The Consequences of a Shitty Economy

The economy is a mess. You know it, I know it, everyone in the fucking country knows it, and the news anchors know that we all know it. It should then come as absolutely no surprise that these assholes continue to mention corporate lay-offs, the Dow Jones industrial average, and other shit that only directly affects uppity white-collar assholes who make their living being criminally uncreative in front of a computer. Fuck these people; their best interests get enough coverage as it is. I'd like to instead focus on some of the effects of the economy that are somewhat relevant to people who haven't traded their individuality and life's goals for a 6-figure salary, baldness, impotence, and a pretentious title.

The Managerial Douchebaggery Index

Theorem: The probability of your manager being a douchebag increases as a function of the unemployment rate. MDI = 100sin(πu/2) where MDI is the probability of encountering managerial douchebaggery (as a percentage) and u is the unemployment rate (as a decimal).

In layman's terms, when the economy has a healthy unemployment rate, the chance of having a complete douchebag for a manager is a tolerable 8%. Right now the MDI of the county I live in is 18 fucking percent.

Another effect guaranteed to cause irreparable long-term damage to our society that often gets swept under the rug is that local governments have no money, so they are forced to cut something from their budgets. That "something," by the way, is always education. Museums, school faculty members, arts programs, you fucking name it, it's being slashed. The only items guaranteed to never get slashed are sports (such as spending $75 Million on a stadium for the Boston Red Sox^[src]), frivolous road construction programs (such as adding two lanes to an interstate freeway over eight years that is going to need an additional two lanes in five years at a cost of $430 Million^[src] instead of adding all four lanes now), and earmarks for some of the dumbest fucking things known to man. I don't know why, but politicians love to cut education budgets. Never mind the laws regulating class sizes or the preexisting shortage of competent public educators, let's take more money from the children and spend it on stupid shit! Responsible spending my ass.

And when the local governments are low on money, they begin thinking of ways to increase revenue. Ways such as raising ticket quotas and pulling people over for not wearing their seat-belts^[src]. Cops have become an amalgamation of bully and salesman: They will pull you over for some minor $15 offense then probe around to see if they can squeeze you for hundreds of dollars. "Why were you going 3 miles per hour over the speed limit?" "My speedometer's not perfect." "Ah, so you're driving an unsafe vehicle? $200!" It's fucking insane. Instead of saying, "Take that $200 and get your car fixed," it's "Give us money, then fork out more to get your car fixed." Are you people fucking kidding me? People aren't bottomless pools of money. There's a reason people turn to crime, asshole.

So let's put this into perspective: You get a shitty education from a Florida high school and don't get into a college. You then decide to get a job, only to be worked like a dog for minimum wage while being verbally abused by a dickhead of a manager who constantly reminds you how replaceable, expendable, and worthless you are. After nine hours of bullshit (let's face it: There's no chance in hell this asshole manager will get off your ass during your lunch break), you're driving home from work only to get pulled over by a cop for something stupid and minor only to go home owing the Clerk of Court $600 that you don't have. The only two logical outcomes from here are prison or what I like to call going retail. And you just know when this happens, journalists everywhere are going to sensationalize the story, demonize the person, and overall miss the fucking point about what just transpired because a journalism degree is not earned, it is traded. One journalism degree in exchange for all your common fucking sense.

The economy is more than abstract numbers designed to trick people into believing that they're not getting fucked over by the system, and its effects hit closer-to-home than any national news organization will ever admit because they don't give a shit about us. They really don't. "Do you work-- or rather, did you used to work 40 hours a week? Were you treated like shit? Too bad, Joe Peckerhead's stock dividends are low. We're running that story instead." The media makes me sick to my fucking stomach some days.