Social Issues

Perhaps The Burning Platform summarized the idiocy of Philadelphia's soda tax better than anyone to date:

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

Over 3,000 millionaires have fled Chicago in recent months.

This is the largest outflow of wealthy people from any US city right now. It’s also one of the largest outflows of wealthy people in the world.

But it’s not just millionaires… Every five minutes someone leaves Illinois.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Consumerism is a simulacrum of real economic agency.

There is perhaps no better metric of class in America than personal power--what is known as agency: the power to influence or transform one's circumstances in a a self-directed manner. Those with agency have power, those without agency (or very limited agency) are essentially powerless.

America’s opioid epidemic is now killing more than 100 people every day, fueling a public-health crisis that’s straining state and local resources – even forcing at least one Pennsylvania coroner to increase his freezer capacity to make room for all of the bodies.

We first introduced readers to the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) crisis last summer in a post entitled "Dallas Cops' Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid."  For those who have managed to avoid this particular storyline for the past 15 months, here is a brief recap of how it all started from our original post on the topic: