Economic Despair

40 Million Americans Already Don’t Have Enough Food To Eat – And Here Is Why It Will Soon Get A Lot Worse

The things that I am going to share with you in this article are definitely very alarming.  But if you live in a wealthy neighborhood and are always surrounded by other wealthy individuals that never have to worry about missing a meal, then some of the numbers in this article may not ring true to you.  Today, the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the United States is larger than ever, and many wealthy Americans don’t have too much sympathy for the struggles that other people are going through.  But the truth is that most Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.  And when you are living right on the edge financially, there are times when it can be really tough to even afford the basic necessities.  If you have never had to miss a meal involuntarily, good for you.  Unfortunately, there are millions upon millions of Americans for which hunger is a very real problem.

If you had to guess, what would you say if someone asked you how many Americans struggle with food insecurity each year?

According to a CBS News article that was published a few months ago, “roughly 4o million people” struggle with not having enough food to eat…

The U.S. economy is enjoying nearly a decade of expansion since the Great Recession. Yet food insecurity — a lack of money or resources to secure enough to eat — still grips almost one in eight Americans. That’s roughly 40 million people. While slowly improving, that figure remains stubbornly higher than before the recession, when more than one in 10 U.S. residents had difficulty knowing when and how they might eat next, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Hungry people live in every county in America, according to the latest annual research from nonprofit relief organization Feeding America. It compiled federal and other data for 2017, its ninth year examining the issue, for a report called Map the Meal Gap. Feeding America serves 4 billion meals each year for one in eight Americans through 200 food banks and 60,000 meal programs and pantries.

We should be incredibly thankful for Feeding America and their vast network of food banks and pantries, but what happens when the need for food dramatically escalates and the food banks start running empty?

Just a few days ago I heard from a good friend in the middle of the country, and she told me that her local food bank is really pressing hard for donations right now because things are starting to get really, really right.

And we haven’t even officially entered the next recession yet.

Normally there wouldn’t be too much reason for concern, but this has definitely not been a normal year.  Crops have been failing across the globe, and African swine fever is killing millions upon millions of pigs all over the planet.

In fact, thanks to the horrific outbreak of African swine fever in China, pork prices over there are 69.3 percent higher than they were a year ago…

Pork prices in China jumped 69.3% in September from a year ago as the country continued to battle a shortage of the meat that followed an outbreak of African swine fever.

Last month’s surge in pork prices was higher compared to the 46.7% increase seen in August, according to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics. That pushed up food prices in China by 11.2% in September, accelerating from the previous month’s 10% gain.

If that sounds really bad to you, that is because it is really bad.

And what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

One of the big reasons why the Chinese just agreed to buy billions of dollars worth of our agricultural products is because they have a desperate need for them.

Here in the United States, food prices have also been rising steadily and we were already going to be facing one of the worst years for Midwest farmers ever, and now an unprecedented October blizzard is going to cause widespread crop failures.

An absolutely massive storm just dumped very deep snow from Colorado to Minnesota, and it hit just as farmers were getting ready to harvest their corn and soybeans.

As I noted in a different article that I just posted, one lawmaker in North Dakota is telling the press that we should expect “massive crop losses – as devastating as we’ve ever seen”.

Millions of acres of corn and soybeans are going to be “a total loss”, and that means that all of us will soon be facing higher food prices at the supermarket.

If you are independently wealthy and food prices don’t really matter to you, then you are in good shape.

But for the rest of us, these higher prices are going to be quite painful.  I would encourage you to stock up ahead of time (#ad) while you still can.

Earlier this year, I extensively documented the major problems that farmers in the Midwest were having with rain and flooding, and I warned that we were potentially facing a disastrous harvest season.

Well, now that this historic blizzard has wiped out millions of acres of crops, we are potentially facing a scenario that is far worse than anything that I originally warned about.

That means that soon far more than 40 million Americans will be dealing with food insecurity.  Much higher prices at the grocery store will make it much more difficult for most of us to afford the basic necessities, and those on the bottom rungs of the economic pyramid will suffer more than anyone else.

About the Author: I am a voice crying out for change in a society that generally seems content to stay asleep.  I am the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I have written four books that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters.  (#CommissionsEarned)  By purchasing those books you help to support my work.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles in written form on their own websites as long as this “About the Author” section is included.  In order to comply with government regulations, I need to tell you that the controversial opinions in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the websites where my work is republished.  This article may contain opinions on political matters, but it is not intended to promote the candidacy of any particular political candidate.  You can follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  Those responding to this article by making comments are solely responsible for their viewpoints, and those viewpoints do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of Michael Snyder or the operators of this website.

 

“I don’t know how I can maintain this face of joy and warmth when I have to go home and forage for food in other people’s garbage”

Despite all the bragging that the mainstream media is constantly doing about the U.S. economy, the truth is that most Americans are deeply struggling right now.  59 percent of us are living paycheck to paycheck, and nearly 50 million Americans are living in poverty.  Sadly, most of those that are living in poverty actually come from a home where at least one person is currently employed.  Millions upon millions of Americans are working as hard as they can, but it simply is not enough to pull them above the poverty line, and it is a very serious national crisis.  Even though employment levels have been relatively stable for the last couple of years, the middle class has continued to disintegrate, and the ranks of the homeless have continued to grow.  Every year the cost of living rises faster than wages are growing, and as a result more U.S. families are being booted out of the middle class on a continual basis.  Many Americans are working two or three jobs in a desperate attempt to make ends meet, but often that isn’t even enough.  And if things are this bad right now, what will things look like once we get deep into the next recession?

Abigail Disney is the granddaughter of the late Roy Disney, and she is exceedingly wealthy, but she does not have any active role with the company her father founded today.

Recently, she heard that employees at Disneyland were having a really rough time making ends meet, and so “she went to Disneyland to see it for herself”…

Abigail Disney told the Yahoo News show “Through Her Eyes” that a worker sent her a Facebook message expressing how tragic being employed at the Magic Kingdom has become. So she went to Disneyland to see it for herself.

“Every single one of these people I talked to were saying, ‘I don’t know how I can maintain this face of joy and warmth when I have to go home and forage for food in other people’s garbage,’” Disney, 59, told Yahoo News host and human rights activist Zainab Salbi in an interview posted Monday.

Could you imagine Mickey Mouse and Snow White foraging for food in the dumpster behind an apartment building after a full day of entertaining children?

Apparently this sort of thing is actually happening, and a recent survey of Disney employees discovered that 73 percent of them didn’t make enough money “to pay for basic expenses each month”…

A 2018 survey conducted by on behalf of a group of unions found that nearly three-quarters of full- and part-time employees (73%) said that they didn’t earn enough money working at Disneyland Resort to pay for basic expenses each month. More than half were worried about being evicted, and about one-tenth reported being homeless in the previous two years.

But actually the truth is that the average Disney employee is better off than the average American worker.

Today, the median yearly salary of a Disney employee is $46,127.

According to the Social Security Administration, 50 percent of all American workers make less than $30,533 a year.

Of course the cost of living is much higher in southern California than it is in most of the rest of the nation, and so that must be factored in as well.

Ultimately, anyone that is making less than $50,000 a year is likely to be struggling in this economy, because you simply cannot support a middle class lifestyle for a family of four or more on $50,000 a year at this point.

What makes things so much worse is the fact that most of us are absolutely drowning in debt.  Today, U.S. consumers are nearly 14 trillion dollars in debt, and many of us have already signed up for a lifetime of debt payments before we even leave school.

For example, I recently read about one woman that still owed nearly half a million dollars on her student loans…

Elisha Bokman has been out of school for eight years. Still, her student loan balance is half a million dollars.

Today, for her doctorate degree in naturopathic medicine and master’s in acupuncture from Bastyr University, she owes $499,322.69.

She and her husband struggled to buy a house because of her debt. Eventually, the financial stress led them to a divorce.

Not even bankruptcy will erase those loans, and they will haunt her for decades to come.

Millions upon millions of Americans are silently suffering as they wrestle with their desperate financial circumstances, and this is happening while things are still relatively good.

But now we are heading into a new economic downturn, and much of the country can see what is happening…

Middle-class Americans are less optimistic about their economic prospects than they were just six months ago, according to a new report from CUNA Mutual Group.

Although the majority of those polled said they feel relatively stable overall, they graded their chances of achieving the American dream as a “C,” down from a “B-minus” in the fall, the insurance provider found. Close to half were increasingly concerned about an upcoming recession.

Economic conditions are not going to get any better than they are right now, and what we are heading for is going to be very painful.

I can definitely understand that people are very frustrated that they cannot make a decent living even though they are working extremely hard, but how much more frustrated will they be when they don’t have any jobs at all?

For decades we have been painting ourselves into a corner, and we have wrecked the great economic machine that was handed down to us by previous generations.

Now a day of reckoning is at hand, and it will eventually result in the greatest economic temper tantrum that our nation has ever seen.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

When President Trump Was Asked About The Epidemic Of Human Feces On Our Streets, Here Is How He Responded…

If you go visit Japan, I guarantee that you won’t see a single person defecating on the sidewalk.  It just doesn’t happen over there, or in most other highly civilized nations on the planet.  But here in the United States, we have such a problem with human waste on our city streets that even the president of the United States is talking about it on national television.  President Trump has been known to comment on the deplorable conditions in other nations from time to time, but during an interview on Monday night Fox host Tucker Carlson asked Trump about the horrific conditions in some of our own cities.  In particular, Carlson noted that unlike New York and Los Angeles, there is “no one going to the bathroom on the streets” in Japan…

Trump sat for an interview with Tucker Carlson during his trip to South Korea over the weekend. The Fox News host observed that cities in Japan, host of the Group of 20 summit, had “no graffiti” and “no one going to the bathroom on the streets,” and said New York City and Los Angeles had a “major problem with filth.”

In response, President Trump blamed the liberals that are running those big cities for the current conditions, and he described what some homeless people are going through as “living in hell”…

The president described cities in a dire state, claiming police officers are “getting sick just by walking the beat,” and some people are “living in hell.”

Some people may be tempted to think that Trump was exaggerating, but the truth is that conditions on the streets of some of our major cities just continue to deteriorate at a very rapid pace.

For example, just consider the following excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article that was published about a month ago…

I’ve seen so many rats the last two weeks in downtown Los Angeles, I have to suspect they’re plotting a takeover of City Hall, which vermin infiltrated last year.

The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle. It used to be that illegal dumpers were a little more discreet, tossing their refuse in fields and gullies and remote outposts.

Now city streets are treated like dumpsters, or even toilets — on Thursday, the 1600 block of Santee Street was cordoned off after someone dumped a fat load of poop in the street. I’m not sure when any of this became the norm, but it must have something to do with the knowledge that you can get away with it.

Of course similar things could be said about Seattle, Portland, Denver or just about any major city out west.

When authorities cleaned up the homeless camps that had popped up on a two mile stretch along a bike trail in Orange County last year, this is what they hauled away…

  • 404 tons of debris
  • 13,950 needles (approximate number based on what disposal containers hold)
  • 5,279 pounds of hazardous waste (human waste, propane, pesticides and other materials)

It literally took months to clean everything up, and that was just one very small two mile stretch of southern California.

But when it comes to human feces, nobody can even come close to San Francisco.

According to Forbes, there have been more than 118,000 officially reported cases of human feces on the streets since 2011…

Since 2011, there have been at least 118,352 reported instances of human fecal matter on city streets.

New mayor, London Breed, won election by promising to clean things up. However, conditions are the same or worse. Last year, the number of reports spiked to an all-time high at 28,084. In first quarter 2019, the pace continued with 6,676 instances of human waste in the public way.

This is supposed to be one of the wealthiest cities on the entire planet, and yet it has become a giant human manure pile.

Of course much of this is being fueled by drugs.  Addicts are often so zombiefied that they don’t care who or what is around when it comes time to use the potty.  In the U.S. today, more people die from drug overdoses than from traffic accidents, and even the New York Times admits that we are in the midst of the “worst drug crisis in American history”.

But for many others, being homeless has nothing to do with drugs at all.  The middle class is being eviscerated all around us, and poverty is growing with each passing day.  And it turns out that several of the counties with the most unaffordable housing in America just happen to be in California…

ATTOM Data Solutions published its 2Q19 US Home Affordability Report, which reveals median home prices last quarter weren’t affordable for the average American in 74% (353 of 480 counties) of the counties analyzed.

The most unaffordable counties, the reported noted, were in Los Angeles County, California; Cook County (Chicago), Illinois; Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona; San Diego County, California; and Orange County, California.

There is never going to be any sort of a permanent solution to the homelessness crisis in California until there is a lot more affordable housing, and right now liberal policies are standing in the way of that happening.

Unfortunately, the entire country is likely to see a substantial rise in homelessness as this new economic downturn continues to escalate.  At this point things have already gotten so tight that a third of all Americans have cut spending within the last 12 months…

A third of Americans say they’ve cut spending in the last year, and that percentage is about the same no matter the demographic. Reasons for spending less ranged from a loss of household income and new debt to fear of recession, job loss or large medical bills from an unexpected illness or injury.

Considering the fact that 59 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck, the truth is that most of us are just a couple of bad breaks away from financial disaster.

So instead of looking down on homeless people, the rest of us should be working harder than ever so that we can survive the very rough times that are coming.

Nobody plans to fall into poverty, and nobody actually wants to be homeless.

But tonight more than 550,000 Americans do not have a home, and that number is only going to keep rising.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Conditions On The Streets Of San Francisco Are Comparable To “The Slums Of Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jarkarta, And Manila”

Once upon a time, some of the most beautiful cities in the entire world were on the west coast, but now those same cities are degenerating into drug-infested cesspools of filth and garbage right in front of our eyes.  San Francisco is known as the epicenter for our tech industry, and Los Angeles produces more entertainment than anyone else in the world, and yet both cities are making headlines all over the world for other reasons these days.  Right now, nearly a quarter of the nation’s homeless population lives in the state of California, and more are arriving with each passing day.  When you walk the streets of San Francisco or Los Angeles, you can’t help but notice the open air drug markets, the giant mountains of trash, and the discarded needles and piles of human feces that are seemingly everywhere.  If this is what things look like when the U.S. economy is still relatively stable, how bad are things going to get when the economy tanks?

In San Francisco, the homeless population has grown by 17 percent since 2017, and when a UN official recently walked the streets she was absolutely horrified by what she witnessed…

When Leilani Farha paid a visit to San Francisco in January, she knew the grim reputation of the city’s homeless encampments. In her four years as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Farha has visited the slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jarkarta, and Manila. The crisis in San Francisco, she said, is comparable to these conditions.

I have never been to Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Jarkarta or Manila, and so I will just have to take her word for what the conditions are like there.

But how can this be happening in one of the wealthiest cities in the entire country?

Sadly, to a large degree San Francisco has done this to itself.  Every single day drugs are openly bought and sold at “an outdoor market of sorts” right in the heart of the city, and authorities know exactly where it is happening…

To drill down on the epicenter of the crisis, a recent New York Times inquiry set out to find the dirtiest block in San Francisco. After asking statisticians to compile a list of streets with the most neighborhood complaints regarding sidewalk cleanliness, the Times landed on a winner: Hyde Street’s 300 block, which received more than 2,200 complaints over the last decade.

A visit to the block yields a harrowing sight of drug addicts and mentally ill residents, many of whom are part of the city’s overwhelmingly large homeless population. During the day, drug users host an outdoor market of sorts, selling heroin, crack cocaine, and amphetamines along the sidewalks.

They could shut down the drug dealing if they really wanted to do so.

And anywhere the illegal drug trade is thriving, you are also going to have a lot of property crime.  At this point, no city in America has a higher rate of property crime than San Francisco does…

San Francisco is the nation’s leader in property crime. Burglary, larceny, shoplifting, and vandalism are included under this ugly umbrella. The rate of car break-ins is particularly striking: in 2017 over 30,000 reports were filed, and the current average is 51 per day. Other low-level offenses, including drug dealing, street harassment, encampments, indecent exposure, public intoxication, simple assault, and disorderly conduct are also rampant.

Meanwhile, things are not much better in Los Angeles.  In fact, many would argue that L.A. is in even worse condition.

The homeless population in the city has risen 16 percent since last year, and it is taking over neighborhood after neighborhood.  Los Angeles was once one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world, but now it is rapidly being transformed into a hellhole…

If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople. Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.

Skid Row is the epicenter of the homeless problem in L.A., and I highly recommend that you do not go down there to check it out for yourself.

It is hard to believe that people are actually living this way in America in 2019.  This is what one reporter witnessed during his visit to the neighborhood…

If you want to know how bad the homelessness crisis has gotten in California, just turn to 4 squares miles east of Main Street in downtown Los Angeles. The area, known as Skid Row, has long been inhabited by the city’s poorest residents. These days it resembles something akin to a nightmare.

Residents sleep in tents surrounded by discarded needles and feces, their belongings tucked into trash bags and shopping carts. Some shade themselves with tarps or use nearby light poles to connect to power. Others have contracted typhus from rats scurrying across the sidewalk. One resident was even found bathing in the water from a broken fire hydrant.

This is where the rest of the country is headed if we are not very careful.  Bad policies have bad consequences, and our leaders have been taking us in the wrong direction for a very long time.

And instead of getting to the root of our problems, most of our politicians seem to think that engaging in bizarre social experiments will somehow solve our problems.

For example, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is convinced that we can solve the homeless problem by building tiny housing units in the backyards of private homeowners…

As part of this mission, the city is pursuing a pilot program, made possible by a $1 million Bloomberg Philanthropies grant, that would help homeowners install backyard units on their properties. In exchange for a $10,000 to $30,000 stipend, homeowners would be able to charge a small rent to homeless tenants, who would pay their share through vouchers or their own income. The city also plans to institute a matchmaking process that pairs owners and tenants.

“Our homeless crisis demands that we get creative,” the mayor said. If the backyard pilot works, he added, the idea could be adopted anywhere.

So if you live in Los Angeles, soon you will be able to bring the needles and piles of human feces from Skid Row into your own backyard.

Meanwhile, homeless people keep dropping dead night after night in Los Angeles.  Just check out these staggering numbers…

A record number of homeless people — 918 last year alone — are dying across Los Angeles County, on bus benches, hillsides, railroad tracks and sidewalks.

Deaths have jumped 76% in the past five years, outpacing the growth of the homeless population, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis of the coroner’s data.

Year after year, this homelessness crisis is only getting worse.

The fabric of our society is literally coming apart right in front of our eyes, and we can all see what is happening, and yet our leaders seem absolutely powerless to fix it.

If we continue on this trajectory, what is our nation going to look like in a few years?

Just something to think about…

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

“The Skid Is Everywhere”, And We Just Received More Confirmation That The Worst Is Yet To Come

All over America, large portions of our major cities are being transformed into stomach-churning cesspools of squalor.  Thousands of tens cities are popping up from coast to coast as the homeless population explodes, even the New York Times admits that we are facing “the worst drug crisis in American history”, there were more than 28,000 official complaints about human feces in the streets of San Francisco last year alone, and millions of rats are currently overrunning the city of Los Angeles.  And yet the authorities continue to insist that the economy is in good shape and that everything is going to be just fine.

Perhaps everything may seem “just fine” if you live in a heavily sanitized wealthy suburban neighborhood and you only get your news from heavily sanitized corporate media sources, but in the real world things are getting really bad.

The other day, LZ Granderson authored an editorial in which he described what life is like in Los Angeles right at this moment…

LA spent nearly $620 million in tax dollars last year to address the issue, and yet the number of homeless people increased by 16%, reaching nearly 60,000 people.

As a Los Angeles resident, I am among those who wonder what the mayor’s office is doing. When I lived downtown it was virtually impossible to walk a full block in any direction without seeing a homeless person. In Silver Lake where I live now, there are tent cities. On my drive to work I see people living underneath the highway overpasses. It’s no longer Skid Row here. The skid is everywhere.

Of course that phrase, “the skid is everywhere”, could also apply to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Memphis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia and countless other U.S. cities.

But without a doubt, L.A. is particularly disgusting at this point.  In fact, last weekend a columnist for the Los Angeles Times admitted that “Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle”…

A swath of Los Angeles has devolved into a wasteland with rats scurrying among piles of decaying garbage and squalid tent cities, according to a series of stomach-churning photos that the Los Angeles Times says depict the “collapse of a city that’s lost control.”

“The city of Los Angeles has become a giant trash receptacle,” columnist Steve Lopez complained on Sunday.

We are seeing this happen at a time when we are being told that the U.S. economy is still relatively stable.

And I will concede that point.  Right now, the U.S. economy is a whole lot more stable than it will be in the months ahead.

So if things are this bad already in our major cities, what are those cities going to look like once we get deep into the next economic downturn?

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that 75,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in May.  That number is consistent with the extremely disappointing figure that ADP reported a few days earlier, and it is well below the number of jobs that we need just to keep up with population growth each month.

Prior to this latest report, there were already more working age Americans without a job than at any point during the last recession, and now things just got even worse.

But the government conveniently categorizes the vast majority of working age Americans without a job as “not in the labor force”, and so officially the unemployment rate is “very low” right now.

What a joke.

The truth is that the middle class has been steadily shrinking for an extended period of time, and all of the numbers that have been rolling in seem to indicate that an economic slowdown has begun.

For instance, when economic activity is expanding demand for key industrial resources such as copper, zinc and lumber increases and prices tend to go up.

But when economic activity is contracting, demand for those key industrial resources diminishes and prices tend to go down.

And right now we are seeing prices for copper, zinc and lumber decline precipitiously…

Copper prices have fallen 6% in just the past month while zinc is down 8.5%. Copper and zinc are big components for many industrial and technology companies. People pay so much attention to copper as a barometer that traders jokingly call it Dr. Copper, as if it has a PhD in economics.

Lumber prices are falling as well, plunging about 10% in the past month. That could be viewed as a sign that the housing market — particularly new home construction — is weakening.

If you were looking for some exceedingly clear indications of where the U.S. economy is heading in the near future, you just got them.

But most Americans will continue to live in denial until the very end.  And even though 59 percent of the population is living paycheck to paycheck, people continue to rack up debt as if there was no tomorrow.

In fact, we just learned that the average size of a new vehicle loan in the U.S. just hit a brand new record high…

People buying a new vehicle are borrowing more and paying more each month for their auto loan.

Experian, which tracks millions of auto loans each month, said the average amount borrowed to buy a new vehicle hit a record $32,187 in the first quarter. The average used-vehicle loan also hit a record, $20,137.

People ask me all the time about how they can prepare for the next economic downturn, and one of the key pieces of advice that I always give is to not take on more debt.

Right now everyone should be building up their financial cushions, because what is coming is not a joke.

Unfortunately, most Americans are still completely in denial about what is happening, and they will find themselves ill-prepared to handle the very harsh economic environment that is ahead.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Goodbye Middle Class: The Percentage Of Wealth Owned By The Top 10% Just Got Even BIGGER

The middle class in America is being systematically eviscerated, and it is getting worse with each passing year.  As you will see below, one new study has found that 10 percent of Americans now own 70 percent of all the wealth.  Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world, but pretty soon we are just going to have the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.  Our system has been designed to funnel as much wealth as possible to the very top of the financial pyramid, and that means that most of the rest of us are deeply struggling.  And when you are just barely getting by from month to month, all it takes is one bad break to knock you completely out of the middle class and into poverty.

I have been chronicling the demise of the middle class for many years, but I didn’t know that the numbers had gotten this bad.  According to a study that was recently conducted by the Federal Reserve, the percentage of wealth controlled by the top 10 percent of U.S. households has shot up from 60 percent in 1989 to 70 percent today…

Deutsche Bank’s Torsten Sløk says that the distribution of household wealth in America has become even more disproportionate over the past decade, with the richest 10% of U.S. households representing 70% of all U.S. wealth in 2018, compared with 60% in 1989, according to a recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve.

The study finds that the share of wealth among the richest 1% increased to 32% from 23% over the same period.

The ironic thing is that the Federal Reserve has actually done much to cause this high concentration of wealth among the elite.  In response to the last financial crisis, the Federal Reserve pumped unprecedented amounts of money into the financial system, and this has created the greatest stock market bubble in our history…

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +2.06% has climbed nearly 300% since its closing low in March 2009, the S&P 500 index SPX, +2.14% has climbed 325%, while the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +2.65% has soared 535% over the same period.

Meanwhile, wages have stagnated for ordinary Americans.  According to the Social Security Administration, the median yearly wage in the United States is currently just $30,533.  In other words, 50 percent of all American workers make at least that much per year, and 50 percent of all American workers make that much or less per year.

$30,533 a year breaks down to approximately $2,500 per month, and you simply can’t support a middle class lifestyle for a typical American family on $2,500 a month.

Meanwhile, the cost of living for middle class families has exploded higher over the past few decades…

Everyday expenses continue to rise, and as the shadow inflation increases, it also threatens to wipe out the middle class – what’s left of it anyway. In fact, middle-class life is now 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago, according to a separate report by CNBC. The cost of things such as college, housing, and child care has risen precipitously: Tuition at public universities doubled between 1996 and 2016 and housing prices in popular cities have quadrupled, Alissa Quart, author and executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, tells CNBC Make It.

As the cost of living has risen faster than our incomes have, more Americans have been squeezed out of the middle class with each passing month.

As a result, an increasing number of Americans have become financially dependent on the government, and our rapidly expanding welfare state is a big reason why the federal government is now 22 trillion dollars in debt.

Of course many Americans are no longer able to make it at all, and the ranks of the homeless are swelling all over the nation.  In fact, we just got some brand new numbers about the growth of homelessness in the Los Angeles area that are absolutely eye-popping…

The number of homeless people counted across Los Angeles County jumped 12% over the past year to nearly 59,000, with more young and old residents and families on the streets, officials said Tuesday.

The majority of the homeless were found within the city of Los Angeles, which saw a 16% increase to 36,300, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority said in presenting January’s annual count to the county Board of Supervisors.

Yes, it is true that we have a record number of millionaires on the west coast in 2019, but meanwhile our major west coast cities are being transformed into rotting, decaying nightmares right in front of our eyes.

During a recent interview with Laura Ingraham, Dr. Drew Pinsky admitted that there is “a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now”…

“We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now,” Pinsky told host Laura Ingraham. “We have the three prongs of airborne disease, tuberculosis is exploding, (and) rodent-borne. We are one of the only cities in the country that doesn’t have a rodent control program, and sanitation has broken down.”

Pinsky’s comments followed news that Los Angeles police officer had contracted typhoid fever, a rare and life-threatening illness that fewer than 350 Americans contract each year.

Los Angeles had a typhus outbreak last summer and will likely have another this summer, Pinsky said. Meanwhile, bubonic plague – a pandemic that killed tens of millions of people during the 14th century – is “likely” already present in Los Angeles, Pinsky added.

Despite all of our great wealth and despite all of our advanced technology, this is what life is like in our second largest city right now.

And if things are degenerating this badly during stable times, what are things going to look like once our society plunges into chaos?

Ultimately, the American Dream is about being self-sufficient.  Most people want to be able to work hard and provide a nice life for their families, but that is becoming harder and harder to do.

No matter which political party has been in power in Washington, the middle class has continued to shrink and more wealth and power has become concentrated in the hands of the elite.

Now we stand on the precipice of the next major economic downturn, and many are deeply concerned about what that is going to mean for the future of our society.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Total Catastrophe For U.S. Corn Production: Only 30% Of U.S. Corn Fields Have Been Planted – 5 Year Average Is 66%

2019 is turning out to be a nightmare that never ends for the agriculture industry.  Thanks to endless rain and unprecedented flooding, fields all over the middle part of the country are absolutely soaked right now, and this has prevented many farmers from getting their crops in the ground.  I knew that this was a problem, but when I heard that only 30 percent of U.S. corn fields had been planted as of Sunday, I had a really hard time believing it.  But it turns out that number is 100 percent accurate.  And at this point corn farmers are up against a wall because crop insurance final planting dates have either already passed or are coming up very quickly.  In addition, for every day after May 15th that corn is not in the ground, farmers lose approximately 2 percent of their yield.  Unfortunately, more rain is on the way, and it looks like thousands of corn farmers will not be able to plant corn at all this year.  It is no exaggeration to say that what we are facing is a true national catastrophe.

According to the Department of Agriculture, over the past five years an average of 66 percent of all corn fields were already planted by now…

U.S. farmers seeded 30% of the U.S. 2019 corn crop by Sunday, the government said, lagging the five-year average of 66%. The soybean crop was 9% planted, behind the five-year average of 29%.

Soybean farmers have more time to recover, but they are facing a unique problem of their own which we will talk about later in the article.

But first, let’s take a look at the corn planting numbers from some of our most important corn producing states.  I think that you will agree that these numbers are almost too crazy to believe…

Iowa: 48 percent planted – 5 year average 76 percent

Minnesota: 21 percent planted – 5 year average 65 percent

North Dakota: 11 percent planted – 5 year average 43 percent

South Dakota: 4 percent planted – 5 year average 54 percent

Yes, you read those numbers correctly.

Can you imagine what this is going to do to food prices?

Many farmers are extremely eager to plant crops, but the wet conditions have made it impossible.  The following comes from ABC 7 Chicago…

McNeill grows corn and soybeans on more than 500 acres in Grayslake. But much of his farmland is underwater right now, and all of it is too wet to plant. Rain is a farmer’s friend in the summer but in the spring too much rain keeps farmers from planting.

The unusually wet spring has affected farmers throughout the Midwest, but Illinois has been especially hard hit. Experts say with the soil so wet, heavy and cold, it takes the air out and washes nutrients away, making it difficult if not impossible for seeds to take root.

Right now, soil moisture levels in the state of Illinois “are in the 90th to 99th percentile statewide”.  In other words, the entire state is completely and utterly drenched.

As a result, very few Illinois farmers have been able to get corn or soybeans in the ground at this point…

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s crop progress reports, about 11% of Illinois corn has been planted and about 4% of soybeans. Last year at this time, 88% of corn and 56% of soybeans were in the ground.

I would use the word “catastrophe” to describe what Illinois farmers are facing, but the truth is that what they are going through is far beyond that.

Normally, if corn farmers have a problem getting corn in the ground then they just switch to soybeans instead.  But thanks to the trade war, soybean exports have plummeted dramatically, and the price of soybeans is the lowest that it has been in a decade.

As a result there is very little profit, if any, in growing soybeans this year…

Farmers in many parts of the corn belt have suffered from a wet and cooler spring, which has prevented them from planting corn. Typically when it becomes too late to plant corn, farmers will instead plant soybeans, which can grow later into the fall before harvest is required. Yet now, planting soybeans with the overabundance already in bins and scant hope for sales to one of the biggest buyers in China, could raise the risk of a financial disaster.

And if the wet conditions persist, many soybean farms are not going to be able to plant crops at all this year.

Sadly, global weather patterns are continuing to go haywire, and much more rain is coming to the middle of the country starting on Friday…

Any hopes of getting corn and soybean planting back on track in the U.S. may be washed away starting Friday as a pair of storms threaten to deliver a “one-two punch” of soaking rain and tornadoes across the Great Plains and Midwest through next week.

As much as 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of rain will soak soils from South Dakota and Minnesota south to Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, according to the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

We have never had a year quite like this before, and U.S. food production is going to be substantially below expectations.  I very much encourage everyone to get prepared for much higher food prices and a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the months ahead.

Even though I have been regularly documenting the nightmarish agricultural conditions in the middle of the country, the numbers in this article are much worse than I thought they would be at this point in 2019.

This is truly a major national crisis, and it is just getting started.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

Wealthy Elitists Freak Out As Hordes Of Homeless People Take Over Their Neighborhoods All Over The West Coast

The elite are very “tolerant” of the homeless until they start showing up in their own neighborhoods.  Even though the mainstream media keeps telling us that the U.S. economy is “booming”, the number of Americans living on the streets continues to grow very rapidly, and this is particularly true in our major west coast cities.  More than half a million Americans will sleep on the streets of our cities tonight, and they need help, care and shelter.  Sadly, as economic conditions deteriorate that number is likely to double or even triple.  Of course many among the elite are all in favor of doing something for the homeless, as long as they don’t have to be anywhere around them.

For example, let’s talk about what is going on in Los Angeles.  No city on the west coast has a bigger problem with homelessness than L.A. does, and many in the homeless population enjoy camping out on the beautiful beaches in the L.A. area at night.

But of course many of the elite that paid millions of dollars for beachfront property are not too thrilled about this.  Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was a key symbol of anti-establishment rebellion in the 1970s, but now he is freaking out because homeless people are making life very difficult for him and his wife in Venice Beach, and what he recently told Newsweek’s Paula Froelich is making headlines all over the nation…

He told her the homeless situation in his swanky LA neighborhood is so bad that thieves are tearing the bars from the windows of his multimillion-dollar home, lobbing bricks, setting up unsightly tent cities and littering the beach with syringes.

“A couple of weeks ago I had a problem,” the former punk prince opined. “They came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It’s like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I’m a bloke that’s worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door.”

It is more than just a little bit ironic that a man that used drugs, sex and rock and roll to shoot to global fame now sounds like a tired old crank that just wants to get the hippies off of his front lawn.

And he also says that the beach in front of his home is almost unusable because of all the needles and human poop in the sand…

Rotten added of the punks: “They’re aggressive, and because there’s an awful lot of them together they’re gang-y. And the heroin spikes . . . You can’t take anyone to the beach because there’s jabs just waiting for young kids to put their feet in — and poo all over the sand.”

Well, Johnny might as well become accustomed to his new neighbors, because the situation is only going to get worse as our national homelessness crisis intensifies.

In Los Angeles, the number of homeless people that have died has risen 76 percent over the past five years, and this has happened during supposedly “good economic times”.

So how bad will things get when the economy really starts going downhill?

Up the coast in San Fransisco, some wealthy residents are fighting tooth and nail to keep a proposed homeless shelter out of their wealthy neighborhood.  The following comes from CBS News…

Some San Francisco residents are turning to crowdfunding to raise money to fight a proposed homeless shelter in their wealthy neighborhood. As of Monday morning, the effort had raised over $80,000 of its $100,000 goal.

Calling itself “Safe Embarcadero for All,” the organizer is appealing to residents of South Beach, Rincon Hill, Bayside Village, East Cut and Mission Bay, saying the money will be directed to a legal fund to pay for efforts to fight the homeless shelter. San Francisco Mayor London Breed has sponsored legislation to fast-track the building of the Navigation Center, which would house 200 homeless people a stone’s throw from Google’s San Francisco offices and Gap’s headquarters.

How wonderfully “tolerant” of them, eh?

Of course it is hard to blame them.  The streets of San Francisco are littered with thousands upon thousands of used syringes, and the number of official complaints about human feces in the streets is going up with each passing year.

But instead of changing course, it looks like San Francisco officials will probably extend their free syringe program…

San Francisco officials are debating if they should continue a needle exchange program that has left city streets littered with hazardous waste.

We have made an uncomfortable observation on social media: Thousands of needles are scattered on city streets, most likely came the Department of Public Health’s needle exchange program.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors expects to approve a seven-year extension of the exchange program, could cost taxpayers a whopping $26 million.

Overall, the city handed out 5.8 million free syringes in 2018, and a large number of those were simply thrown on to the streets when addicts were done using them.

Up in Seattle, neighborhood after neighborhood has been taken over by homeless encampments, and many residents are saying enough is enough…

In the past two weeks, Seattle Is Dying has garnered 38,000 shares on Facebook and nearly 2 million views on YouTube. The report has clearly resonated with anxious, fearful, and increasingly angry Seattle residents. Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.

With all of the money that they have, you would think that the major cities on the west coast would be showing the rest of the nation how to deal with homelessness, but instead things continue to get worse with each passing year.

And of course what we have seen so far is just the beginning.  During the next recession, the homelessness crisis will be far, far worse than it is today.

America should not have more than half a million people living in the streets, but we do, and those in power do not seem to have any solutions.

Get Prepared NowAbout the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

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