harder to climb — they stopped existing.

The second force was trade. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization. Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson tracked what happened in communities most exposed to Chinese manufacturing competition. Local labor markets adjusted remarkably slowly. Wages stayed depressed and employment stayed low at least a decade after the shock arrived, or never recovered.

Most research agrees automation did more national damage than trade. A Ball State University analysis attributes 85 percent of manufacturing job losses to productivity gains, not trade. But trade had outsized, life-altering impacts in specific towns and regions, shuttering plants and wiping out jobs. Autor, Dorn, and Hanson found that Chinese import competition, while responsible for a smaller slice of manufacturing losses nationally — roughly a quarter, by their count — hit specific communities all at once, and many of those places are still recovering.

For decades, America had relied on millions of middle-skill jobs to turn economic growth into upward mobility. As those jobs disappeared — whether through automation, trade, or both — so did one of the country’s most reliable pathways to the American Dream.

The Credential Bottleneck

When the rungs disappeared, something had to replace them. College filled the gap, becoming the default pathway to the middle class — the most reliable route to upward mobility.

The problem was that the ticket got more expensive at the same time everyone decided they needed one — and the most valuable seats barely expanded to meet the demand.

In 1980, attending a four-year college cost roughly $10,000 a year, including tuition, fees, room and board, adjusted for inflation. By the 2025–26 academic year, that same combination — tuition, fees, room and board — had risen to nearly $26,000 at in-state public four-year institutions, and to about $61,000 at the average private nonprofit college. At the most selective schools, such as the Ivy League, the same core costs now run $83,000 to $94,000, according to each institution's own published pricing. Even using the public in-state figure, the price of the credential had risen roughly two and a half times in real terms.

At the same time, many elite institutions chose not to expand enrollment, preserving the scarcity that reinforced their prestige. Harvard's freshman class has stood at roughly 1,600 students for more than four decades — while applications grew substantially over the same period. Before U.S. News began ranking colleges in 1983, schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford were expanding enrollment. The rankings changed the incentive: selectivity became a part of the product. Low acceptance rates drove prestige, and prestige drove applications, donations, and pricing power. Scarcity became an asset. Between 2002 and 2019, Ivy League acceptance rates were cut roughly in half.

In response, families spent more to gain an edge — tutors, test prep, curated extracurriculars — widening the advantage of those who could afford the race. The so-called “Varsity Blues” federal prosecutions in 2019 illustrated the lengths — and lies — wealthy parents and admission consultants would go.

Meanwhile, colleges across the board continued raising tuition, pushing students to borrow ever larger sums. By 2010, student loan debt in the United States had surpassed credit card debt for the first time.

The debt burden has grown so large that millions of Americans now carry student loans well into middle age, with growing numbers still repaying them into retirement.

At precisely the moment America needed more rungs on the ladder, its most prestigious universities chose to preserve the scarcity central to their prestige rather than expand access to meet the need. One of the country's most powerful pathways to upward mobility became narrower just as it became more essential.

Geography Became Destiny

The collapse didn’t happen everywhere at once. It happened in places — in specific towns and regions, along the rivers and rail lines where the mills and factories had once stood.

As manufacturing declined, the new economy concentrated elsewhere. Technology, finance, health care, and professional services clustered in a relatively small number of metropolitan areas — San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle, Austin, among them. Workers with the education and skills those industries demanded followed the jobs. Those without them often stayed behind.

The dynamic became self-reinforcing. Places with talent and capital drew more of both — economists call it agglomeration. Places that lost their anchor employers lost the tax base and demand that might have replaced them. One rose. The other declined. The pattern earned its own name: “winner-take-most.”

America didn't just grow more unequal. It grew unequal by ZIP code.

Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas — built from the anonymized tax and Census records covering nearly the entire U.S. population — showed just how much place itself matters. Researchers traced children’s economic outcomes back to the neighborhoods where they grew up. Children from families with similar incomes, living only a few miles apart, often had dramatically different chances of reaching the middle class or beyond. Where you grew up increasingly shaped where you ended up.

Communities that lost employers often lost tax revenue, social capital, and opportunity alongside them. Chetty’s research found that neighborhoods with strong schools, high employment, and robust social networks consistently produced better outcomes for children. Upward mobility had become deeply tied to geography.

Policy Locked It In

None of these changes made the American Dream’s decline inevitable. Labor markets change. Institutions adapt. Governments intervene. Communities reinvent themselves. What happened instead was that the rules of the economy were rewritten — gradually, across both parties and several decades, to increasingly favor those who already had the greatest advantages.

The clearest example is the tax code. The top federal income tax rate stood at 70 percent in 1979. By 2007, the top rate had been cut in half, to 35 percent. The income share of the top 1 percent more than doubled, from about 10 percent in 1979 to more than 20 percent in 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Money made from investments has long been taxed more lightly than money made from a paycheck — that preference dates to the 1920s. But as the wealthy increasingly made their money from investments and business ownership instead of salaries, that old preference came to shelter a much bigger share of their income. Today the top rate on a paycheck is 37 percent. The top rate on long-term investment gains is 20 percent — roughly half.

Workers lost bargaining power just as capital gained it. Union membership fell by more than half in the four decades after 1980 — from 22.2 percent of workers in 1980 to 9.4 percent by 2022. The gains increasingly flowed to owners and shareholders instead.

Then came the financial crisis of 2008.

Workers entering adulthood inherited an economy that had already lost its traditional pathways upward. The Great Recession narrowed them further. Millions graduated into the weakest labor market since the Great Depression.

Why None of It Got Fixed

Each of the forces above was visible. Documented. Named. The study by Chetty and his colleagues is nearly a decade old. It hasn’t been fixed.

A big part of the explanation is trust — or, more precisely, its erosion.

In 1958, 73 percent of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or almost all of the time. By 2025, that number was 17 percent, according to Pew.

Some of that collapse was earned. The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal gave real reasons for people to stop believing what their government told them.

But the erosion didn’t stop where earned distrust left off. Ronald Reagan made a more explicit push in 1981, declaring: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Donald Trump has gone further, actively sowing distrust. He hasn’t just cast the government as inefficient or overreaching — the traditional conservative critique. He has cast the mechanisms of democracy itself as illegitimate, calling elections “rigged” — unless he, or candidates he supported, won.

Together, these forces created a vicious cycle. The economy stopped delivering for many people, giving them reason to distrust the institutions charged with governing it, making it harder to build the coalitions required to fix what broke, giving people still more reason to distrust.

The ladder got shorter. So did trust in the institutions that could rebuild it.

Up Next: Examining the solutions.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Each series unfolds in weekly installments.

Previous series have examined China’s rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, and — most recently — America’s national debt crisis. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

On Dec. 19, 1966, my wife’s mother, father, and two sisters walked through the doors of the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami. They had fled Cuba and the Castro dictatorship with three changes of clothing — and a dream.

America gave them the chance to realize it. They settled in New York City, became U.S. citizens, worked multiple jobs, and built a good middle-class life. My wife, Danet, was later born in Queens. Their story is one example of an idea that has propelled this country from its earliest days: the American Dream.

Yet that dream is now under pressure unlike any time in decades. As America readies to celebrate its 250th birthday, the data tells a sobering story — about upward mobility stalled, opportunity narrowed, and a promise that fewer and fewer Americans believe still holds.

This series is about that gap. Today, we examine the problem. Next week: the forces driving it. The week after: what solutions might actually look like.

If you prefer to listen, find the audio narrated by me at the top of this page. Every Solving For series is available to read or listen to — I narrate each one myself — at solvingfor.io. (Was this forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

The most invoked phrase in American political life was born not in triumph, but in crisis.

In the spring of 1931, the country was gripped by the Great Depression. Millions were out of work. Unemployment would surge to a quarter of the workforce. Breadlines stretched around city blocks. Banks collapsed at a record clip, prompting bank runs as desperate account holders withdrew deposits.

Into that moment, a historian named James Truslow Adams sat down to finish a book about his country. One that traced the arc of American history and arrived at a conclusion: the nation's greatest contribution to the world was not its wealth or its military power, but an idea.

He called it the American Dream.

Not a dream of material abundance or outsized wealth, but a dream in which every man and every woman could attain the fullest measure of their potential, regardless of the circumstances of their birth. This, he wrote, is “the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world.”

Adams wanted to call his book the American Dream. But his publisher didn't think the phrase would sell. The book was instead called The Epic of America. It was a national bestseller. The title was largely forgotten. The idea inside it was not.

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Yet it’s now invoked so often — in presidential speeches, immigration ceremonies, commencement addresses, mortgage company ads — that few know its origin.

The idea that has fueled this country — that where you start shouldn't determine where you finish — is failing by its own terms. And the data is unambiguous.

A survey last year found that nearly 7 in 10 Americans say the Dream — that if you work hard, you will get ahead — no longer holds true, or never did. That is the highest share in nearly 15 years of Wall Street Journal-NORC polling. Only 25% say they have a good chance of improving their standard of living, a record low in surveys dating to 1987.

The sentiment runs deeper than economics. In a March 2026 NBC News poll, 59% of registered voters agreed that the economic and political systems are stacked against people like them — tying a record high over roughly 40 years since NBC News started polling the question. For context: that’s higher than in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession.

The pessimism cuts across party lines, generations, and income levels. But it is not evenly distributed. An AP-NORC poll conducted this spring found that nearly half of Americans 60 and older still believe the Dream holds true. Among adults ages 18 to 29, that number falls to one in five.

In 2024, Open Research published findings from a three-year economic study. One participant, a woman identified in the study as Tara, put it plainly: “If I work hard, I’m gonna be successful, I’m going to make it.”

Then she added, “I think it’s a bit delusional actually, now that I said it out loud.”

The Dream Wasn’t for All

The Dream that Adams named was always a specific promise. It was never universally applied.

The country that produced it also produced slavery, which lasted until 1865. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. Legal racial segregation persisted until 1964. The postwar economic boom that many Americans remember as the Dream’s fullest expression — the suburbs, the union jobs, the upward mobility — was built on federal policies that systematically excluded Black Americans from its benefits.

The Dream, in other words, was never as advertised. But the promise embedded in it was real, and worth fighting for. Generations did exactly that.

They include people like Irving Berlin, whose family fled Russia when he was five to escape anti-Jewish pogroms. Speaking no English when he arrived, he grew up to write the songs that became the soundtrack of American optimism, including “God Bless America.” And people like Madam C.J. Walker, born to sharecroppers in Louisiana in 1867, two years after emancipation, who built a hair care business into a fortune that made her — a Black woman from the segregated South — one of the first self-made female millionaires in American history. Their climbs required beating odds that shouldn’t have existed. For every Berlin or Walker, millions more never got the chance.

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Langston Hughes saw it clearly. In his 1951 poem Harlem he asked: What happens to a dream deferred? A society that promises the Dream to everyone and delivers it to some is not keeping its promise — it is deferring it, indefinitely, for the rest.

Martin Luther King Jr. called it a broken contract. At the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, he told the crowd that the country’s founders had signed a check — one that guaranteed every American the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Black Americans, he said, had been handed a check marked insufficient funds.

In a July 4, 1965 speech on the American Dream, King said that “ever since the Founding Fathers of our nation dreamed this dream, America has been something of a schizophrenic personality.” He added: “Slavery and segregation have been strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal.”

The promise, across generations and across the battles fought to redeem it, was the same: birth shouldn’t determine destination. Not a guarantee of wealth, but a guarantee of access to the ladder, and a fair shot at climbing it.

Yet even as more Americans gained access to the ladder, the climb has gotten harder.

The Math Behind the Dream

The data Raj Chetty, a Harvard professor, and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights have assembled over the last decade is the most comprehensive picture we have of what the Dream actually delivers.

It is not encouraging.

A child born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has roughly a 7.5% chance of reaching the top fifth. In Denmark, that number is 11.7%. In Canada, 13.4% — approaching twice the American rate. The numbers support what seems like an absurd claim: a child born poor in America has a worse shot at achieving the American Dream than a child born poor in Denmark — or Canada.

Reinforcing the point: a 2020 World Economic Forum report on economic mobility ranked the U.S. 27th.

The generational picture is starker still. Among Americans born in 1940, more than 90% grew up to earn more than their parents. Among those born in 1984, that number had fallen to 50%. Chetty’s team called their paper The Fading American Dream. The title was not rhetorical.

Where you are born matters as much as who you are born to. A child growing up in San Jose has a 12.9% chance of rising from the bottom fifth to the top fifth of the income distribution. In Charlotte, that number is 4.4%. The Dream, it turns out, has a zip code.

Yet economic growth is not the problem. The U.S. economy has roughly tripled in real, inflation-adjusted terms since 1980. America built most of the great companies of the last half century — from Apple to Amazon, Google to Microsoft — and remains the entrepreneurial envy of the world. The problem is not that America stopped producing. The problem is what happened to what it produced.

Over that same period, the bottom half of earners saw their share of national income fall from 20% to 12% — while the top 1% saw their share rise from 12% to 20%. The economy has grown. The growth has not been shared.

Wealth tells the starkest version of the story. According to Federal Reserve data, the top 1% of American households now holds roughly as much of the nation’s total wealth as the entire bottom 90% combined — a level of concentration not seen since 1928, a year before the Great Depression and three years before Adams named the Dream.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing about that same era in The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Gatsby had reinvented himself, accumulated wealth, reached the top. And yet the novel is not a celebration. Fitzgerald dramatized what Adams was about to name: that a society organizing itself around the pursuit of wealth, rather than the expansion of opportunity, produces a different kind of country entirely.

That country is more visible now than at any point since the 1920s.

This is the full shape of the problem. At the bottom, mobility has stalled and the odds of climbing from poverty to prosperity are lower than in many peer democracies. At the top, wealth has concentrated at a rate not seen since the years before the Depression. The ladder still exists. But it is harder to reach, and harder to climb, than at any point in living memory.

“It’s basically a coin flip,” Chetty said, “as to whether you’ll do better than your parents.”

Born in Crisis, Tested Again

Adams coined the term in the depths of the worst economic crisis the country had ever seen.

He also knew it would need defending again.

“Ever since we became an independent nation,” Adams wrote, “each generation has seen an uprising of the ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming and dispelling it. Possibly the greatest of these struggles lies ahead of us.”

He wrote that in 1931.

Each time the Dream has come under pressure — from the Depression, to the long fight for civil rights, to the movements that demanded the promise be extended to everyone it had excluded — Americans have contested it, challenged it, and pushed it closer to what it claimed to be.

The question is not whether that’s possible again. The question is whether we understand what actually broke — and what it would take to rebuild it.

That’s next.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Each series unfolds in weekly installments.

Previous series have examined China's rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, and — most recently — America's national debt crisis. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

Tristan Harris is the clearest voice we have on what’s at stake in the AI moment. More than a decade ago, he sounded the alarm on social media — long before The Social Dilemma made his warnings mainstream. He thinks we’re repeating the mistake now, at a scale that dwarfs what social media wrought.

We cover a lot of ground: the incentives driving the AI race, the prisoner’s dilemma that keeps it from slowing, the difference between what’s possible and what’s probable, and two primary concerns with more advanced AI models — misuse and loss of control. Harris calls this humanity’s “ultimate test.” Whether AI becomes our greatest tool or our last invention depends on choices being made right now.

If you haven’t read our previous three-part series on AI safety, it’s here. The conversation will make more sense with that context — though it stands on its own.

Much has happened since we recorded this in April. But the framework Harris offers for understanding the stakes hasn’t dated.

A big thank you to Pablo De Ritis, the co-founder and President of Faena Rose, and the entire team.

Looking ahead, our next series examines the American Dream. America’s 250th birthday is approaching, and a Wall Street Journal poll last year found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believe the American Dream no longer holds true — or never did. What’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward looks like. That’s what we’re taking on next.

Previous series have examined China's rare earth dominance, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens, and — most recently — America's national debt crisis. Each series is available for reading or listening (and I narrate them all) at solvingfor.io.

Show Notes

• 0:00 — Opening by Pablo De Ritis, President of Faena Rose

• 3:24 — Introduction of Tristan Harris by Matt Haggman

• 8:40 — Why AI dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined

• 12:15 — How AI operates: not programmed, grown

• 15:13 — Regulation of AI: “there is more regulation on making a sandwich in New York City than there is for building potentially world-ending artificial intelligence”

• 16:12 — The incentives: thinking about the possible, but not the probable

• 25:55 — The risks: can’t separate the promise from the peril

• 30:40 — Solutions

• 36:30 — Reasons for optimism

• 42:55 — Q&A

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what's broken, what's driving it, and what a path forward might look like. Learn more here.

In Part Three — the final installment of our series on the national debt — we turn to solutions. How one economist’s warnings are growing harder to ignore. How seven leading think tanks, spanning the ideological spectrum, each produced a credible plan to stabilize the debt. How a Canadian near-collapse in 1995 offers a preview of what may force Washington to act. And why the window for gradual, humane reform keeps closing with every year Congress defers the hard choices.

Missed the earlier installments? Part One explores why the national debt — now larger than the entire U.S. economy — should matter to every American, and why the generation now entering the workforce is the first to inherit a bill they never agreed to run up. Go here. Part Two examines the forces that built it — politicians committing to investments they were unwilling to pay for, shifting the tax burden away from wealth and toward work, and the Baby Boomers whose retirements created a structural deficit no single Congress has been willing to fix. Go here.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Jessica Riedl has spent more than two decades doing math that almost no one in Washington wants to see.

She began her career at the Heritage Foundation in 2001, one of the country’s most influential conservative think tanks, analyzing federal spending, deficits, and debt. She later served six years as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a Republican known for taking fiscal policy seriously in a party that increasingly did not. Today she is a fellow at the Brookings Institution, after eight years at the Manhattan Institute, still following the numbers wherever they lead.

What makes Riedl unusual in Washington is that her conclusions have remained remarkably consistent regardless of political fashion. She has worked in conservative institutions and center-left ones. She has advised Republicans and collaborated with Democrats. Yet her central message has changed very little.

To Riedl, there is no painless solution to America’s outsized national debt.

The gap between what the federal government has promised to spend and what it collects in revenue has grown too large for any single policy to close. It requires a mix across the fault lines of modern U.S. politics: slower growth in Social Security spending, slower growth in Medicare and healthcare spending, less spending across other federal programs, and higher taxes. None of those changes would happen overnight. All would need to be phased in gradually over many years so households, businesses, and retirees could adjust.

The source of the problem is well understood. Americans are living longer, Baby Boomers are retiring, healthcare costs continue to rise, and elected officials have repeatedly chosen borrowing over taxes or spending cuts. Together, those forces have pushed the national debt to 100 percent of GDP — a level the United States has not seen since the years immediately following World War II. The Congressional Budget Office projects the debt will surpass that postwar record this decade.

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Riedl also attacks what she considers budget myths.

Waste, fraud, and abuse are worth addressing, she argues, but the savings are too small to close a fiscal gap measured in trillions. Taxing billionaires more heavily would help, but is not enough by itself. Eliminating foreign aid, shrinking federal bureaucracies, or relying on faster growth may improve the margins, but none fundamentally changes the trajectory.

Riedl has been direct about where that trajectory leads. Unless reforms are enacted, she has written, Washington's escalating borrowing demands will eventually overwhelm the capacity of financial markets to supply lending at plausible interest rates. When that happens, interest rates soar and the federal government cannot pay its bills. The effects would not be abstract — mortgage payments would climb, retirement accounts would lose value, and businesses would pull back on hiring and investment.

In a 2024 interview on PBS’s Firing Line, Riedl noted that when she meets privately with Republicans and Democrats, lawmakers often agree on the broad outlines of what would be required. What they doubt is whether they could survive the politics.

The political will to act, she argues, probably will not arrive “until the sky actually begins falling.”

Economists disagree about the precise mix of spending cuts and tax increases, but there is far less disagreement about the range of options available — and analysts across the ideological spectrum have already produced credible plans to stabilize the debt. Seven of them, in fact.

The obstacle is not analytical clarity. It is creating the conditions under which elected officials are willing to act on what they already know. That is the harder problem — and the one this series ends on.

The Problem Isn’t the Math

How does a democracy fix a problem it has understood for nearly half a century and repeatedly chosen not to address?

The honest answer, supported by the history of nearly every comparable fiscal crisis in democratic governments, is that it usually doesn’t — at least not voluntarily, and not until something forces it.

In 2010, President Obama commissioned a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel led by Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan Simpson. The commission produced a serious, balanced plan that combined spending cuts and tax increases. It borrowed ideas from both parties and satisfied neither. The commission fell short of the 14 votes it needed to formally advance its recommendations to Congress. The political conditions were not yet desperate enough to make soundness matter.

On the spending side, Social Security and Medicare are unavoidable. Together they represent the largest and fastest-growing share of federal spending. Closing the gap means choosing from a short list of genuinely unpopular options: gradually raising the retirement age, slowing benefit growth for higher earners, reforming healthcare programs to reduce cost growth, or some combination of all three.

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The tax side is equally unavoidable. Taxes will need to rise. The debate is over how, and on whom. Possibilities include rolling back the 2017 individual tax cuts — extended permanently by Congress in 2025 — which would raise revenue. Raising the corporate tax rate, which had been cut from 35 percent to 21 percent under the same law, would raise more. Taxing investment income at the same rates as wage income — eliminating a preferential gap that has widened over decades — would raise still more.

Each proposal has supporters and critics. Each carries economic tradeoffs. Each has a well-organized constituency prepared to fight it.

That is the central political challenge. Americans consistently tell pollsters they want the deficit reduced. They also oppose, with equal consistency, most of the specific measures required to reduce it.

The structural problem is not cowardice, exactly. It is rational behavior inside a broken incentive system. Politicians face elections every two or six years. The pain of entitlement reform is immediate, attributable, and politically dangerous. The benefit — a more sustainable fiscal trajectory decades from now — is diffuse and distant.

Politicians are not defying the public. They are following it.

The Solutions Already Exist

In 2024, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation did something unusual. It handed money to seven of Washington’s leading think tanks — organizations that agree on almost nothing — and asked each of them to solve the national debt. Not gesture at it. Solve it.

They called it Solutions Initiative 2024.

The American Enterprise Institute participated. So did the Economic Policy Institute. The Manhattan Institute. The Center for American Progress. The Bipartisan Policy Center. The Progressive Policy Institute. The American Action Forum.

Every single plan worked.

That is the finding worth stapling to the wall of every congressional office. Not one plan — seven. Across every ideological orientation, through combinations of spending cuts and revenue increases that varied in composition, all seven organizations produced a credible path to fiscal stability.

Where the plans agree is striking.

Every organization concluded that healthcare costs are a major driver of long-term debt and must be addressed. Every organization found some changes to Social Security and Medicare unavoidable. Every organization accepted that the gap cannot be closed on one side of the ledger alone.

Where they differ is essentially a values argument dressed in fiscal language.

The right-leaning plans arrive at a smaller government, relying more heavily on spending restraint. The left-leaning plans envision a larger government financed by significantly higher revenues. Both paths stabilize the debt.

The center lands somewhere between those poles, distributing sacrifice across both parties’ sacred cows. A little entitlement reform. A little tax reform. Something for everyone to dislike, which is the definition of a workable compromise.

The obstacle is creating the political conditions under which elected officials are willing to choose.

The Mechanisms for Action

Democracies have developed mechanisms precisely because ordinary politics fails on problems like this one. None is perfect. But they represent the available toolkit.

Bipartisan commissions are the most familiar. Their weakness, as Bowles-Simpson demonstrated, is that they require political leaders to embrace the recommendations after they are made.

A stronger version — modeled on the military base-closing process known as BRAC — would insulate fiscal recommendations from amendment entirely. Under BRAC, a commission's proposals become law automatically unless Congress votes to reject them in their entirety. Lawmakers cannot pick and choose — they can only accept or block the package whole.

Variations of this idea have been proposed repeatedly for Social Security reform, most recently the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026, introduced by Republican Tom Cole and Democrat Tom Suozzi. None has passed.

Fiscal rules offer another approach — statutory limits on deficits, debt, or spending designed to constrain elected leaders. The United States has tried versions before. The Gramm-Rudman deficit targets of the 1980s and the budget caps of 2011 both broke down when Congress decided the limits had become more painful than the deficits.

Independent fiscal institutions offer a fourth path. The Congressional Budget Office already plays this role in part by providing nonpartisan scoring of legislation. But the United States has no institution specifically tasked with evaluating government fiscal plans against long-term sustainability targets — and holding leaders publicly accountable when they fall short. The United Kingdom's Office for Budget Responsibility does exactly that. The U.S. does not have an equivalent.

Automatic triggers may be the most technically promising approach. Under such a system, reforms would take effect automatically when a trust fund approached insolvency, unless Congress voted to stop them — flipping the default. Inaction would now produce reform rather than prevent it. Policy experts across the ideological spectrum have proposed versions of this idea.

Each aims to give elected leaders the political cover to make decisions they already know need to be made. The debt keeps rising.

What Usually Forces Action

Riedl has been direct about where the current trajectory leads. “Washington is on a totally unsustainable fiscal path,” she has written, “that virtually ensures some version of a debt crisis.” History offers a sense of what that looks like.

By the early 1990s, Canada had spent years running deficits that were producing familiar warnings: the debt was too large, the trajectory was unsustainable, something had to change.

Cabinet minister Marcel Massé would later recount one such moment when the warnings stopped being abstract. The deputy minister of finance, he wrote, "told me, ashen-faced before a cabinet meeting early in 1994, that 30 minutes before a Government of Canada bond auction that morning there had been no bids.”

In American terms, this would be the U.S. Treasury holding a routine auction for the bonds that finance the federal deficit — and finding no buyers.

Even then, action did not come quickly. Credit-rating agencies were threatening downgrades. International investors were openly questioning Canada's finances. In January 1995, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling Canada “an honorary member of the Third World.”

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On February 27, 1995, Finance Minister Paul Martin introduced one of the most aggressive deficit-reduction plans in the country’s modern history. Federal spending was cut sharply. Revenues increased. Three years later, Canada recorded its first budget surplus in nearly three decades.

The argument had been available for years. What changed was that the cost of inaction became immediate and visible. The bond market had delivered a verdict that politicians could no longer postpone.

This is the path many fiscal experts believe is most likely for the United States. Not a grand bargain engineered by statesmen. Not a voter awakening. A market event — a spike in Treasury yields, a failed auction, a high-profile downgrade — that suddenly makes the cost of inaction greater than the cost of action.

Earlier this year, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog whose board includes former senators and cabinet secretaries from both parties — warned that the United States is "woefully underprepared" for the next economic shock. It called on Congress to develop what it labeled a "Break Glass Plan," ready to deploy the moment a crisis strikes.

The CRFB did not say if.

It said when.

Before the Sky Begins Falling

Which brings us back to Jessica Riedl. She has spent years warning that there is no painless path out of America’s debt problem. But there is an important distinction between painful and impossible.

In a 2024 Manhattan Institute blueprint, Riedl proposed gradually raising Social Security's early and full retirement ages to 64 and 69, trimming Social Security and Medicare benefits for higher earners while protecting lower-income seniors, and reforming Medicare through more competitive pricing. On the tax side, her blueprint would restore the top income tax rate to 39.6 percent, remove loopholes to avoid capital gains taxes, and eliminate a tax break the 2017 law created for business owners that salaried workers do not receive. No single element closes the gap. The point is the combination.

Her conclusion mirrors what emerged from the seven Peterson Foundation plans: the details differ, the values differ, the balance between taxes and spending differs — but they all converge on the same point. There is no version of stabilizing the debt that allows Americans to keep every promise, maintain current tax levels, avoid major spending reforms, and still bring the debt under control.

The solutions have been studied, scored, debated, revised, and published for years.

The challenge is political.

The cruelest consequence of delay is that the window for gradual reform keeps closing. Every conventional political promise — “we won’t touch benefits for anyone over 55” — becomes harder to honor with each passing year.

Voluntary reform — the kind Congress could enact today with gradual phase-ins, protections for vulnerable retirees, and decades for households to adjust — would almost certainly be less painful than the version imposed by a crisis. Every year of delay makes the eventual changes larger, more abrupt, and more politically explosive.

History suggests that democracies rarely act until they must. Canada waited until markets forced the issue. The United States may prove different. It may not.

The solutions are written.

The unanswered question is whether America’s elected leaders adopt one before the bond market writes its own.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

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Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

In Part Two of our series on the national debt, we turn to the forces that built it. How a budget director's confession in 1981 revealed the mechanism that would define the next four decades. How Congress repeatedly lowered taxes on wealth while expanding what the government promised to spend. How 73 million Baby Boomers created a structural deficit no single Congress has been willing to fix. And how rising interest rates may finally be closing the window that allowed Washington to defer the reckoning.

Missed Part One? Go here to understand why the national debt — now larger than the entire U.S. economy — should matter to every American, and why the generation now entering the workforce is the first to inherit a bill they never agreed to run up. Part Three will explore solutions.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself — audio for this installment is coming soon. In the meantime, Substack's built-in audio is available. All series are at solvingfor.io.

In September 1789, Thomas Jefferson sat down in Paris to write James Madison a letter about money he believed no one had the right to spend.

The city around him was coming apart — the French Revolution only weeks old, the Bastille having fallen in July, the monarchy buckling under debts it could no longer service. Watching the living taxed for debts they had never chosen, Jefferson wrote Madison: “the earth belongs… to the living.” No generation should be able to bind the next with debt it cannot repay within its own lifetime — which Jefferson, working from mortality tables, set at about 19 years.

By 1803, Jefferson sat in Washington as the third president of the United States, and the question he'd put to Madison was about to land on his own desk. Napoleon’s France was willing to sell the Louisiana Territory, and the price was money the young government did not have.

Madison, the man Jefferson warned about the danger of binding future generations, was now his secretary of state. The two men who had argued on paper over whether one generation may mortgage the next found themselves, together, committing the republic to the largest debt of its short life.

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The terms: about $15 million for 828,000 square miles, doubling the size of the country in a single stroke. But the U.S. government did not have the funds in its treasury, nor did America have the capital markets to raise it. The new world turned to the old, issuing bonds through two European banks: Baring & Company in London and Hope & Company in Amsterdam — debt that America would spend two decades repaying, the final installment in 1823. Even the bankers were uneasy. Sir Francis Baring wrote of trembling “at the magnitude of the American account.”

They did it anyway — the purchase encompassed 15 future states, the greatest real estate transaction in history.

The story captures two strands of America's relationship with debt — wary of it in principle, willing to shoulder it when the stakes demanded it.

The Louisiana Purchase was not an exception. America had been born in debt following the Revolutionary War — the first U.S. treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, argued that a manageable debt was a national blessing: committing creditors to the new government's success and building the credit the country would need.

Through its history, the country borrowed a great deal — to survive the War of 1812, to preserve the Union through the Civil War, to lift itself out of the Great Depression, and to fight two world wars. World War II pushed federal debt to a record 106 percent of GDP in 1946 — and over the next three decades, the country paid it down to roughly a quarter.

The borrowing had a beginning, a reason, and an end.

Today, that’s no longer the case.

The country is now adding debt at a rate that will eclipse the post-World War II record by the end of the decade, with no end in sight. But there is no war to point to. No depression to climb out of. No continent to acquire. The federal government keeps borrowing without the discipline that once restrained it, or the purpose that justified it.

Deficits Don’t Matter

Today’s debt problem stems from three choices, repeated over the past 45 years until they hardened into habit.

First, politicians committed to things they were unwilling to ask voters to pay for — tax cuts, wars, new benefits. Rather than raise taxes or cut spending, they let borrowing close the gap, knowing voters rarely held them accountable for the deferral. The bill would come later, after they’re gone.

Second, the tax burden increasingly shifted away from wealth and toward work, asking more of the paycheck than the investment portfolio. The shift reduced federal revenues and added to the debt.

Third, Americans lived longer, and the cost of supporting an aging population through programs like Social Security and Medicare continued to climb. What had once been manageable obligations became steadily larger claims on the federal budget.

The roots of the modern era of debt politics can be traced to 1981.

David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s 35-year-old budget director, spent much of that year arguing that cutting taxes while increasing defense spending would actually shrink the deficit.

Then, in a series of conversations with journalist William Greider that became a damaging profile in The Atlantic that December, he admitted the numbers didn’t add up. Future spending cuts had been replaced by what he called the “magic asterisk”: promises of savings that had never been specified.

The tax cuts were signed. The spending cuts largely were not.

The deficit the asterisk concealed did not disappear. It was simply handed forward.

The details would change. The incentives would not.

There was a brief interruption in the late 1990s, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and a Republican-controlled Congress produced balanced budgets and reduced the debt.

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Then the pattern returned.

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts under President George W. Bush erased projected surpluses. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars were financed through borrowing but, unlike previous wars, without higher taxes or war bonds. America had borrowed to fight wars before. What was new was fighting them while cutting taxes, leaving the bill for future taxpayers. In 2003, Congress added a Medicare prescription drug benefit without identifying how to pay for it.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill later recalled that Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed deficit concerns with a simple conclusion from the Reagan years: “deficits don’t matter.”

Borrowing was no longer an exception. It was becoming standard operating procedure.

Then came two genuine emergencies: the financial crisis and the pandemic. Both required massive federal intervention. Both also left the government with a permanently higher fiscal baseline.

Most of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent in 2012 under President Barack Obama, with bipartisan support in Congress. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by President Donald Trump cut individual taxes again without offsets and reduced the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent — the largest such cut in U.S. history. In 2025, Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress extended many of those cuts through the "One Big Beautiful Bill," which the Congressional Budget Office estimated would add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.

Debt ceased to be an emergency measure reserved for wars, recessions, or national projects. It became the routine way Washington avoided hard choices.

In 2010, Stockman, a Republican, wrote that the seeds had been planted in 1981, lamenting the “Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts.”

Taxing Work, Rewarding Wealth

The second shift was quieter than the rise of deficit politics, but just as consequential.

In a 2011 op-ed, titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” Warren Buffett disclosed that he had paid a federal tax rate of 17.4 percent the previous year. His secretary, Debbie Bosanek, had paid 35.8 percent. The difference was not that Buffett concealed income. It was that most of his earnings came through capital gains and dividends — taxed at lower rates than wages. She was paying more than twice his rate. It was entirely legal.

But the Buffett-Bosanek contrast was not an anomaly. It was the system working as designed.

Over the last 45 years, Congress repeatedly lowered taxes on investment income relative to wages, arguing that lower taxes on capital would encourage entrepreneurship, investment, and economic growth. Today, the top federal tax rate on ordinary income is 37 percent, while long-term capital gains are generally taxed at 20 percent.

The shift changed who carried the tax burden. Wages are taxed automatically through payroll withholding. Investment gains can accumulate for years before being taxed and, when realized, often face lower rates. As asset values rose, more income flowed through forms taxed more lightly than labor.

The full scale of the divide came into view in 2021, when ProPublica published leaked IRS data showing that some of America's wealthiest individuals — including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Michael Bloomberg — had paid little or no federal income tax in certain years, their wealth surging while taxable income remained small.

The question is simple: why was the government repeatedly lowering taxes on wealth while its commitments — and its debts — kept growing?

The result was not that the wealthy paid no taxes. Many paid enormous sums. The result was that the tax base increasingly leaned on earned income while much of the country’s fastest-growing wealth received preferential treatment.

The government had committed itself to large and growing obligations while simultaneously pulling back from taxing some of the fastest-growing sources of wealth. The gap, once again, was filled with borrowing.

No One Voted for This

The third force is different in character from the first two.

Politicians chose to borrow rather than tax or cut. Politicians chose to tax investment returns more lightly than work. But no politician chose to make Americans older. No one decided that Baby Boomers would retire in waves, that lifespans would lengthen, or that healthcare costs would rise faster than the economy. These things simply happened — and the government’s finances were not built to absorb them.

That was David Walker’s message, and he delivered it to anyone who would listen.

Walker served as U.S. Comptroller General from 1998 to 2008 — the country's chief auditor — and became one of Washington's most persistent voices warning that the long-term fiscal trajectory was worse than most Americans understood.

He took his case on the road in the “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour,” and his warnings became the subject of a 2008 documentary, I.O.U.S.A. Few in Washington were listening.

That was 17 years ago. The debt has since grown fivefold.

The programs at the center of Walker’s alarm — Social Security and Medicare — were designed for a different America. When Medicare was established in 1965, there were roughly four workers for every retiree. The math worked because the young were numerous and the old were not.

That ratio has been narrowing ever since. The Baby Boom generation — 73 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — began retiring around 2010 and will continue through the mid-2030s. Lifespans have lengthened. Birthrates have fallen. By 2035, there will be roughly 2.4 workers supporting each Social Security beneficiary, down from four a generation ago.

Healthcare compounds the problem. Medicare costs do not just grow with the number of retirees; they grow with the cost of care itself, which has consistently outpaced inflation and economic growth. An aging population consumes more healthcare, and that healthcare becomes more expensive every year.

The result is a structural deficit that no one voted for and no single Congress created. Social Security and Medicare face a combined funding shortfall of nearly $78 trillion over the next 75 years, according to the programs' trustee reports. The Social Security trust fund is projected to be exhausted by 2033 — seven years from now — at which point benefits would be automatically reduced unless Congress acts. These are not speculative scenarios. They are the official projections of the programs’ own trustees.

This force, unlike the first two, requires no bad faith to explain. The politicians who built these programs were not concealing a time bomb. They were designing a safety net for their moment.

The country changed. The programs largely have not.

This Time May Be Different

Three forces brought the United States to this point: decades of borrowing to avoid difficult choices, a tax system that increasingly favored investment over work, and demographic changes that steadily increased the cost of programs like Social Security and Medicare.

For years, the consequences seemed manageable. The debt grew, but so did the economy. Growth often outran the government’s borrowing costs, allowing Washington to carry ever-larger obligations without an immediate reckoning.

That advantage may be fading, and the reason is interest rates.

Economists have a shorthand for the relationship: r > g, where r is the government's borrowing rate and g is economic growth. When growth is faster than borrowing costs, debt is generally easier to manage. When borrowing costs exceed growth for sustained periods, debt becomes much harder to stabilize.

Interest rates have risen sharply from the ultra-low levels that prevailed for much of the 2010s. The Congressional Budget Office projects that within the next decade the government’s average borrowing costs could exceed the economy’s growth rate — a shift that would make the debt far more difficult to stabilize and increase the risk of a debt spiral.

That prospect has begun to change minds.

In a May 2026 essay for The Atlantic, economist Jared Bernstein noted that he had spent much of his career dismissing claims that a high debt-to-GDP ratio signaled imminent crisis. But if interest rates begin to outpace growth, he argued, the calculus changes. “If you’re not worried about this country’s fiscal outlook,” Bernstein wrote, “you’re not paying enough attention.”

Jefferson’s warning more than 230 years ago was about more than debt. It was about accountability — the idea that the people who make a decision should be the ones who live with it. For most of American history, that principle held, imperfectly but recognizably: wars were fought and paid for, crises met and resolved. What the past 45 years produced is something different — debt without emergency, spending without payment, commitments made by one generation and quietly handed to the next.

At some point, there is no one left to pass it to.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

If this resonated, please give it a like and share with someone you think would enjoy it.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

U.S. government debt has been a fixture of American life for decades. And it hasn’t seemed to matter. Markets keep humming. The economy keeps growing. Life goes on.

Yet, the national debt recently surpassed the size of the entire U.S. economy. The federal government is on its way to setting a new all-time record for indebtedness, and there is little end in sight. Now, some are sounding alarms they haven’t sounded before about the risks it presents today, and the burden it places on the next generation.

Today, we explore the problem and why it should matter. Next week: what’s driving this. The week after: what solutions might actually look like. Every Solving For series is available to read or listen to — I narrate each one myself —at solvingfor.io.

Robert Giaimo and Henry Bellmon had almost nothing in common.

Giaimo was the son of an Italian immigrant banker, raised in New Haven, Connecticut, educated at Fordham and the University of Connecticut law school, a Democrat who spent two decades in the House representing the factory workers and union households in southern Connecticut. Bellmon was born on a farm near Tonkawa, Oklahoma, the son of a Cherokee Strip pioneer, a man who worked his way through Oklahoma A&M College, saw battle as a first lieutenant at Saipan and Iwo Jima, and served two terms in the U.S. Senate, repeatedly returning to his wheat and cattle farm in Noble County. He was a Republican, but he considered himself, above all else, a farmer.

In 1980, both men left the U.S. Congress. They had spent years on opposite sides of the House and Senate Budget Committees — Giaimo as chairman in the House, Bellmon as the ranking Republican in the Senate — watching from the inside as the federal government found it consistently easier to spend than to choose. They had seen the oil shocks, the stagflation years, the beginning of what would become a structural mismatch between what the government promised its citizens and what it was willing to collect from them.

When they left, rather than simply returning to private life, they did something unusual: they decided the problem required an institution. On June 10, 1981, they joined together to incorporate the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget — a nonpartisan organization devoted to the proposition that the country's fiscal path was unsustainable and that someone, outside the political pressures of government, needed to keep saying so.

Nearly 45 years later, the organization's president, Maya MacGuineas, explained how far the problem had traveled.

“It’s happened,” she declared in April 2026. “The national debt is now larger than the U.S. economy, about twice the historic average. We’ve heard plenty of alarm bells in the past few years about our fiscal path, but this one rings especially loudly.”

The Congressional Budget Office projects that by the end of the decade the U.S. will set a new all-time record for debt held by the public — surpassing the 106 percent of gross domestic product reached in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Unlike that debt, which the country reduced systematically over the following three decades, this one has no equivalent plan behind it — just a projection that keeps climbing. And there is a big difference, MacGuineas noted, between that moment and this one. The post-World War II debt was the price of defeating fascism. This one, she said, is the result of “a total bipartisan abdication of making hard choices.”

Why It Matters

This three-part Solving For series explores America’s national debt: why it matters, the forces that got us here, and what a way forward could look like.

It's a problem that has long escaped serious attention or any meaningful reform. But the consequences are no longer theoretical. Continued inaction carries risks to the economy, to American competitiveness, and to a generation that will inherit the bill without having agreed to run it up.

The interest payments on the debt are now the federal government's second largest spending category — more than national defense or Medicare, trailing only Social Security. Within a generation it's projected to become the federal government's single biggest expense, crowding out every public investment that historically drives prosperity: education, infrastructure, research, healthcare.

Today, nearly one-fourth of those interest payments flow to foreign countries, including China, “to build their economies rather than our own,” according to RAND, one of the country’s most respected national security and policy research institutions.

Meanwhile, the debt makes borrowing more expensive for every American who needs a mortgage, a car loan, or a business line of credit. The reason: government borrowing at this scale competes with every other borrower in the same capital markets — and it always wins, driving up the cost of credit across the entire economy.

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It shrinks the fiscal space available to respond to the next crisis. 2008 brought a Great Recession; 2020 brought COVID-19 and a global pandemic. There will be another.

It puts Social Security and Medicare on an insolvency countdown that, without action, ends in automatic benefit cuts for those who need them most.

At a time when the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else has reached the widest point in decades, it dramatically limits the government's capacity to find solutions.

And it carries the risk of a sudden loss of market confidence that turns an outsized debt burden into a full-blown financial crisis.

It’s so concerning that — despite structural advantages like the U.S. dollar's reserve currency status, the depth of American capital markets, and the scale of the U.S. economy — Hank Paulson, former Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, warned in April: “We need an emergency break-the-glass plan…so it’s ready to go when we hit the wall.”

When. Not if. And when it comes, he said, “It will be vicious.”

But the deepest problem isn't the number. A government that spends more on interest payments for past decisions than investments in future growth is one that has stopped making choices — and started living with the consequences of decisions it can no longer take back.

The World’s Richest Debtor

To understand the problem of America’s national debt, start with the economy itself.

The United States has the largest economy in the world — by far. As of the close of the first quarter of 2026, American GDP stood at $31.22 trillion — more than one quarter of all global economic output. For context: China is second at $19.4 trillion, Germany a distant third at just over $5 trillion, and Japan fourth at $4.28 trillion. The U.S. has been the most productive economic engine in human history for more than a century.

And yet. As of March 31 of this year, federal debt held by the public stood at $31.27 trillion — larger than the largest economy in the world. That figure refers to what the government owes outside investors, as distinct from the gross debt figure of $39 trillion, which includes money the government owes to itself.

The debt grows because the federal government continues to run large annual budget deficits — the yawning gap between what it collects in revenue and what it spends each year. To cover the difference, the government borrows by issuing Treasury bonds, compounding the debt.

Consider 2025. The federal government collected $5.2 trillion in revenue and spent $7.0 trillion. The $1.8 trillion gap was borrowed and added to the debt.

It's an especially alarming case of financial mismanagement, but not an anomaly. With a few exceptions, it's become the operating condition of the United States government, sustained across administrations and Congresses of both parties for decades.

The deficit is a two-sided problem. The spending side gets most of the attention. The revenue side is equally revealing — and equally the result of deliberate choices made over decades. Part Two will examine those choices, including a consequential and long-running debate about how investment income is taxed compared to wages — particularly for the wealthiest Americans.

The 2025 budget illustrates the basic picture: where the money comes from, and where it goes.

Of $5.2 trillion in tax revenues, just over half came from individual income taxes on both wages and investment gains — two forms of income the tax code treats very differently; roughly one-third from payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare; about seven percent from corporate income taxes; and the rest from a mix of excise taxes, tariffs, and fees.

The $7 trillion in federal spending falls into three categories, and the proportions reveal something important about the country's actual priorities — not as stated, but as enacted.

The first and largest is mandatory spending: programs governed by permanent law that run on autopilot unless Congress specifically acts to change them. Mandatory outlays totaled $4.2 trillion in 2025 — more than half of the entire federal budget. Social Security, the retirement and disability program, costs roughly $1.6 trillion a year. Medicare — the federal health insurance program for Americans 65 and older — accounts for nearly $1 trillion, and Medicaid — health insurance for low-income Americans of all ages — another $670 billion. These are not discretionary line items subject to annual negotiation. They are legal promises made to tens of millions of Americans who have spent their working lives paying into the system.

The remaining roughly $900 billion in mandatory spending funds other legally mandated commitments: veterans' benefits, federal employee retirement, student loan programs, and agricultural subsidies.

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The second is discretionary spending — programs Congress funds through annual appropriations, subject to yearly negotiation. In 2025, discretionary spending was just 27 percent of the total budget. Defense accounts for the largest share of that — roughly $900 billion. The Trump administration is seeking to increase that figure to $1.5 trillion in the coming fiscal year. Everything else that most people associate with the federal government — education, transportation, scientific research, environmental protection, housing, foreign aid — competes for what remains.

When politicians talk about cutting government spending without touching entitlements or defense, they are negotiating over a relatively small fraction of the whole.

The third is interest on the national debt. In 2025, that totaled nearly $1 trillion — $2.8 billion every day. Interest has become the fastest-growing line item in the entire federal budget. No roads, no research, no benefits, no security. It is the pure cost of decisions already made, extracted from the present.

Stated plainly, the federal budget reflects a specific set of national priorities that have been locked in across decades of legislation: supporting the retirement income of older Americans, funding healthcare for the elderly and the poorest Americans, maintaining a global military presence, and increasingly, servicing the debt accumulated while pursuing all three. Everything else — the investments that tend to determine a country’s future — is funded from what remains after those obligations are met.

In 2025, that remainder was not enough to cover the obligations themselves.

The Generation That Didn’t Vote for This

Researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School conduct what many consider the gold standard of American youth polling — a nationally representative survey of young adults ages 18 to 29, now in its 51st edition. The findings released in December 2025 told an unambiguous story. More than four in ten young Americans said they were struggling or getting by with only limited financial security. A clear majority said the country was on the wrong track. Money was at the root: the sense that the economic system their parents described to them is not the one they actually inherited.

Behind that instability is a specific and measurable inheritance. The generation now entering its working years is the first to do so inheriting a national debt larger than the entire economy — accumulated across decades of decisions made entirely by others. They did not vote for the tax cuts. They did not vote for the unfunded wars. They did not vote for the entitlement expansions or the emergency stimulus programs or the structural mismatch between what the government promised and what it was willing to collect. They are, in the precise sense, inheriting a bill they never agreed to run up.

The people bearing the consequences are not the people who made the decisions. That is not an accident. It is the natural outcome of a democratic system in which the costs of present decisions are deferred long enough that those who will pay them cannot yet vote.

Robert Giaimo and Henry Bellmon saw this coming in 1981. They built an institution to say so, and that institution has been saying so for nearly 45 years. The alarm has not changed. The distance between where it was first sounded and where we now stand has. The debt has crossed 100 percent of GDP. Interest payments have surpassed defense spending. A former Treasury Secretary is calling for an emergency break-the-glass plan. And a generation is entering a world shaped entirely by decisions made before they arrived, by leaders who will not be here to answer for them.

The bill, as bills sometimes do, has found its way to the last people left at the table.

Prefer to listen? I narrate each edition myself. Find the audio at the top of this page or under the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

If this resonated, please give it a like and share with someone you think would enjoy it.

Solving For takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, social media and teen mental health, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

We return to The Open Thread, our periodic check-in on past stories and a look at what’s ahead. Today we revisit four of them: A.I. safety landed on the diplomatic agenda at the U.S. and China summit, the fight for competitive congressional elections has gotten much harder, local news got a rare break, and college sports' new system governing how student athletes are paid is beginning — albeit shakily — to show its shape. All series (for reading or listening — I narrate each one) are at solvingfor.io.

AI Safety: Reconsidered

When we covered A.I. safety last fall, the central tension was this: the U.S. and China were locked in a race that neither side felt it could slow down, even as the creators of A.I., top CEOs and leading researchers warned of the risks of moving too fast. The prisoner’s dilemma of A.I., where mutual caution is the rational choice but unilateral restraint feels like surrender, seemed nearly impossible to escape.

The solution we highlighted: the U.S. and China sitting down to negotiate ways to manage the risks of A.I., just as the U.S. and Soviet Union did nearly 60 years ago (at the height of the Cold War) to control the growth and spread of nuclear weapons.

Last week, we may have seen the start of it.

Ahead of the summit between Trump and Xi in Beijing, both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that A.I. safety would be on the agenda. It came as the Trump administration had done an about-face on the need to explore guardrails, as frontier A.I. models by the likes of Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and China’s DeepSeek grow more powerful on both sides of the Pacific.

The previous posture was clear. Vice President J.D. Vance gave a speech last year in Paris declaring that the “A.I. future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety.”

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Why the change? The catalyst is Anthropic’s powerful new model, Claude Mythos, whose advanced hacking capabilities spooked government officials and set off a scramble about what the government’s role should be in managing the release of the most powerful AI systems. The White House has since moved toward considering pre-deployment safety testing — a sharp reversal from its earlier position of prioritizing rapid innovation without any guardrails.

But the fear remains: any slowdown by one side gives the other an advantage. Hence the push for a global framework established by today’s great powers. Not only rules governing the release of ever-more-powerful A.I. models — systems that could pierce financial networks or assist in the development of bioweapons — but procedures to manage a crisis. Proposals include establishing an emergency hotline between the U.S. and China for A.I. matters, modeled on the one the U.S. and Soviet Union created during the Cold War.

“The two A.I. superpowers are going to start talking,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during the meetings in Beijing. “We’re going to set up a protocol in terms of, how do we go forward with best practices for A.I. to make sure nonstate actors don’t get ahold of these models.”

Following the summit, President Trump was circumspect about specifics, but confirmed the change in approach. “AI is fantastic,” Trump said aboard Air Force One, according to The Hill. But “it’s also got some drawbacks and we’re talking about…we’re going to work together.”

A protocol. A hotline. The echoes of the nuclear age are getting harder to ignore.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety, here.

Congress: Not a Competition of Ideas — Just Power

Start with the baseline: in 2024, just 37 of 435 House races were decided by five points or less — nine percent. Most Americans now live in districts where the outcome is effectively predetermined long before Election Day. The consequence: rising polarization, a dearth of genuine debate, and a Congress no longer structured to reward solving problems — only holding power.

The House was designed by the Framers to be the chamber closest to the people — directly elected, up for election every two years, meant to mirror public sentiment. It has become the opposite.

When we covered the alarming lack of congressional competition, the core problem was structural: the way districts are drawn drains Congress of the competitive pressure that produces accountability to the entire electorate. Closed primaries compound it, pushing candidates toward the extremes before a general election audience ever weighs in. The solutions we examined — including independent redistricting commissions, open primaries, and ranked-choice voting — were slow and contested, but at least still in play.

In recent weeks, the landscape has gotten dramatically worse — and it is worth being clear about how we got here.

Facing increasingly dire polling numbers last summer, President Trump urged Republican-led states to gerrymander their congressional districts to boost the party’s chances in the upcoming midterms. It was a politician choosing his voters rather than voters choosing their politicians — and an extraordinary departure from tradition: congressional redistricting typically follows the decennial census, not a president’s approval ratings. Texas, North Carolina and Missouri quickly complied. Florida recently did too. It was nakedly political — and it set the stage for what followed.

The legal architecture enabling it came in two steps. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering is a political question — federal courts would stay out entirely. Then on April 29th, the Court went further in Louisiana v. Callais, effectively gutting the one remaining constraint: the Voting Rights Act’s protection of minority voters. Justice Kagan, in dissent, warned the majority had rendered Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” Together the two decisions form a closed loop — partisan gerrymandering is unreviewable, and race can no longer meaningfully constrain it.

The human cost is concrete. About one-third of Louisiana's population is Black, yet under the new map being advanced, the state would go from two majority-Black congressional districts back to one. The partisan math is equally stark: Louisiana has nearly identical numbers of registered Democrats and Republicans — and will now likely send five Republicans and one Democrat to Congress.

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The ruling immediately opened a new front. Tennessee drew a new map intended to eliminate the state's last Democratic House seat. South Carolina's governor called the legislature into special session to pursue a redraw. In Alabama, the attorney general was candid about his goal: a congressional map that "favors Republicans seven-to-zero." In a state where 27% of the population is Black — and where Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic — eliminating Black representation and maximizing Republican advantage are a single goal.

Democrats have tried to fight back. California voters passed a new map adding five Democratic-leaning districts. Virginia voters approved a redistricting referendum, only to have the Virginia Supreme Court strike it down 4-3, leaving the state's current maps in place through the midterms.

The point is this: the effort to make Congress more competitive, more representative, and more accountable has not stalled — it has been deliberately dismantled.

The remedies we explored still exist on paper: a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, independent redistricting commissions, open primaries, multi-member districts, and ranked-choice voting all remain possibilities. But the wheels for reform have completely come off. What’s left is the rawest version of the problem we identified — not a competition of ideas, but a competition for power, with the maps drawn accordingly.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Democracy Deficit: Solving For Competition in the People’s House, here.

Local News: A Model Worth Watching

When we covered the collapse of local news, the story was grim: newsrooms gutted, communities left without watchdogs, and no sustainable business model emerging to fill the void at scale.

Here’s a piece of good news.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a 240-year-old newspaper set to close, was purchased by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism — the nonprofit parent of The Baltimore Banner — which took ownership May 4th and pledged $30 million over five years to keep it running. The Venetoulis Institute was established by Baltimore billionaire Stewart Bainum after he failed to acquire The Baltimore Sun. Instead, he launched the Baltimore Banner from scratch in 2022 — a digital-only nonprofit that won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. This isn’t a philanthropic rescue with no model behind it. It’s an organization that has already proven nonprofit journalism can produce serious work.

The Post-Gazette would become only the second major metro daily to fully convert to nonprofit, following The Salt Lake Tribune. One rescue does not reverse a national crisis. But Pittsburgh — which had been on the verge of becoming the largest American city without a daily newspaper — now has a model worth watching.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Community Gap: Solving For Local News, here.

Paying College Athletes: Still Taking Shape

When we covered the end of amateurism in college sports, the headline was simple: the old system was dead. What remained was the harder question — how do you fairly compensate athletes who generate billions while preserving the traditions and educational mission that give college sports its meaning; and fund the non-revenue Olympic sports like track and field that football and basketball have historically bankrolled?

The system is a work in progress. But it has structure now, and that structure recently faced its first real test.

At the center of it is the House settlement, reached last year, which established a $20.5 million per-school pool for direct revenue sharing between schools and athletes — policed by a newly created body called the College Sports Commission. But the richest programs have been spending well beyond that cap. An ESPN report said the most competitive college football programs spend between $30 to $40 million to assemble their rosters. The mechanism: name, image and likeness — NIL — deals structured through third-party marketing firms, which sit outside the cap entirely. The CSC’s position is that those deals have to represent genuine commercial value — a company paying for specific, identifiable use of a player’s likeness — not a backdoor salary payment in disguise.

Last week, an arbitrator upheld the CSC’s decision to deny NIL deals involving 18 Nebraska football players and Playfly Sports, Nebraska’s multimedia rights partner, which had pledged more than $8 million to athletes through arrangements ruled to be “warehousing” — purchasing NIL rights without specifying how they’d actually be used. The ruling signals the new system has teeth. But it is less an ending than a first skirmish: a federal court hearing is scheduled for May 27 to review the CSC’s authority over exactly these kinds of deals, and Nebraska’s attorney general has signaled he may intervene.

A system taking shape. The tests are just beginning.

If you missed it, you can explore the three-part series, The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay, here.

Next up

For our next series, we turn to the U.S. federal debt. The numbers alone are stark: the debt now exceeds the entire U.S. gross domestic product — a milestone that is casting a harsh new light on how the government taxes, spends, and borrows. We’ll unpack the problem, trace how we got here, and examine what might actually be done about it.

Note: Prefer to listen? I narrate each story myself. Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

To see the full roster of deep dives, take a look below —

The 21st Century’s Oil: Solving For China’s Rare Earth Dominance

• Part 1, Rare Earths: The Invisible Backbone

• Part 2, Rare Earths: The Middle Kingdom’s Monopoly

• Part 3, Rare Earths: The Race to Reinvent

The Control Problem: Solving For AI Safety

• Part 1, AI: The Race and the Reckoning

• Part 2, AI: The Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Part 3, AI: The New Nuclear Moment

The Democracy Deficit: Solving For Competition in the People’s House

• Part 1, Congress: The Vanishing Competition

• Part 2, Congress: How We Got Stuck

• Part 3, Congress: Making Democracy Competitive Again

The Amateur Myth: Solving For College Athlete Pay

• Part 1, College Sports: How It Was Broken By a $60 Video Game

• Part 2, College Sports: How the NCAA was Born of Death and Money — Death was the Easy Part

• Part 3, College Sports: The Fork in the Road

The 80-Year Peace: Solving For a Rearming World

• Part 1, War & Peace: The World Rearms

• Part 2, War & Peace: From 1989’s Hope to Rearmament

• Part 3, War & Peace: Rebuilding the Global Order

The Community Gap: Solving For Local News

• Part 1, Local News: The Civic Unraveling

• Part 2, Local News: The Internet Was the First Disruption. AI Is the Next.

• Part 3, Local News: The Bet That Wasn’t Made, But Could Still Be

Engineered Addiction: Solving for Teen Mental Health

• Part 1, Teen Crisis: How Facebook Targeted Tweens

• Part 2, Teen Crisis: The Twenty-Six Words that Shielded Social Media

• Part 3, Teen Crisis: Three Ways Forward

In Part Three of our series on social media’s impact on teen mental health, we turn to solutions. How accountability is being pursued on two fronts at once — through more than a thousand cases working their way through the courts in the opening created by the KGM v. Meta verdict, and through efforts like forty state attorneys general pushing Congress to write a duty of care into law. How Australia raised the minimum age to have a social media account and a growing number of countries are following. How parents, schools, and kids themselves stopped waiting for Washington and went phone-free. And how the question of whether the next generation grows up under different terms is now being answered.

Missed Part One? Go here to unpack the epidemic of depression, anxiety, and, tragically, suicide among a generation of teenagers — and social media’s role in it. Missed Part Two? Go here for how a 1996 law shielded the industry, how the platforms engineered the harm behind that shield, and how lawyers built a legal theory to get around that shield. All series (for reading or listening) are at solvingfor.io.

By the time Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price walked onto The Daily Show set on the night of February 25, 2026, the cultural movement they had helped build was at its most visible. They were in midtown Manhattan to explain to Desi Lydic and her studio audience what had happened to American childhood — and what was, finally, beginning to happen in response.

Haidt had written The Anxious Generation, the 2024 book that crystallized a global conversation about the effects of smartphones and social media on young people's development. Price was the author of How to Break Up With Your Phone. Together they had written a new book for kids called The Amazing Generation. Haidt was on the show to talk about both — but mostly to talk about what had happened in the nearly two years since The Anxious Generation had landed.

A great deal had happened.

“In the first year, we got 40 US states to put limits on phones,” Haidt told Lydic. “Twenty did it right, phone-free for the whole day. Australia is the first country in the world to raise the age to 16 for social media.” The audience cheered. “And just in the last four weeks, a dozen countries have said they're going to follow. So we are at a global turning point.”

The cultural movement Haidt had helped launch — parents organizing in PTA meetings and statehouses, schools rewriting their phone policies, governments passing laws that would have been unthinkable two years earlier — was, by any measure, ascendant.

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Then Lydic asked the question the entire movement had been built around.

"How much of the onus falls on the parent and the teachers," she said, "and how much falls on these tech companies and our leaders to do the right thing?"

Haidt's answer is worth quoting, because everything that follows in this installment is, in one way or another, a response to it.

“In any rational world where you had a consumer product that was used by 95% of all children, that had killed thousands of them, that had gotten to the point where 25% of the girls say that it has damaged their mental health…it would have been sued out of existence or at least made an adult-only product.”

“Of course, we don’t live in that world,” Haidt continued. “We live in a world where wealthy industries can just pay not even that much money to buy huge amounts of influence in Congress and block anything.”

But, he said, the states were acting. The rest of the world was acting too. “I think we're going to win on this eventually, and the companies are going to have to bear some responsibility. Of course, in Los Angeles right now, they're on trial for the first time. They're facing a jury. Thousands of kids are dead and they've never had an answer for it.”

“So I think justice will come,” he concluded.

Twenty-eight days later, it did.

On March 25, 2026, in downtown Los Angeles, the jury in KGM v. Meta et al. found that Meta — owner of Facebook and Instagram — and YouTube had breached a duty of care to the minors who used their products. The verdict was the first of its kind: an American jury had held a major social media company liable, on a product-design theory, for harm to a child.

The legal architecture that had shielded the platforms for nearly thirty years had cracked. The rational world Haidt had described had begun to arrive.

For Part Three, we turn to solutions. Since adolescent depression, loneliness, and suicide began their rise after the smartphone and the always-on social platform reshaped American childhood, the work of finding a fix has been underway. It has broadly coalesced around three approaches.

Fix the product. Hold the platforms accountable for the design of what they sell — through litigation like KGM, through legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act, and through regulation requiring age-appropriate design codes.

Raise the age. Restrict access until children are older. Australia's age-sixteen law took effect in December 2025. A growing number of countries are following.

Change what’s normal. Cultural change among parents, schools, and kids themselves. Phone-free school days. Parents organizing in PTA meetings to break the collective action trap that keeps individual families from saying no. Norms about when children get smartphones and when they get social media. Helping kids make their own good decisions.

“This all makes so much more sense if you stop focusing on the phones and you focus instead on childhood,” Haidt said on The Daily Show. “What is a healthy human childhood?”

Fix The Product

The most direct response to the harms documented in this series is the one the KGM jury delivered: hold the platforms accountable for the design choices that caused the harm. This is the project of taking that verdict and making it the rule rather than the exception.

There are two ways to do this: civil litigation and legislation.

Civil litigation rests on a single legal doctrine: duty of care. It's the long-standing principle that anyone who designs and sells a consumer product owes its users a basic obligation not to design it in ways that foreseeably injure them.

For thirty years, platforms operated outside this framework, because Section 230 was read to immunize them from claims arising out of the content their users posted. The KGM verdict did not overturn Section 230. It established something narrower but consequential: that design-defect claims targeting the platform’s own conduct — its recommender systems, its notification engineering, its retention features — survive Section 230 because they are not about user content. They are about the product.

The path applies duty of care case by case. The cases are piling up. Behind the KGM jury verdict sits a docket that increasingly resembles the early years of tobacco litigation: more than a thousand personal injury cases against Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok consolidated in California state court, and more than two thousand coordinated in federal court.

The social media companies have begun settling some cases and fighting others, the same posture Big Tobacco took in the early 1990s before the cumulative weight of verdicts and disclosures produced the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. Whether the same arc holds for social media remains an open question. What is clear is that the legal wall that protected the industry for thirty years has cracked, and the litigation is moving through the opening.

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Legislation takes a different route: write the duty of care into statute. This approach is illustrated by the proposed Kids Online Safety Act, which would set the standard in federal law and let the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general enforce it across the industry. KOSA passed the Senate 91-3 in July 2024. The House version, advanced by Republican leadership, stripped the duty of care entirely. Forty state attorneys general wrote in February 2026 backing the Senate version, but the legislation is stuck.

In the absence of federal action, states have moved. Age-appropriate design codes have been enacted in California, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont, and South Carolina, imposing requirements like privacy by default, no targeted advertising to minors, and a ban on dark patterns such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and streak counters.

Several of these laws are now under First Amendment challenge. In NetChoice v. Bonta, the Ninth Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction against parts of California's law. Civil liberties groups argue that a duty of care covering the content kids see — not just how the platform is built — chills lawful speech, particularly speech about mental health, sexual orientation, and reproductive care that vulnerable teens often most need to find.

But even if every mechanism outlined here succeeded — if KOSA passed with the duty intact, if the design codes survived constitutional challenge, if KGM became the leading edge of a thousand similar verdicts — the question of whether children should be encountering these products at all would remain.

Fixing the product makes the product safer. It does not answer when, or whether, a child should be using it.

Raise The Age

The second approach starts from a different premise: until the product is safer, keep children away from it.

Australia’s age-sixteen law took effect on December 10, 2025. It applies to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and X — the platforms most American teenagers use, the platforms named in the KGM litigation, the platforms a generation of parents has watched their children disappear into. Within the first six weeks Australia’s eSafety Commissioner reported that 4.7 million accounts belonging to under-sixteens had been removed, with non-compliant platforms facing fines of up to AUD$49.5 million. Greece has announced that a ban at 15 will start in 2027. France is debating a similar law. Indonesia, Brazil, Austria, Denmark, Malaysia, Ecuador, and others have moved or are moving in the same direction.

The cultural and political logic is straightforward. Individual families could not keep their children off the platforms because the platforms were where their children’s friends were — the collective action trap that Haidt and others have spent two years documenting. A government restriction breaks the trap by making the platform legally inaccessible to everyone at once.

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On this question, at a time of deep political polarization in the U.S., the usual partisan map is not holding. Congress has not moved, but states have, and the alignments are unfamiliar. Republican and Democratic attorneys general have filed the same suits. Red-state governors and blue-state senators have backed the same restrictions. Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed a law banning Floridians under 14 from holding social media accounts, said, “Being buried in those devices all day is not the best way to grow up.” Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal is the lead sponsor of KOSA.

The opposition is bipartisan too: the ACLU on speech and privacy grounds, libertarian conservatives on parental rights. When neither coalition maps onto the usual axis, it may signal something is about to give.

It is too early to tell whether age restriction reduces the harms it targets. Australia’s law has been in effect for less than six months. Public health interventions of this kind take a decade or more to show up clearly in outcome data. What the early reports do show is that the law is not yet reaching the kids it's meant to protect: by March 2026, the eSafety Commissioner found no measurable decline in reported cyberbullying or image-based abuse, and roughly 70 percent of parents whose children had previously held accounts believed their children still did.

The deeper questions are about the framework itself. Candice Odgers at UC Irvine and Amy Orben at Cambridge have long argued that the causal evidence linking social media to youth mental health decline is weaker than the Haidt framework presents, raising doubts about whether interventions built on separating teens from social media will deliver the outcomes proponents promise.

But the case for raising the age does not depend on age restriction being sufficient on its own. It buys time during the years when adolescent brains are still forming. It breaks the collective action trap from above, in a way no individual family can break it from below.

Raising the age does not fix the product, and it does nothing for the older teenagers already on the platforms. But it changes the terms on which the next generation encounters them.

Change What’s Normal

The third approach starts from a different question. Even if every mechanism in the first two approaches succeeded — accountability forcing the products to be safer, every age line raised — children will still encounter them. The question is what kind of children encounter them, and what tools they bring to the encounter.

This is the work of cultural change. It is the work parents, schools, and kids themselves can do without waiting for Congress, the courts, or any government at all. It moves at the speed of families talking to other families, of school boards or a single school principal rewriting their phone policies, of friend groups deciding together what they will and will not do. It does not require legal force.

The most widely adopted intervention is the phone-free school day. By early 2026, 35 states had enacted or recommended classroom phone restrictions, and many districts and individual schools had moved on their own ahead of state action. The early data is encouraging: a study of Florida's statewide ban found rising test scores and falling discipline problems by the second year. At one Louisville high school, library checkouts jumped 61 percent after phones came out of the classroom, and the library became, in the principal's words, a place where students "look at each other in the eyes and talk." At Portland's Grant High School, the principal noticed something simpler after his school went phone-free: lunchtime, he said, was loud again.

Alongside this sit broader efforts: Wait Until 8th, which asks parents to delay giving their children smartphones until at least eighth grade, and similar pledges that let parents act in coordinated cohorts rather than as isolated families. There is also a growing body of writing aimed at kids and teens themselves, including Catherine Price and Jonathan Haidt's The Amazing Generation, which is framed as an invitation rather than a prohibition.

Students are taking matters into their own hands. Student-led efforts like the Reconnect Movement, which creates phone-free social spaces without asking participants to give up phones entirely, have been spreading on high school and college campuses.

Whether phone-free schools and parent pledges reduce adolescent depression and anxiety at the population level is not yet known, and cannot yet be known. The phone-free school day movement is barely two years old at scale.

But the cultural-change approach does something the other two cannot. It does not protect children from a world that includes these platforms; it prepares children for that world. Phone-free school days are not just restrictions — they are practice in what attention without a phone feels like. Parent pledges are not just delays — they are demonstrations of what coordinated adult judgment looks like. The youth movement Haidt and Price describe is more than refusal — it is kids exercising the judgment they will need for the rest of their lives.

The goal is not a smaller world for children. It is the capacity to live in this one.

The Work Has Begun

What is a healthy human childhood?

The harms documented in this series did not arrive overnight, and the answer to them will not arrive overnight either. The tobacco settlement took decades to assemble. The leaded-gasoline ban took a generation. Public smoking bans came long after the science was settled. Industrial harm to children, once it has been built into a profitable consumer product, does not unwind on a political news cycle.

The lesson of the years since Section 230 became law is that this is not a decision the tech companies will make for us. The hands-off posture — Section 230’s shield, the deference to innovation, the assumption that tech leaders would act in the public interest — has been tested at scale and failed. The warnings came from inside the companies themselves — Meta, in particular: the Haugen disclosures, the Béjar testimony, the internal documents now part of the KGM trial record. The leadership chose not to act. A generation of children paid the price.

The decision cannot be left to tech companies. The public has to make it. We have to make it.

What can be said now, in the spring of 2026, is that the work has begun. A generation of parents, teachers, and kids themselves stopped accepting that this was normal. The KGM verdict in Los Angeles cracked the legal architecture. Australia raised the age. More than thirty U.S. states have enacted or recommended classroom phone restrictions. Students started organizing phone-free spaces of their own. None of these alone closes the gap between the harm Haidt and Price named on The Daily Show in February and the product still operating today. But the work of closing it has begun.

A generation of children was harmed by design. Whether the next generation grows up under different terms is the question now being answered.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

In Part Two of our series on social media's impact on teen mental health, we turn to the forces that got us here. How the 1996 law shielded the industry for thirty years. How the platforms, behind that shield, engineered what Facebook’s founding president called a vulnerability in human psychology — and aimed it at children. How former employees broke ranks to expose what the company knew. How parents' lawyers, after years of losing, finally found the theory that worked. And how change is now stirring around the world, except in Washington.

Missed Part One? Go here to unpack the epidemic of depression, anxiety, and, tragically, suicide among a generation of teenagers — and social media’s role in it. Part Three will explore solutions. All series (for reading or listening) are at solvingfor.io.

In October 1994, an anonymous user logged onto a bulletin board called Money Talk and accused a Long Island brokerage firm of running fraudulent IPOs. The firm’s president, the post said, had committed a twenty-two-million-dollar criminal fraud.

The bulletin board was hosted by Prodigy — an early online service similar to AOL, a dial-up walled garden with about two million subscribers. The firm was Stratton Oakmont — the boiler room Jordan Belfort would later memorialize in The Wolf of Wall Street. The president was Danny Porush. The accusations were true. But in 1994, the fraud was still hidden, and Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy for defamation. Its theory was that because Prodigy moderated its bulletin boards, it was acting as a publisher of its users’ speech.

On May 24, 1995, a New York judge agreed. If Prodigy had ignored its service and let anything through, it would have been protected as a distributor, like a bookstore. Because it had tried to moderate, it had become liable. The ruling created an impossible choice for every online service in America: moderate and be sued, or abandon moderation entirely.

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Two members of Congress — Chris Cox, a California Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat — thought this was insane. A month after the Prodigy decision, they introduced a provision, buried inside the larger Telecommunications Act, whose operative language ran to twenty-six words:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Twenty-six words, written in response to a defamation suit by a boiler-room brokerage. Eight years before Facebook. Eleven before the iPhone.

On August 4, 1995, the House voted on the Cox-Wyden amendment. Not a single member spoke against it. The vote was 420 to 4. Six months later, President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act into law. The Cox-Wyden provision — now designated Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — took effect with it. Most of the surrounding statute was struck down within eighteen months as unconstitutional. Section 230 survived.

It would come to be called the twenty-six words that created the internet. It would also come to be called the twenty-six words that shielded social media from every parent who tried to hold it accountable for what it did to their child.

The Wall

Cox and Wyden's answer was reasonable for 1995. Let platforms moderate. Hold users responsible for what users say. Keep courts out of policing an emerging medium. For a while, it worked.

Then came the first real interpretation.

Six days after the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, an anonymous user posted on an AOL bulletin board advertising T-shirts that celebrated the attack. To order, the post said, call Ken in Seattle — and listed the phone number of Kenneth Zeran, a real man with no connection to the shirts. Within hours he was receiving death threats. He called AOL. AOL took the post down. Another appeared. The harassment continued for weeks.

By the time Zeran sued in 1996, Section 230 had just become law. AOL invoked it. The case reached the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

American law had long distinguished between publishers — liable for everything they put out — and distributors, like bookstores, liable only after being warned. That was the framework Zeran tried to invoke.

In 1997, the court threw it out. Section 230, the judges ruled, immunized AOL not just from being treated as a publisher, but from nearly any civil suit arising from user content — even when notified, even when a reasonable response would have prevented the harm. A bookstore could be sued for knowingly selling a defamatory book. AOL could not be sued for knowingly hosting a defamatory post.

Cox and Wyden had written a shield. Zeran made it a wall.

The industry that grew up behind that wall is the one we live inside now. Facebook launched in 2004. The iPhone arrived in 2007. Instagram in 2010. TikTok, in its current form, in 2017. Every one of them was built on the assumption that whatever the platform hosted, recommended, amplified, or addicted its users to, the company itself could not be sued for it.

Parents tried. In 2006, a thirteen-year-old girl in Texas named only as Julie Doe created a MySpace profile, lied about her age to get past the site’s safety defaults, and was contacted by a nineteen-year-old man who sexually assaulted her in person a few weeks later. Her mother sued MySpace for failing to implement basic safety measures — age verification, default privacy settings for minors. The Fifth Circuit dismissed the case in 2008. Section 230 barred it. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal.

This became the pattern. Parents sued platforms for facilitating their children’s exploitation, addiction, harassment, and in some cases suicide. Courts dismissed the cases before discovery, often before the company had to produce a single internal document. The reasoning was nearly always the same: the harm came from content, content came from users, and Section 230 did not permit a court to treat the platform as responsible for either.

By the time the plaintiff known as Kaley filed the lawsuit KGM v Meta Platforms in 2023 — the case that would eventually crack the wall — Facebook alone had more than three billion monthly users. The combined market value of the platforms named as defendants — Meta, Google, Snap and TikTok’s parent ByteDance — exceeded three trillion dollars by the time her case reached trial. Every one of them had been built behind the wall.

The Machine

Behind the wall, they built an addiction machine.

This is not a metaphor. It is how the people who built it described what they were building. In 2017, Sean Parker — Facebook's founding president, who helped shape the company in its earliest years — sat down for an interview with Axios.

“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them,” Parker said, “was all about: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

The answer, he explained, was dopamine. Give the user a small chemical reward — a like, a comment, a notification. The brain learns to seek the next reward. Parker called it a "social-validation feedback loop," engineered to exploit "a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Then he said the sentence that matters most. “The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” Asked about the long-term effects on young users, Parker said: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

This was the founding president of Facebook, in a published interview, describing the platform's design intent. The mechanisms he named — infinite scroll, intermittent variable rewards borrowed from slot machines, notifications engineered to manufacture urgency, beauty filters that drive what clinicians now call "Snapchat dysmorphia," algorithms that learn which content keeps a teenage girl scrolling longest and feed her more of it — were not invented for Facebook. They were borrowed from older industries that had spent the twentieth century learning to capture human attention and hold it.

The platforms did not deploy these mechanisms one at a time. They deployed them simultaneously, on a user base that included tens of millions of children and adolescents whose prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for impulse control — does not finish developing until somewhere around age twenty-five.

These were not bugs. They were the product. And behind the wall Section 230 built, there was no one to stop them.

The Inside Voices

For years, what the public knew about Meta came from outside the company. That changed in September 2021, when Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, walked out of the company with tens of thousands of pages of internal documents. She gave them to The Wall Street Journal, filed eight SEC complaints, and on October 5, 2021, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee.

The documents were Facebook's own research, on Facebook's own users. One Instagram study found that 13.5 percent of teenage girls in the U.K. said their suicidal thoughts worsened after they started using the platform. Another found 17 percent said the same about their eating disorders. A third found that 32 percent of teenage girls who already felt bad about their bodies said Instagram made them feel worse. The company’s researchers summarized it for internal leadership in a slide deck: “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.”

That sentence appeared on a slide, in a meeting, inside the company, in 2019 — more than two years before the public saw it.

The documents also showed Facebook had known its platform was amplifying hate speech and misinformation around the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection, in Ethiopia's civil war, and in the 2017 genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. But the documents on teenagers stood out, because they were the cleanest — measured by the company's own researchers, on a defined population, in unambiguous language. That was the thread a plaintiffs' lawyer could pull on.

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Drawing a comparison that would define the next phase of the debate, Haugen told senators: “When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms [they] caused, the government took action.” Lawmakers from both parties agreed, on camera, that Congress would finally do something. Congress did not do something. The internal research did not produce regulation. It produced a news cycle.

Two years later, a second engineer walked out of Meta. Arturo Béjar was not a junior employee. He had been director of engineering for "Protect and Care" — Meta's user-safety and child-protection team — and returned as a consultant in 2019 to work on adolescent safety.

He came back, he later testified, because of his own daughter. She was fourteen. She and her friends had begun receiving unwanted sexual advances from adult men on Instagram. She had reported the messages. Nothing had happened.

Béjar spent two years collecting data. He found that 51 percent of Instagram users reported a “bad or harmful experience” on the app within the previous week. Among thirteen-to-fifteen-year-olds, one in eight had received unwanted sexual advances on Instagram within the previous seven days. On October 5, 2021 — the same day Haugen was testifying to the Senate — Béjar emailed Zuckerberg. He proposed specific, implementable changes. Zuckerberg never replied.

“Meta’s executives knew the harm that teenagers were experiencing,” Béjar told the Associated Press the week of his own Senate testimony in November 2023. “There were things that they could do that are very doable. And they chose not to do them.”

Haugen had shown the world what Meta’s own research found. Béjar showed the world what happened when someone inside the company tried to act on it. What they exposed inside the Senate, a jury in Los Angeles would confirm under oath four years later.

The Crack in the Wall

For almost thirty years, every parent's lawyer faced the same question: was this a case about content, or something else?

If content — what someone had posted, shared, or recommended — Section 230 applied, and the case was dismissed. The plaintiffs who built the case that became KGM v Meta Platforms argued something different: that the platforms themselves — the code, the features, the design — were defective products, built with full knowledge of what they would do to the children who used them.

The legal theory had a clean analogy. If a carmaker knows its brakes will fail at highway speed and sells the car anyway, the manufacturer can be sued — not for what the driver did, but for how the car was built. What matters is whether the product was unreasonably dangerous for its intended use, and whether the manufacturer knew.

Put simply, it's a case about how the product was designed.

Translate that framework to Instagram, and Section 230 had nothing to say about it. Section 230 protected platforms from being treated as publishers of user content. It did not protect them from being treated as designers of a product. Infinite scroll was not speech. The dopamine-calibrated notification schedule was not speech. The algorithm’s decision to keep a teenage girl on a feed of self-harm videos was engineering. And engineering, in every other industry, could be sued.

Parents’ lawyers had been circling this insight for years. It took a judge willing to let it reach a jury.

In October 2023, Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl of the Los Angeles Superior Court — overseeing thousands of consolidated cases — issued an eighty-nine-page ruling that became the template. She rejected the platforms' Section 230 defense. She rejected their First Amendment defense. She allowed the central theory to proceed: that platforms could be held liable in negligence for their design features and for failing to warn users about the addictive properties of those features.

It was the ruling parents’ lawyers had been waiting a generation for.

Two years later, Kuhl denied the platforms’ motions for summary judgment in three bellwether cases. The first — K.G.M. v. Meta Platforms — went to trial in Los Angeles on January 27, 2026.

The verdict came seven weeks later. The internal documents that Haugen and Béjar had pulled out of Meta — IG is a drug. We’re basically pushers. We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls — were read aloud in open court, admitted into evidence, handed to a jury of twelve. On March 25, 2026, that jury found Meta and Google liable. The wall Section 230 had erected around the industry — the wall Zeran had made impregnable — did not cover what those companies had chosen to do.

Meta and Google announced within hours that they would appeal. The appeals will take years. The parallel federal trials in Oakland begin in June. Roughly sixteen hundred individual plaintiffs are already lined up behind KGM in the California proceeding alone.

But the wall had cracked. For the first time in the life of the internet, an American jury had looked at the machine that Section 230 had protected, and had said this was not speech. It was a product, and the company that designed it knew.

The Convergence

In April 1994, seven tobacco CEOs swore under oath before Congress that nicotine was not addictive. The industry's own research had documented the truth for decades. A few months later, a paralegal at Brown & Williamson's law firm anonymously mailed four thousand pages of it to a researcher in California. By 1998, tobacco companies had signed the Master Settlement Agreement with forty-six state attorneys general — $206 billion, the largest civil litigation settlement in American history. Before 1994, the tobacco industry had never lost a product-liability suit. After 1994, it lost and kept losing. What changed was not the harm. What changed was the evidence.

Frances Haugen, testifying in 2021, drew the comparison herself. The analogy is not perfect — tobacco took forty years, social media has had two decades since Facebook launched, and Section 230 has functioned as a kind of preemptive immunity tobacco never had. But the shape of the arc is recognizable. The KGM verdict is an early plaintiff win. The documents are being read in open court. More than forty state attorneys general, across the political spectrum, have filed their own lawsuits against Meta since 2023. The pattern that would make a Master Settlement thinkable is assembling.

And it is assembling on more than one front.

Every direction, that is, except Washington. The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate in July 2024 by ninety-one to three. It died in the House. Reintroduced in 2025, it was gutted. No Section 230 reform has advanced. The federal government, which alone can regulate the industry at the national level, is — for the foreseeable future — out of the game.

But others are not.

In November 2024, the Australian Parliament passed the first national law in the world to ban children under sixteen from holding social media accounts. It took effect in late 2025. Platforms are required to identify and remove underage users or face fines of up to fifty million Australian dollars. Denmark, France, the U.K., and the European Commission have begun moving in similar directions. New York restricted algorithmic feeds for minors; Utah, Arkansas, California, and Virginia passed their own laws. The pressure is coming from every direction except the federal one.

The whistleblower bookshelf, meanwhile, has kept growing. Roger McNamee’s Zucked in 2019. Haugen’s The Power of One, published in 2023. Béjar’s testimony in 2023. In March 2025, Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook executive, published Careless People, a memoir that described a “lethal carelessness” at the top of the company. It reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. Meta won an emergency arbitration order barring her from promoting the book, and tried to block her Senate testimony too. What was once an unusual act of corporate conscience has become a genre.

The wall Section 230 built has cracked. What finishes breaking it down, if anything does, will come from the same places it has been coming from — the parents and children who brought the cases, plaintiffs' lawyers, state legislatures, foreign governments, the former employees of the companies themselves. But not the U.S. federal government. At least not soon.

Next: We explore the solutions being implemented — and those still being pursued and imagined.

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what’s broken, what’s driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.

For this series we examine the youth mental health crisis — an epidemic of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among teenagers that public health officials now treat as an emergency. The data is stark, the timeline is clear, and the internal documents are now public. How it took this long — and whether we’re truly at a reckoning yet — is a story about power, money, and the law.

Today’s installment examines the problem — including a landmark jury verdict that may have changed everything. Next, the forces that got us here: the lobbyists, the regulatory vacuum, and the 26 words that made it possible. The third part explores solutions.

In November 2016, Mark Zuckerberg — CEO of Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram — made a decision. The company’s own data showed that younger users were exceptionally high-retention — far easier to capture, and far more valuable over a lifetime, than older ones. The directive went out in an email on November 7th.

“Mark has decided that the top priority for the company in H1 2017 is teens.”

Facebook is free. Instagram is free. But when a product is free, the user isn't the customer — the user is the product. The actual customers are advertisers, who pay Meta for access to human attention. The more attention Meta captures, the more it can charge. The longer someone stays on the platform, the more valuable they are. And the earlier in life you capture someone, the longer the runway — and the harder it becomes for them to leave.

Meta knew where to apply pressure. "Tweens," in the company's own language, were three times more likely to keep returning to Facebook than a 32-year-old. A 2018 internal document, titled "The Young Ones are the Best Ones," made the logic plain: “Tweens (approximate age 10–12) are special. People who join Facebook as tweens have the highest long term retention out of all age groups.”

There was one problem. Facebook's own terms of service required users to be at least thirteen. The tweens Meta was building its future around weren't old enough to be there.

Meta's internal documents show they decided it didn't matter. “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”

They also knew what the product was doing to the children it was capturing. In one internal exchange, an employee described Instagram with four words: “IG is a drug.” A colleague responded without apparent alarm: “We’re basically pushers.” The conversation went on to compare the platform’s design to slot machines — systems “optimized to keep you engaged as much as possible.”

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The exchange was not unique — similar language runs through the internal documents that would later surface in court. And for years, none of it left the building. Meta's public face was connection, community — bringing the world closer together, as the company's mission statement put it.

Many shared that belief when social media first arrived. The techno-optimism that greeted these platforms — the sense that connection was inherently good, that more of it could only be better — has since curdled into something darker.

It has undermined democracy, spread disinformation, gutted local news, and sowed division. But perhaps most alarming is what it has done to an entire generation of teenagers: an epidemic of depression, loneliness, and suicide that public health officials now treat as a crisis.

In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General called the mental health crisis among young people an emergency and urged Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms — the same labels that go on cigarettes and alcohol. In December 2025, Australia became the first country to ban children under 16 from social media outright. Greece is planning similar action, and governments from Europe to Asia are watching to see if it works. More than a dozen American states have passed their own restrictions.

The question is no longer whether something went wrong. It is whether we can agree on what to do about it. This Solving For series will examine how it happened, why it took this long to reach a reckoning, and what's actually being done to fix it.

When the Lines Bent

To understand what went wrong, start with the numbers. For decades, rates of teen depression, anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, and suicide had held roughly steady.

Then social media arrived. Facebook in 2004. Twitter, now X, in 2006. Then the smartphone made it portable — the iPhone launched in 2007, the Samsung Galaxy in 2009. Suddenly, people carried social media everywhere.

Then, in 2012, the lines bent.

Depression came first into view. In the decade between 2013 and 2023, the share of high schoolers reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness jumped from 30 percent to 40 percent. Nearly 1 in 5 teenagers — about 4.5 million adolescents — had a major depressive episode in the past year. Among girls, the rate was 53 percent. Among LGBTQ+ youth, 65 percent. The trends were consistent across race, income, and geography. The sharpest increases appeared among girls and young women.

The loneliness data is, in some ways, even more striking. From 1991 to 2007, teen loneliness had actually been declining. Then, starting around 2012, it reversed — and accelerated. By 2019, 48 percent more teens felt lonely than had in 2011. The World Health Organization now identifies teenagers as the loneliest age group on earth — 1 in 5 report experiencing loneliness, a rate higher than any other demographic, including the elderly. And this was not an American phenomenon. A study of students across 37 countries found that school loneliness increased between 2012 and 2018 in 36 of them. Wherever smartphone access and internet use were high, loneliness was high.

The suicide data tells the same story, and the same timeline. The share of teenagers seriously considering suicide was around 16 percent before 2012. By 2023 it was 1 in 5 — and that understates the scope. Today, suicide is the second leading cause of death for Americans ages 10 to 34. In 2024, 2.6 million teenagers still had thoughts of suicide. Seven hundred thousand attempted it.

Researchers went looking for a cause. They ruled out the economy — the years between 2010 and 2015 were a period of steady economic growth and falling unemployment. They ruled out academic pressure — homework time barely moved. Income inequality had been widening for decades without producing a sudden break in the data. What had changed, suddenly and universally, was something else. Smartphone ownership crossed the 50 percent threshold between late 2012 and early 2013 — right when teen depression and suicide began to climb.

Rising Alarm, No Accountability

In 2019, Roger McNamee — an early Facebook investor and one of Zuckerberg's mentors — published Zucked, a first-person account of watching a platform he'd helped build become something he no longer recognized. In 2020, The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary featuring former engineers and executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter, put the mechanics of the attention economy in front of a mass audience for the first time. It was watched by tens of millions of people in its first month. In 2024, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, which marshaled years of data to argue that social media and the smartphone had fundamentally rewired adolescent development — and that the industry had known, and had done nothing.

All of it — the books, the documentaries, the congressional hearings, the whistleblowers — struck a nerve. The Anxious Generation has been on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years. And yet none of it produced accountability. Meta and other social media companies marched forward, arguing publicly and in legislative testimony that the research was inconclusive, that correlation wasn’t causation, that they were committed to user safety.

Then came the litigation.

Thousands of families began suing Meta and other social media companies, alleging the deliberate design of addictive products targeting children. One of those cases, KGM v. Meta, went to trial in Los Angeles this year and lasted seven weeks. Jurors heard the internal documents read back to the company in open court — the emails, the slide decks, the employee exchanges about drugs and pushers and slot machines. And they heard from a young woman who had first logged on at six years old.

She is the plaintiff in the case, identified in court documents only by her initials — KGM. Her lawyers called her Kaley.

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Kaley

She grew up in Chico, California, in a quiet cul-de-sac where her mother threw themed birthday parties and took her to Six Flags. She started using YouTube at six years old.

By the time she finished elementary school, she had posted 284 videos on YouTube. She was on Instagram by nine. As a child, she set up multiple accounts so she could like and comment on her own posts. She bought likes through a service where she could like other people’s photos and receive a flood of them in return. “It made me look popular,” she told the jury.

The notifications gave her a rush — she would slip away to the bathroom during school to check them. Beauty filters on Instagram — tools that let her reshape how she looked to the world. A nearly 35-foot canvas banner of her Instagram photos was unfurled in the courtroom. She said almost all of them had a filter on them.

There is a video from this period, introduced at trial, that shows a young Kaley surpassing 100 YouTube subscribers — she is crying tears of joy. Then she turns to the camera and apologizes for her appearance. “I look so fat in this shirt,” the young Kaley says.

Kaley began cutting herself. She developed body dysmorphia, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts. When she tried to set limits on her use, it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t stop.

Meta’s defense was direct: her problems preceded the platforms. Not one of her therapists had identified social media as the cause of her mental health struggles. The company pointed to a turbulent home life. The jury’s task, under California law, was not to find that Instagram caused Kaley’s suffering — only that it was a substantial factor in it.

The First Finding

On March 25, 2026, the jury held Meta liable for deliberately harming a child — for acting with “malice, oppression, or fraud.” They had looked at everything the company knew, everything it decided, and everything that followed — and they held it accountable.

The verdict came one day after a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangering children, ordering $375 million in civil penalties.

The Los Angeles award was smaller: $3 million in compensatory damages and an additional $3 million in punitive damages, with Meta bearing 70 percent of the liability and Google-owned YouTube 30. But the size of the award was not the point. The verdict was a bellwether — a test of whether juries would hold social media companies responsible for the harm their products caused. This one did. Thousands more cases are waiting.

It has prompted comparisons to another industry that once seemed untouchable: tobacco.

A Signal, Not Yet a Reckoning

The evidence is now public. Meta wasn’t just aware that its platforms were reaching younger and younger users — it was engineering that outcome, internally targeting tweens between the ages of 10 and 12 as the foundation of its long-term growth strategy. It also knew, from its own research, that teenagers were being harmed by those same platforms. And it continued optimizing for engagement anyway. With more than 10,000 similar suits still pending, KGM v. Meta may be less an ending than an opening — the first verdict in what could be a sustained legal reckoning.

But litigation is not the same as a solution. The tobacco industry paid hundreds of billions of dollars in settlements and kept selling cigarettes. What changed tobacco was not the verdicts alone — it was what the verdicts made possible: regulation, restriction, a cultural shift so complete that a cigarette in a children’s movie is now unthinkable. Whether social media follows that arc, or whether the companies pay, adjust, and keep optimizing for the same children remains an open question.

For now, what the verdict proved most of all: that these companies can be held to account in a court of law. For three decades, that accountability was effectively foreclosed — blocked by 26 words written into law in 1996 that gave platforms broad immunity from exactly this kind of suit. Into that vacuum, the industry built the architecture of addiction: infinite scroll, recommendation algorithms tuned for compulsion, beauty filters tested on teenage girls, a product strategy that explicitly targeted children before they were old enough to resist it.

Years before a jury reached that conclusion, at least one person inside Meta already had. According to court filings, an employee reacted to the company’s push to recruit underage users with a message to colleagues: “Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now? Zuck has been talking about that for a while… targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago. Like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young’ here.”

Note: Prefer to listen? Use the Article Voiceover at the top of the page, or find all narrated editions in the Listen tab at solvingfor.io.

Solving For is a deep-dive series that takes on one pressing problem at a time: what's broken, what's driving it, and what a path forward might look like.

Previous series have examined rare earth dominance, AI safety, the decline of local news, the end of amateurism in college sports, shrinking competition in Congress, and a world rearming as the global rules-based order weakens. Learn more at solvingfor.io.