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Advisers plan biggest change yet to childhood vaccine schedule
On December 2nd the Washington Post ran a panicked story headlined, “RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisers plan biggest change yet to childhood schedule.” Kirk Milhoan, newly appointed chair of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee, ominously announced, “Not enough attention is being paid to risk.”
Dr. Milhoan, who replaced former committee chair Marty Makary, is a pediatric cardiologist, ivermectin proponent, and long-time critic of covid vaccines. You can imagine how much the media likes him. Yesterday, Dr. Milhoan announced that committee members, meeting tomorrow and Friday, will “broadly scrutinize” the entire pediatric vaccine schedule. You could hear a pin drop.
The “discussions on the timing of vaccines and ingredients could signal major changes to how children in the United States are vaccinated,” the Post reported despairingly. Tomorrow, the committee will formally vote on scrapping the hepatitis B vaccine for babies at birth, so long as their mothers test negative for the virus. (Hep B is usually acquired through sex and illegal drug use.)
Furthermore, and even more encouraging, the committee is “looking at what may be causing some of the long-term changes we’re seeing in population data in children, specifically things such as asthma and eczema and other autoimmune diseases,” Milhoan said in an interview Monday.
Then he dropped the hammer. Milhoan said, “What we’re trying to do is figure out if there are factors within vaccines” that could be causing these problems, instantly terrifying every reporter within earshot and sending ice shooting through their veins (at least, the ones not punctured by needle holes).
Currently, and specifically, the committee is considering aluminum, which is added to over a dozen scheduled vaccines, intended to shock recipients’ immune systems into working even better than without aluminum.
“Public health and medical experts have raised alarms that the panel is moving toward recommending that only vaccines without aluminum adjuvants be used,” the Post said. “ Vaccine industry officials said that removing aluminum adjuvants from vaccines would cost billions of dollars and that finding a replacement would take years,” it explained.
The bowtied brigades can feel the walls closing in. Last week, the CDC revised its website to remove the claim that vaccines don’t cause autism. On Friday, the nation’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Vinay Prasad, announced more stringent approaches to approving vaccines, citing research showing at least ten kids had been killed by the covid shots. Now this.
Government is glacially slow, which is probably a good thing in most cases. By any sane measure, RFK’s team is moving at lightspeed. This is terrific progress.
Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/coon-capers-wednesday-december-3?utm_campaign=post
The Calmest Statement
All four engines died at 37,000 feet—and the captain’s announcement became the calmest statement in aviation history.
June 24, 1982. Seven miles above the Indian Ocean.
British Airways Flight 9—a Boeing 747 carrying 263 souls—was cruising peacefully through the night when something impossible began.
First, the crew noticed St. Elmo’s fire. An eerie blue glow crackling across the cockpit windows like electricity dancing on glass.
Then shimmering sparks appeared along the wings, as if the aircraft were trailing fire through darkness.
Captain Eric Moody and his crew had thousands of flying hours between them. They’d seen unusual weather. They’d handled emergencies.
But they’d never seen anything like this.
Then came the alarm they dreaded most.
Engine four had failed.
Before they could process it, engine two quit.
Then engine one.
Then engine three.
In less than 90 seconds, all four engines had stopped.
Complete silence.
At seven miles above the ocean.
A commercial jet losing one engine is manageable. Losing two is a serious emergency. Losing three is catastrophic.
Losing all four?
That’s not supposed to happen. Ever.
Yet here was Captain Moody, flying a 300-ton glider with 263 people aboard, no engines, no power, and no idea why.
The 747 was descending—losing altitude at an alarming rate. Below them: the dark Indian Ocean and the mountainous Indonesian coastline.
They had minutes to figure out what happened and somehow restart the engines.
In the cabin, passengers saw strange sparks outside their windows. Oxygen masks dropped. Thick, acrid smoke filled the air, smelling like sulfur.
People began writing farewell notes.
Then Captain Moody’s voice came over the intercom with what would become one of the most famous announcements in aviation history:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
A small problem.
All four engines stopped.
Seven miles in the sky.
That’s not just British understatement. That’s leadership—keeping 263 people calm while facing catastrophe.
In the cockpit: controlled chaos.
Senior First Officer Roger Greaves’ oxygen mask had broken, leaving him gasping in the thin air. Moody immediately descended—trading precious altitude for breathable air.
Flight Engineer Barry Townley-Freeman worked frantically through engine restart procedures while First Officer Barry Fremantle handled communications with Jakarta.
They tried restarting the engines.
Nothing.
Again. Nothing.
Ten attempts. Twelve. Fifteen.
Each failure meant less altitude. Less time. Less sky.
The aircraft descended through 15,000 feet. Then 14,000. Then 13,000.
Below them, somewhere in darkness, were Java’s mountains.
They were running out of options.
At 13,500 feet—with terrain looming—engine four suddenly coughed, sputtered, and roared back to life.
Then engine three.
Then engine one.
Finally, engine two.
All four engines—dead for 13 minutes and 13,000 feet of descent—had somehow restarted.
They had power. They had control.
But they still weren’t safe.
Whatever had killed the engines had also destroyed the windscreen. The windows were opaque, sandblasted to translucence by millions of tiny particles traveling at 500 mph.
Captain Moody could barely see through them.
They had to land this crippled aircraft essentially flying blind.
They used side windows for glimpses. Relied on instruments. Followed radio guidance from Jakarta, trusting voices from the ground.
And somehow, impossibly, Captain Moody brought the battered 747 down safely at Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma Airport.
Not a single person died.
All 263 passengers and crew walked away.
Only after landing did investigators discover the truth.
Mount Galunggung in Java had been erupting. On June 24, it sent a massive ash cloud eight miles high—spreading across flight paths.
Flight 9 had flown directly through it in darkness.
Volcanic ash is pulverized rock—microscopic glass shards suspended in air. Invisible to weather radar. Nearly impossible to see at night.
When jet engines running at over 1,000 degrees ingest it, the ash melts instantly, coating components like molten glass and choking the engines completely.
The engines restarted only because Moody’s descent brought them below the ash cloud, where cooler air allowed the melted glass to solidify and break off.
It was luck as much as skill.
But the skill kept them alive long enough for the luck to matter.
British Airways Flight 9 changed aviation forever.
Before June 24, 1982, volcanic ash was considered a minor nuisance.
After Flight 9:
Global volcanic ash detection systems were established
Airlines receive real-time eruption alerts.
Flight paths are immediately rerouted around ash clouds
The International Airways Volcano Watch was created.
Captain Moody’s experience—and his crew’s quick thinking—saved not just 263 people that night.
It potentially saved thousands in the decades since.
Captain Moody continued flying until retirement. He’s remembered not just for his skill, but for that famous announcement—the calm understatement quoted in aviation training worldwide.
“We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped.”
That’s leadership. Keeping people calm when the world is falling apart. Refusing to give up when giving up would be understandable.
The lesson:
The impossible sometimes happens. Prepare anyway.
Calm leadership saves lives. Panic kills.
Never give up. Moody’s crew tried over 15 times to restart those engines. The 15th attempt worked. If they’d stopped at 14, everyone dies.
June 24, 1982.
All four engines died at 37,000 feet.
The crew had 13 minutes to solve an impossible problem.
They couldn’t see why the engines failed.
They couldn’t see the ash cloud killing them.
They couldn’t see the runway when they landed.
But they could think. They could try. They could refuse to quit.
And 263 people survived because four men in a cockpit refused to accept the impossible.
That’s not just an aviation story.
That’s a reminder that even when all four engines fail—literally and metaphorically—you keep trying. You stay calm. You don’t give up.
Because sometimes, the 15th attempt is the one that works.
Doris Day
Street Smarts
Anna Essinger
In April 1933, the Nazis ordered every public building in Germany to fly the swastika.
Anna Essinger looked at the flag. Looked at her students. And made a decision.
She organized a hiking trip.
When the children returned, the flag was gone. It had flown, as required by law—but over an empty building.
“Atop an empty building,” Anna said, “the flag can neither convey nor harm as much.”
It was a small act of defiance. But Anna Essinger was already planning something far larger.
She was going to smuggle her entire school out of Nazi Germany.
Anna was born in Ulm in 1879, the oldest of nine children in a secular Jewish family.
At twenty, she did something unusual for a German woman of her time—she moved to America alone, spent ten years educating herself at the University of Wisconsin, and discovered the Quakers. Their values of equality, compassion, and peaceful resistance shaped everything she would become.
She returned to Germany in 1919 on a Quaker relief mission, feeding hungry children in the aftermath of war. In 1926, she and her sisters founded a boarding school in a village called Herrlingen.
It was progressive, coeducational, open to children of any faith. Students called teachers by their first names. Corporal punishment was forbidden. The philosophy was simple: teach children to think, to question, to live without fear.
By 1933, Anna had built something rare—a school where freedom of thought was the foundation of everything.
Then Hitler became chancellor.
Anna had read Mein Kampf.
While her friends hoped the new government would moderate, Anna saw exactly what was coming. Within weeks of Hitler taking power, Jewish children across Germany were being humiliated in classrooms—ordered to stand while teachers pointed out their “biological differences,” forced to eat lunch in toilets because they were “dirty Jews.”
Anna watched as a famous Jewish educator, Kurt Hahn, was arrested. She watched as book burnings lit up Ulm’s cathedral square—the works of Einstein, Freud, Marx reduced to ash.
And she watched as someone inside her own school betrayed her.
Helman Speer, the husband of one of her teachers, wrote to the Nazi Minister of Culture to denounce Anna. Her “airy-fairy humanism,” he complained, was “altogether uncongenial” to National Socialism. He urged that a Nazi spy be installed at the school.
Anna didn’t wait to find out what would happen next.
That spring, while Germany’s democracy collapsed around her, Anna began traveling secretly across Europe—searching for a new home.
Switzerland. The Netherlands. Finally, England, where she found Quaker supporters willing to help her rent a rundown manor house in Kent called Bunce Court.
Then came the dangerous part.
Mass emigration was prohibited. If the Nazis discovered her plan, they could seize the school, impose crippling sanctions, or worse. Everything had to happen in secret.
Anna gathered the parents in small, hidden meetings across Germany. She explained what she intended to do. She asked for their trust—and their children.
Nearly all of them said yes.
That summer, while the children thought they were simply on vacation, Anna’s staff secretly taught them English. Lessons in British history and culture. Preparation for a journey the students didn’t yet know they would take.
On October 5, 1933, Anna Essinger executed one of the most remarkable escapes of the Nazi era.
Her most trusted teachers spread out across Germany in three teams. Parents brought their children to pre-assigned railway stations along three separate routes out of the country.
They had been warned: show no emotion on the platforms. No tears. No long goodbyes. Nothing that might attract attention.
One group traveled along the Rhine from Basel. Another moved through Munich, Stuttgart, and Mannheim. A third crossed northern Germany.
On the trains, everyone was silent as they approached the border.
Sixty-six children. Their teachers. Their headmistress.
All of them made it to England.
Classes began the next day.
Bunce Court was a wreck—an old manor house that had been abandoned for years.
There was no money for repairs, no funds for domestic help. So everyone worked. Students and teachers together, gardening, laying telephone cables, converting stables into dormitories.
British inspectors initially viewed the school with suspicion. But within a few years, they declared themselves amazed “at what could be achieved in teaching with limited facilities.” They concluded it was “the personality, enthusiasm and interest of teachers rather than their teaching apparatus” that made the school work.
And what teachers they were.
As war approached and Britain classified German refugees as “enemy aliens,” many were forbidden from professional work elsewhere—but allowed to remain at Bunce Court. Suddenly, Anna had an astronomer teaching mathematics. A music teacher who had been assistant to the famous wildlife recordist Ludwig Koch. A former senior producer from Berlin’s Deutsches Theater directing school plays.
The children learned not just academics, but music, art, gardening. They performed concerts for local villagers. They stayed with English families on weekends. They found, against all odds, something like home.
One student, Leslie Brent, later called it “a paradise.” After everything he had witnessed in Germany, Bunce Court made the violence seem “like a bad dream.”
Alumni would later describe it as “Shangri-La.” They spoke of “walking on holy ground.”
But Anna’s work was far from finished.
In November 1938, after Kristallnacht, Britain agreed to accept 10,000 Jewish children on what became known as the Kindertransports. Anna was asked to establish a reception camp.
She took in as many as she could—children from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Children whose parents she would never meet. Children who would never see their families again.
As Hitler invaded country after country, the refugees kept coming. When the British military requisitioned Bunce Court, Anna found another location and moved the entire school again.
Her eyesight was failing. By the war’s end, she was going blind.
She kept working.
The last children to arrive at Anna’s school were concentration camp survivors.
They had seen things no child should see. They no longer knew what normal life looked like.
One of them was Sidney Finkel, a fourteen-year-old Polish boy who had survived the Piotrkow ghetto, slave labor camps, Buchenwald, and Theresienstadt. He arrived in England in August 1945 with ten other Polish boys, all of them shattered.
Anna and her staff treated them with patience and love. Slowly, carefully, they taught them that the world could be safe again.
Decades later, Sidney wrote about his two years at Bunce Court.
“It turned me back into a human being.”
By the time Anna closed her school in 1948, she had taught and cared for over nine hundred children.
Nine hundred.
She started with sixty-six, smuggled across borders in secret. She ended with concentration camp survivors who had forgotten how to be children.
She stayed at Bunce Court until her death in 1960, corresponding with former students, watching them build lives she had made possible.
They became scientists, artists, professors, doctors. Frank Auerbach became one of Britain’s most celebrated painters. Leslie Brent became a pioneering immunologist. They scattered across the world, carrying with them what Anna had given them—not just survival, but the belief that learning and kindness and freedom were worth fighting for.
In 1933, while others hoped the darkness would pass, one woman saw clearly.
She didn’t wait for permission. She didn’t wait for someone else to act. She organized a hiking trip, smuggled sixty-six children across a border, and spent the next fifteen years saving every child she could reach.
Anna Essinger proved something that remains true today:
One person who refuses to look away can change nine hundred lives.
One school built on freedom can outlast any regime built on fear.
One flag flying over an empty building can be the beginning of the end—not for the children beneath it, but for everything that flag was supposed to represent.
The Horse Has Left the Barn
A memo leaked from the FDA over the weekend that admits a point long known among the dissidents. It plainly states that the Covid shot likely killed more children than it saved. So far, with just a minimalist examination, the FDA has found 10 dead kids but cautions there are many more.
This is one of the greatest scandals of our time. Not even the mainstream media could suppress the news, which clearly connects with everyone’s intuitions.
It was left to a new hire at the FDA, Dr. Vinay Prasad, to explain all of this to a nervous legacy bureaucracy. There is much more to come, including the release of all available data on shot safety. The coming weeks are going to be wild.
Brownstone Institute
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman opened a sealed safe at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project using nothing but memory, intuition, and a borrowed screwdriver, then calmly handed out classified files to startled physicists to prove that the world’s most secure laboratory was not secure at all.
He was supposed to focus on equations that would change history, yet he could not ignore the simple fact that the military treated secrecy like magic instead of engineering.
Feynman overheard officers bragging about unbreakable locks. He asked for a copy of the combination system. No one gave it to him, so he studied the filing cabinets instead. He noticed scratches near common numbers, patterns in how physicists set combinations, and the lazy habit of choosing birthdays. Within weeks he opened dozens of safes across the lab with nothing but logic.
He never stole anything. He left polite notes that read, “Please improve your security.” Some generals were furious. Others were terrified. Feynman kept telling them that the point of science was honesty, not ceremony.
Los Alamos changed him. He arrived grieving the death of his first wife, Arline. He wrote her letters every day even after she passed, placing them in a box he kept hidden in his dorm room. He played bongos at night to stay sane. He solved problems on cafeteria napkins. He asked questions that made senior physicists pause. Why does this assumption exist? How do we know it is true? Have we tested it?
He carried that mindset into the world after the war. At Cornell he lectured with a style students described as electricity. His chalk moved faster than most people could think. Then came Caltech, where he wrote on every surface he could find, including plates, windows, and the back of menus. He once explained quantum electrodynamics on a diner napkin so clearly that the waitress asked if he could tutor her son.
His greatest public moment came in 1986. The Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded and the Rogers Commission asked for his help. Feynman sat through days of technical explanations. Then he dipped a small piece of rubber O ring into a glass of ice water on live television. The rubber stiffened instantly. The room fell silent. Feynman looked up and said, “This is how it happened.” No politics. No spin. Just truth made visible.
He won the Nobel Prize, yet he preferred talking with undergraduates. He hated prestige. He loved curiosity. He believed nature was endlessly interesting if you looked closely enough.
Richard Feynman lived by a simple rule.
If something mattered, he tested it for himself, and he showed the world that clarity can be louder than power.
America’s Feast-or-Famine Reality… When $100,000 Feels Like Poverty by Matt Smith
As an entrepreneur, my income has always been feast or famine. For years at the start of a new company, I would earn literally nothing. Now sure, employees had to be paid, and all the business had to move forward, but I took no compensation.
I survived on savings. Luckily I had some. Made from the years of feast. If there’s one thing that makes it hard for most people to be entrepreneurs, it’s this “feast or famine” income volatility. (Still worth it.)
During the COVID hysteria and seeing what’s coming, I decided to totally upend my life. For the first four years and up until fairly recently, I was in a period of personal income famine.
Encouraged by Doug, we launched a few new businesses, including our paid investment newsletter at CrisisInvesting.com. Things have improved. I wouldn’t call it a feast, but it’s enough to cover three hots and a cot.
What Is a Livable Income Today?
How much do you really need to make to live a reasonably prosperous life?
In our trips back to the U.S., I would often comment to my wife: “I don’t know how people can afford any of this.” Prices had gone up so much on virtually everything you can imagine, from food to housing, car insurance, health insurance. It’s insane. Insane enough that I started saying no to travel or new purchases I never would’ve given two seconds’ thought to before.
Admittedly, I’m in a position where these prices are much more of an irritant than a real impediment to my life. But I have eyes and a heart. I look around, I see what’s happening, and I’m worried. I’m worried not for myself, but for the fabric of society itself and all the individuals that are trapped. These individuals include not just random strangers, but friends and family, people I love. From my mom and dad who are retired and in poor health but who worked hard their whole lives. To my siblings whose careers are at risk of the shaky economy and who are being slowly subsumed by the steadily rising prices of all things.
Two years ago, while in the US, I thought, “how are people earning less than $100,000 a year making ends meet.”
A hundred grand is, or at least was, a lot of money. You were in a privileged status to have that kind of earnings power. And yet today, you can earn a hundred grand and be on the cusp of legitimate poverty.
Macro strategist Michael Green made this clear in his recent essay, “Part One: My Life as a Lie — How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America.” I strongly encourage you to read it.
Michael wanted to know more about Americans’ poverty statistics. Perhaps he’d been asking himself many of the questions I had. How are people making it? What he discovered is shocking and disturbing, but totally believable.
According to Uncle Sam, if you’re a family of four earning $30,000 a year, you are living below the poverty line. If you’re above that line, theoretically, you’re doing okay. Not great, but you can survive. As Michael demonstrates, that simply is not true. In fact, it takes a lot more income to stay out of poverty in America today.
As a general rule, when you see a statistic, figure out how it’s calculated. That’s what Michael Green did here, and he learned that the official poverty line is calculated based upon a 1963 formula developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration.
The government estimated the cost of basic food diet for a family. In 1963 households spent 1/3 of their income on food. From there, the formula multiplied that amount by three to account for other living expenses. The formula looks like this: (Food cost in 1963) * 3 + CPI = Poverty line.
For 2024 that number is $31,200.
As Michael says:
“For 1963, that floor made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income, as we’ve discussed. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage averaged $10/month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each other’s kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. With few luxury frills, the neighborhood kids in vo-tech could fix most problems when they did. College tuition could be covered with a summer job. Retirement meant a pension income, not a pile of 401(k) assets you had to fund yourself. The food-times-three formula was crude, but as a crisis threshold—a measure of “too little”—it roughly corresponded to reality. A family spending one-third of its income on food would spend the other two-thirds on everything else, and those proportions more or less worked. Below that line, you were in genuine crisis. Above it, you had a fighting chance.
But everything changed between 1963 and 2024.”
So what’s changed? Housing is now incredibly expensive. Healthcare has become the largest household expense for many families. Childcare ballooned into a $70b industry and a huge expense for families with children. College went from affordable to where now the average of a four-year degree might cost you the net worth of the median American household.
But that’s not all, the requirement for a second income became mandatory in order to provide the standard of living that we were able to achieve before. But a second income means secondary costs. It means two cars become a requirement which means even more insurance. And who’s going to watch the children while both parents are at work? That’s where the $70 billion a year child care industrial complex comes in, consuming a huge portion of American family budgets.
All these new costs are like the price of admission to the American economy and have fundamentally changed the composition of household spending since 1963. The one upside, I guess, is that food costs are no longer a third of household spending. For most families, it’s just 5 to 7 percent. While housing is 35 to 50%, health care takes 20%, and child care can eat 20 to 40% of a family’s budget.
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And so we get to the problem with that poverty line model created in 1963. Michael puts it this way:
“If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.
It becomes sixteen.
Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200.
It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000.
And remember: Orshansky was only trying to define “too little.” She was identifying crisis, not sufficiency. If the crisis threshold—the floor below which families cannot function—is honestly updated to current spending patterns, it lands at $140,000.
What does that tell you about the $31,200 line we still use?
It tells you we are measuring starvation.”
Since the official poverty line for a family of four is $31,200 and the median income is roughly $80,000, we’re led to believe that a family that’s earning 80k a year is doing fine. Or at least surviving, as a stable middle class family.
But as Michael demonstrates above, a family of four living with $80,000 a year would in fact be living in deep poverty according to 1963 methodology.
Yesterday I talked to a friend whose family income was $160,000 a year. They’re living right on the financial edge. Have they made some bad financial decisions? Yes. Did they take on debt they shouldn’t have? Yes. But they are not living large. And there is always this feeling that they are on the brink of falling down.
Ask yourself, does it make more sense, based upon your personal experience, that $140,000 a year in America today is the actual poverty line and living below that line puts you at risk of poverty and destitution? Above that like you’re more likely to be reasonably secure.
Michael’s analysis didn’t stop with updating the 1963 methodology to today’s reality. He went further:
“I wanted to see what would happen if I ignored the official stats and simply calculated the cost of existing. I built a Basic Needs budget for a family of four (two earners, two kids). No vacations, no Netflix, no luxury. Just the ‘Participation Tickets’ required to hold a job and raise kids in 2024.
Using conservative, national-average data:
Childcare: $32,773
Housing: $23,267
Food: $14,717
Transportation: $14,828
Healthcare: $10,567
Other essentials: $21,857
Required net income: $118,009
Add federal, state, and FICA taxes of roughly $18,500, and you arrive at a required gross income of $136,500.
This is Orshansky’s ‘too little’ threshold, updated honestly. This is the floor.”
According to Michael, families are in a trap. To reach the median household income of $80,000, most families need two earners. But the moment you add a second earner to chase that income, you trigger the child care expense. And that child care expense is crushing. Roughly $32,000 a year.
In practice, the second earner is working to pay the stranger watching their children so they can go to work in some soul-crushing job merely to earn an extra $1,000 to $2,000 a month.
In two different models, updating the 1963 methodology for today’s household food-share percentages puts the poverty threshold at $130,000 to $150,000 a year. The second, a line item of reasonable expenses calculated by Michael gets us to $135,000 a year.
I found his analysis extremely convincing and spent a portion of our Crisis Investing VIP call last Monday discussing it with the group. I was looking for pushback from the dozens of people on the call. I got none. They all agreed. The real poverty line in America is $140,000 a year.
In his article, Michael Green goes on to explain some justification for numbers he uses to calculate the gross income needs and provides plenty of backup for his numbers. If anything, he’s being conservative.
The Cost of Participation
In addition, he makes the point that the cost to simply participate in the economy is far higher than is estimated.
He uses the example of the hedonic lie, why a phone costs $200, not $58. He says to function in a 1955 society, to have a job, call a doctor, and be a citizen, you needed a telephone line. That participation ticket cost $5 a month. Adjust it for standard inflation, that $5 should be $58 today. But he says you cannot run a household in 2024 on a landline. To function today, to two-factor authenticate your bank account, to answer work emails, to check your child’s school portal, which is now digital only, you need a smartphone plan and home broadband. So today, that cost of participation for a family of four is not $58, it’s at least $200 a month. Quite the “upgrade.”
He goes on to cover the skyrocketing health care costs, which in 1955 were $10 a month or $115 adjusted for inflation. But today, the average family’s premium is over $1,600 a month, which is four times the rate of inflation.
Up until very recently, I maintained health insurance for my family, even though we hadn’t been to the U.S. in well over a year and rarely used insurance at all. But that insurance cost me nearly $3,000 a month. I cancelled it and saved myself a bundle.
Insurance must be one of the biggest scams out there. $3,000 a month for health insurance I never used, and if I did, the deductibles would be at least $10,000. And car insurance, after decades and decades of paying at least $10,000 a year in auto insurance for all my vehicles. I never had a single claim. And yet, even this year, for my cars in storage in the U.S., my insurance went up.
Taxes, too, are a requirement of participation in the economy. In 1955, the Social Security tax was 2% on the first $4,200 of income. The maximum contribution was $84 a year. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $960. But today, a family earning the median $80,000 pays over $6,100. That’s six times the rate of inflation.
Taxes, insurance, child care, the fact that the median car in America sells for over $50,000, car insurance, cell phones, and housing expenses consuming 35% to 50% of income—these are the costs of participation, the entrance fee you must pay simply to earn a living and maybe, just maybe, reach escape velocity someday.
For a median family, the “Cost of Participation” in the economy is roughly $50,000 a year.
The Broken Welfare System
Michael goes on to explain the sinister ways in which the welfare system locks people in to certain levels of income and makes it virtually impossible for them to escape.
“The family earning $65,000—the family that just lost their (childcare) subsidies and is paying $32,000 for daycare and $12,000 for healthcare deductibles—is hyper-aware of the family earning $30,000 and getting subsidized food, rent, childcare, and healthcare.
They see the neighbor at the grocery store using an EBT card while they put items back on the shelf. They see the immigrant family receiving emergency housing support while they face eviction.
They are not seeing ‘poverty.’ They are seeing people getting for free the exact things that they are working 60 hours a week to barely afford.”
Like it or not, we’re motivated by financial incentives. If you’re earning $30,000 a year and getting subsidized food, rent, child care, and health care, and you choose to put your nose to the grindstone and increase your income by 25% to, say, $40,000, the loss of benefits would actually end up costing you $200. A $10k raise equals a $200 loss.
And it gets worse from there. If through great effort you can push your income up from $30,000 to the $65,000 level, you lose the vast majority of benefits ending up worse off on a net basis.
So here you are at $65,000, well below the median and far, far below the real poverty line in America and taking home an income that would generate the same rewards as earning just $30,000/yr and collecting the benefits from Uncle Sam.
102,500,000 Americans Opted Out
As Michael points out, this should dispel your curiosity about why workforce participation rates are so shockingly low in America today. This is a measure of the working age population that is not employed and not actively looking for work. That’s 36% of the working-age population in America who are not employed and not even looking for a job. Over 100 million people.
It’s easy to scorn these people as freeloaders. But the fact is, maybe they’ve just done the math, and working harder just isn’t worth it. The bar they have to exceed is seen as too high, too out of reach. The $50,000 ticket to participate in the economy? Unachievable in their minds.
When will it become clear that the system is broken? This system which most of us are sending our kids into is setting them up to fail. Personally, I’m not sending my kids into this system. We’re following The Preparation.
The Real Poverty Line (And Why You Feel Poor)
Wrapping up with the great Michael Green again:
“The real poverty line—the threshold where a family can afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation without relying on means-tested benefits—isn’t $31,200.
It’s ~$140,000.
Most of my readers will have cleared this threshold. My parents never really did, but I was born lucky — brains, beauty (in the eye of the beholder admittedly), height (it really does help), parents that encouraged and sacrificed for education (even as the stress of those sacrifices eventually drove my mother clinically insane), and an American citizenship. But most of my readers are now seeing this trap for their children.
And the system is designed to prevent them from escaping. Every dollar you earn climbing from $40,000 to $100,000 triggers benefit losses that exceed your income gains. You are literally poorer for working harder.
The economists will tell you this is fine because you’re building wealth. Your 401(k) is growing. Your home equity is rising. You’re richer than you feel.”
Editor’s Note: If Michael Green is right—and if your own experience tells you he is—then simply “working harder” inside this rigged system is not a plan, it’s a slow bleed.
The Propane Guy
“My name’s Hank. I’m 66. I deliver propane to homes. Rural routes, farms, folks off the grid. I fill their tanks, check connections, drive to the next house. Most customers just sign the slip, barely look up. I’m just the propane guy.
But last February, during that brutal cold snap, I noticed something at the Miller place.
Pulled up to fill their tank, gauge showed empty. Completely dry. In 15-degree weather.
I knocked on the door. Mrs. Miller answered, three kids bundled behind her in coats. Inside the house.
“Ma’am, your tank’s bone dry. How long you been without heat?”
“Four days.” Her voice was steady, but her hands shook. “Bill’s due Friday. We’re waiting on my husband’s paycheck.”
Four days. Three kids. Fifteen degrees.
“Ma’am, I’m filling it now.”
“I can’t pay until”
“I’ll mark it as a delivery error. Computer glitch. Nobody’ll know.”
She started crying. “Why would you do this?”
“Because those kids are wearing coats inside.”
I filled their tank. Checked the furnace. Made sure heat kicked on before I left.
Drove away thinking about what I’d seen. Kids doing homework in winter jackets. A mom choosing between heat and food.
Started paying attention different after that. The elderly veteran whose tank was at 10%, he was rationing, keeping one room warm. The single dad whose payment was two weeks late, he’d been burning firewood he couldn’t really afford.
I started doing something I shouldn’t. When I saw someone struggling, someone who’d run out, someone rationing heat—I’d add 50 gallons. Mark it as “meter calibration” or “pressure test residual.”
Small amounts. Enough to get them through.
Did it eleven times that winter. My boss noticed the discrepancies. Called me in.
“Hank, we’re showing extra gallons delivered but not billed.”
I told him the truth. Everything.
He stared at me for a long time. Then said, “My daughter was a single mom once. Chose between heat and groceries every winter. I wished someone had helped her.”
He didn’t fire me. Instead, he created something, “Warm Hearts Emergency Fund.” Customers could donate. We’d match it. Use it for families in crisis who couldn’t afford propane.
But here’s what broke me, Mrs. Miller came to our office in May. She’d gotten a better job, caught up on bills.
She handed me an envelope. Inside, $200.
“For the next family. The one you’ll find in February, four days without heat, trying to be brave for their kids.”
She grabbed my hands. “Hank, my youngest has asthma. Four more days in that cold… I don’t know if…” She couldn’t finish.
Last winter, the Warm Hearts Fund helped 23 families. Not with handouts, with heat when they had none. With dignity when they felt broken.
And here’s the thing, other propane companies heard about it. Started their own programs. Now there are “emergency heat funds” in six states.
But the moment that destroyed me happened last month. Got a call to deliver to an address I recognized, the Miller place.
Mrs. Miller answered. “Hank! Come in, please.”
Inside, warm, kids doing homework at the table, laughing. She handed me a check. Full payment, plus extra.
“For the fund. But also…” She pulled out a drawing her youngest had made. Stick figure man with a propane truck. Caption in crayon: “Mr. Hank, my hero.”
“She asks about you every winter. ‘Is Mr. Hank making sure people are warm?'”
I’m 66. I deliver propane to houses nobody notices.
But I learned this- Cold doesn’t wait for paychecks. And no child should do homework in a winter coat inside their own home.
So if you deliver anything, oil, propane, firewood, and you see someone struggling, someone empty, someone rationing,
Find a way. Mark it wrong. Call your boss. Start a fund. Do something.
Because heat isn’t a luxury. It’s survival.
And the difference between freezing and living shouldn’t be whether your paycheck arrived on time.
Be the reason someone stays warm.”
Let this story reach more hearts….
By Mary Nelson