Small Business

Thoughts On The “New Normal” And The Things That We Are Losing As A Society…

May 20, 2021May 20, 2021 by Michael

The last two years have greatly shaken America, and our country will never be the same as a result. If you would have told someone two years ago that in 2021 millions of people would run around wearing masks all day and that the federal government would be relentlessly pushing a large scale mass injection campaign, that person probably would have thought that you were nuts. But now this is the “new normal”. Our freedoms and liberties have been permanently eroded, and now that they have gotten away with pushing the envelope so dramatically, government entities on all levels will be ready to flex their muscles again once the next major crisis comes along.

You could argue that we should just vote out the politicians that are running things on the state and federal levels, but exactly how are we supposed to do that?

After what we witnessed last November, tens of millions of Americans won’t believe that our system of choosing leaders is legitimate ever again.

Of course those that are currently running things could attempt to restore faith in the system by getting rid of all the voting machines and by instituting real reforms that would make the process as transparent as possible, but we all know that they will never do that.

The last couple of years have been extremely painful for our economy as well. More than 70 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last year, homeless encampments started popping up like mushrooms all over the country, and countless numbers of small businesses shut down permanently. In fact, most Americans say that they have lost a favorite local business as a result of the pandemic…

Few people have escaped the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic and that’s especially true for local ‘mom and pop’ shops. A new study finds half of Americans have witnessed their favorite local businesses close down because of COVID-19.

A survey of 2,000 people reveals 68 percent personally know a local business owner impacted by the pandemic. According to respondents, the most commonly impacted businesses include cafes (62%), retail shops (58%), gaming shops (55%), and book stores (54%).

On Thursday, we learned that another 444,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week.

In 2019, such a number would have been considered catastrophic.

But in the “new normal”, that number is actually considered to be “good news”.

Our politicians have tried to make everyone feel better by sending out waves of huge government checks, but that has just created rampant inflation and widespread shortages.

We are also losing the peace on our streets. Murder rates were way up in major cities all over America in 2020, and in most of those cities they are even higher this year.

And it isn’t just men that are shooting men. Today, I came across an article about an “eight-woman brawl” that resulted in a pregnant mother being gunned down…

A pregnant mother was shot and killed while she sat in her car close to an eight-woman brawl that erupted in gunfire.

The deadly confrontation took place just before 6pm Tuesday in the 1200 block of Valencia Avenue in Hemet, which is located 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

Family members identified the 27-year-old who had been shot in the head and died after being flown to a county trauma center as Tamika Haynes.

What in the world is happening to us?

You would have never read about such a thing happening on the streets of America in 1950.

These days, we seem to be losing control of just about everything, and that even includes the technology that we have become so dependent upon. Hackers are causing nightmares for large entities all over the U.S., and in many cases absolutely enormous ransoms are being paid out…

CNA Financial Corp., among the largest insurance companies in the U.S., paid $40 million in late March to regain control of its network after a ransomware attack, according to people with knowledge of the attack.

The Chicago-based company paid the hackers about two weeks after a trove of company data was stolen, and CNA officials were locked out of their network, according to two people familiar with the attack who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Criminals seem to have the upper hand on the Internet, in our streets and in the halls of power in Washington and on Wall Street.

In previous times, we could rely on law enforcement to restore order, but now law enforcement authorities are being relentlessly demonized in our society.

In fact, it has gotten so bad that large numbers of law enforcement officers are permanently walking away from their careers. For example, it is being reported that nearly 20 percent of all police officers in Seattle have quit over the past year.

Police departments all over the nation are having an exceedingly difficult time recruiting replacements for those that are leaving, and that is going to continue to be the case as long as we are treating police officers like human garbage.

Speaking of human garbage, just check out the bill that was just passed in the Wisconsin Senate…

Wisconsin senators approved a bill earlier this week allowing dead bodies to be dissolved in a chemical bath and disposed like sewage.

The bill, Senate Bill 228, authorizes a practice called alkaline hydrolysis, or “water cremation,” which liquifies the human body using a mixture of water, heat, and chemical agents, leaving only bones behind. The liquid is then dumped into the sewage system or boiled off, and bones can be crushed and deposited in an urn.

You have got to be pretty sick to want to liquify Grandma and Grandpa before dumping their remains into the sewer.

But that is who we are.

On all levels, we no longer respect life, and that is because as a society we are abandoning our faith. Just check out these numbers…

The American Worldview Inventory (AWVI) 2021, an annual survey that examines the perspectives of adults aged 18 and over in the United States, found that while 57 percent of Millennials (born 1984-2002) consider themselves to be Christian, 43 percent “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.”

Comparatively, 70 percent of Generation X (Gen X) Americans (born 1965-1983), 79 percent of Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964), and 83 percent of the Builder Generation (born 1927-1945) consider themselves to be Christian, while 31, 28, and 27 percent, respectively, “don’t know, care, or believe that God exists.”

America no longer resembles the nation that our founders sacrificed so much to establish, and if we stay on the path that we are currently on there is no future ahead for us.

But even though voices such as mine have been crying out for change for years, most of the population continues to sprint in the other direction.

We have already lost so much, and the “new normal” truly is horrible, but if America does not wake up things are only going to get worse.

***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.

8 Million More Living In Poverty, 9 Million Small Businesses In Danger Of Closing, 10 Million Behind On Rent…

February 9, 2021 by Michael

The economic downturn that we are currently experiencing is making the last recession look like a Sunday picnic. Yes, 2008 and 2009 were bad, but they weren’t anything like this. Unprecedented intervention by the Federal Reserve has allowed the rich to get even richer during this crisis, but meanwhile millions upon millions of ordinary Americans are deeply suffering. Unfortunately, what we have gone through so far is just the beginning.

As a child, I was a big fan of Sesame Street, and one of the characters that really stood out to me was Count von Count. I loved the fact that he was always counting things, and that is what I am going to do in this article in order to illustrate how bad economic conditions have now become.

Let’s start with the number 7. According to the Congressional Budget Office, approximately 7 million more Americans would have jobs right now if the COVID pandemic had never happened…

But in fact, what the CBO is projecting is dire: around 7 million people out of work in 2021 whom CBO thought before the pandemic would be working. That’s dire – and a call to immediate action, not calm, not wait-and-see.

Personally, I think that estimate is way too low.

In fact, the Federal Reserve says that 152 million Americans were working before the pandemic started, and only 142 million Americans are working now.

So the CBO estimate appears to be off by about 3 million.

Count von Count would not be happy.

Let’s try another number. According to Bloomberg, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by 8 million during this crisis…

Support is rising among policy makers to address America’s child-poverty crisis, which is getting worse as the pandemic drags on.

More than 8 million Americans — including many children — fell into poverty during the second half of last year, exacerbating the racial and income inequalities that are holding back the U.S. economy.

In this case, I think that this is a reasonable estimate, but that number will inevitably keep growing in the months ahead.

One of the big reasons why it will continue to rise is because hordes of small businesses will be collapsing, and that brings us to our next number.

According to a study that was recently released by the Fed, 9 million small businesses in the U.S. say that they “won’t survive” in 2021 without more government assistance…

Three in ten small businesses — or 9 million out of the estimated 30 million in the United States — fear they won’t survive in the coming year without additional government assistance, according to a survey recently published by the Federal Reserve.

The Small Business Credit Survey, which was conducted last September and October and released last week, showcased the incredible burden the coronavirus pandemic has placed on America’s small businesses, as 88% of the businesses surveyed reported that sales had not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Can you imagine what our country would look like if almost a third of all small businesses permanently disappeared?

If you watched the Super Bowl, you were bombarded with messaging about the plight of our small businesses. We have never seen anything like this before, and that is because our small businesses have never had to face a crisis of this magnitude.

With each passing day, more small businesses are folding, and nothing that the federal government is going to do will completely stop this trend.

Our next number is 10. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 10 million renters were behind on their rent payments in January, and many more people anticipated not paying rent in February…

An estimated 10 million renters were behind on their rent and at risk of eviction in the middle of January, according to a Census Bureau survey. And an estimated 16 million renters had little to no confidence they could pay rent in February.

Overall, U.S. renters now owe at least 30 billion dollars in back rent.

This has created extreme financial pain for America’s landlords, and when the rent moratoriums are finally lifted we are going to see the largest tsunami of evictions in all of U.S. history by a very wide margin.

Before I wrap up this article, let me leave you with just one more number. So far in 2021, the number of passengers at U.S. airports is down by more than 60 percent compared to 2019…

Over the past seven days, not quite 707,000 passengers per day on average passed TSA checkpoints at US airports, a measure of how many passengers in the US are flying somewhere. This was down by 61.6% from the same period in 2019, the last full year of the Good Times. At the end of January, the drop from 2019 was over 65%.

I honestly do not know how the airline industry is going to survive this without government help.

Speaking of not surviving, Democrats have introduced a bill in Congress that would essentially deal a death blow to the gig economy…

The legislation at the core of their agenda is the PRO Act, which Democrats just re-introduced with sponsors including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer. Among many other things, the bill would severely restrict the legal definition of independent contractors in a way that would largely end the gig economy as we know it.

The legislators’ stated intention is to protect workers and bolster their rights under law. Through the reclassification of independent contractors, Democrats hope to force gig economy companies to hire workers as full employees and thus provide them the accompanying salaries and benefits.

If this bill passes, it would absolutely devastate Uber, Lyft and countless other companies that rely on gig workers.

Basically, millions of jobs would go “poof” with one stroke of Joe Biden’s pen.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 50 million Americans are currently employed by the gig economy. It is great to want those workers to have higher pay and more benefits, but if those companies go out of existence there won’t be any jobs at all.

These are very dark times for the U.S. economy, and the outlook for the future is exceedingly bleak.

However, in the short-term economic conditions should stabilize somewhat thanks to the huge stimulus payments that the government will be sending out.

But that bubble of hope will be very brief, and everyone should be able to see that much more pain is on the horizon.

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

Winter Is Coming: 62% Of U.S. Small Business Owners “Fear The Worst Is Still To Come”

December 16, 2020 by Michael

The official start of winter is just a few days away, and many small business owners are concerned that their businesses won’t be able to make it to the start of spring. This is particularly true for those small businesses that rely on face to face interaction with the general public. Restaurants, bars, gyms, coffee shops, hairdressers and independent retailers all over the nation were absolutely devastated by the first round of lockdowns, and now a new round of lockdowns is dealing death blows to countless businesses that had hoped to find a way to heal and get back on their feet in 2021. Politicians such as California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo don’t seem to care that they are literally destroying millions of hopes and dreams. If and when this pandemic finally ends, they will get to go on with their normal lives, but vast numbers of their constituents will not.

According to a brand new U.S. Chamber-MetLife poll of small businesses, just 40 percent of all U.S. small business owners “believe their small businesses can operate indefinitely” the way things are going right now, and a whopping 62 percent of them are convinced that “the worst is still to come”…

The quarterly poll found that the 62% of small-business owners fear that the worst is still to come with COVID-19’s economic impact. Only 40% said they believe their small businesses can operate indefinitely during the current business environment.

Those numbers are consistent with what other recent surveys of small businesses have shown.

There are approximately 30 million small businesses in the United States today, and so that means that if even a third of them were forced to close down permanently we would lose 10 million small businesses.

Can you imagine what that would mean for the economy as a whole?

That same U.S. Chamber-MetLife poll of small businesses also found that 74 percent of all U.S. small business owners “need further government assistance to weather the pandemic”…

A new U.S. Chamber-MetLife poll of small businesses taken from Oct. 30-Nov. 10 and released on Tuesday showed that 74% of the owners said they need further government assistance to weather the pandemic. That percentage rises to 81% for minority-owned businesses.

And when most of those small business owners say that they are in desperate need of help, they are not kidding.

According to the most recent Alignable rent survey, 35 percent of all small businesses in the United States “couldn’t pay their rent this month”…

- Several B2C industries are devastated – 61% of restaurants can’t pay their rent this month. That’s up 19% from 42% in November.
- 35% of U.S. small businesses couldn’t pay their rent this month, up 3% from 32% in November.
- Beauty salons (46%) and travel/hospitality businesses (43%) round out the Top 3 most-affected businesses, but many others are in trouble.
- Looking at demographics, minority-owned businesses are suffering the most, as 49% of them reported that they could not afford their rent in December. That figure is 5% higher than it was in November.
- Women-owned businesses are also struggling (38% of those have not paid their rent, up 3% from 35% last month).

This isn’t what a “recession” looks like.

When more than a third of all small businesses in the entire nation can’t even pay rent, that is called an “economic collapse”.

We can see more evidence of economic collapse when we look at federal tax receipts.

Over the last 9 months, the drop in tax receipts “is the largest on record”…

The pandemic hit the economy in March, triggering widespread job loss and partial and full closing of many small businesses. In November, 9 months into the pandemic, federal gross withheld income tax receipts were off 13% from a year ago. That is roughly in line with the average decline of 15% recorded over the 9-month span, March through November.

Checking the tax data records from the US Treasury the decline in tax receipts over the last 9 months is the largest on record. The only comparable period is the 14% drop in 2009 during the Great Financial Recession.

In other words, we have never seen anything like this before.

And with each passing day, more Americans are falling out of the middle class and into poverty.

In fact, nearly 8 million more Americans have fallen into poverty just since the month of June…

The U.S. poverty rate has surged over the past five months, with 7.8 million Americans falling into poverty, the latest indication of how deeply many are struggling after government aid dwindled.

The poverty rate jumped to 11.7 percent in November, up 2.4 percentage points since June, according to new data released Wednesday by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame.

Things are getting worse, and it is happening very rapidly.

Everywhere you look there are tragic stories. The other day I was deeply saddened when I heard that a 2-year-old boy had been abandoned at a Goodwill store. When people feel like they are out of options, they can get very desperate, and desperate people do desperate things.

At this point, things are so bad that they are even setting up food banks on U.S. military bases…

Fort Bragg, the largest military base in the United States, has all the trappings of a small American city: shopping centers, a barber shop and social clubs. In a sign of the times, it also has a food bank.

This spring, the Y.M.C.A. on base — which started a food pantry last year to respond to the growing food insecurity among military families — saw a 40 percent increase in requests for groceries. During the same period, grocery requests to AmericaServes, a network that helps military families, jumped to the biggest service request in the organization’s history.

Theoretically, military bases shouldn’t need food banks because everyone in the military is getting a paycheck.

But at this point the cost of living is rising so much faster than paychecks are that even military families are starting to go hungry.

Of course Congress is “feverishly” working on a new stimulus package to help alleviate the suffering of the American people, but some Democrats are extremely upset that they are being forced to choose either enhanced unemployment benefits or $600 stimulus checks for the American people…

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fiercely criticized the apparent trade-off to include a round of $600 stimulus checks at the expense of funding for enhanced unemployment insurance, calling it “inhumane.”

“The fact that Republicans are forcing Dems to choose between stimulus money OR unemployment benefits, as if we couldn’t easily do both, is barbaric,” the New York congresswoman tweeted. “Do they know that people in red states are hungry too, or do they just not care?”

Considering the fact that we are already 27.5 trillion dollars in debt, the truth is that we really can’t afford any of this.

But if we are in the process of liquidating the nation anyway, we might as well ask for the biggest checks that we can possibly get.

Sadly, nothing that our leaders do now is going to stop our economic collapse from eventually getting a whole lot worse.

For the past several decades we have been on the greatest debt binge in the history of the human race, and now that bubble is in the process of bursting.

Those that are expecting life to “return to normal” at some point are going to be deeply disappointed, because the “big meltdown” has now started, and it appears that 2021 is going to be a really, really painful year.

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

48% Of U.S. Small Businesses Fear That They May Be Forced To “Shut Down Permanently” Soon

December 10, 2020 by Michael

What would the United States look like if we lost half of our small businesses? The reason I ask that question is because approximately half of all small business owners in the entire country believe that they may soon be forced to close down for good. Not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s did we see anything like this. The big corporate giants with extremely deep pockets will be able to easily weather another round of lockdowns, but for countless small businesses this is literally a matter of life and death. Every day we are seeing new restrictions being implemented somewhere in the nation, and the politicians that are doing this are killing the hopes and dreams of countless small business owners. According to a recent Alignable survey, 48 percent of U.S. small business owners fear that they could be forced to “shut down permanently” in the very near future…

Based on this week’s Alignable Q4 Revenue Poll of 9,201 small business owners, 48% could shut down permanently before year’s end.

In fact, this number jumped from 42% just two months ago, demonstrating how several factors have converged to devastate small businesses: COVID resurgences, forced government reclosures, elevated customer fears, and a surge in online shopping at Amazon and other national ecommerce giants.

When a small business with only a few employees closes down forever, it never makes any national headlines.

But the truth is that small businesses are the heart and soul of our economy, and we are losing more of them with each passing day.

Here are some quotes from actual small business owners that took part in the Alignable survey…

“COVID has raised its ugly head again. I’m a caterer and I’ve had no work in November and my clients are cancelling for Dec. This is so sad. I have worked so hard to build my business the last 14 years. My business has gone from half a million to not even 200,000. This is devastating for any business.”
“COVID closings are killing this country! My business is on hold — no art walks or gallery openings, and I can’t even open my studio. Everything’s online.”
“Because therapeutic massage is so ‘up close and personal,’ I have only come back to about 40% of my previous clientele. I am afraid that the governor will shut us down again, which will be the end of my business. I also believe the ‘ruling elite’ does not care about small businesses.”

How would you feel if you spent years putting everything you had into a small business in order to make it successful, only to have the politicians come along and completely destroy it?

And every time a small business has to let workers go, it just makes the unemployment crisis in this country even worse.

On Thursday, we learned that another 853,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week…

First-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 853,000, an increase from the upwardly revised 716,000 total a week before, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting 730,000.

I have been warning that the new lockdowns would make the numbers worse, and that is precisely what is happening.

And one expert that was interviewed by CNBC says that this is just the beginning…

“It looks like the unemployment losses are starting to stack up for the economy. It’s not going to be a good month,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank. “You’re starting the first week of the month on a bad note, and it’s probably going to be all downhill from here. It feels like the lockdowns are intensifying. It’s closer to reality for those forecasts that look for the economy to go negative in the first quarter.”

It is also important to remember that there are many Americans that have been unemployed for so long that they are no longer eligible to receive benefits.

One of those long-term unemployed workers is 35-year-old Sarah Groome…

For six months, she received unemployment benefits from the government – but those payments shrank as the programmes wound down this summer. Since October, she’s received nothing.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do financially,” she says. “I’m applying to jobs and I’ve probably applied to over 100 at this point and I’ve had one interview.”

“It’s scary,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

What do you say to someone in her position?

It’s heartbreaking to hear stories like that, and more people are being laid off with each passing day.

And as our new economic depression gets progressively deeper, an increasing number of Americans are becoming very desperate.

In fact, many have already become so desperate that they are turning to shoplifting…

Shoplifting is up markedly since the pandemic began in the spring and at higher levels than in past economic downturns, according to interviews with more than a dozen retailers, security experts and police departments across the country. But what’s distinctive about this trend, experts say, is what’s being taken – more staples like bread, pasta and baby formula.

“We’re seeing an increase in low-impact crimes,” said Jeff Zisner, chief executive of workplace security firm Aegis. “It’s not a whole lot of people going in, grabbing TVs and running out the front door. It’s a very different kind of crime – it’s people stealing consumables and items associated with children and babies.”

Everywhere we look, our society is starting to break down all around us. Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits more than 70 million times this year, the number of homeless in New York City has reached an all-time record high, and civil unrest continues to erupt all over America.

No matter what happens politically, conditions are going to continue to deteriorate as we head into 2021.

Of course the mainstream media is boldly proclaiming that the new vaccines will pull us out of this tailspin and that life in America will soon return to normal.

You can believe the mainstream media if you want, but in the end the “hope” that they are promising will turn out to be a complete mirage.

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

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos And Warren Buffett Have More Money Than The Poorest 50% Of The U.S. Population Combined

November 9, 2017November 9, 2017 by Michael

The problem is not that we have a few people that are rich – the problem is that we have so many that are poor. As you will see below, three extremely wealthy individuals have as much money as the poorest half of the nation combined. In a free market capitalist society, there are always going to be some that do better than others, and there is nothing wrong with that. But in our society today, there are so few that are doing well. At this point a majority of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and “one in five households have zero or negative net worth”…

In the United States, the 400 richest individuals now own more wealth than the bottom 64 percent of the population and the three richest own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, while pervasive poverty means one in five households have zero or negative net worth.

Those are just several of the striking findings of Billionaire Bonanza 2017, a new report (pdf) published Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) that explores in detail the speed with which the U.S. is becoming “a hereditary aristocracy of wealth and power.”

That means that if you have no debt and a single dime in your pockets, you have more wealth than one-fifth of the entire country.

Okay, so let’s talk about the three men that have more wealth than the poorest 50 percent of the U.S. population combined. Those three men are Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, and Warren Buffett. I don’t want to take anything away from what those three have accomplished, because we need more risk takers and entrepreneurs.

Sadly, the level of small business creation has fallen in every presidential administration going all the way back to George H.W. Bush, and the percentage of Americans that are self-employed is hovering near all-time record lows.

As a nation, we desperately need to return to a culture that encourages free market capitalist thinking. We want young men and women to create, invent, innovate and start new ventures. But instead, today our culture encourages young people to become dependent on the government and on the big corporations, and as a result the middle class is evaporating.

As I discussed above, at this point 20 percent of all U.S. households have “either zero or negative wealth”…

The rise at the wealthiest end of society comes as one in five US households live in what the report’s authors call the “underwater nation”, with either zero or negative wealth. Inequality is even more stark among minorities. Three in 10 black households and 27% of Latino ones have zero or negative wealth, compared with 14% of white families.

In recent years, unprecedented intervention by global central banks has created an absolutely enormous stock market bubble, but the real economy has continued to struggle.

Just look at what is happening to Sears. This week they announced that they lost between $525 million and $595 million during the 3rd quarter of 2017.

How in the world do you do that?

If they had their employees doing nothing all day but flushing one dollar bills down the toilet, I still don’t think that they could lose that much money in three months.

Sears is going to sell 140 stores in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, but many believe that this is simply delaying the inevitable. In fact, one prominent analyst named Bill Dreher believes that Sears will never be profitable again…

One Wall Street analyst is beginning to doubt whether Sears Holdings will ever be profitable again, as the 124-year-old retailer struggles for liquidity and same-store sales evaporate.

“Sears’ operational performance is clearly NOT improving, and we grow increasingly concerned whether the company will ever return to profitability,” wrote Susquehanna analyst Bill Dreher in a note to clients Wednesday. “Further highlighting the company’s weakened position is the reality that manufacturers are increasingly demanding tighter payment and/or withholding products.”

Once upon a time, Sears was the number one shopping destination for the middle class.

But like the middle class in America, the best days for Sears are now long gone.

If we want to restore our economy to greatness, we need a vibrant middle class.

And in order to have a vibrant middle class, we need to have a system that encourages entrepreneurs and small businesses. Free markets work if you allow them to, but unfortunately today we are strangling our entrepreneurs and small businesses with rules, regulations, red tape and oppressive levels of taxation, and until we change our ways we are going to continue to get the same very poor results.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

They Are Killing Small Business: The Number Of Self-Employed Americans Is Lower Than It Was In 1990

May 23, 2017May 23, 2017 by Michael

After eight long, bitter years under Obama, will things go better for entrepreneurs and small businesses now that Donald Trump is in the White House? Once upon a time, America was the best place in the world for those that wanted to work for themselves. Our free market capitalist system created an environment in which entrepreneurs and small businesses greatly thrived, but today they are being absolutely eviscerated by the control freak bureaucrats that dominate our political system. Year after year, leftist politicians just keep piling on more rules, more regulations, more red tape and more taxes. As a result, the number of self-employed Americans is now lower than it was in 1990…

In April 1990, 8.7 million Americans were self-employed, but today only 8.4 million Americans are self-employed.

Of course our population has grown much, much larger since that time. In 1990, there were 249 million people living in the United States, but today there are 321 million people living in this country.

What this means is that the percentage of the population that is self-employed is way down.

In fact, one study found that the percentage of Americans that are self-employed fell by more than 20 percent between 1991 and 2010.

And if you go back even farther, the numbers are even more depressing. It may be hard to believe, but the percentage of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” declined by a staggering 53 percent between 1977 and 2010.

Sometimes I like to watch a television show called Shark Tank, and on that show they make it seem like entrepreneurship in America is thriving.

But the exact opposite is actually the case. In a previous article, I discussed how the number of new businesses being created in the United States has been steadily falling over the years. According to economist Tim Kane, the number of startup jobs per one thousand Americans has been declining for several consecutive presidential administrations…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

So why is this happening?

As I mentioned at the top of this article, self-employed Americans are being absolutely strangled by oppressive rules, regulations and taxes.

To illustrate this point, I would like to share with you some quotes from an open letter that was authored by a small business owner named Don Chernoff…

#1 I work for myself and have to pay my own medical expenses. Before the “affordable care act” I was paying about $200 per month for a high deductible policy. It was far from perfect but it got so much worse under the “Affordable” care act.

I now pay over $400 a month, my deductible went from $5,000 to over $6,000 and my out of pocket costs for care have skyrocketed.

#2 I have to spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars for a tax accountant each spring to prepare my taxes because I cannot possibly understand how to do it myself, and I have a master’s degree in engineering.

#3 Many years ago when I quit a perfectly good job to start my own small business, I was shocked to learn that I had to pay both my share and what had been my employer’s share of Social Security.

#4 Between state, federal and local taxes you’ve probably paid 50% or more of your income in taxes, but that’s not enough for politicians.

If you’ve been lucky enough to have created a business you can sell, now you’ll get to enjoy paying another tax on the capital gain from the sale.

This is another reason why we need a conservative revolution in Washington. We should demand that our members of Congress lower tax rates dramatically, completely eliminate the self-employment tax, greatly simplify the tax code and get rid of as many regulations on small business owners as possible.

In fact, if it was up to me I would abolish a number of federal agencies completely.

What we are doing right now is not working. Small businesses have traditionally been one of the main engines of economic growth in this country, but thanks to the left they are unable to play that role at the moment.

It isn’t an accident that over the last ten years the U.S. economy has grown at exactly the same rate as it did during the 1930s.

If we want our economy to be great again, we need to go back and start doing the things that made it great in the first place. If we continue to suffocate our economy, we will continue to get the same results.

And with each passing day, we get more signs that the economy is heading into another major downturn. For instance, we just learned that Sears is closing 30 more stores on top of the 150 that had already been announced…

Sears Holdings, which wasn’t shy when it announced at the start of the year that it is closing 150 underperforming stores, has quietly added at least 30 more to the list.

Another 12 Sears stores and 18 Kmarts are among the locations that are closing, from Carson, Calif., to Hialeah, Fla., with most scheduled to shut their doors in July, based on calls to the stores, malls and confirmation in local media.

At the start of the year, the retailer pinpointed the 150 stores it said it would close. But it declined this week to provide a list of additional locations that are slated to shut since then, saying that it update store counts each quarter.

In addition, we just learned that new home sales in April were 11.4 percent lower than they were in March…

If you’re surprised by the collapse in new home sales in April, then you’re not paying attention.

The 11.4% MoM plunge in new home sales in April was 5 standard deviations below expectations and the biggest since March 2015.

Yes, the stock market is holding up for the moment, but for most Americans the “real economy” just continues to deteriorate. Just because we are at the end of a giant financial bubble does not mean that everything is going to be okay.

The numbers that I brought up in this article are just another example of our long-term economic decline. In a healthy economy, entrepreneurs and small businesses would be thriving. But instead, they are being systematically strangled out of existence by a political system that is wildly out of control.

Trump’s Approval Rating Is Supposedly Only 37 Percent, But Small Business Optimism Just Hit The Highest Level In 12 Years

January 10, 2017January 10, 2017 by Michael

A Quinnipiac University Poll that was released on Tuesday says that Donald Trump only has an approval rating of 37 percent. Meanwhile, that same survey found that Barack Obama currently has an approval rating of 55 percent. Of course considering the fact that Quinnipiac polls showed Hillary Clinton winning the election in November easily, perhaps we should not put too much stock in these results. But other polling organizations have come up with similar results. In fact, an average of nine recent polls indicates that Trump’s approval rating is somewhere around 42 percent. So without a doubt there are a whole lot of people out there that do not like Donald Trump.

But the business community sure seems thrilled with him. We just witnessed one of the greatest post-election stock market rallies in American history, numerous corporations have already announced that they will be bringing jobs back to the United States, and Bloomberg is reporting that small business optimism has hit the highest level that we have seen since the end of 2004…

Optimism among America’s small businesses soared in December by the most since 1980 as expectations about the economy’s prospects improved dramatically in the aftermath of the presidential election.

The National Federation of Independent Business’s index jumped 7.4 points last month to 105.8, the highest since the end of 2004, from 98.4. While seven of the 10 components increased in December, 73 percent of the monthly advance was due to more upbeat views about the outlook for sales and the economy, the Washington-based group said.

On the surface, all of these numbers appear to be contradictory. If the American people are not feeling good about our new president, then it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that the small business community would be so optimistic.

But of course the American people are not a single monolithic entity in 2017. We are a deeply, deeply divided nation, and Donald Trump is the single most polarizing political figure to come along in generations.

Those that love Trump tend to really love Trump, and most of those people are quite optimistic about the future.

And those that hate Trump tend to really hate Trump. Yesterday, I explained that the radical left wants to transform Inauguration Day into an epic riot, and many of his opponents are planning to spend the next four years doing whatever they can to destroy him.

Just look at what happened today. The top story on CNN was about how the Russians supposedly have “compromising personal and financial information” on Donald Trump that they can use to blackmail him…

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

If you want to read the full 35 page report, you can do so right here. Some of the things in the report are so absolutely laughable that I don’t know how anyone could possibly take them seriously. And one particularly absurd section of the report was reportedly originally fabricated by some pranksters on the Internet, but you probably won’t hear that in the mainstream media. CNN is standing by the legitimacy of these documents, and apparently U.S. Senator John McCain thought so much of them that he handed copies of them over to FBI Director James Comey on December 9th…

CNN has also learned that on December 9, Senator John McCain gave a full copy of the memos — dated from June through December, 2016 — to FBI Director James Comey. McCain became aware of the memos from a former British diplomat who had been posted in Moscow. But the FBI had already been given a set of the memos compiled up to August 2016, when the former MI6 agent presented them to an FBI official in Rome, according to national security officials.

The raw memos on which the synopsis is based were prepared by the former MI6 agent, who was posted in Russia in the 1990s and now runs a private intelligence gathering firm. His investigations related to Mr. Trump were initially funded by groups and donors supporting Republican opponents of Mr. Trump during the GOP primaries, multiple sources confirmed to CNN. Those sources also said that once Mr. Trump became the nominee, further investigation was funded by groups and donors supporting Hillary Clinton.

According to this report, the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Donald Trump “for at least five years”.

So has Donald Trump really been a super secret Russian agent all this time?

Of course not. The mainstream media has decided to peddle Internet hoaxes, rampant speculation and fake news as legitimate journalism, and it is absolutely disgraceful.

But we are going to see much more of this. The goal is to destroy Donald Trump, and this is a game that will be played daily now for the next four years.

We are a nation that is bitterly divided, and after everything that has already been said and done I don’t know if Donald Trump could bring us back together even if he wanted to do so.

The protests against Trump in Washington D.C. start in just four days. I think that the period of time immediately surrounding Inauguration Day is going to set the tone for how Trump’s first year is going to play out.

I am definitely hoping for the best, but I also know that there is a large portion of the population that considers him to be the personification of everything that is wrong with America, and they have absolutely no intention of following his leadership.

It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and America is a deeply, deeply divided nation in early 2017.

Perhaps Trump can prove the naysayers wrong and bring us all together in unity, but at this point I am not optimistic that any president will be able to do this ever again.

Small Business Ownership In America Is At An All-Time Low

September 8, 2014September 8, 2014 by Michael

According to the Federal Reserve, the percentage of American families that own a small business is at the lowest level that has ever been recorded. In a report that was just released entitled “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2010 to 2013: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances“, the Federal Reserve revealed that small business ownership in America “fell substantially” between 2010 and 2013. Even in the midst of this so-called “economic recovery”, small business ownership in America has now fallen to an all-time low. If the economy truly was healthy, this would not be happening. And it isn’t as if Americans are flooding the labor market either. As I detailed yesterday, the labor force participation rate in this country is at a 36 year low. That would not be happening if the economy was actually healthy either. The truth is that the middle class in America is dying, and this new report from the Federal Reserve is more evidence of this very harsh reality.

In order to build wealth, middle class Americans either need to have their own businesses or they need good jobs. Sadly, the percentage of Americans that own a business continues to decline steadily. In the report that I mentioned above, the Federal Reserve says that the proportion of U.S. families that have an ownership interest in a small business fell from 13.3 percent in 2010 to a brand new all-time low of 11.7 percent in 2013.

This is one of the factors that is increasing the gap between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us in this country. And of course another of the major factors is the steady decline in good paying jobs.

The U.S. Competitiveness Project at Harvard Business School is chaired by professors Michael E. Porter and Jan W. Rivkin. It just released a new report entitled “An Economy Doing Half Its Job”, and it addressed the fact that the middle class is deeply struggling even though many large U.S. corporations have been thriving. The following is an excerpt from an article in the Boston Globe about this report…

In a statement, Porter added: “Shortsighted executives may be satisfied with an American economy where firms operating here are winning without lifting US living standards. But leaders with longer perspectives understand that companies can’t thrive for long while their workers and their communities struggle.”

Unfortunately, this is not likely to change any time soon. In fact, that same report discovered that Harvard Business School alumni foresee “falling pay and fewer openings for full-time jobs” for American workers in the years ahead…

U.S. workers face a dim future, with stagnant or falling pay and fewer openings for full-time jobs.

That’s the picture that emerges from a survey of Harvard Business School alumni.

More than 40 percent of the respondents foresee lower pay and benefits for workers. Roughly half favor outsourcing work over hiring staffers. A growing share prefer part-time employees. Nearly half would rather invest in new technology than hire or retain workers.

The Obama administration continues to tell us that the unemployment rate is “going down” and that the economy is recovering, but that does not match the reality of what most Americans are experiencing on a day to day basis.

As David Stockman recently so aptly put it, outside of health and education the U.S. economy has not produced a single job since mid-2000 even though our population has grown greatly since that time…

In a few deft seconds, a “no jobs” nobody who apparently doesn’t actually have one himself, essentially explained the contents of the chart below to his silenced CNBC hosts. Over the course of 170 “jobs Fridays” since mid-2000, the latter have apparently never noticed the single most stunning fact embedded in the monthly BLS report. Namely, that outside of health and education there has not been one net new job created in the American economy since July 2000! Yes, not a single new job—as in none, nein, nichts, nada, zip!

In addition, most of the new jobs that are being “added to the economy” each month are part-time jobs. Right now, we still have 1.4 million fewer full-time jobs than we did in 2008 even though more than 100,000 people are added to the population each month.

What this means is that the middle class is shrinking.

We are witnessing an increasing concentration of wealth among the ultra-wealthy, and most of the rest of us are getting poorer. As a recent CNN article detailed, the Federal Reserve has also discovered that the gap between the rich and the poor in America is larger than the Fed has ever recorded before…

In its Study of Consumer Finances, released every three years, the Fed found that the wealthiest 3% of American households controlled 54.4% of the nation’s wealth in 2013, a slight increase from its last survey in 2010. It’s also substantially higher from the 44.8% they held in 1989, showing how quickly the income divide has been growing over the past decade or so.

At the same time, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90% fell to 24.7% in 2013. That’s compared to 33.2% in 1989.

How close does the share of wealth for the bottom 90 percent have to go before we admit that we have a major problem on our hands?

Is there anyone out there that would be okay with it hitting zero percent?

One of the big reasons why the wealthy have been doing so well is because the stock market has been soaring. The money printing policies of the Federal Reserve have sent stock prices to unprecedented heights. This has overwhelmingly benefited the extremely wealthy…

According to recent data from the Federal Reserve, America has the lowest level of stock ownership in 18 years. Yet stock ownership for the wealthy is at a new high—and that has accounted for most of their good fortune compared to the rest of America.

In fact, the Fed says that the wealthiest top 10 percent of all Americans now own 81 percent of all stocks…

Stock ownership is even more concentrated when it comes to share of total stock holdings. In 2010, the latest period available, the top 10 percent of Americans by net worth held 81 percent of all directly held or indirectly held stocks, according to Edward N. Wolff, an economics professor at New York University who specializes in inequality and Federal Reserve data.

Wolff said that share—which has not been released yet for 2013—has probably gone even higher than 81 percent since 2010.

Since the last financial crisis, the Federal Reserve has been very good to the elite.

But most of the rest of us have had a really hard time.

Until more Americans start getting good jobs and building small businesses, things are not going to turn around for the middle class.

But the policies being pursued by our politicians continue to kill good jobs and continue to kill small businesses, so I wouldn’t expect significant changes any time soon.

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