Paradocracy

According to an article published today by The Hill , the Trump administration has declared its intentions to dramatically slash ObamaCare outreach funding from $100 million last year to $10 million this year. Unfortunately, this budget cut is simply not dramatic enough. Simply put, outreach funding is a complete and utter contradiction, as the spirit of any government program is to cater to a specific set of initiative-taking individuals or households who actively take an interest in improving their independent lives, not to attract leeches who merely wish to swindle the taxpayers into affording them an indefinite period of enhanced leisure. In the so-called homelessness initiative, federal and local tax dollars are spent on the same types of projects, whereby outreach staff are subsidized to meet with members of the community who appear homeless to pitch the prolific menu of programs that you, as taxpayers, subsidize through your income and sales taxes. Those outreach teams ...

Gold finally broke out above the $1,300 level today, closing at its intraday high of about $1,316 before surging in after-hours trading near the $1,328 mark, moving the yellow metal more than 2 percent on a day that saw the major indices move sideways and the U.S. Dollar Index ( DXY ) continue its year-to-date decline, ending the day around 92.20. Meanwhile, silver also benefitted from the day’s trading, gaining 2.5 percent to settle around $17.50 per ounce. Commodities traders will want to keep a close eye on the precious metals after gold has finally broken through that key $1,300 level. This is likely to stir further confidence in the metal’s foreseeable upside potential, as the trade has long been subdued after failing to seriously test that key technical threshold since November of last year, the start of what would prove to be a 13-percent decline by Christmas. Gold’s next technical test will be around $1,400, a level that the metal has failed to breach since September ...

Former Google engineer James Damore's memo signals the emergence of an astounding social trend away from truth and facts toward the preferred comforts of idealizations rooted in untested fantasies about the way the world should operate over the pursuit of understanding how and why it operates conversely today. What's more, it seems as though some intellectuals' contentions are more or less equal   than others, as the ensuing ridicule  of Damore as an "ass hole" qualifies as allowable humor, while his own honest opinions on a subject intimately important to him are sexist   or "bull shit." Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one's agenda or point of view, the world fails to operate on the basis of any single individual's determination of "bull shit." The world operates the way it does because of individuals pursuing their own maximum advantage while weighing marginal benefit against marginal labor along the way. All of...

In the history of this world, there is perhaps no form of marketing or protracted syntactical destruction that could ever aspire to achieve as much as the word should has attained in the English language. As much as we rely upon language to convey and interpret meaning, those messages are only worth as much validity as they carry with them.  In dissemination, the remainder becomes hollow conventional wisdom. As it turns out, many purveyors of the word should have been selling you ideological snake oil. The Should Fallacy All beliefs are harnessed through axiomatic distinctions. This author claims not to have any solutions to this world's many perceived problems, as no honest economist will report anything more than a menu of tradeoffs; moreover, I represent only my own beliefs intimately and inseparably hinged to the limits of my own experience and understanding. This is the human condition, a perpetual struggle to maximize one's lot in life while minimizing the atte...