The current thing | Power Line

Whatever happened to “Signalgate“? Remember the “scandal” du jour from late last month, when some lefty journalist wormed his way into a group chat discussing the bombing of Yemen?

It was all you could read about for almost a week. Every backbench congressman and Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary of Agriculture had to answer media questions about the nonevent. It was supposed to be bigger than Watergate and Teapot Dome combined. Then poof, gone.

To be replaced by the next current thing, which appears to be tariffs. But with the stock market rebounding (or at least not crashing), even that subject will quickly fade. Then the next current thing which will alter the course of history, like some Senator’s very long speech about nothing.

Here are the three things that I’m paying attention to, like the gauges on my car’s dashboard:

• U.S. national debt: $37 trillion.
• U.S. birth rate: 1.7
• U.S. GDP per capita: $82,769

I’m less concerned with the figures at any point in time than I am about the trends. Those are the three figures that define the overall health of a society and its future prospects.

Consider this headline from National Review (NR) from about a week ago,

The Stat: Poland to Surpass Japan in GDP per Capita

That headline would have been impossible to contemplate in (pick a year) 1980, 1989, 2000. NR writes,

Poland’s GDP per capita was $12,810 in 1990. That was roughly the same as Brazil’s and over $4,000 behind Mexico’s. Japan’s was almost three times higher, at $35,306.

Yet, here we are. NR asks and answers the most obvious question,

Why have you heard little about this decades-long and ongoing economic success story? Probably because it wasn’t the result of industrial policy or some other government plan.

I’ve been harping on this topic for a decade and a half. Fourteen years ago (to the day), I began a post with this sentence,

One of our favorite people, Mickey Kaus, is credited with inventing/popularizing the concept the of “the undernews” (stories largely ignored by big media, but explored by alternative media).

The situation has not improved with the passage of time. We are getting ever more noise, drowning out the underlying signal.

But I will keep digging, there’s got to be a pony in there, somewhere.