When we sat down with entrepreneur Mitch Francis, author of "BAD-ASS SOLUTIONS: For Today's BIG-ASS Problems," we were expecting polite deficit talk or another PowerPoint solution. What we got instead was a blunt thesis: "the United States is the most valuable corporation on Earth," and it should start acting like one.
America's national debt now sits around $38T, growing by more than $1T every 100 days. According to FRED data, annual net interest payments have overtaken defense spending, quietly becoming one of the largest line items in the federal budget. Francis sees that not as a looming crisis, but as a failure of imagination.
"The debt service is now bigger than what we pay on defense for the country," Mitch Francis told our own Isaiah McCall in an interview.
How Do We Solve The Debt Crisis? From the Gold Standard to an 'Asset Standard'
Francis' core idea is what he calls an "asset standard." It's a modern reboot of the gold standard, but instead of anchoring the dollar to a shiny metal in Fort Knox, it ties it to the full balance sheet of the United States.
For decades, Americans could exchange paper currency for gold. That discipline vanished after Nixon ended the gold standard, leaving Congress with few structural limits on spending.
Francis argues the fix isn't austerity. It's collateral.
"The assets of the United States are not just its gold. We have land, mineral reserves, oil, buildings, ports, bases, planes, schools, hospitals," said Francis. "If you look at the United States as a corporation, those are assets. That's the asset standard."
In his framework, the federal government could restructure its liabilities the same way a dominant corporation would, issuing obligations explicitly backed by tangible national assets. He insists that if the U.S. sent China a check for its roughly $1 T in Treasuries, it would clear, because the underlying economy remains over 55% larger than China's.
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The macro numbers support why this conversation is happening now. FRED data shows federal debt jumping from roughly $23 T in early 2020 to well above $30 T by 2024, with interest costs nearly doubling over the same period as rates rose.
Meanwhile, speculative distractions barely register at that scale. CoinGecko data shows that even at peak mania, meme coins like DOGE topped out in the tens of billions, rounding errors next to trillions in sovereign liabilities and tens of trillions in public assets.
Francis invests in AI stocks like Palantir, AMD, Nvidia and thinks they have more upside compared to most cryptocurrencies.
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Francis believes the next phase hinges on interest rates. In his view, any Fed chair installed by Trump will prioritize aggressive cuts, because no borrower benefits more from lower rates than the federal government itself. "Lowering the interest factor, who benefits more from this? The federal government," Francis said.
That creates a combustible mix for markets: cheaper money, a renewed bid for risk assets, and an AI boom that threatens to hollow out labor faster than policymakers can respond.
Francis's warning is stark in regard to an AI-related black swan event.
"We have a socio-economic catastrophe coming at us, and that is artificial intelligence," said Francis.
His bottom line is simple. Stop pretending marginal fixes can solve exponential math. Either America uses its balance sheet like the dominant economic power it is, or it keeps letting interest payments eat the future while arguing over scraps.
"You're going to have massive numbers of people not working," said Francis. "Artificial intelligence and robotics are specifically geared toward replacing human labor."
His bottom line for markets and policymakers is the same: stop pretending small nudges, tiny tariffs, or meme coins can solve big arithmetic. Either you treat the U.S. like the most valuable corporation on earth and use the balance sheet, or you keep letting the interest bill eat the future.
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