New DVDs By Michael Snyder
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 If you listen to Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama and the mainstream media long enough, and if you didn’t know any better, you might be tempted to think that the economic crisis is long gone and that we are in the midst of a burgeoning economic recovery. Unfortunately, the truth is that the economic crisis is far from over. In 2010, more homes were repossessed than ever before, more Americans were on food stamps than ever before and a smaller percentage of American men had jobs than ever before. The reality is that the United States is an economic basket case and all of these natural disasters certainly are not helping things. The Federal Reserve has been printing gigantic piles of money and the U.S. government has been borrowing and spending cash at a dizzying pace in an all-out effort to stabilize things. They have succeeded for the moment, but our long-term economic problems are worse then ever. We are still in the middle of a full-blown economic crisis and things are about to get even worse.
If you know someone that is foolish enough to believe that the economic crisis is over and that our economic problems are behind us, just ask that person the following questions….
#1 During the 23 months of the “Obama recovery”, an average of about 23,000 jobs a month have been created. It takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So shouldn’t we hold off a bit before we declare the economic crisis to be over?
#2 During the “recession”, somewhere between 6.3 million and 7.5 million jobs were lost. During the “Obama recovery”, approximately 535,000 jobs have been added. When will the rest of the jobs finally come back?
#3 Of the 535,000 jobs that have been created during the “Obama recovery”, only about 35,000 of them are permanent full-time jobs. Today, “low income jobs” account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States. If our economy is recovering, then why can’t it produce large numbers of good jobs that will enable people to provide for their families?
#4 Agricultural commodities have been absolutely soaring this decade. The combined price of cotton, wheat, gasoline and hogs is now more than 3 times higher than it was back in 2002. So how in the world can the Federal Reserve claim that inflation has been at minimal levels all this time?
#5 Back in 2008, banks had a total of 27 billion dollars in excess reserves at the Fed. Today, banks have a total of approximately 1.5 trillion dollars in excess reserves at the Fed. So what is going to happen when all of this money eventually hits the economy?….
#6 If the U.S. economy is recovering, then why are shipments by U.S. factories still substantially below 2008 levels?
#7 Why are imports of goods from overseas growing much more rapidly than shipments of goods from U.S. factories?
#8 According to Zillow, the average price of a home in the U.S. is about 8 percent lower than it was a year ago and that it continues to fall about 1 percent a month. During the first quarter of 2011, home values declined at the fastest rate since late 2008. So can we really talk about a “recovery” when the real estate crisis continues to get worse?
#9 According to a shocking new survey, 54 percent of Americans believe that a housing recovery is “unlikely” until at least 2014. So how is the housing industry supposed to improve if so many people are convinced that it will not?
#10 The latest GDP numbers out of Japan are a complete and total disaster. During the first quarter GDP declined by a stunning 3.7 percent. Of course I have been saying for months that the Japanese economy is collapsing, but most mainstream economists were absolutely stunned by the latest figures. So will the rest of the world be able to avoid slipping into a recession as well?
#11 Next week, Republicans in the House of Representatives are going to allow a vote on raising the debt ceiling. Everyone knows that this is an opportunity for Republican lawmakers to “look tough” to their constituents (the vast majority of which do not want the debt ceiling raised). Everyone also knows that eventually the Republicans are almost certainly going to cave on the debt ceiling after minimal concessions by the Democrats. The truth is that neither “establishment Republicans” nor “establishment Democrats” are actually serious about significantly cutting government debt. So why do we need all of this political theater?
#12 Why are so many of our once great manufacturing cities being transformed into hellholes? In the city of Detroit today, there are over 33,000 abandoned houses, 70 schools are being permanently closed down, the mayor wants to bulldoze one-fourth of the city and you can literally buy a house for one dollar in the worst areas.
#13 According to one new survey, about half of all Baby Boomers fear that when they retire they are going to end up living in poverty. So who is going to take care of them all when the money runs out?
#14 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of about 5 million Americans were being hired every single month during 2006. Today, an average of about 3.5 million Americans are being hired every single month. So why are our politicians talking about “economic recovery” instead of “the collapse of the economy” when hiring remains about 50 percent below normal?
#15 Since August, 2 million more Americans have left the labor force. But the entire period from August to today was supposed to have been a time of economic growth and recovery. So why are so many Americans giving up on looking for a job?
#16 According to Gallup, 41 percent of Americans believed that the economy was “getting better” at this time last year. Today, that number is at just 27 percent. Are Americans losing faith in the U.S. economy?
#17 According to the U.S. Census, the number of children living in poverty has gone up by about 2 million in just the past 2 years, and one out of every four American children is currently on food stamps. During this same time period, Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke have told us over and over that the U.S. economy has been getting better. So what is the truth?
#18 America has become absolutely addicted to government money. 59 percent of all Americans now receive money from the federal government in one form or another. U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes. Americans hate having their taxes raised and they hate having their government benefits cut. So is there any hope that this will ever be turned around before disaster strikes?
#19 The combined debt of the major GSEs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae) has increased from 3.2 trillion in 2008 to 6.4 trillion in 2011. How in the world is the U.S. government going to be able to afford to guarantee all of that debt on top of everything else?
#20 If the U.S. national debt (more than 14 trillion dollars) was reduced to a stack of 5 dollar bills, it would reach three quarters of the way to the moon. The U.S. government borrows about 168 million dollars every single hour. If Bill Gates gave every penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days. So how in the world can our politicians tell us that everything is going to be okay?
 Barack Obama has declared that “immigration reform is an economic imperative“, and is promising to do his best to get an immigration bill pushed through Congress this year. But will “legalizing” all of the illegal immigration that has taken place over the last several decades improve the struggling U.S. economy or will it actually make our economic problems worse? One of the favorite tricks of top politicians is to promise that the economy is going to improve if we just support what it is that they are currently pushing. Hopefully the Americans people will not buy the nonsense that Obama is spewing. The truth is that Barack Obama is wrong about the economic impact of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants don’t do jobs that Americans “don’t want” to do. A million Americans recently showed up to apply for a job at McDonald’s. That is how desperate Americans are for work these days. Please don’t try to tell me that there aren’t millions of Americans out there that would not pick fruit for minimum wage. The millions upon millions of illegal immigrants in this country are stealing jobs, they are depressing wages in a whole host of industries and they are a huge factor in the erosion of the middle class. Millions of middle class American families can’t afford to provide for their families anymore and are losing their homes, drowning in debt or going bankrupt. Rather than what Barack Obama is proposing (which is to essentially “legalize” illegal immigration), we need an immigration policy that makes sense and that protects American jobs.
Before we go any further, it is important for me to make a few points. It is not a bad thing that people want to come to this nation from another country. A lot of people that want to come to the United States are really hard working and have really solid character. This nation has a long tradition of immigrants arriving to build a better life here. At different times this country will need different levels of immigration, but we will always need new immigrants. People on one side of a border are not more “valuable” than people on another side of a border. There is a reason why our founding fathers believed that “all men are created equal”. In every nation on earth there are really wonderful people. We should love all men, women and children no matter where they were born and no matter what they look like. God created us all and He loves us all dearly.
The reason I went into all that is because of the way politics is played in America in 2011. The moment that anyone suggests that there might be a problem with illegal immigration they are immediately branded with all kinds of horrible labels. To put a horrible label on someone that is completely and totally untrue just to score political points is absolutely despicable.
The funny thing is that some of the organizations that denounce others the loudest should actually be examining themselves. For example, one of the largest pro-illegal immigration organizations is called “La Raza”, which literally means “The Race” (as if we all couldn’t figure it out). Perhaps it is time for them to come up with a new name.
Look, we all have to start learning to love each other. If not, our society is going to continue to break down.
A majority of the American people (yes, that is what the polls show) are not against illegal immigration because they “hate” another group of people. Rather, they just want all immigrants to go through the “front door” and they want the government to be sensitive to changing economic conditions.
The sad truth is that the U.S. government has absolutely refused to secure the U.S. border with Mexico for decades, and this has allowed millions upon millions of criminals, drug dealers and gang members to cross freely into the United States. In addition, by refusing to secure the border we have allowed new diseases to spread unchecked into this country.
Meanwhile, the law abiding people that would like to get into this country legally are put through absolute hell. I used to practice law and I have filled out immigration forms. The process is a complete and total nightmare.
So we have been making it really easy for law breakers to sneak in the back door of our country and we have been making it really hard for law abiding people to get in the front door.
What in the world could be wrong about wanting to fix that?
Once many illegal immigrants arrive in the United States they either try to make a living legally (by directly competing with blue collar American workers for jobs and driving their wages down) or illegally by selling drugs or being involved in other kinds of criminal activity.
Apparently Barack Obama believes that this kind of behavior should be rewarded with a “path to citizenship”.
The vast majority of illegal immigrants pay absolutely no federal or state income taxes and they never intend to. At the same time, they seem more than happy to take advantage of the free social services and benefits offered to them. In fact, stories of how “good” life in America is just encourages more and more immigrants to come to the United States illegally.
We need an immigration policy that insists that everyone come in through the front door.
Is there anyone out there that cannot agree with that?
We also need to set immigration levels that our economy can handle.
Right now our economy is struggling. Millions upon millions of Americans are out of work. 44 million Americans are on food stamps. 47 million Americans are living in poverty. We just can’t take in a whole lot of extra workers right now.
You would think that would just be common sense.
But instead, Barack Obama wants to grant amnesty to all of the illegal immigrants that are already here and put them on a path to citizenship.
Wow – do you think that might embolden millions more illegal immigrants to come flooding in?
Barack Obama is against a border fence. He says we don’t need it.
Meanwhile, thousands more illegal immigrants pour into this country every single day.
Barack Obama supports all of the “sanctuary cities” that have openly declared that they are not going to enforce our immigration laws.
So where do you think illegal immigrants are going to flock to? The truth is that word about these “sanctuary cities” gets around really fast. If you live in one of these cities, then you probably know all about it.
If Barack Obama gets his way, nobody will be breaking our immigration laws because essentially there will not be any more immigration laws.
Not that George W. Bush was any better. He was an absolute disaster on immigration as well.
The truth is that our immigration policy has been slowly eroding the U.S. middle class for many decades.
But according to Barack Obama, we desperately need to implement his “immigration reform” plan for the good of the middle class….
“One way to strengthen the middle class in America is to reform the immigration system, so that there is no longer a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor while depressing wages for everybody else.”
What a joke. The reality is that illegal immigration hurts that U.S. middle class and it is severely damaging to the U.S. economy. Because of illegal immigration, every single day wages are lost, taxes don’t get collected, hospitals provide “free health care” for which they are never paid, huge criminal gangs of foreigners are roaming our streets and the cost of providing social services to illegal aliens is slowly bankrupting state and local governments.
The following are 18 facts which prove that illegal immigration is an absolute nightmare for the U.S. economy….
#1 Illegal immigrants take jobs away from American citizens. According to a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data, legal and illegal immigrants gained over a million additional jobs between 2008 and 2010 even as millions of American citizens were losing their jobs during that same time period.
#2 The majority of our immigrants now sneak in through the “back door” that the federal government purposely leaves open. Thanks to the negligence of the federal government, far more people move into the United States illegally than come in through the legal immigration process. This has got to change.
#3 Illegal immigrants generally don’t pay taxes. The vast majority of illegal aliens would never even dream of paying income taxes, but Mexicans living in America send billions upon billions of dollars out of the United States and back to Mexico every single year.
#4 Although illegal aliens pay next to nothing in taxes, they have no problem receiving tens of billions of dollars worth of free education benefits, free health care benefits, free housing assistance and free food stamp benefits. Many communities in the United States now openly advertise that they will help illegal aliens with these things.
#5 The cost of educating the children of illegal immigrants is staggering. It is estimated that U.S. taxpayers spend $12,000,000,000 a year on primary and secondary school education for the children of illegal immigrants.
#6 Thanks to illegal immigration, California’s overstretched health care system is on the verge of collapse. Dozens of California hospitals and emergency rooms have shut down over the last decade because they could not afford to stay open after being endlessly swamped by illegal immigrants who were simply not able to pay for the services that they were receiving. As a result, the remainder of the health care system in the state of California is now beyond overloaded. This had led to brutally long waits, diverted ambulances and even unnecessary patient deaths. Sadly, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.
#7 It was estimated that there were approximately 7.7 million illegal aliens employed by U.S. employers during 2008. How much better would our economy look if all of those jobs were being filled by American workers?
#8 The region along the U.S./Mexico border is now an open war zone. Just across the U.S. border, the city of Juarez, Mexico is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the entire planet because of the brutal drug war being waged there. In fact, Juarez has now become the murder capital of the western hemisphere. Much of that violence has begun to spill over into areas of the southwestern United States.
For example, a while back NPR described one incident in the Juarez Valley that involved American citizens….
A couple of weeks ago, gunmen in the Juarez Valley killed the Mexican relative of a Fort Hancock high school student. When the student’s family in Fort Hancock heard about it, they crossed the border at 10 a.m. to see the body, and took the student with them.
“By 10:30, they had stabbed the relatives that went with him, which included his grandparents, with an ice pick,” says school superintendent Jose Franco. “My understanding is that the gentleman is like 90 years old, and they poked his eyes out with an ice pick. I believe those people are still in intensive care here in a hospital in the U.S.”
#9 A substantial percentage of young illegal immigrants end up in gangs. U.S. authorities say that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the United States. According to federal statistics, these 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year. Latino gangs made up primarily of illegal aliens are responsible for much of this violence.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, some of the most notorious gangs in the country are made up almost entirely of illegal immigrants….
“Gang investigators in Virginia estimate that 90% of the members of MS-13, the most notorious immigrant gang, are illegal immigrants.”
#10 The “18th Street Gang” is certainly giving MS-13 a run for their money. It is believed that the 18th Street Gang has thousands of members in the city of Los Angeles alone. In fact, the gang has become so notorious that there are even rumors that some police officers in Los Angeles simply will not venture into the areas most heavily controlled by the 18th Street gang.
The following is what Wikipedia says about the 18th Street Gang….
A US Justice Department report from 2009 estimates that the 18th Street gang has a membership of some 30,000 to 50,000 with 80% of them being illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America and is active in 44 cities in 20 states. Its main source of income is street-level distribution of cocaine and marijuana and, to a lesser extent, heroin and methamphetamine. Gang members also commit assault, auto theft, carjacking, drive-by shootings, extortion, homicide, identification fraud, and robbery.
#11 The “drug war” in northern Mexico is one gigantic bloodbath. The Mexican government says that as many as 28,000 people have been slaughtered by the drug cartels since 2007. A very significant percentage of those deaths have happened in areas right along the U.S. border, and yet our federal government still sees no reason to get serious about border security.
#12 It is an open secret that Mexican drug cartels are openly conducting military operations inside the United States. The handful of border patrol agents that we have guarding the border are massively outgunned and outmanned.
One agent who patrols the border and who asked to remain anonymous told Fox News the following….
“To say that this area is out of control is an understatement.”
A different federal agent put it this way in an email to Fox News….
“Every night we’re getting beaten like a pinata at a birthday party by drug, alien smugglers.”
#13 Federal border officials say that Mexican drug cartels have not only set up shop on U.S. soil, but they are actually maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona. If you go to Arizona today, there are actually signs that have been put up by the federal government warning American citizens not to venture into certain wilderness routes that are used by Mexican drug cartels to bring in drugs.
#14 The drug war being waged on both sides of the border is so violent that it is almost unimaginable. For example, one very prominent Mexican assassin known as “the soupmaker” has confessed that he made approximately 300 bodies disappear by dissolving them in acid baths. But right now there is essentially nothing that is preventing the next “soupmaker” from crossing the U.S. border and moving into your neighborhood.
#15 Arizona police are being openly warned by the Mexican drug cartels that if they try to interfere with the drug traffic in their area that they will be “taken out” by drug cartel snipers.
#16 While the U.S. military endlessly hunts for “members of al-Qaeda” in the caves of Afghanistan and on the streets of Iraqi cities, a very real threat has been building just south of the border. Over the past 15 to 20 years, Hezbollah has set up operations all over Mexico, Central America and South America. Hezbollah is reportedly making a lot of money in the drug trade and in trafficking illegal aliens. Sadly, our government is largely ignoring this.
#17 Each year, it costs the states billions of dollars to incarcerate illegal immigrant criminals that should have never been allowed into the country in the first place. It is estimated that illegal aliens make up approximately 30 percent of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually.
#18 The drug cartels and the gangs always seem to be a couple steps ahead of our agents along the border. Approximately 75 tunnels along the U.S. border with Mexico have been discovered by law enforcement authorities in the last four years alone.
How much do you think all of this crime, gang violence and drug cartel activity is costing our economy?
Why won’t the federal government do what the Constitution requires and secure the border?
Oh, but Barack Obama says that he has a plan.
He says that he is going to save the day.
The following is how Barack Obama describes his plan…
“We are not going to ship back 12 million people, we’re not going to do it as a practical matter. We would have to take all our law enforcement that we have available and we would have to use it and put people on buses, and rip families apart, and that’s not who we are, that’s not what America is about. So what I’ve proposed… is you say we’re going to bring these folks out of the shadows. We’re going to make them pay a fine, they are going to have to learn English, they are going to have to go to the back of the line…but they will have a pathway to citizenship over the course of 10 years.”
So how many illegal immigrants do you think are going to step forward to pay a fine?
One percent?
How many of them do you think are going to show up for English classes?
Who is going to make them do it?
Obama?
Are we going to have law enforcement officials running around trying to collect fines from illegal immigrants and trying to get them to attend their English lessons?
According to Obama, the millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that are in this country are going to be glad to willingly do the following….
1) Admit they broke the law
2) Pay back taxes and a fine
3) Learn English
4) Be willing to undergo background checks before starting the legalization process
Those four points are taken directly from Obama’s plan.
So what are illegal immigrants going to do when this plan is passed?
99 percent of them are going to laugh and they are just going to keep on doing what they have been doing.
Large numbers of illegal immigrants are already enjoying the “high life” in the dozens of “sanctuary cities” across the United States.
The following is how the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC defines sanctuary cities….
Generally, sanctuary policies instruct city employees not to notify the federal government of the presence of illegal aliens living in their communities. The policies also end the distinction between legal resident aliens and illegal aliens–so illegal aliens often benefit from taxpayer funded government services and programs too.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
Can I sign up for that plan?
After all, who wouldn’t want to earn all income tax-free and yet enjoy unlimited government services?
Today we are being told that we need to make life as comfortable as possible for the waves of illegal immigrants that are coming in. In fact, Barack Obama says that all of us need to make sure that our kids are learning how to speak Spanish….
“I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about, we need to have English only. They want to pass a law, we just, we want English only…Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English, I agree with this. But understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they’ll learn English, you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish.”
All of this is utter insanity.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that we have tightly secured the border between South Korea and North Korea for over 50 years and we could secure our own borders if we really wanted to.
But instead, we continue to leave our border with Mexico completely wide open. Thousands of criminals, gang members and drug pushers continue to come in completely unchecked every single day.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have to subject ourselves to some of the most humiliating “security measures” imaginable before we are even allowed to get on to an airplane.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?
 Perhaps you had heard that the unemployment rate in the United States has been going down and you were planning to start sending out resumes again. Well, unfortunately it is not “morning in America” again. Some really depressing jobs numbers were just released. The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits skyrocketed last week to the highest level that we have seen in 8 months. Also, according to a new poll more American workers say that their companies are getting rid of workers than say that their companies are hiring more workers. So feel free to start mailing out thousands of resumes once again – just don’t expect better results. Tens of millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans have been waiting for the “economic recovery”, but the sad truth is that this is the economic recovery. This is about the best that things are going to get before the next major wave of the economic collapse strikes.
Most economists were extremely surprised by how bad the new numbers were. The following is an excerpt from the press release from the Department of Labor….
In the week ending April 30, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 474,000, an increase of 43,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 431,000. The 4-week moving average was 431,250, an increase of 22,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 409,000.
As noted above, that was the highest number of initial unemployment claims that we have seen in eight months.
In addition, ADP has announced that only 179,000 private sector jobs were added to the economy during the month of April.
That number also was an unpleasant surprise to most economists.
But shouldn’t the economy be recovering by now?
Yes, it should be.
Unfortunately, there is even more bad news.
According to the latest Rasmussen Employment Index, 19 percent of U.S. workers say that their companies are hiring more workers right now and 25 percent of U.S. workers say that their companies are laying off workers right now.
That is not a good sign.
But even when jobs are available most of the time they are crappy jobs.
A growing percentage of jobs in America do not even pay a living wage. Low income jobs now make up 41% of all the jobs in the United States.
In a recent article on outsourcing, I noted that the U.S. economy is bleeding lots of good jobs and that they are being replaced by bad jobs….
Right now America is rapidly losing high paying jobs and they are being replaced by low paying jobs. According to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project, higher wage industries accounted for 40 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months but only 14 percent of the job growth. Lower wage industries accounted for just 23 percent of the job losses over the past 12 months and a whopping 49 percent of the job growth.
So do you want to mop floors at the local Burger King or stock shelves over at Best Buy?
A million Americans recently showed up to apply for a job at McDonald’s. If that is not a sign that the American people are losing faith in the economy then I don’t know what is.
So are you ready to go down and apply for a job at McDonald’s?
Well, if not you may find yourself waiting for a very, very long time for a “good job”.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average duration of unemployment in the United States is now an all-time record 39 weeks.
Today, we have millions upon millions of Americans that are sitting home because they can’t find work.
Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.
That is not good for the economy. Instead of being productive and producing wealth for the economy, all of those unemployed men are a drain on the system.
Today, 18 million more Americans are receiving food stamps than when the economic downturn first began back in 2007.
Considering the gigantic amounts of spending that the U.S. government has been doing since the beginning of the economic downturn and considering the massive amounts of new money that the Federal Reserve has been injecting into the financial system, the unemployment rate should be much, much lower than it is now.
Our leaders have gone “all in” on stimulating the economy in the short-term and yet it is still responding like a dead horse.
Now there are even some in the financial media that are saying that we are going to need “QE3″ in order to get the economy going.
Perhaps we will even need “QE4″, “QE5″ and “QE6″.
This is getting ridiculous.
Essentially the U.S. economy is like a patient that the doctors are hovering around and desperately trying to revive.
So are they going to be successful?
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Sadly, what we are experiencing right now is the economic recovery.
When the next wave of the economic collapse hits, things are going to get even worse.
 What is the best place to live in the United States? I get asked that question all the time. My answer can be summed up in two words: it depends. The truth is that the answer is going to be different for each person. All of us have different goals and different needs. If you have a very strong network of family and friends where you live right now, you might want to think twice before moving hundreds or thousands of miles away. If you have a great job where you live right now, you might want to hold on to it. You should not just assume that you are going to be able to pick up and move to another part of the country and be able to get a similar job right away. The United States is in the midst of a very serious economic decline right now, and wherever you live you are going to have to provide for your family. Just because you move somewhere new does not mean that you are going to leave your problems behind. In fact, you might find that they moved right along with you. With all that being said, the reality is that there are some places in the U.S. that are going to be much more desirable than others when the economy totally falls apart. For example, during a total economic collapse it will not be good to be living in a large city or in a densely populated area. Just think about what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. If the entire nation is going through something like that, you don’t want to have hundreds of thousands of close neighbors at that point. So when thinking about where you want to be when everything falls apart, population density should be a major factor. But there are other factors as well and no area of the United States is perfect.
If you live in or near a major city right now, that is okay. Most Americans do. Even if you have limited financial resources at the moment, you can start developing a plan that will get you where you eventually want to go. If you want to move to another part of the country you can start applying for jobs out there. You can also be working hard to develop a business that would enable you to move. Perhaps you have friends or family in more isolated areas that would allow you to stay with them during an economic collapse.
Those that possess more financial resources could start thinking about getting a second home in a location that is more rural.
The key is to come up with a plan and to be working towards accomplishing that plan.
If you don’t have a plan yet, hopefully the following information will give you something to think about. Not all areas of the United States are equal, and all of them do have problems.
The following are some thoughts about the best place to live in the United States….
The Northeast
A major problem with the Northeast is that it is just so darn crowded. Yes, there are some rural areas, but the overall population density of the region is so high that it would be really hard to go unnoticed for long in the event of a major economic collapse.
Another thing that is not great about the Northeast is that so much of the population lives near the coast. As we saw in Japan recently, living near a coastline is not necessarily a good thing. While it is likely safer to live along the east coast then the west coast, the truth is that there is an inherent level of insecurity when it comes to living in coastal areas. You never know when the next hurricane, oil spill or tsunami is going to strike.
Also, the Northeast is really quite cold. So staying warm and growing your own food would be more difficult than in some other areas of the country.
The Mid-Atlantic
The Mid-Atlantic is one of the most beautiful areas of the nation. Unfortunately, it suffers from many of the same problems that the Northeast does.
The Mid-Atlantic has a very high population density. For example, the area around Washington D.C. is pretty much all suburbs for 50 miles in all directions.
The weather is nicer than in the Northeast and there are some less dense areas once you get south of Washington D.C.
If you think that the Mid-Atlantic might be for you, you might want to check out North Carolina or South Carolina. The people tend to get friendlier the further south you go and there are definitely some areas that could potentially work.
Florida
Florida is generally not going to be a place that you want to be during an economic collapse. The housing market has absolutely collapsed down there and the crime rate is already very high. It is also very densely populated.
The weather is very nice down in Florida, but one big thing that you need to consider when it comes to Florida is the fact that it is very flat and most of Florida is just barely above sea level. In fact, quite a bit of Florida is actually below sea level.
In addition, hurricanes are always a major threat in Florida. It is a beautiful state, but there is a lot of risk to living down there.
The Southeast
The Southeast has really taken a pounding over the last few years. First it was Hurricane Katrina, and then it was the BP oil spill and then it was the tornadoes of 2011.
There is a lot of poverty in that area of the country. There is also a lot of crime.
There are a lot of great people who live down in the Southeast, but if you do not know your way around it can be a very difficult place to move to.
The Mid-South
One of my favorite places east of the Mississippi River are the mountains along the Tennessee/North Carolina border. If you must be in the eastern half of the United States, that is not a bad choice.
Where you do not want to be is anywhere near the New Madrid fault zone. The New Madrid fault zone covers portions of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. The biggest earthquakes in the history of the United States were caused by the New Madrid fault. Many are convinced that we are going to see an absolutely catastrophic earthquake along the New Madrid fault at some point.
So if you want to live in the Mid-South, it is highly recommended that you stay far away from the New Madrid fault zone.
The Upper Midwest
The Upper Midwest was once one of the great manufacturing regions of the world, but now much of it is known as the “rust belt”.
Formerly great manufacturing cities such as Detroit are now absolute hellholes. Tens of thousands of our factories and millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas.
There are some really great people (including some good friends of this column) that live up there, but the truth is that the region is really cold and unemployment is rampant.
The Upper Midwest is an area that people want to get out of. It is probably not a great place to move to.
However, if you do need a job, one place to look is a little bit west of there. Thanks to an abundance of natural resources, unemployment in North Dakota and South Dakota is very low. If you really need a job you might want to look into those two states.
The Southwest
In the Southwest there are a whole lot of freedom-loving Americans, the weather is very warm and there is a lot of space to get lost.
However, the Southwest is also very dry and in many areas there is not a lot of water. Drought and wildfires are quite common.
In addition, illegal immigration is rampant and is a constant security threat.
If you are familiar with that area of the country it is not a bad choice, but if you do not know what you are doing it could end up being disastrous for you.
The Great Plains
As long as you are far enough away from the New Madrid fault, the Great Plains is not a bad choice.
It is very, very flat out there, and it can be quite windy, but the good news is that you should be able to grow your own food.
In addition, the population density is generally very low in most areas.
One big negative, as we have seen recently, is tornadoes. The United States experiences more tornadoes that anywhere else in the world, and “tornado alley” generally gets the worst of it.
The West Coast
During an economic collapse, the West Coast is not a place that you will really want to be. Just take a look at the state of California already. It is an economic nightmare.
Millions of people have left California over the past couple of decades. The millions of people that have left have been replaced mostly with illegal aliens.
Oregon is better, although they have very high taxes and they are experiencing huge economic problems right now as well.
The best area along the West Coast is the Seattle area, but you won’t want to be anywhere near a major population center when things totally fall apart.
Also, the West Coast lies along the “Ring of Fire“. Considering what just happened in Japan and what has been happening in other areas along the Ring of Fire lately, the West Coast is not an area that a lot of people are recommending.
The Northwest
Large numbers of freedom-loving Americans have been moving to the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. You can also throw eastern Washington and eastern Oregon into this category as well.
It gets cold up in the Northwest, but not as cold as the Upper Midwest. There are lots of rivers, streams and lakes and in certain areas there is plenty of rain.
The population density is very low in most areas and there is an abundance of wildlife. Housing prices are reasonable and in many areas you can grow your own food.
The Northwest is one of the favorite areas of the United States for preppers. It is far from perfect, but it does have a lot of advantages.
Alaska And Hawaii
Neither Alaska or Hawaii is recommended. Alaska lies along the “Ring of Fire” and it is very, very cold. Also, almost everything has to be either shipped or flown into Alaska. In the event of a real economic collapse, supplies to Alaska could be cut off and shortages could develop very quickly.
Hawaii has a huge population and it does not have a lot of room. Like Alaska, most supplies have to be either shipped in or flown in. And one really bad tsunami could pretty much wipe Hawaii out.
But once again, there is no “right answer”. There are areas of just about every U.S. state that could potentially work well during a major economic collapse.
When assessing where “the best place to live in the United States” is, it is important to examine your own personal factors. What will work for me and for my family will not necessarily work for you and your family.
So what do all of you think about this list? Which area of the country do you think is best for those Americans who are seeking to prepare themselves for the coming economic collapse?
 Are the American people losing faith in the U.S. economy? The statistics that you are about to read might surprise you. Not everyone believes that the U.S. economy is dying (there are still millions out there that will swallow anything that the mainstream media tells them), but the reality is that there is a growing chunk of the population that has completely lost faith in our leaders and in our economic system. A brand new Gallup poll has found that the number of Americans that believe that we are in a “depression” is actually larger than the number of Americans that believe that the economy is “growing”. That is absolutely shocking because according to official government figures, the U.S. economy is growing right now and virtually nobody in the mainstream media or the government has used the term “depression” to describe the economic downturn that we went through recently. In fact, according to Gallup a total of 55% of the American people believe that we are either in a recession or a depression right now. This is clear evidence that the American people are losing faith in U.S. government economic statistics and instead they are basing their opinions on what they see in their own communities. Despite the pablum about an “economic recovery” constantly being spewed by Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama, faith in our economic system continues to decline. The truth is that the American people are not stupid. They can see what is happening to the economy.
Back when I was a teenager, one day I walked over to the local McDonald’s and filled out an application and was immediately hired.
But that is not how it works today.
Recently, McDonald’s made headlines when they held a National Hiring Day. Some commentators pointed to that event as evidence that the economy was recovering.
Well, you know what? McDonald’s ended up receiving approximately one million applications.
So how many of those people did McDonald’s hire?
They hired about 62,000 people.
That means that somewhere around 938,000 eager job applicants were turned away.
Just think about that.
Only about 6.2 percent of those that applied for a job at McDonald’s were accepted.
As Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider recently pointed out, that means that Harvard now has a higher acceptance rate than McDonald’s does.
Harvard accepts about 7% of those that apply to go to school there.
Who ever thought we would see the day when a higher percentage of applicants get accepted into Harvard than get hired at McDonald’s?
Sadly, the number of jobs continues to shrink. The competition for good jobs has become absolutely crazy.
Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.
So why is this happening? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but as I have written about previously, the fact that millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas is a huge factor.
Without good jobs, an increasing number of Americans are being forced to turn to government assistance in order to survive.
Today, more than 44 million Americans are on food stamps. In addition, government transfer payments now make up 18 percent of all personal income in the United States.
That is frightening.
Things have gotten so bad that now even Wal-Mart is warning that their customers are running out of money.
A large percentage of Wal-Mart customers are just surviving month to month and Wal-Mart has been noticing a huge drop off in sales towards the end of the month when their customers run out of cash. The following is what the CEO of Wal-Mart had to say about this phenomenon recently….
“Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year.”
People are starting to get desperate. When economic times get tough, crime tends to increase. Sadly, as a report in USA Today recently noted, thefts of gasoline are increasing all over the nation.
We never had this kind of a problem back when a gallon of gas only was about a dollar a gallon.
Do you remember those days?
They weren’t that long ago.
Now it takes some people over a hundred dollars to fill up their gas tanks.
Our leaders keep promising that they know what is happening and that they are going to fix things, but most Americans are not buying it. Many Americans are completely losing faith in the system altogether.
Our economic decline has been one of the things that has fueled the growth of the prepper movement. Millions of Americans have decided that they want to start becoming independent of the system. One recent article described what some residents of Colorado are doing to prepare, but the truth is that this phenomenon is happening all over the nation….
A Black Forest resident has erected a geodesic dome on her 5-acre spread to grow vegetables, keeps horses for emergency transportation, in case she can’t get gasoline for her car, and plans to acquire chickens and goats as food sources.
A husband and wife who have a cabin on 100 acres of secluded land in Park County have weaned their property from the electric grid, acquired a three-year food supply and taken other measures to become self-sufficient.
Of course the mainstream media loves to portray preppers as “crazies”, but as the U.S. economy continues to die it would be a bit crazy not to prepare.
No job is completely safe today. Millions of Americans that assumed that their “good jobs” would always be there have had their lives shattered over the past couple of years.
There is nothing wrong with trying to become more self-sufficient.
Everyone should be thinking about either starting up a business or developing alternative sources of income. Yes, it can be exhausting to work on a side business during evening and weekends, but the time for loafing is over. Those that are going to make it through the times ahead are those that are going to be willing to work really hard.
People need to start thinking about becoming less dependent on “the system” however they can. One way to insulate yourself against rising food prices is to learn how to grow your own food.
Even if you only have a very small amount of room you can still grow your own food. For example, there is one family that is actually producing 6000 pounds of produce on just 1/10th of an acre right in the middle of Pasadena, California.
Just because we have lost some of the basic skills that previous generations possessed doesn’t mean that we can’t get them back. Back during World War II, “victory gardens” enabled Americans to grow 40 percent of all the vegetables that they needed. Those gardens greatly contributed to the war effort and helped Americans get through some very difficult times.
There are a lot of preppers out there that are totally out of debt, that own their own land, that are entirely off the electrical grid and that grow most of their own food. Many Americans would look at such people as “crazies” but those preppers will be in a much better position than most people when the economy totally collapses.
Don’t wait until it is too late to prepare. Millions of Americans are completely losing faith in our economic system. People are smart. They can see that we are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. They can see that the guts of our economic infrastructure are being ripped out and shredded. They can see that the number of people living in poverty continues to increase year after year. They can see the the number of good jobs continues to decrease year after year.
When you see a horrible storm coming the rational thing to do is to prepare. Just think about all of those tornadoes that ravaged the southeast U.S. the other day. Most of the people directly in the path of those tornadoes did whatever they could to survive when they realized the twisters were about to hit.
Well, a horrific economic storm is coming. Every American will be affected by this economic storm at least to some extent. We all need to prepare while we still can.
 The U.S. economy is dying and we are heading for the next Great Depression. The talking heads in the mainstream media love to spin the economic numbers around and around and they love to make it sound like the economy is improving, but the truth is that it doesn’t take a genius to see what is happening to the U.S. economic system. All over the nation many of our greatest cities are being slowly but surely transformed into post-apocalyptic wastelands. All over the mid-Atlantic, all along the Gulf coast, all throughout the “rust belt” and all over the entire state of California cities that once had incredibly vibrant economies are being turned into rotting, post-industrial hellholes. In many U.S. cities, the “real” rate of unemployment is over 30 percent. There are some communities that will start depressing you almost the moment that you drive into them. It is almost as if all of the hope has been sucked right out of those communities. If you live in one of those American hellholes you know what I am talking about. Sadly, it is not just a few cities that are becoming hellholes. This is happening in the east, in the west, in the north and in the south. America is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes.
If you still live in an area of the United States that is prosperous, do not mock the cities that you are about to read about. The cold, hard reality of the matter is that economic decline and economic despair are spreading rapidly and they will come to your area soon enough. Right now we are still talking about “American hellholes”, but if the long-term economic trends that are destroying this nation are not turned around eventually we will just be talking about one gigantic “American hellhole”. In the end, no area of the country will completely escape the economic hell that is coming.
Let’s take a closer look at what is currently happening in some of the worst areas of the country….
Detroit, Michigan
In the city of Detroit today, there are over 33,000 abandoned houses, 70 schools are being permanently closed down, the mayor wants to bulldoze one-fourth of the city and you can literally buy a house for one dollar in the worst areas.
During the boom days of the 1950s, Detroit was a teeming metropolis of approximately 2 million people, but today the current population is less than half that. The city of Detroit, once a shining example of middle class America, is now a rotting cesspool of economic decline and it actually saw its population decline by 25 percent during the decade that recently ended. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit lost a resident every 22 minutes between the years of 2000 and 2010.
So why are people leaving Detroit so rapidly?
There simply are no jobs.
At the height of the economic downturn, the mayor of Detroit admitted that while the “official” unemployment rate in Detroit was about 27 percent, the “real” unemployment rate in his city was actually somewhere around 50 percent.
Since there are not enough jobs, that also means that not enough tax money is coming in. Detroit is essentially insolvent at this point.
Detroit officials are trying to implement some austerity measures in a desperate attempt to get city finances under control.
For example, the state of Michigan recently granted approval to a plan that would shut down nearly half of the public schools in Detroit. Under the plan, 70 schools will be closed and 72 will continue operating.
It has been estimated that the remaining public schools will have class sizes of up to 60 students.
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing also wants to cut off 20 percent of the entire city from police and trash services in order to save money.
Essentially that would mean abandoning 20 percent of the city of Detroit to the gangs and to the homeless.
The mayor of Detroit has also discussed a plan in which authorities would bulldoze one-fourth of the city in order to save money on services.
So with all of this going on, is Detroit a pleasant place to live at this point?
No way.
Today, Detroit is considered to be the third most violent city in the United States.
In fact, crime has gotten so bad and the citizens are so frustrated by the lack of police assistance that they have resorted to forming their own organizations to fight back. One group, known as “Detroit 300″, was formed after a 90-year-old woman on Detroit’s northwest side was brutally raped in August.
If you want to see what the future of America looks like, just take a few hours and go driving through Detroit some time. But please only do this during the day. Do not do this at night. Detroit is not a safe place anymore, and you cannot count on the police to help you in a timely manner.
Detroit was once one of the greatest cities in the world.
But today it is an absolute hellhole.
Camden, New Jersey
So is there any place in America that is worse than Detroit?
Well, many would nominate Camden, New Jersey.
Many years ago, Camden was actually thriving and prosperous. But today the city of Camden is known as “the second most dangerous city in America”.
In a recent article entitled “City of Ruins“, Chris Hedges did an amazing job of documenting the horrific decline of Camden. Hedges estimates that the real rate of unemployment in Camden is somewhere around 30 to 40 percent, and he makes it sound like nobody in their right mind would want to live there now….
Camden is where those discarded as human refuse are dumped, along with the physical refuse of postindustrial America. A sprawling sewage treatment plant on forty acres of riverfront land processes 58 million gallons of wastewater a day for Camden County. The stench of sewage lingers in the streets. There is a huge trash-burning plant that releases noxious clouds, a prison, a massive cement plant and mountains of scrap metal feeding into a giant shredder. The city is scarred with several thousand decaying abandoned row houses; the skeletal remains of windowless brick factories and gutted gas stations; overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires; neglected, weed-filled cemeteries; and boarded-up store fronts.
Gangs have stepped into the gaping void left by industry. In Camden today, drugs and prostitution are two of the only viable businesses left – especially for those who cannot find employment anywhere else. The following is how Hedges describes the current state of affairs….
There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city’s few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch.
But before we all start judging Camden for being such a horrible place to live, it is important to realize that this is happening in communities from coast to coast. All over the United States industries are leaving and deep social decay is setting in.
Even the criminals in Camden are struggling. Things have gotten so bad in Camden, New Jersey that not even the drug dealers are spending their money anymore.
So where are the police?
Unfortunately, there is very little money for police. Authorities in Camden recently decided to lay off half of the city police force.
So now the gangs and the drug dealers have more room to operate.
Sadly, this is not just happening in Camden. It is happening all over New Jersey.
Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Police union recently surveyed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.
So why doesn’t the state government step in and help out?
Well, the state of New Jersey is in such bad shape that they still are facing a $10 billion budget deficit for this year even after cutting a billion dollars from the education budget and laying off thousands of teachers.
New Jersey also has $46 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $65 billion in unfunded health care liabilities. Nobody is quite sure how New Jersey is even going to come close to meeting those obligations.
Meanwhile, cities like Camden are rotting a little bit more every single day.
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans had a struggling economy even before Hurricane Katrina struck back in 2005. But that event changed everything. It is now almost 6 years later and virtually the entire region is still a disaster zone.
New Orleans permanently lost 29% of its population after Hurricane Katrina. There are many areas of New Orleans that still look as if they have just been bombed.
21.5 percent of all houses in New Orleans, Louisiana are currently standing vacant. Many of those homes will never be inhabited again.
What made things even worse for New Orleans (and for residents all along the Gulf coast) was the horrific BP oil spill last year. The mainstream news does not talk about the oil spill much anymore, but those living in the area have to deal with the effects every single day.
Some of the industries in the Gulf region were really starting to recover from Hurricane Katrina but the BP oil spill put a stop to that.
Before the oil spill, Louisiana produced more fish and seafood than anywhere in the United States except for Alaska. But now the seafood industry has been absolutely devastated. It has been estimated that the cost of the BP oil spill to the fishing industry in Louisiana alone could top 3 billion dollars.
Some local shrimpers in the region are projecting that it will be about seven years before they can set to sea again.
New Orleans keeps trying to bounce back from all of these disasters, but times are tough down there.
Today, New Orleans is the 13th most violent city in America. That is actually an improvement. Before Katrina New Orleans had even more violent crime.
The truth is that other areas along the Gulf coast are doing a lot worse than New Orleans is doing. A ton of big corporate money has flowed into New Orleans. Officials are trying to clean up the city and make it a huge tourist destination once again.
But in the surrounding areas things are not looking so bright. There are areas along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the panhandle of Florida that are some of the most depressing places in the nation.
It is almost as if there are hundreds of thousands of people that time forgot. In some rural areas along the Gulf coast the poverty is absolutely mind blowing. There are very few jobs and there is very little hope. Meanwhile, large numbers of people in the region continue to get sick from the toxic dispersants used to clean up the oil spill.
Let us hope that we don’t see another major disaster in the Gulf of Mexico any time soon. As it is, it is going to take decades for that region to fully recover. There are a lot of really good people that live down there, and they deserve our prayers.
Vallejo, California (And Virtually The Rest Of The State Of California)
Almost the entire state of California is an economic disaster zone. Austerity measures are being implemented in city after city as tax revenues have nosedived.
The following is an excerpt from a recent New York Times article that describes the brutal austerity that has been implemented in Vallejo, California….
Vallejo is still in bankruptcy. The police force has shrunk from 153 officers to 92. Calls for any but the most serious crimes go unanswered. Residents who complain about prostitutes or vandals are told to fill out a form. Three of the city’s firehouses were closed. Last summer, a fire ravaged a house in one of the city’s better neighborhoods; one of the firetrucks came from another town, 15 miles away. Is this America’s future?
Sadly, that is what the future of America is going to look like. Public services are being slashed all over the nation due to budget crunches.
Unless there is a major jobs recovery, the situation in California is going to continue to degenerate. The truth is that the state of California needs millions and millions of new jobs just to get back to “normal”. For example, near the end of last year it was reported that 24.3 percent of the residents of El Centro, California were unemployed. Not only that, as of the end of last year the number of people unemployed in the state of California was approximately equivalent to the entire populations of Nevada, New Hampshire and Vermont combined.
Businesses are closing in California at an astounding pace. At one point last year it was reported that in the area around Sacramento, California there was one closed business for every six that were still open.
As a result of all of this, home prices in many areas of California have completely fallen off a cliff. For example, the average home in Merced, California has declined in value by 63 percent over the past four years.
California also had more foreclosure filings that any other U.S. state in 2010. The 546,669 total foreclosure filings during the year means that over 4 percent of all the housing units in the state of California received a foreclosure filing at some point during 2010.
Sadly, things don’t look like they are going to turn around in California any time soon. Forbes recently compiled a list entitled “Cities Where The Economy May Get Worse“.
Six of the top seven spots were held by cities in California.
California is becoming a very frightening place. When you combine high unemployment with unchecked illegal immigration what you get is rampant poverty.
20 percent of the residents of Los Angeles County are now receiving public aid of one form or another.
In particular, the number of children that are considered to be in need of public assistance is truly scary.
Incredibly, 60 percent of all the students attending California public schools now qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.
Poverty and illegal immigration have also caused a tremendous health care crisis in the state. The hordes of illegal aliens taking advantage of “free” medical care at hospital emergency rooms have caused dozens of hospitals across the state of California to completely shut down. As a result, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.
The bozos in Sacramento keep passing hundreds of new laws in an attempt to “fix” the state, but the truth is that for the poorest residents of the state all of those new laws don’t make a shred of difference.
The following is how Victor Davis Hansen describes what he saw during his recent tour of the “forgotten areas of central California”….
Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World . There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business – rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections – but apparently none of that applies out here.
Hansen also says that he observed that people in these areas are doing whatever they can to get by….
At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.
In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons).
Are you frightened yet?
You know what they say – “as goes California, so goes the nation”.
What is happening in California now is eventually going to come to your area.
Right now California is also having a huge problem with gangs. Gang violence in America is getting totally out of control. According to authorities, there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the country, and those gangs are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year.
But instead of ramping up to fight crime and fight illegal immigration, police forces all over California are being cut back.
For example, because of extreme budget cuts and police layoffs, Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that there are a number of crimes that his department simply will no longer respond to due to a lack of resources. The following is a partial list of the crimes that police officers in Oakland will no longer be responding to….
- burglary
- theft
- embezzlement
- grand theft
- grand theft: dog
- identity theft
- false information to peace officer
- required to register as sex or arson offender
- dump waste or offensive matter
- loud music
- possess forged notes
- pass fictitious check
- obtain money by false voucher
- fraudulent use of access cards
- stolen license plate
- embezzlement by an employee
- extortion
- attempted extortion
- false personification of other
- injure telephone/power line
- interfere with power line
- unauthorized cable tv connection
- vandalism
Not that Oakland wasn’t already a mess before all this, but now how long do you think it will be before total chaos and anarchy reigns on the streets of Oakland?
Today, Oakland is considered the 5th most violent city in the United States.
Will it soon become the most violent?
But Oakland is not the only major California city that is facing these kinds of issues.
Things have gotten so bad in Stockton, California that the police union put up a billboard with the following message: “Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California. Stop laying off cops.”
Already the police force in Stockton has been stripped down to almost nothing.
A while back, the Stockton Police Department dropped this bombshell….
“We absolutely do not have any narcotics officers, narcotics sergeants working any kind of investigative narcotics type cases at this point in time.”
Do you think drug dealers will be flocking to Stockton after they hear that?
California was once the envy of the world.
Now it is becoming one gigantic hellhole.
During one recent 23 year period, the state of California built 23 prisons but just one university.
So is there any hope for California?
No, unfortunately there is not.
In another article, I wrote about some of the reasons why millions of people have been leaving California for good….
Meanwhile, the standard of living in California is going right into the toilet. Housing values are plummeting. Unemployment has risen above 20 percent in many areas of the state. Crime and gang activity is on the rise even as police budgets are being hacked to the bone. The health care system is an absolute disaster. At this point California has the fewest emergency rooms per million people out of all 50 states. While all of this has been going on, the state legislature in Sacramento has been very busy passing hundreds of new laws that are mostly about promoting one radical agenda or another. The state government has become so radically anti-business that it is a wonder that any businesses have remained in the state. It seems like the moving vans never stop as an endless parade of businesses and families leave California as quickly as they can.
But this is not just a “California thing”. The truth is that what is happening in California, in Detroit, in Camden and in hundreds of other communities is also going to happen where you live.
The U.S. economy is slowly dying. Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in U.S. history.
People are getting desperate. There are ten percent fewer middle class jobs than there were a decade ago and the competition for good jobs has become insane. More than 44 million Americans are now on food stamps and that number grows every single month. Millions more American families fall into poverty every single year.
It is time to face the truth about what is happening to America. Our economy is not growing and becoming stronger. Rather, the cold, hard reality of the matter is that our economy is very sick and it is dying. The seemingly boundless prosperity that we have enjoyed for decade after decade is coming to an end. Our communities are being transformed into absolute hellholes.
Those that are telling you that the U.S. economy will soon be better than ever are lying to you. The U.S. economy is going to go down and it is going to go down hard.
You better get ready.
 The United States is in the middle of a devastating long-term economic decline and it is getting really hard to deny it. Over the past year I have included literally thousands of depressing statistics in my articles about the U.S. economy. I have done this in order to make an overwhelming case that the U.S. economy is in deep decline and is dying a little bit more every single day. Until we understand exactly how bad our problems are we will never be willing to accept the solutions. The truth is that our leaders have absolutely wrecked the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen. Most Americans just assume that we will always experience overwhelming prosperity, but that is not anywhere close to the truth. We are not guaranteed anything. Our manufacturing base has been gutted, the number of jobs is declining, more Americans are dependent on government handouts than ever before, our dollar is dying and as a nation we are absolutely drowning in debt. The economists that are trumpeting an “economic recovery” and that are declaring that the U.S. economy will soon be “better than ever” are delusional. We really are steamrolling toward a complete and total economic collapse and our leaders are doing nothing to stop it.
The following are 24 more signs of economic decline in America. Hopefully you will not get too depressed as you read them….
#1 On Monday, Standard & Poor’s altered its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and warned the U.S. that it could soon lose its AAA rating. This is yet another sign that the rest of the world is losing faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. Treasuries.
#2 China has announced that they are going to be reducing their holdings of U.S. dollars. In fact, there are persistent rumors that this has already been happening.
#3 Hedge fund manager Dennis Gartman says that “panic dollar selling is setting in” and that the U.S. dollar could be in for a huge decline.
#4 The biggest bond fund in the world, PIMCO, is now shorting U.S. government bonds.
#5 This cruel economy is causing “ghost towns” to appear all across the United States. There are quite a few counties across the nation that now have home vacancy rates of over 50%.
#6 There are now about 7.25 million less jobs in America than when the recession began back in 2007.
#7 The average American family is having a really tough time right now. Only 45.4% of Americans had a job during 2010. The last time the employment level was that low was back in 1983.
#8 Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year. That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.
#9 According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.
#10 Gas prices reached five dollars per gallon at a gas station in Washington, DC on April 19th, 2011. Could we see $6 gas soon?
#11 Over the past 12 months the average price of gasoline in the United States has gone up by about 30%.
#12 Due to rising fuel prices, American Airlines lost a staggering $436 million during the first quarter of 2011.
#13 U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.
#14 Approximately one out of every four dollars that the U.S. government borrows goes to pay the interest on the national debt.
#15 Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago.
#16 Total credit card debt in the United States is now more than 8 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.
#17 Average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income. In China, average household debt is only 17% of average household income.
#18 The average American now spends approximately 23 percent of his or her income on food and gas.
#19 In a recent survey conducted by Deloitte Consulting, 74 percent of Americans said that they planned to slow down their spending in coming months due to rising prices.
#20 59 percent of all Americans now receive money from the federal government in one form or another.
#21 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average length of unemployment in the U.S. is now an all-time record 39 weeks.
#22 As the economy continues to collapse, frustration among young people will continue to grow and we will see more seemingly “random acts of violence”. One shocking example of this happened in the Atlanta area recently. The following is how a local Atlanta newspaper described the attack….
Roughly two dozen teens, chanting the name of a well-known Atlanta gang, brought mob rule to MARTA early Sunday morning, overwhelming nervous passengers and assaulting two Delta flight attendants.
#23 Some Americans have become so desperate for cash that they are literally popping the gold teeth right out of their mouths and selling them to pawn shops.
#24 As the economy has declined, the American people have been gobbling up larger and larger amounts of antidepressants and other prescription drugs. In fact, the American people spent 60 billion dollars more on prescription drugs in 2010 than they did in 2005.
 He sure has come a long way since “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. During a recent television segment for CBS, Ben Stein declared that “the tea leaves are ominous” and he warned that an economic collapse may be coming. In particular, Ben Stein is deeply concerned about inflation. During his recent appearance on CBS, Stein proclaimed that the Federal Reserve is “just shoving money out the door as fast as it can” and that this could have horrific consequences for the U.S. financial system. Sadly, Ben Stein is exactly right on this point. The Federal Reserve has already injected enough money into the financial system to create an inflationary disaster. Fortunately most of this liquidity is still being held by the banks (this will be further explored below), but once all of that money starts getting released into the financial system it is going to unleash economic chaos.
In the video that you are about to watch, Ben Stein states that “when serious inflation hits, it hits everyone”.
And that is absolutely true. Inflation is a hidden tax on ever single dollar that each one of us holds. Nobody can cheat that hidden tax and nobody can escape from it.
You may have noticed that the price of gas is going up.
In fact, just the other day UPI reported that the price of gas at one station in the Washington D.C. area was up to 5 dollars a gallon.
Can it get much worse?
Well, actually yes it can.
Richard Hastings, a strategist at Global Hunter Securities, recently told CNBC that he believes that we could potentially see $6 gas at some point this summer.
Do you think that a lot of American families will rethink their summer vacations if that happens?
You betcha.
Perhaps Americans will just fly instead.
Well, that is rapidly becoming more expensive as well. Just check out what one recent CNN article had to say about rising airfares….
Late Tuesday, Southwest Airlines raised all of its round-trip fares by $10. Delta (DAL, Fortune 500) initiated this latest round of price increases on Monday, and as of midday Wednesday American Airlines (AMR, Fortune 500), JetBlue (JBLU) and United Airlines (UAL) had matched it.
As Ben Stein also notes in the video below, food prices are soaring as well. Rampant money printing by the Federal Reserve and serious crop problems all over the globe have created a “perfect storm” for agricultural commodities. In the video, Stein sounds downright apocalyptic as he describes crop failures around the world….
But now, we are getting serious crop shortfalls in China – an enormously important agricultural producer and consumer. U.S. crop forecasts are also disappointing. There are huge problems in Australia, South America, and Russia. Corn, wheat, rice and other foodstuff prices are just going wild.
And you know what?
Ben Stein is right.
In a recent article about the global food crisis, I detailed some of the agricultural commodity price increases that we have seen….
*According to the World Bank, the global price of food has risen 36% over the past 12 months.
*The commodity price of wheat has approximately doubled since last summer.
*The commodity price of corn has also about doubled since last summer.
*The commodity price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June.
*The commodity price of orange juice has doubled since 2009.
But it isn’t just food and gas that are going up. We are seeing inflation everywhere. The value of virtually all “hard assets” is going up.
Investors are running to precious metals such as gold and silver in a desperate attempt to preserve their wealth. Gold and silver have been absolutely skyrocketing. The price of gold set another brand new all-time record high this week. The price of silver hit a 31-year high today.
So why is this happening?
One of the biggest reasons for all of this is that the Federal Reserve has been flooding the system with new money. In the video below, Ben Stein points to quantitative easing as the primary reason why we are seeing so much inflation….
But most important of all, the Fed is just shoving money out the door as fast as it can, creating piles of cash in banks.
The Federal Reserve had hoped that economic growth would be sparked by all of this new cash, but that is only happening to a minimal degree.
Instead, what Ben Stein believes all of this new money is going to bring about is a situation known as “stagflation”.
Do you remember the 1970s and the “misery index”?
Well, we seem to be headed for a repeat of those days.
In a previous article, I defined stagflation….
Stagflation exists when inflation and unemployment are both at high levels at the same time.
Up to this point, we have had high unemployment but relatively low levels of inflation.
But now we are going to get to enjoy high unemployment and high inflation at the same time.
Oh goody!
Video of Ben Stein’s recent appearance on CBS is posted below. You can read a transcript of his remarks here. It is amazing that a mainstream news outlet would allow this much truth to get out….
Look, the reality is that you cannot pump this much money into the financial system without there eventually being very serious consequences.
For decades the Federal Reserve has been systematically debasing the U.S. dollar, but what the Fed has been doing to the money supply over the past couple of years is absolutely unprecedented. Just check out the chart below….
So why hasn’t all of this new cash caused chaos in the economy already?
Well, because most of it is still trapped in the financial system. Banks have been reluctant to loan it out. Instead, they seem content to keep most of it on reserve at the Fed.
But if all of this new money starts leaking out into the economy it is going to drive prices up. When you have lots more money chasing roughly the same number of goods and services it is inevitable that inflation will result.
Robert Wenzel of EconomicPolicyJournal.com believes that more quantitative easing is not even necessary to turn the U.S. economy into a hyperinflationary nightmare. In fact, Wenzel says that there are enough excess reserves at the Fed right now to turn us into another Zimbabwe….
With over $1.4 TRILLION in excess reserves, Bernanke never has to resort to QE style monetary operations ever again, to print money. If those excess reserves leak into the system, Bernanke has enough sitting there to make Zimbabwe look like a model of prudent money management. As per usual, Bernanke has most of the media and Fed watchers looking at the wrong card.
Forget about QE3, keep your eye on excess reserves. Excess reserves are funds that are not in the system bidding up prices, but when they enter the system by banks using them to make loans, have the potential to result in a multiple of their size, when they impact the money supply. Because of this potential for multiple size impact, excess reserve entering the economy are considered high-powered money.
We would have never even been in this position if we had never allowed the Federal Reserve to be created and had never gotten 14 trillion dollars in debt. But now America has a debt problem that can never be solved under the current system. We are locked into a debt spiral from which there is no escape.
Last year, the U.S. government spent more on interest on the national debt than on the following departments combined….
*The Department of Health and Human Services
*The Department of Energy
*The Department of Veterans Affairs
*The Department of Justice
*The Department of Homeland Security
*The Department of Agriculture
*The Treasury Department
*The Department of Labor
Ouch!
But right now the U.S. is still able to borrow tons of money at super low interest rates.
So what happens if interest rates go up?
It could potentially be catastrophic.
That is why the decision by S&P to downgrade its outlook on U.S. government debt was such a big thing the other day. The U.S. still has a “AAA” rating, but S&P is warning that the AAA rating is in danger.
So what would it mean if the U.S. lost the AAA rating that it currently holds?
The Washington Post recently described it this way….
A credit rating downgrade for the United States would spell even more financial trouble for the U.S. government, hampering its ability to borrow money as investors demand higher yields to make up for the increased risk. That would cause its national debt to balloon further and increase the need to hike taxes or make even more painful cuts in spending.
But the U.S. government continues to borrow money like there is no tomorrow and Ben Bernanke and his friends at the Fed continue to recklessly print money.
As bad as things may seem for many of you right now, the truth is that what we are experiencing at the moment is a “false bubble of prosperity”. Things are eventually going to get much, much worse.
Enjoy this time of economic peace and stability while you still can. Our leaders have absolutely destroyed our economic future and we are going to want to have some good memories to hold on to while we are living through economic hell in the years ahead.
 Now that nearly a month has gone by since the horrific tsunami in Japan on March 11th, it is starting to become clear just how much economic damage has been done. The truth is that the Japanese economy is in much bigger trouble than most people think. This is almost certainly going to be the most expensive disaster in Japanese history. The tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th swept up to 6 miles inland, destroying virtually everything in the way. Thousands upon thousands of Japanese were killed and entire cities were wiped off the map. Yes, Japan is a resilient nation, but exactly how does a nation that is already drowning in debt replace dozens of cities and towns that are suddenly gone? The truth is that thousands of square miles have been more completely destroyed than if they had been bombed by a foreign military force. The loss of homes, cars, businesses and personal wealth is almost unimaginable. It is going to take many years to rebuild the roads, bridges, rail systems, ports, power lines and water systems that were lost. Nobody is quite sure when the rolling blackouts are going to end, and nobody is quite sure when all of the damaged manufacturing facilities are going to be fully brought back online.
On top of everything else, the nuclear crisis at Fukushima never seems to end. In fact, it seems to get worse with each passing day.
According to the Los Angeles Times, it has now been announced that seawater off the coast of Japan near the Fukushima facility was recently found to contain 7.5 million times the legal limit of radioactive iodine….
The operator of Japan’s stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.
Do you think anyone is going to want any Japanese seafood after this?
In fact, at this point one must really question the long-term prospects for the seafood industry in that entire region of Asia. There are going to be tens of millions of people (myself included) that will no longer want anything to do with any seafood that comes from that part of the world.
Sadly, some nuclear experts now claim that it could take years to bring the reactors at Fukushima fully back under control.
At the end of this crisis, how large of an area around Fukushima will be uninhabitable?
A 20 km radius?
A 30 km radius?
A 40 km radius?
More?
Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but it never was a large nation to begin with. Now that the tsunami and the nuclear crisis at Fukushima have made the amount of usable land significantly smaller, what is that going to mean for the future of the Japanese economy?
That is a very good question.
The truth is that there are already signs that the Japanese economy is regressing into another recession.
According to The Telegraph, one major manufacturing index in Japan has already shown a very serious decline….
The purchasing mangers’ index (PMI) gave an early indication of the extent of the damage wreaked on the economy as it dropped 6.5 points to a reading of 46.4, the largest slide since the survey began in late-2001.
In particular, the auto industry is really being affected by this crisis. Vehicle supply chains all over the globe are now in a state of chaos.
Approximately 3,000 individual parts go into every single new vehicle. If even one of those parts is missing, a new car or truck cannot be built.
So just how big of a problem are we looking at?
Well, it was originally projected that 72 million vehicles would be built around the globe in 2011.
As a result of the crisis in Japan, approximately 5 million of those vehicles will not be built.
That is very serious.
In fact, Goldman Sachs is projecting that this crisis is currently costing automakers in Japan $200 million every single day.
Ouch!
A recent article on CNBC detailed some of the problems that Japanese automakers are facing right now….
In the weeks ahead, car buyers will have difficulty finding the model they want in certain colors, thousands of auto plant workers will likely be told to stay home, and companies such as Toyota, Honda and others will lose billions of dollars in revenue. More than two weeks since the natural disaster, inventories of crucial car supplies — from computer chips to paint pigments — are dwindling fast as Japanese factories that make them struggle to restart.
Unfortunately, the worst for the auto industry is yet to come. AutoNation is warning that “production disruptions will significantly impact product availability from Japanese auto manufacturers in the second and third quarters of 2011.”
Because of supply chain disruptions, a number of North American manufacturing facilities look like they will be shutting down at least for a while.
For example, Toyota has announced that it will be shutting down all of its North American factories for a certain period of time because of shortages of parts from Japan.
But Toyota is far from alone as a recent report in The Globe and Mail made quite clear….
Honda Motor Co. Ltd. has already slashed output by half at its North American plants, while Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. will shut all its U.S. and Mexican plants for at least one week in April. Ford Motor Co., too, has halted production at a truck plant in Kentucky this week.
So why don’t North American facilities just switch to other suppliers?
Unfortunately, as CNN recently noted, it is just not that simple….
Japanese companies also specialized in making the array of highly specialized computer chips that control everything from the engine to the brakes in modern cars. Computer chip production is a complex process that can take weeks and involves hundreds of individual steps, Morgan Stanley analyst Noriaki Hirakata said.
Not only that, but if an automaker is forced to find a new source for an electronic chip, the process of “certifying” a new computer chip supplier — that is, determining that a new company can meet all the requirements for cost, quality and quantity — can take as long as a year, Hirakata said.
The truth is that this is a complete and total economic disaster.
The Japanese economy is not going to be the same for many years to come. In fact, many are now warning that this could be one of the triggers that could lead to another major global financial crisis.
One of the big fears is that Japan will need to sell off a large amount of U.S. Treasuries to fund the rebuilding of that nation.
If that were to happen, it could result in a “liquidity crisis” similar to what we saw in 2008. Already the rest of the world is really starting to lose confidence in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. Treasuries, and if Japan starts massively dumping U.S. government debt things could get out of control fairly quickly.
In any event, it is undeniable that the Japanese economy has been absolutely devastated by this crisis. In fact, when you combine the tsunami and the nuclear crisis, this could be the biggest economic disaster that any major industrial power has faced since World War 2.
So will the crisis in Japan push the rest of the globe into another major recession?
Only time will tell.
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Barack Obama Is Wrong: 18 Facts Which Prove That Illegal Immigration Is An Absolute Nightmare For The U.S. Economy
Before we go any further, it is important for me to make a few points. It is not a bad thing that people want to come to this nation from another country. A lot of people that want to come to the United States are really hard working and have really solid character. This nation has a long tradition of immigrants arriving to build a better life here. At different times this country will need different levels of immigration, but we will always need new immigrants. People on one side of a border are not more “valuable” than people on another side of a border. There is a reason why our founding fathers believed that “all men are created equal”. In every nation on earth there are really wonderful people. We should love all men, women and children no matter where they were born and no matter what they look like. God created us all and He loves us all dearly.
The reason I went into all that is because of the way politics is played in America in 2011. The moment that anyone suggests that there might be a problem with illegal immigration they are immediately branded with all kinds of horrible labels. To put a horrible label on someone that is completely and totally untrue just to score political points is absolutely despicable.
The funny thing is that some of the organizations that denounce others the loudest should actually be examining themselves. For example, one of the largest pro-illegal immigration organizations is called “La Raza”, which literally means “The Race” (as if we all couldn’t figure it out). Perhaps it is time for them to come up with a new name.
Look, we all have to start learning to love each other. If not, our society is going to continue to break down.
A majority of the American people (yes, that is what the polls show) are not against illegal immigration because they “hate” another group of people. Rather, they just want all immigrants to go through the “front door” and they want the government to be sensitive to changing economic conditions.
The sad truth is that the U.S. government has absolutely refused to secure the U.S. border with Mexico for decades, and this has allowed millions upon millions of criminals, drug dealers and gang members to cross freely into the United States. In addition, by refusing to secure the border we have allowed new diseases to spread unchecked into this country.
Meanwhile, the law abiding people that would like to get into this country legally are put through absolute hell. I used to practice law and I have filled out immigration forms. The process is a complete and total nightmare.
So we have been making it really easy for law breakers to sneak in the back door of our country and we have been making it really hard for law abiding people to get in the front door.
What in the world could be wrong about wanting to fix that?
Once many illegal immigrants arrive in the United States they either try to make a living legally (by directly competing with blue collar American workers for jobs and driving their wages down) or illegally by selling drugs or being involved in other kinds of criminal activity.
Apparently Barack Obama believes that this kind of behavior should be rewarded with a “path to citizenship”.
The vast majority of illegal immigrants pay absolutely no federal or state income taxes and they never intend to. At the same time, they seem more than happy to take advantage of the free social services and benefits offered to them. In fact, stories of how “good” life in America is just encourages more and more immigrants to come to the United States illegally.
We need an immigration policy that insists that everyone come in through the front door.
Is there anyone out there that cannot agree with that?
We also need to set immigration levels that our economy can handle.
Right now our economy is struggling. Millions upon millions of Americans are out of work. 44 million Americans are on food stamps. 47 million Americans are living in poverty. We just can’t take in a whole lot of extra workers right now.
You would think that would just be common sense.
But instead, Barack Obama wants to grant amnesty to all of the illegal immigrants that are already here and put them on a path to citizenship.
Wow – do you think that might embolden millions more illegal immigrants to come flooding in?
Barack Obama is against a border fence. He says we don’t need it.
Meanwhile, thousands more illegal immigrants pour into this country every single day.
Barack Obama supports all of the “sanctuary cities” that have openly declared that they are not going to enforce our immigration laws.
So where do you think illegal immigrants are going to flock to? The truth is that word about these “sanctuary cities” gets around really fast. If you live in one of these cities, then you probably know all about it.
If Barack Obama gets his way, nobody will be breaking our immigration laws because essentially there will not be any more immigration laws.
Not that George W. Bush was any better. He was an absolute disaster on immigration as well.
The truth is that our immigration policy has been slowly eroding the U.S. middle class for many decades.
But according to Barack Obama, we desperately need to implement his “immigration reform” plan for the good of the middle class….
What a joke. The reality is that illegal immigration hurts that U.S. middle class and it is severely damaging to the U.S. economy. Because of illegal immigration, every single day wages are lost, taxes don’t get collected, hospitals provide “free health care” for which they are never paid, huge criminal gangs of foreigners are roaming our streets and the cost of providing social services to illegal aliens is slowly bankrupting state and local governments.
The following are 18 facts which prove that illegal immigration is an absolute nightmare for the U.S. economy….
#1 Illegal immigrants take jobs away from American citizens. According to a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data, legal and illegal immigrants gained over a million additional jobs between 2008 and 2010 even as millions of American citizens were losing their jobs during that same time period.
#2 The majority of our immigrants now sneak in through the “back door” that the federal government purposely leaves open. Thanks to the negligence of the federal government, far more people move into the United States illegally than come in through the legal immigration process. This has got to change.
#3 Illegal immigrants generally don’t pay taxes. The vast majority of illegal aliens would never even dream of paying income taxes, but Mexicans living in America send billions upon billions of dollars out of the United States and back to Mexico every single year.
#4 Although illegal aliens pay next to nothing in taxes, they have no problem receiving tens of billions of dollars worth of free education benefits, free health care benefits, free housing assistance and free food stamp benefits. Many communities in the United States now openly advertise that they will help illegal aliens with these things.
#5 The cost of educating the children of illegal immigrants is staggering. It is estimated that U.S. taxpayers spend $12,000,000,000 a year on primary and secondary school education for the children of illegal immigrants.
#6 Thanks to illegal immigration, California’s overstretched health care system is on the verge of collapse. Dozens of California hospitals and emergency rooms have shut down over the last decade because they could not afford to stay open after being endlessly swamped by illegal immigrants who were simply not able to pay for the services that they were receiving. As a result, the remainder of the health care system in the state of California is now beyond overloaded. This had led to brutally long waits, diverted ambulances and even unnecessary patient deaths. Sadly, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.
#7 It was estimated that there were approximately 7.7 million illegal aliens employed by U.S. employers during 2008. How much better would our economy look if all of those jobs were being filled by American workers?
#8 The region along the U.S./Mexico border is now an open war zone. Just across the U.S. border, the city of Juarez, Mexico is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities on the entire planet because of the brutal drug war being waged there. In fact, Juarez has now become the murder capital of the western hemisphere. Much of that violence has begun to spill over into areas of the southwestern United States.
For example, a while back NPR described one incident in the Juarez Valley that involved American citizens….
#9 A substantial percentage of young illegal immigrants end up in gangs. U.S. authorities say that there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the United States. According to federal statistics, these 1 million gang members are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year. Latino gangs made up primarily of illegal aliens are responsible for much of this violence.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, some of the most notorious gangs in the country are made up almost entirely of illegal immigrants….
#10 The “18th Street Gang” is certainly giving MS-13 a run for their money. It is believed that the 18th Street Gang has thousands of members in the city of Los Angeles alone. In fact, the gang has become so notorious that there are even rumors that some police officers in Los Angeles simply will not venture into the areas most heavily controlled by the 18th Street gang.
The following is what Wikipedia says about the 18th Street Gang….
#11 The “drug war” in northern Mexico is one gigantic bloodbath. The Mexican government says that as many as 28,000 people have been slaughtered by the drug cartels since 2007. A very significant percentage of those deaths have happened in areas right along the U.S. border, and yet our federal government still sees no reason to get serious about border security.
#12 It is an open secret that Mexican drug cartels are openly conducting military operations inside the United States. The handful of border patrol agents that we have guarding the border are massively outgunned and outmanned.
One agent who patrols the border and who asked to remain anonymous told Fox News the following….
A different federal agent put it this way in an email to Fox News….
#13 Federal border officials say that Mexican drug cartels have not only set up shop on U.S. soil, but they are actually maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona. If you go to Arizona today, there are actually signs that have been put up by the federal government warning American citizens not to venture into certain wilderness routes that are used by Mexican drug cartels to bring in drugs.
#14 The drug war being waged on both sides of the border is so violent that it is almost unimaginable. For example, one very prominent Mexican assassin known as “the soupmaker” has confessed that he made approximately 300 bodies disappear by dissolving them in acid baths. But right now there is essentially nothing that is preventing the next “soupmaker” from crossing the U.S. border and moving into your neighborhood.
#15 Arizona police are being openly warned by the Mexican drug cartels that if they try to interfere with the drug traffic in their area that they will be “taken out” by drug cartel snipers.
#16 While the U.S. military endlessly hunts for “members of al-Qaeda” in the caves of Afghanistan and on the streets of Iraqi cities, a very real threat has been building just south of the border. Over the past 15 to 20 years, Hezbollah has set up operations all over Mexico, Central America and South America. Hezbollah is reportedly making a lot of money in the drug trade and in trafficking illegal aliens. Sadly, our government is largely ignoring this.
#17 Each year, it costs the states billions of dollars to incarcerate illegal immigrant criminals that should have never been allowed into the country in the first place. It is estimated that illegal aliens make up approximately 30 percent of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually.
#18 The drug cartels and the gangs always seem to be a couple steps ahead of our agents along the border. Approximately 75 tunnels along the U.S. border with Mexico have been discovered by law enforcement authorities in the last four years alone.
How much do you think all of this crime, gang violence and drug cartel activity is costing our economy?
Why won’t the federal government do what the Constitution requires and secure the border?
Oh, but Barack Obama says that he has a plan.
He says that he is going to save the day.
The following is how Barack Obama describes his plan…
So how many illegal immigrants do you think are going to step forward to pay a fine?
One percent?
How many of them do you think are going to show up for English classes?
Who is going to make them do it?
Obama?
Are we going to have law enforcement officials running around trying to collect fines from illegal immigrants and trying to get them to attend their English lessons?
According to Obama, the millions upon millions of illegal immigrants that are in this country are going to be glad to willingly do the following….
1) Admit they broke the law
2) Pay back taxes and a fine
3) Learn English
4) Be willing to undergo background checks before starting the legalization process
Those four points are taken directly from Obama’s plan.
So what are illegal immigrants going to do when this plan is passed?
99 percent of them are going to laugh and they are just going to keep on doing what they have been doing.
Large numbers of illegal immigrants are already enjoying the “high life” in the dozens of “sanctuary cities” across the United States.
The following is how the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC defines sanctuary cities….
Sounds like a good deal to me.
Can I sign up for that plan?
After all, who wouldn’t want to earn all income tax-free and yet enjoy unlimited government services?
Today we are being told that we need to make life as comfortable as possible for the waves of illegal immigrants that are coming in. In fact, Barack Obama says that all of us need to make sure that our kids are learning how to speak Spanish….
All of this is utter insanity.
The cold, hard reality of the matter is that we have tightly secured the border between South Korea and North Korea for over 50 years and we could secure our own borders if we really wanted to.
But instead, we continue to leave our border with Mexico completely wide open. Thousands of criminals, gang members and drug pushers continue to come in completely unchecked every single day.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have to subject ourselves to some of the most humiliating “security measures” imaginable before we are even allowed to get on to an airplane.
It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?