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 Do you actually believe that the employment numbers are getting better? Do you actually believe that there is a bright future ahead for American workers? If so, then you really need to read this article. The truth is that we are in the midst of the worst employment crisis since the Great Depression, and there has been absolutely no employment recovery. In fact, the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about exactly where it was during the darkest days of the last recession. But the mainstream media is not telling you this. The mainstream media is instead focusing on the fact that the official “unemployment rate” declined from 7.6% in June to 7.4% in July. That sounds like great news, but when you take a deeper look at the employment numbers some very disturbing trends emerge.
Over the past several years, almost the entire decline in the unemployment rate can be accounted for by people “leaving the workforce”. The “unemployment rate” has not been going down because people are actually getting jobs. Rather, the “unemployment rate” has been going down because the government has been pretending that millions upon millions of American workers simply do not want jobs anymore. This is extremely misleading.
We are being told that 162,000 jobs were created in July. Okay, so that is just barely enough to keep up with population growth, and most of the jobs that were created last month were part-time jobs.
Meanwhile, the jobs numbers for the two previous months were both revised down…
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for May was revised from +195,000 to +176,000, and the change for June was revised from +195,000 to +188,000. With these revisions, employment gains in May and June combined were 26,000 less than previously reported.
Will this month eventually be revised down too?
When it comes to measuring employment in the United States, I believe that a much more accurate measurement than the highly manipulated “unemployment rate” is the civilian employment-population ratio. This ratio tells us what percentage of working age Americans actually have a job.
Just prior to the last recession, about 63 percent of all working age Americans had a job. During the recession, that number plunged dramatically and ultimately fell below 59 percent, and it has stayed below 59 percent for 47 months in a row…
This is the first time in the post-World War II era that the employment-population ratio has not bounced back after a recession.
So there has not been an employment recovery. Anyone that tells you that there has been an employment recovery is lying to you.
Since the end of 2009, we have been treading water at best. But during that time, another disturbing trend has emerged. Good paying full-time jobs are rapidly being replaced by low paying part-time jobs.
And this trend has definitely accelerated this year. If you can believe it, an astounding 76.7 percent of the jobs that have been “created” in 2013 have been part-time jobs.
As I wrote about last month, the employment landscape in this country is fundamentally changing. At this point, the number one employer in this country is Wal-Mart, and the number two employer in this country is a temp agency (Kelly Services).
This is a huge reason why the middle class is dying. You simply can’t raise a family on a part-time income.
Our young adults are being hit particularly hard. According to Gallup, the percentage of working age Americans under the age of 30 with a job fell from 47.0% in June 2012 to 43.6% in June 2013…
Fewer Americans aged 18 to 29 worked full time for an employer in June 2013 (43.6%) than did so in June 2012 (47.0%), according to Gallup’s Payroll to Population employment rate. The P2P rate for young adults is also down from 45.8% in June 2011 and 46.3% in June 2010.
When our young people get out of school and enter the real world, they are finding that “good jobs” are few and far between. But unless our young people can find “breadwinner jobs”, they are not going to be able to get married, buy homes and raise families.
A lot of young people are doing their best, but things are really tough out there right now. The lack of good jobs is the primary reason why families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
A lot of young adults are coping with this employment crisis by moving back in with their parents. According to one recent study, 36 percent of all young adults in the 18 to 31 age bracket are currently living with their folks.
Are you starting to understand that our system is broken?
The quality of jobs in this country continues to steadily decline. Just consider the following numbers from one of my previous articles…
-The number of part-time workers in the United States has just hit a brand new all-time high, but the number of full-time workers is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.
-In America today, only 47 percent of adults have a full-time job.
-At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.
-An astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
And as I mentioned yesterday, until we have a jobs recovery there will be no housing recovery no matter how much the Federal Reserve tries to manipulate the system.
The mainstream media continues to insist that “things are looking up” for the housing market, and yet the home ownership rate in the United States is the lowest that it has been in 18 years.
In order for the middle class to thrive, people have got to be able to get good jobs and people have got to be able to buy homes.
Instead, the percentage of good jobs in our economy continues to shrink, the level of home ownership continues to decline, and less than half of all Americans now consider themselves to be middle class.
The next wave of the economic crisis has not even hit us yet, but we continue to see poverty rates soar all over the nation. In fact, just this week there was an article about the tent cities that are starting to pop up all over New Jersey…
Tent cities have popped up across New Jersey including the state’s poorest city.
Meg Baker chased the story of Camden’s tent city. Residing off Route 38 at Wilson Boulevard under an overpass, through woods and down a path of trash lays a community of people living in tents. This particular community was relocated from Federal Street and it’s inhabited by an array of people: addicts, people who have fallen on hard times and some with mental illness.
Baker took a tour of this run down community and the pictures show just how heart-wrenching this situation really is. Among the homes are decomposing food, broken furniture, and feral cats.
This is supposed to be “the economic recovery”.
If things were going to get “better” it should have happened by now.
But things didn’t get better, and now the next wave of the economic crisis is rapidly approaching.
As I tried to explain the other day, the most important number in our economy is the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries. As that number goes up, interest rates all over our economic system go up. And much higher interest rates would be absolutely devastating for our economy.
Unfortunately, many analysts now believe that interest rates are going to go much, much higher than they are right now. Just check out this excerpt from a recent CNBC article…
The Federal Reserve will lose control of interest rates as the “great rotation” out of bonds into equities takes off in full force, according to one market watcher, who sees U.S. 10-year Treasury yields hitting 5-6 percent in the next 18-24 months.
“It is our opinion that interest rates have begun their assent, that the Fed will eventually lose control of interest rates. The yield curve will first steepen and then will shift, moving rates significantly higher,” said Mike Crofton, President and CEO, Philadelphia Trust Company told CNBC on Wednesday.
If interest rates do go that high, our economy simply will not be able to handle that. It would cripple the finances of state and local governments all over the nation, it would absolutely crush the housing market, and it would cause a derivatives crisis unlike anything that we have ever seen before.
The smart money knows that rising interest rates spell big trouble and they are already pulling their money out of the market as a Bloomberg article recently detailed…
Private-equity managers from Fortress Investment Group LLC (FIG) to Blackstone Group LP (BX), which made billions by buying low and selling high, say now is the time to exit investments as stocks rally and interest rates start to rise.
And Apollo Global Management LLC Chief Executive Officer Leon Black said the following back in April…
“It’s almost biblical: there is a time to reap and there’s a time to sow,” Apollo (APO)’s Black said at a conference in April. “We think it’s a fabulous environment to be selling. We’re selling everything that’s not nailed down in our portfolio.”
The smart money is getting out while the getting is good.
They know that a storm is coming.
They know what higher interest rates will do to the economy.
As bad as the employment picture is right now, this is NOTHING compared to what is coming.
This is about as good as things are going to get. It is all downhill from here.
So enjoy this false bubble of pseudo-prosperity while you still can.
When the next great wave of the economic crisis strikes, millions upon millions of Americans are going to lose their jobs and the official unemployment rate is going to soar well up into the double digits.
 Did you know that the total number of unemployed workers in G20 counties is now up to 93 million and that it is increasing with each passing day? You see, the truth is that the United States is not the only one dealing with a systemic unemployment crisis. This is literally happening all over the planet. So what is causing this crisis? Is there any hope that it will be turned around? Well, unfortunately there are several long-term trends that have been developing for decades that have played a major role in bringing us to this point. First of all, the giant corporations that now totally dominate the global economy have figured out that they can make a lot more money by replacing expensive workers that live in major industrialized nations with workers that live in nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. So it isn’t really a huge mystery why there is such a huge problem with unemployment in the western world. If you were running a giant corporation, why would you want to hire workers that will cost you 10 to 20 times as much as other workers? A worker is a worker, and over the past decade we have seen a massive movement of jobs to countries where labor is cheaper. In addition, large corporations are also trying to completely eliminate as many jobs as they can by using technology. If a corporation can get a computer or a machine or a robot to do a task more cheaply than a human worker can do it, then why would that corporation want to continue to rely on human labor? And of course we have seen an overall weakening of the economies of the western world in recent years as well. This has been particularly true in the United States. As these long-term trends intensify, the worldwide unemployment crisis is going to get even worse.
In fact, the director general of the International Labor Organization is fully convinced that unemployment is going to continue to rise in G20 nations. Just check out what he told CNBC on Friday…
Unemployment will likely soar further in the group of 20 major economic powers without immediate action, Guy Ryder, the director general of the International Labor Organization told CNBC on Friday, comparing the jobs crisis to the 2008-2009 financial crisis and warning it needs to be tackled urgently.
“We have gone backwards. It is quite alarming to see…that unemployment has not gone down, in fact it’s gone up,” Ryder told CNBC at the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Moscow.
He said 93 million people were currently unemployed in the G20.
And when those living in G20 nations lose their jobs, they tend to stay out of work for a very long time. In fact, 30 percent of unemployed workers in G20 countries have been out of work for one year or longer.
Major industrialized nations all over the planet are no longer able to produce enough jobs for their people. In many “wealthy nations” the unemployment rate has already risen well up into double digits. Just consider the following numbers…
-The unemployment rate is above 25 percent in South Africa.
-The unemployment rate in France recently hit a 15 year high.
-The unemployment rate in Italy is up to 12.2 percent, which is the highest in 35 years.
-The unemployment rate in the eurozone as a whole is up to an all-time high of 12.2 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Poland is 13.2 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Ireland is now 13.6 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Portugal has rocketed up to 17.7 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Greece is currently sitting at 26.9 percent and it is being projected that it will soon hit 30 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Spain is even worse than in Greece. The unemployment rate in Spain is a staggering 27.2 percent.
Sadly, it looks like things are not going to be getting better any time soon. In fact, global business confidence is now the lowest that it has been since the last recession.
So what about the United States?
Well, it is true that our official numbers do not look quite as bad as much of the rest of the world. But the official unemployment rate in the U.S. has been at 7.5 percent or higher for 54 months in a row. That is the longest stretch in U.S. history.
But at least it is not in double digits yet.
Things could be worse.
However, that does not mean that we are doing well either.
The mainstream media is attempting to convince us that everything is just fine because the unemployment rate has been “going down”, but when you take a deeper look at the numbers that is not exactly an accurate assessment of our situation.
As the New York Times recently pointed out, the decline in the unemployment rate can almost entirely be accounted for by a decline in the labor participation rate…
Let’s take a step back. Lots of people lost jobs during the Great Recession. In the aftermath, the great surprise has been how few are looking for new jobs. Labor force participation, the share of adults working or trying to find work, has stagnated at about 63.5 percent, almost three percentage points below the pre-recession level.
The unemployment rate has dropped almost entirely because of this decline in labor force participation. In other words, it has not fallen because people are finding jobs. It has fallen because fewer people are looking for jobs.
To get a more accurate picture of what is really happening with employment in America, you need to look at the employment-population ratio. It is a measurement of the percentage of the working age population that is actually working. As you can see, the percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job has been declining since the year 2000…
As you can see, there has been no employment recovery.
When the mainstream media tells you that the employment numbers for June were “great”, that is not being honest. The truth is that the unemployment rate rose in 28 U.S. states and it only declined in 11 states during June, and as I mentioned yesterday, the U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs last month.
So no, things are not getting better, and the unemployment problems in the United States and in Europe are likely going to continue to get worse in the years ahead.
That is very bad news for most of us, because the only thing that most of us have to offer in the marketplace is our labor. If the value that is placed on our labor is continually declining, then that puts us in a very difficult position.
It is almost as if we have all been drafted to play a very twisted game of musical chairs. Each time the music stops, more chairs (jobs) are being pulled out of the game.
You might be doing okay for the moment, but what is going to happen when the music suddenly stops one day and your chair gets pulled out of the game?
That is something that you might want to start thinking about.
 A fundamental shift is taking place in the U.S. economy. In fact, this transition is rapidly picking up momentum and is in danger of becoming an avalanche. The percentage of full-time jobs in our economy is steadily declining and the percentage of part-time jobs is steadily increasing. This is not a recent phenomenon, but now there are several factors which are accelerating this trend. One of them is Obamacare. The truth is that Obamacare actually gives business owners incentive to cut hours and turn full-time workers into part-time workers, and according to the Wall Street Journal and other prominent publications this is already happening all over the United States. Perhaps this is part of the reasons why the U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs last month.
In a recent article entitled “Restaurant Shift: Sorry, Just Part-Time“, the Wall Street Journal explained the choices that employers are faced with thanks to Obamacare…
The Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent workers to offer affordable insurance to employees working 30 or more hours a week or face fines. Some companies have said the requirement could increase their costs significantly, although others have played down the potential hit.
The cost for small firms to comply with the health law will depend largely on the number of additional full-time employees that sign up for employer-sponsored coverage. Average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in 2012 were $5,615 for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. That is up from $3,083 and $8,003, respectively, in 2002.
Thankfully the implementation of this aspect of Obamacare was recently delayed, but a lot of employers are saying that it won’t make a difference. They know that it is coming at some point, and so they are already making the changes that they feel they will need to make in order to comply with the law…
Restaurant owners who have already begun shifting to part-time workers say they will continue that pattern.
“Does the delay change anything for us? Absolutely not,” Mr. Adams of Subway said, explaining that whether his health-care costs go up next year or in 2015, he will have to comply with the law. “We won’t start hiring full-time people.”
This is very sad, because we have already been witnessing a steady erosion of “breadwinner jobs” in this country.
It is very, very difficult to support a family if you just have a part-time job or a temp job. But those are the jobs that our economy is producing these days.
In fact, if you can believe it, the second largest employer in the United States is now a temp agency. Kelly Services is actually the second largest employer in the country after Wal-Mart.
Isn’t that crazy?
And full-time employment continues to lag far, far behind part-time employment. The number of part-time workers in the United States recently hit a brand new all-time record high, but the number of full-time workers remains nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.
For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “15 Signs That The Quality Of Jobs In America Is Going Downhill Really Fast“.
At this point, employees are increasingly considered to be expendable “liabilities” that can be dumped the moment that their usefulness is over.
For example, employees at one restaurant down in Florida were recently fired by text message…
It’s bad enough losing your job, but more than a dozen angry employees say they were fired from a central Florida restaurant via text message.
Employees at Barducci’s Italian Bistro said they lost their jobs without notice after the restaurant suddenly closed and are still waiting for their paychecks.
This shift that we are witnessing is fundamentally changing the relationship between employers and employees in the United States. The balance of power has moved very much toward the employers.
Most employers realize that there is intense competition for most jobs these days. If you get tired of your job, your employer can easily go out and find a whole bunch of other people who would be thrilled to fill it.
So why has the balance of power shifted so dramatically?
Well, for one thing we have allowed millions upon millions of good paying jobs to be shipped out of the country. Now American workers literally have to compete for jobs with workers on the other side of the planet that live in nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
This should have never happened, but voters in both major political parties kept voting for politicians that were doing this to us.
Now we all pay the price.
Another factor is the rapid advancement of technology.
These days, businesses are trying use machines, computers and robots to automate just about everything that they can. The following example comes from a recent Business Insider article…
On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds.
The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.
The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization — fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they’re sensitive to bruising.
So what happens when the big corporations that dominate our economy are able to automate everything?
What will the rest of us do?
How will the middle class survive if they don’t need us to work for them?
Over the past couple of centuries, we have witnessed several fundamental shifts in our economy.
Once upon a time, a very high percentage of Americans worked for themselves. There were millions of farmers, ranchers, small store owners, etc.
But then the industrial revolution kicked in to high gear and big corporations started to gain more power. Millions of Americans went to work for these big corporations, but it was okay because they paid us good wages to work in their factories and the middle class thrived.
Unfortunately, the big corporations have realized that things have changed and that they don’t really need us anymore. They can replace us with technology or with super cheap labor overseas.
So that leaves the rest of us in quite a quandry. Very few of us own our own businesses. In fact, the percentage of self-employed workers in the United States is at an all-time record low. And the number of us that are needed by the monolithic corporations that dominate our system is dropping by the day.
All of this is very bad news for the middle class. The only thing that most of us have to offer is our labor, and the value of our labor is continually declining.
Unless something dramatic happens, the future of the middle class looks very bleak.
 As the number of good jobs continues to decline, the number of Americans that cannot take care of themselves without government assistance continues to explode. On Friday, we learned that the U.S. economy added “195,000 jobs” last month. But when you look deeper at the numbers, another story emerges. Last month, the U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs. Overall, the U.S. economy has only added 130,000 full-time jobs in 2013, but it takes about 90,000 full-time jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So we are losing quite a bit of ground as far as full-time jobs are concerned. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has added more than 500,000 part-time jobs so far this year. Unfortunately, there are very, very few part-time and temp jobs that can be considered “breadwinner jobs”. Part-time jobs are great for teenagers, university students and elderly people that only want to work a limited number of hours, but what most Americans need are good paying full-time jobs with benefits that will allow them to take care of their families. Unfortunately, those jobs are continually becoming a smaller part of our economy.
As David Stockman has noted, the U.S. economy has only regained 200,000 of the 5.6 million breadwinner jobs that were lost during the last recession…
By September 2012, the S&P 500 was up by 115 percent from its recession lows and had recovered all of its losses from the peak of the second Greenspan bubble. By contrast, only 200,000 of the 5.6 million lost breadwinner jobs had been recovered by that same point in time. To be sure, the Fed’s Wall Street shills breathlessly reported the improved jobs “print” every month, picking and choosing starting and ending points and using continuously revised and seasonally maladjusted data to support that illusion. Yet the fundamentals with respect to breadwinner jobs could not be obfuscated.
This is a big problem. As I wrote about the other day, the quality of jobs in America is falling very fast. Only 47 percent of all adults in the United States have a full-time job at this point, and 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
Meanwhile, the number of part-time jobs has hit an all-time record high, and the number of temp jobs is absolutely exploding.
Incredibly, the number of temp jobs has increased by more than 50 percent since the end of the recession. Approximately 10 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were temp jobs, but close to 20 percent of the jobs gained since then have been temp jobs.
We are witnessing a fundamental shift in our economy. Full-time jobs are on the decline. Part-time and temp jobs are on the rise.
In fact, the second largest employer in the United States is now a temp agency. Kelly Services has become the second largest employer in the country after Wal-Mart.
But it is really hard to pay the bills stocking shelves at Wal-Mart or working temp jobs for Kelly Services.
Unfortunately, these days millions of American workers find themselves having to take whatever they can find. We live during a period of chronic unemployment. In fact, according to John Williams of shadowstats.com, unemployment in the United States is now higher than it was at any point during the last recession after you factor in discouraged workers and workers that have taken part-time jobs for economic reasons.
So why don’t more Americans go out and start businesses and create their own jobs?
Unfortunately, thanks to the federal government, state governments and local governments, the environment for small businesses in America today is incredibly toxic. In fact, the percentage of self-employed workers in this country is at an all-time record low.
As a result of everything that I have discussed above, more Americans than ever find that they cannot take care of themselves without government assistance.
I have often written about the fact that the number of Americans on food stamps has skyrocketed in recent years. In the year 2000, there were only 17 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are more than 47 million Americans on food stamps.
But the number of Americans that are dependent on our “modern day bread lines” is actually far higher than that.
According to a recent CNS News article, a total of 101 million Americans are enrolled in food assistance programs. The following are some of the staggering numbers for some of these programs…
The National School Lunch program provides 32 million students with low-cost or no-cost meals daily; 10.6 million participate in the School Breakfast Program; and 8.9 million receive benefits from the Woman, Infants and Children (WIC) program each month, the latter designed for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women, as well as children younger than 5 years old.
In addition, 3.3 million children at day care centers receive snacks through the Child and Adult Care Food Program.
There’s also a Special Milk Program for schools and a Summer Food Service Program, through which 2.3 million children received aid in July 2011 during summer vacation.
At farmer’s markets, 864,000 seniors receive benefits to purchase food and 1.9 million women and children use coupons from the program.
Yes, there is some overlap in some of these programs. So the actual number of Americans receiving food assistance is going to be less than 101 million.
But clearly something has gone horribly wrong. Our economy is not producing enough good jobs, and more Americans than ever cannot take care of themselves as a result.
This is not normal. What we are witnessing is the slow-motion collapse of the middle class. The number of Americans that are dependent on the government for their daily bread is so large that it is difficult to comprehend. The following are a few statistics from my recent article entitled “21 Facts About Rising Government Dependence In America That Will Blow Your Mind“…
-Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
-Today, the number of Americans on food stamps exceeds the entire population of the nation of Spain.
-According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
You can read the rest of that article right here.
So what is the solution?
Well, we need a lot more full-time “breadwinner jobs” that will enable men and women to be able to take care of their families.
Unfortunately, we continue to ship millions of good jobs overseas, and our politicians continue to pursue policies which are making the business environment in this country very toxic.
There is not going to be any easy way to fix all of this. We should have seen a nice bounce in the employment numbers during this so-called “recovery”, but that did not happen. And now the next wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching, and the employment crisis in this country is going to become a lot more painful.
 Trying to find a job in America today can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Most of the jobs that are available seem to pay very little, and there is intense competition for just about any job that is open. But it wasn’t always like this. When I was in high school, I was immediately hired when I applied for a job at McDonalds because they were so desperate for workers that they would hire just about anyone that could flip a burger. But in this economic environment, a single nationwide hiring event conducted by McDonalds resulted in a million job applications, and only a small percentage of those applicants were actually hired. Our economy simply does not produce enough jobs for everyone anymore, and the percentage of “good jobs” continues to decline. That means that it is getting really hard to find a job that will enable you to support a family, and a lot of people end up doing jobs that they are massively overqualified for. But when times are tough, people are going to do what they have to do in order to survive.
One thing that we have seen in recent years is an explosion in the number of “temp workers” in America. Even some of the largest companies in America are using them. They like the flexibility of being able to bring in workers when they need them and of being able to dump them the moment they don’t need them anymore. Sadly, those that work in the “temp industry” often work in deplorable conditions for very little pay. The following is a brief excerpt from an absolutely outstanding Pro Publica article…
In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.
This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.
The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies – Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.
Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.
But these are the types of jobs the U.S. economy is “creating” these days. Low paying part-time jobs are continually becoming a bigger part of the economy. This is one of the primary reasons why the middle class in America is shrinking.
You can’t support a family on what most of these part-time jobs pay. But our economy is not producing many high quality full-time jobs these days. The average quality of American jobs just continues to sink.
The following are 15 signs that the quality of jobs in America is going downhill really fast…
#1 The number of part-time workers in the United States has just hit a brand new all-time high, but the number of full-time workers is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.
#2 In America today, only 47 percent of adults have a full-time job.
#3 Even though the U.S. economy created nearly 200,000 jobs in June, the number of full-time jobs actually decreased.
#4 There are now 2.7 million temp workers in the United States – a new all-time high.
#5 One out of every ten jobs in the United States is now filled through a temp agency.
#6 The U.S. economy has actually lost manufacturing jobs for four consecutive months.
#7 The official unemployment rate has been at 7.5 percent or higher for 54 months in a row. That is the longest stretch in U.S. history.
#8 According to one recent survey, 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
#9 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.
#10 High paying manufacturing jobs continue to be shipped overseas. Sadly, there are fewer Americans employed in manufacturing now than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then.
#11 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
#12 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#13 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
#14 At this point, an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
#15 According to a study that was released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States qualify as “good jobs” at this point. In a previous article, I detailed the three criteria that they used to define what a “good job” is….
#1 The job must pay at least $18.50 an hour. According to the authors, that is the equivalent of the median hourly pay for American workers back in 1979 after you adjust for inflation.
#2 The job must provide access to employer-sponsored health insurance, and the employer must pay at least some portion of the cost of that insurance.
#3 The job must provide access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.
All of this is absolutely heartbreaking.
Once upon a time, just about any adult that was willing to work hard in America could go out and find a good paying job that would support a middle class lifestyle.
Now those days are gone forever.
But different conditions exist in different parts of the country.
What are you seeing in your area?
Are good jobs difficult to find?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…
 The mainstream media is heralding today’s “fantastic” employment numbers as evidence that the U.S. economy is steadily recovering. But is that really true? The number of jobs created in June was just a little bit more than what is required to keep up with population growth, and the official unemployment rate remained at 7.6 percent. And if you look deeper in the numbers, they don’t look very good at all. The percentage of low paying part-time jobs in the economy continues to rise, the number of full-time jobs actually decreased and the U-6 unemployment number jumped from 13.8% in May to 14.3% in June. That is a stunning increase. And if the labor participation rate in this country was at the level it was at prior to the last recession, the official unemployment rate would be sitting at 11.1%. But according to the mainstream media, all of this is wonderful news. It is like we are in some sort of economic bizarro world where bad is good and down is up.
When the jobs numbers were released on Friday, Business Insider breathlessly declared that it “was jobs day in America, and America crushed expectations.”
USA Today ran an article on the jobs numbers with the following headline: “First Take: As job gains grow, optimism rises“.
But should we really be celebrating?
Posted below is a chart that shows the percentage of working age Americans with a job since the beginning of the year 2000. This chart does include the jobs numbers that were released on Friday…
Can you see a “recovery” in there somewhere?
Am I missing something?
Let me look again. This time I will squint really hard.
Nope – I still can’t see a recovery.
For three and a half years we have been stuck in a range between 58 percent and 59 percent. We are way, way below where we were before the recession.
So can we please not even begin to use the word “recovery” until we at least get above the 59 percent level?
And most of the jobs that are being created are of very poor quality. As I mentioned above, the figures show that the number of full-time jobs actually decreased last month. And as Zero Hedge pointed out, manufacturing employment has actually declined for four months in a row…
Even as the manufacturing jobs continue to collapse, posting their fourth consecutive monthly drop in June to 11.964 million jobs, minimum wage waiters and bartenders have never been happier. In June Restaurant and Bar employees just hit a new all time high of 10,339,800 workers, increasing by a whopping 51,700 in one month.
Things are pretty good in America right now if you want to flip burgers or wait tables. But if you want a good job that you can support a family with, things are getting even worse.
Meanwhile, bond yields soaring into the stratosphere.
The yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries absolutely exploded today. It opened at 2.50% and closed at 2.71%. When I saw what had happened I could hardly believe it.
If bond yields continue to climb like this, it is going to cause some massive problems in the financial markets. The following is from an article by John Rubino…
A few things to look for: recalculations of the deficit in light of spiking interest costs, comparisons of US and Japanese yields and speculation about what this means for Japanese rates — followed by dire analyses of Japan’s future borrowing costs — and last but not least, a growing concern for the hundreds of trillions of dollars of interest rate derivatives that now have one counterparty deeply in the red.
Most Americans don’t think too much about bond yields, but if they keep spiking it is going to dramatically affect every man, woman and child in the entire country.
Yesterday, I described some of the consequences that rapidly rising bond yields would have…
And if interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds start to rise to rational levels, the U.S. government is going to have to pay more to borrow money, state and local governments are going to have to pay more to borrow money, junk bonds will crash, the market for home mortgages will shrivel up and economic activity in this country will slow down substantially.
Plus, as I am fond of reminding everyone, there is a 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives time bomb sitting out there that rapidly rising interest rates could set off.
Never before have we had anything like the gigantic derivatives bubble that is hanging over global financial markets like a sword of Damocles.
As interest rates continue to go up, the derivatives bubble could burst at any time. When it does, we are going to see financial carnage unlike anything we have ever seen before.
2008 was just the warm up act. What is coming next is going to be the main event.
But in the economic bizarro world that we are living in, the mainstream media insists that skyrocketing interest rates are nothing to worry about.
Today, USA Today ran a headline that declared the following: “Investors: Don’t panic over bond yield spike“.
And Yahoo actually ran a story entitled “Why higher U.S. yields should cheer investors“. Needless to say, the arguments in that story are not very convincing.
And in that story they even admit that record amounts of money were being pulled out of bond funds in June…
Capital is already flowing out of low-yielding bonds. PIMCO Total Return fund, the world’s largest bond fund, suffered record outflows of $9.6 billion in June, in a second straight month of withdrawals.
Mutual and exchange-traded bond funds lost a record $79.8 billion in June, according to TrimTabs Investment Research.
The rush for the exits in the bond market is threatening to become an avalanche.
I hope that this is not the beginning of a financial panic. I hope that we have more time before the next major wave of the economic collapse strikes.
But I certainly cannot guarantee that things will remain stable. Once fear starts to sweep through financial markets, things can change very, very quickly.
 If the economy is improving, then why aren’t things getting better for most average Americans? They tell us that the unemployment rate is going down, but the percentage of Americans that are actually working is exactly the same it was three years ago. They tell us that American families are in better financial shape now, but real disposable income is falling rapidly. They tell us that inflation is low, but every time we go shopping at the grocery store the prices just seem to keep going up. They tell us that the economic crisis is over, and yet poverty and government dependence continue to explode to unprecedented heights. There seems to be a disconnect between what the government and the media are telling us and what is actually true. With each passing day the debt of the federal government grows larger, the financial world become even more unstable and more American families fall out of the middle class. The same long-term economic trends that have been eating away at our economy like cancer for decades continue to ruthlessly attack the foundations of our economic system. We are rapidly speeding toward an economic cataclysm, and yet the government and most of the media make it sound like happy days are here again. The American people deserve better than this. The American people deserve the truth. The following are 36 hard questions about the U.S. economy that the mainstream media should be asking…
#1 If the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is exactly the same as it was three years ago, then why is the government telling us that the “unemployment rate” has gone down significantly during that time?
#2 Why are some U.S. companies allowed to exploit disabled workers by paying them as little as 22 cents an hour?
#3 Why are some private prisons allowed to pay their prisoners just a dollar a day to do jobs that other Americans could be doing?
#4 Why is real disposable income in the United States falling at the fastest rate that we have seen since 2008?
#5 Why do 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year?
#6 Why are wages as a percentage of GDP at an all-time low?
#7 Why are 76 percent of all Americans living paycheck to paycheck?
#8 Why are so many large corporations issuing negative earnings guidance for this quarter? Does this indicate that the economy is about to experience a significant downturn?
#9 Why is job growth at small businesses at about half the level it was at when the year started?
#10 Why are central banks selling off record amounts of U.S. debt right now?
#11 Why did U.S. mortgage bonds just suffer their biggest quarterly decline in nearly 20 years?
#12 Why did we just witness the largest weekly increase in mortgage rates in 26 years?
#13 Why has the number of mortgage applications fallen by 29 percent over the last eight weeks?
#14 Why has the number of mortgage applications fallen to the lowest level in 19 months?
#15 If the U.S. economy is recovering, why is the mortgage delinquency rate in the United States still nearly 10 percent?
#16 Why did the student loan delinquency rate in the United States just hit a brand new all-time high?
#17 Why is the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of municipal bonds being postponed?
#18 What are the central banks of the world going to do when the 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives bubble starts to burst?
#19 Why is Barack Obama secretly negotiating a new international free trade agreement that will impose very strict Internet copyright rules on all of us, ban all “Buy American” laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore?
#20 Why don’t our politicians seem to care that the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975?
#21 Why doesn’t the mainstream media talk about how rapidly the U.S. economy is declining relative to the rest of the planet? According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001. That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011.
#22 Why is the percentage of self-employed Americans at a record low?
#23 What are we going to do if dust bowl conditions continue to return to the western half of the United States? If the drought continues to get even worse, what will that do to our agriculture?
#24 Why is the IRS spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on kazoos, stove top hats, bathtub toy boats and plush animals?
#25 Why did the NIH spend $253,800 “to study ways to educate Boston’s male prostitutes on safe-sex practices”?
#26 Why do some of the largest charities in America spend less than 5 percent of the money that they bring in on actual charitable work?
#27 Now that EU finance ministers have approved a plan that will allow Cyprus-style wealth confiscation as part of all future bank bailouts in Europe, is it only a matter of time before we see something similar in the United States?
#28 Why does approximately one out of every three children in the United States live in a home without a father?
#29 Why are more than a million public school students in the United States homeless?
#30 Why are so many cities all over the United States passing laws that make it illegal to feed the homeless?
#31 Why is government dependence in the U.S. at an all-time high if the economy is getting better? Back in 1960, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages was approximately 10 percent. In the year 2000, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages was approximately 21 percent. Today, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages is approximately 35 percent.
#32 Why does the number of Americans on food stamps exceed the entire population of the nation of Spain?
#33 The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 32 million to 47 million while Barack Obama has been occupying the White House. So why is Obama paying recruiters to go out and get even more Americans to join the program?
#34 Today, there are 56 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits. In 2035, there will be 91 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits. Where in the world will we get the money for that?
#35 Why has the value of the U.S. dollar fallen by over 95 percent since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913?
#36 Why has the size of the U.S. national debt gotten more than 5000 times larger since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913?
 The middle class American worker is in danger of becoming an endangered species. The politicians are not telling you the truth, and the mainstream media is certainly not telling you the truth, but the reality is that there is nothing but bad news on the horizon for workers in the United States. In the old days, when the big corporations that dominate our society did well, that also meant good things for American workers since those corporations would need more of us to work for them. But in the emerging one world economic system that our economy is being merged into, those corporations have other choices now. For instance, the big corporations can now choose to limit the number of “expensive” American workers that they employ by shipping millions of jobs to the other side of the world. And from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. They can make much bigger profits by hiring people on the other side of the planet to work for them for less than a dollar an hour. If they can get good production out of those people, then why should they hire Americans for ten to twenty times as much, plus have to give those Americans health insurance and other benefits? Another major factor in the slow, agonizing death of the American worker is technology. We live during a period when technology is advancing at a pace that is almost unimaginable at the same time that it is steadily becoming cheaper and cheaper. That means that it is going to become easier and easier for companies to replace workers with robots and computers. As I have written about previously, it is being projected that our economy will lose millions of jobs to technology in the coming years. Yes, some of us will still be needed to help build the robots and the computers, but not all of us will. And of course the overall general weakness of the economy is not helping matters either. The American people inherited the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and we have wrecked it. Decades of very foolish decisions have resulted in the period of steady economic decline that we are experiencing now.
America is simply not the economic powerhouse that it once was. Back in 2001, the U.S. economy accounted for 31.8 percent of global GDP. By 2011, the U.S. economy only accounted for 21.6 percent of global GDP. That is a collapse any way that you want to look at it.
Today, American workers are living in an economy that is rapidly declining, and their jobs are steadily being stolen by robots, computers and foreign workers that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. Politicians from both political parties refuse to do anything to stop the bleeding because they think that the status quo is working just great.
So don’t expect things to get better any time soon.
The following are 10 amazing charts that demonstrate the slow, agonizing death of the American worker…
#1 Wages And Salaries As A Percentage Of GDP
As you can see, wages as a percentage of GDP are hovering near an all-time record low. That means that American workers are bringing home a smaller share of the economic pie than ever before.
#2 Average Annual Hours Worked Per Employed Person In The United States
We are an economy that is rapidly trading good paying full-time jobs for low paying part-time jobs. The decline in average annual hours worked that we have witnessed represents the equivalent of losing millions of jobs. There has been an explosion of “the working poor” in the United States, and this trend is probably only going to accelerate in the years to come.
#3 Manufacturing Employment
As you can see, there are less Americans working in manufacturing today than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then. The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001, and yet our politicians stand around and do nothing about it.
#4 Employment-Population Ratio
This is one of my favorite charts. It shows that there has been absolutely no employment recovery at all since the end of the last recession. The percentage of working age Americans that have a job has stayed under 59 percent for 44 months in a row. How much worse will things get when the next major economic downturn strikes?
#5 Labor Force Participation Rate
This is how the Obama administration is getting the “unemployment rate” to magically go down. They are pretending that millions upon millions of Americans simply do not want to work anymore. As you will notice, the decline of the labor force participation rate has accelerated greatly since Barack Obama entered the White House.
#6 Duration Of Unemployment
The average amount of time that it takes an unemployed worker to find a new job has declined slightly, but it is still far above normal historical levels. It is a crying shame that it takes the average unemployed worker two-thirds of a year to find a new job, but this is the new economic reality that we are all living in.
#7 Delinquency Rate On Residential Mortgages
Since there are not enough jobs for all of us, and since our wages are not rising as rapidly as the cost of living is, a whole bunch of us are falling behind on our mortgages. As you can see, the mortgage delinquency rate has only dropped slightly and is still way, way above typical levels.
#8 New Homes Sold
American workers also don’t have enough money to go out and buy new homes either. Yes, new home sales have rebounded slightly this year, but we are nowhere near where we used to be.
#9 Consumer Credit
Millions of American families continue to resort to going into debt in a desperate attempt to make ends meet. After a slight interruption during the last recession, consumer credit once again is growing at a frightening pace.
#10 Self-Employment At A Record Low
Since there aren’t enough jobs for everyone, why aren’t more Americans trying to start their own businesses? Well, the reality of the matter is that the government has made it exceedingly difficult to start your own business today. Taxes, rules, regulations and red tape are choking the life out of millions of small businesses in the United States. As a result, the percentage of self-employed Americans is at a record low.
As all of these long-term trends continue, the middle class will continue to shrink, poverty in America will continue to explode and government dependence will continue to rise.
The numbers don’t lie. Today, the number of Americans on Social Security Disability now exceeds the entire population of Greece, and the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the entire population of Spain.
We are in the midst of a horrifying economic collapse, and the next major wave of that collapse is rapidly approaching.
Are you ready?
 If you think that the latest employment numbers are good news, you might want to look again. In April 2013, 58.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job. But three years ago, in April 2010, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans had a job. Well, you may argue, that is not much of a difference. And that is precisely my point. The percentage of Americans that have a job fell like a rock during the last recession. It dropped from about 63 percent all the way down to below 59 percent, and it has stayed below 59 percent for 44 months in a row. So where is the recovery? This is the first time in the post-World War II era that the employment-population ratio has not bounced back after the end of a recession. So anyone that tells you that we are experiencing an employment recovery is lying to you. Yes, the U.S. economy added 165,000 jobs last month. But it takes nearly that many jobs just to keep up with population growth. The truth is that we are just treading water.
So why has the unemployment rate been going down? Well, it is because the government has been pretending that millions upon millions of unemployed Americans “don’t want jobs” anymore. In fact, an astounding 9.5 million Americans have “left the workforce” since Barack Obama took office.
Some in the mainstream media have started calling them “missing workers”. But whatever label you want to use, the reality of the matter is that they are really hurting. They are part of the reason why food stamp enrollment has soared from 32 million to more than 47 million while Barack Obama has been in the White House.
If you still believe that the employment market is getting better, just look at the following numbers. The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been sitting at about the same level for four years in a row…
April 2008: 62.7 percent
April 2009: 59.8 percent
April 2010: 58.7 percent
April 2011: 58.4 percent
April 2012: 58.5 percent
April 2013: 58.6 percent
So why is everyone getting so excited over the latest numbers? When you step back and look at what has happened to the employment-population ratio over the past decade it really is quite horrifying…
So exactly what part of that chart are we supposed to get excited about?
Yes, I suppose that we should be thankful that the percentage of Americans with a job has not continued to decline over the past few years. Unfortunately, the next major wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching and that is going to make our employment crisis far worse.
A recovery was supposed to already happen by now. Now we are running out of time before the next major downturn strikes.
And things have been particularly hard for our young people. Even if our young people do go to college, there is a very good chance that good jobs will not be waiting for them once they graduate.
According to Accenture’s 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey, 41 percent of all Millennials who graduated from college during the past two years are working in jobs that actually do not require a college degree.
And a different survey conducted a while back found that 53 percent of all college graduates under the age of 25 are either unemployed or underemployed.
Perhaps you have noticed this. Perhaps you have noticed that there seems to be large numbers of young people that are living with their parents or that can’t seem to get their lives started.
It is because the economy is not producing enough jobs for them.
We have shipped millions of good jobs overseas, we have replaced millions of jobs with technology, and we have created an economic environment that is murdering our small businesses.
Sadly, the future does not look bright for the American worker. The big corporations that dominate our society are feverishly trying to increase profits by getting rid of as many “expensive” American workers as possible. That is one of the reasons why corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at a record high, but wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low.
At this point there are more than 101 million working age Americans that do not have a job, and that number is going to go a lot higher in the years ahead.
But the financial markets seem to be absolutely thrilled with the present state of affairs. The latest employment numbers caused the Dow to shoot past 15,000 and the S&P 500 to push past 1600.
Of course stocks have become completely and totally divorced from economic reality, but this does happen from time to time and it never lasts forever. At some point there will be a rude awakening.
And I anticipated that we could potentially see the Dow hit 15,000 before it finally crashed. Back in February, I made the following statement…
Right now, everyone seems to be quite giddy about the fact that the Dow is marching toward an all-time high. And I actually do believe that the Dow will blow right past it. In fact, it is even possible that we could see the Dow hit 15,000 before everything starts falling apart.
Well, now we have seen the Dow hit 15,000. But that doesn’t change any of the long-term trends that are absolutely eviscerating our economy.
So enjoy this bubble of false hope while you can.
It will not last much longer.
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36 Hard Questions About The U.S. Economy That The Mainstream Media Should Be Asking
#1 If the percentage of working age Americans that have a job is exactly the same as it was three years ago, then why is the government telling us that the “unemployment rate” has gone down significantly during that time?
#2 Why are some U.S. companies allowed to exploit disabled workers by paying them as little as 22 cents an hour?
#3 Why are some private prisons allowed to pay their prisoners just a dollar a day to do jobs that other Americans could be doing?
#4 Why is real disposable income in the United States falling at the fastest rate that we have seen since 2008?
#5 Why do 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year?
#6 Why are wages as a percentage of GDP at an all-time low?
#7 Why are 76 percent of all Americans living paycheck to paycheck?
#8 Why are so many large corporations issuing negative earnings guidance for this quarter? Does this indicate that the economy is about to experience a significant downturn?
#9 Why is job growth at small businesses at about half the level it was at when the year started?
#10 Why are central banks selling off record amounts of U.S. debt right now?
#11 Why did U.S. mortgage bonds just suffer their biggest quarterly decline in nearly 20 years?
#12 Why did we just witness the largest weekly increase in mortgage rates in 26 years?
#13 Why has the number of mortgage applications fallen by 29 percent over the last eight weeks?
#14 Why has the number of mortgage applications fallen to the lowest level in 19 months?
#15 If the U.S. economy is recovering, why is the mortgage delinquency rate in the United States still nearly 10 percent?
#16 Why did the student loan delinquency rate in the United States just hit a brand new all-time high?
#17 Why is the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars of municipal bonds being postponed?
#18 What are the central banks of the world going to do when the 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives bubble starts to burst?
#19 Why is Barack Obama secretly negotiating a new international free trade agreement that will impose very strict Internet copyright rules on all of us, ban all “Buy American” laws, give Wall Street banks much more freedom to trade risky derivatives and force even more domestic manufacturing offshore?
#20 Why don’t our politicians seem to care that the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975?
#21 Why doesn’t the mainstream media talk about how rapidly the U.S. economy is declining relative to the rest of the planet? According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001. That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011.
#22 Why is the percentage of self-employed Americans at a record low?
#23 What are we going to do if dust bowl conditions continue to return to the western half of the United States? If the drought continues to get even worse, what will that do to our agriculture?
#24 Why is the IRS spending thousands of taxpayer dollars on kazoos, stove top hats, bathtub toy boats and plush animals?
#25 Why did the NIH spend $253,800 “to study ways to educate Boston’s male prostitutes on safe-sex practices”?
#26 Why do some of the largest charities in America spend less than 5 percent of the money that they bring in on actual charitable work?
#27 Now that EU finance ministers have approved a plan that will allow Cyprus-style wealth confiscation as part of all future bank bailouts in Europe, is it only a matter of time before we see something similar in the United States?
#28 Why does approximately one out of every three children in the United States live in a home without a father?
#29 Why are more than a million public school students in the United States homeless?
#30 Why are so many cities all over the United States passing laws that make it illegal to feed the homeless?
#31 Why is government dependence in the U.S. at an all-time high if the economy is getting better? Back in 1960, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages was approximately 10 percent. In the year 2000, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages was approximately 21 percent. Today, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages is approximately 35 percent.
#32 Why does the number of Americans on food stamps exceed the entire population of the nation of Spain?
#33 The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 32 million to 47 million while Barack Obama has been occupying the White House. So why is Obama paying recruiters to go out and get even more Americans to join the program?
#34 Today, there are 56 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits. In 2035, there will be 91 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits. Where in the world will we get the money for that?
#35 Why has the value of the U.S. dollar fallen by over 95 percent since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913?
#36 Why has the size of the U.S. national debt gotten more than 5000 times larger since the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913?