Have you ever heard of mob robberies? What happens is that dozens of young people storm a store at the same time, take whatever they want, and then storm out as powerless store clerks watch helplessly. Most of the time these “mob robbers” end up getting caught, but unfortunately “group crime” is a trend that is rising. Is it a sign of the times that large groups of people are starting to recklessly invade retail establishments? Is this the future of America? As I have written about so frequently, the U.S. middle class is being destroyed by this economy and large numbers of our young people are losing hope. Frustration and anger are rising from coast to coast and millions of Americans are losing faith in the system. The thin veneer of civilization which we all take for granted is already starting to disappear. So what is going to happen when the economy collapses? As our economic system fails, mob robberies and rampant looting are only going to become more common. Let us hope that the economy can hold together for at least a couple more years, because once society falls apart things are going to get really, really ugly in our major cities.
Are you prepared for what America is going to look like during the next Great Depression? It isn’t going to be pretty. Over the past couple of decades we have gotten hints of what America is going to look like when society breaks down, and those hints have been very frightening.
This first video is a news report about the mob robberies that have taken place in Minnesota recently. What would you do if you were a store clerk in this situation….
Unfortunately, these mob robberies are not just an anomaly. The American people really do seem to be losing it. Over the past couple of years, some almost unbelievable brawls have been breaking out in restaurants and in retail establishments all over the nation.
In addition, who could forget the wild mob scenes that erupted at stores all over America during the most recent Black Friday holiday sales?
Of course we all remember what happened during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. All along the Gulf Coast looting was rampant. Sadly, people were even openly looting stores in front of television news cameras….
This third video contains a compilation of footage from all over the United States over the past few decades. Is this what America is going to look like when the economy breaks down and people are going wild in the streets?….
But don’t think that Americans only act this way in the big cities. The truth is that human decency is breaking down everywhere. This was perfectly illustrated by a recently reported case of horrific child abuse in Oklahoma.
According to CNN, a 9-year-old girl, an 11-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy were actually forced to eat pet food and had suffered burns all over their bodies due to the nightmarish abuse that they had received from the couple that adopted them.
The 15-year-old boy in this case told authorities that at one point he was forced to live in a plastic dog carrier for two months and that all three of the children have had their tongues burned with a hot spoon by their “parents”.
The following is how CNN described some of the abuse that these children were subjected to….
Authorities said the Kluths are accused of burning the children with hot spoons, choking them and locking them “in the storm shelter behind the residence for long periods of time with only chairs to sit in and plastic buckets for bathroom use. It was also alleged that the Kluths deprived the children of meals for punishment and fed them cat food and dog food,” according to a statement from authorities.
Can you imagine?
As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as “good people”, but is that really true?
In the United States today, the percentage of the population that is in prison is more than ten times higher than it is in Japan.
Part of that is because the U.S. is rapidly becoming a “Big Brother” police state, but we also have to admit that the American people don’t seem to be made of the same “stuff” that they used to.
Something has gone dramatically wrong.
We have lost our way.
Is this country going to be able to handle another Great Depression?
Right now more than 43 million Americans are on food stamps. This is helping keep the population under control. But what is going to happen when the price of food goes up 50 percent and all of these millions of people can’t even feed themselves anymore?
That is a frightening thing to think about.
Most Americans have never known hard times. Most Americans cannot even imagine what deep economic suffering is like.
When the U.S. economy does completely unravel, it is going to blindside most of the population. Many Americans will go completely crazy when they finally realize that the “good times” are gone and are never coming back.
What we are seeing in Wisconsin right now is only a very small foretaste of the kinds of economic protests that we will see in the future. There are tens of millions of Americans that are just not going to quietly accept that their affluence is gone permanently.
Unfortunately, the time to start saying something was years ago. Our economy is being gutted right in front of our eyes and yet most Americans just keep on voting for the globalist politicians that continue to ship our factories, our jobs and our prosperity overseas.
Believe it or not, cities like Detroit, Michigan were once the envy of the world.
In 2011, the rest of the world laughs at Detroit. It has become a global joke.
And you know what?
Hundreds of other communities across the United States are being slowly but surely transformed into new Detroits.
Today, there are many towns across the United States where you can almost reach out and feel the despair. It is almost as if someone has sucked all of the hope right out of the atmosphere.
People are getting desperate. As the economy crumbles crime is only going to increase. In fact, many of our biggest cities have large areas where residents simply do not ever want to venture outside after the sun goes down. Life is getting crazier in America with each passing year.
The America that so many of us so fondly remember is being rapidly destroyed.
So what do you all think? Are mob robbers and rampant looting the future of America? Are people going to go crazy when the economy collapses or are Americans going to be able to handle it fairly well? Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….
If the U.S. dollar is being devalued so rapidly, then why does it sometimes increase in value against other global currencies? Well, it is because everybody is recklessly printing money now. The 6 charts which you are about to see below prove this. The truth is that it is not just the U.S. Federal Reserve which has been printing money like there is no tomorrow. Out of control money printing has also been happening in the UK, in the EU, in Japan, in China and in India. There are times when one particular global currency will fall faster than the others, but the reality is that they are all being rapidly devalued. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for a global economic nightmare.
Right now you can almost smell the panic as it rises in global financial markets. Investors all over the world are racing to get out of paper and to get into hard assets. Just about anything that is “real” and “tangible” is hot right now. Gold hit a record high last year and it is on the rise again. In fact, it just hit a new five-week high. Demand for silver is becoming absolutely ridiculous right now. Oil is marching up towards $100 a barrel again. Agricultural commodities have exploded in price over the past year. Many investors are even gobbling up art and other collectibles.
Paper money is no longer considered to be safe. All over the globe investors are watching all of the reckless money printing that has been going on and they are becoming alarmed. An increasing number of investors and financial institutions are putting their wealth into hard assets that are real and tangible in an effort to preserve their wealth.
The other day, a reader of this column named James sent me some charts that he had put together. I thought they were so good that I asked him if I could include them in an article. These charts show how central banks all over the globe have been recklessly printing money. Over the last 30 years virtually the entire world has developed a great love affair with fiat currency….
Of course anyone with half a brain can see where all of this is ultimately headed. In the end, inflation is going to spiral out of control and we are going to witness financial implosion on a global scale.
So why don’t these nations just adopt sound money?
Well, it turns out that if you are a member of the IMF, you are specifically prohibited from having gold-backed currency.
Yes, you read that correctly.
In fact, U.S. Representative Ron Paul once sent an open letter to the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve asking about this and he received no response. The following is the content of that letter….
Dear Sirs:
I am writing regarding Article 4, Section 2b of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s Articles of Agreement. As you may be aware, this language prohibits countries who are members of the IMF from linking their currency to gold. Thus, the IMF is forbidding countries suffering from an erratic monetary policy from adopting the most effective means of stabilizing their currency. This policy could delay a country’s recovery from an economic crisis and retard economic growth, thus furthering economic and political instability.
I would greatly appreciate an explanation from both the Treasury and the Federal Reserve of the reasons the United States has continued to acquiesce in this misguided policy. Please contact Mr. Norman Singleton, my legislative director, if you require any further information regarding this request. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
Ron Paul
U.S. House of Representatives
Sadly, the truth is that the global elite don’t want nations to start adopting gold-backed currencies. They want countries to use fiat currencies that they can openly manipulate for their own benefit.
At this point, every nation on earth (to the best of my knowledge) uses a fiat currency. All of the major global currencies are being continually devalued. In fact, there are times when counties will purposely devalue their currencies even more rapidly in order to gain a competitive advantage in world trade.
This is why so many investors now have such an aversion to paper currency. It starts losing value the moment you take possession of it.
In some areas of the world, “gold fever” is absolutely exploding. For example, China imported five times as much gold in 2010 as it did in 2009. On the Shanghai Gold Exchange, trading volume soared 43 percent during the first 10 months of 2010.
Gold, silver and other precious metals are now seen as a great hedge against inflation worldwide. Investors all over the globe are demonstrating a strong preference for “real money” over “paper money”.
So what does all of this mean?
It means that some tremendous imbalances are being built up in the global financial system. The central banks of the world must continue to inflate these bubbles with constantly increasing amounts of paper money and debt in order to keep the game going. If at some point the reckless money printing comes to a screeching halt it is going to unleash hell on global financial markets.
But if all of this reckless money printing continues we are eventually going to see horrific inflation all over the planet. In fact, we are already seeing significant inflation happening in many areas of the globe. Almost every single day a new headline about inflation in China seems to pop up in the financial news. Rising food prices are sparking unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even U.S. consumers are starting to see some uncomfortable price increases at the gas pump and in the supermarket.
So it is not just Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke that is off his rocker. The whole world is going crazy with money printing.
Hopefully this whole thing is not going to end as badly as many of us fear that it will. But right now the central banks of the world are pumping unprecedented amounts of cash into the global financial system, and those in the global financial system are funneling a very large percentage of that cash into hard assets. Unless something changes, that is going to mean that prices for basic necessities such as food and gas are going to continue to rise.
Have you seen video of the teacher protests that are going on in Wisconsin? We haven’t seen anything like this in America in quite some time. If you haven’t seen video of the protests yet, some very good raw footage is posted below. On the one hand it is good to see Americans coming together and standing up for what they believe in, but on the other hand what these teachers are freaking out about shows just how much America has changed. These teachers are not protesting for liberty, freedom or to change the government. Rather, they are protesting because they want things to remain the same. They simply don’t want anyone to mess with their pay. Well, the truth is that none of us ever wants to experience a pay cut. It is not a lot of fun. But sadly, states like Wisconsin are so broke that they have to find cuts somewhere. Someone is going to have to make a sacrifice. The teachers in Wisconsin just want to make sure that it is not them.
In the United States today, state and local governments are facing unprecedented budget crunches. Tax revenues are way down and expenses are way up. State and local government debt has reached at an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP, and many state and local governments are teetering on the brink of insolvency.
States like Wisconsin have to do something or else they will collapse financially. Wisconsin is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit (which for that state is huge), and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans in the legislature are attempting to make some tough cuts.
In particular, they want public employees to pay a little more towards their health care premiums and pension programs. In fact, what the Republicans are proposing would still leave Wisconsin public employees contributing far less to health care and pensions than their private sector counterparts.
U.S. Representative Paul Ryan recently appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program and described what Governor Scott Walker is asking the teachers to do….
Scott and I are very close friends. We e-mail each other quite a bit… He’s basically saying that state workers which have extremely generous benefits packages relative to their private sector counterparts, they contribute next to nothing to their pensions, very, very little in their health care packages.
He’s asking that they contribute about 12 percent for their health care premiums, which is about half of the private sector average, and about 5.6 percent to their pensions. It’s not asking a lot. It’s still about half of what private sector pensions do and health care packages do.
So he’s basically saying “I want you public workers half of what your private sector counterparts do” and he’s getting riots. It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.
These proposed changes have caused a massive uproar in Wisconsin. Just check out the following raw video footage from the last few days….
But this is what we have come to as a nation. Almost everyone agrees that reducing government debt is a good thing “in theory”, but whenever anyone starts to put forward some specific proposals to cut government spending it makes those that will be affected by the cuts extremely upset.
Just look at what is happening with the federal government. Republicans and Democrats are both frothing at the mouth over extremely small budget cuts that have been proposed. Virtually none of our national politicians are even willing to discuss budget cuts that would actually make a serious dent in our budget deficits.
But we have got to do something. Spending by the U.S. government is spinning wildly out of control. Back in 1970, the U.S. government only spent about 200 billion dollars for the whole year. Well, this year the federal government is going to spend somewhere around 3.6 trillion dollars, and Barack Obama’s newest budget proposal calls for U.S. government spending to increase to 5.6 trillion dollars by the year 2021. If the government continues to spend money at such a rapid pace it is going to completely wipe out our entire economic system….
But it is not just the U.S. government that is spending like a drunken sailor. Most of our state governments are complete financial disaster zones at this point as well.
As I have written about previously, the state of Illinois is such a financial disaster zone that it is hard to even describe. According to 60 Minutes, the state of Illinois is six months behind on their bill payments. 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft asked Illinois state Comptroller Dan Hynes how many people and organizations are waiting to be paid by the state, and this is how Hynes responded….
“It’s fair to say that there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people waiting to be paid by the state.”
Something has got to be done about our national addiction to debt.
Government spending has to be dramatically cut. All of us are going to have to make sacrifices. We simply cannot continue to spend far, far, far more than we bring in.
But we are Americans – we do not like to make sacrifices.
Our founding fathers warned us about this. They warned that when the American people figured out that they could vote themselves money out of the U.S. Treasury it would greatly endanger our republic.
Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening today. The vast majority of government spending on both the national and state levels consists of direct payments to individuals of one sort or another.
The American people have become addicted to the bread crumbs that they receive from the hand of their master.
This is not what our republic was supposed to look like.
As the U.S. economy continues to decline, we are going to see a lot more riots like we have seen in Wisconsin. Once the American people realize that the “good times” are over, all hell is going to break loose.
Already the anger and the frustration of the American people is starting to boil over. Unfortunately, that anger and frustration is focused in 1000 different directions. The ruling elite and the establishment media are constantly encouraging us to hate one another. I recently wrote about this phenomenon in an article on another website….
The truth is that the “establishment” is constantly trying to divide us and get us fighting with one another. They pit the Republicans against the Democrats (even as though control both sides). They pit one race against another. They pit one gender against another. We are told that the rich are against the poor, the north is against the south, urban is against rural and that there are even “generational battles” going on. Frustration and hate are rapidly growing in the United States today, and a lot of that frustration and hate is unfortunately aimed at the targets that the mainstream media has programmed all of us to hate. Meanwhile, those at the top of the pyramid who are controlling the whole game love it when we are divided because we can never become united and challenge their control.
Unfortunately, America is more divided today than ever. Our extreme affluence has kept the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted from disappearing so far, but once our affluence is gone all of the hate and frustration in society is going to come bubbling to the surface and it is going to be horrifying to behold.
Once the economic collapse happens, most Americans are not going to take it sitting down. Most Americans are going to want someone to blame. Most Americans are going to want to lash out somehow.
America today is like a big, fat spoiled baby that is about to have its favorite pacifier permanently taken away. America is going to whine and cry and complain like there is no tomorrow.
For decades the financial “gloom and doomers” have been warning about what would happen to this country if we didn’t get our house in order, but nobody wanted to listen. Everyone just kept piling up more debt as if it would never be a problem.
Well, now our entire country is covered in red ink. Large numbers of state and local governments across the country are on the verge of defaulting on their debts, and they are hoping that the federal government will bail them out. The federal government has already accumulated the biggest pile of debt the world has ever seen and continues to behave as if we can just keep borrowing and spending massive amounts of money forever.
There is no way out of this nightmare under the current system. Taxing people more is not going to solve our problems. Taxing people less is not going to solve our problems.
We have gotten to the point where it is inevitable that the debt bubble that we have created is going to burst. Our politicians can try to delay it for a while, but in the end the whole house of cards is going to come crashing down.
When the U.S. economy does totally collapse, it is going to make the riots that we have seen in Egypt and throughout the Middle East this year seem tame by comparison.
What we are witnessing right now in Wisconsin are just the “birth pains”. The American people don’t want to “tighten their belts”. In fact, most Americans have absolutely no idea what “hard times” would even look like. When things go from bad to worse we are going to see temper tantrums in this country like we have never seen before.
So get ready. Unless there is some kind of dramatic transformation in this country, in the years ahead we are going to see some horrific economic riots.
It would be nice if we had a brighter future to look forward to, but we don’t do ourselves any favors by living in denial.
So what do you all think about what has been going on in Wisconsin? Do you all believe that we could see huge economic riots inside America in the years ahead? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….
The 10 economic charts that you are about to see are completely and totally shocking. If you know anyone that still does not believe that the United States is in the midst of a long-term economic decline, just show them these charts. Sometimes you can quote economic statistics to people until you are blue in the face and it won’t do any good, but when those same people see charts and pictures suddenly it all sinks in. What is great about charts is that you can very easily demonstrate what has been happening to the economy over an extended period of time. As you examine the economic charts below, pay special attention to what has been happening to the U.S. economy over the last 30 or 40 years. The truth is that what is wrong with the U.S. economy is not a great mystery. All of the economic problems that we are experiencing now have taken decades to develop. Hopefully the charts in this article will help people realize just how nightmarish our economic problems have become, because until people start realizing how incredibly bad things have gotten they will never be willing to accept the dramatic solutions that are necessary to fix our financial system.
The sad fact of the matter is that we have been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world over the last 40 years. All of this debt has purchased a wonderful standard of living for the vast majority of us, but all of this debt has also destroyed the economic future of our children and our grandchildren. Someday future generations will look back on what we have done in absolute horror.
The 10 economic charts posted below are meant to shock you. Most Americans today need to be shocked before they will be motivated to take action. Please share these charts with as many people as you can. Hopefully we can wake enough people up that something will be done about all of these problems while there is still time.
1 – Government spending is expanding at an exponential rate. As you can see from the chart below, federal spending is almost 18 times higher than it was back in 1970. Now Barack Obama has proposed a budget that would increase U.S. government spending to 5.6 trillion dollars in 2021. Just imagine what the following chart would look like if that happens….
2 – U.S. government debt is absolutely exploding. The U.S. national debt is currently $14,081,561,324,681.83. It is more than 14 times larger than it was back in 1980. Unfortunately, the national debt continues to grow at breathtaking speed. In fact, the Obama administration is projecting that the federal budget deficit for this year will be an all-time record 1.6 trillion dollars. Can we afford to continue to accumulate debt at this rate?….
3 – Unless something changes right now, the outlook for U.S. government finances in future years is downright apocalyptic. The chart posted below is from an official U.S. government report to Congress. As you can see, it is projected that interest on our exploding national debt is absolutely going to spiral out of control if we continue on the path that we are currently on….
4 – Household debt has soared to almost unbelievable levels over the last 30 years. The sad truth is that it is not just the U.S. government that has a massive debt problem. U.S. households have also been accumulating debt at a staggering rate. Total U.S. household debt did not pass the 2 trillion dollar mark until the mid-1980s, but now total U.S. household debt is well over 13 trillion dollars….
5 – The total of all debt (government, business and consumer) in the United States is now well over 50 trillion dollars. For the past couple of years this figure has been hovering around a level that is equivalent to approximately 360 percent of GDP. This is a debt bubble that is absolutely unprecedented in U.S. history….
6 – As tens of thousands of U.S. factories get shut down and as millions of our jobs get shipped overseas, the number of unemployed Americans continues to go up and up and up. As you can see from the chart below, there has been a long-term trend of increasing unemployment in the United States. In fact, there are about 3 and a half times as many unemployed workers in the United States today as there were when 1970 began. These jobs losses are going to continue as long as we allow our corporations to pay slave labor wages to workers on the other side of the globe. All of the major trends in global trade are very bad for the U.S. middle class. For example, the U.S. trade deficit with China for 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990. How long will our politicians stand by as our nation bleeds jobs?….
7 – The median duration of unemployment in the United States is in unprecedented territory. For most of the post-World War 2 era, when the median duration of unemployment in America reached 10 weeks that was considered a national crisis. Well, today competition for jobs is so intense that the median duration of unemployment is now well over 20 weeks….
8 – Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by over 95 percent. One of the reasons given for the existence of the Federal Reserve is that the Fed helps control inflation. But that is a huge lie. The truth is that the United States never had consistently rampant inflation until the Federal Reserve took control. In particular, once the U.S. totally went off the gold standard in the 1970s inflation really started escalating out of control….
9 – Now the Federal Reserve says that the solution to our current economic problems is to print even more money out of thin air. The games that the Federal Reserve is playing with our money supply are simply inexcusable. Just look at what the Federal Reserve has done to the monetary base since the beginning of the recession….
10 – All of this new money is creating tremendous inflation. In particular, the price of oil is now ridiculously high. A high price for oil is very, very bad for the U.S. economy. Our entire economic system is based on being able to use massive quantities of very cheap oil. Unfortunately, that paradigm is starting to break down and the consequences will be very bitter. Back in mid-2008, the price of oil hit an all-time record of $147 a barrel and subsequently the world financial system imploded a few months later. Well, the price of oil is on the march again and that is very bad news for the U.S. economy….
Needless to say, if the economic trends documented by the charts above continue the U.S. economy will be totally wiped out. The U.S. economy as it currently exists is unsustainable by definition. It is only a matter of time before we slam into an economic brick wall.
We have developed an economy that cannot function without debt, and at this point it seems like almost everyone is drowning in red ink. The federal government is massively overextended, most of our state and local governments are massively overextended, most of our major corporations are massively overextended and the majority of U.S. consumers are massively overextended.
The only way that the game can continue is for the Federal Reserve to print increasingly larger amounts of paper money out of thin air and for everyone in the economic food chain to go into increasingly larger amounts of debt.
But no debt spiral can go on forever. At some point this entire house of cards is going to collapse.
When that happens, there is going to be economic pain that is greater than anything that this country has ever seen before.
Someday we will all desperately wish that we could go back to the “good times” of 2011. A great economic collapse is coming, and all of us had better get ready.
Is Barack Obama trying to play a joke on all of us? The budget that the Obama administration has submitted for fiscal 2012 is so out of touch with reality that it may as well be a budget for “Narnia”, “Fantasy Island”, “Atlantis” or some other mythical land. You can view the hard numbers for Barack Obama’s 2012 budget right here. Obama’s budget assumes that the U.S. will experience economic growth of over 5 percent for most of the coming decade. That is so far-fetched that “optimistic” is not the right word for it. It also assumes that U.S. government income (primarily made up of taxes on all of us) will more than double over the next ten years. For 2011, the budget projects that the U.S. government will take in a total of 2.1 trillion dollars, and for 2021 the budget projects that the U.S. government will take in a total of 4.9 trillion dollars. For the Obama administration to assume that the federal government will be able to drain an extra 2.8 trillion dollars per year out of the American people by the year 2021 is ridicul0us beyond belief. In his new budget Barack Obama does propose some very, very modest spending cuts that he knows have no chance of getting through Congress. Barack Obama’s budget for 2012 also does not even attempt to make any cuts to entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. In essence, you can sum up Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2012 by saying that it is a complete and total joke. This budget is so delusional and so out of touch with reality that it is hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously.
Well, that is a nice sound bite, but as I have written about previously, unless Barack Obama suddenly finds a way to stop multinational corporations from paying slave labor wages to their workers on the other side of the globe the job losses in America are going to continue.
But that is a topic for another day. Getting back to the 2012 budget, Obama is proposing to cut more than a trillion dollars from federal budget deficits over the next ten years.
That sounds really good until you figure out that means that the cuts only amount to about $100 billion a year. Considering the fact that Obama’s budget is projecting that we will have a $1.6 trillion budget deficit this year alone, that really is not a whole heck of a lot to be cutting.
The truth is that Barack Obama should be proposing spending cuts that are at least ten times as large if he was actually serious about addressing our budget woes.
But at least Obama is not proposing an increase in spending.
Oh wait, he actually is.
In fact, under Obama’s budget, U.S. government spending will soar from 3.8 trillion dollars this year to 5.6 trillion dollars in 2021.
But the mainstream media is solely focusing on the budget cuts that Obama is proposing.
Apparently they are trying to cast him as some sort of “fiscal conservative”.
Try not to laugh.
But the modest cuts that Obama is proposing are at least some place to start.
Under Obama’s budget, approximately half of all government agencies will have their funding decreased from 2010 levels.
In fact, approximately 33 billion dollars would be saved by scaling back or shutting down 200 federal programs.
Of course Obama’s fellow Democrats in Congress will never go along with many of these cuts, but at least it is something.
However, this is where most in the mainstream media stop their analysis.
They don’t take a closer look at the numbers in Obama’s budget.
They don’t question the wacky economic growth assumptions.
They don’t question the bizarre government income projections.
But even with the Obama administration’s crooked numbers, the federal deficit still never drops below 600 billion dollars over the next decade and a total of 7.2 trillion dollars is still added to the national debt over the next decade.
If economic growth ends up being much lower, or if the U.S. government is not able to get twice as much money out of the American people by the end of the decade then the projections would look much, much different.
So where does the Obama administration assume all of that extra money for the government is going to come from?
Oh, from raising taxes of course.
The Obama budget assumes that there will be significant tax increases starting in the year 2013.
The plan unveiled Monday includes tax increases for oil, gas and coal producers, investment managers and U.S.-based multinational corporations. The plan would allow Bush-era tax cuts to expire at the end of 2012 for individuals making more than $200,000 and married couples making more than $250,000.
Wealthy taxpayers would have their itemized deductions limited, including deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions and state and local taxes.
There are many liberals (such as my friend Gary) that would love to see these tax increases go into effect, but Obama knows that there is no chance that they will ever see the light of day unless the Democrats retake the House of Representatives.
But most of Obama’s budget for 2012 is based on things that simply never even have a chance of happening.
The reality is that Obama’s budget for 2012 is a great work of fiction.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to accumulate staggering amounts of debt.
In fact, Obama’s budget admits that we will witness the biggest one year debt increase in history this year.
In 2011, the gross federal debt with surpass 15 trillion dollars. In fact, it is being projected by some analysts that this will be the year when the debt finally becomes larger than the size of the entire U.S. economy.
Ouch.
But Obama insists that he is taking this debt problem very seriously.
Obama insists that he is committed to making “deep” cuts.
In fact, as he announced this new budget Obama stated that these budget cuts hit “many programs whose mission I care deeply about, but meeting our fiscal targets while investing in our future demands no less.”
Do any of you actually believe him?
Not that the Obama administration is in an easy position. The truth is that the U.S. government (both Republicans and Democrats) have been horribly irresponsible with our money for decades.
The 14 trillion dollar national debt problem that we have now did not develop overnight.
Neither will it be solved overnight.
But Obama is not even trying to address the tough issues such as Social Security and Medicare.
The truth is that the federal debt problem cannot be solved without addressing our out of control entitlement programs.
So why didn’t Obama address them in his budget?
Well, the reality is that Obama is not stupid. Social Security and Medicare are political sacred cows. Obama is not going to do anything at this point that would cost him millions of votes in 2012.
So Barack Obama ignored most of the $4 trillion in budget cuts recommended by the White House-appointed deficit commission.
It kind of makes you wonder why Obama ever appointed a “deficit commission” in the first place.
One area that Obama does attempt to cut in his new budget is military spending. Obama’s budget for 2012 sets military spending at 5 percent below what the Pentagon requested for 2011.
In fact, Obama’s defense budget would slash military spending by $78 billion over the next five years.
His budget also assumes that we are not going to get involved in any more wars, which is not necessarily a safe assumption.
So will these military spending cuts actually get through Congress?
Not likely.
The Republicans control the House of Representatives, and they are not likely to take too kindly to large cuts to the defense budget.
In fact, the truth is that not too many of Barack Obama’s spending cuts are likely to survive in Congress.
As a recent article on CNN explained, Barack Obama’s budget plan must navigate a vast array of congressional committees in the coming months and by the time it emerges it is likely to be radically changed from its current form….
Before it gets back to Obama’s desk for a signature, the spending blueprint will go through no less than 40 congressional committees, 24 subcommittees, countless hearings and a number of floor votes in the House and Senate.
For example, a total of $3 million has already been granted to researchers at the University of California at Irvine so that they can play video games such as World of Warcraft.
Something seems to happen to people who get elected to Congress. Almost all of them seem to develop an addiction to spending our hard-earned money.
Once upon a time, the United States was the greatest industrial powerhouse that the world has ever seen. Our immense economic machinery was the envy of the rest of the globe and it provided the foundation for the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world. But now the once great U.S. economic machine is being dismantled piece by piece. The U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized and very few of our leaders even seem to care. It was the United States that once showed the rest of the world how to mass produce televisions and automobiles and airplanes and computers, but now our industrial base is being ripped to shreds. Tens of thousands of our factories and millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas. Many of our proudest manufacturing cities have been transformed into “post-industrial” hellholes that nobody wants to live in anymore.
Meanwhile, wave after wave of shiny new factories is going up in nations such as China, India and Brazil. This is great for those countries, but for the millions of American workers that desperately needed the jobs that have been sent overseas it is not so great.
This is the legacy of globalism. Multinational corporations now have the choice whether to hire U.S. workers or to hire workers in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. The “great sucking sound” that Ross Perot warned us about so long ago is actually happening, and it has left tens of millions of Americans without good jobs.
So what is to become of a nation that consumes more than it ever has and yet continues to produce less and less?
Well, the greatest debt binge in the history of the world has enabled us to maintain (and even increase) our standard of living for several decades, but all of that debt is starting to really catch up with us.
The American people seem to be very confused about what is happening to us because most of them thought that the party was going to last forever. In fact, most of them still seem convinced that our brightest economic days are still ahead.
After all, every time we have had a “recession” in the past things have always turned around and we have gone on to even greater things, right?
Well, what most Americans simply fail to understand is that we are like a car that is having its insides ripped right out. Our industrial base is being gutted right in front of our eyes.
Most Americans don’t think much about our “trade deficit”, but it is absolutely central to what is happening to our economy. Every year, we buy far, far more from the rest of the world than they buy from us.
In 2010, the U.S. trade deficit was just a whisker under $500 billion. This is money that we could have all spent inside the United States that would have supported thousands of American factories and millions of American jobs.
Instead, we sent all of those hundreds of billions of dollars overseas in exchange for a big pile of stuff that we greedily consumed. Most of that stuff we probably didn’t need anyway.
Since we spent almost $500 billion more with the rest of the world than they spent with us, at the end of the year the rest of the world was $500 billion wealthier and the American people were collectively $500 billion poorer.
That means that the collective “economic pie” that we are all dividing up is now $500 billion smaller.
Are you starting to understand why times suddenly seem so “hard” in the United States?
Meanwhile, jobs and businesses continue to fly out of the United States at a blinding pace.
This is a national crisis.
We simply cannot expect to continue to have a “great economy” if we allow our economy to be deindustrialized.
A nation that consumes far more than it produces is not going to be wealthy for long.
The following are 21 signs that the once great U.S. economy is being gutted, neutered, defanged, declawed and deindustrialized….
#1 The U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world rose to 497.8 billion dollars in 2010. That represented a 32.8% increase from 2009.
#2 The U.S. trade deficit with China rose to an all-time record of 273.1 billion dollars in 2010. This is the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#3 The U.S. trade deficit with China in 2010 was 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.
#4 In the years since 1975, the United States had run a total trade deficit of 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.
#5 The United States spends more than 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
#6 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of all U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented only 11.5 percent and it continues to fall.
#7 The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.
#8 The Bureau of Labor Statistics originally predicted that the U.S. economy would create approximately 22 million jobs during the decade of the 2000s, but it turns out that the U.S. economy only produced about 7 million jobs during that time period.
#11 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#12 The United States now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago.
#13According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.
#14 Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
#15 Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
#16 The number of Americans that have become so discouraged that they have given up searching for work completely now stands at an all-time high.
#17 Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.
#18 The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#20 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
#21 Ten years ago, the “employment rate” in the United States was about 64%. Since then it has been constantly declining and now the “employment rate” in the United States is only about 58%. So where did all of those jobs go?
The world is changing.
We are bleeding national wealth at a pace that is almost unimaginable.
We are literally being drained dry.
Did you know that China now has the world’s fastest train and the world’s largest high-speed rail network?
They were able to afford those things with all of the money that we have been sending them.
How do you think all of those oil barons in the Middle East became so wealthy and could build such opulent palaces?
They got rich off of all the money that we have been sending them.
Meanwhile, once great U.S. cities such as Detroit, Michigan now look like war zones.
Back in 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was about 6 million dollars for the entire year.
As mentioned above, the U.S. trade deficit with China for 2010 was over 273 billion dollars.
What a difference 25 years can make, eh?
What do you find when you go into a Wal-Mart, a Target or a dollar store today?
You find row after row after row of stuff made in China and in other far away countries.
It can be more than a bit difficult to find things that are actually made inside the United States anymore. In fact, there are quite a few industries that have completely and totally left the United States. For certain product categories it is now literally impossible to buy something made in America.
So what are we going to do with our tens of millions of blue collar workers?
Should we just tell them that their jobs are not ever coming back so they better learn phrases such as “Welcome to Wal-Mart” and “Would you like fries with that”?
For quite a few years, the gigantic debt bubble that we were living in kind of insulated us from feeling the effects of the deindustrialization of America.
Have you been unemployed lately? If so, then you probably know how frustrating it is to try to find a job in the United States today. It now takes the average unemployed worker about 33 weeks to find a job. There are millions of Americans that have not been able to find a full-time job even after searching hard for an entire year. Some areas of the United States have been devastated so badly by the economic downturn that they are starting to resemble war zones. Unless you have been there, it is hard to even try to describe the extreme frustration that one feels when you are unable to pay the mortgage and feed your family. It can be absolutely soul-crushing. But it is not the fault of those who are unemployed. The truth is that our economy is dying and it is not producing nearly enough jobs anymore. Unfortunately, as you will see from the facts listed below, most of the things that are causing our economy to die have no realistic chance of being changed any time soon.
The following are 10 reasons why it has become so insanely difficult to find a job in America today….
#2 There is a lot more competition for the very few job openings that are actually available. According to Gallup, the U.S. unemployment rate has been hovering around 10 percent for over a year. When Gallup includes “underemployed Americans” that have part-time jobs but really want full-time jobs in the numbers, they get a lot worse. Currently, Gallup says that 19.3 percent of the workforce is either unemployed or underemployed.
#3 The U.S. economy is producing an extremely low number of new jobs. The federal government says that only about 36,000 jobs were added in January. Well, an increase of 150,000 jobs per month is necessary just to keep up with population growth. We continue to fall farther and farther behind.
#4 All across the nation, state and local governments are rapidly cutting jobs. Government jobs used to be considered some of the safest jobs available, but today state and local governments all across America are facing horrific budget crunches. In fact, things have gotten so extreme that some cities are cutting their police forces by up to 50 percent.
#5 U.S. businesses are being absolutely crushed by regulations, and yet the government just keeps piling them on. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is projecting that the food service industry will have to spend an additional 14 million hours every single year just to comply with new federal regulations that mandate that all vending machine operators and chain restaurants must label all products that they sell with a calorie count in a location visible to the consumer. These kinds of ridiculous regulations are chasing U.S. businesses out of the country at a blistering pace.
#6 When you combine all forms of taxation, businesses pay more taxes in the United States than just about anywhere else in the world. Some of the biggest corporations have figured out how to get around this, but many other businesses are being absolutely crushed by this. All of this taxation is also chasing businesses out of the country. Now Barack Obama is at it again. He has just proposed an increase in unemployment taxes. This is going to make it even less likely that businesses will want to hire more employees.
#7 Advances in technology mean that less workers are needed today. A robot can do the labor that a hundred workers used to perform. A computer can do the work that a thousand people used to perform. Our society now needs less manual labor than it used to, and that is not going to change. In fact, our society is only going to become more computerized and more automated. That means that the ultra-wealthy do not need as many of us to work for them.
#8 Nations such as China are taking jobs away from us. Tens of thousands of factories and millions of jobs are moving to China. There is a reason why Barack Obama mentioned China four times during his State of the Union address. China now even makes more beer than the United States does. China has been very shrewd. They have invited international corporations to come over and take advantage of their vast population by paying them slave labor wages. The U.S. middle class is being shredded by this. Why should companies pay U.S. workers 10 or 20 times more than they could pay a Chinese worker?
#9 Every single year, the U.S. buys hundreds of billions of dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they buy from us. This is called a trade deficit, and it is killing the U.S. economy. The hundreds of billions of dollars going to the rest of the world could be going to U.S. businesses, and in turn U.S. businesses would need more workers. But instead of fixing our trade balance problem, our politicians continue to insist that “globalism” is going to be really, really “good” for us.
#10 Every single year the U.S. federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars just on interest on the national debt. This is money that we don’t get any economic benefit from. If we were not in so much debt, the U.S. government would be able to spend that money on goods and services inside the United States and that would support a lot more jobs. This is just one of the ways that our horrific national debt is a tremendous drag on our economy.
What you are about to read is perhaps the most heartbreaking story that I have ever come across. It is so tragic that I am not even quite sure how to introduce it. Some time ago, a reader named Ashley sent me an email that described the nightmare that she has been living through over the past year. Ashley’s email was very different from the vast majority of emails I usually receive, and I wrote her back right away and asked her some questions. One of the most important questions I asked was whether or not she really wanted me to share her story with the public. Privacy is such a precious thing, and I wanted her to understand that if I shared her story that thousands upon thousands of people would end up seeing it. After considering what I had to say, Ashley said that she was 100% sure that I should share her story because she felt that it could really help some people.
Sometimes it can be really easy to get lost in the economic numbers and to forget that this economy is really and truly destroying lives. The truth is that there are millions of Americans out there today that are hurting just like Ashley is. Her story is more dramatic than most, but that doesn’t mean that we all don’t know someone that could use our help. We have lost our sense of community in America, and thousands upon thousands of people like Ashley are falling through the cracks.
I cannot even imagine going through the things that Ashley has had to go through over the past year. If you think about it, please say a prayer for her. Also, let this story be an inspiration to all of us to stop being so cold-hearted and to help out those in need that are all around us.
The following is Ashley’s story as told in her own words….
*****
Dear Michael,
My name is Ashley. I live in Upstate New York I have been reading your Economic Collapse blog for the past year. Everything that you have said is true. Our economy is dying, and the economic collapse has destroyed the lives of many, many people. I should know. I am one of them. I lost my house, my car, my feet and my father, all in just seven months.
My father and I had a great life together. He raised me as a single parent. My mother died while giving birth to me. So it was just him and me as I was growing up, and things were wonderful for us, but then everything changed.
In September of 2009, my father was laid off from his job after 26 years. He tried so hard to find another job, but he just couldn’t get one. The economy was too horrible. As a result of the loss of income, he was unable to continue making the mortgage and car payments. Our car was repossessed, and not long after that, the bank foreclosed on us and we lost our house.
We moved into a low rent, hole in the wall apartment and lived off of his savings and his unemployment benefits for the next few months. Finally, in December of 2009, I was lucky enough to get a part time job at a pizza place. It was a really long walk from our apartment, but we needed the money badly. So I took the job.
By mid winter, my old snow boots, which had successfully lasted me through several terrible winters, were beginning to rapidly deteriorate. They had holes all over them and they were splitting at the seams. My feet were soaked and freezing all day long. At that point, we were lucky to have food on the table. We had to watch every penny. We couldn’t afford to get me new boots. So I had to make do with the ones I had. My father worked feverishly to try and repair them. He spent hours supergluing them duct taping them. In addition to that, I doubled up on socks and wore plastic bags inside my boots, but nothing did any good. My feet still got drenched.
One morning, in mid February of 2010, I took the last walk I would ever take on my own two feet. There was a huge blizzard raging outside, but we couldn’t afford to lose a day’s worth of pay. So I ventured out into the blizzard and made the long trudge to work anyway. As usual, my feet were drenched and freezing within minutes of leaving my apartment, but there was no choice but to just stick it out. So I kept going. I finally arrived at work to find the place closed. Nobody had called to tell me. There was nothing to do but turn around and make the long trudge back home. By the time I got home, I knew that something was seriously wrong with my feet. They felt horrible. My father helped me out of my drenched boots and socks and we discovered that my feet were all purple and swollen. They were severely frostbitten.
My father was terrified to take me to the emergency room because that would have bankrupted us. So he did everything he could to try and rewarm my feet at home. He spent the next several days giving me hot chocolate, bundling my feet up in blankets, putting my feet on his stomach, etc. But nothing did any good. My feet didn’t get any better. They just kept getting worse. They eventually turned black and began to ooze. At that point, my father broke down and called a car service to take us to the hospital. The doctors told us that, given the extent of the damage, they would not able to save my feet. The frostbite had progressed too far. I ended up having both of my feet amputated.
For the next whole month, my father didn’t do anything but sob. He sobbed himself to sleep every night. He blamed himself for me losing my feet. I rolled myself into his room on my wheelchair every night and wrapped my arms around him as tight as I could. I told him that it wasn’t his fault and that I didn’t blame him for anything. I told him he was the best father any girl could ever have and that I wouldn’t trade him for anything. I think it helped a little in the moment, but as time went on, he just fell further and further into depression.
On the morning of March 15th, 2010, I was awakened by a knock on the door from a police officer. He told me that my father was dead. I told the officer that was ridiculous and that there had been a mistake, but he insisted that my father was dead and that I should come with him. I went racing into my father’s room as fast as my wheelchair could carry me, but he was gone. There was a note on his bed that he had left for me. In the note, he told me that he loved me dearly. He loved me more than anything, but that he had failed me. He told me that I would be better off without him. At that moment, my heart stopped as I began to realize what must have happened. Horrified, I made my way back to the police officer, and he told me that my father had jumped out the window of our apartment in the middle of the night. I went into shock and begged the police officer to let me see him, but he insisted that I wouldn’t want to see him that way. I started sobbing so hard that the police ended up having to take me to the hospital.
I’ve cried myself to sleep every night since. I’ll never understand how my father could have thought that I’d be better off without him. If only he had known how much I needed him. If it wasn’t for my extremely kind hearted and caring neighbor, I don’t know where I would be right now. She’s such a sweet lady. After I lost my father, she took me in and took care of me as though I were her own family. She has gradually helped nurse me back to health, both physically and mentally.
This is probably going to sound really crazy, but throughout this past year, you have been one of my heroes, Michael. As devastating as the truth of your words may be, it is refreshing that somebody has the good sense and the good judgement to come forward and say them. All the government and the media do is lie to us, every single day. I only wish more people would listen to you and heed your warnings. Feel free to post my story on your blog if you would like. You have my permission to do so. I just ask that you not reveal my full name and my email address. Just use my first name. Perhaps my story will serve some purpose in the way of helping to wake some of these idiots up and getting them to realize that this nightmare is real.
In a shocking new interview, Donald Trump has gone farther than he ever has before in discussing a potential economic collapse in America. Using phrases such as “you’re going to pay $25 for a loaf of bread pretty soon” and “we could end up being another Egypt”, Trump explained to Newsmax that he is incredibly concerned about the direction our economy is headed. Whatever you may think of Donald Trump on a personal level, it is undeniable that he has been extremely successful in business. As one of the most prominent businessmen in America, he is absolutely horrified about what is happening to this nation. In fact, he is so disturbed about the direction that this country is heading that he is seriously considering running for president in 2012. But whether he decides to run in 2012 or not, what Trump is now saying about the U.S. economy should be a huge wake up call for all of us.
Trump says that the U.S. government is broke, that all of our jobs are being shipped overseas, that other nations are heavily taking advantage of us and that the value of the U.S. dollar is being destroyed. The following interview with Trump was originally posted on Newsmax and it is really worth watching….
Now, you may or may not think much of Donald Trump as a politician, but when a businessman of his caliber starts using apocalyptic language to describe where the U.S. economy is headed perhaps we should all pay attention.
The following are 12 key quotes that were pulled out of Trump’s new interview along with some facts and statistics that show that what Trump is saying is really happening.
#1“If oil prices are allowed to inflate and keep inflating, if the dollar keeps going down in value, I think there’s a very distinct possibility that things could get worse.”
Donald Trump is exactly right – we are headed for big trouble if we continue to allow the Federal Reserve to pump hundreds of billions of new dollars into the system. As I have written about previously, all of this new money will give us the illusion of short-term economic growth and it will pump up the stock market, but in the end all of the inflation the new money is gong to cause is going to be very painful. Just look at how rapidly M1 has been skyrocketing over the last couple of years. Is there any way that we are going to be able to avoid paying a very serious price for all of this reckless money printing?….
Already all of this money printing has had a very serious affect on world financial markets. The price of agricultural commodities is skyrocketing and the price of oil has almost reached $100 a barrel once again. The last time that the price of oil soared above $100 a barrel was in the early part of 2008, and we all remember the horrific financial collapse that followed in the fall of 2008.
#2“….you’re going to pay $25 for a loaf of bread pretty soon. Look at what’s happening with our food prices. They’re going through the roof. We could end up being another Egypt. You could have riots in our streets also.”
The price of corn has risen 88 percent over the past year and the price of wheat has soared a whopping 114 percent over the past year. Let’s hope that we don’t have to pay $25 for a loaf of bread in the United States any time soon, but in some areas of the world that is what it now feels like.
Approximately 3 billion people in the world today live on the equivalent of $2 a day or less, and most of that money ends up getting spent on food. When food prices go up 10 or 20 percent in deeply impoverished areas of the globe, suddenly the lives of millions are threatened. The riots that we have seen in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and other nations recently were not entirely caused by rising food prices, but they were certainly a big factor.
#3“I think gold will go up as long as people don’t have confidence in our president and our country. And they don’t have confidence in our president.”
Investors run to gold and other precious metals when they don’t feel secure. We saw that happen a lot in 2010. As confidence in the paper currencies and the financial systems of the world has rapidly diminished, precious metals have become increasingly attractive.
In fact, the price of gold has doubled since the beginning of the economic downturn in 2007. As the global financial situation continues to become more unstable, the demand for precious metals is likely only going to become more intense.
#4“The banks have really let us down. Number one, they did some bad things and caused some bad problems. Number two, if you have something that you want to buy, like a house, they’re generally not there for you.”
Banks were given massive bailouts with the understanding that they would open up the vaults and start lending money to average Americans again.
Well, that has not happened.
In particular, it has become much, much harder to get a mortgage in the United States today. Not that the big banks didn’t need to make changes to their lending practices, but things have gotten so tight now that it is choking the real estate market to death.
#5“I see $3.50 for a gallon of gas for cars, and cars are lined up trying to get it and it’s $3.50. It’s a shame, a ridiculous shame.”
Our lack of a cohesive energy policy is a national disgrace. There is no way in the world that a gallon of gas should be $3.50 a gallon.
The U.S. has massive reserves of oil and natural gas that it should be using. In addition, the lack of progress on developing alternative energy sources in light of our sickening dependence on foreign oil is very puzzling. We should be very far along towards solving our energy problems by this point.
Meanwhile, we keep pouring billions into the pockets of foreign oil barons every single month. Unfortunately, Trump was exactly correct in the interview – if something is not done the price of gas is going to keep going higher.
#6“I think the biggest threat is that our jobs are being stolen by other countries. We’re not going to have any jobs here pretty soon.”
Donal Trump is one of the few prominent leaders that is openly speaking the truth about the predatory economic practices of some of our “trading partners”. Most of our politicians have just kept endlessly promising us that free trade is “good for us” even as tens of thousands of factories and millions upon millions of jobs have been shipped overseas.
Back in 1970, 25 percent of all jobs in the United States were manufacturing jobs. Today, only 9 percent of the jobs in the United States are manufacturing jobs.
Yes, computers and robots have replaced a lot of manual labor today, but technology does not account for most of the decline we have seen in manufacturing.
n 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of all U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented only 11.5 percent. Meanwhile, manufacturing in the “developing world” has absolutely exploded.
#7“We’re like a whipping post for other countries. We are standing there and just being beaten by South Korea, by Mexico, by China, by India.”
Most Americans have absolutely no idea how lopsided many of our “trade agreements” actually are. Other nations openly manipulate their currencies in order to keep their exports dirt cheap and we allow it. Other nations openly subsidize their domestic industries that are directly competing with businesses in the United States and we don’t complain. Other nations make it incredibly difficult for American companies to do business in their countries while we allow foreign corporations to come on in and do pretty much whatever they want here.
Then there are certain nations (such as China) that brazenly rip off trade secrets from foreign corporations time after time after time and never get penalized for it.
Meanwhile, our economy continues to bleed jobs at a staggering pace. The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.
Fortunately, more Americans than ever seem to be waking up and are realizing that globalism is causing many of these problems. A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last year discovered that 69 percent of Americans now believe that free trade agreements have cost America jobs.
#8“All of our jobs are going to China. We’re rebuilding China and other places.”
Most Americans don’t realize that China is literally kicking the crap out of us.
Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.
Every single month we buy about 4 times as much stuff from them as they buy from us. Our trade deficit with China has ballooned to enormous proportions. In fact, the U.S. trade deficit with China during this past August was more than 4,600 times larger than the U.S. trade deficit with China was for the entire year of 1985.
So when Donald Trump says that we are rebuilding China he is not joking around.
Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040 if current trends continue.
Yes, that is how serious things have become.
#9“We are a laughingstock throughout the world.”
Donald Trump has said on several occasions that his friends and business partners in China just laugh and laugh at us. They can’t even believe what they are getting away with.
We have become an incompetent giant that is the butt of all the jokes.
According to Stanford University economics professor Ed Lazear, if the U.S. economy and the Chinese economy continue to grow at current rates, the average Chinese citizen will be wealthier than the average American citizen in just 30 years.
Our formerly great industrial cities are slowly becoming ghost towns. The number of long-term unemployed Americans is at an all-time high. Tens of millions of Americans can’t even survive without government assistance anymore. The number of Americans on food stamps set a new all-time record every single month during 2010, and now well over 43 million Americans are enrolled in the program.
We really have become a joke.
#10“The federal government has no money.”
Unfortunately, our federal government has continued to borrow and spend like there is no tomorrow.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. government will have the biggest budget deficit ever recorded (approximately 1.5 trillion dollars) this year.
Do you have an extra $150,000 to contribute for your share?
By 2015 our national debt will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 trillion dollars.
It is the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world by far, and it is the gift that we are going to pass down to future generations of Americans.
If there are any future generations of Americans.
#11“I hate what is happening to this country.”
We should all hate what is happening to this country. Our economic guts are being ripped out, we are being abused by the rest of the world, America’s infrastructure is being sold off piece by piece, our federal government is drowning in debt, our state governments are drowning in debt and our local governments are drowning in debt.
The only way we can even keep going is to run around to the rest of the world and beg them to keep lending us more money.
The mainstream media keeps proclaiming that we are the greatest economy on earth, but the truth is that we are being transformed into a pathetic loser and our politicians are just standing there with their hands in their pockets letting it happen.
All red-blooded Americans should be horrified by what is happening to this nation. We have been betrayed by corrupt and incompetent leaders. As a nation, we have become fat, lazy and stupid.
Hopefully what Donald Trump and others are saying about a coming economic collapse will serve as a huge wake up call and the sleeping giant will arise once again.
If the sleeping giant does not arise, we are in a massive amount of trouble, because right now the road we are on is leading to the biggest economic collapse the world has ever seen.
If the U.S. dollar is being devalued so rapidly, then why does it sometimes increase in value against other global currencies? Well, it is because everybody is recklessly printing money now. The 6 charts which you are about to see below prove this. The truth is that it is not just the U.S. Federal Reserve which has been printing money like there is no tomorrow. Out of control money printing has also been happening in the UK, in the EU, in Japan, in China and in India. There are times when one particular global currency will fall faster than the others, but the reality is that they are all being rapidly devalued. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for a global economic nightmare.
Mob Robbers And Rampant Looting: Is This The Future Of America?
Are you prepared for what America is going to look like during the next Great Depression? It isn’t going to be pretty. Over the past couple of decades we have gotten hints of what America is going to look like when society breaks down, and those hints have been very frightening.
This first video is a news report about the mob robberies that have taken place in Minnesota recently. What would you do if you were a store clerk in this situation….
Unfortunately, these mob robberies are not just an anomaly. The American people really do seem to be losing it. Over the past couple of years, some almost unbelievable brawls have been breaking out in restaurants and in retail establishments all over the nation.
In addition, who could forget the wild mob scenes that erupted at stores all over America during the most recent Black Friday holiday sales?
Of course we all remember what happened during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. All along the Gulf Coast looting was rampant. Sadly, people were even openly looting stores in front of television news cameras….
This third video contains a compilation of footage from all over the United States over the past few decades. Is this what America is going to look like when the economy breaks down and people are going wild in the streets?….
But don’t think that Americans only act this way in the big cities. The truth is that human decency is breaking down everywhere. This was perfectly illustrated by a recently reported case of horrific child abuse in Oklahoma.
According to CNN, a 9-year-old girl, an 11-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy were actually forced to eat pet food and had suffered burns all over their bodies due to the nightmarish abuse that they had received from the couple that adopted them.
The 15-year-old boy in this case told authorities that at one point he was forced to live in a plastic dog carrier for two months and that all three of the children have had their tongues burned with a hot spoon by their “parents”.
The following is how CNN described some of the abuse that these children were subjected to….
Can you imagine?
As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as “good people”, but is that really true?
In the United States today, the percentage of the population that is in prison is more than ten times higher than it is in Japan.
Part of that is because the U.S. is rapidly becoming a “Big Brother” police state, but we also have to admit that the American people don’t seem to be made of the same “stuff” that they used to.
Something has gone dramatically wrong.
We have lost our way.
Is this country going to be able to handle another Great Depression?
Right now more than 43 million Americans are on food stamps. This is helping keep the population under control. But what is going to happen when the price of food goes up 50 percent and all of these millions of people can’t even feed themselves anymore?
That is a frightening thing to think about.
Most Americans have never known hard times. Most Americans cannot even imagine what deep economic suffering is like.
When the U.S. economy does completely unravel, it is going to blindside most of the population. Many Americans will go completely crazy when they finally realize that the “good times” are gone and are never coming back.
What we are seeing in Wisconsin right now is only a very small foretaste of the kinds of economic protests that we will see in the future. There are tens of millions of Americans that are just not going to quietly accept that their affluence is gone permanently.
Unfortunately, the time to start saying something was years ago. Our economy is being gutted right in front of our eyes and yet most Americans just keep on voting for the globalist politicians that continue to ship our factories, our jobs and our prosperity overseas.
Believe it or not, cities like Detroit, Michigan were once the envy of the world.
In 2011, the rest of the world laughs at Detroit. It has become a global joke.
And you know what?
Hundreds of other communities across the United States are being slowly but surely transformed into new Detroits.
Today, there are many towns across the United States where you can almost reach out and feel the despair. It is almost as if someone has sucked all of the hope right out of the atmosphere.
People are getting desperate. As the economy crumbles crime is only going to increase. In fact, many of our biggest cities have large areas where residents simply do not ever want to venture outside after the sun goes down. Life is getting crazier in America with each passing year.
The America that so many of us so fondly remember is being rapidly destroyed.
So what do you all think? Are mob robbers and rampant looting the future of America? Are people going to go crazy when the economy collapses or are Americans going to be able to handle it fairly well? Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….