Cigarettes were still being manufactured, thirty years after the U.S. Surgeon General determined they were hazardous to one's health. If cigarette smoking continued unabated, and the current trends held, an estimated one billion people would die from smoking in the 21st century. That's a ten-fold increase over the number of people that cigarettes killed in the 20th century.

Even though California had the toughest laws against smoking in the country, smoking-related deaths continued to increase, along with air pollution and smog. In fact, there was a 9-in-10 chance that a Californian lived in an area whose air pollution exceeded the state's legal limit. Analysts estimated that smog - and its effects - cost California more than $75 billion in extra health-care-related expenses every year. Americans were breathing in noxious fumes from the tailpipes of cars, trucks and busses, then millions of them exacerbated the risks to their ability to breath by sucking on expensive little sticks of tobacco that was proven to kill them! Cigarette manufacturers had been discovered to be adding more nicotine to their products in an effort to keep smokers "hooked". While most manufacturers increased the amount of nicotine that cigarettes deliver to the lungs by only 10%, the makers of Kool cigarettes had added 20% more nicotine! Yet there was no FDA law or regulation that prevented cigarette manufacturers from enhancing the "kill factor" in their dangerous products. Obtuse government rules did nothing to protect American consumers from such danger.

If there was a Federal Bureau of Useless Information (and the surprising thing is that there wasn't!), that government agency might have also revealed these interesting tidbits, annually compiled by something known as the Harper's Index:
* 39% of Americans believed U.S. Muslims should be required to carry a special ID card, identifying them as a Muslim!
* More than 15 U.S. states had, by 2007, installed electroic voting machines that left no recountable paper trail!
* In September, 2006, it took a Princeton researcher ONE MINUTE to hack into a Diebold voting machine and sabotage the actual voting tally!
* While there was considerable public outrage over foreign diplomats who disobeyed U.S. laws while in this country, few people knew that the U.S. Embassy's staff in London owed $1,600,000.00 in unpaid traffic tickets!
* One in two white American women believed they would end up as a "bag lady" in her old age. Yet, only 1 in 3 African-American women said they worried about such a situation (proving that black women knew how to work the 'system' better than white women)!
* Bill Clinton made an average of 65 additions to the U.S. endangered-species list each year he was in office. George W. Bush made an average of less than 9 additions, demonstrating how little he cared about the delicate ecological balance between man, plants and animals that allowed us all to co-exist in this planet's environment!
* 30% of Americans could not even correctly guess which year the famed 9-11 terrorist attacks took place!
* Only 45% of U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was represented by salaries and wages. Since such record-keeping had begun in 1929 at the height of the Great Depression, that percentage had NEVER reached such a low point! Many experts agreed that if the trend continued downward, it would lead to an economic meltdown that would make October, 1929 look like an ice cream social. Millions of individuals heavily invested in the stock market would find themselves broke. Banks would collapse. An estimated 60% of Americans would find themselves unemployed.
* In 2007, more than 2 million mortgage holders were faced with readjusted interest rates on their adjustable mortgages. Because it increased their monthly mortgage payments by an average of 25%, a record number of foreclosures resulted. In 2008, experts predicted even more foreclosures would completely devastate the lucrative U.S. housing market.
* More than 160 members of the U.S. State Department's staff were required to speak fluent Arabic as part of their jobs. In 2007, only 64 of those employees actually spoke fluent Arabic!
* More than five-and-a-half billion dollars' worth of total expenditures were artificially transferred from the federal government's fiscal year 2006 to fiscal year 2007. O.U.T.R.A.G.E. analysts predicted that the shift from fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2008 would approach $7.5 billion, had the Bush administration not been decimated.
* Even with the billions of dollars the Bush administration spent on keeping illegal aliens out of the country, more than 50% of "illegal immigrants" still overstayed their legal visas!
* And, still: even though America represented only 5% of the world's population, Americans squandered more than 55% of the world's natural resources. "Waste not, want not" was a motto for the rest of the world; Americans seemed to believe in their own theory of "want it all, waste it all".

Clearly, the United States of America was on a path of gluttonous self-destruction, not unlike the greedy Greek and rapacious Romans had followed, much to their historical demise. Getting millions of Americans to recognize their fate was like trying to keep an alcoholic from drinking by holding AA meetings in a bar. Persuading millions of Americans to lessen their glutted lifestyles was like holding Weight Watchers' meetings in a chocolate store. O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had its work cut out for it. There needed to be a "mental modification" of the American consumer's mindset. People not only had to learn to live on less; they would have to learn to LIKE living on less. O.U.T.R.A.G.E. had a goal of cutting government functions by as much as 90%; it was like asking a 390-lb. man to lose 350 pounds.