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I wanna talk about economic decay in general. I want to talk about some gospel principles that apply here. And hopefully in this ball of yarn, you find some specific things that you can change to be better situated as these things unravel. Um So, so your standard of living, it's, it's going to noticeably decay. That's going to be the case for everyone. There are shifts that will be sudden and there will be shifts that are gradual and all that should sound familiar because it's a pattern that I'm laying out across various aspects of life in these videos. Um You're going to see the cost of living expand so dramatically that it's going to begin to make sense financially. They make increasingly um greater sense to spend time and money in ways that do not currently make any sense. Uh So for example, in producing things at home and not just food, that's a crazy thought. If you have any idea, the energy it takes to produce clothing, that's a crazy thought. But you'll see people doing this increasingly producing things at home and it's actually a tidbit to get, get you a competitive edge in the things to come, gasoline, diesel, we'll just say uh transportation, transportation is an amazingly uh profound gift as far as increasing the standard of living and as that gets increasingly expensive and reduced in availability, this is even before folding in all the other changes that are coming in terms of production and happening already. But as it becomes more and more expensive to move goods or to bring services, cause all that relies on transportation, it's going to open up opportunities for local commerce that do not presently exist. And I'm actually working on some things that I hope go ok to commercially offer something to help with that. It's not related at all to the ministry except that I hope that it opens economic opportunity for people that does don't presently have it. So anyway, I guess there will be more on that later if it ends up working out. But you're gonna see, you're gonna see opportunities for local commerce that do not exist right now because as the cost of transportation goes up, what happens is what would not at all be profitable for you to do around you right now. Well, you'll be able to charge more for it and still undercut this cost. So here's just a crazy random example. If you live in a rural area, the cost of animal feed is as low as it is. It's insane. If you try to grow that on your own property, you will see how astronomically expensive. It is to do. It's as cheap as it is because those growers can, the manufacturers can employ economies of scale. They're not hand harvesting grains. They have a combine, they don't have to store grains in small little bins. They have enormous grain silos, they have big old machines that are dedicated to certain purposes that are massively efficient. But the Achilles heel of that whole opera and they can, they can, they can sell portions of the produce to more profitable ends and use the leftovers in the, the chicken feed . The animal feed like, like the, they call, they're called mid Blings of wheat. It's the, it's the bits that aren't whole heads, they're, they're broken in the process and there's quite a bit as a percentage. You can't sell that for the much more high priced, uh, you know, what has to be an intact grain or it could be deficient in some other way, but totally suitable for animal purposes. And there's nothing wrong with it. It's just not fancy enough to pay the higher price. You see this all through agriculture. But anyway, so these, these feed producers, their Achilles Heel is transportation because yes, they save an enormous amount of money on the production of the raw materials, but they get hammered in the cost of transporting it because it's heavy, it's heavy stuff. And so they have the fuel cost of moving it and then there's add on costs because every chain in the link of distributor in the distributor chain, every link in the distributor chain has to take a cut. So the price goes up every time it changes hands. So as the price of transportation goes up, there might be people who can make chicken feed or I keep saying chicken feed, animal feed more locally and they don't have to drive as far. And so even if they don't have the efficiencies, there might be an opportunity for profit, you see. So things are like that. You could use your imagination. I just want to give a very detailed example to get you going. Things like that might become profitable all of a sudden anyway, so in this decay , um you're gonna see opportunities to do things yourself that you'd never ever do right now or to pay other people to do that, you'd never ever pay them to do right now because you'd go for the larger scale, more industrial, you know, standardized way of doing it. So I'm looking over my notes here and I'm reading a note and I have no idea what I was thinking about when I wrote that. Oh, you could graph the reward for being certain class, you could craft the reward for being in a certain economic class. So there's a reward or standard of living, you could say for being upper class, there's a standard of living for being middle class and there's a standard of living for being lower class. And here's what's happening, ignoring the upper class for a minute because that's rife with a whole bunch of dispute and that's not my point. So let's just make this argument focusing on the other two classes. What happens when you artificially increase the reward of being lower class to come up towards the middle and you reduce the reward for being middle class also um externally like you're forcing this to happen as these get more similar. What happens is the middle class disappears. And here's the phrase to remember when the middle is gone. Once the middle is gone, the bottom drops out. Once the middle is gone, the bottom drops out. Now, I could give you a long lecture on the philosophical reasons for this. It always happens, it always happens. But once you take the incentive away to be a little better than normal, people stop being a little better than normal. And when that happens, the rest of society will experience what happens when a few people stop being better than normal. They will realize just how much of everything they enjoy is only possible because of people who are willing to do more work for less per unit reward than they are. That's really what it comes down to. It's an unpopular idea, but I promise you, it is true. You have no idea. This is a general principle now and it's not just economic, you have no idea. How much of what you enjoy in life rests on the shoulders of people who are willing to do more for less than you are. It's astronomical, it's astronomical. And so when those people shrug, you know, Atlas shrugged, when those people stop producing what they produce because you've taken away even the smidgen of benefit they get for doing. So, um, so you worsen the already bad ratio of cost to benefit compared to where you are. Um Then the whole thing just the bottom drops out because all of those apportion benefits go away, those re appropriated benefits. So once being low class becomes attractive enough, more people will do it. And this is already happening. There are countless examples of people who um they have dropped out of work who are making really good money, who who have a skill that's rare and valuable. And they say, well, I don't want to deal with this anymore. The costs have become too high and there's a monopoly of costs that we could go into. It's not super relevant for the conversation, but it's domain specific for the most part like doctors not wanting to deal with insurance and Medicare and whatever. So and mandates. Um So uh as this happens, the bottom is going to drop out. And the theme there is injustice always comes for those who cause it, injustice always comes for those who cause it. So for example, the mobs that support raising minimum wage most of whom earn minimum wage, they're the ones that suffer the most when minimum wage is raised. It's been shown time and time again. They did a very in depth study when they did this in Seattle. It, and it's obvious that this hurts the people. It's meant to help the most. Uh, another example of this is whenever communists take over a country, the first thing they do once they gain power is they kill all of the people that put them into power. It happens every time, every time injustice always comes for those who cause it. So that's something to remember as this economic decay is rolling out. You don't want to be in those groups that cause the problems. Uh That's the subject of a different video. That's not one of these future warnings. But anyway, let's get into more specifics. You can expect new and higher taxes. It boggles my mind it. I divert, I de I devote a substantial amount of resources trying not to think about the way the taxes work. It boggles my mind if you gather the world's smartest people and you paid them an exorbitant amount of money. And the task was come up with a tax system, that's the absolute worst for all people involved. You would get exactly what we have, you would get exactly what we have. It's as pernicious as it can be and still be supported. It's, it's very meticulously uh constructed. I don't wanna say that it's intentionally constructed, but the way it's turned out has been so pernicious because it causes the greatest possible harm without being detected by a sufficient number of people to change it. There are no property rights. There isn't a place in the country that you can go and actually own a home. The government owns your home and arbitrarily they can change how much you have to pay to stay in it and they do and what you can do about it is so carefully crafted to not be worth your time to try. I could give you examples of how it's done where I live, but suffice it to say that the hoops, you have to jump through the odds of it being successful and the time for which the changes would be effective, make it so that any rational person would not bother because the, the expected value of the outcome is zero. It's, they do it just and just right so that they can crank it up at will and you can't do anything worth doing about it. You've got the, the metastasizing problem of envy that's just gone rampant in our society. It is. I saw it coming a million miles away and I'm still shocked by it just how fully envy has taken the hearts of so many people, just normal people full of envy, full of rage at any hint of any hint of someone having something that they think they deserve someone else, having something that they think they deserve and all common sense, all reasoning, all impartiality goes right out the window and they just have this flaming hatred for the, the, the, the people. It's usually a class of people. It's not even a specific person, but they also will, will attach that to specific people and they say, well, good. I'm glad this terrible thing happened to this person because they have something that I want that I don't have. And there's never, uh, let's stop and think about how they got it. And are you willing to do that? And if you're not let go and just let go of this thing, you think you want, but you're not willing to pay the price. It's fully gone in our society. And you just, you know, I'm talking about taxes new and higher taxes that are coming, but you could follow this thread onto some crazy things that you wouldn't expect to see that you're going to see. Like I talked about another video targeted violence and I talked about how people target economically. They'll say here's a rich person, I'm gonna hurt them. Um, you just wait until people attack old people randomly because they blame them for all their problems. There, there will be targets that don't make sense to you and that are shocking and all the, all the writings are already on the wall. These seeds are already planted people, they're growing they're growing and I, I feel like I do when I go out in my garden and the winds have dropped enough seed into my garden that everywhere I look, I see a sprout of a weed and I know what's going to happen. If I don't do anything about that in the next month, I, I have to go ballistic on that garden or else I will be completely overrun by weeds. And the only thing I'll be able to do is till the whole bed to it all under other factors that are feeding the new and higher taxes, injustice. And I don't mean the world's definition, I mean, God's definition, um, desiring what is not deserved merit, the lack thereof, there's been a horrendous increase in the percentage of government employees. Have you noticed the statistics are out there at every level of government they're ballooning, they're ballooning. The number of government employees or government contractors which are also government employees. Just indirectly, their pay keeps going up. It's the best paying gig in town for people that, that can't do things in the private sector. Um I remember when, you know, because the field I was in at the time I was watching the government grant space as an academic. That's pretty important, right? The second, the second that COVID inflation started, you remember the fed was saying, oh, it's just transitory inflation. Remember that line? They kept saying transitory inflation, it's not permanent. It's just a little blip and those in the know knew that was a lie. But you know, the real tell was while Powell, the chairman of the fed was saying that inflation was transitory. The NSF and I believe the NIH were immediately upping their grants. There was one case where they immediately changed the grant limit 30% and you knew things were gonna be bad when the government money gets increased by 30% immediately suddenly. And the government voice is saying there's no inflation. So they're saying over here, hey, there's no inflation and over here, oh, there's inflation, we better boost everything by 30%. So you see that, that, you know, private sector employees, their wages cannot adjust to inflation in any kind of keeping even kind of way. But the government employees, they get raises all the time, right? As soon as inflation hits , they're the ones at the trough. Ok? So then you've got um there's already grossly uneven taxation in this nation as far as quality goes. Um and this is the head scratcher for me because if we cared anything about fairness, we would get rid of it all and replace it with sales tax with no exemptions and no filings, it's all just done as you pay the money, there's no withholding, there's no nothing and everybody pays the same amount. People laughingly call that regressive as if there's a fairer way of doing it. And they say, well, rich people would pay less taxes. And I say, well, rich people spend their money too. What do you think they're doing with their money? They say, well, rich people have money to invest. They don't spend everything. Yeah. Why did they invest to spend more money later? Like, there are miserly rich people. It's not a rare thing where people have horrendous amounts of money stockpiled in their bank accounts or whatever and, and they still have shoes with holes in them and things. Ok. Fine. But that money will be spent if it cannot be enjoyed until it is spent. Right. And the second it's spent the sales tax would capture it. It'd be the easiest thing in the world. We wouldn't need an IRS we wouldn't need, I mean, all the, the property tax people, there's an army of government agents to implement the taxation policies that are uneven and people cheat it and all these other crazy things, there's half the country doesn't pay it and it's obfuscated out the wazoo. That's actually half the country does pay it. That's, that's not a true statement. They pay massive amounts of payroll tax if there were, were no social security FICA tax, every single person in this country who is a W-2 employee would get a 16% raise. It's actually more than that. Uh, if you do the math, but 8.5% or 7.5% of your salary goes to FICA and you see that on your pay stub, your employer is paying that same amount and you never ever see it reported on your pay stub. But it, it, that is your salary that the government takes from you. And if you're my age, you're never ever gonna see it. If, if they paid it out to you, even if you took it out of your check, you could get over 5% interest in t bills right now. And I promise you, you will not get interest on it at any rate like that. If you do ever see it, which you probably won't if you're young enough. I remember doing the math on this probably 10 years ago. I had a grandmother who was on social security and she was struggling with her bills and out of curiosity, I calculated how much she had paid in over her lifetime. And if she had invested that at a 5% rate of return, she would have been a millionaire and she was a poor person. She did not make a lot of money and work. So this country would be covered with millionaires if the government just gave that money to the people who earned it instead of taking it for their, for their interest at a later date. Now, the fact is that many people are foolish enough that they just burn up the money, but you could still make the argument that the situation would be much better. Than it is anyway, you're going to see newer and higher taxes rent aside. But this is something that, that really bothers me because it's the biggest thing that could be most easily changed to drastically increase the quality of life for so many people and, and put that power into the hands of the individual to make their choices and deal with the consequences. And it would be massively better than what we have other changes, interest rates. They're going to keep climbing, they're going to keep climbing. People think this is it. They're going to keep going up until they don't. And it's, it's likely to be a double whammy. It might happen more than once the, these rate increases. There's no rule that says that they have to be stable. There's no rule that says they can't be volatile and there's so much, if you're not in the financial world, you probably don't realize how much rests on this. It's gonna have an awful lot to do with, with the price of all kinds of insurance because they invest that money. They don't just sit on it, they invest it. And actually most of the profit of insurance companies comes off of the investment of the money you pay not some profit that's baked into your principle, your, your, uh, your policy fees. It's, it's, you're, you're paying basically what it costs to have the program and then they make the money they make off of the investment of that money until it's needed. So it's actually not a terribly profitable game to be in and slight changes in payouts like when there's drastic amounts of inflation or when people are dropping dead at a much higher than normal rate for, for, as a result of what they injected in their arms, then all of a sudden the profitability goes out the window and they have to up the prices significantly and that's what happens. So anyway, interest rates don't bank on them. I mean, if you're, if you're doing something short term or whatever, whatever your, your your strategy is, it, this is not going to last forever, but it may well last for longer than what people are expecting. And I'm intentionally being wishy washy on that one. I don't know the details of how that's gonna go, but what I can guarantee is volatility. Um We could say the same thing about the stock market, although that wasn't in my notes to bring it up. People who know fundamentals know that there is absolutely no logical reason for the stock market to be anywhere near as high as it is. And based on fundamentals, many of these people have said that if the stock market crashed 90% in the short term, it would not surprise them. And yet people who bank on that happening, lose a ton of money. And increasingly what you're seeing is the scriptural phrase, riches are becoming slippery, meaning it's not predictable what there's, there's a, there's not a place you can put your money or a place you can put your time and effort. Even if you don't have money, it used to be. You could accurately predict a field and say, you know, with high certainty, if I make the sacrifices to get into this field, I'm going to be well off, I'm gonna, it's gonna be worth the cost. That's not true anymore. And it's like that with, with investments too, there is nothing you can do that guarantees a worthwhile return. It's Risk city, everywhere you look and really it's danger, city. Risk is a composite of opportunity and danger. What we're seeing is the opportunity fading and the danger increasing at the same time everywhere you look that slippery riches. Um Another thing that we will see is that the government will continue to inflate the dollar until it is completely worthless. There, there are only two things it can do and this is true of the United States. It's true of other governments too who have followed the same path, which is every wealthy nation. The two choices are inflate the currency until it's utterly worthless or default on the debt. Now, people have said there's no way the United States can default on its debt. It would never do that one because it has the power to print as much money as it wants and therefore doesn't ever have to default. Uh Bernanke or Greenspan. I can't remember which chairman of the fed came out and said this, that the United States never has to default because they have the power of the printing press. We can deflate, I'm sorry, inflate the money as much as we want. So we'll always be able to pay our debts. Um That's true that they could, but this does not guarantee that they will. And I, I'm not going to guarantee that they won't default. It could totally happen. But what I'm saying is either way, one of those things is going to happen and they both might happen. We will definitely continue to get massive inflation and you're, you're going to see, you are likely to see at least partial defaults as well. But I want to draw an exponential graph for you low tech exponential graph. So the congressional budgeting office, we are on this. This is our national debt. It's following an exponential pattern and we're pretty far along. It's, you know, it's extreme. This is an oversimplification, but I drew just drew. Yes, that is how the congressional budget office expectations of our debt differ from the current trajectory. Now, what causes this magical reduction in debt, the rate of new debt? Who knows? It's Magic Town, right? It's Magic Town. But already on that Magic Town limited projection, it's, it's vastly under what will actually happen uh in the current trajectory of things, trying to remember how much debt they said we would have in the next 10 years, another 22 trillion or something, it's gonna be higher than that. And, and as that increases the worth of your dollars goes lower and lower and lower. And so, you know, my, I have two sons who have taken advantage of some tremendous opportunities. I've given them in wise ways and they've accumulated an unusual amount of cash at their age as a result. And I hear them talking about buying a car someday. So by the time they're 16 at today's dollars, they'd have enough money to buy a new car each. Um, which is crazy. They're not 16 yet, these two kids. And, um, I'm looking at that and I'm saying, you know, I, I'm doing math on the opposite side of that coin. Well, I don't, I don't think their money is gonna be worth that much to buy a car at that time. But, so I'm trying to warn them, hey, um, adjust your expectations, but I'm playing the math on the flip side of that coin thinking about mortgages and, um, wages always, unless you work for the government, it's, it's less so, but wages trail inflation. And , um, but it's still the case that if you have expenses like mortgages today, it will be cheaper to pay them off later. Uh, depending on interest rates that you locked in. This is actually a much more complicated thing than I wanted to go into. So, maybe I'll back off of that, I guess to summarize those who locked in two point x percent of three point x percent interest rates on their mortgages before that window closed are going to make out like bandits. It doesn't mean that this is a riding the tiger cleanest dirty shirt situation. It doesn't mean they will, they will be wealthy or that they will experience an increased standard of living, but they will decrease in their standard of living as a rule, much less faster. That sounds as terrible as it is than those who did not because that will be dramatically cheaper than the alternatives as interest rates continue to climb. And as inflation goes up up up, because the cost of housing would go up with inflation. And obviously the cost of a mortgage does go up with increased interest rates. And so you can have the same standard of living for half the money, it cost someone else to do. So that's crazy that and that will absolutely drive a lot of not desirable outcomes. So first off the people in that situation are not going to be very um nearly as unhappy as the people who are paying twice as much for the same thing or who can't get the same thing at all because they can't afford twice as much. So you have this huge difference in how upset people are that plays out on the political scene and also life choices. There's a huge set of people that are just barreling forward with life as usual, even though all these things are blowing up in real time. And then there's another set of people who are becoming even more irate because not only do they have to pay twice as much for the same thing. And we were talking about houses but you could go anywhere you want with this. But it's, it's hurting them a lot more and they're really upset. This drives to envy cause they look at people who are the same as them and this is not quite bad as far as envy goes. They sense the real injustice of the fact that these people are exactly the same but have a way better situation. And it's just because they got in earlier. Now, if you got in earlier through wisdom, that's different than if you just fell into the butter, so to speak. But those people aren't going to make a difference between the two. And that is important because if you're in this fraction of the population that lives according to wisdom and you make sacrifices today for the future and you have some sense of accuracy for what's coming. You are going to be targeted as if you did something wrong but you didn't do something wrong, you did something right when no one else was doing it and it used to be that you got rewarded for that sort of thing. But now you'll be punished for it. Ok. Here's a really big one with the inflation of the dollar that you need to be prepared for, especially if you're older or you're on welfare or your older and on welfare, especially as the debt increases exponentially. What you're going to find is that the exponential increase in inflation will mean that your government benefits so called do not go as far. Now, the Feds have been playing a game for a long time where they intentionally doctor the rate of inflation lower than it is to avoid having to pay people more. I'm talking in particular about social security cost of living increases. This is a game they've been at in a long time since the nineties, you can look it up, they continuously change the way the equation is calculated so that it yields a lower result than it would if you use the old equation. And people on social security know this because they notice that their dollars don't buy as much, even though they're supposed to be on this plan that is tethered to inflation. They notice that the older they get , the less they can afford that is going to get way worse. And you see this already if you're on these programs and it's going to get worse. And so this is something you don't want to hear but that someone you really need to hear it as the proverb says, open criticism is better than hidden love. And I'm giving you that right now, I'm telling you what you don't want to hear, but that you really need to hear and it's a greater sign of love than people blowing, smoke up your butt. You need to get into a situation where you're not dependent on social security to stay alive. You're not dependent on social security to pay your bills. If you're on food stamps, you need to have a backup plan. Those sorts of things usually are turn key part of this. You're really not gonna wanna hear this. You need to find people who love you, that's gonna be hard enough, who will help support you, who have the means to do so or you need to work yourself. But hopefully, if you're in that situation, it's not because you had a choice but whatever, if you can do something about it, do something about it. So for some people, this just means getting a job at under 22 hours a week or whatever social security allows for others , this means you're gonna have to bite the bullet, move in with one of your kids or something like this or like move in with other old people or other disabled people or whatever your situation is. And this is the sacred cow of presumed independence, which is false. It's a lie. It's a basis, uh It's on the basis of the unmerited surplus we enjoy in wealthy countries. You're not actually independent if someone's giving you money. You, you have to understand that if the government's paying you, it doesn't matter if you paid in the money or not, you're not independent. You depend on that. And if they change the deal, which they are changing it, you're gonna be up the creek. So make the changes now to adjust yourself to that state of mind that you rely on other people to survive because it's going to be more and more apparent. I told the person I was talking to about this uh a while back, they lost their job. A lot of people are, I said you probably should sell your house. This, this person doesn't have kids at home. Um and they're old or older. I said you just became eligible for early social security. You should sell your house. Move to a very cheap place, not just house like living cheap place . I mean, the cost of living cheap place like West Virginia or something and uh move to some inexpensive place. Um buy an apartment with your equity, a cheap apartment or a um a trailer or something. But, but if it's, if it's a trailer on the land too, you don't wanna have monthly payments is the point . Buy an inexpensive place with your equity and get a part time job working 22 hours a week and draw your social security early. And they said, well, I don't want to sell my house. And I said, what you want is irrelevant. You can only what you want, only matters relative to the set of options before you. You can wish to keep your house, but it doesn't matter what you wish, you have the choices that are before you. But this person had in their minds that they'd never have to be, have to downsize, they'd never have to give up anything. It was just gonna be upward and onward in everything that they do till the moment they keel over and die. And that is a sacred cow that people have in America. And I'm sure in other first world nations, you will become dependent on other people as you age unless you die suddenly at a young age. That's reality. Folks. That's one reason that, that one selfish but valid reason to have kids who is going to take care of you when you can't take care of yourself. It's one reason to treat your kids well. So there's a commandment to honor your father and mother, but not your kids. Why? Because they're the ones changing your diapers when you get old and everyone should know that. Therefore, there's already a reason to treat them well. At least one of them at least have a favorite that you treat well. Right. That's the diaper changer. Although typically when there is a kid that's treated as a favorite, they're the last ones to take care of their parents when they need it. Oddly enough. All right when you, so you, if you were on government money in any way, I don't care if you're a federal retiree, whatever. I don't care. It is highly likely that you are going to see a situation where the money doesn't cover what it's meant to. And as that happens as that happens, it's gonna be too late to do much about it. With time, there will be less you can do about it. So for instance, if you get on this right now, so I know a person who takes a lot of prescription medicines that they probably don't need to take. Now I am a doctor, but I'm not a medical doctor and I'm not giving you medical advice. That's something you need to sort out and you need to figure out. But if you're on some kind of optional treatment judged by you and or your doctor uh then tapering off of that would be a smart move because you reduce your dependency. So what I'm saying is there are, there are independenc, I don't think that's a word, but we're gonna coin it. There are independenc that are false that you need to wrap your head around and get rid of. They're also willing like optional dependencies that you need to get rid of and that will make you more resilient to the changes that are coming. The best way to prepare for changes that you can't completely predict the details of is to have fewer dependencies in your life, the fewer dependencies that you have, the less susceptible you are to the effects that will come through any old change. So, um, but you're, you're going to see times ahead where, for example. So, so people on food stamps, families, it's, you get very little if you're an individual, but once you put kids into the equation, they give you massively more than you'd ever need. It's people on food stamps with kids like they don't even know what to do with the money. So they buy tons of junk food and soda and whatever. They sell the spare stuff on the side, which is totally illegal, but people do it and um, you're going to see. So there's this, there's no variety of food stamps being too much. In many cases, you're gonna see people on food stamps not having enough when you see people on food stamps losing weight because it doesn't go far enough. You'll know that this has happened if you're going to see it, I promise you cause it, you can print an indefinite amount of money, but you cannot grow an indefinite amount of food. There's no amount of money that you can print that puts bodies into the tractors, puts fuel in the tank and puts the food on the shelves. It's limited and we're at the point of diminishing returns right now, we've milked that cow dry and you're going to see it going the other way. And that is, that is one of many things I'm telling you in these videos, you can write it down. No one is gonna tell you that right now. No one is expecting that and it's going to happen and when it does mark it as evidence, that what I'm telling you comes from somewhere that matters, use it as evidence for the other things I'm telling you that seem equally unlikely . Most importantly, the ones that, that relate to changing your behavior, to align with God, not preparedness or end times whatever, that doesn't matter beyond your relationship with God. So if these changes affect people on welfare, which they will, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will vastly affect the ones who aren't on welfare disproportionately. So that's another thing I mentioned that when the government was saying inflation was transitory, they were also increasing the grant award amounts by 30% 20% whatever it was. They did the same thing with food stamps. The second, the reports came out about inflationary, sorry, transitionary inflation. They upped food stamps by 30%. And that's when you knew it was a lie. Not that you, you could just go to the store and see it was a lie. So did normal people not on food stamps, did they get a 30% increase in their food budget? They did not people paying their own way, did not get a 30% boost. And so they were disproportionately harmed by inflation because the people on food stamps didn't feel it. People not on food stamps took a huge bite out of their cart pun intended. So what's gonna happen? And this is one of the factors that cause the problem that increased, um government benefits aren't gonna be enough anymore because you say, well, if they can increase food stamps by 30% why can't they do it again and again and again, I told you why? Because inflating the demand, which is what they're doing does not increase the supply and eventually there just isn't supply at any price, there isn't supply. So what happens when you start upping food stamps as a result of inflation is you create artificial demand, not just in terms of the people already on the program, but you up the incentive for people to get on the program. So to fudge the numbers and make the, the situation more clear. Let's suppose, let's suppose that you make a certain amount of money per year, that's too much to get food stamps. But you have a bunch of kids, you have enough kids that it would be highly profitable to get on food stamps because you have a huge food budget. So maybe you're spending $1000 a month on food, which if you have a few kids, that's not a hard thing to do today. You don't have to eat filet mignon to do it. You can shop sales and everything else and still be coughing up 1000 bucks a month on food easily. So, suppose that you could work a little less and all of a sudden qualify for food stamps. Would you do it? Well, if the economics work out and you have no moral qualms about it. Absolutely. And many people are so now and it's easy to do if you're an hourly employee, you say, hey, boss, I need to work three less hours a week, whatever. So now all of a sudden you have way more money to spend on food than you did before because there's a net increase over what you were paying. So you took a hit in your income but you got back more in food stamps. And so now your food budget is even bigger than it used to be. So, of course, you're going to spend the money and now there's even less food to go around. So with more people on welfare equals higher prices and more shortages. And it's a death spiral and we will just keep going, just keep going. So we're almost done. The last thing I'm gonna talk about in this video is that you're gonna see more and more financial misappropriation. What do I mean by that stimulus tax credits, refundable, so called refundable tax credits. Every time you see fancy words in government programs, you should know that someone's being raped, that's what's going on. They use fancy words to mislead people. So what properties do these things ? These programs have? Well, they're always massive, they always do more harm than good. The benefits that are most loudly advertised are typically the minority of the way the money is spent. So COVID stimulus, people talk about the stimulus checks. That was a drop in the bucket compared to the PPP. I don't remember what that acronym was for, but I do remember that anyone that had a business employing people got a massive amount of money that never had to be paid back. It was an amazing amount of money but another quality. So, so you didn't hear about that if you're normal W-2 employee, all you heard about was the sty checks which came to you and that was a drop in the bucket compared to what went to employers. Now, that money was spent on paychecks, that was a paycheck protection program. You had to spend it on paychecks if I remember correctly, but it had to go into the business. It wasn't just, the owner could cut themselves a check for that whole amount, but um, not to go into details, but if you're paying the paychecks anyway, then whatever money you were using to pay the paychecks that could go directly into your pocket, not the PPP money that had to go to the employees, but the money that offset if, if you were already a profitable business that just became money in your pocket to, to the stockholders or, or the, the business owner. So another property of these programs is they're massively uneven. Meaning there was one, I can't remember what it was called during COVID that you could get a refund on this one of the payroll taxes. I don't remember which one, but it was enormous. And to show you how much money this is. If you own a business, you've probably gotten about 10 billion solicitation calls from companies that spun up out of nowhere to help people get the money. Of course , in exchange for a cut. Um, because there was a lot of paperwork to fill out. But once you've done it, once it's a piece of cake to do you, it's like you, um, tax, typical tax form way too complicated. But once you've gone through the swamp, once you can fill out the next one, a lot easier because you know how to do it, you've read all the instructions, you know, all the ridiculous little bits. So, um, these companies spun up out of nowhere but the requirements on this program were so dang arbitrary. I think in the case of my company, we were $5 off. If we had spent five more dollars on whatever it was tracking, it was something that ridiculous. We would have gotten something like $100,000 more than we did. It was some insane thing like that. And that's the thing with these programs is they're arbitrary and ridiculous and uneven. Now, a lot of these programs, we talked about food stamps. You can , I won't say game because it has a negative connotation and might be associated with something illegal. And I'm not talking about illegal things, but you can optimize the rules given for a certain thing so that you make decisions so that you're best suited for that thing. And it's just an equation and they give you what the variables are. If you know about it upfront. A lot of people do this, for example, with the standard deduction on your income tax in the United States, now they change it pretty much all the time, but they give you enough for warning. So that you know, because what you trade this off with is itemizing deductions. So if you donate to charity and or have a house, there are a lot of things you can deduct if you itemize, but you have to weigh that against the standard deduction. So if this is gonna change, it might influence how you, you're not gonna choose to buy a house or not based on this, maybe because that's more of a long term decision, but how much you're going to give to charity this year. So there are people, for example, who donate sizable portions of their income to churches and they will do things like give twice as much of one year and give zero the next to make the most out of their tax situation doesn't really make a difference to the church and they're still checking their, whatever their religious boxes are, but they make an enormous amount of money in tax savings by doing things like that. So there are situations like that when the programs are arbitrary and they come out of nowhere and no one knows the details. And then once they tell you the details, it's too late to make any decisions to optimize your situation. It's just arbitrary who gets the money and how much. So there's no way to plan for that, which means it guarantees that it can't influence people to do things for improvement. If you don't know ahead of time, there's no way you can optimize. And so what I promise you is going to happen is all these same things are gonna happen. So, so let me just give you one more example not to drone on about it. Do you remember during one of the more recent presidential elections? There was this candidate, I think his name was Andrew Yang. I don't remember, but his kind of only talking points was universal basic income. And this is the first time it had come into such prominent discussion on the national uh in the national spotlight. And, and you could say that the COVID stimulus may have been at least partially a result of his campaign because it implanted this idea, not that those sorts of things hadn't been done before. But, um, it's definitely more prominent because of it. I know the second, the second I heard the phrase universal basic income , I knew three things. One, it was not going to be income, it would be money forcefully taken from someone and given to someone else. It would be someone's income but not the person that was getting it be anti income. Two. I knew it would never be enough to be considered basic. It would never cut any amount of money that you give someone for free will never be enough societally will never be enough to give them more than what they already have. It will always result in the opposite. They will have less than what they already have. That's why minimum wage is also a misnomer. At least in what people think about when they, when you think of it as the minimum amount of that someone's gonna make. No, it's gonna result in more people making less money or at least when you equate it to what that money buys fewer jobs, fewer hours, fewer goods in exchange for the money you make guaranteed. So I knew that the income was a lie. I knew the basic was a lie and I knew the universal was gonna be a lie. I knew it would not be universal. If you gave everybody the same amount of money, you guarantee that it will make no positive difference because the cost of everything will go up by that much. And then the wise people will use it more wisely than everyone else and end up multiplying it, which will make everyone even more angry. These are unavoidable facets of humanity. If you give 10 people randomly from the population, $100 a piece, half of them are gonna waste it immediately on Sunday. Gives them pleasure . Right now. A few of them will use it in a little bit more wiser ways. And maybe one, maybe two of them, we use it in ways that they somehow turn it tenfold to what it was. That's human nature. You cannot escape that. That's all other things being completely equal, which they're not. So I knew it wasn't gonna be universal. I knew it wasn't gonna be basic and I knew it was not going to be income. And sure enough, the second they start putting these things out and this happened with the stimmy, all kinds of arbitrary limits on who gets it. They always sell it from the perspective of this is for everyone and they always implement it from the perspective of we're gonna carve out some demographic to maximize the people that put us into and keep us in power. They do it every time. So look for more arbitrary limits on things. This is another driver into poverty and the destruction of the middle class because income limits never rise as fast as inflation. This is one problem even from a simpleton point of view. Even if you're completely unprincipled, you don't care at all about real justice. This is why every single person should oppose anything that has an income limit, any program that has an income limit should be radically opposed by all people because there will come a day when you or your descendants are considered over the line. Even if your standard of living is no better than it is now or theirs. So when people say, oh, the IRS is only going to audit folks who make more than X. And you say, well , I don't make X, I don't care. Well, that's unjust for one but two, setting that aside the day will come when, if you don't make X, you'll be living in a gutter somewhere because of inflation and that's probably going to happen in your lifetime. So don't support those programs because they'll, they'll come for you too. You're also going to see. And I mentioned this in another video, arbitrary demographic limits that exceed income. We're talking about race, talking about gender, we're talking about other things that might be ideologically correlated and you're going to see crazy set asides and other barriers or facilitation for what seemed like random sets of people. And there really won't be much you can do about it as far as planning for this and trying to get a piece of it. You might even see, I would not be surprised to see drawings, lotteries for who gets the, whatever the benefits might be if it's a stimulus check, whatever it is there. I'm, I'm shocked that governments haven't implemented lotteries yet. And the reason they might do this is as the turd is, is swirling the drain, so to speak. And the, the momentum, this, this thing is just on a down downward spiral and the writings on the wall that there's not enough money to go around, they might cash in on the fact that a substantial portion of the population lacks the math skills to realize that lotteries are always a bad idea. And um you see this lottery idea all through society and certain demographics that tend to be poor. So it's well known that lotteries are a tax on poor people. Um, wealthy people don't play the lottery because they know that the statistics are terrible if they do, they do it like they buy a ticket, like buying a movie ticket where it's just for the entertainment value. They have no hope of getting the winnings . So if you see this outside of economic situations, like the NBA is a lottery situation, there are so many people playing basketball all the time thinking they're going to get into the NBA and they all know it's, it's the odds are so low. It's insane. But they all try anyway. And they exert massive resources into being good basketball players when, if they exerted just a fraction of that into something that was more likely to be productive then. Um, or, or to lead to a good outcome, they'd have dramatically better lives. That's the lottery mentality. Um, you even see this with, with all sorts of things like marriage prospects today where people, especially young ladies, they look around and why I'm not gonna cut young men out of that. We'll, we'll leave it even, but it's for two different reasons. Young ladies look around and they say, huh? Pretty much every woman I know that's married, who's a couple of years into it. Regrets the guy they married and they fooled around while they were young and they settled for, for whatever was left, you know, the, the wealthiest man interested in them when they finally got around to settling down. But I'm gonna do that same thing and it's gonna turn out differently for me. All right. Let me know how that goes for the young men. It's a quite different situation and I think that they're doing a little bit better in getting their reality check about it, adjusting their actions. They look around and they say, huh? Pretty much every guy I know who's been married at least 10 years is either divorced or wishes he was and would be if he wasn't going to get raped by the government by doing so and, or his wife, uh, in losing at least half his stuff being completely ruined financially because of child support and alimony and having his kids hate him. Um But I'm gonna do the same exact thing and it's gonna work out for me. So they are waking up a lot faster to that illusion and saying I refuse to get married under any circumstances. I'll have a living girlfriend, but I'm going to know the law and you're not going to catch me on commonwealth marriage. I will not marry you legally. You will not have half of my stuff. And if you can convince me to marry you legally, we are going to have an ironclad prenup. But I'm probably not even gonna go for that because I've heard enough stories of that being thrown out by a judge. And so a lot more men are waking up to that than women. But that is also the lottery mentality. So suffice it to say that's a short deviation. But the lottery mentality is prevalent in society today. People going to college is the lottery mentality. All these people they see coming out of college can't get jobs and they say, well, I'm gonna go do the same exact thing and it's going to be different for me anyway. I'm shocked that the government hasn't cashed in on this yet, but they will, I think it's highly likely that they will and what exactly that will look like. I don't really know, but you're gonna see something like drawings to determine payouts of benefits. So it would be crazy. What if like social security is you pay in your whole life and then they roll the dice and if it comes up the other way, you don't get anything, it's Willy Wonka, you get nothing, you know, or it'll probably be something else. I don't know, but I fully expect lottery type systems for benefit handouts. Well, that concludes this stack of information. I hope that this gives you some things to think about and prepare for.