The Poor Get Hit First

“Small aircraft have such a poor safety record.” – Iron Man

Who can drink five gallons of gasoline without getting sick?  Jerry can.

Today I was reading that Air India® was going to abandon overseas routes.

Why?

They’re too expensive, the Indian spokesdalit said as he mass-dialed grandmothers in Iowa to try to get them to send him unredeemed gift cards.

The truth is simpler and harsher: the flights aren’t too expensive.  They’re too expensive for Indians.

This might be the single best news to come out of the Israel-America-Iran War so far.  If the Iranians actually follow through on their threat to cut the undersea cables connecting Africa and India to the Internet, well, this would be the best war ever.

It’s like Christmas came early.  Has anything similar happened in the United States due to the war?

Absolutely.

Congratulations!  If you had stock in Spirit® Airlines™ you can now retire 10 years after you die! (as-found)

Spirit™ was the Greyhound Bus© of the skies, and that’s not a compliment unless you’re a fan of things that smell like the socks of a homeless junkie in San Francisco in June.  Spirit© was a bottom-feeder airline, chasing the clientele with the least money, the lowest standards, and the highest likelihood of assaulting a stewardess.

When fuel costs climbed and Spirit© couldn’t raise ticket prices without emptying the plane, they collapsed.  For anyone who actually has to show up at an airport, this is pure upside. Spirit© Airlines™ folding means the skies just got a little more civilized.

I fully expect this pattern to spread.

Remember that former U.S.A.I.D.-funded executive pulling down $272,000 a year?  If not I fear for your reading retention because the meme is right up above, dude.  Anyway, she’s now discovering she can’t land a $19-an-hour gig managing a spice store.

A spice store!  Is government just day care for women with college degrees?  Regardless, she’s now poor.  And that’s good, because the poor lose first, and the credentialed grifters who fed off them are sliding down the same chute right behind.

Let’s talk basics.  Even if the price of rice tripled, I wouldn’t notice much.  Rice is still cheap for me.  If I have to give up steak, I can just eat some rice, right?  But that’s not a universal truth.  If all a person in some third-world hellhole can afford is rice, and the price doubles, welcome back, world hunger.

What a lot of people missed is that world hunger was a solved problem.  People just didn’t starve anymore, except in Hollywood®, and that wasn’t real starvation, it was just skinny starlets mainlining Ozempic® and calling it a diet.

On time I tried an all-tequila diet.  Effective.  I lost two weeks.

Global food production had climbed so high that famine was basically extinct outside of war zones and socialist experiments.  Now the dominoes have started falling.

I expect revolutions popping up like mushrooms in Africa.  Hungry people turn into angry people, and angry people with AK-47s equals a revolution.  The sound of light machine-gun fire is already the national anthem in half the continent.  Outside of colonialism, Africa never really developed.  For whatever reason, they were incurious enough never to have invented the wheel on their own.

Africa is poor:  devastatingly so.  When Muhammad Ali came back from a boxing match in Zaire (a country that didn’t last as long as The Simpsons have been on Fox®), he famously said, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.”

That was the 1970s, after the colonial governments had been tossed out.  It didn’t turn out well for Africa or Africans.  But world hunger had still been beaten in spite of African governments by 2010 or so.

My dad donated all my toys to the orphanage.  I was sad.  Then he said, “So you’ll have something to play with.”

Part of the blame lands squarely on aid.  Food aid to Africa teaches farmers not to farm.  Why bother when free grain shows up from the sky?  The mental link between planting, harvesting, and eating snaps.  To quote that genius South African political leader Julius Malema, “The food we eat in South Africa does not come from farms owned by white people, it comes from Shoprite©, Pick’n’Pay™ and Spar®.”

So yeah, they’ve got that going for them.

Hunger will stalk Africa hardest, but it won’t stop at the Sahara.  It will hit India and the lower-income stretches of Asia, too.  China should skate by because authoritarian efficiency has its uses and they have piles of cash.  The Middle East gets shakier.  Eastern Europe, too.  Sure, the Byelorussians had decades of cheap vodka, but at some point somebody’s going to want to eat those potatoes instead of drinking them.

Is angry vodka mean-spirited?

Then there’s Europe.  Decades of importing millions of people with zero marketable skills has created a permanent underclass that lives on benefits.  Cut those benefits even a little and watch the reaction.  England is already on the edge of something ugly.  Throw in batches of moslims who get even more murder-y when the free checks shrink, and the whole thing slides downhill fast.

The native populations who actually built those countries are the ones who will be expected to keep paying, right up until they can’t.  Back home, the same logic applies.

Inflation didn’t hit the hedge-fund guy first.  It hammered the guy stretching a paycheck from one tank of gas to the next.  Fast-food prices doubled, rent climbed, and the folks at the bottom discovered that “essential workers” are only essential until the margins get squeezed then they can be easily be replaced by illegals or H-1B Indians.

The poor lose first because they have no cushion, no skills that the market values, and no margin for error.  When times get tight, luxury items like $272,000 non-profit jobs disappear, and even the mid-level grift starts to evaporate.

This culling isn’t random.  Societies have always had layers.  The top layer produces, saves, and innovates.  The bottom layer consumes more than it creates.  When the pie stops growing, the bottom layer gets the smallest slice first.

The credentialed political-grifter class is about to get the same lesson.

Those laid-off U.S.A.I.D. types who spent decades flying first class on someone else’s dime are now competing for retail jobs in a world that no longer needs their PowerPoint© decks. Hey, I have an idea!

Since they love foreigners so much, maybe she can move to India and run spice shops if she can’t get the gig here.  Not sure they’ll clear $19 an hour in Mumbai, but at least she can stand at the door and greet customers with a cheerful:

“Season’s greetings.”