Social Issues

An alcoholic in the Netherlands has been euthanized by the state because he had “no prospect of improvement” and could not continue living as an alcoholic. Mark Langedijk, who suffered from depression and anxiety, was allowed to choose the day of his death and was cracking jokes, drinking beer and eating ham sandwiches with his family hours before he passed away. He was killed by lethal injection at his parents’ home on 14 July, according to an account of the ordeal written by his brother and published in the magazine Linda.

Total fertility rates, which can be defined as the average number of children born to a woman who survives her reproductive years (aged 15-49), have decreased globally by about half since 1960. This has drastically shaped today’s global economy, but as Visual Capitalist's Caitlin Cheadle explains, a continued decline could have much more severe long-term consequences.

If the world has too many elderly dependents and not enough workers, the burden on economic growth will be difficult to overcome.

Fertility Rates Start to Decline

A junior republican U.S. Senator from the state of Oklahoma, James Lankford, has released a publication detailing 100 examples of government waste entitled "Federal Fumbles - 100 Ways the Government Dropped the Ball."  The publication is filled with truly infuriating examples of government waste that are sure to get your blood boiling. 

Here are a couple of our favorites:

The distorted minds of the illiberal left do not know boundaries. Their drug addled, satanic, lifestyles of decadence and hedonism have reduced them to feckless shells, idiots who advance via extortion, blackmail and other sorts of wanton corruption.

In just a couple of months, the largest pension fund in the United States, the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), will have to decide whether they'll rely on sound financial judgement and math to set their rate of return expectations going forward or whether they'll cave to political pressure to maintain artificially high return hurdles that they'll never meet but help to maintain their ponzi scheme a little longer.  The decision faced by CALPERS is whether their long-term assumed rate of return on assets should be lowered from the cu