the government can decrypt essentially anything. but encryption is good to use anyways for other reasons.

Even if that's true (and that would imply the NSA having made significant advances in number theory and keeping them quiet - which isn't out of the imagination, considering they are the world's largest employers of mathematicians) the government would not show their hand by breaking strong encryption for just about any case in US legal jurisdiction, and they probably wouldn't act on anything they received via that means that they couldn't have gotten via some other means (after all, if people knew that they could break the encryption, they'd stop using it)

I would argue that anything that fits US guidelines for encryption for SECRET or TOP SECRET documents is strong enough where, if the government could break it, unless you're plotting to do something on an international scale, you don't need to be too concerned currently. But don't take needless risks and keep/transmit things that you don't need to, just because they're encrypted.

Cryptographers say that one of the easiest ways of getting around modern encryption is what they call 'rubber hose cryptanalysis' - extracting encryption keys from the user with the motivating force of a rubber house.

You obviously know nothing about cryptography.

With AES and a 256-bit key, that's a brute force that needs to try 2^256 possible keys.

While it is true that weak passwords will screw you over, that can be easily solved by not using an insecure password.

Like the previous commenter said, the feds would never admit to being able to break crypto like AES. If they were doing it, it'd be for the decryption of big-deal interceptions, but that probably won't happen.

If you're really paranoid, use something like Serpent or another AES finalist, because the criteria for choosing Rjindael for AES were a bit questionable.