Dumber, Sicker, & Poorer

The chart below is a fascinating snapshot of the last 75 years in the demise of the American empire.

As The Burning Platform’s Jim Quinn explains in his no-nonsense manner, there are currently 164 million people employed in America. About 34 million of those are employed part-time.

When you understand the working age population is 275 million and your friendly number fudgers at the BLS declare 103 million of them NOT IN THE LABOR FORCE, and hysterically declaring only 7.8 million Americans are unemployed, you understand what a fraudulent economy we have.

The reported 4.6% unemployment rate is complete and utter bullshit. In reality, it is north of 20%.

Welcome to the golden age…

• The percentage of total jobs in the Education and Health Services sector has grown from 4.8% in 1950 to 17.8% today. Wow!! We must be the smartest, healthiest nation on earth. Not quite. With 28 million teachers, doctors, nurses, and mostly administrators (aka overhead), our education system matriculates millions of barely functional idiots into society every year. Meanwhile, as a country, we are sickly, fat, lazy, dependent upon Big Pharma drugs, and spend more on healthcare than any country on earth. To quote the immortal Dean Wormer,  “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

• Proof we have become a non-productive, debt dependent, government dependent, shadow of our former industrial powerhouse is the decline in the percentage of manufacturing jobs from 30.2% in 1950 to 8.0% today. We borrow and consume, when we used to invest and build. Trump can threaten, tariff the world, and make bullshit announcements about manufacturing jobs coming back, but they are not coming back. Any new manufacturing plants will be operated by robotics.

• Even though the percentage of government employees (aka parasites) has remained relatively steady since 1950, we are stuck with 24 million blood suckers who contribute nothing to the country’s productivity. The average working schmuck has to pay outrageously high taxes to pay the bloated salaries and pensions of these government freeloaders.

• And now some bad news for the formerly well paid workers in the Professional & Business Services sector, which had grown from 6.6% of total jobs in 1950 to 14.1% today. ChatGPT and the avalanche of AI tools are eliminating jobs in these sectors at hyperbolic speed. These are the same assholes who used to tell blue collar workers to “learn to code”. Well, now the plumbers, electricians, and construction workers can recommend they learn to be fry cooks at McDonalds, but too late, robots are taking those jobs.

The relatively stable employment situation over the last few years has been the only thing keeping this ship of fools from sinking.

But, the increase in the fraudulent unemployment rate from 4.0% when Trump took office to 4.6% today shows the ship is taking on water and it won’t be long before millions are drowning under the waves of debt, delusion, and dumb decisions.