We have all heard of the phrase Ponzi Scheme. Charles Ponzi was a slick promoter in Florida who diced up orange groves in the early century and sold bundles of contracts, now called securities, to the public, promising hefty financial rewards. The problem was that the scheme only worked for early entrants by having the promotor, Charles Ponzi, find later entrants to invest, which provided a return of capital plus a promised yield, like a giant bigger-fool theory. This strategy, which sounds eerily familiar, is not an isolated incident. It's a part of a more significant issue of Ponzi schemes and zombie companies that are alarmingly prevalent in our economy, a fact that we all need to be more aware of.

Zombie companies, a term used to describe financially troubled businesses, are known to exist only by issuing new stock or borrowing new debt to keep functioning. In simpler terms, these companies are like the walking dead of the business world. They do not make enough gross profit to pay for expenses, debt services, and taxes. A zombie company can only project a fictitious profitable outcome of wishful thinking in the foreseeable future.

Currently, 20% or more of all public companies are classified as zombies. Three things keep them alive:

• What keeps these zombie companies alive? It's a government subsidy in the form of tax credits and continuous crony capitalist freebee grants. These unrestricted grants, a form of corporate welfare that the oligarchs can demand and receive, sustain these companies. The fact that companies reward the governing elites with fat donations through persistent lobbying only exacerbates the issue. This should raise our concern and vigilance about the role of government in sustaining these entities.
• The government agrees to guarantee the debt through corporate bond issuance and institutional debt. What do you care if the government guarantees your debt and financial success? You can merely show up like every other bureaucrat and crony capitalist parasite and enjoy the financial rewards of the elite class with no downside. All losses or any downside are dumped on the backs of the taxpayers to increase the national debt to pay for all this fraud.

Issue debt as a new stock offering, a strategic stock split, a new corporate bond, or borrowing from an outside source such as a bank or Wall Street securitization offering.

All the above only works if the government steps in somehow to take care of the crony capitalism, monopolists, and contractors of F.O.G. (friends of government). Crony capitalism, a system in which businesses thrive not through competition and innovation but through a close relationship with government officials, plays a significant role in perpetuating the Ponzi Scheme. For instance, when a company receives a government contract due to its political connections rather than its merit, that's an example of crony capitalism. Another example is when a company gets favorable regulations or tax breaks because of its ties to government officials. Like the phrase size matters, well, so do connections matter.

Why would I name this article Zombification of the U.S.? Because almost all aspects and subsets of this country have become both a Zombie and a Ponzi Scheme? Let's discuss a few subsets:

• The Social Security trust fund is supposed to have three trillion assets. But all three trillion invested in U.S. Treasury securities are in low-yielding U.S. Treasury securities debt, not assets. Social Security is broke and must rely on current workers to pay for the subsistence income for 67,000,000 retired folks.
• Annual taxation, federal, state, and local. The total is about five trillion, almost two trillion short. The government issues fiat debt borrowing to make up the difference. Government borrowing causes inflation and the corresponding reduction of the dollar's purchasing power. This should make us all feel the weight of our economic situation.
• National accrued of the book's debt.
• Unfunded mandates, including $200 trillion in future obligations for social security, Medicare, and pension fund shortages, are not reflected in the books.
• Government backstopping or guaranteeing private enterprises' debt with no strategy to pay back the debt.
• Governments are backstopping or securing the obligation of public enterprises with no strategy to pay back the debt.
• Government monopoly enterprises like the Postal Service are sometimes called GSEs.
• The U.S. Government has consistently refused to audit any aspect of Federal Government financing. There are no substantial audits for Social Security, the Military Budget, agencies such as F.B.I., C.I.A., N.S.A., Postal Services, Department of Health and Education, etc., including dozens of overlapping government enterprises that escape accountability. This lack of transparency and oversight in government finances is a cause for concern and needs to be addressed.