America Has Gone to Hell

Andy Snyder|July 28, 2022

Editor’s Note: We’re doing something a bit different this morning. We’re presenting readers with one of Andy’s most important and most popular essays ever. A version of it was originally published in the April 2022 issue of Manward Letter.

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The last few years in America have been hellish.

Some would say it’s not just here in the States. It’s been hell on Earth.

The ignorant will blame a tough series of events. They’ll say contested elections, race riots, round after round of pandemic panics, a couple of economic shake-ups and a worldly war in Europe – all one after the other – are mere coincidence.

The suffering was supposed to end once a new leader was chosen… then it would end when 2020 turned to 2021. After that, 2022 was supposed to be the year of hope… After the masks came off, it’d be the “Roaring ’20s.”

Ha.

Each passing day only seems to disappoint the naïve. They’ve been duped, like a dead-broke gambler at a blackjack table, that the next hand is the winner.

Eventually, the casino will comp them a taxi. It’ll be a long, blurry-eyed ride home.

The truth is none of this is coincidence. It’s no more a result of chance than the well-prepared man who succeeds in life. What’s the old saying… “Luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity”?

It’s a critical idea.

What has taken place over the last three years is merely fallout from the same idea… just flipped on its ugly little butt.

What we have now is what happens when a lack of preparation and honest thought meets reality.

Stupid Hurts

Decades of spending on all the wrong things. A floundering education system that fails to tell the world’s important history… or its painful consequences. A carefully crafted system of checks and balances that’s been pushed aside for “feel-good” laws and politics. And, perhaps the invisible killer, a social safety net that swallows its victims instead of bouncing them back to independence.

We’ve written about it all before.

In early 2019, we famously debuted our “Gone to Hell” scale to Manward Letter readers. It’s a unique rating system that helps us gauge the health of not just the American economy and culture, but any government system of any scale.

Each time we bring it up, we put ourself at greater risk. Folks don’t want to hear this stuff. They take offense to the idea. “How dare he say the Social Security system is a fraud!” Or “How dare he say those innocent teachers are leading our kiddos astray!”

But look in the mirror, America. This black eye – uncontrolled inflation, an economy on the brink, stores closing because of runaway crime – isn’t from some creep who came in from the back and sucker-punched us. It’s a self-inflicted wound. We got drunk and careless. We tripped on our own ignorant pride and fell right down the steps.

With that, we turn to our “Gone to Hell” scale to see how things are trending. Once we know how we’re doing, we can take that first critical step to fix it.

Longtime subscribers will know the scale looks at five key criteria, grading each on a traditional A through F scale. We look at our adherence to good law, the health of our education system, our social safety nets, our self-defense, and the difference in tax treatment between the rich and the poor.

Many ratings have changed.

There’s good news. And there’s bad news. But all of it is honest and fair.

Let’s take a look…

No. 1: The Rule of Law

When we first debuted the scale, the ongoing debate about immigration was at the forefront of the nation’s mind. Back then, we honed in on the push to change the term “illegal alien” to “undocumented immigrant.”

The word “illegal” was deemed too harsh.

It’s an ideal example of how we have laws on the books that have been created in a delicate system of checks and balances… but yet are made null by a lack of enforcement or prosecution.

We see the same idea all across the nation. For several years, we’ve had sanctuary cities, where certain laws are not enforced based on the politics of the day. But now we’ve got something even more dangerous: district attorneys who are creating their own systems of laws.

In Baltimore, the home of Manward’s offices, marijuana is illegal. But the city’s district attorney has vowed not to prosecute the crime. Cops can arrest folks for weed, but they’ll be pushed out the back door and never get charged with a crime.

It’s the same for prostitution, urinating in public, trespassing and open container laws.

Each law serves a purpose… especially if it’s your doorstep getting peed on. And all of these laws were voted on by a proper caucus of elected officials. But one person now stands in their way.

It’s like that in cities all across America. But only in Baltimore has this one person also been arrested on federal charges for perjury and making false mortgage applications.

That’s not a good sign for the rule of law.

Or take New York. The state is gearing up to allow its first-ever retail sales of marijuana. Great. Let freedom ring, right?

Of course, sellers must be legally licensed. But who gets to be first in line to get these coveted licenses?

Is it the folks who have the best business plans or who have worked the hardest to get where they are?

Nope…

This is insane.

Hold on to your pearls. To get one of those licenses, you or your family must have been busted for a marijuana-related crime. The law-abiding aren’t eligible.

It’s a smack in the face for all the folks who enforced the laws and devoted their lives to them… and, just as important, the millions of people who – even if they disagreed with them – followed the rules.

They did what was right under the law. And now somebody with a drug conviction gets ahead… simply because they broke the law.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

In fact, it’s this disregard for the law from the very top that had us downgrade this category yet again – from a D+ to a D-. We’re convinced the system is on the brink of failure.

No. 2: Our Education System

Oh boy… where to start? Our public education system is a mess. That’s nothing new.

And, bringing the thoughts of a true expert on the subject into things, Mike Rowe recently asked… Why is it that our government is eager to forgive the debt on a student loan, but not the debt of an entrepreneur who took a risk to start his own business?

What a powerful question.

But something peculiar has happened over the last two years.

You’ve heard the phrase “iron sharpens iron.” Truly, it’s the capitalist’s motto. A bit of competition makes everybody stronger. Thanks to COVID, that’s what’s happened in our schools.

It’s no surprise that the number of families home-schooling children in America has grown from 5.4% in early 2020 to 11.1% last fall. Of course, as the pandemic wanes, so too will these numbers.

But not all kids will head back to a “real” classroom in the next few weeks. And some folks say that with a larger chunk of kids accelerating through independent education, more folks will be attracted to the idea.

That’s good news all around. It creates badly needed competition for public schools.

Almost 25% of home-schooled children are at least one grade above their age-level peers in public schools. Their grade-level test scores are typically in the 70th to 80th percentile – by definition, well above the public-school average. And home-schooled children have significantly higher SAT scores.

Seeing these results, parents who bother to pay attention should surely be pushing for something better from the public system.

But, come on, this is America. It’s not grades that do the talking… it’s money.

This is where things get good. It’s where and how real change will be made. You see, for each kid who pulls out of the public system, the school system gets that much less money from the state. In Georgia, for instance, one school district saw 700 students pulled from its roster. That amounted to as much as $2 million in lost funding.

The teacher’s union doesn’t like that.

“Hopefully, we can capture some of those kids that are in those daycares out there and we can get our enrollment up,” said the school’s CFO. “If they show up in January after the first of the year, it’s a little bit too late for us.” They don’t get the money.

Perhaps that explains the big push for earlier publicly funded childhood education. Just follow the money.

We like the tension in the school systems. Add in the fact that more folks are able to take advantage of remote learning and the many different educational facets that have been born out of it… and it’s reason for an upgrade.

We’re moving the nation’s education system up from an F- to a D+. The less the government is involved, the better the grade will get.

No. 3: Social Safety Nets

This one is easy… it gets a downgrade. A big one – from a B to a C-.

It should be only a temporary move… a result of heavy-handed pandemic-related stimulus spending. But until the filth that covered the global economy is etched away by the sands of time, we must cast a skeptical eye toward the nation’s safety nets.

What started as a bold idea to protect the widows and the orphans expanded into a program to help the lame and the unable. Good, most folks will say. It should be the community’s job, but where a culture fails, it’s fair to hope the government steps in.

But things have gone downhill fast. Over the last 2 1/2 years, the American economy has deepened its addiction to handouts from deep-pocketed Uncle Sam. We’ve put checks in mailboxes. We’ve paid folks not to work. And just this year, the Federal Reserve finally made the last purchase through its quantitative easing program.

The bureaucrats should not file their forms too far away, though. The program will be back.

Over the last two years, businesses have been given money to pay their bills, students have been told not to pay back their loans, and in some parts of the economy, it’s impossible not to turn around and run into another free-money grant.

It’s too much.

It’s so much, in fact, that states haven’t been able to spend it all – and that’s saying something. At the end of last year, eight states had yet to spend a single dollar of the pandemic relief money handed to them by Congress. It’s $16.5 billion in total.

There’s no rush to spend it. They’ve got until 2024 to unload it… despite the dangerous inflation the unnecessary spending is fueling.

That means it wasn’t a pandemic safety net at all. It was a free money giveaway disguised as relief.

For proof… we turn to our own personal email inbox. As an owner of farmland, we just received an email from the USDA announcing “American Rescue Plan Technical Assistance to Benefit Underserved Farmers, Ranchers and Forest Landowners.”

It’s a grant program that helps folks apply for grants.

It’s free money chasing free money. And, of course, “There is no anticipated overall maximum funding level.” The five-year plan (yes, taking us to more than seven years after the nation needed to be “rescued”) offers grants “normally ranging from $500,000 to $3.5 million.”

Again… none of it is aimed at building anything new or researching anything novel. It’s all aimed at helping to give more money away.

It’s insane spending.

That’s why we’ve downgraded this category. It’s not that the nation doesn’t catch the folks who are falling. It’s that it’s also catching the folks who’ve merely slipped or are slowing down… or still aren’t quite sure who to vote for.

We can’t afford it. And the effects on the economy are far too wide… much wider than the folks in charge care to admit.

No. 4: National Defense

The last time we wrote about this criterion, the news had just been released that it took a two-person team only one hour to gain access to a critical weapons system. It took them just one day to gain full control.

In a digital world, with cyberthreats growing by the minute, that’s a big letdown.

But it’s true that we can’t prove a negative. And we don’t know what we don’t know – or what’s still classified.

Earlier this year, Microsoft worked in tandem with the folks in D.C. to detect and thwart a sizable attack. Even with all the angst with Russia, our systems have yet to be struck in any sizable way. That’s good. We must give our systems credit.

Yes, there was some embarrassment in Afghanistan. The scene we created was not good. But we got our troops home and have shrunk our footprint.

We have more aircraft than any other country. We have the best special forces. We’re No. 5 in the world when it comes to military-aged population (a crucial idea as our enemies face rapidly aging populations). And, of course, we spend like no other.

At the end of the day, there’s no other military we’d rather have protecting us.

It’s not perfect, but our shores are safer than the rest.

For that, we’ll upgrade this category from a D+ to a C.

No. 5: Taxes

This category isn’t just about the obvious. It’s not limited to how much the man takes from our pockets. Those numbers have consistently been record-breaking.

Corporate tax revenues, for instance, hit $370 billion in fiscal 2021 – an all-time high.

It’s been one record after another this year. In all, the federal government collected $4.05 trillion in fiscal 2021.

That’s a fifth of the nation’s entire GDP.

It’s far too much for a free and independent economy. It’s proof that Washington’s sticky hand has grown far too large.

But this failing grade comes down to what we wrote when we first debuted this scale…

History from ancient Rome to modern Russia shows that as the gap between the rich and the poor widens (no matter the actual dollars changing hands), it’s hell on a government and the nation it represents. That’s because it’s one of the clearest signs of crony capitalism and political perversion.

Despite rich campaign promises and all sorts of rhetoric, nothing has changed. Worse, thanks to the pandemic, the income gap between the rich and the poor soared like few times before. It tears open the wound and pours a gallon of taxpayer-funded salt into it.

Anything but a failing grade for the nation’s tax system and everything that surrounds it would be a farce. This one gets another big, bold F.

America is better than most countries. We wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. But our nation’s leadership sure should focus on keeping our grades up.

They’re not good. And that, no coincidence, leads to trouble.

We’ll leave you with a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville. He penned some fine and pertinent words in his 1831 book Democracy in America…

Nothing is more striking to a European traveler in the United States than the absence of what we term the Government, or the Administration. Written laws exist in America, and one sees that they are daily executed; but although everything is in motion, the hand which gives the impulse to the social machine can nowhere be discovered.

My, how things have changed.

We could say, in fact, things have gone to hell.