> engage with me on the data and research

Look, I know bullshit when I see it. I've been around that long. Sorry, and I do not mean this as a personal attack, the study you posted is complete horseshit. And so is every single study that claims that forcing the entire population to pay for some X a subset of the population chose to buy on their own accord is not a way to build a society based on personal responsibility and the idea that your rights must end where mine begin.

I'll give you one example of this in healthcare. Our family was nicely covered and happy with an insurance plan that cost us $650 per month and had a low thousands deductible way back when. Then President Obama comes along and publicly promises everyone: "If you like your doctors, you'll keep them. If you like your healthcare plan, you'll keep it." He is on video multiple times making this assertion.

What happened? We were forced into Obamacare. Why? The terms of the bill forced companies to cancel all prior plans. And then, our plan went from $650 per month to over $1,800 per month. The deductible went from somewhere around $4,000 per year to over $9,000 per year. We could no longer go the the doctors we had been going to for years.

I did the math. My family would have to be run over by a truck before our insurance would pay real benefits. And yet we have been spending over $22K per year on premiums for over twelve years now. That's over TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS so far since being forced into this fucking abomination. Over $270K. For what?

And I voted for that fucker too. Biggest mistake of my life. Incompetent to the core. Well spoken like few before and after him. And, of course, he used that to divide this nation in ways most have yet to recognize. And costs will go up. At this rate I would not be surprised if it costs my family over a million dollars in my lifetime.

Perfect example of a politician promising to help people, yet causing great harm instead. One can find examples of this kind of thing across the isle as well. Not claiming Democrats are the only culpable here.

Politicians in this nation, by law, can lie to all of us and suffer no consequences for it. That's wrong and should change. They are causing way too much damage using that superpower.

The political "species" --because they are not human beings, they are parasites-- in the US has done more damage to this country in the last 50 years than any of our enemies could have hoped to inflict on us through any means available to them. They have destroyed this nation from the inside by only caring about themselves while pretending to care for those who's votes they want and need.

Why people do not wake up to this and revolt is something I might never understand. The fact that, in 2016, our only two choices for "leadership" were Trump and Clinton says a lot about just how stupid we all are and how putrid our political system has become. Out of all the brilliant and capable people in this nation, those two rose to the top? Amazing.

> let’s tackle this the best we can with the information we have

We have to be very careful. This "information we have" is deeply polluted by political forces and financial interests. I would advise anyone to almost, by default, discard anything that comes out of our universities one a range of topics. They have become paid political actors. The forces that be know how to manipulate this through grants and programs that only favor certain perspectives.

For example, go search for the body of articles challenging some of the narratives surrounding what we can and cannot do about atmospheric CO2 concentration and climate change. The number of studies --if you can find any-- is absolutely dwarfed by those showing we are Zeus and can lick this thing within a few years or even decades (which, of course, is complete and utter horseshit).

And so, if we were to tackle this with the information we have, the only conclusion they want us to reach is that we have to destroy entire economies to "save the planet" --which, again, is complete horseshit.

There are thing in life that don't require layers of research studies to understand or debunk. For example, any engineer with a reasonable amount of experience knows that building a submarine using a carbon fiber pressure hull is fucking stupid.

Bailing everyone out of X (which can be anything) isn't a way to build a strong, resilient, responsible society with self determination and ability to make good decisions and honor them despite outcomes. It's a way to build a loser society that will surely buckle at the first sign of trouble. Even worse, it's a way to build a society perennially dependent on government handouts, with all the downsides history has shown this brings.

I think there's reason to be angry. Some of us have been working hard for decades, only to see the people we hired to look after our nation destroy it from the inside and divide us to use us like pawns for their own benefit. That's not cool. That's something to be angry about. And rightly so.