It's 1929.
A man named Edward Bernays is sitting in a boardroom somewhere in New York. His client has a problem. Half their potential customers — women — aren't buying their product because society says it isn't appropriate for them to do so.
Bernays doesn't redesign the product. He doesn't lower the price. He does something nobody had thought to do before. He reframes the entire meaning of the purchase.
Within months, women across America are smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes in public. Not because they suddenly decided they wanted to smoke. Because Bernays told them it was an act of freedom. Of independence. He called them "Torches of Freedom." He staged a parade. He let the press do the rest.
He didn't sell cigarettes. He sold identity.
And with that, something fundamental changed in the American economy — and honestly, in American life.
Before Bernays, the economy ran on production. Companies made things. People bought what they needed. When the product wore out, they bought another one. It was simple, largely utilitarian, and it put a natural ceiling on growth.
That ceiling terrified American industry.
So they hired men like Bernays to solve it. And solve it he did. He applied his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of psychology to commerce — tapping into emotion, desire, status, and fear rather than logic and need. He engineered consent, as he put it. He made people want things they had never wanted before, for reasons they couldn't entirely explain.
Credit made it possible to act on those wants immediately. GMAC financed the car. Department stores financed the refrigerator on layaway. The concept of buying now and paying later wasn't born out of necessity. It was a tool deliberately handed to consumers to accelerate spending.
By the time World War II ended and the factories retooled from tanks to televisions, the infrastructure was already in place. Pent up demand met easy credit met a media machine selling the American dream in every living room. Consumer spending became the engine of the entire economy. Today it drives roughly 70% of US GDP.
That didn't happen by accident. It was built.
Really think about that for a moment.
The system you grew up in — the one that normalized a new car every few years, the bigger house, the private school, the vacations, all of it — was deliberately engineered over the better part of a century to turn earners into consumers. Not owners. Consumers.
Spending became identity. Accumulation became success. And saving, investing, building assets quietly in the background? That was for other people. Boring people. People without ambition.
Here's the thing nobody told you: the people building assets in the background are the ones who eventually get to choose. Choose when to stop working. Choose what to do with their time. Choose whether the next layoff or diagnosis is a crisis or an inconvenience.
That's what the Income Cliff really is. Not a personal failure. Not a lack of discipline. It's the natural outcome of living inside a system that was designed — from the very beginning — to keep you spending rather than owning.
The good news is you can opt out. Not all at once. Not by rejecting everything. But one asset at a time, one decision at a time, you can start shifting from the consumer side of the ledger to the owner side.
That shift is what Asset Accelerator is about.
It starts with understanding the water you've been swimming in.
Now you do.
Until next week,
— Jim
P.S. Happy Independence Day. 250 years of this great Country, founded by courageous men. Now it’s our turn to stand up and own assets, to do good.
