Federal Government Reopens Asylums For Citizens Broken By Truth Of Jeff Booth's 'Price Of Tomorrow'

WASHINGTON – After closing most of its mental hospitals in the mid 20th century, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday the reopening of several state-run psychiatric facilities.

The shuttered asylums are being urgently recommissioned to accommodate an influx of citizens driven to acute psychosis after reading Jeff Booth’s 2020 macroeconomic text, The Price of Tomorrow.

Federal officials privately acknowledge that Booth’s thesis, which posits that exponential technological progress creates ineluctable deflationary pressure (that central banks desperately offset through catastrophic debt expansion) is mathematically undeniable.

Sadly, confronting this reality has rendered thousands of otherwise productive adults entirely incapable of functioning in a consumer economy.

"The tragedy is that these patients are not delusional; indeed, they are entirely correct," said HHS Undersecretary Thomas Barakat, gesturing toward surveillance footage of a wild eyed man in a hospital gown attempting to explain marginal cost collapse to a light fixture.

"Exponential tech really is driving the cost of everything to zero while our debt-based fiat structure requires infinite growth just to service yesterday's interest...

"It is an impossible paradox," he said.

"Naturally, coming to this realization just turns the human brain into soup... Which luckily gives us full legal authority to lock them in a padded room."

While civil liberties groups have protested the mass institutionalization as an authoritarian overreach, medical staff maintain the holds are most assuredly clinical.

According to intake records at the newly reopened St. Elizabeths annex, symptoms typically begin within forty-eight hours of finishing chapter four. Sufferers exhibit dilated pupils, muttering about base-layer monetary protocols, and an inability to purchase a cup of coffee without sobbing about the Cantillon effect.

"When a patient realizes that every institutional lever is actively fighting natural abundance to preserve artificial scarcity, their psychic architecture simply caves in," explained attending psychiatrist Dr. Julie Khalil.

"We administer low doses of haloperidol and gently assure them that real estate will always appreciate at seven percent annually. It doesn't cure them, but it stops them from screaming at our vending machines."

Administration officials confirmed that patients will remain held indefinitely under medical supervision until they can glance at a thirty-year mortgage rate without visibly twitching.

At press time, staff writers observed orderly staff sedating inmate Justin Morgan after he spent three consecutive hours writing the phrase "WTF happened in 1971" over and over on the walls of his room in crayons.