We Are Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America

Historically, small businesses have been the primary engine of new job creation in the United States.  If the economy was getting healthy, we would expect to see the number of jobs at new businesses rise.  Instead, we are witnessing just the opposite.  We are told that the economy is supposed to be “recovering”, but the number of “startup jobs” at new businesses has fallen for five years in a row.  According to an analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data performed by economist Tim Kane, there were almost 12 startup jobs per 1000 Americans back in the year 2006.  By 2011, that figure had fallen to less than 8 startup jobs per 1000 Americans.  According to Kane, the number of jobs in the United States at businesses that are less than one year old has fallen from 4.1 million in 1994 to 2.5 million in 2010.  Overall, the number of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” has fallen by more than 50 percent as a percentage of the population since 1977.  The United States was once known as “the land of opportunity”, but now that is fundamentally changing.  At this point we truly do have a “crisis of entrepreneurship” in this country, and that is a huge reason why America is in decline.  We are witnessing the slow death of the small business in America, and that is incredibly bad news for all of us. (Read More...)

55 Reasons Why California Is The Worst State In America

Why in the world would anyone want to live in the state of California at this point?  The entire state is rapidly becoming a bright, shining example of everything that is wrong with America.  It is so sad to watch our most populated state implode right in front of our eyes.  Like millions of Americans, I was quite enamored with the state of California when I was younger.  The warm weather, the beaches, the great natural beauty of the state and the mystique of Hollywood all really appealed to me.  At one point I even thought that I wanted to move there.  But today, hordes of Californians are racing to get out of the state because it has become a total nightmare.  It is the worst state in the country in which to do business, taxes were just raised even higher, unemployment is more than 20 percent higher than the national average and the state government is drowning in debt.  Meanwhile, poverty, gang activity and crime just seem to get worse with each passing year.  On top of everything else, the insane politicians in Sacramento just keep on passing more laws that make the problems that the state is facing even worse.  Unfortunately, what is happening in California may be a preview of what is coming to the entire nation.  The old adage, “as California goes, so goes the nation”, has been proven to be true way too many times. (Read More...)

Sorry Protesters: Your Jobs Are Being Sent To China And They Aren’t Coming Back

Did you see the huge crowds of protesters that flooded the Michigan Capitol on Tuesday?  They were there to protest two bills there were being considered by the state legislature that would limit the power of unions in the state.  Michigan lawmakers approved the bills and this absolutely infuriated the protesters.  There is a lot of passion on both sides of this debate, but I am afraid that both sides in this debate are missing the bigger picture.  If we keep shipping millions of our jobs to China, there isn’t going to be work for anyone no matter how much power unions have or don’t have.  During the month of October, the U.S. trade deficit increased to 42.2 billion dollars.  Our trade with China accounted for most of that deficit.  Our trade deficit with China in October increased to a new all-time one month record of 29.5 billion dollars.  Nearly 30 billion dollars that could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers went to China instead.  Since 1975, a total of about 8 trillion dollars that could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers went to the rest of the world instead.  Shiny new factories are going up all over China, and meanwhile our once great manufacturing cities are degenerating into desolate wastelands.  So what is going to happen when all of the good paying manufacturing jobs are gone?  Are we all going to fight bitterly over whether we should unionize the low paying jobs that remain at places such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds?  Such an approach is not going to bring back prosperity to America.  We desperately need to start building things and start creating real wealth inside this country once again.  We desperately need to stop sending tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of our national wealth out of the country.  Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone out there holding protests about our trade deficit.  Nobody really seems to care, so our economy will continue to bleed good jobs and the middle class will continue to be destroyed. (Read More...)

15 Signs That The Economy Is Rapidly Getting Worse As We Head Into 2013

How can the mainstream media claim that the U.S. economy is “improving” when it is painfully obvious to anyone with a brain that the middle class is being absolutely eviscerated?  According to numbers that were just released, the number of Americans on food stamps rose by more than 600,000 in a single month to an all-time record high of 47.7 million.  Youth unemployment in the U.S. is at a post-World War II high and large companies have announced the elimination of more than 100,000 jobs since Barack Obama won the election.  Consumer debt just hit a new record high and the federal government is accumulating debt at a much faster pace than it was at this time last year.  So where is the evidence that the economy is getting better?  The mainstream media says that the decline of the unemployment rate to “7.7 percent” is evidence that things are improving, but I showed how fraudulent that number is yesterday.  The percentage of working age Americans with a job today is exactly where it was back in September 2009 in the midst of the last major economic crisis.  The mainstream media is desperate for any shred of evidence that it can use to make people feel good and show that the Obama administration has our economy on the right track, and so they jump on any number that even looks remotely promising and they ignore mountains of evidence to the contrary.  They don’t seem to care that poverty is absolutely exploding and that the number of Americans on food stamps has risen by nearly 50 percent while Obama has been in the White House.  They don’t seem to care that the U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011.  They don’t seem to care that more good paying jobs are being shipped overseas with each passing day.  They don’t seem to care that formerly great U.S. cities that were once the envy of the entire globe are now crime-infested hellholes.  All they seem to care about is putting out news that makes people feel warm and fuzzy and making sure that Obama looks good.  Unfortunately, the truth is that the U.S. economy is steadily getting worse, and 2013 is not looking very promising at all right now.  Hopefully at some point the mainstream media will take a break from coverage of the royal pregnancy and the latest celebrity scandals to report on the real problems that we are facing right now. (Read More...)

Unemployment Is Not Going Down: The Employment Rate Has Been Under 59 Percent For 39 Months In A Row

The mainstream media is heralding the decline of the official unemployment rate to 7.7 percent as evidence that the U.S. economy is improving.  But it is a giant lie.  The truth is that unemployment in America is not actually going down.  The percentage of working age Americans with a job actually dropped slightly in November.  During the last recession, the percentage of working age Americans with a job fell from about 63 percent to under 59 percent and it has stayed there for 39 months in a row.  In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed.  In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed.  It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place!  So how in the world are they able to pretend that the “unemployment rate” is going down steadily?  Well, they get there by pretending that hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers “leave the labor force” each month.  According to the government, another 350,000 Americans left the labor force during November, and when you keep pretending that huge chunks of workers “disappear” each month it is easy to get the “unemployment rate” to go down.  But any idiot can see that there is something really funny about these numbers.  Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million.  Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million.  At this point the official unemployment rate is so manipulated that it is of very little value at all. (Read More...)

Show This To Anyone That Believes That Taxes Are Too Low

Every year average Americans pay dozens of different types of taxes, and yet many of our politicians are very open about the fact that they want to raise rates even higher and invent even more ways to bleed us all dry.  Someday historians will look back and be absolutely amazed at how stupid we were.  We have the most complicated tax code in all of human history and at this point the federal tax code is more than four times as long as the entire collected works of William Shakespeare.  In many places it is so incomprehensible that nobody actually understands what it means and the entire thing is absolutely riddled with loopholes from the beginning to the end.  Trust me, I used to study this stuff.  Nobody could ever read the entire thing – it is close to four million words long.  But that is just for federal income taxes.  We have a number of other taxes taken out of our paychecks such as state income taxes, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes.  Sadly, the taxes taken out of your paycheck are only just the beginning.  As I will detail below, there are more than 40 other taxes that average Americans pay each year in addition to the taxes that are taken out of our paychecks.  Our politicians love to find ways that they can “raise revenue” without us feeling it.  Most people just focus on income tax rates and they forget about the dozens of other ways that they are bleeding us dry.  It really is kind of like “death by a thousand cuts”, and of course the middle class gets hit the hardest.  The poor are exempt from many taxes, the ultra-wealthy are masters at cheating the system and avoiding taxes, and so the most pain is always felt by those in the middle.  Hard working middle class families and small businesses all over America are being financially raped by this insidious system.  If you know of anyone out there that believes that taxes are “too low”, please show this article to them. (Read More...)

From Good Jobs To Bad Jobs To No Jobs – The Tragic Downfall Of The American Worker

There was a time in America when virtually anyone that wanted a job could go out and get one and the United States boasted the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world.  Sadly, those days are long gone.  Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job.  But now there are millions of Americans in their prime working years that cannot find a job.  Millions of others are working low wage jobs or part-time jobs because that is all they can get.  The other day I went to a large retail store and I got into a conversation with the lady who was checking me out.  She said that she had worked professional jobs all her life, and that she had taken this job to tide her over as she searched for a new job, but now she had been there for two years with no end in sight.  I felt really bad for her, because she was obviously a sharp lady with a lot of skills.  But this is the new reality.  Good paying manufacturing and professional jobs are being replaced by low paying service jobs.  We are transitioning from an economy with plenty of good jobs to an economy with plenty of bad jobs.  The next stage in our transition will be to an economy where it seems like there are no jobs for anyone.  We are witnessing the tragic downfall of the American worker, and it is heartbreaking. (Read More...)

The Coming Derivatives Panic That Will Destroy Global Financial Markets

When financial markets in the United States crash, so does the U.S. economy.  Just remember what happened back in 2008.  The financial markets crashed, the credit markets froze up, and suddenly the economy went into cardiac arrest.  Well, there are very few things that could cause the financial markets to crash harder or farther than a derivatives panic.  Sadly, most Americans don’t even understand what derivatives are.  Unlike stocks and bonds, a derivative is not an investment in anything real.  Rather, a derivative is a legal bet on the future value or performance of something else.  Just like you can go to Las Vegas and bet on who will win the football games this weekend, bankers on Wall Street make trillions of dollars of bets about how interest rates will perform in the future and about what credit instruments are likely to default.  Wall Street has been transformed into a gigantic casino where people are betting on just about anything that you can imagine.  This works fine as long as there are not any wild swings in the economy and risk is managed with strict discipline, but as we have seen, there have been times when derivatives have caused massive problems in recent years.  For example, do you know why the largest insurance company in the world, AIG, crashed back in 2008 and required a government bailout?  It was because of derivatives.  Bad derivatives trades also caused the failure of MF Global, and the 6 billion dollar loss that JPMorgan Chase recently suffered because of derivatives made headlines all over the globe.  But all of those incidents were just warm up acts for the coming derivatives panic that will destroy global financial markets.  The largest casino in the history of the world is going to go “bust” and the economic fallout from the financial crash that will happen as a result will be absolutely horrific. (Read More...)