Welcome to the latest installment of ‘The Great American Experiment: Self-Immolation Edition.’ In our current chapter, the imperial center of Washington D.C.—a city primarily inhabited by people who failed upwards until they were given the power to ruin your life—has achieved its ultimate goal. It has stopped thinking entirely. Not that there was much intellectual heavy lifting happening between the performative pearl-clutching on the Left and the drooling, prehistoric posturing on the Right, but now they’ve managed to turn off the lights on the one thing that actually mattered: the numbers. Gridlock has officially shuttered the data spigots, and the result is a national economy currently flying blind through a thunderstorm, piloted by 535 narcissists who couldn't find their own dignity with a GPS and a flashlight.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, those dreary institutions tasked with the unenviable job of counting just how broke you are, have been effectively muzzled. Why? Because the ‘leaders’ of this crumbling empire are too busy playing a high-stakes game of fiscal chicken where the only guaranteed casualty is reality itself. The Democrats, of course, treat the budget like a bottomless wishing well for their latest sociological experiments, while the Republicans treat it like a moral failing unless it’s being funneled into the military-industrial complex or a billionaire’s Cayman account. Between these two poles of incompetence, the gears of the administrative state have ground to a halt. We no longer know the unemployment rate, the inflation index, or the retail sales figures. It’s like a pilot deciding that since he can’t agree with the co-pilot on what music to play, they should both just smash the instrument panel and hope for the best.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the predatory world of private finance. In the absence of official government data—which, let’s be honest, was always a polite fiction designed to prevent mass panic—we now have a cacophony of ‘unofficial’ trackers stepping into the breach. These are the private oracles of the 21st century: credit card companies, tech startups, and high-frequency trading firms who claim they can tell us the state of the union by tracking your Uber receipts and your late-night search history for ‘how to sell a kidney.’ The problem, predictably, is that these private data sets disagree with each other more than the actual politicians do. One firm claims the consumer is ‘resilient,’ which is corporate-speak for ‘we haven’t quite finished draining their savings yet,’ while another suggests we are already in the midst of a silent depression.

This is the beautiful irony of our age. We live in the era of ‘Big Data,’ yet we are more ignorant than a medieval peasant about our actual economic health. The peasant at least knew if the harvest was failing because he could see the dead wheat; we are forced to wait for a Tweet from a hedge fund manager to tell us if we can afford eggs. The bipartisan failure here is profound. The Left will claim this is a ‘threat to our democracy,’ a phrase they use for everything from an actual coup to a slightly inconvenient parking ticket. The Right will claim this is a blow against the ‘Deep State,’ as if making the country functionally illiterate is a victory for freedom. Both sides are fundamentally invested in the chaos because chaos is easier to manage than accountability.

Without official data, the narrative becomes entirely untethered from the ground. It allows the administration to claim a ‘historic recovery’ based on vibes, and it allows the opposition to claim a ‘total collapse’ based on the price of a single gold-plated burger in Manhattan. Truth has been replaced by a Choose Your Own Adventure book where every ending is a cliff. We are now navigating the largest economy in history based on gut feelings and the conflicting spreadsheets of entities that view the American public as nothing more than a harvestable resource.

Consider the absurdity: a global superpower that can send a probe to a distant moon but cannot tell you how many people are looking for work in Ohio because two octogenarians in the Senate are having a playground spat over a spending bill. It is a spectacular display of civilizational decay. We have become a nation of statistical ghosts, haunted by the specter of an economy we can no longer measure, managed by people who couldn't balance a checkbook if their lives depended on it—though, fortunately for them, it’s only our lives that are on the line. The data blackout isn't just a bureaucratic glitch; it’s a confession. It’s Washington admitting that it has no idea what it’s doing, and frankly, it would prefer if you didn't know either. So, keep scrolling, keep spending, and keep ignoring the fact that the instrument panel is dark. We’re sure to land this thing eventually, even if it’s nose-first into the side of a mountain.