Some predict that a majority of the U.S. populace will now opt out of its previous obligation to give it 110 percent, and, in the coming weeks and months, give as little as 45 percent. For underachieving Americans, that number is expected to drop to as low as 5 percent by March.

A recent Interior Department report found that, although failure was not officially an option until this Tuesday, there have in fact been hundreds of billions of cases of it over the past two centuries, culminating in Fort Collins, CO high school junior Tim Kemp's failing grade on a physics exam last month.

Many scholars now believe that such failures have historically been obscured by optimistic slogans and so-called positive thinking, neither of which, according to the report, has had a verifiable effect: Americans' overall failure rate went up nearly 2,350 percent over the past decade, with 1,435,643 instances of failure reported last Sunday alone.

"In retrospect, failure becoming an option was ine