Idiocracy

One metric that has always seemed to define America is that each generation enjoys better living standards than the one before it. We achieve this through improvement, innovation and drive. Lately there has been much doubt raised as to whether this will continue. Global warming, economic collapse and escalating health concerns all seem to threaten our prosperity.

Have we reached an inevitable tipping point? If human nature got us to where we are, does that mean it can also take it down? Are we even capable of moving forward?

There was an old proverb I learned in first grade. Give a man a fish, he eats a for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats forever. We've been giving away fish like Sea World. Over 40% of Americans pay no federal income tax. And our government has plans to make that number over 50%. At this point we have two serious issues.

The first being that over half the country, and potentially over half of all voters, will have no skin in the game. People who got 100% financing for homes during the housing boom walked away when things began to turn south. If a citizen and a voter is not a taxpayer, why should they care how the taxes are spent? More importantly, if they're not putting any money into the system, why wouldn't they want to make every effort to ensure they receive as many taxpayer benefits as possible?

This leads to the second issue. With the majority of our country effectively shaking down the minority, what's the incentive to work at all? There is a law of diminishing return that our government seems to be ignoring. Yes, there needs to be a certain amount of taxation. At 0% there is no revenue because 0% of anything is $0.00. At 100% there is no revenue because there is no incentive to work when you don't keep a penny. Somewhere between 0 and 100 there is an optimal rate which allows the government to take in as much as possible. Not that I'm advocating for it to be found. Government should exist to do collectively what we must do and cannot do individually. It does not need $4 trillion to do this.

And not to beat a dead horse, but at the rate we're going our children are going to inherit a deficit of tens of trillions of dollars. If this is ever going to be paid down it's going to take a serious reduction in government services and likely a serious raise in tax revenue. We may be able to work 40 hours a week and enjoy about 3 weeks vacation, often someplace tropical. Our children will work 70 hour weeks and if they're lucky perhaps 4 day vacation in their own home.

And speaking of that home, good luck buying one. More and more people living paycheck to paycheck will make mortgages harder to find than a good Woody Harrelson movie.

If that's not enough to make us dwindle into the abyss, think about this. The fast food industry now takes in more revenue than higher education. People too lazy to cook a healthy meal have effectively turned Burger King into their family kitchen. More than 66% of us are overweight and more than half of those are obese. Walk into a McDonalds and you may surprise someone by telling them that their supersized Big Mac extra value meal has about 1200 calories as they take another bite of grease.

This leads me back to the title of this post. Idiocracy. It's a Mike Judge movie and not really worth seeing for entertainment purposes. It's billed as a stoner flick but can also come off as a futuristic documentary. It depicts a world with politicians dumber than nails, completely automated systems that never work right and somehow Like Wilson's character was the smartest person there. Ladies and gentlemen, are we really that far away from this?