Why is the economy going to collapse? Have you ever been asked that question? If so, what did you say? Sometimes it is difficult to communicate dozens of complicated economic and financial concepts in a package that the average person on the street can easily digest. It can be very frustrating to know that something is true but not be able to explain it clearly to someone else. Hopefully many of you out there will find the list below useful. It is a list of 70 numbers that show why we are headed for a national economic nightmare. So why does the title of the article single out Barack Obama? Well, it is because right now he is the biggest cheerleader for the economy. He is attempting to convince all of us that everything is just fine and that the economy is heading in a positive direction. Well, the truth is that everything is not fine and things are about to get a whole lot worse. Certainly others should share in the blame as well. Congress has been steering the economy in the wrong direction for decades, the “too big to fail” banks have turned Wall Street into a pyramid of risk, leverage and debt, and the Federal Reserve has more power over the financial system than anyone else does. Our economy has been in decline for quite a while now, and soon we are going to smash directly into an economic brick wall. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are in denial about this. A lot of people out there doubt that an economic collapse is coming. Well, if you know someone that believes that the U.S. economy is going to be “just fine”, just show them the list below.
The following are 70 facts that Barack Obama does not want you to see….
$3.59 – When Barack Obama entered the White House, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.85. Today, it is $3.59.
22 – It is hard to believe, but today the poverty rate for children living in the United States is a whopping 22 percent.
23 – According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day during 2010.
30 – Back in 2007, about 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or longer. Today, that number is above 30 percent.
32 – The amount of money that the federal government gives directly to Americans has increased by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.
35 – U.S. housing prices are now down a total of 35 percent from the peak of the housing bubble.
40 – The official U.S. unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for 40 months in a row.
42 – According to one survey, 42 percent of all American workers are currently living paycheck to paycheck.
48 – Shockingly, at this point 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
49 – Today, an astounding 49.1 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives benefits from the government.
60 – According to a recent Gallup poll, only 60 percent of all Americans say that they have enough money to live comfortably.
61 – At this point the Federal Reserve is essentially monetizing much of the U.S. national debt. For example, the Federal Reserve bought up approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department during 2011.
63 – One recent survey found that 63 percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. economic model is broken.
$6000 – If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
$10,000 – According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
49,000 – In 2011, our trade deficit with China was more than 49,000 times larger than it was back in 1985.
50,000 – The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
56,000 – The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
$85,000 – According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.
$175,587 – The Obama administration spent $175,587 to find out if cocaine causes Japanese quail to engage in sexually risky behavior.
$328,404 – Over the next 75 years, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars. That comes to $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
$361,330 – This is what the average banker in New York City made in 2010.
440,00 – If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to totally pay it off.
500,000 – According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
2,000,000 – Family farms are being systematically wiped out of existence in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today.
2,600,000 – In 2010, 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.
5,400,000 – When Barack Obama first took office there were 2.7 million long-term unemployed Americans. Today there are twice as many.
16,000,000 – It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
$20,000,000 – The amount of money the U.S. government was spending to create a version of Sesame Street for children in Pakistan.
25,000,000 – Today, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.
40,000,000 – According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
46,405,204 – The number of Americans currently on food stamps. When Barack Obama first entered the White House there were only 32 million Americans on food stamps.
88,000,000 – Today there are more than 88 million working age Americans that are not employed and that are not looking for employment. That is an all-time record high.
100,000,000 – Overall, there are more than 100 million working age Americans that do not currently have jobs.
$150,000,000 – This is approximately the amount of money that the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress are stealing from future generations of Americans every single hour.
$2,000,000,000 – The amount of money that JP Morgan has admitted that it will lose from derivatives trades gone bad. Many analysts are convinced that the real number will actually end up being much higher.
$147,000,000,000 – In the U.S., medical costs related to obesity are estimated to be approximately 147 billion dollars a year.
295,500,000,000 – Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.
$359,100,000,000 – During the first quarter of 2012, U.S. public debt rose by 359.1 billion dollars. U.S. GDP only rose by 142.4 billion dollars.
$454,000,000,000 – During fiscal 2011, the U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt.
$1,000,000,000,000 – The total amount of student loan debt in the United States recently surpassed the one trillion dollar mark.
$1,170,000,000,000 – China now holds approximately 1.17 trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. Yet the U.S. government continues to send them millions of dollars in foreign aid every year.
$1,600,000,000,000 – The amount that has been added to the U.S. national debt since the Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives. This is more than the first 97 Congresses added to the national debt combined.
$5,000,000,000,000 – The U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars since the day that Barack Obama first took office. In a little more than 3 years Obama has added more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined.
$5,000,000,000,000 – What the real U.S. budget deficit in 2011 would have been if the federal government had used generally accepted accounting principles.
$11,440,000,000,000 – The total amount of consumer debt in the United States.
$200,000,000,000,000 – Today, the 9 largest banks in the United States have a total of more than 200 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives. When the derivatives market completely collapses there won’t be enough money in the entire world to fix it.
When the economy of a nation collapses, almost everything changes. Unfortunately, most people have never been through anything like that, so it can be difficult to know how to prepare. For those that are busy preparing for the coming global financial collapse, there is a lot to be learned from the economic depression that is happening right now in Greece. Essentially, what Greece is experiencing is a low level economic collapse. Unemployment is absolutely rampant and poverty is rapidly spreading, but the good news for Greece is that the global financial system is still operating somewhat normally and they are getting some financial assistance from the outside. Things in Greece could be a whole lot worse, and they will probably get a whole lot worse before it is all said and done. But already things have gotten bad enough in Greece that it gives us an idea of what a full-blown economic collapse in the 21st century may look like. There are reports of food and medicine shortages in Greece, crime and suicides are on the rise and people have been rapidly pulling their money out of the banks. Hopefully this article will give you some ideas that you can use as you prepare for the economic chaos that will soon be unfolding all over the globe.
The following are 10 things that we can learn about shortages and preparation from the economic collapse in Greece….
#1 Food Shortages Can Actually Happen
Most people assume that they will always be able to run out to their local supermarket or to Wal-Mart and get all of the supplies they need.
Unfortunately, that is a false assumption. The truth is that our food distribution system is extremely vulnerable.
In Greece, many people are starting to totally run out of food. Even some government institutions (such as prisons) are now reporting food shortages. The following was originally from a Greek news source….
The financing for many prisons has decreased to a minimum for some months now, resulting in hundreds of detainees being malnourished and surviving on the charity of local communities.
The latest example is the prison in Corinth where after the supply stoppage from the nearby military camp, the prisoners are at the mercy of God because, as reported by prison staff, not even one grain of rice has been left in their warehouses. When a few days earlier the commander of the camp announced to the prison management the transportation stoppage, citing lack of food supplies even for the soldiers, he shut down the last source of supply for 84 prisoners. The response of some Corinth citizens was immediate as they took it upon themselves to support the prisoners, since all protests to the Justice ministry were fruitless.
#2 Medicine Is One Of The First Things That Becomes Scarce During An Economic Collapse
If you are dependent on medicine in order to survive, you might want to figure out how you are going to get by if your supply of medicine is totally cut off someday.
In Greece, medicine shortages have become a massive problem. The following is from a recent Bloomberg article….
Mina Mavrou, who runs a pharmacy in a middle-class Athens suburb, spends hours each day pleading with drugmakers, wholesalers and colleagues to hunt down medicines for clients. Life-saving drugs such as Sanofi (SAN)’s blood-thinner Clexane and GlaxoSmithKline Plc (GSK)’s asthma inhaler Flixotide often appear as lines of crimson data on pharmacists’ computer screens, meaning the products aren’t in stock or that pharmacists can’t order as many units as they need.
“When we see red, we want to cry,” Mavrou said. “The situation is worsening day by day.”
The 12,000 pharmacies that dot almost every street corner in Greek cities are the damaged capillaries of a complex system for getting treatment to patients. The Panhellenic Association of Pharmacists reports shortages of almost half the country’s 500 most-used medicines. Even when drugs are available, pharmacists often must foot the bill up front, or patients simply do without.
#3 When An Economy Collapses, So Might The Power Grid
Try this some time – turn off all power to your home for 24 hours and try to live normally.
Sadly, most people simply do not understand just how dependent we are on the power grid. Without power, all of our lives would change dramatically.
In Greece, authorities are warning of an impending “collapse” of the power grid. If it goes down for an extended period of time in Greece, the consequences would be catastrophic….
Greece’s power regulator RAE told Reuters on Friday it was calling an emergency meeting next week to avert a collapse of the debt-stricken country’s electricity and natural gas system.
“RAE is taking crisis initiatives throughout next week to avert the collapse of the natural gas and electricity system,” the regulator’s chief Nikos Vasilakos told Reuters.
RAE took the decision after receiving a letter from Greece’s natural gas company DEPA, which threatened to cut supplies to electricity producers if they failed to settle their arrears with the company.
#4 During An Economic Collapse You Cannot Even Take Water For Granted
If the power grid goes down, you will soon no longer have clean water coming out of your faucets. That is one of the reasons why it is absolutely imperative that the power grid stay operable in Greece.
Sadly, most people don’t understand just how vulnerable our water system is. In a previous article, I quoted from a report that discussed how rapidly our water supply would be in jeopardy in the event of a major transportation disruption….
According to the American Water Works Association, Americans drink more than one billion glasses of tap water per day. For safety and security reasons, most water supply plants maintain a larger inventory of supplies than the typical business. However, the amount of chemical storage varies significantly and is site specific. According to the Chlorine Institute, most water treatment facilities receive chlorine in cylinders (150 pounds and one ton cylinders) that are delivered by motor carriers. On average, trucks deliver purification chemicals to water supply plants every seven to 14 days. Without these chemicals, water cannot be purified and made safe for drinking. Without truck deliveries of purification chemicals, water supply plants will run out of drinkable water in 14 to 28 days. Once the water supply is drained, water will be deemed safe for drinking only when boiled. Lack of clean drinking water will lead to increased gastrointestinal and other illnesses, further taxing an already weakened healthcare system.
What will you do when clean water stops coming out of your faucets?
You might want to start thinking about that.
#5 During An Economic Crisis Your Credit Cards And Debit Cards May Stop Working
Most people have become very accustomed to using either debit cards or credit cards for almost everything.
But what would happen if the financial system locked up for a period of time and you were not able to use them?
This is something that the citizens of Greece are potentially facing in the coming months, and this is something that all of us need to start thinking about.
#6 Crime, Rioting And Looting Become Commonplace During An Economic Collapse
Big corporations are already making extensive plans for how to protect their stores in the event that Greece switches from the euro to the drachma.
British electrical retailer Dixons has spent the last few weeks stockpiling security shutters to protect its nearly 100 stores across Greece in case of riot.
The planning, says Dixons chief Sebastian James, may look alarmist but it’s good to be prepared.
Company bosses around Europe agree. As the financial crisis in Greece worsens, companies are getting ready for everything from social unrest to a complete meltdown of the financial system.
#7 During A Financial Meltdown Many Average Citizens Will Start Bartering
During this economic depression, alternative currencies have already been popping up in Greece.
When things fall apart on a global scale, will you have things to barter for the things that you need?
#8 Suicides Spike During An Economic Collapse
When you think of the Great Depression of the 1930s, what do you think of?
Many people think of images of people jumping out of buildings.
Well, something similar has been happening in Greece. Suicide statistics in Greece have been absolutely soaring during the last couple of years.
Once prosperity disappears, many people feel as though life is not worth living anymore.
#9 Your Currency May Rapidly Lose Value During An Economic Crisis
Just remember what happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic and what has happened recently in places like Zimbabwe.
The truth is that it can happen anywhere.
Right now, Greeks are pulling their money out of the banks because they are worried that their euros will be turned into drachmas which would rapidly lose value.
If I was living in Greece I would definitely be concerned about that. The return of the drachma seems to get closer with each passing day. Just check out these screenshots.
#10 When Things Hit The Fan The Government Will Not Save You
Has the government of Greece come to the rescue of all of those that are deeply suffering right now?
Of course not. The truth is that the Greek government can barely take care of itself at the moment.
History has shown us that governments simply cannot be counted on when things hit the fan.
Just remember what happened during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In the end, the only one that can be counted on to take care of you and your family is you.
Preparation is going to look different for every family. No two situations are exactly the same.
But there are some practical steps that nearly all of us can take to better position ourselves for what is coming. Now is the time to get educated and now is the time to take action.
Or you could be like all of those that laughed at Noah while he was building that big boat.
In the end, things did not work out too well for those folks.
America has been overrun by control freaks. Once upon a time the United States was considered to be “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, but today there are millions of laws, rules and regulations that tightly regulate our daily lives. Most of these laws, rules and regulations were established by people who believed that they had “good intentions”, but at this point the nanny state has become so oppressive that it is strangling the life out of us. If you look back throughout history, the societies that have really thrived have had a very high degree of liberty and freedom. When the bureaucrats get the upper hand, it can suck the life out of any economy. Unfortunately, our political system seems to be a magnet for control freaks. These control freaks truly believe that they know better than the rest of us and they are systematically moving toward taking total control of our lives. Our rights are being stripped away a little bit more with each passing day, and we are being told that we need a “permit” or a “license” for almost everything. Many younger Americans have been living this kind of “straight jacket existence” for so long that they don’t even remember what real liberty and freedom are. We are steamrolling down the road toward totalitarianism, and most Americans don’t even realize what is happening.
Sadly, there are many Americans that actually agree that the state should regulate nearly every detail of our lives. There are many Americans that actually believe that life is better when there are millions of rules that we all have to follow. There are many Americans that actually believe that too much liberty and freedom is a bad thing.
If we are not careful the control freaks are going to destroy this nation. They always tell us that the rules that they are imposing upon us are “for our own good”, but every time they lay another burden on our backs they just suck a little bit more life out of us all.
The following are 18 examples of the nanny state gone wild….
#1 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced that he wants to ban the sale of all large sodas and sugary drinks in order to fight obesity. Personally I don’t have any sodas in my refrigerator, but I certainly do not want the government telling me that I am banned from drinking large sodas. Every American should have the freedom to decide if they want to drink soda or not.
#2 In North Carolina, authorities are threatening to send a blogger to prison for blogging about his battle against diabetes….
Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.
When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.
But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.
#3 In San Francisco, if you do not recycle your trash correctly you can be fined up to $500.
#4 The following are just some of the cities that have started using RFID tracking chips to monitor the recycling habits of their citizens….
*Cleveland, Ohio
*Charlotte, North Carolina
*Alexandria, Virginia
*Boise, Idaho
*Dayton, Ohio
*Flint, Michigan
#5 In Minnetonka, Minnesota you can be fined up to $2,000 for having a muddy vehicle.
#6 In Hazelwood, Missouri it is against the law for little girls to sell girl scout cookies in front of their own homes.
#8 Over the past couple of years there have been quite a few instances all over the country where lemonade stands run by children have been shut down by police because the children had not acquired the proper permits.
#9 State legislatures all over the country have been passing legislation making it more difficult for parents to opt out of having their children vaccinated.
#10 In many U.S. states is it now illegal to collect any rain that falls on to your own property.
#11 In San Juan Capistrano, California it is against the law to hold a home Bible study without a “conditional use permit“.
#12 In New York City, it is against the law to smoke at public parks and beaches.
#13 In California,”food confiscation teams” visit the homes of people that have been discovered to have purchased raw milk. The following is from a recent Natural News article….
In a bombshell revelation of the depth of the food police state that now exists in LA County, California, NaturalNews has learned that the LA County health department has unleashed door-to-door raw milk confiscation teams to threaten and intimidate raw dairy customers into surrendering raw milk products they legally purchased and own.
According to Mark McAfee (see quotes below), both LA County and San Diego county have attempted to acquire customer names and addresses from Organic Pastures (www.OrganicPastures.com) for the sole purpose of sending “food confiscation teams” to customers’ homes to remove the raw milk from customers’ refrigerators. Using both phone calls and home visits, these teams intimidate customers and try to force them to give up their milk.
#16 In Louisiana, one church was ordered to stop passing out water because it did not have the proper permit.
#17 At public schools all over the United States, the lunches that little children bring from home are now inspected to make sure that they meet USDA guidelines. The following is one recent report of this phenomenon from North Carolina….
A preschooler at West Hoke Elementary School ate three chicken nuggets for lunch Jan. 30 because the school told her the lunch her mother packed was not nutritious.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
#18 Today, a vast array of government agencies is constantly monitoring what all of us say and do on the Internet. They claim that this helps makes us all more “safe” and “secure”.
In order to maintain proper “control” over our lives, the nanny state is obsessed with watching us and monitoring us. This point was beautifully made in a recent article by Chuck Baldwin….
America is no longer “one nation under God.” Today, America is “one nation under surveillance.” Cameras monitoring our every movement, satellites taking pictures of our homes, listening devices being used to record our conversations, hi-tech computers capturing virtually every piece of correspondence, banking institutions forwarding our private financial records to Big Brother, and now armed drones flying over the neighborhoods of the American citizenry all reveal that America is anything but the “land of the free.”
Is this really how we want to live?
Do we want our children and our grandchildren to live their lives in a nation that is increasingly coming to resemble totalitarian regimes like North Korea?
Yes, every society needs laws.
But we don’t need millions of them.
Our founders intended to create a society where liberty and freedom would be maximized, and all of that liberty and freedom helped create an environment that gave birth to the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen.
But now the control freaks are choking the life out of our society. Please take a stand against them while you still can.
The way that we tax people in the United States is fundamentally broken and should be completely discarded. The U.S. tax code is absolutely riddled with loopholes that allow the super rich to legally avoid taxes while many of the rest of us are being taxed into oblivion. In our system of taxation, middle class families that work hard and try to play by the rules are deeply penalized while those that are willing to abuse the system make out like bandits. There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that enables wealthy politicians such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to pay a smaller percentage of their incomes in taxes than millions of middle class families. Mitt Romney has millions of dollars parked down in the Cayman Islands and in other tax havens. He does this to avoid taxes. Unfortunately, most Americans do not have the resources to funnel money through offshore tax havens. Most Americans just automatically have their paychecks shredded by taxes and then try to live on whatever is left over. Most Americans are just trying to survive financially from one month to the next. But the super rich have options. Thanks to technology, they can live almost anywhere they want and they can run their companies and manage their investments from anywhere in the world. The truth is that the wealthier you are the easier it is to avoid taxes. But even as the ultra-wealthy do their best to avoid taxes, many of them still feel free to demand that the rest of us be taxed more.
So what are some of the ways that the super rich avoid taxes?
Well, let’s start with those that are just “somewhat wealthy”. Many millionaires still want or need to be U.S. citizens, so they are subject to the U.S. tax code. Fortunately for them, their tax lawyers know of thousands of loopholes that have been designed to help the rich avoid taxes.
The following is from a recent article by Jen Talley….
Some of the richest people in the country pay the least, relatively speaking, in taxes. How is this possible? Answer: Through the clever manipulation of the U.S. tax code’s loopholes. And it works: as income rises, effective tax rates rise as well, but only up to a point. IRS data shows that the effective income tax rate flattens out at just over 24 percent for those making over a million dollars. As income exceeds $1.5 million, the rate begins to decline; those with incomes above $10 million pay an average income tax rate of around 19 percent. So, how do they do it?
You could write an entire series of books on the technical details of how this gets done. Trust me, I studied tax law when I was in law school.
If you are interested in digging into some of the technical details of tax avoidance, a recent Businessweek article detailed 10 ways that the wealthy use our current tax code to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes. It is an article worth reading if you have the time.
Sadly, tax avoidance by the wealthy is not just something that happens in the United States. The truth is that the exact same kind of thing happens in the UK as well.
There is not an easy fix to this problem. Our politicians have had decades to try to come up with a fair tax system and they have completely failed. The wealthy are always several steps ahead of them.
But federal taxes are not the only taxes that can be avoided. The vast difference in state tax rates creates another opportunity.
One advantage that wealthy Americans have is that they are far more mobile than most other Americans are. So if they don’t like the tax system in one state they can simply pick up and move to another state.
According to the Tax Foundation, 3.4 million Americans left New York state between 2000 and 2010.
Where are they escaping to? The Tax Foundation found that more than 600,000 New York residents moved to Florida over the decade – opting perhaps for the Sunshine State’s more lenient tax system – taking nearly $20 billion in adjusted growth income with them.
There is no state income tax in Florida. So moving from New York to Florida can end up saving you a bundle.
The same kind of migration is happening out west as well. According to that same CNS article, hundreds of thousands of people have been moving from California (a high tax state) to Texas (no state income tax)….
Between 2000 and 2010, the most recent data available, 551,914 people left California for Texas, taking $14.3 billion in income. Texas has no state income tax or estate tax.
A total of 48,877 people moved to Texas from California between 2009 and 2010 alone, totaling $1.2 billion in income. Another 28,088 from California relocated to Nevada and 30,663 to Arizona, a loss of $699.1 million and $707.8 million in income respectively.
Not that anyone really needs much of an excuse to move away from California. It is rapidly decaying right in front of our eyes.
But a lot of families do not have the same options that wealthy people do. Unfortunately, most average Americans are tied to their jobs and it would be much more difficult for them to pick up and move across the country. In this economy it can be economic suicide to give up a good job.
The reality is that most of us simply do not have the resources to play the same kinds of games that the wealthy play.
Sadly, even our most prominent politicians avoid taxes.
Just look at Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. He has avoided approximately $500,000 in taxes by docking his yacht in Rhode Island rather than in Massachusetts.
Yet Kerry sure does love to call for more taxes on the rest of us, doesn’t he?
Now let’s talk about the “super rich” and the “ultra-wealthy”. For many people that are worth billions of dollars, tax avoidance has become an art from.
Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin made national headlines recently when he gave up his U.S. citizenship, but the truth is that his case is small potatoes compared to the global elite and the shadow banking system that supports them.
According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banks.
That amount is more than the GDP of the United States for an entire year.
Well, the term originally developed because the banks on the Channel Islands were “offshore” from the United Kingdom. Most “offshore banks” are still located on islands today. The Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Isle of Man are examples of this. Other “offshore banking centers” such as Monaco are actually not “offshore” at all, but the term applies to them anyway.
Traditionally, these offshore banking centers have been very attractive to both criminals and to the global elite because they would not tell anyone (including governments) about the money that anyone had parked there.
It has been reported that 80 percent of all international banking transactions involve offshore banks. A whopping 1.4 trillion dollars is being held in offshore banks in the Cayman Islands alone.
An article that appeared in the Guardian estimated that a third of all the wealth on the entire planet is being kept in offshore banks. One of the primary reasons for this is tax avoidance.
A lot of wealthy individuals never even visit these tax havens and yet reap the benefits anyway. The truth is that tax avoidance has become way too easy. The following example is from a recent Politico article….
A plausible scenario plays out like this: I hire an accountant. Doing her job, my accountant tells me that if I sign a few legal documents and route my money through a small Caribbean island, I could keep more of my paycheck and pay a lower tax rate. I may have earned my money in the United States, but legally I can claim that it was, in fact, earned in a tax haven.
Are you disgusted yet?
You should be.
But even though they avoid taxes like the plague, many of these elitists have the gall to call for higher taxes on all the rest of us.
For example, let’s review what the managing director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, said in a recent interview….
“Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax.”
Even more than she thinks about all those now struggling to survive without jobs or public services? “I think of them equally. And I think they should also help themselves collectively.” How? “By all paying their tax. Yeah.”
It sounds as if she’s essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe, you’ve had a nice time and now it’s payback time.
“That’s right.” She nods calmly. “Yeah.”
And what about their children, who can’t conceivably be held responsible? “Well, hey, parents are responsible, right? So parents have to pay their tax.”
Well, it turns out that she doesn’t pay any income taxes at all on her own income….
The IMF chief Christine Lagarde was accused of hypocrisy yesterday after it emerged that she pays no income tax – just days after blaming the Greeks for causing their financial peril by dodging their own bills.
The managing director of the International Monetary Fund is paid a salary of $467,940 (£298,675), automatically increased every year according to inflation. On top of that she receives an allowance of $83,760 – payable without “justification” – and additional expenses for entertainment, making her total package worth more than the amount received by US President Barack Obama according to reports last night.
Her “diplomatic status” allows her to escape all income taxes.
So perhaps she should pay her “fair share” before pointing the finger at anyone else.
But she is not the only one being hypocritical.
The super rich claim that they should pay lower taxes on investment income for the good of our “capitalist system”, but when their banks are about to go under they are more than happy to have those losses be socialized.
As I wrote about yesterday, the stage is already set for another massive round of bailouts when the next great financial crisis strikes. Once again our taxes will pay for the mistakes of the ultra-wealthy.
The truth is that our system is fundamentally broken.
We need to abolish the income tax and shut down the IRS.
Those two steps alone would do wonders for our economic system.
Why does the state of California seem to be so incredibly hopeless? These days California can’t seem to do anything right, and if you live in California things just got a whole lot worse. Governor Brown has announced that the state budget deficit for this year is going to be much larger than projected, that more government services are going to be cut and that voters are going to vote on another round of tax increases in November. Meanwhile, unemployment is sitting at 11 percent and extended federal unemployment benefits for workers in the state are ending. Because California is one of the worst places in the nation to conduct business, there has been a steady flow of companies leaving the state. Those companies have taken a whole lot of good jobs with them. Due to the lack of jobs and a steady stream of impoverished immigrants coming in from Mexico and other countries, poverty in the state has exploded and crime is rapidly increasing. California may be the land of “endless sunshine”, but for the California economy there are only dark clouds on the horizon. The state is coming apart at the seams and there is not much hope that things are going to turn around any time soon.
These days, California is very similar to Greece in many ways.
Just like Greece, California has had round after round of “austerity” and yet still cannot seem to balance the budget.
Even after all of the cuts that have been implemented in recent years, the California budget deficit is still going to be far larger than originally projected this year. The following is from the Los Angeles Times….
Gov. Jerry Brown announced on Saturday that the state’s deficit has ballooned to $16 billion, a huge increase over his $9.2-billion estimate in January.
The bigger deficit is a significant setback for California, which has struggled to turn the page on a devastating budget crisis. Brown, who announced the deficit on YouTube, is expected to outline his full budget proposal on Monday in Sacramento.
“This means we will have to go much further, and make cuts far greater, than I asked for at the beginning of the year,” Brown said in the video.
During his remarks on YouTube, Governor Brown stated that California is “still recovering from the worst recession since the 1930s” and he stressed that hard choices are ahead.
But the California state government has already cut back in so many places. For example, back in the late 1970s the state of California was number one in per-pupil spending on education, but now California has fallen to 48th place.
Unfortunately, Governor Brown does not believe that budget cuts alone will solve the problem.
So you know what that means.
Tax increases!
The tax increases that California voters will be voting on in November were outlined in a recent Bloomberg article….
Brown this week submitted more than 1.5 million signatures to place the tax measure on the ballot. It would temporarily raise the state sales tax, already the highest in the U.S., to 7.5 percent from 7.25 percent. It would also boost rates on income starting at $250,000. The 10.3 percent levy on those making $1 million or more would rise to 13.3 percent, the most of any state.
Get ready to fire up the moving vans.
The rest of the California economy may be falling apart, but moving companies will continue to do very well.
As I have written about previously, California has already experienced a net loss of approximately four million residents to other states over the past 20 years.
If the top rate on those making a million dollars or more a year hits 13.3 percent you will see a lot more wealthy people leave.
And thousands of businesses have left California in recent years as well. Sadly, one survey found that CEOs ranked California as the worst place in the United States to do business for seven years in a row.
You would think that the state legislature would get the message.
Unfortunately they have not.
California absolutely suffocates businesses with rules and regulations and it gets worse with each passing year.
So lots of good jobs continue to leave the state.
As mentioned earlier, the official rate of unemployment in California is sitting at 11 percent. That is almost 3 points higher than for the nation as a whole.
Of course the “official” numbers greatly understate the true scope of the unemployment problem, but for more on that you can check out this article.
However you want to look at it, the reality is that California has a massive unemployment problem.
Sadly, a whole bunch of unemployed workers in California are about to lose their unemployment benefits.
On Saturday, more than 200,000 unemployed Americans were dumped off the unemployment rolls. Close to half of them live in California.
Instead of 99 weeks, unemployed workers in California will now only be able to collect unemployment benefits for a maximum of 79 weeks.
It is estimated that a total of 93,000 people in California have suddenly lost their benefits as a result of this change.
Unfortunately, the truth is that the employment picture in California is not really getting any better. It is still incredibly difficult to find a decent job.
Unless you are “connected”, it can be a horribly frustrating experience trying to find a new job in this economic environment.
But if you are truly desperate, there are some folks out there who are always hiring.
These days, “national security” is quite a growth industry. For example, if you are currently unemployed you can always apply to work as an Internment/Resettlement Specialist for the national guard.
While the economy is going to pot, you can get paid to lock up other Americans that are protesting about the state of our country.
Doesn’t that sound fun?
But seriously, if you live in California right now you probably don’t need anyone else to tell you how bad things are.
You probably already know that the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent since 2007.
California is rapidly changing, and not for the better.
But it is not just the economy that is falling apart in California. The truth is that there are a whole host of good reasons to move away from California. The traffic is nightmarish, crime is on the rise, the gangs are bigger and more active than ever before, millions of illegal immigrants have poured into the state, and the control freak politicians become more insane with each passing year.
Plus there is the constant threat that your home will be destroyed by a mudslide, a wildfire or an earthquake.
One of these days the “big one” will hit California.
The truth is that economic conditions are horrible in most of the country and are rapidly getting a whole lot worse.
According to one poll, 30 percent of all Americans described the condition of the economy as “good” back in February but only 20 percent do now.
When we enter the next major economic downturn, unemployment is going to go higher everywhere in the nation.
There will be small pockets where jobs are still plentiful (where the oil industry is strong for example) but almost everywhere else will be really hurting.
So what do all of you think?
For people looking to move away from California, where should they go?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….
Are we digging our own graves with our teeth? Is the food that we eat every day slowly killing us? When I was growing up, I just assumed that everything in the grocery store was perfectly safe and perfectly healthy. I just assumed that the government and the big corporations were watching out for us and that they would never allow something harmful to be sold in the stores. Boy, was I wrong! Today, the average American diet is extremely unhealthy. Most of the foods that we all love to eat are absolutely packed with things that will damage our health. Many of the ingredients that make our foods “taste good” such as fat, salt and sugar can be extremely damaging in large amounts. On top of that, most processed foods are absolutely loaded with chemicals and preservatives. The next time you go to the grocery store, just start turning over packages and read the “ingredients” that are being put into our food. If you have never done this before, you will be absolutely amazed. In many of our most common foods there are “ingredients” that I cannot even pronounce. Sadly, most Americans have no idea that eating a steady diet of these processed foods will likely leave them massively overweight, very sick and much closer to death.
Eating healthy takes more time, more effort and more money than eating poorly does.
Unfortunately, most Americans are content to chow down on foods that are quick to make and that taste good.
In particular, Americans are absolutely addicted to foods that are loaded with sugar and high fructose corn syrup.
When you start looking at food product labels, you will find that either sugar or high fructose corn syrup is in almost everything.
For example, I was absolutely amazed when I learned that most bread sold in our grocery stores contains high fructose corn syrup.
Why in the world would they need to put that into our bread?
Today, Americans are consuming far more sugar and high fructose corn syrup than ever before, and this has many health professionals very alarmed. The following is an excerpt from an article on the website of the Mayo Clinic….
Some research studies have linked consumption of large amounts of any type of added sugar — not just high-fructose corn syrup — to such health problems as weight gain, dental cavities, poor nutrition, and increased triglyceride levels, which can boost your heart attack risk.
But it is not just sweeteners that are a concern.
There are great concerns about much of the meat that we eat as well.
Today, we grow animals much larger than we used to, but it comes at a price.
For example, we pump our cows full of growth hormones and they stand around in piles of their own manure until it is time for them to die.
If many Americans were aware of where the “cheap beef” in their grocery stores really comes from they might just change their eating habits.
Another dramatic change that has happened to our food supply in recent decades has been the rise of genetically modified crops.
In this area, there has been nothing short of a revolution.
In 1996, only about 2% of all soybeans in the United States were genetically modified. Today, about 90% of all soybeans in the United States are genetically modified.
At this point, approximately 70% of all processed foods in our grocery stores contain at least one ingredient that has been genetically modified.
This is one reason why so many Americans have shifted to an organic diet. Nobody really knows what the long-term health effects of eating all of this genetically-modified food will be on all of us.
But there are some things that we do know.
For example, if you drink large amounts of soda every day you are going to gain weight and you are likely to damage your health.
All of this obesity helps to explain the dramatic rise that we have seen in diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes in recent years.
Did you know that people living in the United States are three times more likely to have diabetes than people living in the United Kingdom?
It is not a mystery why this is happening.
It is because of our unhealthy diets.
The food we eat is killing us.
We are a nation that is becoming a little less healthy every single day, and this is causing healthcare costs to completely spiral out of control.
According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3%.
That is an incredible rise.
And health care costs have been rising much faster than the overall rate of inflation.
For example, health insurance premiums have risen three times faster than wages have in the United States over the past decade.
As Americans get sicker, health care will continue to be a “growth industry”.
According to the CDC, the percentage of Americans that report that they have taken at least one prescription drug within the last 30 days has risen to almost 50 percent.
In fact, 31 percent of Americans say that they have taken at least two prescription drugs within the last 30 days and 11 percent have taken at least five prescription drugs within the last 30 days.
But what happens when you take prescription drugs?
Well, most of them have nasty little side effects that cause even more health problems.
You know, there is something to be said for going back to a much more natural approach to health. For example, a recent study found that Amish children have very low levels of asthma and allergies. The following is from a recent Reuters article….
Amish children raised on rural farms in northern Indiana suffer from asthma and allergies less often even than Swiss farm kids, a group known to be relatively free from allergies, according to a new study.
“The rates are very, very low,” said Dr. Mark Holbreich, the study’s lead author. “So there’s something that we feel is even more protective in the Amish” than in European farming communities.
What it is about growing up on farms — and Amish farms in particular — that seems to prevent allergies remains unclear.
Could the Amish teach the rest of us a thing or two about staying healthy?
That is something to think about.
Another aspect of all this is the packaging that our food comes in.
Chemicals from the packaging our food comes in can often get into our food and have serious health effects as an article by Emily Barrett recently described….
Increasingly, evidence shows that the plastics and wrappers used for packaging can inadvertently leach unwanted chemicals into food. Several recent studies found high levels of bisphenol A – an environmental chemical that can disrupt hormonal processes – in canned foods and in packaged foods for people and pets.
Now, another study suggests that the problems go far beyond just one culprit or one health effect. Among the many toxic chemicals that can migrate from packaging into food are the endocrine disrupting phthalates and organotins and the carcinogen benzophenone. These compounds are heavily used in food packaging and have known health effects, yet are not routinely tested or regulated in food, according to the paper’s author Jane Muncke.*
Although some regulations exist to guarantee safe food packaging, the current system does not address concerns posed by endocrine disrupting chemicals, Muncke explains.* The associated health effects of exposure to hormone altering compounds are many and varied, including immune disfunction, metabolic disorders (diabetes, thyroid) and reproductive problems.
But our story is still not over.
After we are done with our food we throw the packaging in the garbage and most Americans never even think about where it eventually ends up.
Unfortunately, much of it ends up out in the ocean.
In the Pacific Ocean today, there is a toxic stew of plastic and garbage about twice the size of the continental United States that is known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch“.
According to a BBC report, there are now 100 times more small plastic fragments in the northeast Pacific Ocean than 40 years ago.
But most of us never even stop and think about how the food we eat is destroying our bodies and the world around us.
Most of us just go through our daily lives assuming that somehow everything is going to be okay.
But the truth is that our food is causing major problems.
Sadly, with each passing year the federal government and the big corporations get even more control over our system of food distribution.
Hopefully more Americans will wake up and will start rejecting the “food” that the system wants to cram down our throats.
We all need to start making better choices.
Growing a garden, eating organic foods and supporting local farmers are some good places to start.
At a time when America desperately needs to come together, we are becoming more divided than ever. The mainstream media and most of our politicians love to pit us against one another in dozens of different ways, and right now class warfare has become one of their favorite tools for getting us to hate one another. If you are struggling in this economy, you are being told that “the wealthy” are the cause of your problems. If you have money, you are being told that the poor hate you and want to tax you into oblivion. Class warfare has already become a dominant theme in the 2012 race for the White House, and there will certainly be endless speeches given along these lines by politicians from both major political parties all the way up to election day. Class warfare will be used by both sides as a way to divide America and get votes. And the frightening thing is that it is clearly working. There is more hatred between the poor and the wealthy in America today than at any other time that I can remember. But hating people because of how much money they have or don’t have is not going to solve anything. Instead, it is just going to cause more problems.
The other day, Yale economics professor Robert Shiller told CNBC that the globe is already in a state of “late Great Depression“. The United States is heading into unprecedented economic and financial problems and we desperately need to pull together as a country and solve these problems.
But instead, our leaders are tapping into the politics of division in a desperate attempt to get elected in the fall.
Rather than focus on real issues and real solutions, our politicians attempt to make “the wealthy” or “welfare recipients” the focus of our debates.
Well, you know what?
Most people that are rich and most people that are poor are not purposely trying to abuse the system. Most of them are hard working people that are trying to do the best that they can in a world that is increasingly going crazy.
These days, the Occupy Wall Street crowd loves to talk about how evil the “1 percent” is. But most of the “1 percent” are people that have worked really hard and that have been fortunate enough to get some really good breaks in life.
Yes, there are some among the “1 percent” that do some really bad things. The too big to fail banks and the big money managers on Wall Street should be held accountable for the crimes that they have committed.
But most wealthy Americans are not trying to oppress the poor. Most of them are just trying to do the best that they can for themselves and their families.
Neither are most poor people trying to abuse the system either.
Yes, without a doubt there are some that do not want to work and that want to live on government benefits indefinitely.
But that is a minority.
Most Americans that are receiving government benefits today would rather be working good jobs that would enable them to provide for their families.
Most Americans understand that government handouts can never provide dignity and hope for a better future.
But if you don’t demonize the poor and you point out the decline of the middle class, many Republicans will call you a “liberal” or a “socialist”.
And if you don’t demonize the rich and you don’t blame them for all of our economic problems, many Democrats will call you a “pig” or a “fascist”.
Unfortunately, playing the blame game is not going to get us anywhere.
The number of Americans living in poverty increased dramatically under George W. Bush and it also increased dramatically under Barack Obama.
Sadly, Americans seem to really enjoy blaming one another these days. Just check out some of the slogans that have been seen on various signs at Occupy Wall Street protests….
“They Only Call It Class Warfare When We Fight Back”
“Eat The Rich – Feed The Poor”
“The Rich Are Wrecking The Planet”
So will destroying the lives of the rich solve our problems?
Of course not.
The truth is that we should want millions more Americans to be prosperous. We should be cheering for one another instead of tearing one another down.
But that is heresy to many on the left.
On the right, it is heresy even to mention that our tax system is fundamentally flawed and that it has thousands of loopholes that are being abused by the very wealthy.
In a previous article, I detailed how many of the largest and most profitable corporations in America get away with paying absolutely nothing in taxes.
There is something very wrong with that.
Our income tax system should be abolished altogether, but if we do have to pay income taxes, then it is fundamentally unfair for some people and businesses to be able to pay little or nothing while the rest of us get absolutely obliterated by taxes.
But if you try to say that to many on the right, they will look at you in horror.
The other day, there was a New York Times article that detailed the extreme measures that Apple takes to avoid paying taxes. It turns out that Apple sets up shell offices all over the globe in order to evade taxation….
As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.
That same article talked about how Apple has become a model which hundreds of other companies have followed. To giant corporations such as Apple, tax evasion has become an art form….
Apple, for instance, was among the first tech companies to designate overseas salespeople in high-tax countries in a manner that allowed them to sell on behalf of low-tax subsidiaries on other continents, sidestepping income taxes, according to former executives. Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.
So what is the solution to all of this?
Raising income taxes won’t work too well because the tax lawyers are always several steps ahead of our politicians.
The truth is that when taxes get raised it is always the middle class that gets absolutely clobbered and the wealthy always find more ways to reduce their exposure.
Just take a look at Mitt Romney. He made more than 42 million dollars in 2010 and yet Romney had an effective tax rate of only 14 percent.
If I could find a way to have an effective tax rate of only 14 percent I would be jumping up and down for joy, and so would millions of other Americans.
Our tax system is deeply, deeply broken and needs to be thrown into the trash can.
Abandoning the current tax system would not solve all of our problems, but it would be a start.
Unfortunately, neither political party is willing to even consider this.
Instead, the Democrats want to raise taxes a little bit and the Republicans want to lower taxes a little bit.
But neither alternative will do much of anything to solve any of the real problems we are facing.
Our economy is dying and it is not producing nearly enough jobs for all of us. When Barack Obama took office, the number of “long-term unemployed workers” in America was 2.6 million. Today, it is 5.3 million.
At this point, an astounding 53 percent of all college graduates under the age of 25 are either unemployed or underemployed.
So where is all of the “change” that Obama promised?
Things just keep getting worse.
Since Obama has been in the White House, 14 million more Americans have gone on food stamps, and more than 25 percent of all American children are enrolled in the program today.
How will class warfare help those people?
Will blaming the wealthy make things better for them?
They are already receiving government handouts.
Will increasing those handouts a little bit more fundamentally change their lives for the better?
Of course not.
What those people need are good jobs.
But instead, both the Democrats and the Republicans continue to pursue the same job killing policies that have been destroying American jobs for decades.
In a previous article, I detailed the explosive growth of social welfare benefits that we have seen under both Republicans and Democrats….
Back in 1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and wages. In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and wages. Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and wages.
The goal should not be to rape the rich and give out even more social welfare benefits.
Instead, the goal should be to develop an economy that creates good jobs.
We need have an economy that empowers individuals and small businesses.
Instead, we have an economy dominated by big government and big corporations.
We have an economy that funnels the vast majority of the economic rewards to a tiny elite while most of the rest of us struggle.
Just consider the following statistics….
*Back in the 1970s, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States brought in about 8 percent of all income. Today, they bring in about 21 percent of all income.
*The following is how income gains in the U.S. were distributed during 2010….
-37 percent of all income gains went to the top 0.01 percent of all income earners
-56 percent of all income gains went to the rest of the top 1 percent
-7 percent of all income gains went to the bottom 99 percent
*According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.
So what is the solution to that problem?
Is it to attack the rich and take away all their money and give more government handouts to the poor?
Of course not.
Rather, we need to change the rules of the game so that individuals and small businesses are empowered to succeed.
We need to decentralize economic power and dramatically reduce the undue influence that big government and giant corporations have over our economic system.
We need to create an environment where almost anyone that has a good idea and that is willing to work hard can succeed.
But instead of focusing on real solutions like shutting down the Federal Reserve, converting to debt-free currency, eliminating the income tax, shutting down the IRS, massively reducing the size of government and getting rid of thousands upon thousands of unneeded regulations, the mainstream media and our politicians are going to continue to try to get Americans to blame one another for our problems.
The efforts to divide America are working, and hatred is growing to unprecedented levels in this country.
Eventually this will lead to mass rioting in our major cities and that will make our problems far worse.
Hatred and division are not going to bring us a better future.
They are only going to destroy us from within.
We don’t need hate.
What we need is more love and more solutions.
Unfortunately, our leaders are leading us down a very dark path, and we are heading for a future that is going to be a complete mess.
An entire way of life is rapidly dying right in front of our eyes. The family farm is being systematically wiped out of existence in America, and big agribusiness and the federal government both have blood all over their hands. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today. That doesn’t mean that there is less farming going on. U.S. farms are producing more than ever. But what it does mean is that farming is increasingly becoming dominated by the big boys. The rules of the game have been tilted in favor of big agribusiness so dramatically that most small farmers find that they simply cannot compete anymore. Back in 1900, about 39 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. At this point, only about 2 percent of all Americans now live on farms. Big agribusiness, the food processing conglomerates, and big seed companies such as Monsanto completely dominate the industry. Unless something dramatic is done, the family farm is going to continue to be wiped out of existence. Unfortunately, it does not look like things are going to turn around any time soon.
The way that the farming industry is structured today, it is simply not economically feasible to operate a small family farm. According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good.
Many old timers are trying to hang on for as long as they can. A very large percentage of family farmers are in their fifties, sixties or seventies at this point. Today, only about 6 percent of all farmers are under the age of 35.
Most young people these days are not too eager to choose farming as a career. A lot of young adults that grew up on family farms have decided that investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a business that requires you to work 12 hours or more per day most of the year for very meager wages is simply not worth it.
In recent years, many family farmers have been forced to find second jobs in order to support their families. Many farm families are constantly on the verge of financial ruin. It is a really tough life for many of them.
Sadly, less than 25 percent of all farms in America bring in gross revenues in excess of $50,000. The following comes from the EPA website….
It has been estimated that living expenses for the average farm family exceed $47,000 per year. Clearly, many farms that meet the U.S. Census’ definition would not produce sufficient income to meet farm family living expenses. In fact, fewer than 1 in 4 of the farms in this country produce gross revenues in excess of $50,000.
On top of everything else, the federal government and many state governments just keep endlessly piling more rules and regulations on to the backs of farmers.
Big agribusiness has the resources to deal with all of these regulations fairly well, but most family farms do not.
With each passing year, the farming industry becomes even more centralized. If current trends continue, big agribusiness will eventually control nearly all of it. The following is from the EPA website….
By 1997, a mere 46,000 of the two million farms in this country accounted for 50% of sales of agricultural products (USDA, 1997 Census of Agriculture data). That number was down from almost 62,000 in 1992.
In certain industries the amount of consolidation has been absolutely stunning. For example, between 1970 and today the United States has lost 88 percent of its dairy farms.
Another factor that is shaping the farming business is the incredible power that the giant food processing conglomerates have accumulated.
Today, there are 10 corporations that control most of the things that Americans eat and drink on a daily basis. If you doubt this, just check out this chart.
The giant food processing conglomerates have a massive amount of influence over how food is grown in the United States today. Small farmers that try to go against the tide often have a very rough go of it.
That is also true when it comes to seeds.
For example, approximately 80 percent of all corn grown in the United States is grown using seeds that have been genetically modified by Monsanto.
If you want to try to defy companies such as Monsanto, you are playing a very dangerous game. The predatory business practices of Monsanto have been well documented. Monsanto has taken countless numbers of farmers to court, and they are absolutely ruthless.
Plus, it certainly does not help that there is a constant revolving door between Monsanto and federal government agencies. If you doubt this, just check out the chart about Monsanto on this page.
Amazingly, in spite of all this there are still some small farmers that are able to overcome all of these obstacles and run successful businesses.
But that is where the federal government comes in.
In recent years, the federal government has become absolutely obsessed with going after small farmers.
For example, a recent Food Freedom News article detailed what the feds have been doing to Randy and Karen Sowers. They were keeping their cash deposits under $10,000 so that they would not have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, and the federal government came down on them like a hurricane….
“Structuring,” explains Overlawyered.com, “is the federal criminal offense of splitting up bank deposits so as to keep them under a threshold such as $10,000 above which banks have to report transactions to the government.”
While being questioned, the Sowers were finally presented with a seizure order and advised that the feds had already emptied their bank account of $70,000. The Dept. of Justice has since sued to keep $63,000 of the Sowers’ money, though they committed no crime other than maintaining their privacy.
Without funds, they will be unable to make purchases for the spring planting.
When a similar action was taken against Taylor’s Produce Stand last year, the feds seized $90,000, dropped the charges, and kept $45,000 of Taylor’s money.
Knowing that most farms operate on a very thin margin, such abuse of power wipes out a family’s income, and for a bonus, the feds enhance the monopoly power of Monsanto, Big Dairy and their supply chain.
At many other small farms across America, the feds have conducted military-style raids at the crack of dawn over the smallest infractions.
Some examples of this were detailed in a documentary entitled “Farmaggedon“. The following is a short trailer for that film….
The sad truth is that the federal government has been using your tax money to go after small farmers in absolutely vicious ways.
For example, the feds raided one Amish farm at 5 AM one morning.
So what was the big crime that the feds were so concerned about?
There has been no society in the history of the world that has ever been 100% safe. No matter how much money the federal government spends on “homeland security”, the truth is that bad things will still happen. Our world is a very dangerous place and it is becoming increasingly unstable. The federal government could turn the entire country into one giant prison camp, but that would still not keep us safe. It is inevitable that bad stuff will happen in life. But we have a choice. We can choose to live in fear or we can choose to live as free men and women. Our forefathers intended to establish a nation where liberty and freedom would be maximized. But today we are told that we have to give up our liberties and our freedoms and our privacy for increased security. But is such a trade really worth it? Just think of the various totalitarian societies that we have seen down throughout history. Have any of them ever really thrived? Have their people been happy? Unfortunately, the U.S. federal government has decided that the entire country needs to be put on lock down. Nearly everything that we do today is watched and tracked, and personal privacy is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Many of the things that George Orwell wrote about in 1984 are becoming a reality, and that is a very frightening thing. The United States is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Sadly, we are rapidly becoming the exact opposite of that.
I don’t know about you, but I never signed up to live in North Korea. When I was growing up I was taught that repressive regimes such as North Korea are “the bad guys” and that America is where “the good guys” live.
So why do we want to be just like North Korea?
When they put in the naked body scanners at U.S. airports and started having TSA agents conduct “enhanced pat-downs” of travelers, I decided that I was not going to fly anymore unless absolutely necessary.
Then I heard about how “random bag checks” were being conducted at Metro train stations in the Washington D.C. area, and I was glad that I was no longer taking the train into D.C. anymore.
But now the TSA is showing up everywhere. Down in Houston, undercover TSA agents and police officers will now “ride buses, perform random bag checks, and conduct K-9 sweeps, as well as place uniformed and plainclothes officers at Transit Centers and rail platforms to detect, prevent and address latent criminal activity or behavior.”
So now I have another thing to add to my list of things that I can’t do anymore.
No more riding buses for me.
But the truth is that you can’t escape this expanding security grid no matter how hard you try.
In fact, TSA “VIPR teams” conduct approximately 8,000 “unannounced security screenings” every year at bus terminals, train stations, ports and highway rest stops throughout the United States.
Look, every society needs some level of security. There are always bad guys out there that want to harm innocent people.
But in the United States we must demand that those in charge of our security do their jobs in a way that does not compromise our dignity, our liberties or our freedoms.
Does having TSA thugs touch the private parts of old women and young children before they get on their flights keep us any safer?
Of course not.
But it does move our country in a very dangerous direction.
The reality is that this “Big Brother control grid” that is being constructed all around us is expanding in a thousand different ways.
For example, a new bill before the U.S. Congress would require black box data recorders to be installed in all new vehicles starting in 2015. These black box data recorders will be able to constantly transmit data about everything that your car is doing to the government and to the insurance companies. The following is from a recent article by Eric Peters….
And naturally, they – the government, insurance companies – will be able to track your every move, noting (and recording) where you’ve been and when. This will create a surveillance net beyond anything that ever existed previously. Some will not sweat this: After all, if you’ve got nothing to hide, why worry? Except for the fact that, courtesy of almost everything we do being either “illegal” or at least “suspicious” we all have a great deal to hide. The naivety of the Don’t Worry, it’s No Big Deal crowd is breathtaking. Did the average Soviet citizen also “not have anything to hide,” and hence why worry?
But the last possibility is probably the creepiest possibility: EDRs tied into your car’s GPS will give them – the government and its corporate **** ******* (edited for language) – literal physical control over (hack) “your” vehicle. This is not conspiracy theorizing. It is technological fact. Current GM vehicles equipped with the same technology about to be mandated for every vehicle can be disabled remotely. Just turned off. All the OnStar operator has to do is send the appropriate command over the GPS to your car’s computer, which controls the engine. It is one of the features touted by OnStar – of course, as a “safety” feature.
In the future, it will be used to limit your driving – for the sake of “energy conservation” or perhaps, “the environment.” It will be the perfect, er, vehicle, for implementing U.N. Agenda 21 – the plan to herd all of us formerly free-range tax cattle into urban feedlots. So much easier to control us this way. No more bailing out to the country or living off the grid – unless you get there (and to your work) by walking.
Even when you are sitting at home you are still being watched and monitored in countless ways.
For example, every single call you make on your cell phone is intercepted and monitored by the government.
Your Internet activity is tracked and monitored by a whole host of government agencies as well. If you doubt this, just read this article.
CISPA creates an exception to all privacy laws to permit companies to share our information with each other and with the government in the name of cybersecurity…. CISPA’s ‘information sharing’ regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like internet use history or the content of emails, to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command. Once in government hands, this information can be used for any non-regulatory purpose so long as one significant purpose is for cybersecurity or to protect national security.
Frightening stuff, eh?
I want you to imagine a scenario for a moment. Imagine that the government assigned two “watchers” to you that followed you everywhere you went and stared directly into your face the entire time.
Would you feel comfortable?
Why not?
You don’t have anything to hide, do you?
Well, of course the truth is that none of us would like having our privacy constantly invaded. It is not pleasant to constantly feel like you are being watched.
That is why all of these new “security measures” are so alarming. A system is being set up where all of us are being constantly watched and monitored 24 hours a day.
And most Americans have no idea how fast the transition to full martial law could potentially be.
Barack Obama recently updated an old executive order that has been around for decades that would enable him to take charge of all food, all energy, all health resources and all transportation resources in the United States with the stroke of a pen. This new update would allow him to do it even in “non-emergency” situations.
This means all of our water resources, construction services and materials (steel, concrete, etc.), our civil transportation system, food and health resources, our energy supplies including oil and natural gas – even farm equipment – can be taken over by the President and his cabinet secretaries. The Government can also draft U.S. citizens into the military and force U.S. citizens to fulfill “labor requirements” for the purposes of “national defense.” There is not even any Congressional oversight, only briefings are required.
Later on in her letter, Representative Granger even used the phrases “martial law” and “government takeover” to describe the power that Barack Obama potentially has under this executive order….
It is still unclear why this order was signed now, and what the consequences are for our nation – especially during times of peace. This type of Martial Law imposes a government takeover on U.S. citizens that is typically reserved for national emergencies, not in a time of relative peace.
Do you trust Barack Obama with that kind of power?
Unfortunately, considering the really bad decisions that all of our government officials regularly make, it is really hard to trust any of them to do the right thing at this point.
The American people need to let their voices be heard on these issues. If not, the federal government will continue to strip away our privacy, our liberties and our freedoms until everything is gone.
Do you want your children to grow up in a country that has been turned into a giant prison camp and that more closely resembles North Korea than it does the nation that our forefathers originally founded?
If not, please do what you can to speak out against these abuses.
The truth is that the federal government does not really even care about our national security anyway.
If they did, they would secure our borders. Just today I read that the National Guard is withdrawing 900 troops from the U.S.-Mexico border. Our border security is already a total joke and now it is going to be even worse.
Over the past several decades, tens of millions of people have crossed that border illegally. Every single day, terrorists, drug dealers, gang members, sexual predators and a whole host of other “bad guys” could be crossing that border and we would never even know about it because we aren’t doing anything to stop it.
For nearly 60 years, the U.S. government has successfully protected the border between South Korea and North Korea, but the U.S. government flatly refuses to protect our own borders.
Until the federal government decides to do what the U.S. Constitution requires them to do and start protecting our borders, then the federal government should not be asking any of us to make a single sacrifice in the name of “security”.
The truth is that we can have a reasonable level of security in this nation without giving up the liberties and the freedoms that millions of Americans have shed their blood to protect.
We do not need to turn the United States into a giant prison camp. America is supposed to be the land of the free, and we need to work hard to get that dream back.
When the economy of a nation collapses, almost everything changes. Unfortunately, most people have never been through anything like that, so it can be difficult to know how to prepare. For those that are busy preparing for the coming global financial collapse, there is a lot to be learned from the economic depression that is happening right now in Greece. Essentially, what Greece is experiencing is a low level economic collapse. Unemployment is absolutely rampant and poverty is rapidly spreading, but the good news for Greece is that the global financial system is still operating somewhat normally and they are getting some financial assistance from the outside. Things in Greece could be a whole lot worse, and they will probably get a whole lot worse before it is all said and done. But already things have gotten bad enough in Greece that it gives us an idea of what a full-blown economic collapse in the 21st century may look like. There are reports of food and medicine shortages in Greece, crime and suicides are on the rise and people have been rapidly pulling their money out of the banks. Hopefully this article will give you some ideas that you can use as you prepare for the economic chaos that will soon be unfolding all over the globe.
The U.S. Economy By The Numbers: 70 Facts That Barack Obama Does Not Want You To See
The following are 70 facts that Barack Obama does not want you to see….
$3.59 – When Barack Obama entered the White House, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.85. Today, it is $3.59.
22 – It is hard to believe, but today the poverty rate for children living in the United States is a whopping 22 percent.
23 – According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day during 2010.
30 – Back in 2007, about 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or longer. Today, that number is above 30 percent.
32 – The amount of money that the federal government gives directly to Americans has increased by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.
35 – U.S. housing prices are now down a total of 35 percent from the peak of the housing bubble.
40 – The official U.S. unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for 40 months in a row.
42 – According to one survey, 42 percent of all American workers are currently living paycheck to paycheck.
48 – Shockingly, at this point 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
49 – Today, an astounding 49.1 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives benefits from the government.
53 – Last year, an astounding 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.
60 – According to a recent Gallup poll, only 60 percent of all Americans say that they have enough money to live comfortably.
61 – At this point the Federal Reserve is essentially monetizing much of the U.S. national debt. For example, the Federal Reserve bought up approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department during 2011.
63 – One recent survey found that 63 percent of all Americans believe that the U.S. economic model is broken.
71 – Today, 71 percent of all small business owners believe that the U.S. economy is still in a recession.
80 – Americans buy 80 percent of the pain pills sold on the entire globe each year.
81 – Credit card debt among Americans in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket has risen by 81 percent since 1989.
85 – 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.
86 – According to one survey, 86 percent of Americans workers in their sixties say that they will continue working past their 65th birthday.
90 – In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
93 – The United States now ranks 93rd in the world in income inequality.
95 – The middle class continues to shrink – 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.
107 – Each year, the average American must work 107 days just to make enough money to pay local, state and federal taxes.
350 – The average CEO now makes approximately 350 times as much as the average American worker makes.
400 – According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.
$500 – In some areas of Detroit, Michigan you can buy a three bedroom home for just $500.
627 – In 2010, China produced 627 million metric tons of steel. The United States only produced 80 million metric tons of steel.
877 – 20,000 workers recently applied for just 877 jobs at a Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama.
900 – Auto parts exports from China to the United States have increased by more than 900 percent since the year 2000.
$1580 – When Barack Obama first took office, an ounce of gold was going for about $850. Today an ounce of gold costs more than $1580 an ounce.
1700 – Consumer debt in America has risen by a whopping 1700% since 1971.
2016 – It is being projected that the Chinese economy will be larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2016.
$4155 – The average American household spent a staggering $4,155 on gasoline during 2011.
$4300 – The amount by which real median household income has declined since Barack Obama entered the White House.
$6000 – If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
$10,000 – According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
49,000 – In 2011, our trade deficit with China was more than 49,000 times larger than it was back in 1985.
50,000 – The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
56,000 – The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
$85,000 – According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.
$175,587 – The Obama administration spent $175,587 to find out if cocaine causes Japanese quail to engage in sexually risky behavior.
$328,404 – Over the next 75 years, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars. That comes to $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
$361,330 – This is what the average banker in New York City made in 2010.
440,00 – If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to totally pay it off.
500,000 – According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
2,000,000 – Family farms are being systematically wiped out of existence in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today.
$2,000,000 – At this point, the U.S. national debt is rising by more than 2 million dollars every single minute.
2,600,000 – In 2010, 2.6 million more Americans fell into poverty. That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.
5,400,000 – When Barack Obama first took office there were 2.7 million long-term unemployed Americans. Today there are twice as many.
16,000,000 – It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
$20,000,000 – The amount of money the U.S. government was spending to create a version of Sesame Street for children in Pakistan.
25,000,000 – Today, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.
40,000,000 – According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
46,405,204 – The number of Americans currently on food stamps. When Barack Obama first entered the White House there were only 32 million Americans on food stamps.
88,000,000 – Today there are more than 88 million working age Americans that are not employed and that are not looking for employment. That is an all-time record high.
100,000,000 – Overall, there are more than 100 million working age Americans that do not currently have jobs.
$150,000,000 – This is approximately the amount of money that the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress are stealing from future generations of Americans every single hour.
$2,000,000,000 – The amount of money that JP Morgan has admitted that it will lose from derivatives trades gone bad. Many analysts are convinced that the real number will actually end up being much higher.
$147,000,000,000 – In the U.S., medical costs related to obesity are estimated to be approximately 147 billion dollars a year.
295,500,000,000 – Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.
$359,100,000,000 – During the first quarter of 2012, U.S. public debt rose by 359.1 billion dollars. U.S. GDP only rose by 142.4 billion dollars.
$454,000,000,000 – During fiscal 2011, the U.S. government spent over 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt.
$1,000,000,000,000 – The total amount of student loan debt in the United States recently surpassed the one trillion dollar mark.
$1,170,000,000,000 – China now holds approximately 1.17 trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. Yet the U.S. government continues to send them millions of dollars in foreign aid every year.
$1,600,000,000,000 – The amount that has been added to the U.S. national debt since the Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives. This is more than the first 97 Congresses added to the national debt combined.
$5,000,000,000,000 – The U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars since the day that Barack Obama first took office. In a little more than 3 years Obama has added more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined.
$5,000,000,000,000 – What the real U.S. budget deficit in 2011 would have been if the federal government had used generally accepted accounting principles.
$11,440,000,000,000 – The total amount of consumer debt in the United States.
$15,734,596,578,458.59 – The U.S. national debt as of June 7, 2012.
$200,000,000,000,000 – Today, the 9 largest banks in the United States have a total of more than 200 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives. When the derivatives market completely collapses there won’t be enough money in the entire world to fix it.