National Suicide

We Must Have MOAR: Almost Everyone In Washington Seems To Agree That More Free Money Will Fix The Economy

There seems to be a growing consensus in Washington that the only way to fix the worst economic downturn in more than 70 years is by giving out much more free money.  Joe Biden wants more “stimulus”, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants more “stimulus”, and most members of Congress from both parties want more “stimulus”.  Of course none of the previous “stimulus packages” that we spent trillions of dollars on fixed the economy, but they insist that this latest one will finally do the job.  In addition to the 1.9 trillion dollar package that Biden has already proposed, Democrats in Congress are now pushing monthly direct payments to parents that have children under the age of 18.  Needless to say, that proposal has overwhelming support among the American people, because direct socialist payments have become wildly popular since they were first introduced last year.  But by borrowing and spending so much money, we are literally committing national suicide, but very few people are concerned about that at this point.

Even though the previous round of “stimulus payments” is still being sent out, Biden and his minions can’t wait to start sending out another round.

In fact, Biden insists that we literally “don’t have a second to waste”…

“We don’t have a second to waste when it comes to delivering the American people the relief they desperately need. I’m calling on Congress to act quickly and pass the American Rescue Plan.”

Quite a few independent economists are alarmed by the inflation that previous “stimulus payments” have created, but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is dismissing those fears.

Instead of focusing on inflation, she says that not sending out more free money would be an even greater risk…

“As treasury secretary, I have to worry about all of the risks to the economy, and the most important risk is that we leave workers and communities scarred by the pandemic and the economic toll that it’s taken, that we don’t do enough to address the pandemic,” Yellen told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

“I’ve spent many years studying inflation and worrying about inflation, and I can tell you, we have the tools to deal with that risk if it materializes,” she continued. “But we face a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country. We’ve got to address that. That’s the biggest risk.”

She is assuring us that inflation is not an imminent threat, and perhaps we should believe her.

After all, if we can just completely ignore the hard numbers and the extremely shocking charts the Federal Reserve keeps putting out, what she is saying sounds pretty good.

I know that it is not “normal” for M1 to nearly double over the course of 12 months, but this is the “new normal” where the laws of economics are suspended and we can do whatever we want.

So let’s borrow and spend trillions more, because this party is just getting started.

A while back, “Republican” Senator Mitt Romney proposed thousands of dollars in direct payments to parents with children, and Democrats liked that idea so much that they plagiarized it…

Under the proposal, the Internal Revenue Service would provide $3,600 over the course of the year per child under the age of 6, as well as $3,000 per child of ages 6 to 17. The size of the benefit would diminish for Americans earning more than $75,000 per year, as well as for couples jointly earning more than $150,000 per year. The payments would be sent monthly beginning in July.

The benefits would not be deducted off taxpayers’ existing tax liability, meaning American parents would still receive $250 per month per child — or $300 per month per young children — even if they have an existing tax obligation with the IRS.

I think that this proposal will have a 90 percent approval rating with U.S. parents.

Of course a minority will strongly object.  They will insist that these are “socialist welfare payments” and that the federal government should not be doing this.

If you are one of those objectors, you are 100 percent correct.

But take the money anyway.

Let me be 100 percent serious for a moment.  Since the entire ship is going down anyway, take anything that they send to you and use it for yourself and your family.  At this point, survival is the priority.

There is no going back to the way that things once were.  We are literally committing national financial suicide, and at this point even most Republicans in Washington have completely discarded any pretense of fiscal responsibility.

In the old days, Republicans in Congress at least made minimal attempts to slow down the wild spending that the Obama administration was pushing.  But now almost all resistance is gone, and the left is greatly rejoicing that “the path to a fast recovery and an era of prosperity is now open for Biden”…

The left has stewed for a dozen years over Obama’s inability to secure more fiscal stimulus. And while he might perhaps have gotten a bit more out of Congress with more clever design, ultimately the most important constraints came from outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama’s economic-recovery push came in an atmosphere of pure hysteria, in which media and business elites joined by many members of his own party believed the United States stood on the precipice of hyperinflation and a public-debt crisis, the resolution of which had willing partners across the aisle. All those myths now lay in tatters. After hard experience, the path to a fast recovery and an era of prosperity is now open for Biden.

Yeah, we’ll see about that.

But what we do know is that all of the insane borrowing and spending that has been going on is already causing inflation to show up in countless ways.

In 2020, silver performed even better than the stock market did, and it continues to climb higher.

Gold has been surging too, and the outlook for precious metals is going to continue to be bright as long as our leaders continue to flood the system with more money.

Meanwhile, the real economy continues to steadily deteriorate…

Without a fresh round of COVID-19 aid from the federal government, about a third of the nation’s pandemic-stricken small businesses are warning they won’t be able to survive.

That’s according to a new report published by the Federal Reserve, which found that sales for 88% of small businesses have not yet returned to pre-crisis levels. About one in three — roughly 30% — of businesses said they expected they could not stay afloat without further assistance from the government, according to the report from the U.S. central bank’s 12 regional offices.

No amount of complaining from the rest of us will prevent a new round of stimulus payments from going out.

The good news is that all of this new money is likely to improve short-term economic conditions for a very brief period of time.

But the bad news is that our long-term problems continue to get much, much worse.

We are literally in the process of completely destroying our money, and since the U.S. dollar is the de facto reserve currency of the whole world, the economic fate of the entire globe is in our hands.

***Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael Snyder and my brand new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book, I have written four others that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned)  By purchasing the books you help to support the work that my wife and I are doing, and by giving it to others you help to multiply the impact that we are having on people all over the globe.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  During these very challenging times, people will need hope more than ever before, and it is our goal to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with as many people as we possibly can.

America’s Financial Suicide: The Budget Deficit Rises 26% In 1 Year As Federal Spending Spirals Wildly Out Of Control

We are in the process of committing national financial suicide, and most Americans don’t seem to care.  As  you will see below, the federal budget deficit for the fiscal year that ended on September 30th was the largest in 7 years.  In fact, it was actually 26 percent larger than last year.  Federal spending is wildly out of control, and “non-discretionary spending” is projected to go through the roof in the years ahead.  Under our current system, it is literally going to be impossible to turn things around.  As the Baby Boomers continue to retire, the amount of resources demanded by Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs is going to continue to escalate dramatically.  Meanwhile, the biggest bureaucracy in the history of the world just continues to get even larger with each passing year, and neither political party seems interested in trying to do anything about it.  Our national debt will shortly hit 23 trillion dollars, but we will never actually pay it off.  Instead, we will just keep piling on more debt until this entire charade comes crashing down like a house of cards.

At this point, we shouldn’t expect the Democrats to show any concern for our skyrocketing national debt.  During the Obama years the national debt increased by an average of more than a trillion dollars a year, and this unprecedented spending helped to stabilize the U.S. economy following the Great Recession.

However, if we could go back and remove the 9.3 trillion dollars that was added to the national debt during Obama’s time in office, those eight years would have been the worst eight years economically in the history of our nation.  We borrowed mountains of money from the future in order to make the present more pleasant, but in the process we literally destroyed the bright future our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.

Of course most Americans don’t understand any of this, and many people look back on “Obama’s economy” with great fondness.

But isn’t Trump essentially doing the same thing?

Of course he is.

Just like Obama, Trump doesn’t want to preside over “a second Great Depression”, and so he is perfectly fine with taking our national debt into the stratosphere.  If we tried to live within our means and only spent the money that we actually brought in, the U.S. economy would immediately collapse.  And if the U.S. economy fell to pieces, Trump would have no chance of winning again in 2020, and we all know that Trump desperately wants to win the next election.

In the old days there were at least some Republicans that actually seemed to care about our financial future.  The Republican Party was supposedly “the party of fiscal responsibility”, and a big driver of the Tea Party movement was concern about the size of our national debt.

But these days very, very few Republican leaders are making a peep about our rapidly growing mountain of debt.  Instead, most of them seem absolutely fine with the fact that we are literally destroying ourselves financially.

This is yet another example that shows that there really is not that much of a difference between the two political parties at this point.  One may want to take us down the tubes a little faster than the other one, but the final destination is still the same.

I would love to hear any Republican voter make a rational defense for what we are witnessing right now.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal budget deficit was 984 billion dollars during the fiscal year which just ended on September 30th…

The federal budget deficit for 2019 is estimated at $984 billion, a hefty 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and the highest since 2012, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said on Monday.

The deficit was 205 billion dollars bigger than the previous fiscal year, and overall that represented an increase of 26 percent in just one year.

Of course the official “budget deficit” is a bit misleading, because it actually understates the amount by which our national debt increases.

According to official U.S. Treasury numbers, our national debt actually increased by 1.113 trillion dollars during the fiscal year that just ended.

Adding more than a trillion dollars to the national debt in a single year is certainly not “conservative”.

Can anybody out there possibly defend such recklessness?

If you think you can, please feel free to give it a shot.  Sadly, the truth is that all of our politicians that have supported such irresponsible spending should be completely and utterly ashamed of themselves.  What they are doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal, and if future generations of Americans get the chance they will look back and curse us for what we have done to them.

As our founders understood very well, government debt is a way for one generation to literally steal money from future generations.  And as Jason Pye has noted, our “unsustainable situation is only going to get worse”…

“Democrats and Republicans must be held responsible for the outrageous deficit reported today by the CBO,” said Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs at the conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks.

“This unsustainable situation is only going to get worse,” he added.

Unfortunately, there really isn’t anything to be done at this point.  Now that fiscal irresponsibility has become the official position of both major political parties, all that we can really hope for is that the coming financial implosion will be put off for as long as possible.

In the short-term, the Federal Reserve will undoubtedly attempt to stabilize things.  In recent days they have begun to start wildly printing money once again.  They aren’t calling it “quantitative easing”, but that is essentially what is going on.  The Fed balance sheet is beginning to rise at an exponential pace, and this “emergency intervention” that they are conducting is starting to look more permanent with each passing day.

Sadly, it is just another indication that our financial sins are starting to catch up with us.  Previous generations handed us the keys to the most powerful economy in the history of the planet, but that wasn’t good enough for us.  We always had to have more, and in our endless greed we have created the largest debt bubble in the history of the world.

Now we stand on the brink of oblivion, and yet our addiction to debt is so strong that we just can’t help ourselves.

There is no way that this story is going to end well, but even at this late hour most Americans still don’t realize what is coming.

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

When They Shall Say “Peace And Safety”: Polls Show Americans Are The Most Optimistic They Have Been In A Very Long Time

By a very wide margin, this is the most optimistic that Americans have been about the future since I started The Economic Collapse Blog in late 2009.  Even though the middle class is shrinking, 102 million working age Americans do not have a job, and we are now 21 trillion dollars in debt, most people are feeling really good about things right now.  Especially among Republicans, there is an overwhelming consensus that the United States is starting to head in the right direction and that better times are ahead.  As a result, so many of the exact same people that were “prepping” while Barack Obama was in the White House are now partying now that Donald Trump is president.  But none of the long-term trends that are systematically destroying our nation have been significantly altered, and none of our long-term problems have been solved.  We are still steamrolling down a path toward national suicide, but most Americans simply do not care.

What Americans do care about is that it seems to be easier to find a job at the moment than it has in a very long time.  In fact, the percentage of Americans that believe that it is “a good time to find a quality job” is at the highest level that Gallup has ever recorded…

Sixty-seven percent of Americans believe that now is a good time to find a quality job in the U.S., the highest percentage in 17 years of Gallup polling. Optimism about the availability of good jobs has grown by 25 percentage points since Donald Trump was elected president.

Gallup has asked Americans to say whether it is a good time or bad time to find a quality job monthly since August 2001. Prior to 2017, the percentage saying “good time” never reached 50%, but since Trump took office in January that year, the percentage has stayed at or above 50% and has been higher than 60% in eight of the past nine months.

A Rasmussen survey that asked a similar question came up with very similar results.

Of course the reality of the matter is that 66 percent of all jobs in the United States pay less than 20 dollars an hour, and 78 million Americans are participating in the “gig economy” because they need to supplement their normal incomes in order to make ends meet.

But perception is sometimes more powerful than reality, and right now the perception is that the U.S. economy is doing well…

“Nothing is better for the issues about trade wars or issues about G-7 than a good economy,” Omar Aguilar, chief investment officer for equities at Charles Schwab Investment Management, said by phone. “The jobs report on Friday gave a lot of people confidence that the U.S. economy is still pretty solid.”

Small businesses in the United States are also feeling extremely optimistic right now.

In fact, one survey found that small business optimism has surged to record highs…

The Q2 MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index (Index) released today recorded an overall score of 68.7, up 2.4 points from the Q1 score of 66.3, driven in part by the strongest local economic outlook on record, a firmer hiring environment, and a stronger backdrop for investing. Two out of every three small business owners are optimistic about their company and the small business environment in the United States.

That is definitely a good sign, because we desperately need small businesses to do well, but is all of this optimism really warranted?

The financial markets continue to be filled with optimism as well.  Despite the outbreak of an international trade war and tremendous turmoil over in Europe, the Nasdaq closed at a brand new record high on Tuesday.

In recent years stock prices have just continued to go up and up and up no matter what news breaks, and now we are facing the greatest stock market bubble in our history.

How long do we have until it finally bursts?

There is a lot of optimism in the housing market as well.  At this point, a staggering 64 percent of all adults in this country believe that housing prices will continue to go up over the next year.  The following comes from Marketwatch…

A majority of U.S. adults (64%) continue to believe home prices in their local area will increase over the next year, a recent survey released by polling firm Gallup concluded. That’s up nine percentage points over the past two years and is the highest percentage since before the housing market crash and Great Recession in the mid-2000s.

The level of optimism is edging closer to the 70% of adults in 2005 who said prices would continue rising. That, of course, was less than one year before the peak of the housing market bubble in early 2006, which was largely fueled by a wave of subprime lending.

Moving beyond short-term concerns, Americans are also becoming increasingly optimistic about the long-term future too.  A recent Gallup survey discovered that approximately 60 percent of all Americans believe that our young people “will have a better life than their parents did”…

About six in 10 Americans say it is very or somewhat likely that today’s young people will have a better life than their parents did. The latest reading marks continued improvement since the low of 44% in 2011 but is still not back to the level of 66% measured in February 2008.

Hopefully the optimists will be correct, but I do not believe they will be.  If we keep doing the same things that we have been doing as a nation, it is simply not possible that there will be any sort of a bright future for America.

And I will tell you one area where Americans are quite pessimistic.  One recent survey found that 77 percent of all Americans believe that morality is in decline in this country.  Our national character continues to deteriorate at a frightening pace, and most Americans appear to be quite aware that this is happening.

But instead of changing our ways, we proudly believe that our “greatness” will allow us to continue to enjoy a massively inflated debt-fueled standard of living for a very long time to come.

Unfortunately for us, it simply does not work that way, and as a nation we are way overdue for a very serious wake up call.

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

 

When Americans Shall Say ‘Peace And Safety’…

earthquake-apocalypse-public-domainMillions of Americans are expecting a new “golden age” for America under Donald Trump, but is that what they are going to get?  There is always optimism when a new president is elected, but I don’t know if I have ever seen anything like the euphoria that many Trump supporters are expressing right now.  Look, I voted for Donald Trump and I want him to be as successful as possible.  But when Donald Trump becomes our next president on January 20th, that does not mean that all of the great problems that our nation is facing will somehow magically disappear.  If you listen to some people, they make it sound like America is going to experience nothing but peace, prosperity and blessing for decades to come.  I would love it if that was indeed going to be the case, but unfortunately that is simply not the truth.

We are currently on a path that leads to national suicide, and unless we change our ways it isn’t going to matter who is in the White House.

I keep hearing about how our new president is going to “unify” the nation, but that is going to be extremely difficult to do considering the fact that we are now more divided than ever.  In fact, a brand new Gallup survey found that an all-time record high 77 percent of all Americans believe that we are “greatly divided when it comes to the most important values”.

I keep hearing about how we are now entering a golden age of peace and prosperity, but how is that supposed to happen while we are still butchering millions of innocent children in our abortion mills?

I keep hearing about how the economy is about to take off like a rocket, but how is that possible when we have already been on the greatest debt binge in world history?  The only way we have been able to maintain our massively inflated debt-fueled standard of living is by piling up debt at a faster pace than any generation in history.  Today we have accumulated 12 trillion dollars in consumer debt, corporate debt has doubled since the last financial crisis, and the national debt is rapidly approaching 20 trillion dollars.  How can Trump possibly pump up our standard of living with debt more than Obama has already done?

I keep hearing about how we are “going to make America great again”, but how can we be great when we are producing more pornography than the rest of the world combined?

I keep hearing about how “law and order is going to restored”, but meanwhile chaos has already been erupting in cities all over the nation and the far left is planning to turn Inauguration Day into a major riot.

I keep hearing about how “things are going to go back to the way they used to be”, but as I discussed in a previous article, “sexually-transmitted diseases are spreading at the fastest pace in decades, the percentage of births out of wedlock is more than 10 times higher than in 1940, and approximately two out of every three Christian men watch pornography on a regular basis.”

I keep hearing about how we are going “to drain the swamp”, and yet there are no plans to even reform the Federal Reserve system which is at the very heart of our financial problems as a nation.

I keep hearing about how good judges are going to be put on the Supreme Court, but how can we trust that when our new president just said that he is “fine with” the Supreme Court decision that forced all 50 states to redefine the institution of marriage?

I keep hearing about how we are going to be “an example” for the rest of the world, but how can we be “an example” when just about every form of evil imaginable is exploding in popularity inside our own country?

I keep hearing about how our government is going to be “blessed”, but how can a government that gives hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Planned Parenthood be “blessed”?  Now that the Republicans have control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, this is their golden opportunity to defund Planned Parenthood.  If it doesn’t happen now, it probably will never happen, and it will show what a complete and utter failure the Republican Party has become.  Remember, Planned Parenthood is an organization that has been caught on camera admitting that they harvest organs from the babies that they kill and that they sell those organs off to the highest bidder.

Some would argue that America is already “great” at a lot of things.  After all, the United States is number one in the world in television watching, legal drug use and illegal drug use.

We lead the world in plastic surgery, eating disorder deaths, teen pregnancy and lawyers per capita.

We have the highest STD infection rate in the industrialized world, the highest divorce rate in the industrialized world, and the largest prison population on the entire planet.

We also have the most complicated tax system in the entire world, the largest trade deficit in the entire world, and the largest national debt in the entire world.

So if we want to make America great again, we sure have a lot of work to do.

The complacency that I am seeing out there right now really alarms me.  So many people seem to think that the battle is won because Donald Trump was victorious on election night.  But that is not even close to reality.

If we do not fundamentally change course as a nation we will not survive.  Tinkering with tax rates, regulations and trade agreements is not going to get the job done.  So many people are acting as if we just have a few cuts and scratches, when the reality is what our country really needs is major heart surgery.

Donald Trump is not some sort of a messiah, and even if he is able to accomplish every single thing that he is promising right now it will not nearly be enough.

But for the moment millions of Americans are proclaiming “peace and safety” now that Donald Trump has won the election, and we shall see how it all turns out…