Want Your Mind Blown? Apply the 80/20 Principal to Politics

In the early 20th century, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that 20% of the pea pods in his garden produced approximately 80% of the peas. This later became known as the Pareto Principal, or the 80/20 principal.
In short, the 80/20 Principle basically states that the 20% of the input or action will produce the 80% of the output or results.

Many successful entrepreneurs and businesses operate on this principal as they routinely try to determine which 20% of their customers bring in 80% of sales and which 20% of their costs lead to 80% of their expenses…Etc. This is one way to figure out if they are on the right track.

Now I know, politics is the only occupation in history where you have the worst of the worst consistently securing top positions, but what if we were to apply the 80/20 principle on the country’s most significant issues?

Just to have a general idea about which 20% of the country’s activities create the 80% of the damage and liabilities, and which 20% generates most of the spending…

And more importantly to figure just how cavernous the incompetence runs in the deep state.

All Out War

At this stage, it’s undeniably obvious that there is very little doubt left -if any - that war is one of the most significant problems that have been plaguing the country for the last decades.

Trillions of Dollars have been spent, millions of lives have been lost, and for what? Achieving the status of the biggest debtor nation the world has ever seen? The mind boggled.

How much in revenue do these orphan-making wars generate in returns to the American economy? And how many trillions of tax payer’s money do they cost in exchange?

And more importantly:

In which universe would committing horrific war crimes to generate a massive debt seem like a good idea?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell if that’s bad judgment or a missing chromosome.

Still in the unproductive business of killing people, mention apart deserves the drone program.

Game of Drones

The drone program accidentally murders nine innocent people by mistake every time they try to hit a target suspect. So far, nobody seems to find anything wrong with that.

If Amazon drones on the other hand were to deliver your package to nine different neighbors every time they try to reach your house, I bet it would be a totally different story, would it not?

But let’s think this through for a second.

Ninety percent of the victims are killed without even being targeted at all. They just tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the wedding crashers arrive – If by wrong place we mean the safety of their homes.

Now, let’s think about this again only this time keeping in mind that most of these innocent victims are routinely killed in countries that they aren’t even in war with in the first place.

Productivity I’m afraid is not even the same zip code.

Modus Operandi: 1984

Next, spying, another disturbing behavior we tolerate from time to time whenever a threat is blown out of proportions, but at some point you just have to break out of the bad habits and do the math.

Let’s face it, you have many more chances to be killed by a toddler, fatally crushed by furniture or stung to death by a honey bee than you are to die from terrorism, several times over in fact.

So excuse me if I question the wisdom in recreating real-life versions of dystopian novels.

The same of course could be said about the police militarization and its exceedingly increasing budgets. Do you really need to parade a mine resistant vehicle and a SWAT team every time a cat gets stuck on a tree?

Orange Is the New American Way of Life

With only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has almost 25% of the world’s prison population, more than Stalin’s entire Gulag archipelago. So maybe it’s time we talked about that glorious prison industrial complex.

Do you really need to keep locking people away just because they were caught collecting rain water, or carrying bits of vegetation on their person?

Do you really need to keep throwing them in dark dungeons where sexual assault is the national sport? A little too dis-proportioned don’t you think?

At this point, and as you probably have guessed, the cost benefit/ratio is absolutely staggering - In negativity of course as they wouldn’t have it any other way.

It is estimated that each inmate is currently costing the taxpayers an average of thirty thousand dollars per year, multiply that by the number of inmates in the world's number one jail colony and you will realize just how much of a waste of money we are talking about.

I urge you to think about that for a second.

Now think about that again, only this time keeping in mind that 85% of people in jail were brought there for victimless crimes.

So instead of reforming criminals into productive members of society, what they do is taking decent citizens and turning those into criminals.

Is your mind boggled yet?

At this point you are probably wondering if there is any dime that you spend on taxes that isn’t directly another person’s liability, I am too. But it gets more confusing as you realize that there’s still a long haunting list of ‘unproductive’ activities to explore, ranging from The War on Drugs to Assets Forfeiture.

The Opposite of Productivity

What to say about life? When you are more likely to be robbed by cops than by actual thieves, when there is a higher rape percentage amongst the military than in jail, and when you are in fact more likely to be killed by police than dying in an actual warzone?

Sometimes it seems like that these guys are doing it all backwards, that they’re pulling a reverse 80/20, only worse, much worse.

Not only do they spend most of the money, resources, and manpower to engage on the most unproductive activities, but they spend it on those that produce most of the damage and none of the benefits.

Running the country as a successful enterprise using this coercion model is as utopist as it gets. In fact, you couldn’t find worse ways to ruin a business if you tried.

And yet you keep hearing: The system is not perfect but… Perfect? It’s not even average, in fact they took incompetence to a whole new level, and by incompetence I mean counter-productivity.

The crazy part however is that only in politics do people tolerate such systematic incompetence, would you hire a cleaning lady that trashes your place every chance she got? You would fire her right away, would you not?

Here’s the crazier part, can you imagine if the rest of the population operated on the same principal? Then plumber of the year would be the one who floods more homes, doctor of the year would be the one who killed the highest number of healthy people…

And yet some people still wonder how come the more regulations they impose, the more problems get worse.

Must be a coincidence.