POLITICS: Toaster – USSA News | The Tea Party’s Front Page.

America has reached the stage where it cannot even produce a decent toaster. This seems like it should not be a metric, but it is. People complain about this online: the toasters today are disposable plastic-based gadgets that burn out after a year or two.

It should not be hard to make a good toaster since the technology is now a century old. However, in order to do so for a decent price, companies are cutting corners and using plastic bodies with stamped-metal inserts that are thin and tend to warp over time.

The heating elements are thinner, too, which means that when bread crumbs get stuck to them, those crumbs burn and then burn through the heating elements over time. The little trays on the bottom to clean out the bits of bread barely work and do not capture the crumbs on the bottoms of the sides.

The routine has become going to the store, buying a toaster, and then a short time later replacing it, throwing out the disposable toaster. One wonders how much of our landfill now is filled up with toasters that died after short unhappy lives as glitchy pieces of junk.

It is not surprising that corners have been cut: regulations, affirmative action, unions, and taxes (RAUT) have burned down American industry. Regulations impose costs, often to achieve ideological goals, on manufacturers. Affirmative action forces hiring huge staffs who do little.

Unions threaten companies by shutting down plants. No one can operate a business if it will randomly cease operation so that it can be extorted for more money. Taxes, including property taxes, get passed on to the consumer directly.

Likely half of the cost of the toaster is these imposed external costs, and therefore, corners must be cut. Instead of a good quality ten-dollar toaster you get a low-quality thirty-five dollar toaster or a garbage-tier twenty-dollar toaster.

People ask why prosperity has passed America by, but it is apparent because everything is toasters all the way down. Every object carries a high cost, so every object barely works for its purpose, and every corporation is rapacious to please its shareholders despite the raised costs of doing business.

Government takes this money for a budget that mostly goes to anti-poverty and anti-“racism” programs. They write the rules, you pay. These rules do not work, so they write more. Eventually your toaster is going to cost a hundred bucks and last six months.

The only way out of this spiral is for the voters to stop being greedy. Nothing “free” from government is free; each dollar it spends on entitlements or via regulation (1) forces corner cutting and (2) floods the market with cash, reducing its proportional value.

It is amazing how obvious this is, and yet how the voters avoid this realization every time, as if they were programmed not to.