Jobs

Is Obama Negotiating A Treaty That Would Essentially Ban All “Buy American” Laws?

69 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sent Barack Obama a letter expressing their concern that a new international treaty currently being negotiated would essentially ban all “Buy American” laws. This new treaty is known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and it is going to be one of the biggest “free trade” agreements in history. Critics are referring to it as the “NAFTA of the Pacific“, and it would likely cost the U.S. economy even more jobs than NAFTA did. At the moment, the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. Barack Obama is pushing hard to get the United States into the TPP, and Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, Canada, Japan and South Korea are also reportedly interested in joining. But quite a few members of Congress have heard that “Buy American” laws will essentially be banned under this agreement, and this has many of them very concerned. You can read the entire letter that was sent to Obama right here. Unfortunately, the leaders of both major political parties are overwhelmingly in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so the objections of these 69 members of Congress are likely to fall on deaf ears. The Trans-Pacific Partnership will accelerate the flow of American jobs out of this country, and meanwhile our politicians will continue to insist that they are doing everything that they can to “create jobs”.

There is not much protecting American jobs these days. The “Buy American” laws are one of the last remaining barriers that helps protect against much, much cheaper foreign labor, but now “Buy American” laws are in danger of being banned permanently as a recent article in the Huffington Post explained….

Since the 1930s, the American government has offered preferential treatment to American producers in the awarding of federal contracts. If a domestic producer offers the government a more expensive bid than a foreign producer, it can still be awarded the contract under certain circumstances, but more recent free trade agreements have granted other nations the same negotiating status as domestic firms. The Obama administration is currently pushing to grant the several nations involved in the Trans-Pacific deal the same privileged status, according to the Thursday letter.

The big problem is that foreign companies often have huge advantages over firms based in America.

In the United States, we have minimum-wage laws. On the other side of the globe, it is legal to pay workers less than a dollar an hour with no benefits.

In the United States, we have thousands upon thousands of laws and regulations that businesses must comply with. On the other side of the globe, there is often very little red tape.

The truth is that “free trade” is a really bad deal for the average American worker. In the emerging one world economic system, labor has become a global commodity and U.S. workers must now compete for jobs with people on the other side of the planet.

Since U.S. workers are often 10 to 20 times more expensive than workers on the other side of the world, there has been a massive outflow of jobs from this country. Treaties such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership will accelerate those job losses.

You would think that our politicians would notice that our formerly great manufacturing cities are turning into hellholes.

For example, the following is how James Kunstler described what he saw when he traveled through Gary, Indiana recently….

Between the ghostly remnants of factories stood a score of small cities and neighborhoods where the immigrants settled five generations ago. A lot of it was foreclosed and shuttered. They were places of such stunning, relentless dreariness that you felt depressed just imagining how depressed the remaining denizens of these endless blocks of run-down shoebox houses must feel. Judging from the frequency of taquerias in the 1950s-vintage strip-malls, one inferred that the old Eastern European population had been lately supplanted by a new wave of Mexicans. They had inherited an infrastructure for daily life that was utterly devoid of conscious artistry when it was new, and now had the special patina of supernatural rot over it that only comes from materials not found in nature disintegrating in surprising and unexpected ways, sometimes even sublimely, like the sheen of an oil slick on water at a certain angle to the sun. There was a Chernobyl-like grandeur to it, as of the longed-for end of something enormous that hadn’t worked out well.

The economic guts of this country are being ripped to shreds right in front of our eyes.

Overall, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been shut down since 2001.

That number is so crazy that it is hard to fully grasp.

The truth is that the “free trade” agenda of globalists such as Barack Obama is absolutely devastating our economy.

There are hundreds of statistics which prove this. I don’t have space in this article to reproduce them all, but if you are interested in examining many of them I recommend checking out the following articles….

1) 35 Facts About The Gutting Of America’s Industrial Might That Should Make You Very Angry

2) 47 Signs That China Is Absolutely Destroying America On The Global Economic Stage

3) America Is Being Transformed From A Wealthy Nation Into A Poor Nation At Breathtaking Speed

4) 17 Facts About The Decline Of The U.S. Auto Industry That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

5) If You Are A Blue Collar Worker In America You Are An Endangered Species

6) The Worst In The World – The U.S. Balance Of Trade Is Mind-Blowingly Bad

7) Free Trade Or Fair Trade? 20 Reasons Why All Americans Should Be Against The Insane Trade Policies Of The Globalists

When you combine a market that has expensive labor with markets that have ultra-cheap labor, it is inevitable that large numbers of jobs will migrate to the areas that have the ultra-cheap labor.

This isn’t rocket science.

That is why “Buy American” laws are such a good thing. They help to protect American jobs.

But even if you do not work in an industry where large numbers of jobs are being sent out of the country, the loss of jobs still affects you. The millions of Americans that are being displaced from jobs that have been sent overseas end up applying for other kinds of jobs. So they become your competition. This increases the demand for the jobs that remain and it keeps wages down.

As I wrote about the other day, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs. Many of those jobs have been replaced by low income jobs, but you can’t support a family on a low income job.

The Obama administration tells us that the unemployment rate is going down, but the truth is that there are now almost 101 million working age Americans that do not have jobs.

Instead of looking at the “unemployment rate” which is manipulated so much, what I prefer to do is to look at the “employment rate“. And sadly, the percentage of Americans with a job has been steadily declining. The following are the percentages of working age Americans with a job during April during the past six years….

April 2007: 63.0%

April 2008: 62.7%

April 2009: 59.8%

April 2010: 58.7%

April 2011: 58.4%

April 2012: 58.4%

Some Americans have decided to escape the lousy job market by going back to school. Others have decided to retire early. Yet others have decided to become full-time dependents of the government, and a shocking number have decided to try to get on to the Social Security disability rolls.

But most Americans that are unemployed just want to get back to work. Many suffer in complete anonymity and many never take a single penny from the government. They just want someone to hire them so that they can put in an honest day of work for an honest day of pay once again.

Even if you still have a good job, it could be gone tomorrow. This point was underscored by a comment that a reader identified as “DaytoDay” left on a recent article….

Well, I can relate to this, I just lost my job Tuesday. I worked for Uhaul and on the DAY that I became eligible for my benefits and 401k they canned me, exactly 90 days.

So, it’s just another reminder that those who work for corporations are nothing more than numbers. It’s sad reality, they don’t care if you have a family to feed, they don’t care about your bills, and they damn sure don’t care about quality…

I was notified while working, and was instantly let go, up until that point, there had been no warnings, no emails, no conferences, nothing… They simply fired me to avoid paying the benefits and 401k that was would have been entitled to.

And to think, this is the reward for being a good hard worker?

Other Americans are not able to find any work at all. This is especially true for young Americans. Millions upon millions of hard working Americans are graduating from college only to find that the “real world” can be very cruel.

For example, just check out the comment that a reader named “Simon” left on one of my recent articles….

I graduated from a top university just after the Collapse of 2008 (Class of ’09). I had already seen the number of customers at my college job go way down in that year. Got my four-year degree, had good grades, good work record. Now I live in south FL and I can’t even get a job in fast food, there is so much competition for minimum-wage jobs. No one wants to hire me to wait tables or bag groceries because I have a prestigious degree. The only thing I got out of college was 10 grand in debt, which is actually quite small (I came from a poor family, so I got a lot of free tuition to bribe me to be part of the university indoctrination). Good thing I defaulted on my loans a year or two ago or I would be in worse trouble. I just throw out all their threatening letters and never answer their calls- my friend told me it would work, and it did. Of course I’m no longer a “good citizen”- I don’t earn money, don’t pay taxes, don’t have health insurance, my credit is horrible, I’ll never buy a home or a new car—but who cares?

Millions of other Americans that have lost their jobs have been forced to take whatever they can get. A reader identified as “Gary2″ recently left a comment on one of my articles describing what his family has been through….

Check this out—I had 12 years as a good worker (regional manager level position) several promotions-steller reviews-which I kept copies of BTW) regular good pay increases heck I even saved a persons life, got a big award plack for it, pictures with everyone etc and 4 months later was downsized–no warning no thanks for helping them pass many JACHO inspections (I was a regional manager for a hospital chain) nothing. Just that we decided to outsource your entire department and that you are no longer needed.

So now I get to be grossly underemployed making 1/2 of what I used to make with NO benefits. My wife is no longer a stay at home raise the kids mom and is also working. Together we still make less than I did on my own. This sucks.

As millions upon millions of Americans suffer deeply month after month, it is creating a volcano of anger and frustration that could absolutely devastate our society at some point. A reader identified as “Cinderella Man” left the following comment on a recent article….

If anyone thinks that almost 50 million Americans on food stamps is a sign of recovery and pardon my language but you have **** for brains. The other day I went shopping and I spent $170 on my ten bags of food and I watched a man and his daughter ring up ten packs of cheap balogna he meekly asked the clerk if those were the 10 for 10 deal and she said yes. Then the Dad said to the daughter “I hope you like it were going to be eating it till we bust!” This is what our world has come to. A man is feeding his kid trying to stretch their meager food stamp budget by eating balogna for several meals. I couldnt help but think of the movie of my namesake Cinderella Man with Russell Crowe when his wife was frying balogna for every meal back during the first Great Depression. Ive seen it all in these past 4 years. From beautiful women in souplines and ****** hotels to living in my car and watching inflation destroy all of our lives. We are all 9 meals from anarchy.

Sadly, thousands upon thousands more good jobs are being lost each and every month.

But our politicians continue to integrate us even more deeply into the emerging one world economic system. Huge numbers of jobs will continue to leave this nation and the standard of living for most American workers will continue to decline.

So have any of you ever had your job shipped out of the country? Feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below….

There Are 100 Million Working Age Americans That Do Not Have Jobs UPDATED

The unemployment crisis in America is much worse than you are being told. Did you know that there are 100 million working age Americans that do not get up in the morning and go to work? No wonder why it seems like there are so many people that do not have jobs! According to the federal government, there are 12.6 million working age Americans that are considered to be “officially” unemployed, but there are another 87.8 million working age Americans that are not working either. The federal government considers those Americans to be “not in the labor force” so they are not included in the unemployment rate. In fact, this is one of the key ways that the government manipulates the unemployment numbers. The Obama administration would have us believe that the unemployment rate is going down and that that since the start of the last recession about as many Americans have left the labor force as we saw during the entire decades of the 1980s and 1990s combined. Of course that is a bunch of nonsense, but that is what the Obama administration would have us believe. The truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is just about the same right now as it was two years ago. It was incredibly difficult to get a job back then and it is incredibly difficult to get a job right now. So don’t believe the hype that things are getting much better. If you still do have a good job, you might want to hold on to it tightly, because there is not much hope that things are going to improve significantly any time soon.

The first chart that I have posted below shows the total number of “officially” unemployed workers in America. According to the Federal Reserve, that number is currently 12,673,000. This chart makes it look like the employment picture in America is getting significantly better….

But if you dig deeper into the numbers you quickly see that this is not true. A lot of those workers that were formerly classified as “unemployed” have now been moved into the “not in labor force” category. Since the start of the last recession, the number of Americans not in the labor force has risen by more than 8 million according to the Obama administration. The total number of working age Americans not in the labor force now stands at 87,897,000….

So when you add 12,673,000 and 87,897,000, you get a total of 100,570,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.

Yes, there are certainly millions upon millions of working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.

But you have to be delusional to believe that there are nearly 88 million working age Americans that do not have jobs and that do not want jobs.

The Obama administration tells us that the labor force participation rate is now the lowest it has been since 1984. But back then, a very large percentage of women were staying home and raising families. The percentage of stay at home mothers has declined steadily since then.

So the truth is that the employment statistics that we are being fed are not portraying an accurate picture of what is really going on.

As a CNN article recently explained, there are millions of Americans that say that they would like to have a job even though they have not been “actively” looking for one in the past four weeks. If those people were included in the unemployment rate, it would immediately shoot up to around 11 percent….

About six million people claim they want a job, even though they haven’t looked for one in the last four weeks. If they were to all start applying for work again, the unemployment rate would suddenly shoot up above 11%.

If you want a much more accurate picture of what is really happening to the employment situation in America, the key is to look at the employment to population ratio. As I have written about previously, the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs is not increasing.

Let’s take a look at the employment to population ratio for the last six years for the month of March….

March 2007: 63.3%

March 2008: 62.7%

March 2009: 59.9%

March 2010: 58.5%

March 2011: 58.5%

March 2012: 58.5%

The percentage of the working age population that had jobs fell rapidly during the recession and it has stayed very low since then.

When Barack Obama tells you that “America is going back to work” he is lying to you.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that there are millions of hard working Americans that have been sitting at home for years hoping that a new job will come along.

Back in 2007, approximately 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for one year or longer.

Today, that figure is above 30 percent.

The average duration of unemployment in the United States today is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

And according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the number of announced job cuts is actually rising again….

Also, announced jobs cuts rose 7.1% in April, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, to 40,599 — and up 11.2% from last April — another bit of evidence that the jobs market isn’t doing well.

Economic conditions in the United States have been steadily getting worse for quite a while, but that is not the only reason for our employment problems.

There are two other trends that I want to briefly mention.

1) A lot of jobs that used to be very labor intensive are now being replaced by technology. Thanks to robotics, automation and computers, a lot of big companies simply do not need as many workers these days. Those are jobs that are never going to come back.

2) As labor has become a global commodity, millions upon millions of U.S. jobs have been sent overseas. Today, you are not just competing for a job with your neighbors. You are also competing with workers on the other side of the globe. Unfortunately, it is legal to pay slave labor wages in many of those countries. By sending our jobs out of the country, big corporations can also avoid a whole host of rules, regulations, taxes and benefit payments that they would be facing if they hired American workers.

So U.S. workers are at a massive competitive disadvantage. Why should a big corporation pay 10 or 20 times more for an American worker when they can pad their profits by exploiting cheap foreign labor?

The sad truth is that the value that the marketplace puts on the labor of the average American worker is continually decreasing.

This is making it much more difficult to find a job and it is keeping wages down.

In the old days, pretty much any man that was a hard worker and that really wanted a good job could go out and get one.

But now all of that has changed. 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.

And sadly, the vast majority of the jobs that are being lost are good jobs. As I wrote about the other day, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the recession were middle class jobs.

So how are middle class families making it these days?

Many of them are going into tremendous amounts of debt. As a recent CNN article detailed, the average debt load being carried by those of us in the bottom 95 percent of all income earners has risen dramatically over the past several decades….

In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings.

Unfortunately, many American families are absolutely maxed out at this point. According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are currently paying their bills late.

If your goal is to live a middle class lifestyle, you need to realize that the entire way that the game is being played is changing.

In the old days, you could start out with a company as a young person and stay with that company until you retired. If you worked hard and you were loyal, there was a really good chance that the company would recognize that and be loyal to you too.

These days, most companies are absolutely heartless when it comes to their workers. The good job that you have today could be gone tomorrow. Workers are increasingly being viewed as “liabilities”, and there is a good chance that the moment you become “expendable” to your company you will be kicked out on the street.

That is one reason why I am encouraging people to consider starting their own businesses. If you work for someone else, your security can be taken away from you at any moment. But if you work for yourself, you aren’t going to get fired.

Unfortunately, tough economic times are coming and things are not going to be easy no matter what road you take. It will be imperative to work harder than ever, to stay flexible, and to never, ever give up.

***UPDATE***

Since the monthly jobs numbers were released on Friday I thought I would update this article to reflect the latest figures.

The federal government has announced that the unemployment rate has declined to 8.1 percent.

That certainly sounds like good news.

But knowing better, I immediately went and checked how the employment to population ratio had changed.

Well, it turns out that the employment to population ratio has fallen once again.

That means that a smaller percentage of working age Americans had jobs in April than in March.

The following are the figures for the past three months….

February 2012: 58.6%

March 2012: 58.5%

April 2012: 58.4%

If the percentage of people that have jobs is going down, then how can they claim that things are getting better?

The following are the two Federal Reserve charts posted above after they have been updated with the new numbers. These charts are very revealing.

1) There are now 12,500,000 workers that are “officially” considered to be unemployed….

2) There are now 88,419,000 Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”. Please note that this number rose by 522,000 in just a single month!….

Okay, so now let’s do the same math that we did before.

12,500,000 unemployed workers plus 88,419,000 Americans that are “not in the labor force” equals 100,919,000 working age Americans that do not have jobs.

That number just continues to climb at a very rapid pace.

When is the mainstream media going to start telling us the truth?

The Shocking Truth About Unemployment In America In One Chart

The mainstream media is not telling you the truth about unemployment in the United States. The percentage of working age Americans that are employed is not increasing. In March 2010, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans had a job. In March 2012, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans had a job. So if the employment rate is exactly the same as it was two years ago, then how in the world can the Obama administration claim that things have gotten significantly better since then? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official unemployment rate in the United States was 9.8 percent in March 2010 and it declined to 8.2 percent in March 2012. So how is this possible if the percentage of working age Americans that have jobs hasn’t moved? Well, what they do is they claim that there are millions upon millions of Americans that have “left the labor force”. In other words, they claim that there are millions upon millions of unemployed Americans that don’t want jobs anymore. Of course that is a total farce, but the mainstream media and most Americans are buying it. They actually believe that the unemployment rate is going down. But the truth is that the unemployment crisis in America has not subsided. In fact, we are pretty much exactly where we were two years ago, and things are about to get a whole lot worse.

If you want to know the shocking truth about unemployment in America, all you need to do is to look at one chart. The chart posted below shows the change in the employment-population ratio over the past few years. What the employment-population ratio measures is the percentage of working age Americans that actually have jobs. As you can see, it fell dramatically during 2008 and 2009, and since then it has been hovering between 58 and 59 percent….

So there has been no employment recovery, and this is very odd because the employment-population ratio always bounces back after a recession.

The chart posted below shows how the employment-population ratio has changed since the late 1940s. The shaded areas represent recessions. Please take note that after every single recession (other than the current one) the employment-population ratio has always bounced back substantially.

During the most recent recession, the employment-population ratio fell farther than it had during any other recession in the post-World War II era.

If these were normal economic times, it would have been reasonable to expect a huge surge in hiring by now.

But we have not seen that.

Instead, the employment rate in the United States has been remarkably flat for more than two years.

So Barack Obama should not even begin to say anything at all about a “recovery” until the employment rate at least breaks the 59 percent barrier.

In the past I have written about how fraudulent the employment statistics put out by the federal government are.

Well, fortunately there are some folks up on Capitol Hill that are starting to take notice of this phenomenon as well. There is a new bill in Congress that would change the way that the unemployment rate is calculated….

A Republican lawmaker is intensifying his push for legislation that would change how the government measures the unemployment rate.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) intends to press GOP leaders to move his bill to include the number of individuals who gave up looking for work in the percentage of jobless claims.

Of course there is probably not a chance that such a bill would ever get through the Senate, but at least some lawmakers are trying to get people to notice what is going on.

The sad truth of the matter is that the employment crisis in America is still about as bad as it was a couple of years ago.

Do you remember a couple of months ago when Barack Obama spoke with the wife of an unemployed engineer and asked her to send his resume to the White House?

Well, it turns out that the unemployed engineer still doesn’t have a job….

More than two months after President Barack Obama asked for Darin Wedel’s résumé, the phone is quiet, e-mails are no longer flooding in and the long-sought-after job interviews — which had begun to be scheduled — have petered out.

“Not even recruiting companies are calling anymore,” said Jennifer Wedel, the Fort Worth mother of two who chatted online this year with Obama about her out-of-work husband.

She says his job search has been hurt by a program to hire skilled foreign workers.

But Barack Obama is doing the same thing on a national level.

He is promising all of us that things are improving and that there will be lots of jobs for everyone soon, but it is all a lie.

The truth is that this period of relative stability that has been purchased by unprecedented levels of government debt will soon give way to even more economic trouble.

One of my readers recently brought to my attention a list of some of the major companies that are currently getting rid of workers….

Ford will be laying off 1,200 assembly line workers later on this month.

Pittsburgh-based paint and coating manufacturer PPG has announced that it will be laying off 2,000 workers.

J.C. Penney recently laid off 600 workers and has plans to lay off another 300 workers in July.

Lockheed Martin has announced that it will be laying off hundreds of workers.

Dow Chemical has announced that hundreds of workers are going to be laid off.

Yahoo has formally announced that it will be getting rid of about 2,000 workers.

Sony has announced plans to eliminate 10,000 jobs globally.

Even Oprah Winfrey is laying off workers. Oprah is reducing the size of the staff at the OWN network by 20 percent.

Meanwhile, our economy continues to bleed jobs at an astounding pace. At a time when American workers desperately need jobs, millions of them continue to be sent overseas.

In fact, even some jobs that you would think would be impossible to outsource are being given to foreigners. Just recently, ABC News did a major report on all of the roads and bridges all over the United States that are being built by Chinese companies. If you have not seen that report yet, you can view it online right here.

If you go into a Wal-Mart or a dollar store and you start turning over products you will find that huge numbers of them are made in China and that very few of them are made in the United States. China is absolutely dominating us on the global economic stage. Last year our trade deficit with China was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world. Yet we continue to pursue the exact same trade policies year after year.

So how is the American economy ever supposed to recover if we continue to play to lose?

As a nation we spend far more than we make, we consume far more than we produce and our federal government implements thousands of new business-crippling regulations every single year.

If you still have a good job, you should treasure it and you should try to hold on to it for as long as you can. Soon the next major economic downturn will be upon us and millions more Americans will lose their jobs and their homes.

Things did not have to turn out this way, but we made horribly bad decisions for decades and now the consequences are catching up with us.

You better get ready.

Not So Fast On That Whole Economic Recovery Thing

Not so fast. Those that are publicly declaring that an economic recovery has arrived are ignoring a whole host of numbers that indicate that the U.S. economy is in absolutely horrendous shape. The truth is that the health of an economy should not be measured by how well the stock market is doing. Rather, the truth health of an economy should be evaluated by looking at numbers for things like jobs, housing, poverty and debt. Some of the latest economic statistics indicate that unemployment is getting a little bit worse, that the housing market continues to deteriorate, that poverty in America continues to soar and that our debt problem is worse than ever. If we were truly experiencing the kind of economic recovery that the United States has experienced after every other post-World War II recession we would see a sharp improvement across the board in most of our economic statistics. But that simply is not happening. Sadly, this is about as much of an “economic recovery” as we are going to get because soon the economy will be getting much worse. So enjoy this period of relative stability while you can.

The Obama administration would have us believe that unemployment in the United States has declined, but the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed has stayed very, very flat for more than two years and now there are some measures of unemployment that are actually getting worse.

For example, according to Gallup the unemployment rate in the United States has risen from 8.5% in December to 8.6% in January to 9.1% in February. The Obama administration would have us believe that it is actually going the other direction.

Initial unemployment claims are rising again. For the week ending March 3rd, they increased by 8,000 over the previous week to 362,000. This is not the kind of good news that people were hoping for.

What the U.S. economy could really use are millions of good jobs. But those are being shipped out of the country at a staggering pace.

Right now there are millions of Americans in their prime working years that are sitting at home wondering what to do with their lives. The average duration of unemployment in the United States continues to hover near a record high, and if we were truly experiencing an economic recovery it should have been falling by now.

But a lot of Americans have bought into the propaganda about an economic recovery and they are out running up huge amounts of debt once again. In January, consumer credit increased by much more than expected. The following is from a recent Reuters report….

Nonrevolving credit, which includes auto loans as well as student loans made by the government, rose $20.723 billion during the month. That was the biggest increase in dollar terms since November 2001, when credit was surging in the wake of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Don’t fall into the trap of debt slavery. During the last recession millions of Americans lost their homes and most of what they owned because they got overextended.

Don’t do it.

The U.S. housing market continues to deeply struggle as well. If we were really in an economic recovery housing would be bouncing back. But that is not happening. Just consider the following facts….

*The number of new homes sold in the United States continues to hover near a record low.

*U.S. home prices in the 4th quarter of 2011 were four percent lower than they were during the 4th quarter of 2010.

*According to CoreLogic, 22.8 percent of all homes with a mortgage in the United States were in negative equity as of the end of the 4th quarter of 2011. That was an increase from 22.1 percent in the third quarter.

Why are things still getting worse for the U.S housing market?

That is a really good question.

We should have seen some improvement by now.

But it isn’t happening.

Also, poverty in America continues to explode.

For example, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased to 46.5 million – a brand new all-time record.

If we really were in an economic recovery, wouldn’t that number be going down?

We should be thankful that the U.S. economy is not declining as rapidly as it was during 2008 and 2009. But what we are experiencing right now is not an economic recovery. It is simply just a bubble of false hope.

The big problem is that our nation is covered in an ocean of constantly expanding debt.

U.S. consumers are drowning in debt, U.S. businesses have pushed debt levels to the red line, and the U.S. financial system is massively overleveraged.

Of course government debt is our biggest debt problem of all.

All over the nation, state and local governments are on the verge of financial ruin.

If we were in the middle of an economic recovery, so many states would not be in crisis mode. A recent article in the Los Angeles Times declared that “California could run out of cash in March“. As the economy continues to crumble we are going to hear a lot more of this kind of thing.

A lot of local governments around the nation are on the verge of total financial collapse. Stockton, California has announced that they will be defaulting on some debt payments, and Suffolk County in New York recently declared a fiscal emergency after discovering that it would rack up more than 500 million dollars of debt between 2011 and 2013.

Keep your eyes open for more news items like this in the months ahead.

Of course the biggest problem of all is the U.S. national debt and it continues to rapidly get worse.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. government had a budget deficit of 229 billion dollars in the month of February. That is the worst one month budget deficit in the history of the United States.

The Congressional Budget Office also says that the U.S. government is now borrowing 42 cents of every single dollar that it spends.

Ouch.

The U.S. national debt has gotten more than 59 times larger since 1950.

The U.S. national debt is now more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.

Are there any words in the English language that are strong enough to describe how foolish we have been?

Of course we won’t be able to accumulate so much debt indefinitely. At some point the trillion dollar deficits will stop and our false prosperity will disappear.

If you want to get an idea of what happens then, just take a look at Greece.

But Barack Obama and most members of the U.S. Congress don’t really care about what they are doing to our future.

What they care about is winning the next election so that they can continue living their fabulous lives.

Barack Obama is supposed to be taking care of the American people, but instead he has been very busy taking care of the people who helped him get elected. Politics in America is all about money. Just check out the following very short excerpt from a recent article in the Washington Post….

More than half of Obama’s 47 biggest fundraisers, those who collected at least $500,000 for his campaign, have been given administration jobs. Nine more have been appointed to presidential boards and committees.

At least 24 Obama bundlers were given posts as foreign ambassadors, including in Finland, Australia, Portugal and Luxembourg. Among them is Don Beyer, a former Virginia lieutenant governor who serves as ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Washington D.C. is deeply corrupt and if you are waiting for our politicians to fix our problems you are going to be deeply disappointed.

The federal government is not going to save you.

Our politicians are not going to save you.

You better figure out how you are going to take care of yourself and your family in the years ahead because this is about as good as things are going to get.

This “economic recovery” is about to end and more pain is about to begin.

55 Interesting Facts About The U.S. Economy In 2012

How is the U.S. economy doing in 2012? Unfortunately, it is not doing nearly as well as the mainstream media would have you believe. Yes, things have stabilized for the moment but this bubble of false hope will not last for long. The long-term trends that are ripping our economy and our financial system to shreds continue unabated. When you step back and look at the broader picture, it is hard to deny that we are in really bad shape and that things are rapidly getting worse. Later on in this article you will find a list of interesting facts that show the true state of the U.S. economy. Hopefully many of you will find this list to be a useful tool that you can share with your family and friends. Each day the foundations of our economy crumble a little bit more, and we need to wake up as many Americans as we can to what is really going on while there is still time. We have accumulated way too much debt, we consume far more wealth than we produce, millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas, our big cities are decaying, family budgets are being squeezed more than ever, poverty is rampant and we have raised several generations of Americans that expect the government to fix all of their problems. The U.S. economy is at a crossroads, and the decisions that the American people make in 2012 are going to be incredibly important.

The statistics listed below are presented without much commentary. They pretty much speak for themselves.

After reading this list, it will be hard for anyone to argue that we are on the right track.

The following are 55 interesting facts about the U.S. economy in 2012….

#1 As you read this, there are more than 6 million mortgages in the United States that are overdue.

#2 In January, U.S. home prices were the lowest that they have been in more than a decade.

#3 In Florida right now, some drivers are paying nearly 6 dollars for a gallon of gas.

#4 On average, you could buy about 10 gallons of gas for an hour of work back in the mid-90s. Today, the average hour of work will get you less than 6 gallons of gas.

#5 Sadly, 43 percent of all American families spend more than they earn each year.

#6 According to Gallup, the unemployment rate was at 8.3% in mid-January but rose to 9.0% in mid-February.

#7 The percentage of working age Americans that have jobs is not increasing. The employment to population ratio has stayed very steady (hovering between 58% and 59%) since the beginning of 2010.

#8 If you gathered together all of the workers that are “officially” unemployed in the United States into one nation, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the entire world.

#9 When Barack Obama first took office, the number of “long-term unemployed workers” in the United States was approximately 2.6 million. Today, that number is sitting at 5.6 million.

#10 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is hovering close to an all-time record high.

#11 According to Reuters, approximately 23.7 million American workers are either unemployed or underemployed right now.

#12 There are about 88 million working age Americans that are not employed and that are not looking for employment. That is an all-time record high.

#13 According to CareerBuilder, only 23 percent of American companies plan to hire more employees in 2012.

#14 Back in the year 2000, about 20 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs. Today, about 5 percent of all jobs in America are manufacturing jobs.

#15 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#16 Amazingly, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been shut down since 2001.

#17 According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.

#18 During the Obama administration, worker health insurance costs have risen by 23 percent.

#19 An all-time record 49.9 million Americans do not have any health insurance at all at this point, and the percentage of Americans covered by employer-based health plans has fallen for 11 years in a row.

#20 According to the New York Times, approximately 100 million Americans are either living in poverty or in “the fretful zone just above it”.

#21 In the United States today, corporate profits are at an all-time high. The percentage of Americans that are living in “extreme poverty” is also at an all-time high according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

#22 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

#23 The poorest 50 percent of all Americans now collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#24 The number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent since 2007.

#25 According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4% of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1% of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6% of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6% of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.

#26 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 32 million to 46 million.

#27 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.

#28 In 1984, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger. Today, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.

#29 If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.

#30 After adjusting for inflation, U.S. college students are borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago.

#31 According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark at some point in 2012. If you went out right now and starting spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#32 Today, 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month.

#33 Incredibly, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.

#34 The average interest rate on a credit card that is carrying a balance is now up to 13.10 percent.

#35 Of the U.S. households that do have credit card debt, the average amount of credit card debt is an astounding $15,799.

#36 Overall, Americans are carrying a grand total of $798 billion in credit card debt. If you were alive when Jesus was born and you spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent $798 billion by now.

#37 It may be hard to believe, but the truth is that consumer debt in America has increased by a whopping 1700% since 1971.

#38 At this point, about 70 percent of all auto purchases in the United States involve an auto loan.

#39 In the United States today, 45 percent of all auto loans are made to subprime borrowers.

#40 Mortgage debt as a percentage of GDP has more than tripled since 1955.

#41 According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.

#42 To get the same purchasing power that you got out of $20.00 back in 1970 you would have to have more than $116 today.

#43 When Barack Obama first took office, an ounce of gold was going for about $850. Today an ounce of gold costs more than $1700 an ounce.

#44 The number of Americans that are not paying federal incomes taxes is at an all-time high.

#45 A staggering 48.5% of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.

#46 The amount of money that the federal government gives directly to Americans has increased by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.

#47 During 2012, the U.S. government must roll over nearly 3 trillion dollars of old debt.

#48 The U.S. debt to GDP ratio has now reached 101 percent.

#49 At the moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $15,419,800,222,325.15.

#50 The U.S. national debt is now more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.

#51 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office.

#52 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.

#53 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.

#54 Right now, the U.S. national debt is increasing by about 150 million dollars every single hour.

#55 Spending by the federal government accounted for about 2 percent of GDP back in 1800. It accounted for 23.8 percent in 2011, and according to former U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker, it will account for 36.8 percent of GDP by 2040.

Bad news, eh?

But it isn’t just our economy that is decaying.

We are witnessing a tremendous amount of social decay as well. As I wrote about the other day, America is rapidly decomposing right in front of our eyes.

When the water level of a river drops far enough, it will reveal rocks that have been hidden from view for a very long time. Well, a similar thing is happening in America right now. For decades, our debt-fueled prosperity has masked a lot of the social decay that has been going on.

But now that our prosperity is evaporating, a lot of frightening stuff is being revealed.

Unfortunately, another major financial crisis is rapidly approaching and economic conditions in the United States are going to get a lot worse.

So what is our country going to look like when that happens?

That is a very good question.

20 Signs You Might Be A Typical American Worker

Once upon a time, anyone that was relatively competent and willing to work hard could go out and easily get a job that would enable that person to financially support a family. Unfortunately, that is simply no longer true anymore. Well paying “middle income jobs” are being rapidly replaced with “low income jobs” and part-time jobs. As the economy crumbles, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the typical American worker to survive from month to month. The number of companies that provide benefits such as health insurance has fallen steadily over the past ten years, and paychecks have not been keeping up with the rising prices of food and gas. Average American families are seeing their budgets squeezed like never before, and many of them are going into huge amounts of debt in order to make up the difference. Sadly, this is a problem that has developed over an extended period of time and that is not going to be reversed overnight. Over the past four decades, the ratio of wages and salaries to GDP in America has fallen dramatically. The typical American worker is not as valued as much as he or she used to be, and if current trends continue even more of us will be working part-time jobs or “low income jobs” in the years ahead.

In America today there is a great deal of focus on the unemployed, but there are also millions upon millions of Americans that are working part-time jobs because that is all that they can find.

It can be absolutely soul crushing to go all the way through school getting good grades, spend a ton of money on an education, and then work for 8 bucks an hour doing meaningless work for some predator corporation that simply does not care about how talented you are.

Today, an astounding 48 percent of all Americans are considered to be either “low income” or are living in poverty.

According to the New York Times, approximately 100 million Americans are either living in poverty or in “the fretful zone just above it”.

A lot of those people actually do have jobs. Unfortunately, a part-time job that pays 8 or 9 dollars an hour just will not get you anywhere close to getting over the poverty line.

This is not the way that the U.S. economy used to work. Back in the old days, good paying jobs that would allow you to live “the American Dream” were plentiful.

But now millions upon millions of Americans are scrambling for anything that they can get. According to a recent survey conducted by Gallup, the percentage of Americans that are working part-time jobs but that would like full-time jobs is now higher than it has been at any other time in the last two years.

In this economy, a good paying full-time job is incredibly precious. If you still have one, you should consider yourself to be very fortunate.

Check out the following chart. It is a chart that shows the level of wages and salaries as a percentage of GDP in the United States since the late 1940s. As you can see, the slice of the pie being taken home by American workers has been dropping like a rock since about 1970….

Is that a clear trend or what?

And it is going to continue year after year as long as we continue to pursue the same foolish economic policies.

As our politicians continue to allow millions of American jobs to be shipped overseas, competition for the jobs that remain inside this country is becoming extremely intense.

Back in 1967, 97 percent of all U.S. men with a high school degree between the ages of 30 and 50 had jobs. Today, that figure is down to 76 percent.

As you read this, there are hordes of hard working American workers sitting at home staring at their televisions as they wonder why nobody will hire them.

Right now, if you gathered together all of the unemployed people in the United States, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

That is absolutely insane.

But even if you do have a job that does not mean that you are in good shape. The percentage of “low income jobs” just continues to climb. 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.

Many Americans work as hard as they can and still find that they must turn to the government for financial assistance. According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.

And that number is just going to keep climbing unless we change what we are doing as a nation.

Perhaps you are working a “low income job” right now. Most of us have worked a job like that at least once in our lives. Hopefully you will find the following list amusing. Yes, I have exaggerated a few things slightly, but I think you will get the point.

The following are 20 signs you might be a typical American worker….

#1 If you are working three jobs and you still don’t have enough money at the end of the month, you might be a typical American worker.

#2 If your job involves asking the question “Would you like fries with that?”, you might be a typical American worker.

#3 If you shop at the dollar store because Wal-Mart is too expensive, you might be a typical American worker.

#4 If your job requires you to wear a smock, a brightly colored polo shirt or lots of “flair”, you might be a typical American worker.

#5 If people are constantly asking you where the restroom is while you are at work, you might be a typical American worker.

#6 If your employer hires extra part-time workers in order to avoid giving anyone full-time hours, you might be a typical American worker.

#7 If you are required to watch a mindless “training video” after being hired, you might be a typical American worker.

#8 If the company you work for is owned by someone on the other side of the world, you might be a typical American worker.

#9 If a trained seal could do your job and you feel like your expensive education is going to waste, you might be at typical American worker.

#10 If you don’t have any health insurance at all, you might be a typical American worker. Only about 25 percent of all part-time workers in the United States receive employee benefits such as health insurance or paid sick leave.

#11 If your car is older than your kids are, you might be a typical American worker.

#12 If you can’t afford to buy the things that you are selling to the public, you might be a typical American worker.

#13 If the balances on your credit cards are larger than your bank accounts are, you might be a typical American worker.

#14 If going to Burger King is your idea of “fine dining”, then you might be a typical American worker.

#15 If it costs more to fill up your car with gas than you will make at your job today, you might be a typical American worker. The price of gasoline has increased by 83 percent since Barack Obama first took office, and the average cost of a gallon of gas in the United States is now up to $3.52.

#16 If you eat your cereal with a fork so that you can save milk, you might be a typical American worker.

#17 If your electricity bill keeps going up but your paycheck never does, you might be a typical American worker.

#18 If it feels like you are losing an organ every time you pay for health insurance each month, you might be a typical American worker.

#19 If you feel like your employer is constantly tempted to replace you with someone younger and cheaper, then you might be a typical American worker.

#20 If you are so poor that you cannot even afford to pay attention, you might be a typical American worker.

Unfortunately, a lot more Americans are going to be forced into working these kinds of jobs if current trends continue.

Since the year 2000, we have lost 10% of our middle class jobs even though our population has increased by more than 30 million since then. In the year 2000 there were about 72 million middle class jobs in the United States, but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs.

The lack of good jobs in America has some very real consequences. In particular, our young adults are really feeling the pain of not being able to find quality employment.

According to a recent poll conducted by Generation Opportunity, huge numbers of Americans in the 18 to 29 year old age bracket are delaying major life decisions due to the poor economy….

-44% are delaying buying a home

-28% are delaying saving for retirement

-27% are delaying paying off student loans or other debt

-27% are delaying going back to school or getting more education

-23% are delaying starting a family

-18% are delaying getting married

All of those things take a lot of money, and if you simply don’t have the money it makes things really tough.

Sadly, the economy is about to get even worse.

As I have written about previously, what is going on in Greece right now is a warning sign for the rest of the world, and we are on the precipice of another major global financial crisis.

There are an increasing number of voices in the financial world that believe that we are going to see a Greek default in March. So will this actually happen? I certainly don’t know. But what some folks are currently saying about the situation sure does make for interesting reading.

In the old days, you could graduate from college, get a good job, work for the same company for 30 years, save up for retirement and count on a comfortable life in your old age.

That paradigm is now totally shattered. The entire global economic system is in a state of chaos and things change faster today than they ever have before.

If you have a job today, it may be gone tomorrow.

The financial institution or insurance company that you are working with today may be out of business by next month.

We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable. That is why it is imperative to try to become more self-sufficient and less dependent on the system.

It is tough to plan in such an environment, but one thing is for sure – tough times are coming and things are not going to get any easier than they are now.

The Financial Crisis Of 2008 Was Just A Warm Up Act For The Economic Horror Show That Is Coming

The people out there that believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a permanent recovery and that very bright days are ahead for us should have their heads examined. Unfortunately, what we are going through right now is simply just a period of “hopetimism” between two financial crashes. Things may seem relatively stable right now, but it won’t last long. The truth is that the financial crisis of 2008 was just a warm up act for the economic horror show that is coming. Nothing really got fixed after the crash of 2008. We are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it has gotten even bigger since then. The “too big to fail” banks are larger now than they have ever been. Americans continue to run up credit card balances like there is no tomorrow. Tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs continue to leave the country. We continue to consume far more than we produce and we continue to become poorer as a nation. None of the problems that caused the crisis of 2008 have been solved and we are even weaker financially than we were back then. So why in the world are so many people so optimistic about the economy right now?

Just take a look at the chart posted below. It shows the growth of total debt in the United States. During the financial crisis of 2008 there was a little “hiccup”, but the truth is that not much deleveraging really took place at all. And since the recession “ended”, total credit market debt has gone on to even greater heights….

So what does this mean for the future?

Well, if a small “hiccup” in the debt bubble caused so much chaos back in 2008, what is going to happen when this debt bubble finally bursts?

That is something to think about.

Sadly, most Americans seem oblivious to all of this.

If you go out to malls in the wealthy areas of America today, people are charging up a storm. In all, Americans charged a whopping 2.5 trillion dollars on their credit cards during 2011. Way too many people have already forgotten the lessons that we all learned back in 2008.

Of course some Americans pay off their credit cards every month, but way too many Americans are not doing that. Today, Americans are carrying 793 billion dollars in revolving credit balances.

And student loan debt is an even bigger bubble than credit card debt is. As I have written about previously, total student loan debt in America is rapidly approaching a trillion dollars.

So it looks like U.S. consumers have not learned to stay away from debt.

That is not good.

Well, what about the banks?

Has the financial system learned any lessons since 2008?

No, not really.

Sadly, the “too big to fail” banks are now even bigger than ever. The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011. If they were to fail today, they would be even more of a threat to our financial system than they were back in 2008.

And our major banks continue to be very highly leveraged. In fact, major banks all over the world are absolutely swamped with debt.

The following statistics come from Zero Hedge….

The U.S. banking system is leveraged 13 to 1.

The Japanese banking system is leveraged 23 to 1.

The French banking system is leveraged 26 to 1.

The German banking system is leveraged 32 to 1.

These are insane levels of leverage, and they are just inviting another major financial crisis.

Do you all remember Lehman Brothers? The fact that they were leveraged so highly is what did them in back in 2008. When the value of their holdings declined by just a little bit they were totally wiped out.

Well, during this next financial crisis large financial institutions are going to be wiped out all over the world. Major banks all over the globe are going to be crying out for more bailouts when things take a turn against them.

They are making the exact same mistakes that they made before, and they are going to be expecting more government handouts when things go bad.

Will we ever learn?

So obviously the banking system has not learned any lessons.

What about the federal government?

Well, if you follow my blog regularly, you know that I love to write about how horrific U.S. government debt is.

Unfortunately, over the past four years things have gotten so much worse.

Back in 2008, the U.S. national debt crossed the 10 trillion dollar mark.

Just recently, it crossed the 15 trillion dollar mark.

So now we are in a much weaker position financially to respond to another major financial crisis.

Just check out the chart posted below. This is a recipe for national financial suicide….

During fiscal 2011, the Obama administration stole close to 150 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour.

At the moment, the legacy of debt that we are passing on to future generations is sitting a grand total of $15,351,406,294,640.49.

But keep in mind that it is going up every single hour.

Meanwhile, our ability to service that debt is declining. We are rapidly getting poorer as a nation.

During 2011, the amount of money that left the United States exceeded the amount of money that entered the United States by more than a half a trillion dollars.

This gap is called a trade deficit, and it is absolutely ripping our economy to shreds.

For a moment, imagine Uncle Sam standing next to a giant pile of money on a map of the United States. Then imagine a half a trillion dollars being taken out of that pile every single year.

So why haven’t we totally run out of money yet?

Well, it is because we borrow those dollars back. In order to maintain our false standard of living, our federal government, our state governments and our local governments have to go out and beg the rest of the world to lend us our dollars back.

Sadly, our government schools have “dumbed-down” the population so much that most of them don’t even know what a “trade deficit” is anymore.

Meanwhile, our economic infrastructure is being gutted like a fish.

Look, I know that I go over this point over and over and over, but it is absolutely imperative that we all understand this.

The half a trillion dollars a year that leaves this country every year could have gone to support businesses and jobs inside the United States.

But instead it is going to support businesses and jobs on the other side of the world.

The consequences of this are absolutely devastating.

According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day closed down in the United States during 2010. Overall, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have shut down since 2001.

Even many so-called “American companies” have been bought up by the rest of the world. The following comes from a recent article posted on Economy In Crisis….

RCA is now a French company, Zenith is a Korean company. Frigidaire is a Swedish company. IBM’s Personal Computer Division—with its 500 patents—is now a Chinese company. Westinghouse Nuclear Energy’s major shareholder is Toshiba—a Japanese Company. Lucent Technologies, a former research division of AT&T, along with all the patents acquired from the beginning of the phone system, is now a French company. In 2008, Brazilian-Belgian brewing company InBev purchased the iconic American brewer Anheuser-Busch, makers of Budweiser. With the sale of these manufacturing companies, the future profit and technologies all belong to foreign entities.

We once had the greatest economic machine in the history of the world.

Now it is being dismantled and bought up by foreigners.

When America’s economic infrastructure declines, that means that there are less jobs available for all of us.

As I wrote about the other day, the employment situation in this country is not getting better and we have never even come close to recovering from the recession that started back in 2008.

During 2008 and 2009, the U.S. economy lost millions of jobs. Since the beginning of 2010, the percentage of the U.S. population that has had a job has remained very stable….

Normally, when a recession ends the percentage of Americans that have a job bounces back pretty dramatically.

So considering the fact that the employment situation has never recovered from the last financial crisis, what is going to happen when the next financial crisis hits?

And most of the jobs that have been “created” during this so-called “recovery” have been low income jobs. In fact, if you look closely at the employment numbers that were released last Friday, you will find that the vast majority of the “new jobs” were part-time jobs.

But you cannot pay a mortgage and support a family on a part-time job.

Sadly, the truth is that median household income in America has been steadily dropping over the past several years. Tens of millions of American families are deeply struggling and more Americans than ever are falling into poverty.

Back in the year 2000, about one out of every nine Americans was living in poverty. Today, about one out of every seven Americans is living in poverty.

All of this is causing a great deal of anxiety in America today. Large numbers of Americans know that something has fundamentally changed, even if they don’t understand the specifics. That is one reason why sites such as this one have become so popular. People want some answers.

And once people get some answers about what is really happening, they tend to want to prepare for the hard times that are coming.

In a few days, a new series on National Geographic entitled “Doomsday Preppers” premieres. The mainstream media is starting to take notice of the growing “prepper” movement in America today. It is estimated that there are at least 2 million “preppers” in the United States at this point. Of course people are “prepping” for a whole host of reasons, but the number one concern among most groups of preppers is the economy.

As the economy crumbles, more Americans than ever have decided that it is not a good thing to be 100% dependent on the system.

Back in 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs. Because they did not have any finances stored up, large numbers of them also lost their homes. Many went from being solidly middle class to being out on the street in a matter of months.

That doesn’t have to happen to you. Instead of blowing your money on frivolous things, do what you can to set something aside for the difficult times that are on the horizon.

A lot of those “in the know” are quietly making their own preparations. For example, legendary film director James Cameron (Avatar, Titanic and Terminator) has purchased more than 2600 acres of farmland in New Zealand and he is getting out of the U.S. for good apparently.

Unfortunately, most of us do not have the resources for something like that. But what most of us can do is we can change our priorities and start focusing on the things that will help us survive the hard times that are coming.

So are you ready?

47 Signs That China Is Absolutely Destroying America On The Global Economic Stage

Have you ever watched a football game or a basketball game where one team dominates the other team so badly that calling it a “blowout” would be a huge understatement? Well, that is what China is doing to the United States. China is absolutely destroying America on the global economic stage. Once upon a time, the Chinese economy was a joke and the U.S. economy was the most powerful the world had ever seen. But over the past couple of decades the U.S. economy has decayed and declined while the Chinese economy has skyrocketed. Today, China makes more steel, more automobiles, more beer, more cotton, more coal and more solar panels than we do. China has the fastest train in the world, the fastest computer in the world and they export twice as much high-tech equipment as we do. In 2011, our trade deficit with China was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world, and China has now accumulated more than 3 trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves. Every single day, we lose more jobs, more businesses and more of our national wealth to China. In technical economic terms, China has “taken us out behind the woodshed” and has beaten the living daylights out of us. Unfortunately, most Americans are so addicted to entertainment that they don’t even realize what is happening.

If you do not believe that China is wiping the floor with America in front of the rest of the world, just keep reading. The following are 47 signs that China is absolutely destroying America on the global economic stage….

#1 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.

#2 America has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.

#3 The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.

#4 In 2010, China produced more than twice as many automobiles as the United States did.

#5 In 2010, China produced 627 million metric tons of steel. The United States only produced 80 million metric tons of steel.

#6 In 2010, China produced 7.3 million metric tons of cotton. The United States only produced 3.4 million metric tons of cotton.

#7 China produced 19.8 percent of all the goods consumed in the world during 2010. The United States only produced 19.4 percent.

#8 During 2010, we spent $365 billion on goods and services from China while they only spent $92 billion on goods and services from us.

#9 In 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was 6 million dollars for the entire year. The final U.S. trade deficit with China for 2011 will be very close to 300 billion dollars. That will be the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.

#10 The U.S. trade deficit with China is now 28 times larger than it was back in 1990.

#11 Since China entered the WTO in 2001, the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown by an average of 18% per year.

#12 According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China.

#13 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

#14 The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

#15 The United States had been the leading consumer of energy on the globe for about 100 years, but during the summer of 2010 China took over the number one spot.

#16 15 years ago, China was 14th in the world in published scientific research articles. But now, China is expected to pass the United States and become number one very shortly.

#17 China is also expected to soon become the global leader in patent filings.

#18 In 2009, the United States ranked dead last of the 40 nations examined by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” over the previous ten years.

#19 China now awards more doctoral degrees in engineering each year than the United States does.

#20 China now possesses the fastest supercomputer on the entire planet.

#21 China now has the world’s fastest train and the world’s most extensive high-speed rail network.

#22 The construction of the new $200 million African Union headquarters was funded by China.

#23 Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.

#24 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.

#25 Amazingly, China now consumes 53 percent of the world’s cement.

#26 There are more pigs in China than in the next 43 pork producing nations combined.

#27 China is now the number one producer of wind and solar power on the entire globe.

#28 Chinese solar panel production was about 50 times larger in 2010 than it was in 2005.

#29 Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.

#30 China controls over 90 percent of the total global supply of rare earth elements.

#31 China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.

#32 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”.

#33 The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#34 Back in the year 2000, more than 20 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs. Today, only about 5 percent of all jobs in America are manufacturing jobs.

#35 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.

#36 The average household debt load in the United States is 136% of average household income. In China, the average household debt load is 17% of average household income.

#37 The new World Trade Center tower is going to be made with imported glass from China.

#38 The new MLK memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

#39 A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted a while back found that 61 percent of all Americans consider China to be a threat to our jobs and economic security.

#40 According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day closed down in the United States during 2010.

#41 Overall, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have shut down since 2001.

#42 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent out of the country over the next two decades.

#43 Over the past several decades, China has been able to accumulate approximately 3 trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves, and the U.S. government now owes China close to 1.5 trillion dollars.

#44 According to the IMF, China will pass the United States and will become the largest economy in the world in 2016.

#45 According to one prominent economist, the Chinese economy already has roughly the same amount of purchasing power as the U.S. economy does.

#46 According to Stanford University economics professor Ed Lazear, if the U.S. economy and the Chinese economy continue to grow at current rates, the average Chinese citizen will be wealthier than the average American citizen in just 30 years.

#47 Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040 if current trends continue.

If the global economy was a game, America would be losing very badly and China would have all the momentum.

Unfortunately, the global economy is not a game. Very real businesses and very real jobs are affected by this every single day.

Barack Obama keeps talking about how “the economy is improving“, but the reality is that we have never even gotten close to where we were back before the financial crisis of 2008.

The following chart (which I pulled off a Fed website today) shows the average duration of unemployment in America. Does this look like an economic recovery to you?….

The Obama administration tells us that the official unemployment rate is only 8.5 percent, but that is a joke. Even the Congressional Budget Office admits that the official unemployment rate should actually be somewhere up around 10 percent.

But the real story is the number of long-term unemployed workers we have in America today.

According to the Hamilton Project, approximately 53 percent of all unemployed workers in the state of Florida were out of work for more than six months during 2011.

But Barack Obama seems absolutely amazed that there are still so many unemployed people out there during his “economic recovery”. Just check out the following interaction that took place between Obama and one concerned wife during a recent appearance by Obama on Google+….

“Can I ask you what kind of engineer your husband is?,” Obama said to the wife of the unemployed engineer.

“He’s a semiconductor engineer,” she responded.

“It is interesting to me — and I meant what I said if your send me your husband’s resume, I’d be interested in finding out exactly what’s happening right there because the word that we’re getting is that somebody in that type of high-tech field, that kind of engineer, should be able to find something right away.”

Obama does not realize that it is not so simple to “find something right away” in this economy.

We have been shipping high-tech jobs overseas at a blistering pace. The jobs simply are not there anymore.

In Europe, unemployment is even worse. Just check out this chart which shows what has been happening to youth unemployment in Europe recently.

In both the United States and Europe, a great disconnect has taken place. Just because big corporations in the U.S. and in Europe are doing well, that does not mean that they are going to provide good jobs for workers in the U.S. and in Europe.

These days, it is way too easy for big corporations to ship jobs over to places like China where it is perfectly legal to pay workers slave labor wages.

So unless something changes, that means that from now on there will be chronic structural unemployment problems in the United States.

That also means that the number of Americans dependent on the government is going to continue to increase.

And unfortunately, there are signs that the economy is about to experience another downturn. Consumer confidence in the U.S. is falling once again. The Baltic Dry Index, which is often used as a measure of the health of the world economy, has fallen more than 60 percent since October.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Europe is heading into a recession and several European nations are already experiencing depression-like conditions.

Considering the fact that half of all global trade involves Europe in some manner, that is not a good thing for us.

So if you have a job right now, you might want to hold on to it tightly. Jobs are precious commodities at the moment, and they are going to become even more scarce in the years ahead.

16 Statistics Which Show That The Number Of Americans Dependent On The Government Is At An All-Time High

A higher percentage of the American population is receiving government benefits than ever before. Yes, there have always been poor people that have needed our assistance, but what does it say about our economy that the number of Americans dependent on the government is at an all-time high? Every night on the evening news we are told that the economy is improving, and Barack Obama is endlessly giving speeches about the “economic recovery” that is supposedly underway. But that is not the reality on the ground for those on the bottom rungs of the income ladder in America. People are really hurting out there, and the number of Americans that are turning to the government for financial assistance just continues to increase. Yes, we should always have a “safety net”, but right now our “safety net” is becoming massively overloaded as millions more Americans jump on to it every single year. What all of these impoverished Americans really need are jobs, but the U.S. Congress and the past several administrations have been systematically killing job growth in America. So unfortunately the number of poor Americans is going to continue to rise, and that is really bad news for a nation that is already drowning in debt.

Some people out there want to blame the poor for the statistics that you are about to read, but that is a mistake. Yes, there are a lot of people out there that are abusing the system, and that needs to be stopped.

But many Americans that are dependent on the government are in that situation because there simply are not enough jobs in this country.

And unfortunately, the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress continue to pursue the same job-killing policies that have gotten us into this mess in the first place. So millions of Americans that have learned to survive as government dependents are not being given the opportunity to break out of that cycle. When there is a shortage of decent jobs, it is easy to give up. Many tend to become more and more comfortable being dependent on the government as time goes by.

Once you become addicted to getting a government check in the mail, it can be very difficult to give that up. There are some that get trapped in a life of government dependence for years or even decades.

The following are 16 statistics which show that the number of Americans dependent on the government is at an all-time high….

#1 According to the Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that gets direct monetary benefits from the federal government. Back in 1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a home that received direct monetary benefits from the federal government.

#2 The amount of money that the federal government gives directly to Americans has increased by 32 percent since Barack Obama entered the White House.

#3 The number of Americans receiving Social Security disability benefits has increased by 10 percent since Barack Obama first took office.

#4 Back in 1990, the federal government accounted for 32 percent of all health care spending in America. Today, that figure is up to 45 percent and it is projected to surpass 50 percent very shortly.

#5 The number of Americans on food stamps recently hit a new all-time high. It has increased by 3 million since this time last year and by more than 14 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House.

#6 Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps. This is unprecedented in American history.

#7 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

#8 Back in 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income. In 2010, government transfer payments accounted for 18.4% of all income, which was a new all-time high.

#9 By the end of 2011, approximately 55 million Americans received a total of approximately 727 billion dollars in Social Security benefits. As the retirement crisis becomes much worse, that dollar figure is projected to absolutely skyrocket.

#10 According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system paid out more in benefits than it received in payroll taxes in 2010. That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016.

#11 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

#12 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run out five years faster than previously anticipated.

#13 The total cost of just three federal government programs – the Department of Defense, Social Security and Medicare – exceeded the total amount of taxes brought in during fiscal 2010 by 10 billion dollars.

#14 It is being projected that entitlement spending by the federal government will nearly double by the year 2050.

#15 Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.

#16 When you total it all up, American households are now receiving more money directly from the federal government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

Once again, I am not blaming the poor. Almost all of us know of someone that is on government assistance. Most of them are not dependent on the government because they are lazy or because they want to cheat the system. Most of them have just had their dreams crushed by this horrible economy and need a helping hand.

It is incredible how anyone can run around claiming that the U.S. economy is heading in the right direction with all of this going on.

Yes, things are going fairly well for the boys and girls down on Wall Street, but for the vast majority of Americans things are looking quite bleak.

For example, things have gotten so bad that the state of Florida is actually considering using ballparks and sports stadiums as shelters for the homeless.

But when it comes to so many people being financially dependent on the federal government, there is a major problem.

The problem is that the federal government is absolutely drowning in debt.

So why don’t our politicians just explain to the American people that we need to start cutting back and reducing the size of some of these programs?

Well, if any of our politicians try to do that they won’t get elected next time around.

The truth is that the American people are deeply addicted to government money.

Any politician that proposes significant cuts to Social Security or Medicare is a goner.

Every poll or survey that is done on this subject shows that the American people are overwhelmingly against cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare.

So politicians will just keep spending money like there is no tomorrow, and the American people will just keep sending them back to Washington.

But just like we saw in Greece, a day of reckoning comes eventually.

There will come a time when the federal government will not be able to steal 150 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren.

There will come a time when there will not be enough money for all of these growing social programs.

So once the government checks stop rolling in, what is going to happen then?