The Invoice for the Fireworks

There are two Americas and they have always shared the same zip code. One of them lands on the moon, writes a constitution that became a template for democracies on four continents, and genuinely believes that a document produced by slaveholders contains within it the seeds of universal liberation. The other funds Pinochet, trains torturers in the School of the Americas, builds a military budget approaching a trillion dollars, and cannot find the money to house 650,000 people sleeping outside on any given night. Both are true. The 250th anniversary celebration is for the first one. The second one is still here, still operating, and still waiting for its own parade.

The military budget tells the story with the arithmetic that politicians prefer to avoid. The Department of Defense’s 2026 budget request totaled $961 billion. Trump subsequently requested $1.5 trillion, described by defense analysts as one of the largest budget requests in modern American history (Congressional Budget Office, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026). Ending homelessness for every person experiencing it on a given night in the United States would cost less than one percent of the annual military budget, according to research from the Urban Institute on the cost of permanent supportive housing. The country that cannot locate money for housing has located nearly a trillion dollars annually for weapons. This is a choice, dressed up as a constraint.

The wealth numbers are equally unambiguous. The top one percent of American households owned 31.7 percent of all United States wealth in the third quarter of 2025, the highest share on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking household wealth in 1989. Collectively, the wealthiest one percent held approximately $55 trillion in assets, roughly equal to the wealth held by the bottom 90 percent of Americans combined (CBS News, 2026). The richest one percent own 50 percent of all United States stock and mutual funds, up from 40 percent in 2002. Between 1989 and 2022, a household in the top 0.1 percent gained an average of $39.5 million in wealth. A household in the bottom 20 percent gained less than $8,500 across the same period (Oxfam, 2025). As of June 2026, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Today’s top wealth concentration exceeds the Gilded Age by every available measure, and the Gilded Age is the era against which American political mythology most likes to define its progress.

35.9 million Americans lived in poverty in 2024 according to Census Bureau data, in the wealthiest country in the history of human civilization. The United States now ranks 27th globally in social mobility. Ninety percent of children born in 1940 went on to earn more than their parents. Children born in the 1980s have a roughly 50-50 chance of doing the same (Medium, 2025). The American Dream, as a statistical proposition, has been cut approximately in half.

The foreign policy record requires the same candor the 250th anniversary speeches will not provide. The United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, each time calling the intervention a defense of freedom. Henry Kissinger explicitly approved Argentina’s military junta and its dirty war, in which the regime eventually killed up to 30,000 people, including 400 children stolen from murdered parents. Declassified documents confirm Kissinger told Argentine Foreign Minister Guzzetti, in October 1976, that the United States would like him to succeed and that the quicker he succeeded the better (Salon, 2014). Brazil’s National Truth Commission stated in 2014 that the United States taught the Brazilian military regime torture techniques. The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta systematically compiled lists of thousands of communist operatives, handed them over to the Indonesian military to aid the purges, and meticulously checked off the names of those who had been confirmed executed or captured (U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968; National Security Archive, 2017).The School of the Americas, which trained military officers from across Latin America, was described by Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II as having run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world.

The Economist Democracy Index classifies many of the 45 countries currently hosting United States military bases as authoritarian governments. The country that placed the Declaration of Independence in its founding mythology has spent the bulk of its foreign policy history ensuring that other nations remain friendly to American business interests rather than governed by their own people. Supporting dictators is, as Foreign Policy magazine noted without particular irony, as American as apple pie (Cook, 2019).

The two-tier justice system does not require extensive documentation at this point because the documentation has been accumulating for decades. Black unemployment stands at 7.2 percent compared to 3.7 percent for white workers. The median white worker earns 24 percent more than the typical Black worker and 29 percent more than the median Latino worker (Medium, 2025). The United States makes up 4 percent of the world’s population and accounts for 35 percent of global firearm suicides. It produces 82 percent of all gun deaths among 23 high-income nations while representing roughly half their combined population (Brady United, 2026). The country spends $961 billion on its military and cannot pass a background check bill.

The denial of all of this is not ignorance. Ignorance is a correctable condition. This is a structural preference, maintained through political will and narrative management, for a version of the country that requires the second America to remain invisible. The moonshot is real. The Apollo program happened. So did Operation Condor. The Constitution exists as a remarkable document. So does the documented evidence that the United States taught torture to foreign militaries and checked names off death lists. The 250th anniversary will celebrate one version with fireworks on the National Mall. The invoice for the other version arrives on a different schedule, carried by people who were told to wait their turn and have been waiting for 250 years.

References

Al Jazeera. (2026, May 21). Trump seeks historic $1.5 trillion for military in Congress budget request. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/5/21/trump-seeks-historic-1-5-trillion-for-military-in-congress-budget-request

Brady United. (2026). Statistics. https://www.bradyunited.org/resources/statistics

CBS News. (2026, January 21). Wealth inequality in America just hit its widest gap in more than 3 decades. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-decades-federal-reserve/

Congressional Budget Office. (2026). Defense and national security. https://www.cbo.gov/topics/defense-and-national-security

Cook, S. A. (2019). Loving dictators is as American as apple pie. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/11/loving-dictators-is-as-american-as-apple-pie/

Medium. (2025, October 6). The great divide: Wealth inequality in 2025–2026. https://medium.com/@averageguymedianow/the-great-divide-wealth-inequality-in-2025-2026-cf1db4248c3f

Oxfam America. (2025, November 3). Income inequality is surging in the US. As reported in Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/josiecox/2025/11/03/income-inequality-is-surging-in-the-us-new-oxfam-report-shows/

Salon. (2014, March 8). 35 countries where the US has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists. https://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/35_countries_the_u_s_has_backed_international_crime_partner/

Shrider, E. A., & Bijou, C. (2025). Poverty in the United States: 2024. United States Census Bureau. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-287.pdf

National Security Archive. (2017, October 17). U.S. Embassy Tracked Indonesia Mass Murder 1965: Newly Declassified U.S. Embassy Jakarta Files Detail Army Killings, U.S. support for Quashing Leftist Labor Movement https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/indonesia/2017-10-17/indonesia-mass-murder-1965-us-embassy-files

U.S. Department of State. (n.d.). Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXVI, Indonesia; Malaysia-Singapore; Philippines. Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v26/d185