Government Debt

Why Donald Trump Must Shut Down The Federal Reserve And Start Issuing Debt-Free Money

March 16, 2017November 16, 2016 by Michael

If Donald Trump truly wants to fix the economy, he must shut down the Federal Reserve. If he just tries to patch up our current system, he will fail, because it has been fundamentally flawed from the very beginning. A little over a century ago, very powerful forces on Wall Street convinced Congress to completely restructure our financial system. An immensely powerful central bank known as the Federal Reserve was created, and the goal was to transform the U.S. dollar into a debt-based currency that would continuously be inflated and to create an endless debt spiral from which the federal government could never possibly escape. Sadly, they were successful on both counts. Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by approximately 98 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

Americans tend to give most of the credit or most of the blame for the performance of the U.S. economy to our presidents, but the truth is that an unelected, unaccountable group of central bankers has far more power over our economy than anyone else does. The Federal Reserve has become known as “the fourth branch of government“, but unlike the other branches of government we are told that the Fed’s decisions are “above politics” because they are “too important”. Fed officials fiercely guard their “independence”, and they fiercely resist any “interference” from Congress, the President, or the American people.

Donald Trump can try to lower taxes and reduce regulations, but what he will be able to do to influence the economy pales in comparison to the immensely powerful tools that the Fed wields. The Fed controls interest rates, the Fed controls the money supply, and the Fed regulates the banks.

To give you an idea of how enormously powerful the Fed is, I want you to pull out a dollar bill.

As you look at that dollar bill, I want you to notice that it says “Federal Reserve Note” right at the top.

In the financial world, a “note” is an instrument of debt, and the truth is that our system was designed to create as much debt as possible.

So why are we using debt-based “Federal Reserve Notes” in the first place? Shouldn’t Congress have control over our currency?

According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, it is Congress that has the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.

So how did the Fed get involved?

Well, it is a very long and convoluted story, and if you are interested in the history behind it I would commend to you an excellent book by G. Edward Griffin entitled “The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve“. Basically, big money interests on Wall Street got their hooks into the White House and Congress, and they rushed through legislation right before Christmas in 1913 that created this insidious central banking system that was designed to slowly but surely take wealth from the American people and put it into their hands.

Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize that we have a debt-based currency, nor do they understand where our money comes from. In a previous article, I discussed how money is normally created by the Federal Reserve under our current system…

When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.

Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.

The Federal Reserve takes the U.S. Treasury bonds that it receives in exchange for the “Federal Reserve Notes” that it gave to the government and it auctions off those bonds to the highest bidder. But of course this process always creates more debt than it does money…

The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system.

But wait.

There is a problem.

Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created.

So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?

Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.

But that never actually happens, does it?

And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well. They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt. They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.

So our debt just keeps going up and up and up. While Barack Obama has been in the White House our national debt has risen by more than 9 trillion dollars, and at this moment it is sitting just under the 20 trillion dollar mark.

But we shouldn’t be surprised by this, because this is precisely what the Federal Reserve system was designed to do to us.

Many conservatives still hold to the mistaken illusion that we could somehow pay all of this debt back someday, but as I have shown in a previous article, this is mathematically impossible to do.

If the government went out today and grabbed every single dollar in existence we could not pay back the national debt, and of course we have trillions of dollars of household debt, trillions of dollars of corporate debt and trillions of dollars of state and local government debt that we need to pay back as well.

Under the current system our only hope is to keep the wheel spinning by continuing to devalue the dollar and by continuing to go into even greater amounts of debt.

And of course it isn’t just the United States that is in this predicament. At this point, almost every single nation on the entire planet has a central bank.

Even though there are extremely sharp disagreements among nations on virtually everything else, somehow central banking has achieved nearly universal adoption.

As you read this article, well over 99.9% of the population of the globe lives in a country that has a central bank.

Do you think that is just a coincidence?

Of course there are still a few very small countries such as the Federated States of Micronesia that do not have a central bank, but the only big nation not to have one is North Korea.

And you would literally have to be insane to want to live in North Korea.

But now we have an opportunity to get free from this insidious system. The truth is that we don’t have to have a central bank. In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no central bank.

We don’t need central planners to set our interest rates and to manipulate our money supply. They will never admit this, but the reality of the matter is that their interference in the economy often creates tremendous economic busts.

Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions: 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.

Considering their track record, isn’t it time for a change?

And we don’t have to have a debt-based currency. In fact, not too long ago we had a president that decided to start issuing debt-free “United States Notes”.

Back in 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue debt-free “United States Notes” which were directly created by the U.S. government.

He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but many of the debt-free United States Notes that were issued under President Kennedy are still in circulation today, and President Trump could do something similar.

But will he?

It has been said that the borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve system has turned all of us into debt slaves.

Debt is a form of social control, and the global elite use all of this debt to dominate the planet. The total amount of debt in the world just hit a brand new record high of 152 trillion dollars, and the longer we allow the central banks to control the system the bigger this debt bubble will become.

There is a way out, and here in the United States that starts with shutting down the Federal Reserve and issuing debt-free currency. It would take someone very bold to make a move like this, and so let us hope that the man that we just elected is up to the task.

The Total Amount Of Debt In The World Just Hit A Record $152,000,000,000,000 (152 Trillion)

October 11, 2016October 11, 2016 by Michael

If anyone ever asks you how much debt there is in the world, now you will know the answer. According to the IMF, the total amount of debt around the globe has now hit a staggering 152 trillion dollars. That is an amount of money that is almost unimaginable, and the IMF says that it is equivalent to 225 percent of global GDP. It is the biggest debt bubble in the history of the planet, and it is rising at an extremely alarming pace. Experts all over the world agree that when this debt bubble finally bursts, it is going to create an economic crisis on a scale that humanity has never seen before.

When I first saw this number I was absolutely astounded at how reckless we all have become, and I was also amazed that there was hardly anything about this announcement in the mainstream media in the United States. The following excerpt comes from a story in a major British news source…

The International Monetary Fund has urged governments to take action to tackle a record $152tn debt mountain before it triggers a fresh global financial and economic crisis.

Warning that debt levels were not just high but rising, the IMF said it was vital to intervene early in order to mitigate the risks of a repeat of the damaging events that began with the collapse of the US sub-prime housing bubble almost a decade ago.

It said that new research in its half-yearly fiscal monitor covering 113 countries had shown that debt was currently 225% of global GDP, with the private sector responsible for two-thirds of the total.

Right now the mainstream media in the United States is so obsessed with Trump and Clinton that almost every other important story is pushed to the side, but it boggles my mind how this cannot be major front page news.

When we borrow money, consumption is transferred from the future to the present. For example, if you put a 70 inch television on your credit card today, the quality of your lifestyle will immediately go up, but you won’t have that money to spend at some point in the future. In fact, you are ultimately going to pay back significantly more money than you originally spent for the television.

So when we go into debt, we are literally destroying the future one dollar at a time.

On a national scale, what we are doing to our children, our grandchildren and all future generations of Americans is beyond criminal. Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers warned that government debt was simply thievery from future generations, and they were exactly right. If future generations get the chance, they will look back and curse us for what we have done to them.

Earlier today I looked up our national debt, and it is currently sitting at $19,688,773,606,117.54. That means that Barack Obama has officially become “the 9 trillion dollar man”.

When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. government was 10.6 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are 19.6 trillion dollars in debt, and there is a very good chance that we could hit 20 trillion dollars by the time he leaves the White House on January 20th, 2017.

In a just society, the politicians that have done this to future generations of Americans would be going to jail, but instead we put them up on pedestals.

It is truly hard to grasp how much money “a trillion dollars” represents.

For instance, if you were alive when Jesus Christ was born, and you had spent a million dollars every single day since that time, you still would not have spent a trillion dollars by now.

Since Barack Obama entered the White House, we have been stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day, and as Obama’s second term draws to a close the pace of that theft is accelerating according to Simon Black…

In fact, for the 2016 fiscal year that ends in just ten more days, the US government’s debt growth of $1.36 trillion is on track to be the third biggest annual increase ever.

The only two years in all of US history that posted higher US debt growth were 2010 and 2011– the peak of the financial crisis.

Even more acutely, last month the US federal debt grew by $151.5 billion.

Not counting the financial crisis, and a few anomalous months following a debt ceiling reset, August 2016 was the single biggest expansion of US debt EVER.

How could we do this?

And I know that I have pointed the finger at Barack Obama a lot in this article, but the truth is that Republicans are highly to blame as well.

The Tea Party revolution of 2010 gave the Republicans control of the House of Representatives, and since that time they have also gained control of the Senate. Without Republican approval, Barack Obama would not be able to spend a single penny. The American people were counting on the Republicans to put a lid on the wild spending of Barack Obama and the Democrats, and the Republicans in Congress have completely failed.

Nobody wants to end the party. Because without a doubt, cutting back on our wild borrowing and spending would seriously damage the economy in the present, and nobody wants to be responsible for that.

So now the only thing to do is to keep the party going for as long as possible until it ends in a horrible, fiery crash.

Overall, the total amount of debt in the United States is now roughly equivalent to 350 percent of U.S. GDP, and a day of reckoning is rapidly approaching. Just consider what Charles Schwab’s chief investment strategist, Liz Ann Sonders, recently told Business Insider…

Sonders noted that total debt — public, private, nonfinancial, and financial — had become 350% of gross domestic product, and that is already causing problems for the economy.

“The question I get all the time is: When are we going to hit the wall? When are we going to hit the debt wall?” Sonders said. “I think we hit the debt wall in ’08, which unleashed a big round one of what I think will be a rolling set of crises — and not just in the US but globally.“

And I very much agree with her.

We definitely “hit a wall” in 2008, but it was just “round one” of our problems.

The coming rounds are going to be even more painful, but most Americans don’t understand this.

Most Americans seem to believe that our debt-fueled standard of living can be sustained indefinitely and that there is nothing to be concerned about.

Unfortunately, the laws of economics cannot be defied forever, and eventually the American people are going to experience economic and financial pain on a scale that we have never seen before in our entire history.

26 Incredible Facts About The Economy That Every American Should Know For The Trump-Clinton Debate

September 26, 2016September 25, 2016 by Michael

Are you ready for the most anticipated presidential debate in decades? It is being projected that Monday’s debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton could potentially break the all-time record of 80 million viewers that watched Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter debate back in 1980. Many Americans probably hope to see some personal fireworks between the two nominees, but the two candidates have both expressed a desire to focus on substantive issues. There will likely be quite a few questions about the economy, and without a doubt this is an area where Trump and Clinton have some very sharp differences. The mainstream media would have us believe that the U.S. economy is in pretty good shape, and if that was true that would seem to favor Clinton. But is it actually true? The following are 26 incredible facts about the economy that every American should know for the Trump-Clinton debate…

#1 When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. government was 10.6 trillion dollars in debt. Today, the U.S. government is 19.5 trillion dollars in debt, and Obama still has several months to go until the end of his second term. That means that an average of more than 1.1 trillion dollars a year will be added to the national debt during his presidency. We are stealing a tremendous amount of consumption from the future to make the economy look much, much better than it otherwise would be, and we are systematically destroying the future in the process.

#2 As Obama prepares to leave office, the rate at which we are adding to the national debt is actually increasing. During the fiscal year that is just ending, the U.S. government has added another 1.36 trillion dollars to the national debt.

#3 It isn’t just the federal government that is on a massive debt binge. Total U.S. corporate debt has nearly doubled since the end of 2007.

#4 Default rates on U.S. corporate debt are the highest that they have been since the last financial crisis.

#5 Corporate profits have fallen for five quarters in a row, and it is being projected that it will be six in a row once the final numbers for the third quarter come in.

#6 During the month of August, commercial bankruptcy filings were up 29 percent compared to the same period a year ago.

#7 The rate of new business formation in the United States dropped dramatically during the last recession and has hovered at that new lower level ever since.

#8 The Wall Street Journal says that this is the weakest “economic recovery” since 1949.

#9 Barack Obama is on track to be the only president in all of U.S. history to never have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least 3 percent.

#10 In August, the Cass Freight Index dipped to the lowest level that we have seen for that month since 2010. What this means is that the total amount of stuff being shipped around the country by air, by rail and by truck is really dropping, and this is a clear sign that real economic activity is slowing down in a major way.

#11 Capital expenditure growth has turned negative, and history has shown that this is almost always followed by a new recession.

#12 The percentage of Americans with a full-time job has been sitting at about 48 percent since 2010. You have to go back to 1983 to find a time when full-time employment in this country was so low.

#13 The labor force participation rate peaked back in 1997 and has been steadily falling ever since.

#14 The “inactivity rate” for men in their prime working years is actually higher today than it was during the last recession.

#15 The United States has lost more than five million manufacturing jobs since the year 2000 even though our population has become much larger over that time frame.

#16 If you can believe it, the total number of government employees now outnumbers the total number of manufacturing employees in the United States by almost 10 million.

#17 One study found that median incomes have fallen in more than 80 percent of the major metropolitan areas in this country since the year 2000.

#18 According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#19 The rate of homeownership in the U.S. has fallen every single year while Barack Obama has been in the White House.

#20 Approximately one out of every five young adults are currently living with their parents.

#21 The auto loan debt bubble recently surpassed the one trillion dollar mark for the first time ever.

#22 Auto loan delinquencies are at the highest level that we have seen since the last recession.

#23 In 1971, 61 percent of all Americans were considered to be “middle class”, but now middle class Americans have actually become a minority in this nation.

#24 One recent survey discovered that 62 percent of all Americans have less than $1,000 in savings.

#25 According to the Federal Reserve, 47 percent of all Americans could not even pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money from somewhere or selling something.

#26 The number of New Yorkers sleeping in homeless shelters just set a brand new record high, and the number of families permanently living in homeless shelters is up a whopping 60 percent over the past five years.

Despite all of the facts that you just read, the truth is that there is one particular group of people that have been doing quite well during the Obama years. I really like how Charles Hugh Smith made this point in one of his recent articles…

The top 5% of households that dominate government, Corporate America, finance, the Deep State and the media have been doing extraordinarily well during the past eight years of stock market bubble (oops, I mean boom) and “recovery,” and so they report that the economy is doing splendidly because they’ve done splendidly.

By recklessly creating money out of thin air and pumping it into the financial markets, the Federal Reserve has greatly enriched the elite, but they have also dramatically increased the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us. Since he has been in the White House during this time, Barack Obama has gotten the credit for this temporary stock market bubble, and most of the elite love Obama anyway.

But in the process the stage has been set for the greatest economic and financial implosion in U.S. history, and the pain that is coming is going to affect every man, woman and child in this country.

During the debate, Trump and Clinton will talk a lot about tinkering with tax rates and regulations, but those measures are essentially going to be meaningless when compared to the massive economic tsunami that is coming. The next president is going to inherit the biggest economic problems that this nation has ever faced, and it is going to take a miracle of Biblical proportions to turn the U.S. economy in the right direction.

America The Debt Pig: We Are A ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Society – And ‘Pay Later’ Is Rapidly Approaching

August 28, 2016August 28, 2016 by Michael

If you really wanted to live like a millionaire, you could start doing it right now. All you have to do is to apply for as many credit cards as possible and then begin running up credit card balances like there is no tomorrow. At this point, I know what most of you are probably thinking. You are probably thinking that such a lifestyle would not last for long and that a day of reckoning would eventually come, and you would be exactly right. In fact, anyone that has ever had a tremendous amount of credit card debt knows how painful that day of reckoning can be. To mindlessly run up credit card debt is exceedingly reckless, but unfortunately that is precisely what we have been doing as a nation as a whole. We are a “buy now, pay later” society, and our national day of reckoning is approaching very, very quickly.

Often we like to focus on our exploding national debt, but household debt is out of control too. In fact, the total amount of household debt in the United States is now up to a whopping 12.3 trillion dolllars…

In the second quarter, total household debt increased by $35 billion to $12.3 trillion, according to the New York Fed’s latest quarterly report on household debt. That increase was driven by two categories: auto loans and credit cards.

We throw around words like “trillion” so often these days that they often start to lose their meaning. But the truth is that 12.3 trillion dollars is an astounding amount of money. It breaks down to about $38,557 for every man, woman and child in the entire country. So if you have a family of four, your share comes to a grand total of $154,231, and that doesn’t even include corporate debt, local government debt, state government debt or the gigantic debt of the federal government. That number is only for household debt, and there aren’t too many Americans that could cough up their share right at this moment.

Do you remember when I wrote about how credit card companies are specifically targeting less educated and less sophisticated consumers? Well, that is where much of the credit card debt growth has come lately. Just check out these numbers…

Now, credit cards are returning among individuals with low credit or subprime credit scores below 660. Among people with credit scores between 620 and 660, the share that had a credit card rose to 58.8% in 2015 from a low of 54.3% in 2013. Among those with scores below 620, the number of people with a credit card increased to 50% from a low of 45.6% two years ago. Both figures for 2015 are the highest since 2008.

In America today, we are enjoying a standard of living that we do not deserve.

We consume far more wealth than we produce. The only way we are able to do that is by going into debt.

Debt takes future consumption and brings it into the present. In other words, we are damaging the future in order to make the present a little bit better. On an individual level, we may enjoy the big screen television we buy with a credit card today, but we are taking away our ability to spend money later. And on a national level, what our unprecedented debt binge is doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.

Earlier this month I explained these things to a live studio audience down at Morningside, and you can view a video of that right here…

In this article I haven’t even talked about corporate debt yet. Instead of learning their lessons from the last financial crisis, big corporations have gone on the biggest debt spree of all time. If you can believe it, corporate debt has approximately doubled since the last financial crisis. In other words, since the last recession we have essentially matched the total amount of corporate debt that we accumulated from the beginning of the country up to 2009.

Unfortunately, a lot of that debt is now going bad.

In previous articles I have documented that corporate debt delinquencies are now the highest that they have been since the last financial crisis, and corporate debt defaults are also the highest that they have been since the last financial crisis.

At this point, even the mainstream media is acknowledging that we have a corporate debt “crisis”. The following comes from an article that was just put out by the Denver Post…

The number of companies that have defaulted so far this year has already passed the total for all of last year, which itself had the most since the financial crisis. Even among companies considered high-quality, or investment grade, credit-rating agencies say a record number are so stretched financially that they’re one bad quarter or so from being downgraded to “junk” status.

Companies whose debt is already deemed “junk” are in the worst shape in years. To pay back all they owe, they would have to set aside every dollar of their operating earnings over the next eight and a half years, more than twice as long as it would have taken during the 2008 crisis, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Are you starting to get the picture?

And I haven’t even started talking about our national debt yet. When Barack Obama entered the White House, we were 10.6 trillion dollars in debt. Today, we are 19.4 trillion dollars in debt. That means that we have added 8.8 trillion dollars to the national debt under Obama, which breaks down to an average of 1.1 trillion dollars of additional debt a year.

We have been taking more than 100 million dollars of future consumption and bringing it into the present every single hour of every single day during the Obama administration. That is why I am constantly referring to our “debt-fueled standard of living”. We do not deserve to live the way that we do, but since we are able to steal from our children and our grandchildren we are able to enjoy a standard of living that most people in the world can only dream about.

Of course we are literally destroying the future of America in the process, but very few people seem to care about that these days.

Without all of this debt, we would be in a very deep economic depression right now.

But even with all of this “stimulus”, we are still mired in the worst economic “recovery” since 1949. In fact, Barack Obama is actually on track to be the very first president in all of American history to not have one single year when U.S. GDP grew by 3 percent or better, and he has had two terms in which to try to get that accomplished. The percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job is way down from where it was just prior to the last recession, and in this video I explain why the employment numbers put out by the government are not nearly as good as the administration would have us believe…

If the American people would have been willing to sacrifice and make some very hard choices a long time ago, maybe we could have gotten a handle on all of this debt.

But instead we continue to rack up debt as if there is no tomorrow, and in the process we are literally destroying tomorrow.

Every dollar of debt that we accumulate now makes life worse for our children and our grandchildren.

Unfortunately, we are a bunch of debt pigs, and we just can’t help ourselves. We have come to believe that it is “normal” to go into so much debt, and as a society we continue to race toward economic oblivion.

19.4 Trillion Dollars In Debt – We Have Added 1.1 Trillion Dollars A Year To The National Debt Under Obama

July 20, 2016July 20, 2016 by Michael

In 2006, U.S. Senator Barack Obama’s voice thundered across the Senate floor as he boldly declared that “increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.” That was one of the truest things that he ever said, but just a couple of years later he won the 2008 election and he turned his back on those principles. As I write this article, the U.S. national debt is sitting at a grand total of $19,402,361,890,929.46. But when Barack Obama first entered the White House, our federal government was only 10.6 trillion dollars in debt. That means that we have added an average of 1.1 trillion dollars a year to the national debt under Obama, and we still have about six more months to go.

Even though Barack Obama is on track to be the first president in all of U.S. history to not have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by 3 percent or better, many have still been mystified by the fact that the economy has been relatively stable in recent years.

But the explanation is rather simple, actually. Anyone can live like a millionaire if the credit card companies will lend them enough money. You could even do it yourself. Just go out and apply for as many credit cards as possible and then spend money like there is no tomorrow. In no time at all, you will be living the high life.

Of course many of you would immediately object that a day of reckoning would come eventually, and you would be right. Just like for those that abuse credit cards, a financial day of reckoning is coming for America too.

In the United States today, our standard of living is being massively inflated by taking trillions of dollars of future consumption and moving it into the present. The politicians love to do this because it makes them look good and they can take credit for an “economic recovery”, but what we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal.

On average, we are stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day. We are complete and utter pigs, and yet most Americans don’t see anything wrong with what we are doing.

At this point, our national debt is more than 30 times larger than it was just 40 years ago, and many (including myself) have argued that it is now mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to ever pay off all of this debt.

The only thing that we can do now is to keep the party going for as long as possible until the day of reckoning inevitably comes.

Under Obama, our national debt will come close to doubling. What that means is that during Obama’s eight years we will accumulate almost as much debt as we did under all of the other presidents in U.S. history combined.

Right now, the U.S. government is responsible for about a third of all the government debt in the entire world. Fortunately the financial world continues to lend us gigantic mountains of money at ridiculously low interest rates, but if that were to ever change we would be in an enormous amount of trouble very rapidly.

For instance, if the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt simply returns to the long-term average, we would very quickly find ourselves spending more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.

And as the Baby Boomers age, our “unfunded liabilities” threaten to absolutely swamp us. By the year 2025, it is being projected that “mandatory” federal spending on “unfunded liabilities” such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare plus interest on the national debt will exceed total federal revenue. What that means is that we will spend every penny we bring in before a single dollar is spent on the military, homeland security, paying federal workers, building roads and bridges, etc.

In recent years the Federal Reserve has also had a “buy now, pay later” mentality.

While Obama has been in the White House, the size of the Fed balance sheet has grown by about two and a half trillion dollars. The goal has been to artificially pump up the economy, but when the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air it is actually a tax on all of us. The purchasing power of every dollar that we will spend in the future has been diminished thanks to the Fed, but most Americans don’t understand this.

What most Americans want is for someone to “fix things” in the short-term, and not much consideration is ever given to the long-term damage that is being done.

I know that the phrase “trillion dollars” is thrown around a lot these days, and to a lot of people it doesn’t have a whole lot of meaning anymore. But the truth is that it is an absolutely enormous amount of money. In fact, if you went out right this moment and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

A final example of our “buy now, pay later” mentality can be seen in our ridiculously bloated trade deficit. We consume far more than we produce as a nation, and we buy far more from the rest of the world than they buy from us. As a result, tens of thousands of businesses and millions of good paying jobs have gone overseas, and many of our formerly great manufacturing cities are now vast industrial wastelands. Our economic infrastructure has been gutted at a pace that is staggering, and yet most Americans still don’t understand what has been done to them.

If you visit your typical “big box” retail store today, where is most of the stuff made? Instinctively, most of you would answer “China”, and that is not too far from the truth.

We buy far, far more stuff from China then they buy from us. This makes them steadily wealthier, and it makes us steadily poorer. Unfortunately, our trade deficit with China has gotten much, much worse while Barack Obama has been in the White House.

At the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office, our yearly trade deficit with China was 226 billion dollars. Last year, it was more than 367 billion dollars.

Are you starting to see a trend?

Our long-term economic and financial problems have greatly accelerated under Barack Obama, but our leaders feverishly work to make things look okay in the short-term and so most Americans don’t notice what is happening.

Unfortunately, this Ponzi scheme cannot go on forever and a day of reckoning is coming. And when it arrives, the pain that it is going to cause for ordinary Americans is going to be far greater than most of us would dare to imagine.

It’s Official: Over A Trillion Dollars A Year Will Be Added To The Debt During Obama’s Presidency

December 21, 2015December 21, 2015 by Michael

Under Barack Obama, the U.S. national debt has risen from $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January 20th, 2009 to $18,795,033,928,275.59 on December 21st, 2015. That means that the debt that we are passing on to future generations has increased by 8.16 trillion dollars since Barack Obama was inaugurated. There is still a little more than a year to go in Obama’s presidency, and it is already guaranteed that Obama will add more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt during his presidency. In fact, when you do the math, we are stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day. It is a crime of a magnitude that is almost unimaginable, and at this point it is mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off all of this debt. To say that we are in trouble would be a massive understatement.

And of course not all of the blame goes to Obama. The Republicans have had control of the House of Representatives for all but two years while Obama has been in the White House, and they have gone along with all of this reckless spending. Without the approval of the House, Obama could not spend a single penny, but the Republicans have consistently chosen not to stand up to him. In fact, the Republicans in Congress just approved another massive 1.2 trillion dollar spending bill that essentially gave the Democrats every single thing that they wanted. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi even admitted that the Republicans “were willing to concede so much” during the negotiations.

So why do we even have a Republican Party? They always just go along with pretty much whatever the Democrats want anyway. Why shouldn’t we just disband the Republican Party and let the Democrats completely run things? How would Washington D.C. be any different if the Republicans didn’t even exist?

At this point, even Rush Limbaugh is completely disgusted with the Republican Party…

I have a headline here from the Washington Times: “White House Declares Total Victory Over GOP in Budget Battle.” That headline’s a misnomer. There was never a battle. None of this was opposed. The Republican Party didn’t stand up to any of it, and the die has been cast for a long time on this. I know many of you are dispirited, depressed, angry, combination of all of that. But, folks, there was no other way this could go. Because two years ago when the Republican Party declared they would never do anything that would shut down the government and they would not impeach Obama, there were no obstacles in Obama’s way and there were no obstacles in the way of the Democrat Party.

Do you remember when Republican politicians were running around promising that they would defund Obamacare?

That didn’t happen.

Do you remember when Republican politicians were running around promising that they would defund Planned Parenthood?

That didn’t happen.

Do you remember when Republican politicians were running around promising that they would defund Obama’s refugee program?

That didn’t happen.

In this new spending deal, the Republicans got nothing. It was a sham, a farce and a total insult to the American people. Here is more from Rush Limbaugh…

It fully funds Planned Parenthood. That, to me, is unforgivable, with everything now known about what goes on behind closed doors at Planned Parenthood, and that the federal government, led by a Republican Party, sees fit to pay for it. It is beyond comprehension, and it is a total squandering of moral authority to fully fund the butchery at Planned Parenthood. This spending bill fully pays for Obama’s refugee plans, fully. This spending bill, this budget bill quadruples the number of visas Obama wants for foreign workers. This is even a slap at American union workers. Not the leaders. The union leaders seem to be in favor of it, but blue-collar people, known as working people, have been sold down the river along with everybody else here.

This spending bill even fully pays for every dime asked for by Obama on all of this idiocy that’s tied up into climate change. Everything Obama wanted, everything he asked for, he got. You go down the list of things, it’s there.

Even after watching all of the undercover Planned Parenthood videos that came out over the past year, the Republicans in Congress still voted to fund the harvesting and sale of body parts from aborted babies.

And surveys have found that the American people support the continued funding of Planned Parenthood by about a 2 to 1 margin. After everything that we have seen, the vast majority of Americans still want to continue giving those butchers hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars a year.

No wonder so many people are comparing America to Nazi Germany these days. We truly have become an exceedingly wicked nation.

We like to think that we are an “example” for the rest of the planet, but in reality the only example that we are is a bad one. Our guilt has been put on display for all the world to see, and yet we just continue to race toward even more evil.

Not only did the Republicans not defund Planned Parenthood, the truth is that not a single pro-life amendment of any sort even got into the bill thanks to Paul Ryan. The following comes from lifesitenews.com…

“The bill failed to include a single major pro-life policy rider, despite the requests of over 120 members of Congress and the disturbing revelations about Planned Parenthood brought to light this year,” said Congresswoman Diane Black, R-TN, who voted against the bill.

The House Freedom Caucus offered a series of amendments to the bill defunding Planned Parenthood, strengthening conscience protections for pro-life physicians and organizations, and ending all U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The House Rules Committee rejected these riders earlier this week, as Speaker Paul Ryan said he did not want conservative amendments added to the bill that would drive away his Democratic colleagues.

The committee also rejected an amendment to increase vetting of refugees who enter the United States from the terrorist hotbeds of Syria and Iraq, which had previously passed the House, with 47 Democrats adding strong bipartisan support.

Like I said, the Republicans completely capitulated, just like they always do.

Now the U.S. national debt is nearly double the size that it was just before the last financial crisis struck, and our leaders continue to borrow and spend as if there is no tomorrow.

Perhaps they have convinced themselves that there will never be any consequences for acting so foolishly.

Perhaps they believe that in the end everything will turn out okay somehow.

Perhaps they are able to rationalize the theft of more than a hundred million dollars an hour from future generations of Americans.

But nothing can erase what they have done to us. The promising future that our children and our grandchildren should have had has been completely wiped out, and the leading edge of the greatest economic crisis that any of us has ever known is now upon us.

If we had done things differently, things wouldn’t have had to turn out this way. But now the die is cast, and we are all going to pay a very high price for the mistakes that have been made in Washington.

The U.S. Government Is Spending 400,000 Dollars On A Single Helmet

October 27, 2015October 27, 2015 by Michael

Would you pay $400,000 for a single helmet? Of course you wouldn’t – but that is precisely what the U.S. government is doing. Just the helmet for the pilot of the new F-35 Lightning II is going to cost taxpayers nearly half a million dollars. And since we are going to need 2,400 of those helmets, the total bill is going to end up approaching a billion dollars. But what is a billion dollars between friends, eh?

Sadly, our military has a very long history of wasting money like this. Back in the 1980s, the “six hundred dollar toilet seat” became quite famous. Average Americans were absolutely outraged that the government was wasting so much of our hard-earned money, and promises were made that things would change. Here is more on what transpired back then from Wikipedia…

Beginning in 1981, President Ronald Reagan began an expansion in the size and capabilities of the United States armed forces, which entailed major new expenditures on weapons procurement. By the mid-1980s, this spending became a scandal when the Project On Government Oversight reported that the Pentagon had vastly overpaid for a wide variety of items, most notoriously paying $435 for a hammer, $600 for a toilet seat, and $7,000 for a coffee pot.

But of course things haven’t changed, have they?

Instead, they have gotten even worse.

I have no idea how a single helmet could be worth $400,000.

Does it grant magic wishes?

Does it turn the user into a mutant superhero?

Here is an excerpt from the USA Today article that is reporting on this super expensive helmet…

When the joint strike fighter, the F-35 Lightning II, finally takes to the skies on its first official mission, it will be one of the most advanced and one of the most expensive planes ever.

And the pilots flying the aircraft will be wearing the most advanced and most expensive helmet ever.

The helmet will give pilots quicker access to the information they need to see and has special cameras to “see” through the bottom of the plane. But it will cost an estimated $400,000 per helmet — more than four times as much as the Air Force paid for head wear for other aircraft such as the F-16.

Is that why the helmet is so expensive?

It can help the pilot see through the bottom of the plane?

Really?

If you just go down to your local Ford dealer they will be glad to show you lots of new trucks that can “see behind them”, and the best truck on the lot only costs about $50,000.

Or better yet, if F-35 pilots really want to see what is going on underneath them they should just slap a window on the bottom of the plane.

Of course I am just being facetious, but I think that you get the point.

We all work really hard for our money, and it is quite disheartening to watch the government waste it so flippantly.

And this week the Republicans in Congress have agreed to suspend the debt ceiling for the rest of the time that Barack Obama is in the White House. In one of his final acts as House Speaker, John Boehner has given Barack Obama a wonderful parting gift…

Outgoing House Speaker John Boehner presented his newly forged budget deal to his Republican colleagues at a private meeting this morning, outlining his plan to avert another government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling as a parting gift to his successor.

The deal would increase federal spending by $80 billion over two years and raise the federal borrowing limit through 2017. The 144-page bill, which was released Monday shortly before midnight, was welcomed by Democrats who have been pushing for budget negotiations all year.

Thank you John Boehner for selling us all down the river time after time. You have done a great disservice to our nation.

This new budget agreement is actually going to significantly increase spending. Here are some more of the details from the New York Times…

For this fiscal year alone, the deal would add $50 billion in spending, divided equally between defense and domestic programs, as well as $16 billion for emergency war spending, half for the military, half for the State Department. Together, that represents an increase of $66 billion in the spending limits for 2016, not far off the $70 billion increase Mr. Obama requested in his budget.

Personally, I can’t wait to see how much of that 16 billion dollars is for lethal military aid for Ukraine. Many of you that have been following this closely know exactly what I am talking about.

Of course this budget deal still must be approved by Congress, but that is just a formality at this point. Many “conservatives” in Congress are voicing displeasure with this deal, but is anyone listening? The following comes from Business Insider…

Conservatives moved quickly to revolt over a blockbuster budget deal reached among congressional leaders and the White House early Tuesday morning, calling it a “betrayal” days before US House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is set to leave Congress.

“This budget deal is a betrayal of all the fiscally conservative promises Republicans made in the last election. It is emblematic of why working-class Americans are angry with congressional Republicans,” said prominent right-leaning economist Stephen Moore, in a statement released by the conservative group FreedomWorks.

The Tea Party is supposed to be standing against the tax and spend agenda of the Democrats and the establishment Republicans, but enthusiasm for the Tea Party seems to be subsiding. In fact, according to Gallup support for the Tea Party has hit an all-time low of 17 percent.

So we will just continue to witness business as usual in D.C. until disaster strikes. At this point it is expected that somewhere around 100 Republicans in the House will support this deal, and with all of the Democrats on board that should be enough to get it to pass.

Since Boehner reached his first “budget deal” with Barack Obama back in 2011, the U.S. national debt has increased by $3,970,023,503,348.07. It is a betrayal of a magnitude that is difficult to put into words.

Overall, the federal government has been stealing 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day since Barack Obama first entered the White House.

When I tell most people that, I can tell that they don’t really believe me, and truthfully that statistic does sound completely and utterly ridiculous.

But it is true.

When you multiply 100,000,000 by 24 by 365 you get 876,000,000,000. And if you multiply that number by 7 (the number of years that Obama has “served” so far rounding up), you get 6.132 trillion.

Well, according to CNSNews.com the U.S. national debt has risen by more than seven and a half trillion dollars since Barack Obama was first inaugurated…

Since Obama took office, the total debt of the federal government has already increased by $7,525,761,885,381.30—rising from $10,626,877,048,913.08 on Jan. 20, 2009 to $18,152,638,934,294.38 on Oct. 23, 2015.

When you break that number down, the amount of new debt added under Obama comes to $64,134.73 per household…

The $7,525,761,885,381.30 that the total debt has increased so far during the Obama presidency equals $64,134.73 for each of the 117,343,000 households that were in the United States as of June.

Are you ready to cough up your share?

The truth is that it is already mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off this debt.

What our politicians are attempting to do now is to keep borrowing money and extending the game for as long as they possibly can.

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

What our leaders have done to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal. But the American people have come to accept this as “normal”, and only a very small percentage of us are still complaining about it.

So the jokers in Washington will just keep on doing what they are doing until it all comes tumbling down all around them. By then, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

The Bankruptcy Of The Planet Accelerates – 24 Nations Are Currently Facing A Debt Crisis

July 20, 2015July 16, 2015 by Michael

There has been so much attention on Greece in recent weeks, but the truth is that Greece represents only a very tiny fraction of an unprecedented global debt bomb which threatens to explode at any moment. As you are about to see, there are 24 nations that are currently facing a full-blown debt crisis, and there are 14 more that are rapidly heading toward one. Right now, the debt to GDP ratio for the entire planet is up to an all-time record high of 286 percent, and globally there is approximately 200 TRILLION dollars of debt on the books. That breaks down to about $28,000 of debt for every man, woman and child on the entire planet. And since close to half of the population of the world lives on less than 10 dollars a day, there is no way that all of this debt can ever be repaid. The only “solution” under our current system is to kick the can down the road for as long as we can until this colossal debt pyramid finally collapses in upon itself.

As we are seeing in Greece, you can eventually accumulate so much debt that there is literally no way out. The other European nations are attempting to find a way to give Greece a third bailout, but that is like paying one credit card with another credit card because virtually everyone in Europe is absolutely drowning in debt.

Even if some “permanent solution” could be crafted for Greece, that would only solve a very small fraction of the overall problem that we are facing. The nations of the world have never been in this much debt before, and it gets worse with each passing day.

According to a new report from the Jubilee Debt Campaign, there are currently 24 countries in the world that are facing a full-blown debt crisis…

■ Armenia

■ Belize

■ Costa Rica

■ Croatia

■ Cyprus

■ Dominican Republic

■ El Salvador

■ The Gambia

■ Greece

■ Grenada

■ Ireland

■ Jamaica

■ Lebanon

■ Macedonia

■ Marshall Islands

■ Montenegro

■ Portugal

■ Spain

■ Sri Lanka

■ St Vincent and the Grenadines

■ Tunisia

■ Ukraine

■ Sudan

■ Zimbabwe

And there are another 14 nations that are right on the verge of one…

■ Bhutan

■ Cape Verde

■ Dominica

■ Ethiopia

■ Ghana

■ Laos

■ Mauritania

■ Mongolia

■ Mozambique

■ Samoa

■ Sao Tome e Principe

■ Senegal

■ Tanzania

■ Uganda

So what should be done about this?

Should we have the “wealthy” countries bail all of them out?

Well, the truth is that the “wealthy” countries are some of the biggest debt offenders of all. Just consider the United States. Our national debt has more than doubled since 2007, and at this point it has gotten so large that it is mathematically impossible to pay it off.

Europe is in similar shape. Members of the eurozone are trying to cobble together a “bailout package” for Greece, but the truth is that most of them will soon need bailouts too…

All of those countries will come knocking asking for help at some point. The fact is that their Debt to GDP levels have soared since the EU nearly collapsed in 2012.

Spain’s Debt to GDP has risen from 69% to 98%. Italy’s Debt to GDP has risen from 116% to 132%. France’s has risen from 85% to 95%.

In addition to Spain, Italy and France, let us not forget Belgium (106 percent debt to GDP), Ireland (109 debt to GDP) and Portugal (130 debt to GDP).

Once all of these dominoes start falling, the consequences for our massively overleveraged global financial system will be absolutely catastrophic…

Spain has over $1.0 trillion in debt outstanding… and Italy has €2.6 trillion. These bonds are backstopping tens of trillions of Euros’ worth of derivatives trades. A haircut or debt forgiveness for them would trigger systemic failure in Europe.

EU banks as a whole are leveraged at 26-to-1. At these leverage levels, even a 4% drop in asset prices wipes out ALL of your capital. And any haircut of Greek, Spanish, Italian and French debt would be a lot more than 4%.

Things in Asia look quite ominous as well.

According to Bloomberg, debt levels in China have risen to levels never recorded before…

While China’s economic expansion beat analysts’ forecasts in the second quarter, the country’s debt levels increased at an even faster pace.

Outstanding loans for companies and households stood at a record 207 percent of gross domestic product at the end of June, up from 125 percent in 2008, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

And remember, that doesn’t even include government debt. When you throw all forms of debt into the mix, the overall debt to GDP number for China is rapidly approaching 300 percent.

In Japan, things are even worse. The government debt to GDP ratio in Japan is now up to an astounding 230 percent. That number has gotten so high that it is hard to believe that it could possibly be true. At some point an implosion is coming in Japan which is going to shock the world.

Of course the same thing could be said about the entire planet. Yes, national governments and central banks have been attempting to kick the can down the road for as long as possible, but everyone knows that this is not going to end well.

And when things do really start falling apart, it will be unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Just consider what Egon von Greyerz recently told King World News…

Eric, there are now more problem areas in the world, rather than stable situations. No major nation in the West can repay its debts. The same is true for Japan and most of the emerging markets. Europe is a failed experiment for socialism and deficit spending. China is a massive bubble, in terms of its stock markets, property markets and shadow banking system. Japan is also a basket case and the U.S. is the most indebted country in the world and has lived above its means for over 50 years.

So we will see twin $200 trillion debt and $1.5 quadrillion derivatives implosions. That will lead to the most historic wealth destruction ever in global stock, with bond and property markets declining at least 75 – 95 percent. World trade will also contract dramatically and we will see massive hardship across the globe.

So what do you think is coming, and how bad will things ultimately get once this global debt crisis finally spins totally out of control?

Please feel free to add to the discussion by posting a comment below…

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