I recently heard about a divorce involving a colleague. The guy is in his 50s. His wife is quite certainly of a similar age, and they have a child who recently moved out due to attending university. He spoke about his wife being in the process of getting a new place, and himself wanting to downsize as well. In addition, he sighed at the prospect of getting lawyers involved as well as the problem of splitting their, i.e. his, assets. As I nodded and listened, I thought of something else. As you may be aware, one ranking among countries is the gross domestic product (GDP), which is the aggregate of all goods and services consumed in a country. This is a highly imperfect measure that is often mocked, but as long as dim-witted politicians use it as the one figure to increase, they will do whatever it takes. Your quality of life may nosedive due to an excess of illegal immigrants. However, GDP balloons as a consequence because more money is moving around in the economy. If the government takes 10,000 dollars from you and three others, and uses this money to house and feed one illegal immigrant, GDP goes up by 40,000 dollars. Granted, all of you are worse off, but this is irrelevant from the angle of GDP, assuming that you would have saved the money and not spent it recklessly.

If you look at divorce as a driver of GDP growth, you realize that there is a lot of money being moved around as well. You need two households with their own furniture and equipment, they cannot share a car or even more trivial expenses like a TV or streaming services. Basically, a divorced couple spends about twice as much as a married couple. Thus, if you are a politician who wants to optimize your country’s GDP, you are incentivized to pump up those divorce numbers. The money that goes to lawyers also increases GDP. The second best solution is if people never move in together at all and instead sit in their own apartments. You can sell this to women as “being independent”. Furthermore, without a family it is much harder to build up resources. In fact, after a divorce you may be less inclined to save up money in order to support your soon-to-be ex-wife or spend a lot of money on your estranged children. If your leftover money goes into consumption instead, perhaps in the form of a luxury car to celebrate your three-quarter-life crisis, GDP increases again. The effect on the destroyed family is similar to inheritance taxation. Tax money goes to the government so that it can be wasted on illegal immigrants or clime-change bullshit, which also increases GDP.

If you put on your schizo hat firmly, you could also wonder if one of the primary goals of the government is complete and utter demoralization. They tax you up the wazoo in order to spend it on everything that makes your life more miserable. Promoting the divorce industry has the same effect. Mass immigration, as mentioned above, drastically lowers your quality of life. The same is true for all the people affected by divorce. Even women, the main initiators of a divorce, normally wake up at some point and realize that they have messed up their lives. All of this is just baseless speculation, of course, but if the goal of the government was to keep you down, using excess taxation and promoting divorce or single households in general would be an excellent way of increasing dependency on the state. There is even a positive aspect because GDP numbers increase, so everything is apparently fine.