Well into the fourth year of the Great Recovery, I foresee:
Cinnabon has created the Minibon and Cinnabon Bites. They will be among other innovators in developing quarter-inch-cube desserts. Theirs will be the Cini-Nano. Starbucks will sell individual croutons, specially-designed by a foreign chef, for $5.00. Venti drinks will be outlawed unless made by unions, and they will be replaced by the due. Even so, people will manage to eat enough to out-blob nutritionists’ anorexic expectations for ideal body mass index.
This will cause government to double its eminent domain acquisitions of private land for the public good. Greater awareness will cause people to advocate for the voiceless animals. Not only will more people need to take their animals everywhere they go, those who don’t will be looked at as weird. Those who do will gain standing by projecting the most complex of analytical capabilities on little Fufu. For just a few tens of millions of dollars, streetscapes will be modified with alcoves for canine interaction. Scratching posts and messes for getting into will be imperative for little kitties. Birds, too, will need space to land and nest. Aquatic parks will be needed for those who need to carry their fishies everywhere they go. This is not a call for back-to-nature, but advocacy for habitat planned by those in elective office who know so much more than Mother Nature.
Roads will of necessity fall into disrepair. Funds will go toward traffic calming rather than paving. Half the trucks are already broken down when they’re needed, so that will only get worse. Conscious people will call their inability to pay for Valvoline’s $80 oil changes an intentional reduction of their carbon footprint. Similarly, landlords will decide that 55 degrees Fahrenheit is no longer cool enough, and help their tenants be green by setting the thermostats at 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Detroit will be more of a model city, and people will intentionally break windows for economic multipliers to abound. Casinos, unions, and other enterprises run by the same folks will be the exception.
The average Joe dropping out of high school will be expert in vector calculus, and fluent in five languages, but that will not qualify him for bagging groceries in the Twenty-First Century. Schools will therefore have to beef up essential skills curricula for diversity awareness, anger management, and gun personification. With over half the population in public housing with free food, those wanting to buy big-screen TV’s and games will need to work no fewer than six fulltime jobs, while attending college fulltime. To keep a job, employees will still have to give 110% while multitasking with continual improvement, constantly innovating new strategies and forward-thinking power verbs. The average number of a person’s employers who cannot make payroll will increase from two or three to five or six.
Manufacturing jobs will continue to dwindle. Markets will increase for people who will measure the people taking measurements, but the math they use will be based on a new religion of demand-side law of attraction with cosmic energies; i.e., 4 = 5.00000000000 if you believe hard enough. More bureaucrats will be needed to document the documentation of paperwork. Francisco d’Anconia’s question about when watchers will be hired to watch the government watchers will be answered. Yes-men and useful idiots will be in even higher demand, as people trying to make money won’t want anybody finking on them.
Political speech will become even more meaningless. Rather than talking about a “fiscal cliff,” “recession,” or “unfunded liabilities,” politicians will gain traction with concepts like “hey, man,” “like yeah,” and “uh.” New ways to avoid dealing with financial realities will be invented. These may include cotton dipped in ether and novacane. The masses will go wild when they see their rock-star politicians. It will not be enough that people cannot have food or shelter without the government, leadership will start providing diapers, cribs, and multi-flavored pacifiers for adults.
We’ll all be paying dearly for healthcare (a.k.a. insurance). Premiums will consume half of one’s unsubsidized belongings, but nobody will be able to afford to see an eye doctor, dentist, or surgeon. That will cause doctors to go back to school for free to study law, as everybody will be entitled to at least two government-subsidized, nonprofit lawyers.
