Too much month and not enough check plagued the U.S. poor and working class before the federal government shutdown and funding lapse. To wit, business is booming for America’s car repossession industry. In fact, there were 769,925 car repossessions for the third quarter of 2025 versus 706,383 for this year’s second quarter. “If all of this goes as expected, 2025 will show to be the busiest year the repo session industry has ever seen on record,” according to Recovery Database Network.

Texas has the most car repossessions by state, with 319,754, year-to-date. Florida has the second-most auto repossessions with 222,523. California, the nation’s most populous state, ranks third in total repossession volume year-to-date.

The trend of rising car repossessions has a widespread impact. Consider the financial services industry. “A crisis in the U.S. auto loan market was signaled on October 22, 2025,” according to msn.com, “when PrimaLend Capital Partners, a significant subprime auto lender with headquarters in Plano, Texas, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. PrimaLend’s demise highlights the mounting stress among subprime borrowers—those with bad credit—who depend on financing to purchase cars through “buy-here-pay-here” (BHPH) dealerships.”

Subprime lending, recall, was the match that lit the fire of the crash in housing prices that caused the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Democratic President Obama, elected on his campaign pledge of “hope and change,” delivered a bailout for mortgage lenders and a sellout for foreclosed home buyers. That political decision to aid Wall Street instead of Main Street helped to create the socioeconomic conditions for the election of President Trump, twice.

Sadly given the weak supply of mass transit in the U.S., driving a personal car is a necessity to get to and from work for scores of Americans. At the same time, the success of the corporate-government war on labor unions has driven growth of nonunion employment. The union membership rate of 20.1 percent in 1983 fall to 9.9 percent in 2024, according to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data. This widespread trend has led to a term to describe employed Americans who can’t make ends meet: the working poor.

Amazon.com, Inc. is the second-largest nonunion U.S. employer, with 1.1 million employees, according to the World Population Review. Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon.com, is one of the world’s richest men with an estimated wealth of over $200 billion.

The biggest private-sector nonunion employer, and largest retailer, in the U.S. is Walmart Inc., with 1.6 million workers. The Walton Family owns the company, and holds wealth in excess of $400 billion.

Nonunion workforces and billionaire owners are no accident. Further, a so-called free market doesn’t create such radical inequality. Taxpayers subsidize this inequality between employees and employers.

The LA Times reported that public funding helps such employers as Amazon and Walmart offset employees’ low wages. “The beneficiaries of what can properly be defined as corporate welfare include some of America’s biggest employers, such as Walmart, McDonald’s and Amazon. All three consistently land at or near the top of lists of major corporations with significant shares of their workers collecting public assistance.”

Unionizing corporate behemoths as Amazon and Walmart is how to pressure such employers to pay employees higher wages and better benefits. On that note, Walmart is the largest employer of black workers in the country.