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In today’s edition, Joe shares:
- The Spartan who torched every debt record in the country, and the one thing he made sure never got burned
- What growing up around the 1980s S&L collapse taught Joe about owing money
- The two taxes you pay on your body every single day, whether you notice or not
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$40 Trillion and Nobody Wants to Do the Burpees
In 241 BC, a Spartan named Agesilaus watched every mortgage bond in the country burn in a heap. He'd campaigned for that fire, talking his own twenty year old nephew, the king, into it. What he left out: he owed more money than almost anyone in Sparta, and owned more of the best land than almost anyone. The plan had two halves. Wipe the debts. Redistribute the land. He got the first half passed. Made sure the second half never happened.
Plutarch says he told the ruined lenders his eyes had never seen a brighter, purer flame. Within a year the young king was strangled in a prison cell, along with his mother and grandmother, who'd handed over their fortunes to fund the reform. Agesilaus walked out alive. Debts gone. Every acre intact.
I've met that guy. My father did business with a hundred of him in the 1980s. Borrow was the whole religion. Leverage was free money. The guy who paid cash was the sucker. Then the tax rules changed, the S&Ls blew apart, and values came down. When values come down, the debt doesn't come down with them. Men who looked rich on Tuesday were finished by Friday.
I was a kid in that house. I took something out of it I've never put down. A real, physical fear of owing money.
We now owe $39.8 trillion, crossing $40 trillion by end of September, adding roughly $8 billion a day. We spend more on interest than on the entire military. Rent on money we already spent.
There are only four doors out. Grow. Spend less. Tax more. Debase the currency, Rome's move, and it always ends the same way. Everyone wants door one. Nobody wants doors two and three.
Now the part that matters to you. Your body runs on identical accounting. You owe two taxes every day. The Burpee Tax: hard physical work, and today's payment doesn't cover tomorrow. The Salad Tax: real food, water, sleep. Skip them and you've borrowed. Feels like found money. It's a loan with terrible terms, and you signed without reading it.
The bill is delayed by decades. Borrow at 25, it comes due at 55, and by then it's thirty years of compounding. That's interest: paying for consumption you enjoyed decades ago and can no longer remember.
Your body is worse off than the government. The government can grow, tax, inflate, or roll the debt forever. You can't refinance a body. No Fed for your arteries. No bailout. The Spartans once hauled a citizen named Naucleides in front of the assembly and let Lysander tear him apart for going soft. Your body wasn't a personal preference. It was a load bearing wall of the state.
What actually drives that $40 trillion isn't foreign aid. It's health care. Medicare and Medicaid, overwhelmingly chronic conditions, built out of small decisions. The national debt and the national health crisis are one problem wearing two costumes.
You can't vote the deficit away. But you can pay down your own health debt starting today.
Ledger one: cut the debt this month. Ledger two: pay the burpee tax and the salad tax today, then again tomorrow.
Both ledgers. Every day. That's why almost nobody does it.
Now go get after it.
Joe
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TAXES
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YOU OWE TWO TAXES EVERY DAY.
THE BURPEE TAX. THE SALAD TAX.
SKIP THEM AND YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN AWAY WITH ANYTHING.
YOU'VE BORROWED.
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| They Said It |
| "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
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| – Dienekes, Spartan commander at Thermopylae, 480 BC
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➝The Hard Way Podcast with Joe |
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| THE HARDWAY PODCAST
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He raised $700 million and burned it in three years. The other did federal time and rebuilt with iron discipline. Joe sits down with Richard Baker and Adam Weitsman to find out what actually separates founders who survive from the ones who fold.
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