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 If you increased your credit card spending by a couple thousand dollars per month would your lifestyle improve? Of course it would. By going into large amounts of debt, it is possible to live a lifestyle that you can't really afford, at least for a while. But if you keep racking up huge amounts of credit card debt every single month, eventually it gets to a point where it is extremely difficult to even keep up with the minimum monthly payments and the credit card companies will not lend you any more money. Well, on a larger scale it is the same thing with government debt. Right now, the U.S. government is spending more than a trillion dollars more than it takes in every year. Even if the U.S. government spends all of that money on incredibly stupid stuff, it still gets into the pockets of ordinary Americans. In turn, those ordinary Americans use that money to pay the mortgage, buy food, shop at the mall, etc. All of this borrowing and spending by the U.S. government has created a "false prosperity" bubble that is not real. It may feel real to you right now, but it is unsustainable by definition. If the U.S. government suddenly started spending only the money that it actually brought in every year, our economy would be doomed and all of this "false prosperity" would rapidly disappear. But if the U.S. government continues to rack up debt at this pace we are doomed as well. In fact, every dollar that gets borrowed makes our eventual collapse ever worse. We are heading down the exact same road that Greece has gone. Eventually the rest of the world is not going to lend us gigantic mountains of super cheap money anymore. When the flow of cheap money stops, it can be extremely painful. Anyone that has ever seen the interest rates on their credit cards go above 20 percent knows how this feels. If we had addressed these problems as a nation a decade or two ago, perhaps we could have found a solution. But now there is no way out under our current financial system and a devastating economic collapse is on the horizon no matter what we do. (Read More....)
 Well, it was nice while it lasted. One of the really good things that came out of the recent economic downturn was that millions of American families decided to get out of debt. In particular, we had seen a sustained trend of reduced credit card usage in the United States. It looked like Americans had finally wised up. But we should have known that Americans would not be willing to tighten their belts forever. Unfortunately, it appears that getting out of debt is no longer so "trendy". In fact, the month of December was the third month in a row in which consumer credit grew in the United States. Prior to that, consumer credit in the United States had declined for 20 months in a row. The American people were doing so, so good. Why did they have to stop? It appears that the American people have fallen off the wagon and have gotten a taste for credit card debt once again. This time, however, the credit card companies are back with interest rates that are higher than ever. In fact, one national credit card company has hundreds of thousands of customers signed up for a card that charges interest rates of up to 59.9%. (Read More....)
 Without millions more good jobs, the U.S. economy is simply never, ever going to recover. But at this point, there is every indication that the U.S. economy is going to continue to bleed jobs. In the past, employment would bounce up and down as the economy went through various cycles. But today what we are witnessing is something much different. Over the past 30 or 40 years, literally millions of good jobs have been shipped off to China, India and to dozens of third world nations where half-starving workers are more than happy to slave away for big global corporations for less than a dollar an hour. In the new "global economy" that we were promised would be so good for us, the expensive American worker is obsolete. The giant global predator corporations that now dominate our economy do not exist to provide you and your family with a nice home, two cars and college educations for all your children. No, their goal is to keep costs as low as possible so that their profits will be as high as possible. For many of these giant global predator corporations, that means that paying workers as close to zero as possible is the best decision for the bottom line. (Read More....)
 An overwhelming majority of American voters now believe that the United States could experience a total economic collapse. According to the latest Fox News poll, 79 percent of U.S. voters believe "it’s possible the nation’s economy could collapse", and the poll found that this belief in the fragility of the American economy cuts across the entire political spectrum. The truth is that the American people, at least on some level, know that a day of reckoning is at hand. For decades, America has been enjoying the biggest party in the history of the world, but unfortunately that party was fueled by a gigantic mountain of debt, and now the bills are starting to come due. Unfortunately for those trying to do something about this economic mess, the American people are starting to realize that the U.S. economy is now basically a house of cards, and that could lead to massive financial panic when things really start to fall apart. (Read More....)
 What are hard working Americans who have scrimped and saved and have done everything "right" financially for decades supposed to think about all of these "bailouts" and of the massive financial mess in Washington? How are people who have handled their own finances admirably supposed to feel now that the foolishness of others is leading us all towards a horrific economic collapse? Well, a reader named "Mae" recently left a comment that I think does a good job of communicating what a lot of hard working Americans are feeling right now: My situation is this – we have lived our lives playing by the rules: never carried debt on a credit card that we couldn’t pay off by the due date. If we couldn’t afford the item, we didn’t buy it. We always had a Christmas Club which enabled us to pay cash for the holiday. We payed ourselves first after every paycheck whether it was $10 or $100, whatever we could afford. We made double payments on our mortgage when we could which helped us to pay off our modest home 10 years early. We knew that we couldn’t afford to “have it all” so we made our choices early on and stuck with it. We sacrificed the fancy vacations in order to do large home repairs (like a new roof) ourselves. We didn’t buy expensive cars and now own one outright and carry a small loan on another. That’s our only debt besides monthly bills. We chose jobs that provided health care benefits. We did everything right…we saved and saved and saved to have a decent retirement but of course last year took half the value of our 401k. (Read More....)
 There have been very few things more damaging to American consumers over the past couple of decades than credit card debt. Easy credit has enabled many of us to live absolutely fabulous lifestyles, but outrageously high interest rates, ridiculous penalties and predatory fees have sucked the financial life out of millions of American families. It is very easy to blame the rapidly exploding debt of the U.S. government for the economic collapse that we are now experiencing, but the truth is that tens of millions of Americans have created their own personal economic disasters by overusing credit cards. The temptation of easy credit has been too much for millions of Americans to resist, but now all of that easy credit is proving to be incredibly difficult to pay back, and massive debt problems are literally tearing many American families apart. (Read More....)
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59.9 Percent? Americans Are Racking Up Huge Credit Card Balances Once Again And Some Of The Interest Rates Are Absolutely Outrageous!