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. (Read More....)

The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told.  Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work?  No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs!  According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be "officially" unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either.  The federal government considers those Americans to be "not in the labor force" so they are not included in the unemployment rate.  In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers.  The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined.  Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama administration would have us believe.  The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago.  It was incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly difficult to get a job right now.  So don't believe the hype that things are getting much better.  If you still do have a good job, you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not much hope that things are going to improve significantly any time soon. (Read More....)

Who is the biggest loser in the ongoing decline of the U.S. economy?  Is it the wealthy?  No, the stock market has been soaring lately and their incomes are actually going up.  Is it the poor?  Well, the poor are definitely hurting very badly, but when you don't have much to begin with you don't have much to lose.  Unfortunately, it is the middle class that has lost the most during this economic downturn.  According to Bloomberg, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were middle class jobs.  That is an absolutely astounding figure.  Yes, some executives lost their jobs during the last recession as did some minimum-wage workers.  But overwhelmingly the jobs that were lost were middle income jobs.  Sadly, the limited number of jobs that have been added since the end of the last recession have mostly been low income jobs.  A higher percentage of Americans are working low income jobs than ever before, and the cost of living continues to rise at a very brisk pace.  This is causing an erosion of the middle class unlike anything we have ever seen in American history. (Read More....)

The Federal Reserve says that everything is going to be okay.  The Fed says that unemployment is going to go down, inflation is going to remain low and economic growth is going to steadily increase.  Do you believe them this time?  As you will see later in this article, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been dead wrong about the economy over and over again.  But the mainstream media and many Americans still seem to have a lot of faith in the Federal Reserve.  It doesn't seem to matter that Bernanke and other Fed officials have been telling the American people lies for years.  As I always say, most people believe what they want to believe, and many people seem to want to have blind faith in the Federal Reserve even when logic and reason would dictate otherwise.  The truth is that things are not going to be getting much better than they are right now.  When the next wave of the financial crisis hits, the U.S. economy is going to fall back into recession, financial markets are going to crash and unemployment is going to absolutely skyrocket.  But you will never hear any of that from the Federal Reserve. (Read More....)

If you are in college right now, you will most likely either be unemployed or working a job that only requires a high school degree when you graduate.  The truth is that the U.S. economy is not coming anywhere close to producing enough jobs for the hordes of new college graduates that are entering the workforce every year.  In 2011, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.  Millions upon millions of young college graduates feel like the system has totally failed them.  They worked hard in school all their lives, they went into huge amounts of debt in order to get the college education that they were told they "must have" in order to get a good job, but after graduation they found that there were only a handful of good jobs for the huge waves of college graduates that were entering the "real world".  All over America, college graduates can be found waiting tables, flipping burgers and working behind the register at retail stores.  Unfortunately, the employment picture in America is not going to get significantly better any time soon. (Read More....)

The mainstream media is not telling you the truth about unemployment in the United States.  The percentage of working age Americans that are employed is not increasing.  In March 2010, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  In March 2012, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  So if the employment rate is exactly the same as it was two years ago, then how in the world can the Obama administration claim that things have gotten significantly better since then?  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official unemployment rate in the United States was 9.8 percent in March 2010 and it declined to 8.2 percent in March 2012.  So how is this possible if the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs hasn't moved?  Well, what they do is they claim that there are millions upon millions of Americans that have "left the labor force".  In other words, they claim that there are millions upon millions of unemployed Americans that don't want jobs anymore.  Of course that is a total farce, but the mainstream media and most Americans are buying it.  They actually believe that the unemployment rate is going down.  But the truth is that the unemployment crisis in America has not subsided.  In fact, we are pretty much exactly where we were two years ago, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. (Read More....)

Most Americans have no idea how much economic trouble is heading our way.  Most of them just assume that everything will eventually "return to normal" just like it always has before and that those running our economy "know what they are doing" and that we should trust them to do their jobs.  Unfortunately, these beliefs are being reinforced by the bubble of false hope that we are experiencing right now.  For example, it is being reported that weekly unemployment claims in the United States have fallen to a four-year low.  That is a very good thing.  Let us hope that unemployment claims go even lower and that the current period of stability lasts for as long as possible.  We should enjoy these last fleeing moments of tremendous prosperity for as long as we can, because when they are gone they won't be coming back.  As I noted the other day, all of this false prosperity in the United States has been financed by the 15 trillion dollar party that we have been enjoying.  We are adding about 150 million dollars to our debt every single hour so that we can continue to enjoy an inflated standard of living.  Unfortunately, nobody in the history of the world has ever been able to keep a debt spiral going indefinitely, and our debt bubble will burst eventually as well. (Read More....)

The unemployment rate in the eurozone is now 10.7 percent.  That is the highest the unemployment rate has been since the introduction of the euro.  The unemployment rate in the eurozone never got any higher than 10.2 percent during the last recession.  This is very troubling news.  It was just recently announced that the eurozone has entered another recession, and already the unemployment rate is hitting new record highs.  So how bad are things going to get in the months to come?  The truth is that the problems for Europe are just starting.  The European sovereign debt crisis continues to get worse, and another major global financial crisis is going to be here way too soon.  The EU as a whole has a larger population, a larger banking system and more Fortune 500 companies than the United States does.  When the financial system of Europe crashes, the entire world is going to feel it. (Read More....)

How is the U.S. economy doing in 2012?  Unfortunately, it is not doing nearly as well as the mainstream media would have you believe.  Yes, things have stabilized for the moment but this bubble of false hope will not last for long.  The long-term trends that are ripping our economy and our financial system to shreds continue unabated.  When you step back and look at the broader picture, it is hard to deny that we are in really bad shape and that things are rapidly getting worse.  Later on in this article you will find a list of interesting facts that show the true state of the U.S. economy.  Hopefully many of you will find this list to be a useful tool that you can share with your family and friends.  Each day the foundations of our economy crumble a little bit more, and we need to wake up as many Americans as we can to what is really going on while there is still time.  We have accumulated way too much debt, we consume far more wealth than we produce, millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas, our big cities are decaying, family budgets are being squeezed more than ever, poverty is rampant and we have raised several generations of Americans that expect the government to fix all of their problems.  The U.S. economy is at a crossroads, and the decisions that the American people make in 2012 are going to be incredibly important. (Read More....)

On Friday, the entire financial world celebrated when it was announced that the unemployment rate in the United States had fallen to 8.3 percent. That is the lowest it has been since February 2009, and it came as an unexpected surprise for financial markets that are hungry for some good news.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm payrolls jumped by 243,000 during the month of January.  You can read the full employment report right here.  Based on this news, pundits all over the world were declaring that the U.S. economy is back.  Stocks continued to rise on Friday and the Dow is hovering near a 4 year high.  So does this mean that our economic problems are over?  Of course not.  A closer look at the numbers reveals just how fraudulent these employment statistics really are.  Between December 2011 and January 2012, the number of Americans "not in the labor force" increased by a whopping 1.2 million.  That was the largest increase ever in that category for a single month.  That is how the federal government is getting the unemployment rate to go down.  The government is simply pretending that huge numbers of unemployed Americans don't want to be part of the labor force anymore.  As you will see below, the employment situation in America is not improving.  Yet everyone in the mainstream media is dancing around as if the economic crisis has been cancelled.  I can't take it anymore!  It is beyond ridiculous that so many intelligent people continue to buy in to such fraudulent numbers. (Read More....)

Very few things illustrate how dramatically America has been deindustrialized than the stunning decline of the U.S. auto industry.  Once upon a time, the United States literally taught the rest of the world how to make cars.  We were the ones that invented the assembly line.  We were the ones that showed the rest of the world what mass production could do for an economy.  For decades, we produced more cars than anyone else and we sold more cars than anyone else.  Detroit was known as "the Motor City" and our manufacturing prowess dominated the planet.  But now all of that has changed.  Japan makes far more vehicles than we do today.  So does Germany.  As you read this, state of the art production facilities are going up all over China.  Meanwhile, the U.S. auto industry continues to rot and thousands upon thousands of good automotive jobs continue to leave our shores.  The rest of the world is making cars better than we are, they are making them cheaper than we are and they really don't care that many of our formerly great manufacturing cities are turning into rotting, stinking hellholes.  The U.S. auto industry was once a symbol of American dominance, but now it is just a symbol of American decline.  If we want to remain a great nation, then we need to start becoming great at making things once again. (Read More....)

Have you ever heard of the dodo bird?  Once upon a time, dodo birds lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.  But if you go there today you won't find any because they are extinct.  Well, if you are a blue collar worker in America today it looks like you are headed for a similar fate.  Blue collar workers are truly becoming an "endangered species" in the United States.  In the old days, the balance of power between business owners and labor was more even because they both needed each other.  But today that has all changed.  Thanks to robotics, automation and computers there is simply not as much of a need for physical laborers anymore and nothing is going to reverse that trend.  Big employers will continue to look for ways to replace men with machines, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But there is another major trend that is also destroying blue collar jobs in America that we should do something about.  Right now, it is perfectly legal for big corporations to shut down manufacturing facilities in the United States and send the jobs over to nations on the other side of the globe where it is legal to pay slave labor wages and where there are barely any regulations.  As you will see later on this article, this has been the biggest reason for the shocking blue collar job losses in America over the past decade.  The big corporations don't care that you need to pay the mortgage and put food on the table for your families.  All they care about it the bottom line, and if dramatic changes are not made soon, the number of blue collar jobs leaving the United States will continue to increase. (Read More....)

Beware of bubbles of false hope.  Right now there is a lot of talk about how the U.S. economy is improving, but it is all a lie.  The mainstream media can be very seductive.  When you sit down to watch television your brain tends to go into a very relaxed mode.  In such a state, it becomes easy to slip thoughts and ideas past your defenses.  Sometimes when I am watching television I realize what the media is trying to do and yet I can still feel it happening to me.  In this day and age, it is absolutely critical that we all think for ourselves.  When you look at the long-term trends and the long-term numbers, a much different picture of the U.S economy emerges than the one that is painted for us on television.  Over the long-term, the number of good jobs in America has been steadily going down.  Over the long-term, the number of Americans living in poverty and living on food stamps has been steadily going up.  Over the past couple of decades, tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth have gone out of the country.  Our debt is nearly 15 times larger than it was 30 years ago, and U.S. consumer debt has soared by 1700% over the past 40 years.  Year after year the rate of inflation goes up faster than our incomes do, and this is absolutely devastating the middle class.  Anyone who believes that we can keep doing the same things that we have been doing and yet America will still have a bright economic future is delusional.  Until the long-term trends which are taking the U.S. economy straight into the toilet are reversed, any talk of a bright economic future is absolute nonsense. (Read More....)

Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen.  Unfortunately, that is rapidly changing.  The statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the U.S. middle class is dying right in front of our eyes as we enter 2012.  The decline of the middle class is not something that has happened all of a sudden.  Rather, there has been a relentless grinding down of the middle class over the last several decades.  Millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas, the rate of inflation has far outpaced the rate that our wages have grown, and overwhelming debt has choked the financial life out of millions of American families.  Every single day, more Americans fall out of the middle class and into poverty.  In fact, more Americans fell into poverty last year than has ever been recorded before.  The number of middle class jobs and middle class neighborhoods continues to decline at a staggering pace.  As I have written about previously, America as a whole is getting poorer as a nation, and as this happens wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated at the very top of the income scale.  This is not how capitalism is supposed to work, and it is not good for America. (Read More....)

Well, it is time to raise the debt ceiling again.  Right now we are about to hit the current limit of $15.194 trillion and the Obama administration is going to ask that it be raised by another 1.2 trillion dollars.  Unfortunately, Congress has already promised not to stand in the way, and so soon the debt limit will be raised to a staggering $16.394 trillion.  Considering how much debt we have already placed on the backs of future generations, what is another 1.2 trillion dollars?  After all, if we are going to sell our children and our grandchildren into debt slavery, we might as well go all the way, right?  Such is the thinking in "the Obama Nation".  During "the Obama Nation", the federal government has already accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.  Of course the Bush administration was nearly as bad at piling up government debt.  Between Bush and Obama (with a big helping hand from the Federal Reserve), they have done a pretty good job of wiping out the financial future of the United States.  If there are future generations of Americans, they will look back and curse those that did this to them.  It is absolutely immoral to steal trillions of dollars from future generations.  Unfortunately, there are very, very few members of Congress that are even objecting to this madness. (Read More....)

Did you know that an average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year?  As World War II ended, the United States emerged as the greatest industrial power that the world has ever seen.  But now America's industrial might is being gutted like a fish and both political parties seem totally unconcerned.  Yes, we will always need trading relationships that are fair and balanced with other countries that have economic systems that are similar to our own.  However, the truth is that most of our trading relationships are neither "fair" nor balanced.  For example, China manipulates currency rates so that Chinese products are much cheaper than they should be, they brazenly steal our technology and we let them get away with it, they deeply subsidize their most important industries and they exploit their citizens by allowing them to be paid slave labor wages.  How in the world does that resemble the "free market" at work?  Predatory nations such as China do everything that they can to distort the free market.  So why in the world would any rational economist ever recommend that we should keep trading with other countries that are cheating us blind?  After you read the facts in this article about the gutting of America's industrial might, hopefully you will get very angry.  We need the American people to start getting very upset about these very important issues. (Read More....)

Today, millions of smart, hard working Americans are flipping burgers, waiting tables or working dead end retail jobs not because they want to, but because they have no other options.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 14 million Americans are currently unemployed and another 9.3 million Americans are currently "underemployed".  During this economic downturn, a lot of Americans have been forced to take part-time jobs because they have been unable to find full-time jobs.  For many, this can be a soul-crushing experience.  It can be easy to become very bitter when you have worked very hard all your life and yet you find yourself having to take a job that only pays you a fraction of what you used to make.  A lot of young college graduates end up hating life because the only jobs that they can seem to find do not even require a college degree and don't even come close to enabling them to keep up with their crippling student loan debt payments.  Sadly, the underemployment problem continues to grow even worse.  In September alone, the number of underemployed Americans rose by close to half a million. (Read More....)

Are you unemployed and out of options?  Well, if you live in most areas of the country there is not much hope for you.  But there is one state where hiring is really hot right now.  If you are desperate for a job, you just might want to check out North Dakota.  Way back in the middle of the 19th centurty, author Horace Greeley gave young Americans the following advice: "Go West, young man, go West".  Well, we have reached another moment in U.S. history when it may be wise for many Americans to pick up and move to another part of the country in search of opportunity.  Of course traveling to North Dakota is not "going west" for all Americans, but for the majority of the population it is.  In the 19th century, many Americans traveled west because they believed those that told them that there was "gold in them thar hills", but today a different kind of "gold" is being found in North Dakota.  The state is currently enjoying a boom of "black gold", and all of that oil is creating a huge number of jobs.  If you are unemployed and you are desperate, you might want to check out North Dakota.  Desperate times call for desperate measures. (Read More....)

So that was what we have been waiting for?  That was what all the hype was about?  With a little over a year until the next election, that was the "best shot" that Obama has for fixing the unemployment crisis in this country?  The Obama Jobs Plan (also now known as "the American Jobs Act") is going to cost $447 billion and it is going to do next to nothing to create more jobs.  Many Americans were hoping for something bold and new from Obama, but instead what they got was a bad joke.  When Obama stated that there is "nothing radical in this bill", he was not kidding.  Instead of addressing the fundamental issues that are causing job loss, Obama wants us to spend half a trillion dollars on measures that will only create a very small number of jobs.  Sadly, much of what Obama is proposing actually consists of huge bribes to middle class voters.  Obama is trying to keep his own job, and he appears willing to pile up even more debt in order to make that happen. (Read More....)

Do you have friends, neighbors and relatives that can't find work?  Well, unfortunately the current U.S. jobs famine is about to get a whole lot worse.  Right now there are approximately 13.9 million unemployed Americans.  That does not count those that "are not looking for work".  That does not count those that are working part-time jobs but that are desperate for full-time work.  The truth is that we need tens of millions more full-time jobs in order to give one to everyone that wants one.  Sadly, the long-term trends that have caused this mess continue to get worse.  Unless truly dramatic changes are made, the U.S. economy is going to continue to bleed jobs and that is going to suck the hope right out of this country.  It is time to wake up America!  It is not a big mystery why we don't have enough jobs.  But sadly, very few of our leaders are talking about the real issues. (Read More....)