Economic Despair

Jobless Recovery?: 25 Unemployment Statistics That Are Almost Too Depressing To Read

Guess what?  Unemployment is up again!  That’s right – even though Wall Street is swimming in cash and the Obama administration is declaring that “the recession is over”, the U.S. unemployment rate has gone even higher.  So are you enjoying the jobless recovery?  The truth is that there should not be any talk of a “recovery” as long as the “official” unemployment rate remains at around 10 percent and the “real” unemployment continues to hover around 17 percent.  There are millions and millions of American families that are living every day in deep pain because of the lack of jobs.  Meanwhile, there are all of these economic pundits that are declaring that we are just going to have to realize that chronic unemployment is the “new normal” and that if other nations can handle high rates of unemployment then so can we.  The most optimistic economists are projecting that we can perhaps get the unemployment rate down to around 8 percent by 2012.  On the other hand, there are many economists that are convinced that things are going to get even worse.

If you have never been unemployed, it can be hard to describe how soul-crushing it can be.  As the bills pile up and the financial obligations mount, the pressure can be debilitating.  Being unemployed for an extended period of time can easily plunge you into depression and grind your self-worth away to almost nothing.  After getting rejected dozens of times (or even hundreds of times), many Americans simply give up.  There are countless marriages and countless families that are being ripped to shreds by financial pressure even as you read this.  When the money is gone and there is no job in sight it can be a really, really empty feeling.

Of course there is a whole lot more to life than money, but it can be difficult to tell that to someone who can barely sleep at night because of the intense pressure to find a job.

The vast majority of Americans have at least one family member or close friend that is looking for work right now.  Times are really, really tough and unfortunately the long-term outlook is very bleak.  We should have compassion on those who are out of work right now, because soon many of us may join them.

The following are 25 unemployment statistics that are almost too depressing to read….

#1 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate for November was 9.8 percent.  This was up from 9.6 percent in October, and it continues a trend of depressingly high unemployment rates.  The official unemployment number has been at 9.5 percent or higher for well over a year at this point.

#2 In November 2006, the “official” U.S. unemployment rate was just 4.5 percent.

#3 Most economists had been expecting the U.S. economy to add about 150,000 jobs in November.  Instead, it only added 39,000.

#4 In the United States today, there are over 15 million people who are “officially” considered to be unemployed for statistical purposes.  But everyone knows that the “real” number is even much larger than that.

#5 As 2007 began, there were just over 1 million Americans that had been unemployed for half a year or longer.  Today, there are over 6 million Americans that have been unemployed for half a year or longer.

#6 The number of “persons not in the labor force” in the United States recently set another new all-time record.

#7 It now takes the average unemployed American over 33 weeks to find a job.

#8 When you throw in “discouraged workers” and “underemployed workers”, the “real” unemployment rate in the state of California is actually about 22 percent.

#9 In America today there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone.  In fact, there are now approximately 5 unemployed Americans for every single job opening.

#10 According to The New York Times, Americans that have been unemployed for five weeks or less are three times more likely to find a new job in the coming month than Americans that have been unemployed for over a year.

#11 The U.S. economy would need to create 235,120 new jobs a month to get the unemployment rate down to pre-recession levels by 2016.  Does anyone think that there is even a prayer that is going to happen?

#12 There are 9 million Americans that are working part-time for “economic reasons”.  In other words, those Americans would gladly take full-time jobs if they could get them, but all they have been able to find is part-time work.

#13 In 2009, total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined in the United States.

#14 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing.  The last time that less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.

#15 The United States has lost at least 7.5 million jobs since the recession began.

#16 Today, only about 40 percent of Ford Motor Company’s 178,000 workers are employed in North America, and a big percentage of those jobs are in Canada and Mexico.

#17 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output.  In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.

#18 Earlier this year, one poll found that 28% of all American households had at least one member that was looking for a full-time job.

#19 In the United States today, over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.

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

#21 As the employment situation continues to stagnate, millions of American families have decided to cut back on things such as insurance coverage.  For example, the percentage of American households that have life insurance coverage is at its lowest level in 50 years.

#22 Unless Congress acts, and there is no indication that is going to happen, approximately 2 million Americans will stop receiving unemployment checks over the next couple of months.

#23 A poll that was released by the Pew Research Center back in June discovered that an astounding 55 percent of the U.S. labor force has experienced either unemployment, a pay decrease, a reduction in hours or an involuntary move to part-time work since the economic downturn began.

#24 According to Richard McCormack, the United States has lost over 42,000 factories (and counting) since 2001.

#25 In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.

But this is what we get for creating the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world.  For decades we have been digging a deeper hole for ourselves by going into increasingly larger amounts of debt.  In America today, our entire economy is based on debt.  Even our money is debt.  We were fools if we ever thought this could go on forever.

Just think about it.  Have you ever gone out and run up a bunch of debt?  It can be a lot of fun sitting behind the wheel of a new car, running your credit cards up to the limit and buying a beautiful big house that you cannot afford.

But in the end what happens?

It always catches up with you.

Well, our collective debt is starting to catch up with us.  There is a sea of red ink on every level of American society.  It is only a matter of time before it destroys our economy.

If you think that things are bad now, just wait.  Things are going to get a whole lot worse.  A horrific economic collapse is coming, and it is going to be very, very painful.

Less Money, More Problems

How in the world is the U.S. economy going to recover if the American people have less money to spend?  Millions of American families are heading into 2011 knowing that either they won’t be seeing an increase in income or that their incomes will be smaller next year.  Long-term unemployment benefits are being cut off for millions of Americans, federal workers are having their wages frozen, Social Security recipients are not going to get a cost of living increase for 2011, taxes are going up for the vast majority of U.S. families and employers are forcing pay cuts on their workers across the United States.  Meanwhile, the cost of food just keeps going up, the cost of gas just keeps going up and the cost of health care just keeps going up.  So what are millions of American families that are already stretched to the limit going to do when they have less money in 2011?

Millions of unemployed American workers are heading for a very bleak 2011.  Unless Congress acts, and there is no indication that is going to happen, approximately 2 million Americans will stop receiving unemployment checks over the next couple months.

The government is really between a rock and a hard place on this one.  After all, who is so heartless that they actually want to cut off the little financial support that millions of deeply struggling American families are depending on?  Not extending the long-term unemployment benefits is going to mean more Americans are going to lose their homes, more Americans are going to go bankrupt and more Americans will end up in tent cities.

But as CNN recently reported, extending the long-term unemployment benefits through next year would cost the federal government $56.4 billion that we simply do not have.  The U.S. government is absolutely drowning in red ink and cannot afford to just chuck another 56 billion dollars more debt on to the pile.

At this point even Barack Obama is taking some small steps to get federal spending under control.  He has just announced a plan to freeze the pay of federal government workers for the next two years.

So how are federal government workers handling the news that they will not be seeing any raises for the next coupe of years?

Not well.  In fact, many of them are absolutely furious.

But can you blame them?

How would you feel if your wages were just frozen for two years and yet the price of everything just continues to keep going up?

Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration announced last month that there will be no cost of living adjustments for Social Security benefits once again next year.

According to the government, the cost of living is not going up.

So now our seniors will just have to stretch those meager checks even more.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, now a whole slew of tax increases is coming.  The U.S. Congress is busy debating which (if any) of the Bush tax cuts that they are going to allow to expire, but the truth is that the Bush tax cuts are only a small part of the story.  There are so many tax increases scheduled to go into effect in 2011 that it is hard to keep track of them all.  In fact, there are many (myself included) that are calling 2011 “the year of the tax increase“.

But it is not just the federal government that is raising taxes.  In the past two years, 36 of the 50 U.S. states have jacked up taxes or fees.

In addition, many local governments are so strapped for cash that they are going to absolutely ridiculous lengths to raise cash.  For example, from now on if you are caught jaywalking in Los Angeles you will be slapped with a $191 fine.

This kind of thing is happening all over America.  Police departments are being turned into revenue raising operations.  Police are so busy writing tickets that they barely have any time to investigate actual crimes anymore.

Unfortunately, all of this latest news comes at a time when incomes are already down from coast to coast.  Median household income in the U.S. declined from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009.  Some areas are declining faster than others, but the truth is that almost all areas of the United States have been seeing incomes go down.  In fact, of the 52 largest metro areas in the United States, only the city of San Antonio did not see a decline in median household income during 2009.

Times are getting really tough.  Employers all over America are forcing their employees to take pay cuts.  Even some of the most prominent unions are agreeing to unprecedented concessions.  For example, just check out what The New York Times says is going on over at General Motors….

In its most recent union contract, General Motors is paying new employees $14 an hour, half the rate it pays its long-term workers.

Unfortunately, American families are going to have to try to do more with less during a time when prices are going to be going up.  Most economists agree that all of the quantitative easing that the Federal Reserve is doing is going to cause inflation to start increasing significantly at some point.  In fact, some of the top Federal Reserve officials have publicly stated that they want to purposely raise the rate of inflation as a way to stimulate the economy.

One of the great things about Americans is our relentless sense of optimism, but it is time for a major reality check.  Our economic system is in an advanced state of decay.  Our nation is a sea of red ink from coast to coast, we continue to consume tens of billions more than we produce every single month and we are rapidly being transformed into a post-industrial wasteland.

The economy is not going to be “getting better” in the long-term.  Unless fundamental changes are made to our economic system, we are going to continue to speed toward a horrific economic collapse.

The storm clouds are gathering on the horizon and time is running out.  It is imperative that we all make the most out of every single day because night is coming soon.

9 Shocking Examples Of Black Friday Violence – Is This A Foretaste Of The Economic Riots We Can Expect When The Financial System Collapses?

It seems with each passing year the madness on Black Friday gets even worse.  This year, there were reports of fights and rioting from coast to coast.  It was estimated that over 180 million U.S. shoppers headed for the stores on Friday, and whenever you get that many people together there are going to be problems.  But just how crazed ordinary Americans are getting over saving a little bit of money is deeply disturbing when you really start thinking about it.  If people will go this wild just to save 40 percent on a television set, then what in the world are they going to do when they have been without food for a couple of days?  If Americans will act like psychotic animals just to save 50 bucks, then what in the world will they do when they have lost everything and are desperate to survive?

All of us had better hope and pray that an economic collapse does not happen any time soon, because it is becoming increasingly apparent that the American people are not morally equipped to be able to handle one.  Greed and selfishness have become so rampant in America that large segments of the population have totally forgotten how to be any other way.

If the United States ever experiences a really, really bad economic downturn, this nation could very quickly start looking like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina from coast to coast.  Most Americans would simply not know how to handle it.

The following are 9 shocking examples of Black Friday violence that should make all of us wonder what is happening to America….

#1 At a Target store in Buffalo, New York the crowds waiting impatiently outside suddenly became a chaotic mob once the doors opened at 4 AM on Friday morning.

One man that was lying on the ground remembers thinking “I don’t want to die here” while he was being trampled by crazed shoppers….

#2 Crowds were becoming so violent at a Wal-Mart in Sacramento, California that the police actually evacuated the store early Friday morning.

#3 Three women from West Palm Beach, Florida said that $1,000 in presents that they had just purchased at Best Buy were stolen from their vehicle on Friday morning within minutes of being purchased.

#4 One U.S. Marine reservist that was collecting toys for children was stabbed with a knife when he attempted to stop a shoplifter in eastern Georgia on Friday.

#5 Blogger Lynne Elder-Blau has posted about overhearing police officers describe a huge brawl that erupted this year at one well-known store on Black Friday….

Well, the girls and I were in a popular convenience store in Garden City last night while a store employee and a Garden City Police Department Officer were visiting. They were conversing about a large group of customers who got into a knock-down brawl at a nationally-known variety store in Garden City yesterday morning. Several police officers were brought in to break up the ball of adults who were pulling and tugging at products and actually punching other customers in their faces and stomach areas! We’re not just talking about a few people who were involved in this violent non-sense. The officer said that there was a large amount of people involved in this particular altercation. Ridiculous!!!

#6 A 21-year-old woman from Middleton, Wisconsin was arrested when she threatened to shoot other shoppers while waiting to get into a Toys R Us store for Black Friday.  The other shoppers had objected when she attempted to move to the front of the line.

#7 The following is video of customers literally tearing apart a store display at a Wal-Mart in Douglasville, Georgia as they pushed and shoved each other in an attempt to grab the best deals….

#8 The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department actually “locked down” a section of a Cerritos, California shopping mall after a wild fight broke out in the food court.  There were even reports that some people were  flinging chairs at other customers.

#9 At one Wal-Mart in Texas, a near-riot broke out right in the middle of the store as a huge crowd of customers pushed and shoved each other to get a handful of Black Friday deals that were being wheeled out to the floor….

If you want to see even more videos of Black Friday craziness, check out this and this.

Remember, the products that these Americans are fighting over are not free.  This is how crazy people are willing to go just to get a deep discount on an item.

So what is going to happen someday when people are desperate for food or shelter?

If this is how people act when the sun is shining, how are they going to behave once a really bad storm arrives?

In America today, fewer and fewer people are treating others the way that they would like to be treated themselves.

Instead of showing others kindness and respect, in 2010 most Americans would seemingly rather trample anyone who is in the way of getting what they want.

So what do you think?  Are Americans becoming more greedy and more selfish or are they basically “good” and “decent” people most of the time?  Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion….

Happy Holidays? 28 Hard Questions It Would Be Great If We Could Get Some Real Answers To

Over the coming weeks, Americans will be wishing each other “happy holidays” millions upon millions of times.  But are these really happy times?  Record numbers of Americans are going to be going hungry and cold this winter.  Millions upon millions of our fellow citizens would gladly give up all holiday celebrations in exchange for a decent job.  The vast majority of us have plenty of examples of horrible personal tragedy all around us this holiday season, and much of that tragedy has been brought on by the deteriorating economic conditions.  Meanwhile, we have a “control freak” government that wants to establish an even tighter grip over our lives and that now insists on either viewing our exposed bodies or groping our private areas before we can get on an airplane.  Once upon a time in America the holiday season was a time to rejoice because we lived in a prosperous land where liberty and freedom were respected, but today we live in a nation with a highly centralized economy dominated by a federal government that is becoming more “totalitarian” by the day.

But we are told that centralized control by an overwhelmingly powerful national government is good in our case because “they” know what is best for us.

Oh really?  They sure have done a great job “managing” our economic system, haven’t they?  Unfortunately, it seems as though anything that the federal government takes control over just gets more messed up.

The following are 28 hard questions that you should ask anyone who believes that having a highly centralized economy and a highly centralized government is good for us….

#1 Why is the U.S. government trying to put a choke hold on our food production system? S. 510, The Food Safety Modernization Act, is being called one of the most dangerous bills in American history.  This very vague and incredibly broad bill (which you can read here) will give the U.S. government unprecedented control over the growing, storing and sale of food in the United States.

#2 Approximately 14.8 million Americans are unemployed this holiday season.  So why in the world is the “greatest economy on earth” not able to provide jobs for all of them?

#3 Why are the U.S. and South Korea insisting on conducting 4 days of naval exercises in the Yellow Sea when tensions in the reason are at an all-time high and when a single mistake could spark an all-out war?  Wouldn’t it be better to postpone these naval exercises until things have calmed down a bit?

#4 What prompted Russia and China to suddenly decide to quit using the U.S. dollar and instead start using their own national currencies when trading with each other?

#5 Why does it cost $181,757 per hour for Barack Obama to travel on Air Force One?

#6 Are we still a “great nation” when so many of our citizens are going hungry?  According to a recent BBC report, 15% of all U.S. households experienced a shortage of food at some point during 2009.  One of our readers named Gary recently left a comment that indicated that he encountered a very big crowd during his recent visit to a local food pantry….

The line at the food pantry was very long. There are a lot of folks who have little food and no money.

#7 If the U.S. economy is recovering, why were new home sales for October down 28.9 percent from a year ago and why were existing home sales for October down 25.9 percent over the previous year?

#8 Why are there so many reports of unprofessional behavior by TSA agents?  For example, it is being reported that some TSA agents have specifically targeted attractive young women for “additional screening”.

#9 Why are U.S. home builders only selling one-fifth of the homes that they were selling during the “boom times” five years ago?

#10 How did a man who had been convicted of misdemeanor harassment and stalking get hired to be a TSA agent?  Now it turns out he is being accused of abducting and sexually assaulting a woman.  These are the people who are supposed to be protecting us?

#11 In the “wealthiest nation on earth”, why are a record number of Americans going to be without heat this winter? According to the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, more than 10 million U.S. households will not be able to afford to heat their homes this winter without assistance, which would be a new all-time record.  One of our readers named Elaine recently shared that she is one of those Americans that is going to be cold this winter….

It’s starting to get cold here in the mountains. I’m unemployed, no heat, at risk for foreclosure, etc. Everyone is at risk for this, it’s just that many of the muddleclass can’t face it yet. For a lot of us, it’s not cutting back on that bi-weekly latte that’s going to help, it’s cutting back on having electricity. Don’t judge the poor until you’ve been here.

#12 Why are Americans becoming so pessimistic about the future?  According to one recent poll, now only 51 percent of Americans believe that today’s young people will have a better life than their parents did.

#13 How did we ever get to the point as a nation where only 39 percent of likely voters believe that the U.S. government is operating within the limits established by the U.S. Constitution?

#14 Why does the mainstream media largely ignore the fact that thousands of people are being slaughtered near the U.S. border with Mexico each year and a city just across the Mexican border is now being dubbed “the most dangerous place on earth”?

#15 What does it say about American politics that the companies that produce the new naked body scanners have more than doubled their spending on political lobbying over the last five years?

#16 Why is the Washington Post working so hard to defend the policies of the Federal Reserve?

#17 Have we now gotten to the point where the financial condition of the U.S. government is so bad that it will be virtually impossible to ever have a balanced federal budget ever again?

#18 Why aren’t more Americans deeply concerned about the dozens of nasty diseases that they could catch from TSA agents if they don’t change gloves between each groping?

#19 Why are there 18 times as many banks on the FDIC “problem list” as there were just four years ago?

#20 What does it say about the United States that now 39 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete?

#21 How can anyone claim that the U.S. economy is turning around as long as the number of Americans on food stamps continues to set a new all-time record month after month?

#22 As thousands of factories and millions of jobs continue to be shipped overseas, why does Barack Obama keep publicly proclaiming that globalism is so good for us?

#23 Why aren’t Homeland Security officials willing to consider changes to the new airport security procedures when many women are actually using the term “sexual assault” to describe their experiences with the new “enhanced pat downs”?

#24 The median wealth of a U.S. Senator in 2009 was 2.38 million dollars.  So exactly what does that say about the health of our Republic?

#25 Why have our leaders allowed U.S. strategic grain reserves to shrivel away to almost nothing?

#26 In 2009, 54.9 million international tourists visited the United States, and those tourists spent approximately 93 billion dollars.  How far will those numbers drop once stories of TSA abuse circulate all over the globe?

#27 If Congress does not authorize another emergency extension of long-term unemployment benefits, then what in the world are the 2 million Americans who are going to suddenly lose their checks going to do?

#28 Are there still any areas left in the United States where liberty and freedom are respected, where taxes are low, where regulations are not suffocating, where the people are friendly and where Americans can be free to live an independent lifestyle?

Tent Cities, Homelessness And Soul-Crushing Despair: The Legacy Of Decades Of Government Debt And Mismanagement Of The Economy

For decades, our politicians have been deeply addicted to government debt, they have stood idly by as millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas and they have passed countless business-crushing regulations and they never thought that it would catch up with us.  Well, it has.  America has been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and now that bubble is starting to pop.  There has never been such an extended period of unemployment in the United States since the Great Depression, and millions of Americans are losing their homes.  Homelessness is skyrocketing, tent cities are popping up everywhere and countless numbers of American families are experiencing the soul-crushing despair that comes from desperately trying to hang on for month after month after month.

Now, because of the horrific hole that our politicians have dug for us, we are faced with some heartbreaking choices.  For example, right now the U.S. Congress is deciding whether or not to extend long-term unemployment benefits for the nation’s jobless.

Extending those benefits through the end of February would add another $12.5 billion to the U.S. national debt.  But not doing it would cut off the only lifeline that many Americans have just in time for the holidays.

The extension of jobless benefits that was passed last summer expires on December 1st.  If these long-term benefits are not renewed, approximately 2 million unemployed Americans will lose their checks.

But what can the U.S. Congress do?  Just keep going into endless amounts of debt?  As I have written about previously, the United States is never going to see another balanced budget ever again under the current system.  The U.S. government is flat out broke.  Somehow our politicians desperately need to find a way for the federal budget to stop hemorrhaging red ink.

There is no more “extra money” to spend.  The U.S. government has piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world and we are headed for a complete and total economic disaster because of it.

But what are we going to do?  Are we going to let millions of Americans starve in the streets?

It’s not just the rapidly rising number of homeless Americans that is the problem.  Millions of Americans are not going to be able to heat their homes this winter.  Millions of others are going to have to choose between buying medicine and buying food because they will not be able to afford both.

How would you like to be at a point where you could not go to the doctor because you knew that you could not pay the deductible?

How would you like to be at a point where you had to decide whether to buy diabetes medicine or to buy macaroni and cheese to feed your family?

More than 42 million Americans are now on food stamps, and that number keeps going up month after month after month.

Just think about that.

42 million Americans would not be able to eat if the U.S. government did not give them handouts.

The safety net is getting awfully crowded.

If you really want to see some soul-crushing desperation, go check out the flood tunnels under the city of Las Vegas.  But do not do this alone – it is very dangerous down there.  Today, there are hordes of “tunnel people” who call those dark tunnels home.  Nobody knows for sure how many people are down there (some people say that it is well into the thousands), but everyone agrees that the number is rapidly growing.

But in many major U.S. cities there are no flood tunnels to go to.  Instead, in many areas of the United States huge tent cities have sprouted.  The following is a video news report from the BBC about the tent cities that are popping up all over America….

But it is not just “drug addicts” and the “mentally ill” that are going to these tent cities.  One anonymous unemployed woman identified only as “Kaynonymous” is a highly educated professional who figures that she will end up in a tent city soon….

“I’m a 99er too. 53, female, single and once on track with an IT career. No one in their right mind would consider me for an IT position after being gone from the field for over 2 years. I have officially been a 99er since May 2010. In Aug. 2010 all of my savings and retirement funds were finally depleted–not only can I no longer make my mortgage payment, I can no longer afford utilities either. I’m just not sure that the 99ers ever had a voice outside of union organizers and even with them it was too little too late. Guess I’ll be seeing ya’ll in the soup kitchens and tent cities. I do still have my tent…”

So we should just extend the long-term unemployment benefits, right?  Well, according to a recent poll commissioned by the National Employment Law Project, 73 percent of Americans want Congress to continue paying out extended unemployment benefits.

But it is not just that simple.

America is broke.

The entire financial system is dying.

The U.S. government desperately needs to stop spending so much money.

But how can we turn our backs on people who are desperately hurting?

There are millions of Americans that have just about reached the end of their ropes.  For example, one 43-year-old woman named Jacqueline recently expressed some of the extreme frustration that she is experiencing on her blog….

I am one of the 6 million poor, unemployed middle-aged Americans struggling without any safety net or income other than food stamps. I have resorted to salvaging scrap metal just to survive while keeping up an increasingly hopeless job search. On May 4th, 2010 just three weeks before my 43rd birthday ago I got slapped with a diagnosis of very early stage glaucoma when I had a six year long overdue optical exam for badly needed new glasses. Without treatment — including ophthalmologist’s glaucoma monitoring exams — I will end up blind and permanently disabled. It’s not a matter of “if”, it’s a matter of when.

As a society, we will be judged by how we treat those who are the most vulnerable.  It can seem easy to bash those who have lost everything, but someday you might end up in that position.  In the following video, police in St. Petersburg, Florida are seen using box cutters to slice up the tents that the homeless were sleeping in….

Hopefully you were deeply disturbed by that video.

We have gotten ourselves into a giant mess, and things are only going to get worse.

Unfortunately, some extremely painful decisions are going to have to be made.

The truth is that we are so deeply in debt that the U.S. government just cannot be spending any extra money right now.

However, we also cannot turn our backs on millions of American families that are going to lose their homes and go hungry if we do not help them.

So what do we do?

What hurting Americans need most of all are not handouts – what they really need are good jobs.

But good jobs are being shipped overseas at a breathtaking pace.  The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.  The greatest economic machine in the history of the world is literally having its guts ripped out, and most of you kept voting in jokers who supported all of this deindustrialization.

For decades, our politicians kept telling us how wonderful globalization would be for America.  We didn’t listen when Ross Perot warned us about “the great sucking sound” that these “free trade” agreements would bring about.

Well, look how all of that turned out.  In 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was 6 million dollars for the entire year.  In the month of August alone, the U.S. trade deficit with China was over 28 billion dollars.

In case you can’t figure it out, that means that 28 billion dollars of our national wealth was transferred to China in just one month.

This is happening month after month after month.

And yet Barack Obama continues to get up and tell us how wonderful globalism is.  During his recent trip to India, Barack Obama made the following statement….

“This will keep America on its toes. America is going to have to compete. There is going to be a tug-of-war within the US between those who see globalization as a threat and those who accept we live in a open integrated world, which has challenges and opportunities.”

Yes, globalization is a threat.  We should have never merged our economy with the economy of China where workers make less than a tenth of what an American worker makes.

Jobs are flooding out of the U.S. and they are flooding into places like India and China where labor is far, far cheaper.

But without good jobs, how in the world are average Americans going to pay the bills?

The answer is that an increasing number of them are not.  1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.

Incomes are going down.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States fell from $51,726 in 2008 to $50,221 in 2009.

Things are getting worse instead of getting better.

And things are going to continue to get worse because the U.S. government goes into more debt every single month, most state and local governments go into more debt every single month, and thanks to America’s exploding trade deficit, tens of billions of our national wealth gets transferred out of the United States every single month.

The U.S. economy is dying.  There are going to be even more tent cities and even more hungry Americans.  The scale of the economic nightmare that we are facing in the years ahead is going to be unimaginable.

So if you get to enjoy a warm dinner and you get to sleep in a warm bed tonight, please consider yourself to be very fortunate.  Someday soon you also may find those things cruelly stripped away from you.

Will You Be Able To Heat Your Home This Winter? Millions Of American Families Will Not

Will you have a warm house to come home to this winter?  If so, you should consider yourself to be very fortunate. With the United States experiencing the highest levels of long-term unemployment that it has seen since the Great Depression, millions of Americans families are simply out of money.  All across America this winter, families are going to be forced to make some heart breaking decisions.  For many, the choice will come down to either heating their home or putting food on the table.  According to the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, more than 10 million U.S. households will not be able to afford to heat their homes this winter without assistance, which would be a new all-time record.  So, if you are in a position to easily heat your home this winter, be very, very thankful.  The number of American families that cannot even afford the basics of life is growing by the day.

As I have written about previously, millions of formerly middle class families have been absolutely ripped apart by this economy.  There simply is not nearly enough jobs for everyone, and those who have been left on the outside looking in are becoming increasingly desperate.

Of course there is federal help available, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough for those who are truly in need.  For example, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) assists low income households in paying their home heating bills.  However, the truth is that usually only a small fraction of heating costs are covered.  Nationally, the average benefit represents only about 8% of the average winter heating bill.

Last winter, a record number of U.S. households applied for home heating assistance.  In fact, in 17 states application requests were up more than 20% from the year before.  Due to rapidly spreading poverty, the number of Americans filing for heating assistance is expected to increase even more this winter.

If you cannot heat your home, it is a really, really big deal.  In 2009, a 93-year-old man in Bay City, Michigan actually froze to death inside his own home.

These days, many American families are finding that their budgets are stretched beyond the breaking point.  Most Americans take it for granted that they will be able to heat their homes, but for the poor, being able to have enough heat is a great blessing.  Today, the poorest 20 percent of Americans spend more than 50 percent of their after-tax income on food and energy….

So can’t the U.S. federal government just pay for everyone to have heat?

No, they cannot.

The truth is that as millions upon millions of Americans jump on to the “safety net” it is rapidly approaching the breaking point.  For example, 42 million Americans are now enrolled in the food stamp program.  That is a whole lot of hungry mouths to try to feed every month.

Not that feeding hungry people should not be a priority.  It is just that the U.S. government continues to spend way, way more money than it is bringing in and is basically bankrupt at this point.

So what about the states?  Can’t they step in and help?

No, the truth is that most U.S. states are absolute basket cases financially.  A recent article that I wrote about the state of California illustrates this point very well.

Unfortunately, most Americans families are just going to have to scrape by the best that they can.

It is hard to even describe the horrible pain that many Americans are experiencing because of this economy.  The following story from the Unemployed-Friends website is from a woman named Leetah who is desperately hoping that her family will be able to get through this upcoming winter….

The place I live in right now has no jobs and no places to live. My fiance, Lloyd, and I have been looking for anything but he lost his job from McDonald’s and the factories (the only jobs to make a living off of) consider him an insurance liability. I can’t get hired to a factory because of I was fired from our major factory for attendance (I had to miss 3 days of work because I was sick). So we are moving to the Edmond/OKC region where we are hoping to find a job and a place with running water and heating. We’ve spent the last few years without heat and running water and so having a place with water and heat would be heaven.

Winter is coming up fast and I am so afraid. Last winter we almost died from the cold and now the thought of cold makes my throat close up and my heart pound. But it isn’t just ourselves we are looking out for, we have our dog too. Our wonderful APBT Maggie who is 2-years-old and has been with us since she was 5-months-old. She’s our baby girl and we can’t lose her. We almost lost her to the cold too and it scared me so much. We are going to be living in our car soon with our dog.

I am hoping to be able to keep our food stamps in the new city so we can still eat. I have already applied for ten+ jobs and nothing yet but I am keeping my hopes up. Hopefully it will get easier to find a job once we get there. Then we just have to save up and then we can afford an apartment. Now finding an apartment with my awesome dog is another story.

Please say a prayer for those who are hurting this winter.  This economy has pushed millions of Americans to the absolute edge of despair.  Another participant on the Unemployed-Friends forum named Sanskay sounds like the hard reality of her situation has sucked almost all of the life out of her….

I met the love of my life when I was 19, and we moved in together. He had an excellent job and savings (he was several years older than me), and we decided together that I would stay home. When I was 26, he started feeling sick to his stomach a lot. By the time he was diagnosed with colon cancer (at 33!), it had already spread to his liver. We lost everything to medical bills, treatments, and medications. We fought so hard to prolong his life, and we drained his (our) savings accounts to try to cure him. Well, it did not work. He died in agony.

So then I was 26 and a widow and penniless, and I had not worked since college. I moved back in with my parents and decided to go back to school. Everyone told me that the health care fields were all in demand, so I studied to become an ultrasound tech. I excelled in my classes. It took me two years to do all of my prerequisites before I entered the program. By then, the recession had hit, but everyone at the school told me that I would have no problem landing a job as long as I was willing to move. This ended up being all lies. By that point, they knew that they were having trouble placing grads from 2007 and 2008, but that was never mentioned to me. This was a community college with a good reputation, and not some for-profit school, and I believed them.

I graduated last year (2009) and have been looking for employment as an ultrasound tech for over a year now. I have applied to over 400 jobs. I have gained three in-person interviews and seven phone interviews. None of them have amounted to anything. I am still unemployed. There are many per-diem (they’ll call you when they need you, and you have no guaranteed hours) jobs listed, but I cannot move unless I have a full-time job.

It’s awful because they are still funneling people into the program and telling them that as long as they’re willing to move out of state, they will have no trouble finding full-time work. They’re just concerned with keeping the seats full and they don’t care if their new graduates are unable to find work. I feel betrayed.

So now I’m 30 years old and still living in my parents’ basement, as I have been for years now. I feel like such a loser. My parents paid for my community college degree and my registry exams, which are all worthless now. It’s been so long that I have scanned anyone that I don’t remember what to do for some of the exams any longer, not to mention what the pathologies look like.

I haven’t applied to a job in a month. The official unemployment rate in my county is 15.6%, but the “unofficial” unemployment rate (REAL unemployment rate!) is easily double that. There is no work here, and I have no money to move, and no salable skills even if I had the money to move.

I miss my husband terribly. Suicide has definitely crossed my mind many times, but it would literally kill my mother if I did anything rash (she has a heart condition and can’t allow herself to become over-excited or her heart starts beating out of rhythm, which could cause a heart attack). It seems most days that the best years of my life are far behind me and that I have nothing to look forward to anymore.

Hopefully as you read these kinds of stories you feel your heart move.  The truth is that it could be any of us that are next.

In this economy, no jobs is secure.  In this economy, no business is secure.  There is no guarantee that the income that you are enjoying today is going to be there tomorrow.

The U.S. economic system is slowly dying.  There are many that are cheering this downfall, but the cold, hard truth is that tens of millions of us are going to experience horrible economic pain as the economy unravels.

It is not going to be a fun time.  So count your blessings while you still have them.

One Piece Of Moderately Good Economic News And 14 Pieces Of Bad Economic News That Are So Horrifying You Might Not Want To Read Them Standing Up

Today the financial world was buzzing with excitement because there was one moderately good piece of news for the U.S. economy.  U.S. employers added 151,000 jobs during the month of October and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.6%.  This is certainly welcome news, but these days it seems as though there are at least ten pieces of bad economic news for every hopeful economic signal.  So don’t get fooled when the U.S. economy takes one step forward, because it is about to take another dozen or so steps backwards.  We are living in the middle of a nightmarish long-term economic decline that has been building for generations.  The deindustrialization of the United States, the horrific trade deficit caused by globalization and the skyrocketing national debt are problems that have taken decades to develop.  The Federal Reserve has been ripping the guts out of our financial system since 1913.  These are not things that are going to be fixed overnight.  In fact, there are some statistics that just keep getting worse and worse and worse as time goes by.  We are heading straight for a devastating economic collapse and hopefully we can all warn as many people as possible while there is still time.

The more research that you do into our economic situation the more depressing it becomes.  We are in big, big, big trouble.  The following are 14 pieces of bad economic news that are so horrifying you might not want to read them standing up….

#1 More than 42 million Americans were on food stamps during the month of August.  That is a new all-time record, and that number is 17 percent higher than it was one year earlier.  In fact, the number of Americans on food stamps is up more than 58 percent since August 2007.

#2 The number of “persons not in the labor force” in the United States has set another new all-time record.  The United States has not had such an extended bout of mass unemployment since the Great Depression.  The “official” unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months.

#3 More than 1000 people now live in the 200 miles of flood tunnels that exist under the city of Las Vegas.  Once one of the most prosperous cities in the United States, Las Vegas is now little more than a shiny, glittering corpse that it rapidly decaying.

#4 Poverty is absolutely exploding and it is hitting those who are the most vulnerable the hardest.  According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.

#5 In the past 60 days alone, the price of cotton is up 54%, the price of corn is up 29%, the price of soybeans is up 22%, the price of orange juice is up 17%, and the price of sugar is up 51%.

#6 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

#7 The American Bankruptcy Institute says that there will be about 1.6 million consumer bankruptcies in 2010.  That would represent a huge increase over 2009.

#8 According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

#9 The individual U.S. states are mostly flat broke.  For example, it is being reported that the 15 largest U.S. states spent on average over 220% of their tax receipts over the past decade.  Clearly this is not even close to sustainable.

#10 The U.S. government is completely and totally broke.  After analyzing Congressional Budget Office data, Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff concluded that the U.S. government is facing a “fiscal gap” of $202 trillion dollars.

#11 In an attempt to keep our financial system solvent, the U.S. Federal Reserve has announced plans to create $600 billion out of thin air and pump it into the U.S. economy.  The Fed is calling this “quantitative easing“, but what they should really be calling it is “cheating, debasing and inflating”.

#12 Many of the major trading partners of the United States are expressing deep resentment regarding the new quantitative easing policy announced by the Fed.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recently described the growing animosity this way….

Li Deshui from Beijing’s Economic Commission said a string of Asian states share China’s “deep bitterness” over dollar debasement, and are examining ways of teaming up to insulate themselves from the tsunami of US liquidity.

#13 For many analysts, the economic collapse of the United States comes down to cold, hard math.  For example, the former CEO of the tenth largest bank in the United States says that it is a “mathematical certainty” that the U.S. government will eventually go bankrupt.

#14 According to a recent article on CNBC, the financial world is already buzzing about QE3….

“They’re already talking about QE3,” said Dave Rovelli, managing director of US equity trading for Canaccord Adams. “Eventually we’re going to be printing so much money the dollar is going to really go down and everybody’s going to try to deflate their currency against us. I just don’t know how this could end well.”

So is that all the Federal Reserve has left?

Are they just going to keep pouring bags of money into the economy until things get back to “normal”?

Are we going to have “Quantitative Easing 3”, “Quantitative Easing 4”, and “Quantitative Easing 5”?

It has been a long-running joke, but perhaps by the end of this thing Ben Bernanke will literally go up in a helicopter and start shoveling out huge piles of cash over the countryside.

The era of great prosperity that we have all enjoyed for so long is coming to an end.  It would be advisable to use the remaining period of economic stability that we still have to prepare for what is ahead.

These economic problems could have been fixed decades ago if people would have actually listened and would have followed sound economic principles on an individual and on a corporate level, but that did not happen.

Now we are up to our eyeballs in debt and the greatest economic machine in history is rotting all around us.

We are in deep, deep, deep trouble and denying it is not going to make it go away.

Millions Of Unemployed Americans Now Live As Paupers Even As Foreign Nations Use Sovereign Wealth Funds To Buy Up Huge Chunks Of American Infrastructure

Most Americans still do not understand just how bad the economic horror we are facing really is.  Today, millions of Americans are living as paupers in the land that their foreathers built even as America’s infrastructure is literally being sold out from under their feet by corrupt politicians.  The “official” unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months, and today it takes the average unemployed American about 35 weeks to find a job.  However, the “official” unemployment rate is misleading, because it does not include workers that have quit looking for work or that have had their hours cut back to part-time.  According to 60 Minutes, when you add those “discouraged workers” and “underemployed workers” into the equation the actual rate is about 17 percent, and in the state of California the actual rate is about 22 percent.  Meanwhile, foreign nations are using sovereign wealth funds to buy up staggering amounts of U.S. infrastructure.  America is quite literally for sale in 2010.  All across the United States, highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters are being gobbled up by foreign powers.  We have shipped massive amounts of wealth and jobs to other nations, and now those very same countries are turning around and buying huge amounts of U.S. infrastructure with the gigantic piles of dollars that they have accumulated.    

Widespread long-term chronic unemployment was something that America was never supposed to see again.  Our leaders promised us that the U.S. financial system was so strong that we would never have another “Great Depression” in our lifetimes.  But then the financial crisis of 2008 happened.  Unprecedented numbers of Americans started losing their jobs and the U.S. Congress did something that it had never done before.  Congress decided to extend unemployment benefits all the way out to 99 weeks.

Doing that has cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $100 billion dollars to this point, but we were promised that it was a “temporary” fix and that it would give displaced U.S. workers a chance to find new jobs. 

Surely any industrious American worker could get another job within 99 weeks, right?

Wrong.

Today, there are at least 1.5 milion “99ers” – those Americans that have completely exhausted all 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and that still do not have jobs. 

Sadly, as bad as that number sounds, it is likely to keep growing.  Today, over one-third of all unemployed Americans have already been unemployed for at least one year.  If this trend continues, we are going to end up with millions of “99ers”.

60 Minutes recently did a report on some of these “99ers”.  Many of them are very highly educated and very highly qualified.  If you have not seen this 60 Minutes report yet, you have got to take few minutes to sit down and watch it.  This video is so shocking that many of you will have your jaws on the floor by the time you finish watching it….  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CwpdGyIY2fQ

So is there much reason for these “99ers” to be optimistic?

No, not really.

In fact, there are some indications that unemployment in America is actually getting worse.  Gallup’s measure of unemployment, which is not adjusted for “seasonal factors”, exhibited a sharp increase in the month of September.  According to Gallup, unemployment has increased from 8.9% in July to 9.3% in August and to 10.1% in September.

In addition, the seasonally-adjusted “Alternate Unemployment Rate” compiled by Shadow Government Statistics also indicates that unemployment in the U.S. is going up once again.  The Alternate Unemployment Rate calculated by SGS reflects estimated “long-term discouraged workers”, which the U.S. government stopped keeping track of back in 1994….

But it is not just the massive number of Americans that are completely unemployed that we need to be concerned about.  The truth is that more Americans than at any other time in recent history are working part-time jobs because that is all they can find.  The number of Americans working part-time jobs “for economic reasons” is now the highest it has been in at least five decades.

Meanwhile, sovereign wealth funds from nations such as Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait, Libya, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are buying up highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters from coast to coast.

So exactly what is a sovereign wealth fund?

Well, just think of it as a huge mountain of state-owned money that roams about the countryside looking for assets to gobble up.

In a recent piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described some of the U.S. infrastructure assets that these sovereign wealth funds are buying up….

A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

It turns out that U.S. politicians have figured out that they can help solve their budget problems by selling off or leasing out pieces of infrastructure.  Foreign nations with money to burn have been glad to come in and start buying a lot of this infrastructure up.  Today, it is estimated that the rest of the world currently owns several trillion dollars more of America than America owns of the rest of the world.  Later on in his article, Taibbi noted that the trend toward selling off pieces of infrastructure only seems to be accelerating….

At this writing Nashville and Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can think of that isn’t nailed down and some things that are — for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.

Sadly, both the number and the value of major acquisitions made by sovereign wealth funds approximately doubled during the first half of 2010.

Instead of being the “land of the free”, we are rapidly becoming the “land that has been leased out to foreign nations”.

So where in the world did these sovereign wealth funds get all this money?

Well, they got it from us of course.

Every single month, the United States buys massive amounts of oil from the Middle East and massive amounts of cheap plastic crap from China.  The rest of the world buys a bunch of stuff from us too, but not nearly as much as we buy from the rest of the world.

So every single month tens of billions of dollars that used to belong to the American people ends up in the hands of foreigners.  Now some of that money is returning to this country and is being used to buy up our infrastructure.

Many of these highways and toll roads that are being sold off had already been completely paid for.  Can you imagine the frustration of the taxpayers in many of these areas when they realize that a road that they have already completely paid for with their tax dollars has been sold out from underneath them?

Another place that all these U.S. dollars held by foreigners is going is into U.S. Treasuries.  In fact, the federal government very much encourages this.  After all, we have to finance our exploding debt somehow. 

In essence, first we made some folks in the Middle East and in Asia incredibly wealthy, and now we are asking them to please lend that money back to us so that we can continue living far beyond our means.

Today, the national debt of the United States is rapidly approaching 14 trillion dollars.  An increasing percentage of this debt is owned by foreigners.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we are rapidly becoming enslaved to the rest of the world.

This is national economic suicide, but our politicians have become so addicted to debt that there doesn’t seem to be much hope that things can be turned around any time soon.

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