New DVDs By Michael Snyder
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 Is the financial system of Europe on the verge of a meltdown? I have always maintained that the next wave of the economic crisis would begin in Europe, and right now the situation in Europe is unraveling at a frightening pace. On Monday, European stocks had their worst day in over six months, and over the past four days we have seen the EUR/USD decline by the most that it has in nearly seven months. Meanwhile, scandals are erupting all over the continent. A political scandal in Spain, a derivatives scandal in Italy and banking scandals all over the eurozone are seriously shaking confidence in the system. If things move much farther in a negative direction, we could be facing a full-blown financial crisis in Europe very rapidly. So watch the financial markets in Europe very carefully. Yes, most Americans tend to ignore Europe because they are convinced that the U.S. is “the center of the universe”, but the truth is that Europe actually has a bigger population than we do, they have a bigger economy then we do, and they have a much larger banking system than we do. The global financial system is more integrated today than it ever has been before, and if there is a major stock market crash in Europe it is going to deeply affect the United States and the rest of the globe as well. So pay close attention to what is going on in Europe, because events over there could spark a chain reaction that would have very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the planet.
As I noted above, European markets started off the week very badly and things have certainly not improved since then. The following is how Zero Hedge summarized what happened on Thursday…
EuroStoxx (Europe’s Dow) closed today -1% for 2013. France, Germany, and Spain are all lower on the year now. Italy, following ENI’s CEO fraud, collapsed almost 3% from the US day-session open, leaving it up less than 1% for the year. Just as we argued, credit markets have been warning that all is not well and today’s afternoon free-fall begins the catch-down.
In addition, the euro has been dropping like a rock all of a sudden. Just check out this chart which shows what happened to the euro on Thursday. It is very rare to see the euro move that dramatically.
So what is causing all of this?
Well, we already know that the economic fundamentals in Europe are absolutely horrible. Unemployment in the eurozone is at a record high, and the unemployment rates in both Greece and Spain are over 26 percent. Those are depression-level numbers.
But up until now there had still been a tremendous amount of confidence in the European financial system. But now that confidence is being shaken by a whole host of scandals.
In recent days, a number of major banking scandals have begun to emerge all over Europe. Just check out this article which summarizes many of them.
One of the worst banking scandals is in Italy. A horrible derivatives scandal has pushed the third largest bank in Italy to the verge of collapse…
Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS.MI), Italy’s third biggest lender, said on Wednesday losses linked to three problematic derivative trades totaled 730 million euros ($988.3 million) as it sought to draw a line under a scandal over risky financial transactions.
There is that word “derivative” that I keep telling people to watch for. Of course this is not the big “derivatives panic” that I have been talking about, but it is an example of how these toxic financial instruments can bring down even the biggest banks. Monte dei Paschi is the oldest bank in the world, and now the only way it is able to survive is with government bailouts.
Another big scandal that is shaking up Europe right now is happening over in Spain. It is being alleged that Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and other members of his party have been receiving illegal cash payments. The following summary of the scandal comes from a recent Bloomberg article…
On Jan. 31, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published copies of what it said were ledgers from secret accounts held by Luis Barcenas, the former treasurer of the ruling People’s Party, which revealed the existence of a party slush fund. The newspaper said 7.5 million euros in corporate donations were channeled into the fund and allegedly doled out from 1997 to 2009 to senior party members, including Rajoy.
That doesn’t sound good at all.
So what is the truth?
Could Rajoy actually be innocent?
Well, at this point most of the population of Spain does not believe that is the case. Just check out the following poll numbers from the Bloomberg article quoted above…
According to the Metroscopia poll, 76 percent of Spaniards don’t believe the People’s Party’s denials of the slush-fund allegations. Even more damning, 58 percent of the party’s supporters think it’s lying. All of the Spanish businessmen with whom I discussed the latest scandal expect it to get worse before it gets better. Their assumption that there are more skeletons in the government’s closet indicates what little trust they have in their leaders.
Meanwhile, the underlying economic fundamentals in Europe just continue to get worse. One of the biggest concerns right now is France. Just check out this excerpt from a recent report by Phoenix Capital Research…
The house of cards that is Europe is close to collapsing as those widely held responsible for solving the Crisis (Prime Ministers, Treasurers and ECB head Mario Draghi) have all been recently implicated in corruption scandals.
Those EU leaders who have yet to be implicated in scandals are not faring much better than their more corrupt counterparts. In France, socialist Prime Minister Francois Hollande, has proven yet again that socialism doesn’t work by chasing after the wealthy and trying to grow France’s public sector… when the public sector already accounts for 56% of French employment.
France was already suffering from a lack of competitiveness. Now that wealthy businesspeople are fleeing the country (meaning investment will dry up), the economy has begun to positively implode.
As the report goes on to mention, over the past few months the economic numbers coming out of France have been absolutely frightful…
Auto sales for 2012 fell 13% from those of 2011. Sales of existing homes outside of Paris fell 20% year over year for the third quarter of 2012. New home sales fell 25%. Even the high-end real estate markets are collapsing with sales for apartments in Paris that cost over €2 million collapsing an incredible 42% in 2012.
Today, the jobless rate in France is at a 15-year high, and industrial production is headed into the toilet. The wealthy are fleeing France in droves because of the recent tax increases, and the nation is absolutely drowning in debt. Even the French jobs minister recently admitted that France is essentially “bankrupt” at this point…
France’s government was plunged into an embarrassing row yesterday after a minister said the country was ‘totally bankrupt’.
Employment secretary Michel Sapin said cuts were needed to put the damaged economy back on track.
‘There is a state but it is a totally bankrupt state,’ he said.
So what does all of this mean?
It means that the crisis in Europe is just beginning. Things are going to be getting a lot worse.
Perhaps that is one reason why corporate insiders are dumping so much stock right now as I noted in my article yesterday entitled “Do Wall Street Insiders Expect Something Really BIG To Happen Very Soon?” There are a whole host of signs that both the United States and Europe are heading for recession, and a lot of financial experts are warning that stocks are way overdue for a “correction”.
For example, Blackstone’s Byron Wien told CNBC the other day that he expects the S&P 500 to drop by 200 points during the first half of 2013.
Seabreeze Partners portfolio manager Doug Kass recently told CNBC that what is happening right now in the financial markets very much reminds him of the stock market crash of 1987…
“I’m getting the ‘summer of 1987 feeling’ in the U.S. equity market,” Kass told CNBC, “which means we’re headed for a sharp fall.”
Toward the end of 2012 and at the very beginning of 2013 we saw markets both in the U.S. and in Europe move up steadily even though the underlying economic fundamentals did not justify such a move.
In many ways, that move up reminded me of the “head fakes” that we have seen prior to many of the largest “market corrections” of the past. Often financial markets are at their most “euphoric” just before a crash hits.
So get ready.
Even if you don’t have a penny in the financial markets, now is the time to prepare for what is ahead.
We all need to learn from what Europe is going through right now. In Greece, formerly middle class citizens are now trampling one another for food. We all need to prepare financially, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically so that we can weather the economic storm that is coming.
Most Americans are accustomed to living paycheck to paycheck and being constantly up to their eyeballs in debt, but that is incredibly foolish. Even in the animal kingdom, animals work hard during the warm months to prepare for the winter months. Even so, we should all be working very hard to prepare during prosperous times so that we will have something stored up for the lean years that are coming.
Unfortunately, if events in Europe are any indication, we may be rapidly running out of time.
 Did you know that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has continually been falling since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Did you know that the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House was more than three times greater than the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during the entire decade of the 1980s? The mainstream media would have us believe that 157,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in January. Based on that news, the Dow broke the 14,000 barrier for the first time since October 2007. But if you actually look at the “non-seasonally adjusted” numbers, the number of Americans with a job actually decreased by 1,446,000 between December and January. But nowhere in the mainstream media did you hear that the U.S. economy lost more than 1.4 million jobs between December and January. It is amazing the things that you can find out when you actually take the time to look at the hard numbers instead of just listening to the media spin. Back in 2007, more than 146 million Americans were employed. Today, only 141.6 million Americans are employed even though our population has grown steadily since then. When the government and the media tell you that we are in a “recovery” and that unemployment is lower than it was a couple of years ago, I encourage you to dig deeper. The truth is that even the government’s own numbers tell us that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed continues to fall and that the U.S. economy is heading into a recession. The Obama administration and the media have been lying to you about unemployment and about the true condition of our economy. After you see the numbers that I have compiled in this article, I think that you will agree with me.
First of all, let’s take a look at the percentage of the civilian labor force that has been employed over the past several years. These numbers come directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As you can see, this is a number that has been steadily falling since 2006…
2006: 63.1
2007: 63.0
2008: 62.2
2009: 59.3
2010: 58.5
2011: 58.4
In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed.
Do the numbers above represent a positive trend or a negative trend?
Even a 2nd grader could answer that question.
So how in the world can the Obama administration and the mainstream media claim that the employment picture is getting better and that we are in a “recovery”?
But most Americans believe what they are told. It is almost as if we are in some kind of a “matrix” where reality is defined by the corporate-controlled propaganda that is relentlessly pumped into our brains.
The only way that the government has been able to show a declining unemployment rate is by dumping massive numbers of Americans into the “not in the labor force” category.
Just check out how the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years…
2006: 77,387,000
2007: 78,743,000
2008: 79,501,000
2009: 81,659,000
2010: 83,941,000
2011: 86,001,000
In January, there were supposedly 89,868,000 Americans that were at least 16 years of age that were not in the labor force.
That number has risen by more than 8 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House, and that is highly unusual, because the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only increased by 2,518,000 during the entire decade of the 1980s.
You sure can get the numbers to look more “favorable” if you pretend that millions upon millions of American workers simply “don’t want a job” any longer. The truth is that if the labor force participation rate was at the same level it was at when Barack Obama was first elected, the official unemployment rate would be well above 10 percent.
But that wouldn’t do at all, would it? 7.9 percent sounds so much nicer.
And of course even if you do have a job that does not mean that you are doing okay.
If you can believe it, in America today 41 percent of all workers make $20,000 a year or less.
To me, that is a mind blowing statistic. It would be incredibly challenging for anyone to live on $20,000 a year, much less try to support a family.
If you live in Washington D.C. or New York City and you have a “good job” working for the establishment, you may not realize it, but there are tens of millions of American families that are really hurting out there. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point, and most of those people actually do have jobs.
For much more on the “working poor” in the United States, please see my previous article entitled “35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind“.
If something is not done, the middle class will continue to disappear and poverty in America will continue to explode.
In a previous article, I noted that during Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.
How bad do things have to get before people realize that we are living through a nightmare?
Sadly, most Americans still have faith in the system.
Most Americans are still convinced that our politicians will somehow find a way to turn things around.
Most Americans will gather around their television sets this weekend and watch the Super Bowl and laugh at all the funny commercials without even thinking about how America is literally falling apart all around them.
But there is one group of Americans that is acutely aware of how bad things have really gotten. Small businesses have traditionally been the primary engine of job growth in this country, but right now small business owners all over the nation are facing a tremendous crisis.
Millions of small businesses are on the verge of extinction, and yet our politicians just continue to pile on more taxes, more rules and more regulations.
A recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of all small business owners in America are “worried about the potential cost of healthcare”, and that an astounding 30 percent of all small business owners in America are not hiring and fear that they will go out of business within the next 12 months.
In a previous article entitled “We Are Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America“, I detailed how small businesses in America are being systematically wiped out. Small businesses are dying all around us, and the number of new small businesses continues to decline.
According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per one thousand Americans breaks down by presidential administration…
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
Is that a good trend or a bad trend?
All of this is so simple that even the family pet should be able to figure it out, and yet most Americans seem oblivious to all of this. They just keep gobbling up the mainstream media propaganda and they just continue to go out and wildly spend money.
It is almost as if we didn’t learn any lessons from 2008.
Even while household spending in Europe has moderated, household spending in the United States continues to soar. Just check out the chart in this article.
And guess what? The infamous “no money down mortgages” are back. If we wait long enough, perhaps “interest only mortgages” will make a comeback as well.
Unfortunately, I am afraid that time is running out. we have been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it is only a matter of time until it bursts.
2008 was just a “hiccup” compared to what is coming. Our politicians and the Federal Reserve were able to keep the house of cards from completely crashing down back then, but they are not going to be able to avert the economic horror show that is rapidly approaching.
I hope that you are getting prepared. Back in 2008, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs, and because many of them did not have any savings, many of them suddenly lost their homes. One of the most important things that you can do to prepare for the coming crisis is to build up an emergency fund. If things suddenly go bad, you don’t want to lose your house and everything that you have always worked for.
In addition, anything that you can do to become more self-sufficient and more independent of the system is a good thing, because the system is failing. The years ahead are going to be much more chaotic than what we are experiencing right now, and when the next crisis strikes you will be very thankful for the time and the energy that you put into preparing.
So what are all of you seeing in your own areas?
Are businesses shutting down?
Are people having a hard time finding good jobs?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
 The mainstream media covered the inauguration of Barack Obama with breathless anticipation on Monday, but should we really be celebrating another four years of Obama? The truth is that the first four years of Obama were an absolute train wreck for the U.S. economy. Over the past four years, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has fallen, median household income has declined by more than $4000, poverty in the U.S. has absolutely exploded and our national debt has ballooned to ridiculous proportions. Of course all of the blame for the nightmarish performance of the economy should not go to Obama alone. Certainly much of what we are experiencing today is the direct result of decades of very foolish decisions by Congress and previous presidential administrations. And of course the Federal Reserve has more influence over the economy than anyone else does. But Barack Obama steadfastly refuses to criticize anything that the Federal Reserve has done and he even nominated Ben Bernanke for another term as Fed Chairman despite his horrific track record of failure, so at a minimum Barack Obama must be considered to be complicit in the Fed’s very foolish policies. Despite what the Obama administration tells us, the U.S. economy has been in decline for a very long time, and that decline has accelerated in many ways over the past four years. Just consider the statistics that I have compiled below. The following are 37 statistics which show how four years of Obama have wrecked the U.S. economy…
1. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.
2. At the beginning of the Obama era, 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.
3. According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
4. The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government each month has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 to more than 128 million today.
5. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.
6. The unemployment rate in the United States is exactly where it was (7.8 percent) when Barack Obama first entered the White House in January 2009.
7. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job. Today, only 58.6 percent of all working age Americans have a job.
8. During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000. That far exceeds any previous four year total.
9. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.
10. The Obama years have been absolutely devastating for small businesses in America. According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
11. Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
12. The economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for the hordes of young people now entering the workforce. Approximately 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed in 2011.
13. According to a report from the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of the jobs that have been created since the end of the recession have been low paying jobs.
14. Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”. Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.
15. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all of the jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.
16. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
17. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
18. The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
19. According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001. That number declined steadily over the course of the next decade and was only at 21.6 percent in 2011.
20. The United States actually has plenty of oil and we should not have to import oil from the Middle East. We need to drill for more oil, but Obama has been very hesitant to do that. Under Bill Clinton, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 58 percent. Under George W. Bush, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 116 percent. Under Barack Obama, the number of drilling permits approved actually decreased by 36 percent.
21. When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.84. Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline is $3.26.
22. Under Barack Obama, the United States has lost more than 300,000 education jobs.
23. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
24. Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 now have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
25. More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as were sold in 2012.
26. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
27. Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president.
28. Today, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.
29. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
30. The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.
31. The Obama administration has been spending money on some of the most insane things imaginable. For example, in 2011 the Obama administration spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
32. U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.
33. The U.S. government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year under Barack Obama.
34. When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent. Today, it is up to 103 percent.
35. During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
36. As I wrote about yesterday, when you break it down the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama’s first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States. Are you ready to contribute your share?
37. If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
But despite all of these numbers, the mainstream media and the left just continue to shower Barack Obama with worship and praise. Newsweek recently heralded Obama’s second term as “The Second Coming“, and at Obama’s pre-inauguration church service Reverand Ronald Braxton openly compared Obama to Moses…
At Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, Braxton reportedly crafted his speech around Obama’s personal political slogan: “Forward!”
Obama, said Braxton, was just like Moses facing the Red Sea: “forward is the only option … The people couldn’t turn around. The only thing that they could do was to go forward.” Obama, said Braxton, would have to overcome all obstacles – like opposition from Republicans, presumably, or the bounds of the Constitution. Braxton continued, “Mr. President, stand on the rock,” citing to Moses standing on Mount Horeb as his people camped outside the land of Israel.
But it wasn’t enough to compare Obama with the founder of Judaism and the prophet of the Bible. Braxton added that Obama’s opponents were like the Biblical enemies of Moses, and that Obama would have to enter the battle because “sometimes enemies insist on doing it the hard way.”
So what do you think the next four years of Obama will bring?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
 Will this be the last normal holiday season that Americans ever experience? To many Americans, such a notion would be absolutely inconceivable. After all, in the affluent areas of the country restaurants and malls are absolutely packed. Beautiful holiday decorations are seemingly everywhere this time of the year and children all over the United States are breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus. Even though poverty is exploding to unprecedented levels, most families will still have mountains of presents under their Christmas trees. Of course a whole lot of those presents were purchased with credit cards, but people don’t like to talk about that. It kind of spoils the illusion. Sadly, the truth is that our entire economy is a giant illusion. The extreme prosperity that we have been enjoying has been fueled by debt, and any future prosperity that we will experience is completely dependent on our ability to go into even more debt. The total amount of debt in our economy is almost 10 times larger than it was just 30 years ago, but we don’t like to think about that too much. Most Americans are way too busy living the good life to be bothered with “doom and gloom”. Well, get ready to say goodbye to normal. As history has shown us, no financial bubble lasts forever, and time is rapidly running out for us.
You know that the hour is late when even mainstream news sources start publishing articles with titles such as this: “Will 2013 Mark the Beginning of American Decline?”
That article appeared on Bloomberg.com the other day, and it was written by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is convinced that a day of reckoning is coming for U.S. government finances, and he seems resigned to the fact that we will not be ready when that day arrives…
“Sooner or later, it will be America’s turn to fall out of favor with investors and to see its own interest rates rise. It is hard to know when that day will come, or precisely what pressures the country will face.
Let me only venture one forecast: We will not be ready.”
Other analysts are far more pessimistic. For example, the following is what Gerald Celente said about the “bond bubble” during a recent interview with King World News…
Eric King: “Gerald, I wanted to take a look at this upcoming issue you have coming out. (In here it says,) ‘Bonds Away! The bond bomb is ready to explode … threatening to make the real estate and dot-com bubbles, and even the Great Recession, look like market corrections.’ Can you talk about that?”
Celente: “Yes. This piece is being penned by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan. And he is convinced that the bond bubble is about to burst. This cannot continue to go on the way it is. Everyone knows that the whole game is rigged, and so is this….”
“The whole game is rigged. It’s ready to go down, and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts believes it’s ‘Bonds Away’ in 2013 as the bond bubble explodes and brings about a financial disaster even worse than the Great Depression.”
Eric King: “He’s saying here it’s a road to financial collapse that we are going to head down when this thing bursts.”
Celente: “It is. Because the whole world is being propped up by these phony bonds and it’s going to collapse. It has to happen. Interest rates are going to start going up, and when they do the bond bubble explodes. You cannot keep interest rates at zero for this amount of time and expect anything other than disaster to follow.”
For much more on all this, you can listen to another excellent interview with Gerald Celente right here.
Our politicians just assume that we will be able to borrow trillions upon trillions of dollars far into the future at super low interest rates, but that is a very dangerous assumption.
As I noted the other day, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 2.534 percent at the end of November. If that number just rose to where it was about a decade earlier we would be in a massive amount of trouble.
Back in the year 2000, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 6.638 percent. If we were at that level today, the U.S. government would be paying out more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.
But our politicians just keep borrowing and spending as if we could do this forever.
From the time that George Washington was inaugurated (1789) to the time that George W. Bush was inaugurated (2001), the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt.
During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt.
How can anyone support this kind of insanity?
You can see an excellent video demonstrating the vastness of our national debt right here. In the end, all of this debt will absolutely destroy the U.S. dollar, our economic system and the bright futures that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.
As if all of that was not enough to be concerned about, there is also the threat that Wall Street could implode at any time. Most Americans have no idea that Wall Street has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world. The “too big to fail” banks are the ringleaders, and the derivatives bubble hangs over our financial system like a “sword of Damocles” that could fall at virtually any moment.
Everything will remain fine as long as the spiral of derivatives that our bankers have constructed remains perfectly balanced. But if something happens and it becomes unbalanced and starts to collapse, the consequences could be unlike anything we have ever seen before.
A recent Zero Hedge article entitled “1000x Systemic Leverage: $600 Trillion In Gross Derivatives ‘Backed’ By $600 Billion In Collateral” detailed how there is barely any collateral backing up the hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives that are out there…
But a bigger question is what is the actual collateral backing this gargantuan market which is about 10 times greater than the world’s combined GDP, because as the “derivative” name implies all this exposure is backed on some dedicated, real assets, somewhere. Luckily, the IMF recently released a discussion note titled “Shadow Banking: Economics and Policy” where quietly hidden in one of the appendices it answers precisely this critical question. The bottom line: $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement! Surely nothing can possibly go wrong with this amount of unprecedented 1000x systemic leverage.
Our entire economy has become a giant pyramid of debt, risk and leverage. At some point there is going to be a giant crash. When that happens, people are going to become very desperate.
When people become very desperate, they often accept “solutions” that they were not willing to consider previously.
We need to learn some lessons from history. This is exactly the kind of thing that happened back in the 1930s.
For example, an elderly woman named Kitty Werthmann is telling audiences what life was like in Austria back in the late 1930s…
“In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates.”
“Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs.”
The Austrian people were really hurting and they were desperate for answers. When Hitler came to them with “solutions”, they were ready to embrace him with open arms…
“We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living.”
“Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back.””Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler.”
“We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.”
Sadly, America is already starting to go down the same path in many ways. If you doubt this, you can read the rest of her account right here.
Right now, things are still relatively good in America. Yes, there are a whole host of economic numbers that look really bad, but what we are experiencing right now is nothing compared to the horrific economic pain that is coming.
When our economy finally crashes, nobody is going to be able to press a button and restore things to how they were previously. We will be told that we have to “adjust” and consider “new solutions” to our “new challenges”. Someday we will look back on the good life that we were enjoying in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and wish that we could go back to those days.
So enjoy the relative peacefulness and prosperity of these times while you still can. A horrific economic collapse is on the way, and once it strikes none of our lives will ever be the same.
 There was a time in America when virtually anyone that wanted a job could go out and get one and the United States boasted the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world. Sadly, those days are long gone. Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job. But now there are millions of Americans in their prime working years that cannot find a job. Millions of others are working low wage jobs or part-time jobs because that is all they can get. The other day I went to a large retail store and I got into a conversation with the lady who was checking me out. She said that she had worked professional jobs all her life, and that she had taken this job to tide her over as she searched for a new job, but now she had been there for two years with no end in sight. I felt really bad for her, because she was obviously a sharp lady with a lot of skills. But this is the new reality. Good paying manufacturing and professional jobs are being replaced by low paying service jobs. We are transitioning from an economy with plenty of good jobs to an economy with plenty of bad jobs. The next stage in our transition will be to an economy where it seems like there are no jobs for anyone. We are witnessing the tragic downfall of the American worker, and it is heartbreaking.
Many of our politicians insist that things are getting better for American workers, but that is simply not true. Just look at the chart below. Back at the start of 2008, the percentage of working age Americans with a job was sitting at about 63 percent. Since then it has fallen below 59 percent and it has stayed there for over 3 years. After every other recession in the post-World War II era the employment-population ratio has always bounced back. That has not happened this time…
If this number was going to recover, it would have done so by now. We are rapidly approaching the next major economic crisis and the percentage of working age Americans with a job is going to go even lower.
And our politicians are certainly not helping matters. Many of the things that they have done are actually going to accelerate the loss of good jobs. For example, as one small business owner recently pointed out, Obamacare is going to force businesses all over the United States to minimize the number of full-time workers they are using and replace them with part-time workers…
Here is what I am doing for the rest of the year — working with every manager in my company so that as of January 1, 2013, none of our employees are working more than 28 hours a week. I think most readers know the reason — we have got to get our company under 50 full time employees or else I am facing a bill from Obamacare in 2014 that will be several times larger than my annual profit. I love my workers. They make me a success. But most of my competitors are small businesses that are exempt from the Obamacare hammer. To compete, I must make sure my company is exempt as well. This means that our 400+ full time employees will have to be less than 50 in 2013, so that when the Feds look at me at the start of 2014, I am exempt. We will have more employees working fewer hours, with more training costs, but the Obamacare bill looks like about $800,000 a year for us, at least, and I am pretty sure the cost of more training will be less than that.
This will be unpopular but tolerable to most of my employees. The vast majority of them are retired and our company is merely an excuse to stay busy, work outdoors, and get a little extra money.
But this is going to be an ENORMOUS change in the rest of the service sector. I have talked to a lot of owners of restaurants and restaurant chains, and the 40-hour work week is a thing of the past in that business. One of my employees said that in Hawaii, it was all the hotel employees could talk about. Many chains are working on mutli-team systems where two teams of people working part-time replace the former group of full-time employees. 2013 is going to see a lot of people (who are not paid very well to begin with) getting their hours and pay cut by 25%. At the same time that they are required, likely for the first time since many are relatively young, to purchase health insurance.
How could we be so foolish?
Unfortunately, this is not something new. Our economy has been replacing good jobs with bad jobs for quite some time. If you can believe it, 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
Will nearly all of us eventually be working in fast food restaurants or stocking shelves at retail giants like Wal-Mart?
Amazingly, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
No wonder our middle class is being absolutely destroyed.
At this point, wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low in America. As millions more good jobs are shipped out of the country, the competition for the remaining jobs will become incredibly fierce and that number will get even lower.
Many Americans that actually do have jobs right now find that they simply don’t make enough to take care of themselves and their families. They are called “the working poor”, and their ranks are growing steadily. Today, about one out of every four workers in the United States brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level.
American households are getting poorer at a time when prices continue to rise. Median household income in America has declined for four years in a row. Overall, it has fallen by over $4000 during that time span.
But have the prices in the stores declined?
Of course not.
No wonder middle class families are feeling more financial stress than ever before. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 85 percent of middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.
The transition from good jobs to bad jobs in our economy has been taking place for a very long time, and it is not going to be reversed overnight. Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs. There are less tickets to the middle class than there used to be, but neither political party seems interested in stopping the flow of good jobs out of the country.
If we keep doing the same things that we have been doing, we will continue to get the same results.
When I was young, I was told that there would always be “good jobs” available for anyone that got a good education and that worked hard.
What a crock of baloney that turned out to be.
According to a paper that was recently released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States qualify as “good jobs” at this point.
In a previous article, I detailed the three criteria that they used to define what a “good job” is….
#1 The job must pay at least $18.50 an hour. According to the authors, that is the equivalent of the median hourly pay for American workers back in 1979 after you adjust for inflation.
#2 The job must provide access to employer-sponsored health insurance, and the employer must pay at least some portion of the cost of that insurance.
#3 The job must provide access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.
More than 75 percent of all jobs in the U.S. today are not “good jobs”, and things are not looking promising for the future.
No wonder so many families are barely surviving these days. Right now, approximately 77 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck at least some of the time. That is a dreadful number.
But if you still do have a job, you should consider yourself to be fortunate.
There are millions upon millions of Americans out there without any job at all.
Did you know that 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed during 2011?
Hordes of fresh college graduates are entering the marketplace each year only to find that the good jobs that they were promised simply are not there.
And now it looks like things are getting even worse. This week Citigroup announced that it plans to eliminate 11,000 jobs in an attempt to reduce costs. But Citigroup is far from alone. We have seen dozens of major layoff announcements since the election. If you doubt this, just see this article and this article.
It is time to wake up and admit that our economy is in an advanced state of decline, that we need to quit shipping our jobs out of the country, and that what we are doing now is clearly not working.
If we are “the greatest economy on earth”, then why are approximately 48 percent of all Americans either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty?
We need to return to the principles that our Founding Fathers founded this country on or else things are going to get a lot worse and people are going to get very, very angry.
Our politicians have been pitting different groups of people against one another and many of them have been blaming the wealthy for all of our problems. Never before in my lifetime have I seen so much anger directed toward those that have money. This anger is even being expressed in ways that you would not normally expect. For example, the California Federation of Teachers recently produced a video that portrays wealthy people peeing on poor people. That shocked me.
Eventually, all of this anger is going to lead to violence if we are not careful. When the next major wave of the economic crisis strikes and unemployment gets significantly worse, I fear for what might happen. I believe that it is very possible that we may see mobs of struggling people storm into wealthy neighborhoods and play “Robin Hood” with their possessions.
Instead of hating one another, we need to return to the principles that once made our economy so great. Those principles would enable everyone to prosper.
Unfortunately, this country continues to turn away from those principles and hate and anger continue to grow.
If we continue down this path, the end result is going to be a complete and total nightmare.
It is possible to turn this economy around. But we can’t do the same things that we have been doing. We have to start making better decisions.
 Can you hear that sound? It is the sound of the air being let out of the economy. Since the election, there has been a massive tsunami of layoffs and business failures. Of course the company that is making the biggest headlines right now is Hostess. On Monday, Hostess will be in a New York bankruptcy courtroom as it begins the process of liquidating itself. Needless to say, Twinkie lovers all over America are horrified. Many are running out to grocery stores and hoarding as many as they can find, and some online sellers are already listing boxes of 10 Twinkies for as much as $10,000 on auction websites such as eBay. Well, there is really no reason to panic. It is very likely that another company will purchase the Twinkie brand and continue to produce them. In fact, it is already being rumored that a Mexican company may have the inside track. But even though the Twinkie may survive, the failure of Hostess is yet another sign of how weak the U.S. economy has become. Approximately 18,500 Hostess workers will be losing their jobs, and even if some of them are rehired by the company that takes over the Twinkie brand, the truth is that those workers will almost certainly be looking at greatly reduced pay and benefits. Sadly, we are seeing this kind of thing happen all over America. Large numbers of once thriving businesses are either shutting down or laying off workers. Overall, the failure of Hostess is not that big of a deal for the U.S. economy. But we may look back someday and remember Hostess as a symbol of the economic problems that were unleashed by the election of 2012. Since November 6th, a wave of pessimism has swept over the economy and we are now seeing some of the worst economic numbers that we have seen in more than a year. Many fear that we may have reached a tipping point and that things are only going to get worse from here.
Sadly, the reality is that Hostess is not the only iconic American company that is in a huge amount of trouble right now. Sears just announced a loss of nearly 500 million dollars in the third quarter. Sears has been bleeding money like this for a couple of years, and if they continue to do so it will just be a matter of time before Sears is headed for liquidation as well.
Can you imagine trying to explain the Sears catalog and Twinkies to future generations in a world where those things no longer exist?
Our world is changing at mind blowing speed, and the pace of change is only going to keep accelerating.
A few days after the election, I wrote an article about the huge number of layoff announcements that we saw after Barack Obama won.
Well, it has gotten even worse since then. The following is a partial list of the layoffs and job losses that have been announced since November 6th…
Abbott Labs 700
Activision 30
Adventist Health 48
Airlines SAS 6000
AMD 400
American Cotton Growers 110
ArcelorMittal 20
American Independence Museum 4
Ameridose 790
American Airlines 4400 + 800 leaving voluntarily
American Coal 54
Atlantic Lottery Corporation 16
Assc Milk Producers 130
Aveo Oncology 45
ATI 172
Bankia 5000
Bechtel Power Corp 277
Bigpoint Games 47
Boston Scientific 1200
Brake Parts LLC 75
Brattleboro Retreat 31
Bristol Myers 500
Career Education 900 + Closing 23 Campuses
Cigna 1300
Citigroup 100
Commerzbank 6000
Consol Energy in W.V. 145
Covidien 595
Crouse Hospital Syracuse NY 70
Cummins 150
CVPH 27
DEP in Tallahassee FL 15
DuPont, Co. 64
Eagle-Tribune, Andover 21
Emanuel Medical Cente 24
Energizer Holdings 1500
Ericsson 1550
Exide Tech, Laureldale 150
City of Findlay, OH 39
First Energy 400
Gameforge Berlin 20
Gamesa Energy 92
GenOn Energy Inc 33
Glen Falls Hospital 29
Groupon 80
GT Advanced Tech 165
Harris’ Broadcast 17
Hawker Beechcraft 400 + Facilities closing
Hill Rom 200
Hills Holdings 300
HMX Group 567
Hostess 627
Iberia Airlines 4500
ICM of Colwich 25
ING 2350
Judson University 21
Juniper Networks 500
Kaiser Permanente 84
Kinetic Concepts 427
Kratos Defense Security 125
Lackawanna County PA 11
Lightyear Network Solutions 12+
Lonza 500
Majestic Star Casino/hotel 80
Major Wind Company 3000
Martha Stewart Living 70
Medtronic 1000
Mills Manufacturing NC 68
Momentive, Inc. 150
Monitor Group 235
Montco Behavioral Health/Dev 58
NBC 500
Nebraska Medical Center 38
Neovia Logistics Services 52
New Energy 40
Ormet 200
Panasonic 10000
PayPal 320
Penn Refrigeration 40
Penske Logistics 50
Pepsi 4000
Philips Electronics 218
Pierce Mfg 325
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne 100
Research in Motion 200
Rheem Manufacturing 50
Sentry Foods 70
Shaw’s Supermarket 700
Shawano foundry WI 90
Smith & Nephew 770
Smithfield Packing Co. 125
Solel Solar Systems 140
Southeastern Container 15
SpaceX 100
SRA Intl Inc 222
St. Jude Medical 300
Stryker 1170
Sulake 60
Sun Media 500
TE Connectivity 620
TECO Coal Corporation 90
Texas Instruments 1700
The Providence Journal Co 23
TMX Group Ltd. 100
Turbocare 220
Turkey Point Nuclear Plant 277
Oce North America, Inc. 135
Turbocare OCE 220
UBS 10000
US Cellular 980
UtahAmerican Energy Inc 102
Volvo Trucks Pulaski County 300
Wake Forest Baptist Medical 950
Welch Allyn 275
West Ridge Mine 102
Westinghouse 50
World Media Enterprises Inc 105
WPS Health Insurance 600
Wright Patterson AFB 115
Wyodak Coal Mine 11
Xerox 2500
Sadly, the list actually keeps going. You can view the remainder of the list right here.
Even companies owned by Obama supporters are laying people off. Just check out this excerpt from a report by CitizenLink…
A corporation whose part owner gave $2 million to a group committed to re-electing President Obama announced this week that it will be forced to lay off more than 1,000 employees in lieu of the financial hardship imposed by the president’s signature health care law.
Overall, more than 100,000 job losses have been announced since the election. It is almost as if the election was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Everyone in the business community that had been hoping for something different now realizes that no change is coming.
Meanwhile, Obama continues to pour on even more rules and regulations. According to CNSNews.com, the Obama administration has posted a total of 6,125 regulations on its reguations.gov website during the past 90 days. Our politicians are clueless and they simply don’t understand what they are doing to the business community.
But of course this goes for politicians from both sides. For decades we have been consuming far more than we produce and spending far more money then we bring in, and most of our politicians seem to be under the delusion that this can continue indefinitely.
The other night my wife had me watch a documentary entitled “The Queen of Versailles” that followed the lives of time share mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie. I found it to be a perfect metaphor for what America is going through right now. David Siegel built the greatest time share empire the world has ever seen on a mountain of easy money and cheap credit. At the beginning of the movie, David and Jackie were living the high life and were constructing the largest house in America down in Florida.
Well, things dramatically changed when the financial crisis of 2008 struck. Suddenly nobody wanted to lend to David’s company and the house of cards started to crumble. But even though they were facing massive financial problems, Jackie found it incredibly difficult to adjust her lifestyle. She just kept spending and spending and spending.
It would be easy to pass judgment on David and Jackie, but the truth is that they are a perfect example of what this entire country is going through. Thousands of businesses are failing, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, millions of jobs are being shipped overseas, our financial system has become a gigantic casino and we keep piling even more mountains of debt on top of the mountains of debt that we already have. We have been living way above our means for so long that we don’t even have any concept of what “normal” is anymore.
If you have not seen “The Queen of Versailles” yet, I encourage you to do so. Don’t watch it to laugh at the downfall of David and Jackie Siegel. They are just trying to make their way in this world like all of us are. Rather, watch for parallels between their lives and what the United States is experiencing as a whole. As I mentioned earlier, I found their story to be a perfect metaphor for what is happening to this entire country. You can find the trailer for “The Queen of Versailles” right here.
As the economy falls apart, it is going to be really easy to point fingers at one another and blame one another. But what will really be needed is more love and compassion. A lot of workers at Hostess and a lot of other good companies just lost their jobs. The unemployment epidemic in this country is going to get a lot worse. These people are going to need our love and support.
In the end, we are all in this together. The coming economic storm is not going to be averted, but we can choose how we respond to it. Hopefully the crisis that is coming will bring out the best in many of us.
 The future of the United States of America is being systematically destroyed by our politicians, but unfortunately most Americans don’t really grasp exactly what is happening. 30 years ago, our national debt had just crossed the one trillion dollar mark. Just recently, it crossed the 16 trillion dollar mark. Prior to every election, politicians from both parties swear up and down that they will do something about our exploding debt, but it never happens. Once again this year, our politicians are making all kinds of grand promises about getting U.S. government finances under control. But they are also promising all kinds of new plans and programs which are going to cost a lot more money on top of what we are already spending. For the average American, all of this can be incredibly confusing. That is why I have put together a list of facts about the debt and U.S. government finances below. These are things that every voter should know. The federal government is stealing more than a trillion dollars a year from our children and our grandchildren, and they are spending that money in some of the most foolish ways that you could ever imagine. We have accumulated the largest mountain of debt in the history of the world, but our politicians just can’t help themselves – they appear to be absolutely addicted to spending money. If we continue on the path that we are currently on, our entire financial system and our entire economy will be destroyed by all of this debt. Time is running out and urgent action is needed to address this crisis.
Many of our founding fathers attempted to warn us about the dangers of government debt. For example, Thomas Jefferson once said the following…
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.
Where would we be today if such an amendment had been added to our Constitution?
How much brighter would our future be if the federal government had been forced to only spend what it took in all these years?
Those are very good questions.
The following are 55 facts about the debt and U.S. government finances that every American voter should know….
#1 While Barack Obama has been president, the U.S. government has spent about 11 dollars for every 7 dollars of revenue that it has actually brought in.
#2 During the fiscal year that just ended, the U.S. government took in 2.449 trillion dollars but it spent 3.538 trillion dollars.
#3 During fiscal year 2011, over a trillion dollars of government money was spent on 83 different welfare programs, and those numbers do not even include Social Security or Medicare.
#4 Over the past four years, welfare spending has increased by 32 percent. In inflation-adjusted dollars, spending on those programs has risen by 378 percent over the past 30 years. At this point, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. Once again, these figures do not even include Social Security or Medicare.
#5 Over the past year, the number of Americans getting a free cell phone from the federal government has grown by 43 percent. Now more than 16 million Americans are enjoying what has come to be known as an “Obamaphone”.
#6 When Barack Obama first entered the White House, about 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Now, nearly 47 million Americans are on food stamps. And this has happened during what Obama refers to as “an economic recovery”.
#7 The U.S. government recently spent 27 million dollars on pottery classes in Morocco.
#8 The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently spent $300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar at a time when more families than ever are having a really hard time just trying to put any food on the table at all.
#9 During 2012, the National Science Foundation spent $516,000 to support the creation of a video game called “Prom Week”, which apparently simulates “all the social interactions of the event.”
#10 The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the largest snack food maker in the world (PepsiCo Inc.) a total of 1.3 million dollars in corporate welfare that was used to help build “a Greek yogurt factory in New York.”
#11 The National Science Foundation recently gave researchers at Purdue University $350,000. They used part of that money to help fund a study that discovered that if golfers imagine that a hole is bigger it will help them with their putting.
#12 If you can believe it, $10,000 from the federal government was actually used to purchase talking urinal cakes up in Michigan.
#13 The National Science Foundation recently gave a whopping $697,177 to a New York City-based theater company to produce a musical about climate change.
#14 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $666,905 to a group of researchers that is studying the benefits of watching reruns on television.
#15 The National Science Foundation has given 1.2 million dollars to a team of “scientists” that is spending part of that money on a study that is seeking to determine whether elderly Americans would benefit from playing World of Warcraft or not.
#16 The National Institutes of Health recently gave $548,731 to a team of researchers that concluded that those that drink heavily in their thirties also tend to feel more immature.
#17 The National Science Foundation recently spent $30,000 on a study to determine if “gaydar” actually exists. This is the conclusion that the researchers reached at the end of the study….
“Gaydar is indeed real and… its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features”
#18 Back in 2011, the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
#19 The U.S. government spends more on the military than China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined. In fact, the United States accounts for 41.0% of all military spending on the planet. China is next with only 8.2%.
#20 In a previous article, I noted that close to 500,000 federal employees now make at least $100,000 a year.
#21 In 2006, only 12 percent of all federal workers made $100,000 or more per year. Now, approximately 22 percent of all federal workers do.
#22 If you can believe it, there are 77,000 federal workers that make more than the governors of their own states do.
#23 During 2010, the average federal employee in the Washington D.C. area received total compensation worth more than $126,000.
#24 The U.S. Department of Defense had just nine civilians earning $170,000 or more back in 2005. When Barack Obama became president, the U.S. Department of Defense had 214 civilians earning $170,000 or more. By June 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense had 994 civilians earning $170,000 or more.
#25 During 2010, compensation for federal employees came to a grand total of approximately 447 billion dollars.
#26 If you can believe it, close to 15,000 retired federal employees are currently collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. That list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.
#27 During 2010, the federal government spent $33,387 on the hair care needs of U.S. Senators.
#28 During 2010, U.S. Senators pulled $72,370 out of the “Senate Restaurant Fund”.
#29 During 2010, an average of $4,005,900 of U.S. taxpayer money was spent on “personal” and “office” expenses per Senator.
#30 In 2013, 3.7 million dollars will be spent to support the lavish lifestyles of former presidents such as George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
#31 During 2011, the federal government spent a total of 1.4 BILLION dollars just on the Obamas.
#32 When you combine all federal government spending, all state government spending and all local government spending, it comes to approximately 41 percent of U.S. GDP. But don’t worry, all of our politicians insist that this is not socialism.
#33 As I have written about previously, less than 30 percent of all Americans lived in a home where at least one person received financial assistance from the federal government back in 1983. Today, that number is sitting at an all-time high of 49 percent.
#34 Back in 1990, the federal government accounted for just 32 percent of all health care spending in America. This year, it is being projected that the federal government will account for more than 50 percent of all health care spending in the United States.
#35 The number of Americans on Medicaid soared from 34 million in 2000 to 54 million in 2011, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#36 In one of my previous articles, I discussed how it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
#37 If you can believe it, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
#38 In the United States today, more than 61 million Americans receive some form of Social Security benefits. By 2035, that number is projected to soar to a whopping 91 million.
#39 Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
#40 When Barack Obama first took office, the U.S. national debt was about 10.6 trillion dollars. Now it is about 16.2 trillion dollars. That is an increase of 5.6 trillion dollars in less than 4 years.
#41 The federal government has now run a budget deficit of more than a trillion dollars for four years in a row.
#42 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
#43 If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
#44 Some suggest that “taxing the rich” is the answer. Well, if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
#45 If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for 2011 would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.
#46 The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does.
#47 At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.
#48 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.
#49 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.
#50 The U.S. national debt is now more than 37 times larger than it was when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard.
#51 The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.
#52 The U.S. national debt jumped more on the very first day of fiscal year 2013 than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined.
#53 Historically, the interest rate on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has averaged 6.68 percent. If the average interest rate on U.S. government debt rose to that level today, the U.S. government would find itself spending more than a trillion dollars per year just on interest on the national debt.
#54 A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.
#55 Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is warning that the U.S. government is facing a gigantic tsunami of unfunded liabilities in the coming years that we are counting on our children and our grandchildren to pay. Kotlikoff speaks of a “fiscal gap” which he defines as “the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue”. His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.
Please share this article with as many people as you can. Time is running out to fix these problems.
 When it comes to explaining the problems with our economy, one of the hardest things to do is to get people to understand that we are living in an economic fantasy world that is completely and totally unsustainable. As a nation we consume far more than we produce, we spend far more than we bring in, our debt is growing much faster than our GDP is, our entitlement programs are growing at an exponential rate, our retirement system is a Ponzi scheme and the Federal Reserve is printing money as if there is no tomorrow in a desperate attempt to paper over all of our problems. But we have all grown so accustomed to the debt-fueled prosperity that we have been enjoying for so many decades that it actually feels “real” to most of us. Unfortunately, history has shown us that it is simply not possible to grow your debt faster than your economy indefinitely. At some point your consumption will drop back to a level more equal to your production. Sometimes that adjustment can be gradual, but other times it can be extremely painful. In our case, we have been living way above our means for so long that it would take a major economic miracle just to keep our adjustment to an “exceedingly painful” level. We are living in the largest debt-fueled prosperity bubble in the history of the world, and our unsustainable economy is going to crash and burn at some point. Hopefully it will be later rather than sooner, but a crash is most definitely coming.
The following are some of the reasons why the bubble economy that we are living in right now is unsustainable….
The Trade Deficit
Most Americans do not really understand what a “trade deficit” is, but it is at the very core of our economic problems.
Basically, we buy far more stuff from the rest of the world than they buy from us. We send them huge piles of our money, and they send us oil that we burn in our cars and cheap plastic products that we end up throwing away. We keep doing this month after month after month, and this is systematically making us poorer as a nation.
In 2012, it is being projected that our trade deficit will fall somewhere between 500 billion and 600 billion dollars.
At this point, the United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.
Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975.
Instead of going out of the country, those 8 trillion dollars could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers. In turn, taxes would have been paid on those 8 trillion dollars and our debt problems would not be nearly as dramatic today.
But we didn’t do that.
We chose to allow tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth to leave the country.
Stupid move, eh?
But both political parties have been endlessly pushing the “free trade” agenda. They have both promised that it would bring us tremendous prosperity.
Well, just take a look at our formerly great manufacturing cities today. Do they look prosperous to you?
It turns out that Ross Perot was right when he warned about the “giant sucking sound” that would happen if NAFTA was implemented.
When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
That didn’t work out so well, did it?
What about opening up trade with China?
Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little “m”) for the entire year.
In 2011, our trade deficit with China was 295.4 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
Our trade with China is tremendously unbalanced. Today, U.S. consumers spend approximately 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that Chinese consumers spend on goods and services from the United States.
This is a huge reason why shiny new factories are going up all over China, and our blue collar cities are turning into rotting war zones filled with unemployed people.
If you can believe it, the United States has actually lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
Until we fix the trade deficit we are going to continue bleeding factories, jobs and national wealth at an astounding pace.
The National Debt
It is being projected that U.S. GDP will grow at a rate of about 2.2 percent this year.
The problem is that our federal budget deficit will be somewhere around 7 percent of GDP this year.
With each passing day we are losing ground. No other nation on earth has been able to run up debt like this indefinitely, and neither will we.
Does this chart look like a healthy situation to you?….
Sadly, all of this government debt is just about the only thing holding up our economy at this point. Since Barack Obama has been in the White House, the U.S. national debt has increased by about 5.5 trillion dollars. Of course the Obama administration has spent a lot of that money on incredibly stupid stuff, but it still gets into the pockets of average Americans that in turn spend it on food, gas, mortgage payments, etc.
If we could go back in time and suck that 5.5 trillion dollars of extra spending out of the economy we would be in a horrible economic depression right now.
But that does not mean that borrowing and spending all of that money was the right thing to do. We have stolen it from our children and our grandchildren and we are going to stick them with the bill.
That is highly immoral and it is a national disgrace.
Yet we continue to do it because we can’t help ourselves. We are ruining the future of this nation in order to make the present more pleasant for ourselves.
As I noted yesterday, the U.S. national debt jumped more on the very first day of fiscal year 2013 than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined.
We are completely addicted to debt and we can’t stop. We know that we are destroying the future of the United States but we have absolutely no self-discipline.
By the end of Barack Obama’s first term, the U.S. government will have accumulated more debt during those four years than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.
But most Americans seem fine with that.
Most Americans don’t even really know why this is happening, and most don’t really seem too concerned about finding out. They just want the good times to continue to roll.
Sadly, the truth is that our financial system is designed to create government debt. It is one of the primary purposes of the Federal Reserve system.
At this point, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.
So I guess you could say that the Federal Reserve is doing a good job of what it was designed to do.
And until we change the system things are going to continue to get worse until the entire system collapses.
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is warning that we are basically facing financial armageddon if something is not done. Kotlikoff speaks of a “fiscal gap” which he defines as “the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue”. His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the United States is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.
Where in the world are we going to get an extra 222 trillion dollars?
Entitlements
Every society needs a safety net, but we are rapidly getting to the point where there are going to be more Americans on the safety net than there are Americans supporting it.
Back in 1983, less than 30 percent of all Americans lived in a home where at least one person received financial assistance from the federal government.
Today, that number is up to an all-time record of 49 percent.
Many people don’t believe me when I tell them that more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government right now, and that does not even count Social Security or Medicare.
But it is actually true.
Overall, there are nearly 80 different “means-tested welfare programs” that the federal government is currently running.
But of course the biggest financial burdens are Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. All three are on course to become completely and totally unsustainable.
For example, the number of Americans on Medicaid soared from 34 million in 2000 to 54 million in 2011, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
Ouch.
Well, what about Medicare?
Sadly, Medicare is even more frightening.
As I wrote recently, it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
How in the world can we afford that?
At this point, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
Are you ready to contribute your share?
Social Security is in really bad shape as well.
At the moment, approximately 56 million Americans are collecting Social Security benefits.
By 2035, that number is projected to soar to a whopping 91 million.
Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
Where are we going to get that money?
Total Debt
Of course the national debt is not out only debt problem. All over the country there are state and local governments that are on the verge of insolvency. Corporations and financial institutions are leveraged like crazy. And of course consumers have absolutely gorged on debt over the past several decades.
As a result, we are drowning in debt from sea to shining sea.
The good news is that our GDP is more than 12 times larger than it was 40 years ago.
The bad news is that the total amount of debt in our country is more than 30 times larger than it was 40 years ago….
Obviously this is something that cannot go on forever.
We simply cannot keep accumulating debt much faster than our economy is growing.
Nobody knows exactly when the “adjustment” is coming, but it most definitely will arrive at some point.
Money Printing
The Federal Reserve has attempted to monetize many of our economic problems by printing gigantic mountains of money in recent years.
The Federal Reserve is at the very heart of our economic problems, but most Americans don’t realize this. It was the Federal Reserve that created the conditions for the housing bubble, and it was the Federal Reserve that badly mismanaged the response when that bubble burst. The Federal Reserve decides how much money will be printed and what our interest rates will be. The Federal Reserve lends out trillions of dollars to the banks that they like, and other banks they let die. The Federal Reserve picks winners and losers in our economy, and most of the time that means good things for the big Wall Street banks and bad things for the rest of us.
In a desperate attempt to keep our unsustainable financial system from collapsing, the Federal Reserve has decided to start printing unprecedented amounts of money. Just look at what this has done to the monetary base….
And QE3 really hasn’t even started to kick in yet.
So how bad will that chart look after QE3 has been adding another 40 billion dollars a month to the financial system for a while?
You know, the Weimar Republic was absolutely convinced that they were doing the right thing by printing lots of money too.
But in the end that didn’t work out very well for them at all….
So should we really be celebrating the fact that the Federal Reserve is going down the same path that the Weimar Republic did?
Demonocracy has released a great new graphic that does a wonderful job of illustrating just how huge the amounts of money involved in QE3 are going to be. If you have not seen it yet, you can view the graphic right here.
The rest of the world is watching the games that we are playing with our currency. Right now we think that we are getting away with it, but what we are doing is not sustainable. At some point the rest of the world will totally lose confidence in the U.S. dollar, and when that happens the U.S. dollar could easily lose its status as the primary reserve currency of the world.
If that were to happen the coming shift in our standard of living would happen much more rapidly.
Please share this article with as many people as you can. We need to wake people up and get them to understand how incredibly vulnerable our financial system really is. We are on a path that is unsustainable any way that you want to look at it, and if something dramatic is not done our economy is going to experience an unprecedented collapse.
So what happens if nothing is done and everything crashes all around us?
Well, I hope that you are prepared because it isn’t going to be pretty.
 The Federal Reserve continues to pump up this “bubble economy” by recklessly printing money and by setting interest rates artificially low, and the U.S. Congress continues to stand aside and allow them to systematically destroy our economy. The U.S. Congress could choose to end this madness at any time, but the truth is that Congress won’t even pass a law that would allow the American people to see what is going on over at the Federal Reserve. Congress has voted down every single bill that would authorize a comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve. So the folks over at the Fed will continue to be able to destroy our future in secret. In fact, back in July Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke actually sent five thank you letters to members of Congress that gave speeches on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives encouraging their fellow lawmakers to vote against the bill to audit the Fed. Since the U.S. Congress continues to refuse to do anything to hold the Federal Reserve accountable, the Fed will continue to print unprecedented amounts of money, it will continue to set interest rates insanely low and it will continue to pump up the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world. Unfortunately, all debt bubbles eventually burst, and when this one does it is going to be a financial nightmare unlike anything we have ever seen before.
It was Politico that first broke the story about the thank you letters that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sent to five members of Congress back in July. Bernanke acknowledged in the letters that there was never any worry that the “Audit the Fed” bill would actually get through Congress and be signed into law, but he was still extremely grateful that a number of members of Congress got up and publicly denounced the bill….
In July, the Fed chairman sent letters of gratitude to five Democratic members of Congress after they delivered speeches on the House floor urging fellow lawmakers to reject the “Audit the Fed” bill authored by retiring Texas Republican Ron Paul, the central bank’s chief antagonist.
Their efforts failed to defeat the bill, but they were not in vain, at least in Bernanke’s eyes.
“While the outcome of the vote was not in doubt, your willingness to stand up for the independence of the Federal Reserve is greatly appreciated,” Bernanke wrote in the letters, which were obtained by POLITICO through a Freedom of Information Act request.
So who did Bernanke send those letters to?
According to Politico, the thank you letters were delivered to U.S. Representatives Barney Frank, Elijah Cummings, Melvin Watt, Carolyn Maloney and Steny Hoyer.
By refusing to take action against the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Congress is silently endorsing their incredibly foolish policies.
Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize that the Federal Reserve has more control over our economy than anyone else does. Most Americans that are actually concerned about politics are busy arguing over whether Obama or Romney will be better for the economy when it is actually the Fed that controls the levers of economic power.
Just think about it.
The Federal Reserve played a major role in creating the housing bubble which severely damaged our financial system a few years ago.
As the chart below shows, after 9/11 the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to historically low levels. This allowed potential home buyers to get into much larger mortgages, and the big banks (which the Fed supposedly “regulates”) started making home loans to almost anyone with a pulse.
When interest rates started to go back up to normal levels in 2005, many home owners discovered that their adjustable rate mortgages started to become much more painful. By 2007, we started to see a massive wave of mortgage defaults. In 2008, the financial system crashed.
In response to the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to record low levels. The effective federal funds rate is essentially at zero at this point, and the Fed has promised to keep interest rates at ultra-low levels all of the way into 2015.
But didn’t artificially low interest rates cause many of our problems in the first place? The central planners over at the Fed are convinced that this is the right course for our economy, but can we really live in a zero interest rate bubble indefinitely? Won’t this eventually cause even greater problems?….
The Fed is also destroying our economy by recklessly printing money.
Once upon a time, the U.S. monetary base rose at a very steady pace. But since the financial crisis of 2008, Ben Bernanke has been flooding the financial system with money and this has caused an unprecedented explosion in our money supply.
It isn’t too hard to see from this chart what the foolish “quantitative easing” policies of the Federal Reserve have done to our monetary base….
Fortunately a lot of the money from previous rounds of quantitative easing is being stashed by the big banks as “excess reserves” with the Federal Reserve, but when that money starts flowing into the “real economy” (and it will at some point), we are going to have a major problem on our hands.
But more than tripling our monetary base was not enough for Bernanke. He recently announced yet another round of quantitative easing which he says will last indefinitely.
Basically, Bernanke is taking a sledgehammer to the U.S. dollar. Our currency is being systematically destroyed, and the U.S. Congress is standing by and doing nothing.
For a lot more on why QE3 is going to be so incredibly destructive for our economy, please see the following five articles….
-“QE3: Helicopter Ben Bernanke Unleashes An All-Out Attack On The U.S. Dollar”
-“How QE3 Will Make The Wealthy Even Wealthier While Causing Living Standards To Fall For The Rest Of Us”
-“The Federal Reserve Is Systematically Destroying Social Security And The Retirement Plans Of Millions Of Americans”
-“QE4? The Big Wall Street Banks Are Already Complaining That QE3 Is Not Enough”
-“Quantitative Easing Did Not Work For The Weimar Republic Either”
The Federal Reserve seems to think that printing more money is always the solution to whatever economic problems we are having.
But of course the Fed has been debasing our currency from the very beginning. The entire Federal Reserve system is designed to create inflation.
From the time that the Federal Reserve was created back in 1913, the purchasing power of a U.S. dollar has declined from $1.00 to only about 4 pennies today.
And now Bernanke seems bound and determined to wipe out those last 4 pennies.
The Federal Reserve system was also designed to create a never ending spiral of government debt.
Sadly, most Americans simply have no idea where money comes from. Most Americans have no idea that money that the Federal Reserve zaps into existence out of thin air is loaned to the U.S. government at interest. Most Americans have no idea that the primary reason why we are 16 trillion dollars in debt is because this is what the system was designed to do to us.
Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created in 1913. This did not happen by accident….
Not that our politicians should be off the hook for this. They have been spending money as if there is no tomorrow. Most of them have shown no concern at all about the legacy of debt that they are passing on to future generations of Americans.
If our politicians had been more responsible, the national debt would still be there, but it would be at a much more manageable level.
If we ever want to totally get rid of our national debt, the Federal Reserve must be abolished.
There is no other way.
And government debt is not the only bubble that the Federal Reserve has pumped up.
The following is a chart that shows the growth of all forms of debt (government, business, consumer, etc.) in the United States. The total amount of debt in the United States has grown from less than $2 trillion to more than $55 trillion over the past 40 years….
How in the world could we have been so foolish?
How in the world did we allow the total amount of debt in our country to get more than 27 times larger over the past 40 years?
As you can see, there was a slight “hiccup” in the bubble as a result of the financial crisis of 2008, but now it has started growing again.
At this point our entire financial system is based on debt, and if the debt bubble does not continue to expand the entire thing will collapse.
But no financial bubble grows forever. History has proven that to us over and over.
At some point this bubble is going to burst.
When it does, we will either experience a deflationary collapse or a hyperinflationary collapse depending on how “the powers that be” respond to what is happening.
History has shown us that financial collapse is often accompanied by social upheaval. Many times it even leads to war.
So what will happen to America when our economic collapse happens?
That is a very good question.
How would you answer it?
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37 Statistics Which Show How Four Years Of Obama Have Wrecked The U.S. Economy
1. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.
2. At the beginning of the Obama era, 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.
3. According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
4. The number of Americans receiving money directly from the federal government each month has grown from 94 million in the year 2000 to more than 128 million today.
5. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point.
6. The unemployment rate in the United States is exactly where it was (7.8 percent) when Barack Obama first entered the White House in January 2009.
7. When Barack Obama first entered the White House, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job. Today, only 58.6 percent of all working age Americans have a job.
8. During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000. That far exceeds any previous four year total.
9. During Obama’s first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.
10. The Obama years have been absolutely devastating for small businesses in America. According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
11. Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
12. The economy is not producing nearly enough jobs for the hordes of young people now entering the workforce. Approximately 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed in 2011.
13. According to a report from the National Employment Law Project, 58 percent of the jobs that have been created since the end of the recession have been low paying jobs.
14. Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”. Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.
15. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, only 24.6 percent of all of the jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.
16. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
17. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
18. The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
19. According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001. That number declined steadily over the course of the next decade and was only at 21.6 percent in 2011.
20. The United States actually has plenty of oil and we should not have to import oil from the Middle East. We need to drill for more oil, but Obama has been very hesitant to do that. Under Bill Clinton, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 58 percent. Under George W. Bush, the number of drilling permits approved rose by 116 percent. Under Barack Obama, the number of drilling permits approved actually decreased by 36 percent.
21. When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $1.84. Today, the average price of a gallon of gasoline is $3.26.
22. Under Barack Obama, the United States has lost more than 300,000 education jobs.
23. For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
24. Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 now have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
25. More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as were sold in 2012.
26. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
27. Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president.
28. Today, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.
29. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
30. The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.
31. The Obama administration has been spending money on some of the most insane things imaginable. For example, in 2011 the Obama administration spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
32. U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.
33. The U.S. government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year under Barack Obama.
34. When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent. Today, it is up to 103 percent.
35. During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
36. As I wrote about yesterday, when you break it down the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama’s first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States. Are you ready to contribute your share?
37. If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
But despite all of these numbers, the mainstream media and the left just continue to shower Barack Obama with worship and praise. Newsweek recently heralded Obama’s second term as “The Second Coming“, and at Obama’s pre-inauguration church service Reverand Ronald Braxton openly compared Obama to Moses…
So what do you think the next four years of Obama will bring?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…