New DVDs By Michael Snyder
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 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 beginning of the year has traditionally been a time of optimism when we all look forward to the exciting things that are going to happen over the next 12 months. Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of things about 2013 that we already know are going to stink. Taxes are going to go up, good paying jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be destroyed, the number of Americans living in poverty will continue to soar, our infrastructure will continue to decay, global food supplies will likely continue to dwindle and the U.S. national debt will continue to explode. Our politicians continue to pursue the same policies that got us into this mess, and yet they continue to expect things to magically turn around. But that is not the way that things work in the real world. Bad decisions lead to bad outcomes. Instead of realizing that what we are doing is not working, our “leaders” continue to give us more of the same. As a result, there are going to be a lot of things about 2013 that will not be great. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that everything will be “okay” somehow is not going to help anyone. We’ve got to make people understand exactly what is happening and why it is happening if we ever hope to see real changes.
The following are 16 things about 2013 that are really going to stink…
#1 Taxes Are Going To Go Up
Even if a fiscal cliff deal is reached, some taxes will still go up next year. And if no deal is reached, there will be a whole bunch of different tax increases in 2013.
According to CBS News, these tax increases would be very painful for the middle class…
If lawmakers fail to work out any sort of deal, there will be severe long-term consequences for the economy: According to the Tax Policy Center, going off the “cliff” would affect 88 percent of U.S. taxpayers, with their taxes rising by an average of $3,500 a year; taxes would jump $2,400 on average for families with incomes of $50,000 to $75,000. Because consumers would get less of their paychecks to spend, businesses and jobs would suffer.
#2 The Middle Class Is About To Be Scorched By The Alternative Minimum Tax
Of more immediate concern for the middle class is the Alternative Minimum Tax. Many Americans have never heard of the AMT, but it is truly one of the worst things about our tax code.
If Congress does not act, and right now it does not look promising, millions of middle class households will see a massive increase in their tax bills for 2012.
According to one analysis, households that are forced to pay the AMT will end up paying an extra $3,700 in taxes…
Unless Congress acts by the end of the year, more than 26 million households will for the first time face the AMT, which threatens to tack $3,700, on average, onto taxpayers’ bills for the current tax year. Because those people have never paid the AMT, they have no idea they are in its crosshairs — put there by a broader stalemate over tax policy that has kept Congress from limiting the AMT’s reach.
Do you have an extra $3,700 sitting around to send to Uncle Sam?
If not, you had better contact your representatives in Congress and scream like crazy about passing a fix for the AMT. They have always gotten it done before, but this year there is so much animosity between the Republicans and the Democrats that nothing may end up getting done.
#3 The Economy Will Continue To Get Worse
Despite all of the talk in the mainstream media and from our politicians that our economy is getting better, the truth is that the U.S. economy continued to decline in 2012. If you doubt this, just read the 75 statistics in this article.
And there are a whole host of signs that the economy is starting to slow down even more as we enter 2013. For example, consumer confidence in the United States has experienced its largest two-month drop in over a year, and retail sales during the holiday season turned out to be quite disappointing.
#4 Good Paying Jobs Will Continue To Be Shipped Out Of The United States
Thanks to decades of “free trade agreements”, workers in the United States must directly compete for jobs with hundreds of millions of workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
We continue to see millions of jobs being shipped out of the country and our politicians stand by and do nothing.
Most Americans have no idea how this emerging one world economic system works. The beautiful product that you buy at the big retail store may have been made by someone working in some of the most horrific conditions imaginable.
A 42-year-old woman named Julie Keith recently found this letter inside a box of Halloween decorations that had been made in China…
“If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.
People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month).
People who work here, suffer punishment 1-3 years averagely, but without Court Sentence (unlaw punishment). Many of them are Falun Gong practitioners, who are totally innocent people only because they have different believe to CCPG. They often suffer more punishment than others.”
But both political parties continue to tell us how wonderful it is that we are trading with communist China. They see no problem with the fact that good paying jobs that used to be performed in America are now being performed by slave laborers on the other side of the planet. And most Americans continue to support this system by filling their shopping carts with lots of stuff that has “made in China” stamped on it.
#5 Small Businesses Will Continue To Be Destroyed
At the same time, small businesses all over America are being strangled to death by taxes and regulations. Just consider the following numbers from a previous article…
We are told that the economy is supposed to be “recovering”, but the number of “startup jobs” at new businesses has fallen for five years in a row. According to an analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data performed by economist Tim Kane, there were almost 12 startup jobs per 1000 Americans back in the year 2006. By 2011, that figure had fallen to less than 8 startup jobs per 1000 Americans.
How is our economy ever going to thrive if we keep killing off our small businesses?
#6 Hunger And Poverty Will Continue To Explode To Unprecedented Levels
As the U.S. economy bleeds jobs and loses small businesses, the number of Americans living in poverty continues to explode.
Here are some numbers to show to people who still don’t understand how desperate the situation is…
-Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
-According to U.S. Census data, 57 percent of all American children live in a home that is either considered to be “poor” or “low income”.
-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.
#7 The Number Of Americans On Food Stamps Will Continue To Increase
If the economy is recovering, then why does the number of Americans on food stamps continue to soar?
As I wrote about yesterday, about 17 million Americans were on food stamps back in the year 2000.
Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.
Does anyone want to explain to me how that is a sign that things are getting better?
Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
How much worse do things have to get before people realize that what we are doing is not working?
#8 Millions Of Americans Are About To Lose Their Unemployment Benefits
During this economic crisis, an unprecedented number of American families have been relying on unemployment benefits in order to stay afloat.
Well, if no agreement is reached in Washington D.C., millions of Americans will shortly lose those benefits…
Three million Americans may become unwitting casualties of the political war in Washington over the fiscal cliff.
Since 2008, the federal government has funded extensions of the unemployment insurance offered by states, more than tripling the amount of aid available to the unemployed in some areas. But the program is expensive, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating it would cost $30 billion to extend it through 2013. President Barack Obama wants to extend the benefits for another year, but Congress has already pared back the program, and Republicans insist it represents the kind of largesse Washington can no longer afford.
#9 Our Infrastructure Will Continue To Rot And Decay
The United States once had the most beautiful infrastructure in the entire world. Our highways, bridges, airports, railroads, sewer systems and electrical grids were the envy of the entire planet.
Well, now we don’t even have enough money to repair what we already have, so our infrastructure will continue to rot and decay in 2013…
Highways and bridges will need $2.5 trillion in upgrades if they are to survive for another 50 years — a must-do to keep commerce thriving. And that figure doesn’t even take into account the airports, railroads, subways, sewage-treatment plants, waterworks, levees, electric grids, pipelines, and all of those other expensive systems that people ignore until they break down.
#10 Many Of Our Major Cities Will Continue To Be Transformed Into Festering Hellholes
A lot of our major cities are also rapidly degenerating. Detroit is one of my favorite examples, but the same kinds of things could be said about dozens of other major cities all over the country. The following is a brief excerpt from one of my recent articles…
If you can believe it, more than 50 percent of all children in Detroit are living in poverty, and close to 50 percent of all adults living in the city are functionally illiterate. The high school graduation rate in Detroit is down to about 25 percent, and the city has become a breeding ground for gangs and violence. The number of murders in Detroit is already higher than last year, and recently groups of young men toting AK-47s have been running around robbing gas stations. How much worse can things possibly get for Detroit?
#11 State And Local Governments Will Find Ways To Squeeze Even More Money Out Of Us
In case you haven’t noticed, state and local governments all over the country are bleeding cash and are desperate for money. In 2013 you can expect them to continue to find more ways to squeeze even more money out of all of us. Here is one example…
Over the course of 2013, the District government will add 134 traffic cameras to its network, more than doubling the size of a system that generated $85 million in revenues for the city in its last fiscal year.
Police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump told The Washington Examiner that the city will intensify its camera-based efforts to cite motorists for speeding and stoplight violations while also adding cameras to detect other moving violations.
#12 Drug Cartels Will Continue To Easily Cross Our Borders And Terrorize Our Citizens
The federal government continues to refuse to protect our borders, and that means that drug runners and gang members will continue to pour into the United States.
Down in the Southwest, many ranchers are being absolutely terrorized by these criminals. The following is from a recent NBC News article…
Just before nightfall, 73-year-old rancher Jim Chilton hikes quickly up and down the hills on his rugged cattle-grazing land south of Tucson, escorting two U.S. Border Patrol agents.
He wants to show them the disturbing discovery he made earlier in the day: a drug-smugglers’ camp on his private property. Stacked together under a stand of trees are blankets, jackets, food, water, binoculars and bales of marijuana from Mexico wrapped in burlap. The smugglers, themselves, are nowhere in sight and are believed to have fled the area, which is about 10 miles north of the Mexican border.
Chilton has had his house burglarized a couple of times and his family regularly encounters groups of armed drug smugglers coming across from Mexico…
Their cattle fences are frequently cut and paths heading north from Mexico cross their property. Beckham says a smuggler even fired shots at him while he walked his land with a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Several illegal border crossers have also approached his house at night–one even reaching his hand into their bathroom window.
“Several years ago, one of my children was taking a shower and had a gentleman reach into the shower while he was in there, and he came out screaming, absolutely refusing to take a shower for the next couple months.”
But even if you don’t live along the border, all of this still affects you. According to government figures, Mexican drug cartels are actively operating in more than 1,200 U.S. cities right now. They are probably hard at work in the community where you live.
So what is the Obama administration doing to fix the problem?
Not much.
In fact, the Obama administration is actually encouraging people to come to the U.S. and become dependent on the system. If you can believe it, there is actually a website run by the Department of Homeland Security that teaches immigrants how to apply for welfare benefits once they get into the United States.
#13 Social Decay Will Continue To Accelerate
All over America we are seeing signs of social breakdown. Here is yet another example…
A woman sleeping on a street bench outside a drug store was doused with an accelerant and set on fire early Thursday morning in Van Nuys.
Witnesses told police that a man poured liquid — possibly a beverage containing alcohol — on the sleeping woman at about 1 a.m. outside a Walgreens store near Van Nuys Boulevard and Sherman Way. He lit a match and ran from the location, witnesses told police.
Who would just run up and set a woman on fire?
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. For many more examples like this, please see this article: “20 Shocking Examples Of How Sadistic And Cruel People Have Become“.
We need to admit that we have a major problem on our hands. Violent crime in the United States increased by 18 percent in 2011, and another huge increase is expected when the numbers for 2012 come out.
America is changing, and not for the better.
#14 Global Food Supplies Will Continue To Dwindle
Did you know that for six of the last eleven years the world has consumed more food than it has produced?
As a result, global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.
So what is going to happen if the world continues to eat more food than it makes?
Let us hope that there is not another major drought in 2013. If there is, we could be looking at a very serious food crunch.
#15 Wall Street Will Continue To Resemble A Giant Casino
Our financial system seems to have not learned any lessons from the financial crash of 2008.
Instead of admitting their mistakes, they just continue to engage in even more reckless behavior.
Today, there are four major U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.
At some point that house of cards is going to collapse and we will be facing a derivatives crisis of unprecedented magnitude.
Will it be in 2013?
#16 The U.S. National Debt Will Cross The 17 Trillion Dollar Mark
In 2013, our national debt will blow past the 17 trillion dollar mark and start heading toward 18 trillion dollars.
How stupid can we possibly be?
During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. national debt has grown by about as much as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.
It really takes something to match more than 200 years of debt accumulation in less than four years.
But our politicians don’t seem to care about all of this debt. They will continue to steal more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day. That is beyond criminal, and yet the American people don’t seem to care.
What in the world has happened to this country?
Of course not everything about 2013 will be bad. Personally, I am looking forward to an exciting year. I have a new book that will be coming out, and my family is blessed and healthy. I would like to wish all of you a very blessed 2013. Things may be falling apart all around us, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a great year even in the midst of all the chaos.
 America is rapidly becoming a nation of takers. An increasing number of Americans expect the government to take care of them from the cradle to the grave, and they expect the government to dig into the pockets of others in order to pay for it all. This philosophy can be very seductive, but what happens when the number of takers eventually outnumbers the number of producers? In 11 different U.S. states, the number of government dependents exceeds the number of private sector workers. This list of states includes some of the biggest states in the country: California, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Maine, Kentucky, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico and Hawaii. It is interesting to note that seven of those states were won by Barack Obama on election night. In California, there are 139 “takers” for every 100 private sector workers. That is crazy! The American people have become absolutely addicted to government money, and it gets worse with each passing year. If you can believe it, entitlements accounted for 62 percent of all federal spending in fiscal year 2012. It would be one thing if we could afford all of this spending, but unfortunately we simply cannot. We are drowning in debt, and we are stealing more than a hundred million more dollars from future generations with each passing hour. No bank robber in history can match that kind of theft.
Yes, we will always need a safety net. There are many people out there that simply cannot take care of themselves. We certainly don’t want to see anyone sleeping in the streets or starving to death.
But if the number of people jumping on to the safety net continues to grow at the current pace, the net will break and it will not be available for any of us.
For example, the number of Americans on food stamps grew from about 17 million in 2000 to more than 47 million today. It nearly tripled in just 12 years.
What will happen if it nearly triples again over the next 12 years?
The federal government even has a website (benefits.gov) that guides people through the process of figuring out what welfare programs they can take advantage of.
Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different “means-tested welfare programs” and more than 100 million Americans are already enrolled in at least one of those programs.
Yes, I realize that figure is very hard to believe. I had a hard time believing it when I first came across it.
And it is even more shocking when you realize that the figure of 100 million Americans does not even include those who only receive Social Security or Medicare.
Today, there are 56.76 million Americans on Social Security.
To support all of those Americans on Social Security, there are only about 94.75 million full-time private sector workers.
So there are just 1.67 full-time private sector workers to support each American that is on Social Security.
Medicare is also growing like crazy. As I wrote about the other day, the number of Americans on Medicare is expected to grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
How much farther can we push things before the entire system collapses?
In order to support this exploding entitlement system, we need a lot more Americans to be working good paying jobs.
Unfortunately, millions of good paying jobs continue to be shipped overseas and they aren’t coming back.
We are even losing good jobs to our own prisoners. The United States has the largest prison population in the world by far, and the exploitation of that low wage labor pool has become a boom industry in America. Even Microsoft and Boeing are using prison labor now. Just check out this video.
Meanwhile, there are millions upon millions of law-abiding Americans that cannot find jobs and that cannot take care of their families.
So poverty and dependence on the government are absolutely exploding. We have a system that is so messed up that it is hard to even put it into words. The middle class is being viciously shredded, and most Americans just continue to applaud the politicians from both parties that are doing this to us.
Our economy is being gutted at the same time that the welfare state is experiencing unprecedented growth. Instead of giving us real answers, our “leaders” just continue to borrow, spend and print more money. We are about to hit the debt limit again, and the Obama administration is saying that we should just do away with the debt limit permanently.
Most of our politicians don’t seem to understand that they are systematically destroying our economy and the bright futures that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.
But there are some politicians out there that get it. Unfortunately, many of them live in other countries. For example, Canadian MP Pierre Poilievre seems to have a firm grasp on what debt is doing to the United States. The following are some excerpts from one of his speeches…
“By 2020, the US Government will be spending more annually on debt interest than the total combined military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel.”
“Through government spending the indulgence of one is the burden of another; through government borrowing, the excess of one generation becomes the yoke of the next; through international bailouts, one nation’s extravagance becomes another nation’s debt”
“Everyone takes, nobody makes, work doesn’t pay, indulgence doesn’t cost, money is free, and money is worthless.”
You can see his entire speech right here.
And if we continue down this path it is most definitely true that our money will eventually become worthless at some point. Just today I was down at the grocery store, and a can of chili that I was able to get on sale for 75 cents a couple of years ago now has a “sale price” of $1.69. If the Federal Reserve keeps recklessly printing dollars, eventually we will be fortunate to get a can of chili for 10 bucks. Things cost too much already, and the Fed seems absolutely determined to cut the legs out from under the U.S. dollar.
Unfortunately, printing money is the only way that we are going to be able to service the gigantic amounts of debt that we are accumulating.
According to Chris Cox and Bill Archer, two men who served on Bill Clinton’s Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, there is no way in the world that we could raise taxes high enough to pay for all of the obligations that we are currently taking on. They say that even if we taxed all corporations and all individuals at a 100% tax rate on all income over $66,193, “it wouldn’t be nearly enough to fund the over $8 trillion per year in the growth of U.S. liabilities.”
Are you starting to get an idea of how much trouble we are in?
We don’t have enough money to pay for all of this.
We are broke.
Our current economy is a debt-induced illusion, and we will soon be waking up to a tremendous amount of pain.
Are you ready?
 What a year 2012 has been! The mainstream media continues to tell us what a “great job” the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class. It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening. If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode. Just “tweaking” things slightly is not going to fix our economy. We need a fundamental change in direction. Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic “adjustment” that America has ever gone through. We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.
The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year. Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones. Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion. So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be “just fine”, just show them these numbers. They are a good summary of the problems that the U.S. economy is currently facing.
The following are 50 economic numbers from 2012 that are almost too crazy to believe…
#1 In December 2008, 31.6 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, a new all-time record of 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps. That number has increased by more than 50 percent over the past four years, and yet the mainstream media still has the gall to insist that “things are getting better”.
#2 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
#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 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all Americans have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives.
#5 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.
#6 Median household income in the U.S. has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
#7 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#8 The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been under 59 percent for 39 months in a row.
#9 In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place.
#10 When you total up all working age Americans that do not have a job in America today, it comes to more than 100 million.
#11 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all small business owners in America “say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.”
#12 The number of jobs at new small businesses continues to decline. According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in 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
#13 The U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011.
#14 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#15 There are four major U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.
#16 In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.
#17 According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are.
#18 The Pew Research Center has also found that 85 percent of all middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.
#19 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.
#20 Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#21 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.
#22 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.
#23 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#24 The average amount of time that an unemployed worker stays out of work in the United States is 40 weeks.
#25 If you can believe it, approximately one out of every four American workers makes 10 dollars an hour or less.
#26 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government. Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.
#27 Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare. Overall, there are almost 80 different “means-tested welfare programs” that the federal government is currently running.
#28 When you account for all government transfer payments and all forms of government employment, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government.
#29 Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million.
#30 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#31 According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.
#32 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.
#33 Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.
#34 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.
#35 At this point, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States are good jobs.
#36 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.
#37 Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.
#38 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#39 One survey of business executives has ranked California as the worst state in America to do business for 8 years in a row.
#40 In the city of Detroit today, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty, and close to 50 percent of all adults are functionally illiterate.
#41 It is being projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.
#42 More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as will be sold in 2012.
#43 If you can believe it, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.
#44 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#45 Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.
#46 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
#47 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
#48 The U.S. tax code is now more than 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long.
#49 According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands.
#50 The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal Reserve was first created.
#51 2012 was the third year in a row that the yield for corn has declined in the United States.
#52 Experts are telling us that global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.
#53 One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.
#54 If you can believe it, one recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.
#55 Medical costs related to obesity in the United States are estimated to be approximately $147 billion a year.
#56 Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.
#57 Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.
#58 The wealthiest 400 families in the United States have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of all Americans combined.
#59 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.
#60 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
#61 Nearly 500,000 federal employees now make at least $100,000 a year.
#62 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.
#63 If you can believe it, there are 77,000 federal workers that make more than the governors of their own states do.
#64 Nearly 15,000 retired federal workers are collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. The list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.
#65 U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.
#66 Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.
#67 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
#68 During fiscal year 2012, 62 percent of the federal budget was spent on entitlements.
#69 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.
#70 It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#71 Medicare is also growing by leaps and bounds. As I wrote about 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.
#72 Thanks to our foolish politicians (including Obama), 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.
#73 Amazingly, the U.S. national debt is now up to 16.3 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
#74 During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about as much debt as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.
#75 Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created back in 1913.
Please share this article with as many people as you can. Time is running out, and we need to wake up as many people as possible.
 Historically, small businesses have been the primary engine of new job creation in the United States. If the economy was getting healthy, we would expect to see the number of jobs at new businesses rise. Instead, we are witnessing just the opposite. We are told that the economy is supposed to be “recovering”, but the number of “startup jobs” at new businesses has fallen for five years in a row. According to an analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data performed by economist Tim Kane, there were almost 12 startup jobs per 1000 Americans back in the year 2006. By 2011, that figure had fallen to less than 8 startup jobs per 1000 Americans. According to Kane, the number of jobs in the United States at businesses that are less than one year old has fallen from 4.1 million in 1994 to 2.5 million in 2010. Overall, the number of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” has fallen by more than 50 percent as a percentage of the population since 1977. The United States was once known as “the land of opportunity”, but now that is fundamentally changing. At this point we truly do have a “crisis of entrepreneurship” in this country, and that is a huge reason why America is in decline. We are witnessing the slow death of the small business in America, and that is incredibly bad news for all of us.
Unfortunately, the problems that small businesses are experiencing right now have been building up for decades. The economic environment for small businesses in America has become incredibly toxic. Sadly, we can see this in the numbers. According to Kane, the following is how the decline in 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
Obviously, we are headed very much in the wrong direction. Kane speculates about why this may be happening in his paper…
There is anecdotal evidence that the U.S. policy environment has become inadvertently hostile to entrepreneurial employment. At the federal level, high taxes and higher uncertainty about taxes are undoubtedly inhibiting entrepreneurship, but to what degree is unknown. The dominant factor may be new regulations on labor. The passage of the Affordable Care Act is creating a sweeping alteration of the regulatory environment that directly changes how employers engage their workforces, and it will be some time until those changes are understood by employers or scholars. Separately, there has been a federal crackdown since 2009 by the Internal Revenue Service on U.S. employers that hire U.S. workers as independent contractors rather than employees, raising the question of mandatory benefits. New firms tend to use part-time and contract staffing rather than full-time employees during the startup stage. According to Labor Department data, the typical American today only takes home 70 percent of compensation as pay, while the rest is absorbed by the spiraling cost of benefits (e.g., health insurance). The dilemma for U.S. policy is that an American entrepreneur has zero tax or regulatory burden when hiring a consultant/contractor who resides abroad. But that same employer is subject to paperwork, taxation, and possible IRS harassment if employing U.S.-based contractors. Finally, there has been a steady barrier erected to entrepreneurs at the local policy level. Brink Lindsey points out in his book Human Capitalism that the rise of occupational licensing is destroying startup opportunities for poor and middle class Americans.
Kane raises some very good points in his analysis. Without a doubt, small businesses in the United States are being taxed into oblivion. If you doubt this, just read this article.
And the regulatory environment for small businesses is more suffocating than it has ever been before. Unfortunately, our politicians never seem to learn that lesson. During his first term, Obama piled on mountains of new regulations, and now that he has won a second term he is preparing to unleash another massive wave of new regulations.
But many times the worst offenders are politicians on the state and local level. There are some areas of the country (such as California) that have created absolutely nightmarish conditions for small businesses. California had the worst “small business failure rate” in the country in 2010. It was 69 percent higher than the national average. And in 2011, the state of California ranked 50th out of all 50 states in new business creation.
Yet the politicians in California just continue to pile on even more regulations and even more taxes.
Sadly, this kind of thing is happening from coast to coast and it is killing off hordes of small businesses. Just consider the following statistics…
-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. economy lost more than 220,000 small businesses during the last recession.
-As a share of the population, the percentage of Americans that are self-employed fell by more than 20 percent between 1991 and 2010.
-As a share of the population, the percentage of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” dropped by a staggering 53 percent between 1977 and 2010.
-The average pay for self-employed Americans declined by $3,721 between 2006 and 2010.
So what needs to be done?
Well, first of all, the tax burden and the regulatory burden on small businesses both need to be greatly reduced.
Secondly, the balance of power in our nation needs to be dramatically shifted. Conservatives run around talking about the need to reduce the power of government and liberals run around talking about the need to reduce the power of corporations, and actually both of them are right.
Our founding fathers intended to establish a Republic where power would never be concentrated in the hands of just a few. That is why they tried to strictly limit the power of the federal government in the U.S. Constitution, and that is why they greatly restricted the size and scope of corporations in early America. For much more on this, please see this article: “Corporatism Is Not Capitalism: 7 Things About The Monolithic Predator Corporations That Dominate Our Economy That Every American Should Know“.
Our founding fathers wanted to empower individual citizens and small businesses. They never intended for us to have a system where big government and big corporations dominate everything and crush the “little guy” at every opportunity.
Even as we witness the death of the small business in America, corporations are absolutely thriving. The following chart shows how corporate profits after tax have exploded to new record highs in recent years…
So has this been good for workers? No, it has not translated into more jobs and higher wages. In fact, wages and salaries as a percentage of GDP are now at an all-time low…
That is why it is imperative that we change “the rules of the game” so that the balance of power is shifted back in the direction of individual citizens and small businesses. We desperately need to turn back to the principles that this nation was founded upon.
If nothing is done, these trends are going to get even worse. Barack Obama certainly has no plans to reduce the size and the power of the government. Since he was elected, an average of 101 new federal employees have been added to the government payroll every single day…
In the 1,420 days since he took the oath of office, the federal government has daily hired on average 101 new employees. Every day. Seven days a week. All 202 weeks. That makes 143,000 more federal workers than when Obama talked forever on that cold day in January of 2009.
And if nothing is done, the monolithic predator corporations that dominate our economy will just get even larger and even more powerful. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands more small businesses will close up shop all over the country.
Unfortunately, most Americans seem totally apathetic about these issues. They seem content to wear “meggings“, watch “Honey Boo Boo” on television and let our government and corporate overlords run everything. Most of them have even been brainwashed into believing that this is the American way of doing things.
So where do we go from here?
Well, this nation will probably continue to keep doing the same things that it has been doing, and it will continue to get the same results.
The death of small business in America is happening right in front of our eyes, and everybody can see it happening, but very few people are doing anything to stop it.
 Did you see the huge crowds of protesters that flooded the Michigan Capitol on Tuesday? They were there to protest two bills there were being considered by the state legislature that would limit the power of unions in the state. Michigan lawmakers approved the bills and this absolutely infuriated the protesters. There is a lot of passion on both sides of this debate, but I am afraid that both sides in this debate are missing the bigger picture. If we keep shipping millions of our jobs to China, there isn’t going to be work for anyone no matter how much power unions have or don’t have. During the month of October, the U.S. trade deficit increased to 42.2 billion dollars. Our trade with China accounted for most of that deficit. Our trade deficit with China in October increased to a new all-time one month record of 29.5 billion dollars. Nearly 30 billion dollars that could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers went to China instead. Since 1975, a total of about 8 trillion dollars that could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers went to the rest of the world instead. Shiny new factories are going up all over China, and meanwhile our once great manufacturing cities are degenerating into desolate wastelands. So what is going to happen when all of the good paying manufacturing jobs are gone? Are we all going to fight bitterly over whether we should unionize the low paying jobs that remain at places such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds? Such an approach is not going to bring back prosperity to America. We desperately need to start building things and start creating real wealth inside this country once again. We desperately need to stop sending tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth out of the country. Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone out there holding protests about our trade deficit. Nobody really seems to care, so our economy will continue to bleed good jobs and the middle class will continue to be destroyed.
The funny thing is that the workers that are out there protesting these union bills actually voted for the politicians that are killing their jobs. Both parties are married to the one world economic system and the “free trade” agenda, and Barack Obama has been one of the worst offenders. He has been pushing for more “free trade agreements” throughout the past four years, and yet union workers continue to support him enthusiastically.
How foolish can they possibly be?
Yeah, let’s merge American workers into a global labor pool with workers in third world countries on the other side of the globe that work in absolutely nightmarish conditions for as little as 45 dollars a month. That sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?
Oh, but you don’t want to work for 45 dollars a month?
You don’t even want to work for 450 dollars a month?
Well, then the big corporations that fund politicians like Obama will just take your jobs and send them halfway around the planet.
Do you think that your unions will save your jobs?
Michigan already has the highest rate of union membership in the Midwest.
It also has the highest rate of unemployment in the Midwest.
Over the past couple of decades, thousands of businesses in Michigan have either closed down or moved facilities overseas.
Did the unions prevent any of that?
No.
If union bosses really wanted to do some good, they would be organizing protests against our incredibly foolish trade policies.
But instead, they tell their members to vote for politicians like Obama and then they run out to the stores and fill their carts with huge piles of products that were made in China.
Union workers need to wake up to one fundamental economic fact – in a one world economic system, the big corporations simply do not need you. They can make their products in lots of other countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
But instead of getting upset about what is really killing their jobs, union workers in Michigan are screaming mad about a couple of new laws that will take some power away from the unions.
That is kind of like being obsessed with a broken fingernail when your leg has just been sawed off and you are gushing blood all over the floor.
Oh, but union workers did put on a good show up in Michigan. The following is how a Bloomberg article described the protests…
Officials spent days gearing up for crowds brought out by the legislature’s sudden action last week to give initial approval to three anti-dues bills, which exclude police and firefighters. At least one helicopter buzzed overhead today, and mounted police surveyed the protesters. Signs reading “Don’t hurt working families” dotted lawns.
The crowd numbered more than 10,000, according to State Police Inspector Gene Adamczyk, with more buses still arriving. The Capitol was closed when it reached its capacity of 2,000.
The anger surrounding these protests was almost palpable. One state representative even declared that “there will be blood”.
Meanwhile, many of those same protesters will buy toys for their kids that were made in China with wrapping paper that was made in China and they will put them under a Christmas tree that was made in China.
Merging our economy with the economy of communist China was one of the stupidest economic moves that we could have ever made. They are systematically taking our wealth, and then we have to go over there and beg them to lend money back to us.
Pretty soon the Chinese economy will dwarf ours. According to the National Intelligence Council, the GDP of Asia will have surpassed the GDP of North America and the GDP of all of Europe combined by 2030.
But if we had never opened up trade with communist China none of this would have ever happened.
Why won’t American workers get upset about this stuff?
Do you really want your standard of living to decline to the level of a Chinese factory worker?
You can see some photos of what life is like for workers in China’s toy factories right here. This is what the future holds for American workers unless something is done.
For much more on how our trade policies are absolutely gutting our economy, please see the statistics in this article: “55 Reasons Why You Should Buy Products That Are Made In America This Holiday Season“.
But no, the big unions will never dare oppose Obama. They love him far too much to do that.
Meanwhile, we continue to bleed good jobs. Large companies have announced the elimination of more than 100,000 jobs since November 6th, and it looks like 2013 is going to be a very difficult year for American workers.
If you are an American worker, you need to ask yourself why anyone would want to hire you in this kind of economic environment. You are 10 to 20 times more expensive than workers on the other side of the globe. In addition, our politicians just keep piling more rules, regulations and taxes on to the backs of the employers in this country. It is more difficult than ever to make a profit from the labor of an American worker.
Honestly, I understand why most small businesses don’t want to hire anyone in this economic environment. It just doesn’t make sense. For much more on this, please see this excellent article by Charles Hugh-Smith.
And there are signs that things are going to get even worse. For example, the NFIB Small Business Outlook survey dropped like a rock during November. That is a very bad sign for hiring.
And another ominous sign for the economy was that the latest trade report showed that imports and exports are both declining. That is usually a signal that a recession is coming. Exports fell faster than imports did, and that is the reason why the trade deficit grew. If imports and exports both fall again next month, it will be time to become extremely concerned. When imports and exports both decline, that is a sign of slowing economic activity.
The United States will always need to trade with other nations, but we need to do it in a way that is balanced and that protects American workers. Right now there is a one way conveyor belt taking businesses, jobs and money out of this country. If we don’t do something about our mammoth trade deficit, we will have no chance of reversing the steady decline of the U.S. economy.
Hopefully we can get the American people to wake up and realize this. Instead, most of the comments at the end of this article will probably be about the pros and cons of unions. That will be yet another sign that most people still don’t get these issues.
 How can the mainstream media claim that the U.S. economy is “improving” when it is painfully obvious to anyone with a brain that the middle class is being absolutely eviscerated? According to numbers that were just released, the number of Americans on food stamps rose by more than 600,000 in a single month to an all-time record high of 47.7 million. Youth unemployment in the U.S. is at a post-World War II high and large companies have announced the elimination of more than 100,000 jobs since Barack Obama won the election. Consumer debt just hit a new record high and the federal government is accumulating debt at a much faster pace than it was at this time last year. So where is the evidence that the economy is getting better? The mainstream media says that the decline of the unemployment rate to “7.7 percent” is evidence that things are improving, but I showed how fraudulent that number is yesterday. The percentage of working age Americans with a job today is exactly where it was back in September 2009 in the midst of the last major economic crisis. The mainstream media is desperate for any shred of evidence that it can use to make people feel good and show that the Obama administration has our economy on the right track, and so they jump on any number that even looks remotely promising and they ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary. They don’t seem to care that poverty is absolutely exploding and that the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by nearly 50 percent while Obama has been in the White House. They don’t seem to care that the U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011. They don’t seem to care that more good paying jobs are being shipped overseas with each passing day. They don’t seem to care that formerly great U.S. cities that were once the envy of the entire globe are now crime-infested hellholes. All they seem to care about is putting out news that makes people feel warm and fuzzy and making sure that Obama looks good. Unfortunately, the truth is that the U.S. economy is steadily getting worse, and 2013 is not looking very promising at all right now. Hopefully at some point the mainstream media will take a break from coverage of the royal pregnancy and the latest celebrity scandals to report on the real problems that we are facing right now.
The following are 15 signs that the economy is rapidly getting worse as we head into 2013…
#1 According to numbers that were just released, the number of Americans on food stamps has risen to a new all-time record of 47.71 million. That is a huge increase of more than 600,000 over the previous reading of 47.10 million. After about a year of slow growth, it looks like the number of Americans on food stamps is starting to skyrocket once again. Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
#2 Youth unemployment in the United States is now at the highest level that we have seen since World War II.
#3 According to Gallup, unemployment in the United States shot up very sharply during the month of November.
#4 It looks like the unemployment numbers are likely to get even worse. Since the election, dozens of large companies have announced major layoffs. Overall, large companies have announced the elimination of more than 100,000 jobs since November 6th.
#5 According to the Wall Street Journal, of the 40 biggest publicly traded corporate spenders, half of them plan to reduce capital expenditures over the coming months.
#6 Small business owners all over America are declaring that Obamacare is going to force them to start replacing full-time workers with part-time workers during 2013.
#7 One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.
#8 A different recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.
#9 62 percent of middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.
#10 Many Americans are trying to make ends meet for their families by going into more debt. Consumer borrowing hit another brand new record high in October. It looks like the American people have not learned from their past mistakes and have decided to roll up consumer debt at a faster pace than ever before.
#11 Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
#12 Wall Street bankers are expecting “the worst bonus season” since 2008. Not a lot of people are going to shed tears over this one, but this is a sign that there is trouble in the financial world.
#13 Food banks all over America are reporting that more needy families than ever before are showing up to get food.
#14 As I wrote about yesterday, the federal government has run a deficit of $292 billion dollars during the first two months of fiscal 2013. That figure is $57 billion higher than it was during the same period last year. Government debt continues to soar wildly out of control and at some point all of that debt is absolutely going to crush us.
#15 I have written previously about how the once great city of Detroit has become a symbol of the downfall of the U.S. economy. Well, now the state of Michigan is laying the groundwork for a “managed bankruptcy” of Detroit. Sadly, many other large U.S. cities will likely follow suit over the next couple of years.
We should truly mourn for what is happening to Detroit. At one time, it was one of the most beautiful cities on earth. But now it is on the cutting edge of America’s economic decline. You can see some amazing before and after pictures of an abandoned Detroit school right here. Sadly, what is happening to Detroit will soon be happening to the rest of the country.
A similar thing is happening over in Europe. Greece is on the cutting edge of Europe’s economic decline, and people over there are becoming very desperate. The following is an excerpt from a Financial Post article about how the Greek middle class is turning to crime as the depression in that nation gets even worse…
In the once stable neighborhood of Kordelio, the unemployed and drug users gather in the parks, scaring away mothers and children, and crimes like chain snatching are on the rise. Many long-time residents have left, moving abroad or to their families’ villages, leaving behind empty houses, said Evangelia Rombou, 58, who has lived in Kordelio for 22 years.
But it is not just Greece that is grappling with these kinds of issues. Now even countries that had been thought to be “stable” are experiencing significant problems. For example, a massive crime wave has broken out in France. The crime wave in France is being blamed on “austerity”, but the government of France still spends far more than it brings in.
So how bad would things get in France if the French government actually did go to a balanced budget?
And how bad would things get in the United States if the federal government was not stealing more than 100 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren?
Even in the midst of our debt-fueled prosperity we are starting to see glimpses of how desperate people will become when our country is someday forced to live within its means. For example, the following is from a report about an incident that happened in Columbus, Ohio the other day…
Columbus Police sprayed Mace on several people in a crowd that had gathered to sign up for a list to get subsidized housing at a northwest Columbus apartment complex.
Police said the crowd started to gather Friday night for the Saturday morning event at The Heritage apartment complex on Gatewood Road near Sunbury Road in northeast Columbus.
Authorities said that its highest number, the crowd reached 2,000 people.
Our entire economy is a giant mirage. Our prosperity has been purchased by stealing from the future. A few people have been warning that we have completely destroyed our future in the process, but both major political parties just continue to do it and the mainstream media just continues to cheer them on.
At some point this con game will end and this economic mirage will disappear. When that happens, millions of people all over this country are going to become very angry and very desperate.
I hope that you have a plan for what you will do when that happens.
 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.
 This is the time of the year when Americans run out to their favorite retail stores and fill up their shopping carts with lots of cheap plastic crap made by workers in foreign countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. By doing this, the American people are actively participating in the destruction of the U.S. economy. You see, buying products that are made in America is not just a matter of national pride. It is a matter of national survival. If we do not support American workers, they are going to continue to see their jobs shipped out of the country. If we do not support American businesses, they are going to continue to die off at a staggering rate. Last year, the United States had a trade deficit with the rest of the world of 558 billion dollars. More than half a trillion dollars that could have gone into the pockets of U.S. workers and U.S. businesses went overseas instead. If that money had stayed in the country, taxes would have been paid on that mountain of cash and our local, state and federal government debt problems would not be as severe. As a result of our massive trade imbalance, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of national wealth. Both major political parties have sold us out on these issues, and we are getting poorer as a nation with each passing day. We desperately need a resurgence of economic patriotism in the United States before it is too late.
Yes, I know that it is very tempting to buy foreign-made products. After all, they are almost always cheaper.
But most people don’t often think about why they are cheaper.
Unfortunately, in the name of “free trade” American workers have been merged into a global labor pool where they have to compete directly for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. This makes employing American workers a tremendous liability.
If a company hires you and pays you 10 to 15 dollars an hour with benefits, how is it going to compete with another company that pays workers a dollar an hour with no benefits on the other side of the planet?
Both major political parties are pushing this emerging “one world economic system“, but it is absolutely killing American jobs. We have already seen a mass exodus of jobs and businesses out of this country, and wages for the jobs that remain in the United States are being forced down because there are hordes of unemployed workers that are willing to take just about any decent job they can find.
It has become painfully obvious that our politicians are not going to do anything to help us on these issues, so what we need is a mass awakening among the American people.
We need to educate people that buying things that are made in America is good for the economy and that buying things that are made elsewhere is bad for the economy.
But for now, most Americans are clueless. They will line up on Black Friday morning and trample one another in a desperate attempt to save a few bucks on cheap plastic devices that were made on the other side of the planet.
And they will pay for much of this “shopping” with credit cards.
Credit card debt is on the rise once again. In fact, average credit card debt per borrower was 4.9 percent higher in the third quarter of 2012 than it was in the third quarter of 2011. It looks like most of us didn’t learn our lessons from the last financial crisis.
But not all Americans enjoy the shopping that is typically involved with this time of the year. One recent survey found that approximately 45 percent of all Americans think that there is so much financial pressure associated with the holidays that they wouldn’t mind skipping them completely.
That same poll found that approximately 41 percent of all Americans would only be able to survive for two weeks without a paycheck. Many Americans are up to their eyeballs in debt, their incomes are not keeping up with rising prices, and they find themselves scratching and clawing just to make it from month to month.
Meanwhile, we continue to destroy our own jobs and businesses by spending our money on products that have been made outside the country.
The following are 55 reasons why you should buy products that are made in America this holiday season…
1. When you buy products that are made in America you support American workers.
2. When you buy products that are made in America you support companies that are doing business in America.
3. In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.
4. The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.
5. Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.
6. In 2011, our trade deficit with China was 28 times larger than it was back in 1990 and more than 49,000 times larger than it was back in 1985.
7. When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
8. One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.
9. Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975. That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers. Federal, state and local taxes would also have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.
10. According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
11. The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
12. According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, the United States has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years.
13. During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day.
14. Overall, the United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
15. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
16. Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.
17. As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.
18. Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.
19. Right now, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job, and the vast majority of the new jobs that are being created are low paying jobs.
20. The United States now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago.
21. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every $1 billion of goods that are imported from overseas.
22. As our economic infrastructure is gutted, formerly great manufacturing cities all over America are being transformed into festering hellholes.
23. Between 2001 and 2007, the value of products that Wal-Mart imported from China grew from $9 billion to $27 billion.
24. In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China. In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.
25. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
26. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Today, China’s high-tech exports are more than twice the size of U.S. high-tech exports.
27. In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in “advanced technology products” of $16 billion with the rest of the world. In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.
28. The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.
29. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
30. The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors. This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business.
31. According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.
32. In 2010, China produced more than twice as many automobiles as the United States did.
33. Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.
34. Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe? Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.
35. In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.
36. In 2010, China produced 627 million metric tons of steel. The United States only produced 80 million metric tons of steel.
37. In 2010, China produced 7.3 million metric tons of cotton. The United States only produced 3.4 million metric tons of cotton.
38. Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.
39. 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.
40. Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.
41. China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems. How stupid can we possibly be?
42. According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment. According to an article in U.S. News & World Report, during 2010 the number one U.S. export to China was “scrap and trash”.
43. All over the United States, road and bridge projects are being outsourced to Chinese firms. Just check out the following excerpt from a recent ABC News article….
In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.
In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.
In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.
These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.
“When we subsidize jobs in China, we’re not creating any wealth in the United States,” said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
44. The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.
45. The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.
46. The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.
47. The Chinese economy is projected to be larger than the U.S. economy by 2016.
48. One economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.
49. In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced “free trade” and the emerging one world economy like never before. Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history….
If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.
50. If you gathered together all of the workers that are “officially” unemployed in the United States today, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.
51. China now holds approximately more than a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt. If you were alive back when Jesus was born and you had spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent that much money by now.
52. Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s highly touted “Jobs Council”, has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States.
53. Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty. Today, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.
54. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
55. If U.S. consumers do not start supporting U.S. workers and U.S. businesses, eventually we will all be so poor that very few of us will be able to afford to buy any gifts during the holiday season.
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16 Things About 2013 That Are Really Going To Stink
The following are 16 things about 2013 that are really going to stink…
#1 Taxes Are Going To Go Up
Even if a fiscal cliff deal is reached, some taxes will still go up next year. And if no deal is reached, there will be a whole bunch of different tax increases in 2013.
According to CBS News, these tax increases would be very painful for the middle class…
#2 The Middle Class Is About To Be Scorched By The Alternative Minimum Tax
Of more immediate concern for the middle class is the Alternative Minimum Tax. Many Americans have never heard of the AMT, but it is truly one of the worst things about our tax code.
If Congress does not act, and right now it does not look promising, millions of middle class households will see a massive increase in their tax bills for 2012.
According to one analysis, households that are forced to pay the AMT will end up paying an extra $3,700 in taxes…
Do you have an extra $3,700 sitting around to send to Uncle Sam?
If not, you had better contact your representatives in Congress and scream like crazy about passing a fix for the AMT. They have always gotten it done before, but this year there is so much animosity between the Republicans and the Democrats that nothing may end up getting done.
#3 The Economy Will Continue To Get Worse
Despite all of the talk in the mainstream media and from our politicians that our economy is getting better, the truth is that the U.S. economy continued to decline in 2012. If you doubt this, just read the 75 statistics in this article.
And there are a whole host of signs that the economy is starting to slow down even more as we enter 2013. For example, consumer confidence in the United States has experienced its largest two-month drop in over a year, and retail sales during the holiday season turned out to be quite disappointing.
#4 Good Paying Jobs Will Continue To Be Shipped Out Of The United States
Thanks to decades of “free trade agreements”, workers in the United States must directly compete for jobs with hundreds of millions of workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
We continue to see millions of jobs being shipped out of the country and our politicians stand by and do nothing.
Most Americans have no idea how this emerging one world economic system works. The beautiful product that you buy at the big retail store may have been made by someone working in some of the most horrific conditions imaginable.
A 42-year-old woman named Julie Keith recently found this letter inside a box of Halloween decorations that had been made in China…
But both political parties continue to tell us how wonderful it is that we are trading with communist China. They see no problem with the fact that good paying jobs that used to be performed in America are now being performed by slave laborers on the other side of the planet. And most Americans continue to support this system by filling their shopping carts with lots of stuff that has “made in China” stamped on it.
#5 Small Businesses Will Continue To Be Destroyed
At the same time, small businesses all over America are being strangled to death by taxes and regulations. Just consider the following numbers from a previous article…
How is our economy ever going to thrive if we keep killing off our small businesses?
#6 Hunger And Poverty Will Continue To Explode To Unprecedented Levels
As the U.S. economy bleeds jobs and loses small businesses, the number of Americans living in poverty continues to explode.
Here are some numbers to show to people who still don’t understand how desperate the situation is…
-Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
-According to U.S. Census data, 57 percent of all American children live in a home that is either considered to be “poor” or “low income”.
-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.
#7 The Number Of Americans On Food Stamps Will Continue To Increase
If the economy is recovering, then why does the number of Americans on food stamps continue to soar?
As I wrote about yesterday, about 17 million Americans were on food stamps back in the year 2000.
Today, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.
Does anyone want to explain to me how that is a sign that things are getting better?
Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
How much worse do things have to get before people realize that what we are doing is not working?
#8 Millions Of Americans Are About To Lose Their Unemployment Benefits
During this economic crisis, an unprecedented number of American families have been relying on unemployment benefits in order to stay afloat.
Well, if no agreement is reached in Washington D.C., millions of Americans will shortly lose those benefits…
#9 Our Infrastructure Will Continue To Rot And Decay
The United States once had the most beautiful infrastructure in the entire world. Our highways, bridges, airports, railroads, sewer systems and electrical grids were the envy of the entire planet.
Well, now we don’t even have enough money to repair what we already have, so our infrastructure will continue to rot and decay in 2013…
#10 Many Of Our Major Cities Will Continue To Be Transformed Into Festering Hellholes
A lot of our major cities are also rapidly degenerating. Detroit is one of my favorite examples, but the same kinds of things could be said about dozens of other major cities all over the country. The following is a brief excerpt from one of my recent articles…
#11 State And Local Governments Will Find Ways To Squeeze Even More Money Out Of Us
In case you haven’t noticed, state and local governments all over the country are bleeding cash and are desperate for money. In 2013 you can expect them to continue to find more ways to squeeze even more money out of all of us. Here is one example…
#12 Drug Cartels Will Continue To Easily Cross Our Borders And Terrorize Our Citizens
The federal government continues to refuse to protect our borders, and that means that drug runners and gang members will continue to pour into the United States.
Down in the Southwest, many ranchers are being absolutely terrorized by these criminals. The following is from a recent NBC News article…
Chilton has had his house burglarized a couple of times and his family regularly encounters groups of armed drug smugglers coming across from Mexico…
But even if you don’t live along the border, all of this still affects you. According to government figures, Mexican drug cartels are actively operating in more than 1,200 U.S. cities right now. They are probably hard at work in the community where you live.
So what is the Obama administration doing to fix the problem?
Not much.
In fact, the Obama administration is actually encouraging people to come to the U.S. and become dependent on the system. If you can believe it, there is actually a website run by the Department of Homeland Security that teaches immigrants how to apply for welfare benefits once they get into the United States.
#13 Social Decay Will Continue To Accelerate
All over America we are seeing signs of social breakdown. Here is yet another example…
Who would just run up and set a woman on fire?
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. For many more examples like this, please see this article: “20 Shocking Examples Of How Sadistic And Cruel People Have Become“.
We need to admit that we have a major problem on our hands. Violent crime in the United States increased by 18 percent in 2011, and another huge increase is expected when the numbers for 2012 come out.
America is changing, and not for the better.
#14 Global Food Supplies Will Continue To Dwindle
Did you know that for six of the last eleven years the world has consumed more food than it has produced?
As a result, global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.
So what is going to happen if the world continues to eat more food than it makes?
Let us hope that there is not another major drought in 2013. If there is, we could be looking at a very serious food crunch.
#15 Wall Street Will Continue To Resemble A Giant Casino
Our financial system seems to have not learned any lessons from the financial crash of 2008.
Instead of admitting their mistakes, they just continue to engage in even more reckless behavior.
Today, there are four major U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.
At some point that house of cards is going to collapse and we will be facing a derivatives crisis of unprecedented magnitude.
Will it be in 2013?
#16 The U.S. National Debt Will Cross The 17 Trillion Dollar Mark
In 2013, our national debt will blow past the 17 trillion dollar mark and start heading toward 18 trillion dollars.
How stupid can we possibly be?
During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. national debt has grown by about as much as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.
It really takes something to match more than 200 years of debt accumulation in less than four years.
But our politicians don’t seem to care about all of this debt. They will continue to steal more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day. That is beyond criminal, and yet the American people don’t seem to care.
What in the world has happened to this country?
Of course not everything about 2013 will be bad. Personally, I am looking forward to an exciting year. I have a new book that will be coming out, and my family is blessed and healthy. I would like to wish all of you a very blessed 2013. Things may be falling apart all around us, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a great year even in the midst of all the chaos.