In 2014, Americans filled 4.3 billion prescriptions while spending a record amount of $374 billion for their medications.
United States on-budget military spending in 2014 was $600.4 billion.
For purposes of this discussion, we will ignore the much reported, but unknowable amount of black money that significantly increases the total. Nevertheless, given a USofA population of 313.9 million people, the country spends roughly $2,000 for every man, woman and child on defense.
Combine funding the military industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industrial complex and you have a total of $974,400,000,000 shared among 115,610,216 households. With only 2/3rds of those households earning money in the private sector, the trillion-dollar war/drug budget is actually shouldered by 77 million households.
Imagine how much easier it would be for families to get by
with an additional $12,642 tax-free CASH.
These are two obvious major loads, but bureaucratic governmental meddling is estimated to add 25% to the cost of everything we buy. The war on non-prescription drugs triples our prison-industrial-complex size/cost.
There are also huge costs to government-mandated monopolies, not the lest of which is enabling multi-million dollar upper-level salaries that come out of our pockets. Unknowable is what we lose in productivity and innovation from stifling competition.
I won’t even try to compute the cost of exporting our kids to the multitude of government programs instead of keeping them home and in their own neighborhoods. The cost of both parents going to work is also complicated, but nevertheless rather large.
In the end, in every measure, middle-income families are far less well-off than we were with one income per household.
All the factors combine to eliminate the middle class, dissolve the family, destroy the village and centralize everything. Whether part of a plan or accidental I’ll leave to you for now.
Meanwhile,
Take stock.
Feed your head.
Feed your family.
But PLEASE don’t feed the machine.