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“Efficiency” has become one of the hottest trends in the tech industry, and that is really bad news for American workers, because one of the best ways to become “more efficient” is to get rid of low-performing employees.  Just about every time a big tech company fires a bunch of workers, the stock price of that particular company makes a significant jump.  Needless to say, many executives have taken note of this, and that could help to explain why even highly successful tech companies have been conducting multiple rounds of mass layoffs in 2025.

Through September 15th, the tech industry has laid off more than 166,000 workers.

And by the end of this year, it is being projected that the grand total could reach nearly a quarter of a million…

Between 1 January and 15 September 2025, more than 166,000 employees were laid off in the technology sector. We estimate that, on average, 645 workers have lost their jobs every day since the start of the year and, at this pace, the tech industry is set to let go of another 69,005 people by year-end. If the trend continues, calculations show that total tech-sector layoffs in 2025 could reach 235,392.

Tech industry jobs are good paying jobs.

So it isn’t as if a bunch of people that are making minimum wage suddenly have to find something else to do.

When good paying jobs are eliminated, the middle class gets smaller.

And as I have extensively documented, middle class workers that have lost their jobs are having an exceedingly difficult time finding new employment in this very harsh environment.

The tech company that is slashing jobs the hardest is Intel.

By the end of this year, more than 30,000 Intel employees will have been forced to hit the bricks…

The company cutting the most jobs so far in 2025 is Intel, which had close to 109,000 employees at the end of 2024 and, by the end of this year, plans to reduce headcount to 75,000, according to Reuters, effectively slashing more than 30 thousand positions.

Without a doubt, Intel has been struggling.

So it makes sense that they are reducing headcount.

But tech companies that have been highly profitable are also brutally cutting employees.

For example, Microsoft has already conducted multiple rounds of mass layoffs in 2025…

Since the beginning of 2025, Microsoft has laid off more than 19,000 employees across various divisions and departments. This includes a limited number of performance-based layoffs in January, reductions within its Xbox division, as well as another 6,000 job cuts announced in May. In its latest round, the company said it would further reduce headcount, eliminating management positions across different teams and regions.

Of course we are also seeing painful layoffs happen in many other industries as well.

In fact, we haven’t seen widespread layoffs of this magnitude in the construction industry since the days of the Great Recession…

As unsold completed new-build inventory piles up and builders see their pricing power decrease—particularly in Sun Belt markets like Austin, Tampa, and Jacksonville—more homebuilders are turning to layoffs to avoid a larger margin compression. Many builders are trimming corporate staff head counts a little and scaling back on spec construction in areas where supply has gotten too high for their liking.

Look no further than a recent John Burns Research and Consulting survey, which found that 63% of U.S. homebuilders said their local peers had recently conducted layoffs, while only 14% reported no recent layoffs among peers.

The numbers were even more striking in key Sun Belt markets: 87% of Texas builders and 79% of Florida builders said their peers had recently cut workers.

Those numbers are horrifying.

I have such respect for those that build our homes, because they are actually doing something that greatly benefits our society.

If our economy was functioning properly, there would be tremendous demand for construction workers right now, because we are facing a national housing shortage epidemic.

But our economy is not functioning properly, and vast numbers of highly skilled workers are being canned.

And most of us knew that this was coming.

A survey that was conducted last December found that 81 percent of American workers were concerned about losing their jobs in 2025.

Now we know why.

With each passing day, there are more shocking layoff announcements in the news.

Overall, the number of announced job cuts in the United States is up 66 percent compared to last year.

It is very clear which direction the employment market is going, and nobody can deny it.

Meanwhile, the cost of living just continues to soar.

The price of coffee has already risen to absolutely absurd levels, and this week coffee futures spiked to very alarming levels…

Arabica coffee futures have soared over the past six weeks, reaching their highest level since February as traders closely monitor tightening supplies, adverse weather conditions in Brazil and other top growers, and uncertainty surrounding upcoming harvests, which has fueled a short squeeze.

Arabica, the premium bean used by Starbucks, Dunkin’, and other chains, jumped as much as 6.2% to $4.21 on Monday, with momentum easing on Tuesday as $4.20 emerged as a line of resistance. Notably, futures have surged nearly 50% since early August.

What this means is that the price of coffee is going to be even higher in 2026.

Ouch.

In fact, bad weather in South America has caused so much damage that we are being told that “there is ZERO POSSIBILTY for global production to recover until 2030″…

In a mid-August report, we cited Maja Wallengren, Danish-born independent coffee market reporter and founder of SpillingTheBean, who warned that adverse weather across key coffee-producing areas in Brazil, including the entire Cerrado Mineiro region and parts of Southern Minas, had experienced “frost damage” severe enough to be a potential “death blow” to the 2026 harvest.

Wallengren recently warned that “multiple and continuing weather disasters across the world’s Arabica and Robusta producing countries” are producing an extreme situation where “there is ZERO POSSIBILTY for global production to recover until 2030 and it’s a FACT that The World IS Running Out of Coffee !!“

At the same time, the price of ground beef has risen to an all-time record high of $6.32 per pound.

Of course just about everything in the grocery store has become much more expensive in the past few years.

One young nursing student that was just interviewed by the BBC admitted that “prices are really drastically high”…

But Americans like Yanique Clarke are feeling the pinch.

Yanique, a nursing student in Manhattan who identifies as lower-income, said while shopping for groceries at a Target store this week that “prices are really drastically high” for meat, vegetables and fruit.

“It’s quite a while now, but it’s getting higher,” she said.

If you think that prices are bad now, just wait until you see what 2026 will bring.

As real food becomes increasingly expensive, more companies than ever will be pushing food products that are made from mass produced bugs or from cheap GMO sludge.

Some have even joked that we could be moving toward a “Soylent Green” society.  Interestingly, New Jersey just became the 14th state in the last 6 years to legalize human composting…

The Garden State approved a bill that legalizes human composting, an alternative to traditional burials in which a corpse is transformed into nutrient-rich soil that loved ones can use to feed their favorite houseplant or scatter like ashes.

Human composting, more formally known as natural organic reduction, has skyrocketed in popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic left more than a million Americans dead.

New Jersey is the 14th state to have legalized the practice over the last six years.

This is what happens when a society no longer has any respect for human life.

We have slaughtered millions upon millions of our own people, and we continue to do it to this day.

If we keep traveling down this road, we will get exactly what we deserve.

Just look at what we have become.

It is so sick.

We must wake up and reverse course.

If we do not wake up and reverse course, the layoffs that we are witnessing now will be the least of our problems.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

How can we possibly undo the severe long-term damage that has been done to an entire generation of young people over the course of several decades?  One of the most powerful pieces of evidence that our society is a failure is the fact that we have produced a “lost generation” of young adults that doesn’t have any hope.  We shipped most of them off to public schools where they were trained to believe that they came from monkeys, there is no purpose to their lives, and when they die nothing waits for them on the other side.  This sick philosophy is endlessly pounded into the heads of our young people, and many of those that have adopted it have come to the conclusion that they might as well live as hedonistically as they can while they are here.  Of course that doesn’t give them any meaning or purpose either, and so a lot of them end up sort of drifting through life seeking anything that can fill the painful emptiness that they feel inside.

It isn’t really a mystery why so many of our young people have gone completely insane.  Our modern liberal society urges them to constantly chase after things that will never satisfy them.  As a result, we have a national epidemic of loneliness, a national epidemic of depression, a national epidemic of drug abuse, and a national epidemic of suicide.

Our young people are offered one hamster wheel after another.  Each time, they are told that if they will just run hard enough they will finally be happy.

Of course that never actually happens.

It all starts in the public schools.  Parents send their children to these schools believing that they will receive a quality education, but the truth is that the quality of education in our public schools just keeps getting worse…

The reading and math scores of 12th graders have plunged to their lowest level in over 20 years.

The scores, part of a test from the National Assessment of Education Progress, showed the average reading score for 12th graders dropped to the lowest level since the NAEP first administered the reading assessment in 1992. The average score for 12th graders in math in 2024 was the lowest since 2005, when the math assessment framework changed significantly.

I went to public schools all the way through high school, and then I attended two public universities for a total of eight years.

The quality of the education that I received was a joke.

The entire system is a fraud!  It is about time that we all finally admit that the emperor doesn’t have any clothes on.

But what our public schools are good at is indoctrinating young minds.  For example, just consider what has been happening in the state of Maryland…

Schools are subverting students’ mental health by endlessly hectoring them to doubt or despise their own bodies. These school antics reached epidemic level even before the start of the Covid pandemic. In 2019, the state of Maryland issued regulations to promote “viewing each student’s” “gender identity and expression” as “valuable.” Government officials and political appointees arrogated to themselves the prerogative to redefine gender in the state of Maryland. Montgomery County, the largest school system in the state, announced that it would choose books for the curriculum “through an ‘LGBTQ+ Lens’ and ask whether books ‘reinforced or disrupted’ ‘stereotypes,’ ‘cisnormativity,’ and ‘power hierarchies,’” according to a brief filed at the Supreme Court by parents who successfully challenged the school system. That brief also noted that “teachers are told to frame disagreement with [pro-LGBTQ] ideas as ‘hurtful,’ and to counter with examples of ‘men who paint their nails’ or ‘wear dresses.’” The goal is to instill in children “a new perspective not easily contravened by their parents,” as the county school board admitted.

The indoctrination produced a 582% increase in the number of kids self-identifying as “non-binary” in Montgomery County schools. “Disrupting children’s thinking” has been so successful that almost half of the students identified themselves as non-binary.

Sadly, most parents have no idea what is really going on in these schools.

They just assume that their kids are being prepared for life in the real world.

But instead they are having leftist “values” systematically shoved down their throats.

Needless to say, it gets even worse at the next level.

Our colleges and universities are completely and utterly dominated by radical leftists.

This is why so many of our young people abandon the values that they were raised with once they enroll in these “institutions of higher learning”.  This is a point that was made exceptionally well in a recent article by Victor Davis Hanson…

Hundreds of thousands of students emerge from campuses not just indoctrinated with contempt for the Western tradition and American exceptionalism, and not just often thousands of dollars in debt from inflated tuition, but also poorly educated by the standards that once defined education.

The working classes and high school graduates, supposedly the losers of our society, are not those who are dividing the country. They are not often advocating violence or trying to use any means necessary to overturn the established order. But so often the products of the modern university are doing just that.

Sadly, in all these recent horrors, the ideology behind them—the premise that either birthed or appeased them—was birthed in modern higher education.

He is right.

Once upon a time, colleges and universities were primarily concerned with equipping students with the skills that they would need for their future careers.

Today, colleges and universities are primarily concerned with brainwashing impressionable young kids.

So how is that working out for our society?

Well, we now have a raging epidemic of loneliness among our young people…

Half of U.S. youth say that loneliness has a daily disruptive impact on their mental health, according to Hopelab and Data For Progress survey results shared exclusively with Axios.

In addition, the percentage of the population that is suffering with or receiving treatment for depression has nearly doubled over the past decade…

Depression remains an ongoing problem in the U.S. as historically high rates persist, polling company Gallup reveals.

The reported percentage of U.S. adults suffering or receiving treatment for depression has been higher than 18 percent for the past two years. A decade ago, in 2015, the number was just over 10 percent.

“The increase is alarming, and it is important that we keep an open mind and explore all possible causes for the rapid, and apparently sustained, rise in depression rates over the past decade,” Dr. Gerard Sanacora, a professor of psychiatry, director of Yale Depression Research Program and co-director of Yale New Haven Hospital Interventional Psychiatry Service at Yale University, told Newsweek.

On top of everything else, “deaths of despair” caused by alcohol abuse, drug abuse and suicide are absolutely soaring…

Two non-profits, Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust, published a report this month which paints a harrowing picture of reality for millennials with an addiction in the United States. According to the report, which is an analysis of data from the CDC, millennials are the most likely age demographic to die from alcohol, drug abuse, and suicide. Millennials are most often defined as people who were born between the years 1981 and 1996, although some definitions expand the category to cover people who were born up through the year 2000.

Over the course of one decade, from 2007 to 2017, the rate of alcohol-related deaths among millennials rose by 69%, the rate of deaths caused by drugs rose by 108%, and the suicide rate rose by 35%. The report also indicates that the opioid epidemic has devastated millennials. From 1999 to 2017, the rate of fatal opioid overdoses among millennials rose by 500% and the rate of fatal overdoses involving synthetic opioids (especially fentanyl) skyrocketed by 6,000%.

Please go back and look at those numbers one more time.

What we are doing is clearly not working.

We have a system that does not give our young people any hope, and the consequences have been absolutely devastating.

Those of us that refuse to go along with the system are increasingly being marginalized and pushed to the fringes of our society, but we will not yield because we have found hope in Jesus Christ.  If you would like to study the evidence that proves that the Christian faith is true, I would strongly encourage you to read my book entitled “Why”, because it contains a lot of information that has been kept from the general population.

Our schools aren’t going to tell you the truth.

Neither will the other major institutions in our society.

If you are tired of being lied to, it is time to wake up and start thinking for yourself.

We live at a time when deception is literally all around us, but the truth is still out there, and you can find it if you are willing to search for it.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

The video that I have to share with you today is absolutely chilling.  In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I have been horrified by the thousands of celebration videos that have been posted all over social media.  Sometimes I think that I don’t even recognize this country anymore.  For a lot of really sick people on the left, the death of Charlie Kirk is the greatest thing that has happened in the U.S. in a long time.   If it was just a few deranged individuals that were feeling this way, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  But the truth is that there are vast numbers of people that are celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death and can’t resist posting about it on social media.  Needless to say, that says a lot about the current state of our society.

I have viewed a lot of extremely sick celebration videos in recent days, but this one has got to be the worst of the worst…

There are a couple of important points that I wanted to make about this video.

First of all, I think that it is quite obvious who she is talking about when she mentions “two better candidates”.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, it is the president of the United States and the vice-president of the United States.

Secondly, there seems to be something very unnatural about her delivery.

She cackles demonically throughout the video, and I honestly wonder if someone else has control over her mental faculties at this point.

Needless to say, any rational person would not laugh at the thought of the president of the United States and the vice-president of the United States being dead.

Of course this woman is far from alone.

There are so many others that are reacting to Charlie Kirk’s death in ways that can only be described as evil.

For example, a public school teacher in Toronto repeatedly showed footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to his young students and told them that he deserved to die…

A public school teacher has been suspended after allegedly showing a video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to students as young as 10 in his class, authorities in Canada said.

The teacher also suggested that Kirk deserved to be killed, and gave the young students a speech about anti-fascism and transgender issues, according to a report.

“Several students from his class went home and complained to their parents, traumatized at witnessing the on-camera death, which they were forced to witness numerous times over,” a source told the Toronto Sun after the shocking incident at a school in Toronto on Thursday.

How angry would you be if you were the parent of one of those children?

We have entered a new era of domestic terrorism in the United States, and every time another incident happens there will be vast hordes of crazed leftists cheering it on.

In an attempt to get to the source of the problem, the Trump administration has announced plans to go after leftist NGOs…

Angered in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Trump administration officials say they’re planning to use “every resource” available across the federal government to target left-wing organizations they contend are promoting political violence.

Vice President JD Vance and Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff, on Sept. 15 discussed plans to “go after” left-wing non-government organizations, or NGOs, they said support “doxxing” campaigns against conservatives, help orchestrate riots, publicize the addresses of political opponents and promote messages intended to create violence.

“We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks,” Miller said as he joined Vance on a livestream as the vice president hosted “The Charlie Kirk Show” to pay tribute to the late conservative activist.

It certainly appears that many of these NGOs have been involved in activities that are highly illegal.

And hopefully cracking down on them will help.

But for now, the violence continues.

In fact, we have learned that two Pakistani men tried to blow up a news van in Utah on Friday…

Two men allegedly planted a bomb underneath a news van in Utah on Friday and tried to ignite it, sparking a massive evacuation and federal probe.

Adeeb Nasir, 58, and Adil Justice Ahme Nasir, 31, were each arrested Sunday when authorities turned up at their front door in Magna, Utah — less than an hour away from the college where famed conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was assassinated last Wednesday.

The pair is accused of hiding an incendiary device found underneath a news media vehicle parked next to an occupied building. The explosive had been lit but apparently malfunctioned, police said.

The reason why that particular news van was targeted was because it belonged to Fox 13 News Utah…

Fox 13 News Utah is owned by Scripps. Stations like Fox 13 are affiliated with the Fox network but are not directly part of the Fox News Channel, the pro-Trump cable news network.

The station confirmed the news about its vehicle on Sunday night and said, “FOX 13 News is working closely with law-enforcement and our risk management team, with the safety of our employees as our top priority.”

Both national and local media outlets have stepped up security efforts in the wake of the Kirk assassination.

Fox News is not very conservative at all.

So if even Fox News is being targeted, that is extremely alarming.

A photo that was taken outside of the home of the two Pakistani men shows that they were hanging a large flag that asks if Trump is dead yet…

There were also anti-Trump flags hanging outside their home, including one that read TACO Trump (a leftist meme meaning Trump Always Chickens Out) and “Is He Dead Yet?” according to photos posted to social media by Daniel Greenfield of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

This is the political environment that we live in today, and there are literally millions of people that think like this.

And leftists are committing acts of violence in western Europe too.

In fact, they just caused so much damage to Germany’s power grid that it “may take until 2026 to fully make repairs”…

Far left extremists are claiming responsibility for a major attack on a power supply hub providing power to southeast Berlin, which led to a blackout that left 50,000 people without power, the biggest blackout in Berlin since the Cold War.

The damage has been so severe that authorities are reporting it may take until 2026 to fully make repairs, according to Tagesspiegel.

A letter of responsibility was published on Indymedia, a website where many leftist groups publish such letters following attacks.

We have been repeatedly warned that an “internal revolution” started by radical leftists would be coming.

For a long time, many mocked the idea that the radical left had declared war on conservatives.

But nobody is laughing now.

The radical left is greatly celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, and it appears that it is inevitable that they will soon be going after other high profile targets.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

When two-thirds of all the workers in your entire country are just barely scraping by from month to month, you have got a major crisis on your hands. For a long time, our standard of living has been going down and the middle class has been shrinking. But in recent years, those two trends have accelerated. We have now reached a point where it takes 5 million dollars to live the American Dream for a lifetime. Needless to say, the vast majority of the population will never come close to making that sort of money. But most Americans continue to strive to live a middle class lifestyle, and as a result most people are teetering on the brink of financial disaster in this day and age.

According to a survey that was recently conducted by PNC Bank, 67 percent of U.S. workers are now living paycheck to paycheck…

A growing share of U.S. workers are struggling to cover expenses as everyday costs continue to weigh heavily on household budgets, according to new survey findings.

PNC Bank’s annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024.

The report surveyed 1,000 U.S. workers aged 21 to 69 who work full time at companies with more than 100 workers.

There are two very important points that I want to make about this survey.

First of all, it only covers people that actually have a job.

There are vast numbers of other Americans that are not employed and that are deeply struggling right now.

So when you take that into account, this survey is even more shocking.

Secondly, it is clear that we are rapidly moving in the wrong direction.

It was bad enough that 63 percent of U.S. workers were living paycheck to paycheck last year, but now we are at 67 percent.

A four percent jump in a single year is a very troubling sign.

The primary reason why so many employed Americans are struggling financially is due to the rapidly rising cost of living.

For example, the price of coffee has risen by almost 21 percent over the past 12 months…

Coffee drinkers are in for a jolt long before their first sip.

Retail coffee prices in the United States in August jumped nearly 21% compared to the same month last year — the largest annual jump since October 1997, according to the latest Consumer Price Index, released Thursday. On a monthly basis, coffee prices rose 4%, the most in 14 years.

The vast majority of the coffee that we drink is imported, and Brazil is the number one source…

Coffee, for instance, is largely imported because there are only a handful of places in the U.S. where the beans can be grown, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico. About 80% of unroasted coffee imports are sourced from Latin America, primarily from Brazil, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Products from Brazil that are shipped to the U.S. now face a 50% tariff, according to the White House.

If you drink coffee, you will want to brace yourself, because prices are only going to go higher in the months ahead.

Of course just about everything has become significantly more expensive, and this is pushing many consumers over the edge.

I recently wrote about how subprime auto loan delinquencies in the U.S. have risen to an all-time high, and now we have learned that one of the largest subprime auto loan lenders in the U.S. has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy…

A company that provides auto loans to families with poor or no credit has filed for bankruptcy.

Tricolor Holdings, a Dallas-based car fixing and credit company, has filed for Chapter 7 — or liquidation — bankruptcy. The filing typically means the company will quickly go out of business.

The company’s demise is a warning sign for the US economy: Americans are racking up a huge amount of debt to keep their cars, while a record amount can’t keep up with the payments.

This is just the beginning.

There will be more failures.

At this stage, most of us can feel the change that is in the air.  In fact, it is being reported that consumer confidence “dropped sharply in September”…

Consumer confidence dropped sharply in September to its lowest level in four months, according to preliminary data released Friday, as Americans expressed growing anxiety about job security and the persistence of high prices.

The University of Michigan’s closely watched index of consumer sentiment fell to 55.4 in September from 58.2 in August, missing economists’ expectations and reflecting what survey director Joanne Hsu described as “multiple vulnerabilities in the economy.”

And the confidence that Americans have in being able to find a new job has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded…

In the latest sign of trouble for the U.S. labor market, confidence in the ability to move from one job to another has hit a record low, according to a New York Federal Reserve survey released Monday.

Respondents to the central bank’s monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations for August indicated a 44.9% probability of finding another job after losing their current one. The reading tumbled 5.8 percentage points from the prior month and is the lowest in the survey’s history dating back to June 2013.

If you are thriving in this extremely difficult economic environment, good for you.

For most of the population, things are very painful at this moment.

The ranks of the middle class are steadily thinning out, poverty is growing all around us, and more Americans are homeless than ever before in our entire history.

In Los Angeles, one homeless encampment has become so enormous that it is now being described as a full-blown “city”…

A sprawling homeless encampment in Los Angeles is drawing ire from neighbors who say the makeshift shelter has grown into a full “city” of its own, complete with working electricity and a recreational area featuring a tennis court, garden and barbecue pit.

The encampment sits on a vacant Koreatown lot surrounded by apartment buildings and other structures, according to ABC 7.

“The reason why people are sleeping here is because you leaders are sleeping on not taking initiative and action to clean this place up,” neighborhood resident Daniel King told the station.

Most Americans are just a few bad breaks from losing everything.

In fact, there are already millions of Americans that have lost everything, and those that are on the bottom levels of the economic pyramid are becoming increasingly desperate.

When things really start hitting the fan in this country, vast numbers of extremely desperate people will cause tremendous chaos throughout our society.

Things didn’t have to turn out this way.

If we would have made much different decisions over the past 50 or 60 years, we would have gotten much different results.

But we just kept doing things the wrong way, and now we shall reap what we have sown.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

Finding Charlie Kirk’s killer and bringing that individual to justice is of the utmost importance.  The longer it takes authorities to find this person, the more likely it is that they will never find him at all.  So if we can discover some clues that will help point authorities in the right direction that is a good thing.  Of course not every theory that is being proposed on the Internet is accurate.  And some of the leads that I will be discussing in this article may not pan out.  But we owe it to Charlie and to the nation as a whole to follow every potential lead.

One day before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a Twitter user known as “Omar” stated that Charlie Kirk would be coming to his college the next day, and in a subsequent post “Omar” warned that “something big will happen tomorrow”…

Internet sleuths have determined that the owner of this Twitter account does attend Utah Valley University.

After the shooting, “Omar” denied that he had anything to do with it, but I think that authorities should ask him some hard questions about what he knew and when he knew it.

There has also been speculation about the gestures that two members of Charlie Kirk’s security team were making just before he was shot…

One of those individuals has apparently been working with Charlie for a very long time, and so it seems extremely unlikely that he was involved.

The second individual also appears to be working security, and I don’t think that he was involved either.

But just outside of the security perimeter, there was a man in a white t-shirt that did something very odd with his fists just before the assassin fired.

The very best footage that I have been able to find of this man in a white t-shirt is on Twitter, and I am not able to embed it, but you can find it for yourself right here.

I was also able to find some footage on YouTube where you can see the man in a white t-shirt begin to make the gestures with his fists…

There are many that now believe that the question about mass shooters that Charlie was asked just before he was shot was orchestrated.

Whoever asked that question needs to be brought in.

Of course the shooter on the roof more than 100 yards away would not have been able to hear the question that was being asked, and so that is why someone on the ground needed to give the shooter a signal that it was time to take the shot.

A man that had asked Charlie a question shortly before the fateful moment arrived told reporters that he believes that the whole thing “was clearly a setup and that multiple people were involved”…

A witness interviewed in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination said he believed it was a carefully orchestrated multi-person operation.

The man told reporters he had just finished speaking with Kirk when he overheard the person next in line at the Utah Valley University event mention wanting to ask about transgenderism, however, when they took the podium they asked about shootings instead.

“After I got done talking to him I really couldn’t exit because there was such a big crowd and so I turned around and about 10-20 seconds later after I got done talking to Charlie I saw that he was shot in the neck and just squirting blood everywhere. But I was piecing things together and it was really weird because the second guest I talked to before I went and asked him the question…he was talking to him about how he was gonna ask about transgenderism or something like that, but…nothing about shootings,” the man described.

“And this is the irony that came to me, which was like right when he asked that not like five, ten seconds later he was shot – and not only that, right after that someone confessed to it who had no weapon, which makes me think that it was clearly a setup and that multiple people were involved.”

I agree.

If authorities are focusing on just the assassin, that is a huge mistake.

Of course catching the assassin is absolutely critical.

The FBI has released images of their primary suspect, and it is being reported that they know his name…

The FBI released images of a person of interest in the Charlie Kirk assassination in a desperate appeal for help, offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest.

Late on Thursday afternoon, law enforcement sources said they knew the name of the person of interest, but did not publicly reveal their identity.

The suspect appears to be very young, and we are being told that he is of college age.

Following the shooting, the assassin ran into a wooded area where he abandoned the rifle that had been used.

Thankfully, authorities were able to retrieve it…

Behind Utah Valley University’s Losee building, FBI forensics agents were still gathering evidence Sept. 11 in the wooded area where the bureau said agents recovered the “high-powered” rifle a shooter used to kill political influencer Charlie Kirk.

The Wall Street Journal and New York Times, citing law-enforcement sources, reported it was an older model Mauser .30-06 caliber bolt action rifle. An ATF spokesperson declined to comment to USA TODAY, citing the active investigation.

Evidence markers on a small hill behind the building appeared to mark the trail the shooter took, scrambling through some trees towards a nearby construction site.

A picture of the rifle has been released to the public, and any DNA evidence that has been left behind should be very helpful in helping to track down the killer.

Interestingly, we have learned that cartridges that were recovered by authorities contained engravings that expressed transgender and anti-fascist ideology.

This is a story that was originally broken by Steven Crowder…

EXCLUSIVE: This morning my team received an e-mail from officer at ATF.

The email included a screen shot from what appears to be an internal message describing a weapon and cartridges located by an ATF and other law enforcement near the scene of the Charlie Kirk shooting at Utah Valley State University.

“On September 10, 2025, at approximately 12:24PM, Conservative political influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at the Utah Valley University in Orem, UT. Mr. Kirk was speaking at the University as part of the American Comeback Tour. Multiple SLC I and III agents responded immediately. The suspect fired one shot from an elevated position on a rooftop in an adjacent building on the campus and surveillance video shows the suspect, jumping off and fleeing the area on foot. ATF and other law-enforcement located an older model imported Mauser .30-06 caliber bolt action rifle wrapped in a towel in a wooded area near the campus. The location of the firearm appears to match the suspects route of travel. The spent cartridge was still chambered in addition to three unspent rounds at the top fed magazine. All cartridges have engraved wording on them, expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology. An emergency trace has been submitted an ATF SLC is working leads generated by the trace. The firearm and ammunition have been taken by the FBI for DNA analysis and fingerprint impressions. Upon completion of forensics, the firearm will be disassembled for additional importer information. Multiple people of interest having contacted or detained because of eyewitness testimony and review of video footage. The primary suspect is yet to be identified. ATF is assisting the investigation with multiple other federal, state, and local partners and the case is co-led by the FBI and Utah SBI.””

These shocking details have since been confirmed by multiple mainstream sources.

As he was escaping through the woods, the assassin came upon a construction site where he actually spoke with an electrician…

At the site, Dylan Hope, an electrician, told USA TODAY that his colleague, who was operating an excavator Wednesday, Sept. 10, when the shooting took place, believes he spoke with the gunman. Hope said his colleague spoke with a young man who appeared on the site and asked if he could walk through it.

After that, it is unclear what happened to the assassin.

There has been much speculation that he flew out of Provo on a private jet…

Speculation on social media has pointed to a private jet that left the airport shortly after the single shot that killed the conservative activist rang out.

Flight tracking data shows the jet left the airport shortly after 2pm and headed south towards the Arizona border before it disappeared from radars.

It then reappeared on radars and returned to Provo roughly one hour after leaving the airport.

The jet in question has a registered owner in the Utah city of Lehi, according to FAA data seen by the Daily Mail.

So far, I have not been able to find any evidence that indicates that the assassin was actually on that private jet.

But as I said earlier, authorities need to follow up on every single lead.

It has now been well over 24 hours since the shooting.

With each passing hour, the trail is going to get colder and colder.

So let us hope that the authorities are able to arrest the assassin soon, because we desperately need justice in this case.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

I am sitting here trying to process everything that just happened. I was doing research for this article, and then I got the news that Charlie Kirk had just been shot. I am going to try to find the words to express what I am feeling at this moment, and I will be putting together a full article about this horrifying tragedy later today. Meanwhile, NATO is literally closer to all-out war with Russia than it has ever been before. Last night 19 Russian drones entered Polish airspace, and NATO fighter jets shot down several of them…

Polish fighter jets, with help from NATO allies, shot down multiple Russian drones that entered its eastern border early Wednesday, Sept. 10. It was the first time the NATO member directly engaged with Russian military assets in its airspace since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Polish officials said 19 objects entered its airspace during a large Russian air attack on Ukraine. Polish jets shot down at least three of the aircraft.

No casualties have been reported.

This is crazy.

Just yesterday I wrote about 13 major World War III developments that had just occurred in a 48 hour period.

And now this has happened.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk is warning that his nation is dangerously close to a direct military conflict with Russia…

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said the country is closer to military conflict “than at any time since the second world war” as Warsaw and Nato allies weighed a response to an incursion of Russian drones into Polish airspace.

Poland scrambled its own and Nato air defences, shooting down at least three drones, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine spread to Nato territory early on Wednesday in the most significant way since the full-scale invasion more than three years ago.

This is an extremely serious situation.

Following the incident with the drones, Poland formally invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty…

Poland and the United States are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which at its core is a mutual defense pact formed after WWII to deal with the threat posed by the Soviet Union, meaning an attack on one may be considered an attack on all.

Tusk said he had activated Article 4 of NATO’s treaty, under which alliance members can demand consultations with their allies, and that he was in touch with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who called the incursion “reckless behavior,” irrespective of whether it was deliberate.

A NATO official confirmed to NBC News that Poland had “requested consultations under Article 4 of the Washington Treaty,” only the 8th time that the article — which does not trigger a military reaction — has been invoked since NATO was established in 1949.

Invoking Article 4 does not mean that we are going to war.

Instead, what it means is that members of NATO will now discuss what steps should be taken next…

This is not the better-known Article Five, which activates obligatory collective defence from all members, but rather one that triggers a consultation process. Per NATO itself: “Any member country can formally invoke Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty. As soon as it is invoked, the issue is discussed and can potentially lead to some form of joint decision or action on behalf of the Alliance. Whatever the scenario, fellow members sitting around the Council table are encouraged to react to a situation brought to their attention by a member country.”

As NATO leaders talk things through, hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

The Russians are insisting that they had absolutely no intention of attacking any targets inside Poland…

Russia labeled the accusations “groundless” and said it did not plan to attack any targets in Poland.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it had attacked the “military-industrial complex of Ukraine” in a “large-scale strike” but that “there were no targets envisioned for destruction on the Polish territory,” pointing to the flight range of the drones it said it used against western Ukraine.

It said it was “ready to hold consultations with the Polish Ministry of Defense on this matter.”

The Russians obviously do not want NATO to get directly involved in the war in Ukraine.

So why did Russian drones end up flying into Poland?

The Belarusian military is claiming that the Russian drones “lost their track as a result of the impact of the parties’ electronic warfare assets”…

The Belarusian military earlier reported having given their Polish counterparts early warning that some drones used by Ukrainian and Russian forces for mutual attacks “lost their track as a result of the impact of the parties’ electronic warfare assets.”

“This allowed the Polish side to respond promptly to the actions of the drones by scrambling their forces on duty,” said General Pavel Muraveiko, the chief of the general staff of Belarus.

The general added that some of the stray aircraft had been intercepted by Belarusian air defenses. He stressed that the exchanges with Poland were part of regular communications about incoming threats, with the Polish side regularly informing officials in Belarus about aircraft detected in Ukrainian airspace.

Yes, it is entirely plausible that electronic warfare caused the Russian drones to accidentally veer off course.

But I think that there is also a possibility that electronic warfare could have been used to purposely direct those drones into Polish airspace.

There are those that are absolutely determined to drag NATO into the war in Ukraine by any means possible.

One of those individuals is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  Following the drone incident in Polish airspace, he immediately proposed “a joint air defense system” that would “create an effective air shield over Europe”…

There are several reasons for this brazen behavior of Russia, and they are absolutely obvious to everyone. We need to work on a joint air defense system and create an effective air shield over Europe. Ukraine has long proposed this, and we have concrete solutions. We must respond together to all current challenges and be ready for potential threats to all Europeans in the future. Likewise, we need to significantly increase joint funding for the production of interceptor drones. They have already proven their effectiveness.

In other words, he wants NATO to provide air defense for Ukraine.

But it wouldn’t end there.

Zelensky knows that Ukraine can never defeat Russia alone.  So he is desperate to get NATO ground forces involved, and it is interesting to note that French hospitals have been instructed to prepare for mass casualties by March 2026…

French hospitals have been told to prepare a potential armed conflict in Europe by next year, local media reported.

In a letter sent to regional health agencies, revealed by Le Canard Enchaîné , the Ministry of Health asked hospitals to prepare for a “major (military) engagement” by March 2026.

The newspaper warned that between 10,000 and 50,000 men could be expected in hospitals over a period of 10 to 180 days.

Ultimately, the direction that NATO takes in the months ahead is going to be largely determined by the Trump administration.

Following the drone incident in Poland, President Trump posted a very ominous message on his Truth Social account…

Here we go?

I don’t like the sound of that at all.

And President Trump is also proposing that the U.S. and the EU should slap extremely high punitive tariffs on China and India because they are still conducting normal levels of trade with Russia…

The United States is ready to broaden tariffs targeting buyers of Russian oil — if the EU takes similar moves — to hit at revenue Moscow needs for the war in Ukraine.

Dialing in to talks between United States and European Union officials, President Donald Trump raised the possibility of tariffs between 50 percent and 100 percent on oil buyers such as China and India, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss these details publicly.

The talks come as EU sanctions envoy David O’Sullivan, who has spearheaded the bloc’s global outreach on preventing Moscow’s evasion of sanctions, is leading a delegation in Washington for meetings on Monday and Tuesday.

U.S. tariffs on most Chinese imports are already above 50 percent.

If those tariffs are raised by another 50 percent or more, it is likely that the flow of most goods coming over from China will simply stop.

That would lead to the sort of shortages that I warned about a few months ago when tariffs on Chinese imports briefly spiked to 145 percent.

In addition, much higher tariffs on Chinese goods would be a critical blow to our rapidly deteriorating relationship with China.

U.S. policies over the past decade have driven the Chinese and the Russians into one another’s arms, and now they are very united in their opposition to us.

This is a scenario that we should have tried very hard to avoid for obvious reasons.

Peace with the Russians is still possible, but it is not going to be produced by threatening the Russians.

I have tried to make that point as strongly as I can, but now time is running out.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

How do 911,000 jobs suddenly disappear into thin air?  Can someone explain that to me?  Throughout 2024, I wrote extensively about how all of the reliable numbers showed that economic conditions in the United States were deteriorating.  But those that were skeptical of what I was saying would point to the employment numbers that the government was giving us as evidence that everything was just fine.  Of course I didn’t have any faith in those numbers, and now we see exactly why I didn’t have any faith in those numbers.  They were fake the entire time.  We were sold a lie based on numbers that were completely fraudulent.

On Tuesday, the fake bureaucrats at the BLS informed us that 911,000 “jobs” that they originally told us were “created” during the 12 months ending in March 2025 never existed at all…

U.S. employers added far fewer jobs in 2024 and early 2025 than previously thought, indicating the labor market may have been significantly weaker than initial estimates had suggested.

The U.S. economy added 911,000 fewer jobs over the 12 months ending in March than previously estimated, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) said on Tuesday. The figure, which exceeded economists’ expectations, appears to be the largest revision ever recorded. The preliminary estimate will be finalized next year.

This is a major scandal.

Either way we are talking about incompetence on a grand scale, or this was being done on purpose.

Month after month during the Biden administration, the employment numbers looked good.

But it was all a lie.

As Zero Hedge has aptly pointed out, approximately 2 million jobs that were supposedly created during the final three years of the Biden administration “have now been revised away”…

2 million jobs from the last 3 years of the Biden admin have now been revised away. This despite the biggest debt issuance spree on record.

Kamala Harris ran for president on the supposedly strong job creation record of the Biden administration, but that strong job creation record was a total fraud.

Needless to say, the Trump administration is pretty upset about the massive revision that we just witnessed…

The White House used revised jobs data released Tuesday as fodder to criticize three frequent targets of President Donald Trump: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, former President Joe Biden and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

“Today, the BLS released the largest downward revision on record proving that President Trump was right: Biden’s economy was a disaster and the BLS is broken,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

“This is exactly why we need new leadership to restore trust and confidence in the BLS’s data on behalf of the financial markets, businesses, policymakers, and families that rely on this data to make major decisions,” she said.

This isn’t something that we should just brush under the rug.

The employment numbers have very serious consequences.

The outcome of the presidential election last November could have potentially been altered by these fake numbers, because they gave voters a very skewed picture of  our economic performance.

And the Federal Reserve could have started cutting interest rates much sooner if the numbers that the government was giving us were more realistic.

Hopefully the Fed will really start slashing interest rates throughout the remainder of 2025, because we desperately need it.

Every single day, we learn of more large employers that are eliminating good jobs.

For example, Salesforce has eliminated 4,000 customer support jobs and has “replaced them with artificial intelligence (AI) agents”…

Salesforce has cut 4,000 customer support jobs and replaced them with artificial intelligence (AI) agents, CEO Marc Benioff said recently.

Benioff made the comments while discussing how the new technology is impacting the $248 billion computer software company’s headcount during an appearance on “The Logan Bartlett Show” podcast that was published on Friday.

And the U.S. just continues to bleed more manufacturing jobs month after month…

Employers shed 12,000 manufacturing jobs in August, while payrolls in the sector have shrunk by 42,000 since April, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress (CAP) that draws on government labor data.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out where all of this is going.

Meanwhile, large banks continue to shut down local branches at a staggering pace.

In fact, we just lost 74 more in a period of only six weeks…

Major US banks closed 74 locations in just six weeks this summer, leaving ever more Americans without access to local services.

Banks including US Bank, Chase and PNC closed 74 locations between July 17 and August 28.

Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Chase closed 14 branches each in the six week period, the most among the major institutions.

They aren’t closing all of these branches because they think the economy is going to get better.

Let’s get real.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has typically been one of the most optimistic bank CEOs, but even he is now warning that “the economy is weakening”…

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said that a Labor Department report released Tuesday confirmed that the U.S. economy is slowing down.

The department revised lower its nonfarm payrolls data for the year through March 2025 by 911,000 jobs from initial estimates. That was on the high side of Wall Street’s expectations for a downward shift and the biggest revision in more than two decades.

“I think the economy is weakening,” Dimon said. “Whether it’s on the way to recession or just weakening, I don’t know.”

All along I have told my readers that government economic numbers almost always make things look better than they actually are.

There was a time when I would get criticized for making a claim like that.

But now we all see the truth.

During the Biden administration, our leaders borrowed and spent trillions upon trillions of dollars that we did not have in a desperate attempt to prop up the economy.

But our economy steadily deteriorated anyway.

So where do we go from here?

Our society is literally standing on the edge of an abyss, but most people don’t seem to realize this yet.

We are drowning in debt with no way out, and our system is failing all around us.

There is a reason why people like me have been ranting about the foolish decisions that our leaders have been making for so many years.

It was inevitable that the consequences of those foolish decisions would catch up with us, and we are the ones that get to be here for it.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.

What in the world has happened to us? When I was growing up, it was assumed that pretty much everyone in my generation would be able to achieve the American Dream. But today most of the U.S. population is not living the American Dream, and more people are falling out of the middle class every day. As I have detailed in previous articles, this is particularly true for Millennials and those in Generation Z. The collective prosperity of the middle class has been declining for an extended period of time, and now that long-term decline threatens to become a full-blown avalanche.

Borrowing money always creates pain, and since 2009 our leaders in Washington have borrowed and spent 27 trillion dollars that we did not have.  Pumping all of that extra money into the system has had very serious consequences, because now the purchasing power of our dollars has been greatly diminished.

In fact, Newsweek is reporting that the cost of living the American Dream for a lifetime has now reached 5 million dollars…

The American Dream has long symbolized the promise of opportunity, prosperity, and upward mobility. Coined in 1931 by writer James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America, the term described “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

But nearly a century later, achieving that vision is more expensive than ever. According to new research published by Investopedia, the lifetime cost of attaining the traditional American Dream—including homeownership, retirement, raising children, a wedding, new cars, healthcare, pets, and annual vacations—now totals roughly $5 million. These calculations assume a college-educated, dual-income household capable of sustaining these ambitions over a lifetime.

Is your household going to bring in 5 million dollars over the course of your lifetime?

Sadly, most U.S. households don’t have a prayer of getting anywhere even close to that.

But if you want to live the American Dream for an entire lifetime, that is what it is going to take.

We live at a time when virtually everything is steadily becoming more expensive.

In a previous article, I explained that each month an average family of four spends $996 on groceries, $1,437 on health insurance, $745 on a vehicle payment and $2,259 on a mortgage payment.

Once upon a time, it was quite common for Americans to have large families.

But in our time raising children has become so expensive.

In fact, it is being estimated that the cost of raising two children all the way through college will cost you $876,092…

Raising two children from infancy through college remains one of the costliest undertakings. Using Economic Policy Institute data, Investopedia calculates $650,000 to cover childcare, transportation, meals, and other expenses, with college costs exceeding $230,000 for two children.

“College is more expensive than ever, and many students take on a lot of debt, only to find that their paychecks don’t grow fast enough to pay it off quickly,” Battin said.

According to the Education Data Initiative, the average cost of college is $38,270 per student per year, including books, supplies, and daily living expenses.

This is one of the reasons why our society values money so much at this stage.

The truth is that it takes a giant pile of money each month just to live a normal life.

Older Americans are far more likely to be living a middle class lifestyle right now because they control most of the wealth…

As young buyers scrape together down payments, boomers are sitting on $82 trillion in wealth—more than twice what Gen X has and four times as much as millennials. New research shows the wealth gap has only widened since the 1980s, as older generations saw bigger gains in homeownership and stocks while younger people took on faster-growing mortgage debt. With boomers holding on to large homes and aging in place, younger buyers are struggling to break into a shrinking market.

I know lots of Americans that are over the age of 50 that are successfully living middle class lifestyles in 2025.

But I know of very few Americans that are under the age of 40 that are successfully living middle class lifestyles in 2025.

Over the past several decades, homeownership among young adults has absolutely collapsed.

I shared the following chart that was posted by Nathan Halberstadt on Twitter in a previous article, but I felt that I should share it again in order to illustrate this point…

Just look at that chart.

That is what a long-term economic collapse looks like.

And I don’t think that anybody is even going to attempt to argue that I am wrong about that.

The middle class is being systematically eviscerated.

As older middle class Americans die off, they are not being replaced in sufficient numbers by young adults that are entering the middle class.

In 2025, most of the population is just barely scraping by from month to month.

Debt levels have risen to extremely alarming levels, and so have delinquency rates.

This week, I was deeply saddened to learn that the delinquency rate on subprime auto loans has soared to the highest level ever recorded…

The auto loan landscape is teetering on the edge of chaos as delinquency rates climb to unprecedented heights. Data from the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs reveal that subprime auto loan delinquencies have rocketed past 5%, a stark milestone that surpasses the worst days of the 2008 financial crisis.

According to Experian, 30-day-plus delinquencies over the past year have risen 40% among consumers with the lowest credit scores, signaling growing distress among high-risk borrowers. Skyrocketing car prices, coupled with elevated interest rates and mounting economic pressures, are stretching household finances to the breaking point, leading to a surge in missed payments.

Prime auto loan delinquencies, while reaching a 15-year high, but short of the crisis-era peak, suggest a more limited ripple effect among borrowers with better credit.

It is starting to look a lot like 2008 all over again.

And that includes mass layoffs.

Large employers have been eliminating good paying jobs all over the nation, and in many cases these layoffs are being driven by the AI revolution…

The list of companies laying off companies is growing following two years of significant job cuts in tech, media, finance, manufacturing, retail, and energy. According to Business Insider, a World Economic Forum survey found that some 41% of companies worldwide expect to reduce their workforces over the next five years because of the rise of artificial intelligence.

Big companies such as Oracle, CNN, Dropbox, and Block have all previously announced layoffs linked to AI. While Amazon has not reported any job cuts this year, CEO Andy Jassy warned employees in June that the company will likely require “fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today” in the coming years as it increases its adoption of generative AI and AI agents.

If things are this bad now, what will happen once AI can do almost all of our jobs less expensively and more efficiently than humans can?

Of course AI is not the only reason why so many Americans are losing their jobs right now.

As I discussed yesterday, this is the toughest job market that we have seen in ages.

But don’t just take my word for it.  According to the New York Fed, “confidence in the ability to move from one job to another has hit a record low”…

In the latest sign of trouble for the U.S. labor market, confidence in the ability to move from one job to another has hit a record low, according to a New York Federal Reserve survey released Monday.

Respondents to the central bank’s monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations for August indicated a 44.9% probability of finding another job after losing their current one. The reading tumbled 5.8 percentage points from the prior month and is the lowest in the survey’s history dating back to June 2013.

The economy is a mess.

That is very clear.

And it is also very clear that we are moving into an extremely challenging future.

But that doesn’t mean that you should curl up into a fetal position and cry about it.

You were born for such a time as this.

It is when times are the darkest that the greatest lights are needed.

Living the American Dream does not determine whether you are a “success” or not.

You are living at one of the most important moments in all of human history, and you have been given a purpose that only you can fulfill.

Yes, all of the crazy stuff that is happening all around us can be frightening at times, but don’t let all of that noise prevent you from becoming everything that you were created to be.

Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

About the Author: Michael Snyder’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.  He has also written nine other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Chaos”, “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”.  When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing.  You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter.  Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.