Intelligent Design

Of our populace's degradation?

Take a broad look around modern society here in the US, and it is easy to feel contempt for our fellow citizens. We are unhealthy, often obese, and functionally ill-educated. This obesity data is collected in phone interviews of self-reported weight/height from this dystopian sounding branch of the CDC: Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. It was a relief to see it was just another government boondoggle in the form of a call center that calls citizens to ask them their weight. In my experience and commensurate anecdotal observations, people misrepresent their height and weight by something like 1-2% on height and 2-5% on weight. Seems like not great data for a science organization, which sounds about right for the CDC.

Mix in a bit of illiteracy with a population that is obese, unhealthy and living on the dole. According to this Bureau of Labor Statistics paper, means-tested government assistance families spent less on housing, food, medical care, and transportation than did families not on assistance. The buried lede is, of course, that the same families that receive means-tested assistance also receive housing benefits, are on Medicaid, and participate in one of the many government food programs like SNAP. So they spend less of their money, but more of yours.

Ultimately 1 out of 5 US families live on the largesse of other tax payers, are dramatically unhealthy and are largely illiterate and innumerate, yet they are allowed a vote. Voting our way out of the growth of the cancerous tumor known as the Federal Government is likely not possible, particularly when importing a large population of uneducated immigrants. The proper term is now migrants as declared by yet another class of your betters in the UN and Western NGOpolis, who take money from what we nostalgically call your government to facilitate the mass migration to your town. When they get there, they won’t be unemployed because the large company in your town will just give them your jobs. Easy as that.

But don’t worry, the money it costs and that you used to earn is hardly real with the looming 30-something trillion deficit that your betters in the legislature spend to fund that massive executive branch bureaucracy that taxes you, spends money on boondoggle science, gives benefits to the the unhealthiest and least productive aspect of our population, and subsidizes companies to hire people who walked across the border yesterday. So rest easy. They got this

Currently the powers that be will say inflation is running at a manageable 3% or so, but the catch is that the previous price increases over the last years of money printing and gluttonous spending have not gone away. We just add a few percent a year to the increase from the previous years. The chart below is from this site.

The Covid years really jump out here. And remember this chart only includes food prices. 20 percent over a three year period is a pretty sharp increase to the cost of feeding a family. The trick they all play is they show rates coming down, but that is the rate of increase. The actual price never comes down. So when you see charts from the smart folks at Statista:

This makes it look like wage growth is outpacing inflation, so you should be doing great. Right? I am just a middle-aged, middle income, common man from our time. There are no letters after my name to indicate my bona fides, I graduated from an unexceptional university, and my expertise and skill set are not analyzing economic data or policy. However, even we rubes recognize gaslighting. So no matter how many times they tell you that you are all doing great and that they have things under control, remember that they lie. They lie with their statistics, they lie with their studies, they lie with their analysis, and they ultimately don’t care that you know it.

They just paint circles in the air for the masses and assume (rightly) that most don’t know or care enough. Folks, parallel economies and systems are the only way to free ourselves from the parasitic class, above and below. So snap to it.