Welfare

The 2.6 Billion Dollar Welfare Payment That The U.S. Government Gives To Wal-Mart

December 28, 2014December 28, 2014 by Michael

Should the federal government be spending billions of dollars to pump up Wal-Mart’s profits? I know that question sounds really bizarre, but unfortunately this is essentially what is happening. Because Wal-Mart does not pay them enough money, hundreds of thousands of Wal-Mart employees enroll in Medicaid, food stamps and other social welfare programs. Even though Wal-Mart makes enormous profits, they refuse to properly take care of their employees so the federal government has to do it. And of course this is not just a Wal-Mart problem. There are hundreds of other major corporations doing exactly the same thing. And they will keep on doing it as long as they can because relying on the federal government to take care of their employees allows them to make much larger profits. This gives these companies an enormous competitive advantage and it distorts the marketplace. If you love the free enterprise system, you should be aghast at this. Our big corporations have become the biggest “welfare queens” of all, and Wal-Mart is near the top of that list.

Does your local Wal-Mart store seem like it needs help from the federal government?

Of course not.

Wal-Marts all over the nation were absolutely packed this holiday season, but according to a recent Bloomberg article, the average amount of welfare that Wal-Mart employees receive from the government each year breaks down to about $420,000 per store…

Wal-Mart’s low wages have led to full-time employees seeking public assistance. These are not the 47 percent, lazy, unmotivated bums. Rather, these are people working physical, often difficult jobs. They receive $2.66 billion in government help each year (including $1 billion in healthcare assistance). That works out to about $5,815 per worker. And about $420,000 per store.

Does that make you angry?

It should.

Today, Wal-Mart employs approximately 1.2 million people in the United States, and it makes a yearly profit of about 17 billion dollars.

So why does it need 2.6 billion dollars of help from the U.S. government?

Wal-Mart is a colossal money-making behemoth. Just consider the following numbers…

The size of Wal-Mart is sometimes difficult to visualize. To put it into some context, consider the following: 100 million U.S. shoppers patronize Wal-Mart stores every week. Wal-Mart has twice the number employees of the U.S. Postal Service, a larger global computer network than the Pentagon, and the world’s largest fleet of trucks. Americans spend about $36 million dollars per hour at the stores. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other company in the world, capturing one of every four dollars spent on food in the U.S. The average American family of four spends over $4,000 a year there. Each week, it has 200 million customers at more than 10,400 stores in 27 countries. If the company were an independent country, it would be the 25th largest economy in the world.

Wal-Mart does well enough to be able to pay their workers a livable wage.

And yet they refuse to do it.

Shame on them.

Meanwhile, the six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the poorest one-third of all Americans combined.

This reminds me of something that I read in the fifth chapter of James the other day…

Come now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have stored up treasures for the last days. Indeed the wages that you kept back by fraud from the laborers who harvested your fields are crying, and the cries of those who harvested have entered into the ears of the Lord of Hosts. You have lived in pleasure on the earth and have been wayward. You have nourished your hearts as in a day of slaughter.

But we continue to reward this behavior, don’t we?

100 million of us continue to visit Wal-Mart every single week, and we continue to fill up our shopping carts with cheap products that are made outside this country.

We refuse to support American workers and American businesses, and this is a recipe for utter disaster. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “National Economic Suicide: The U.S. Trade Deficit With China Just Hit A New Record High“.

The truth is that we cannot consume our way to prosperity. When we consume far more wealth than we produce, we pile up debt and we become poorer as a nation.

And as a country we have become exceedingly cold-hearted toward our workers. If you truly love free markets and capitalism, you should be encouraging big companies to pay their workers properly. Instead, we are moving closer and closer to the slave labor model employed by China and other communist nations with each passing day. Sadly, I am becoming increasingly convinced that many prominent “pro-business” voices in America today are actually closet communists. They seem to want everything to be made in China and for American workers to be paid just like Chinese workers.

At this point, the U.S. middle class is well on the way to being destroyed. As I have written about previously, 40 percent of all American workers now make less than what a minimum wage worker made back in 1968 after you account for inflation.

How is the middle class supposed to survive in such an environment?

And for any “pro-business” people that want to defend Wal-Mart, do you actually like paying suffocating taxes to support all of the people that are being forced on to the safety net?

What is our society going to look like as millions more Americans become dependent on the federal government each year? Government dependence is already at an all-time record high. How much worse do things have to get before we admit that we have a real problem?

Unfortunately, it looks like our problems are only going to accelerate in 2015. Thanks to the stunning decline in the price of oil, we are starting to lose good paying jobs in the energy industry…

One company caught in the industry downturn is Hercules Offshore Inc. The Houston-based firm is laying off 324 employees, roughly 15% of its workforce, because oil companies aren’t renewing contracts for its offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico while crude prices are depressed.

“It’s been breathtaking,” said Jim Noe, executive vice president of Hercules, which was founded in 2004. “We’ve never seen this glut of supply and dislocation in oil markets. So we’re not surprised to see a significant decline in demand for our services.”

These are jobs that we cannot afford to lose.

Since the end of the last recession, the energy industry has been the leading creator of good paying jobs in America.

But now as the U.S. energy boom goes bust, it might lead the way in job losses.

In order to have a middle class, we have got to have middle class jobs.

Unfortunately, those kinds of jobs are disappearing and the entire U.S. economy is moving toward the Wal-Mart model.

In the end, we will all pay a great price for such foolishness.

Why Is Obama Encouraging Illegal Immigration When We Can’t Take Care Of Millions Of Our Own Citizens?

July 7, 2014 by Michael

For years, the Obama administration has been making it abundantly clear that it is a friend of illegal immigrants. Border security is a joke, the federal government refuses to go after “sanctuary cities” even though they are breaking federal law, there is a website that instructs immigrants how to sign up for welfare programs once they arrive in the United States, and the Obama administration has distributed flyers that tell illegal immigrants that their immigration status will not be checked when they apply for food stamps. And Obama has even instructed officials to use “prosecutorial discretion” in deportation cases involving non-criminals. In other words, Obama has been flashing a huge green light to illegal immigrants, and so of course our borders were going to be inundated with them.

Apologists for the Obama administration will debate you all day about what Obama “intended” and what he didn’t “intend”, but there is no doubt about what message immigrants from Central America have been receiving.

For example, one young mother recently told the press that she heard that if you “go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away“.

And you can view video of a little boy from Central America telling an investigate reporter that he believes that Barack Obama has “given permission” for him to live in the United States right here.

It isn’t an accident that our southern border is literally being flooded with illegal immigrants right now. Newspapers in El Salvador and Honduras have been publicizing how easy illegal immigration has become, and even the President of Honduras has said that people are coming to the United States for “Obama’s amnesty”.

When they arrive, thousands upon thousands of these illegal immigrants are using rehearsed answers that border patrol agents are hearing over and over again. Word has spread that if illegal immigrants claim that they are “fleeing gang violence” that it is more likely that they will be allowed to stay.

What we are witnessing down on the southern border is really unprecedented. It has been estimated that twelve times as many kids are crossing our borders illegally now compared to just a few years ago.

And they just keep on coming.

This is utter madness.

Now, please don’t think that I am anti-immigrant. I am all for legal immigration. This is a nation of immigrants and we will always need immigration. But everyone should be required to come in through the front door. Encouraging illegal immigration is simply a recipe for disaster.

If we keep the back door wide open, the truth is that we have absolutely no idea who is coming into our country. Do we really want countless numbers of criminals, welfare parasites, drug dealers and gang members pouring into our cities? According to the FBI, there are now approximately 1.4 million gang members living in the United States, and it has been estimated that illegal immigrants make up approximately 30 percent of the total population in federal, state and local prisons.

And why in the world would we not want to control the diseases coming into this country? Over the past several weeks, it has been documented that some of the illegal immigrants that have been apprehended have scabies and tuberculosis.

But instead of sending them right back out of the country, U.S. officials are setting up camps for this tsunami of illegal immigrants. In other cases, the federal government is simply putting them on buses and planes and shipping them all over the country. The illegal immigrants are released into their new communities and are given papers which order them to eventually appear in court, but of course the vast majority of them never show up. You can see a map that documents areas where the federal government has been shipping illegal immigrants right here.

The rational thing to do would be to secure our borders and to send a very clear message that illegal immigration is not welcome in the United States.

But instead of doing that, the Obama administration is actually bringing in a riot squad to deal with anti-immigration protesters.

During normal times all of this would be crazy enough, but right now we are at a point where we cannot even take care of millions upon millions of our own citizens.

We are told that illegal immigrants do the jobs “that Americans don’t want to do”, but is that really accurate?

In this day and age, there is intense competition for just about any kind of a job. Despite what the mainstream media says, the truth is that there hasn’t been a significant employment recovery in the United States. As you can see from the chart posted below, the percentage of the working age population that is actually working is still far, far below where it was just prior to the last recession…

Yes, there has been a very slight bump in the numbers in recent months, but it is certainly no reason for celebration. When the mainstream media declares that unemployment in America has been steadily going down, they are simply being disingenuous. Right now things are only slightly better than they were during the worst times of the past several years.

And according to shadowstats.com, the broadest measure of unemployment is still well over 20 percent and has been steadily rising since the end of the last recession.

So no, there aren’t nearly enough jobs in the United States.

And thanks to competition from immigrant labor and thanks to the fact that millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas, the quality of our jobs continues to decline as well. For much more on that trend, please see this article.

Needless to say, now is not the time to open up the floodgates to millions of immigrants that will need jobs to support themselves. Many of our major cities are already so economically depressed that they look like war zones. In fact, things have gotten so bad in Detroit that a plan is being considered to bulldoze a fifth of the entire city…

In May, a group ominously titled the “Detroit Blight Removal Task Force” released a report claiming that around 22 percent of the city’s properties were “blighted” – vacant, damaged or considered dangerous. They also found that, of the 84,000 properties owned by public entities, just over 5,000 were occupied by squatters, making the city of Detroit, the report’s authors noted, “a very large and inadvertent landlord”.

The task force’s proposed solution is to demolish it all over the next five years and start again. Unfortunately, the plan doesn’t extend to rebuilding the properties – it’ll be down to private companies and developers to buy up the land and rebuild.

For much more on the decay of our major cities, please see my previous article entitled “The Death Of The Rust Belt“.

Considering the fact that we are already having such a severe problem taking care of our current population, what do you think is going to happen to these waves of illegal immigrants as they attempt to settle in to communities all around the nation?

Ultimately, we are going to have to end up financially supporting a very large percentage of them too.

Right now, more than 20 percent of children in this country are already living in poverty, and 49 million Americans are dealing with food insecurity.

If Obama continues to encourage mass illegal immigration, those numbers are going to get much worse.

Government dependence is already at an all-time record high, and about half the country currently receives benefits of some sort from the federal government every month.

How much more weight can we put on the “safety net” before it breaks? Just check out some more numbers about this crisis from one of my previous articles…

–Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.

–The U.S. government has spent an astounding 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs over the past five years.

–Today, the federal government runs about 80 different “means-tested welfare programs”, and almost all of those programs have experienced substantial growth in recent years.

–Back in 1960, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages was approximately 10 percent. In the year 2000, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages was approximately 21 percent. Today, the ratio of social welfare benefits to salaries and wages is approximately 35 percent.

–While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the total number of Americans on food stamps has gone from 32 million to nearly 47 million.

–Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.

–It sounds crazy, but the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the entire population of the nation of Spain.

–According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps is now greater than the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

–According to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, 43 percent of all immigrants that have been in the United States for at least 20 years are still on welfare.

A lot of people that are trying to immigrate here illegally just want to make a better life for themselves, and I can appreciate that.

But a policy of making it incredibly difficult for honest people to come in through the front door while keeping the back door completely wide open for lawbreakers is a recipe for national suicide.

And right now we don’t have jobs for these immigrants.

We can’t even take care of the people that are already living here.

Something desperately needs to be done about this, but I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for Obama to make a bold move to stop illegal immigrants from pouring over the border.

Meet One Of The Victims Of Obama’s “Economic Recovery”

November 11, 2013 by Michael

Have you ever cried yourself to sleep because you had no idea how you were going to pay the bills even though you were working as hard as you possibly could? You are about to hear from a single mother that has been there. Her name is Yolanda Vestal and she is another victim of Obama’s “economic recovery”. Yes, things have never been better for the top 0.01 percent of ultra-wealthy Americans that have got millions of dollars invested in the stock market. But for most of the rest of the country, things are very hard right now. At this point, more than 102 million working age Americans do not have a job, and 40 percent of those that are actually working earn less than $20,000 a year in wages. If we actually are experiencing an “economic recovery”, then why is the federal government spending nearly a trillion dollars a year on welfare? And that does not even include entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. We live in a nation where poverty is exploding and the middle class is shrinking with each passing day. But nothing is ever going to get fixed if we all stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything is “just fine”.

What you are about to read is an open letter to Barack Obama that has gone absolutely viral on the Internet in recent days. It is a letter that a single mother named Yolanda Vestal posted on her Facebook page, and it has really struck a nerve because countless other young parents can clearly identify with what she is going through. The following is the text of her letter…

Dear President Obama,

I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for all you have done and are doing. You see I am a single Mom located in the very small town of Palmer, Texas. I live in a small rental house with my two children. I drive an older car that I pray daily runs just a little longer. I work at a mediocre job bringing home a much lower paycheck than you or your wife could even imagine living on. I have a lot of concerns about the new “Obamacare” along with the taxes being forced on us Americans and debts you are adding to our country. I have a few questions for you Mr. President.

Have you ever struggled to pay your bills? I have.

Have you ever sat and watched your children eat and you eat what was left on their plates when they were done, because there wasn’t enough for you to eat to? I have.

Have you ever had to rob Peter to pay Paul, and it still not be enough? I have.

Have you ever been so sick that you needed to see a doctor and get medicine, but had no health insurance because it was too expensive? I have.

Have you ever had to tell your children no, when they asked for something they needed? I have.

Have you ever patched holes in pants, glued shoes, replaced zippers, because it was cheaper than buying new? I have.

Have you ever had to put an item or two back at the grocery store, because you didn’t have enough money? I have.

Have you ever cried yourself to sleep, because you had no clue how you were going to make ends meet? I have.

My questions could go on and on. I don’t believe you have a clue what Americans are actually going through and honestly, I don’t believe you care. Not everyone lives extravagantly. While your family takes expensive trips that cost more than most of us make in two-four years, there are so many of us that suffer. Yet, you are doing all you can to add to the suffering. I think you are a very selfish and cold hearted man, who does not care what is best for the people he was elected by (not by me) to represent, but more so out for the glory of your name attached to history. So thank you Mr. President, thank you for pushing those of us that are barely staying afloat completely under water and driving America into the ground. You have made your mark in history, as the absolute worst and most hated president of the United States. God have mercy on your soul!

Sincerely,

Yolanda Vestal

Average American

These are the kinds of emotions that millions of American parents are wrestling with on a daily basis. Many of them are working as hard as they possibly can and yet still find themselves unable to adequately provide for their families.

And now that food stamps are being cut back, more of them than ever are going to be forced to turn to food banks for help. The following is what the head of a large food bank in Casper, Wyoming told one local newspaper about the increase in demand that he is witnessing in his area…

Across the state, food banks and other related programs aiming to feed the needy are worried the supply to meet the uptick in need during the holiday season won’t meet the growing demand for food caused by the expiration of SNAP benefits.

“People are scared to death of the lack of food availability,” Martin said.

Martin called Joshua’s Storehouse a reliable barometer for measuring the rate of need in Casper. The number of people using the food bank skyrocketed before the reduction in SNAP, he said.

Fewer than 2,000 people used the food bank in October 2012. Last month 2,500 people went there for help.

And of course this is not just happening in rural areas either. Margarette Purvis, the head of the largest food bank organization in New York City, says that she is anticipating a huge surge in demand and that veterans are being hit particularly hard…

“On this Veterans Day, when we’re waving our flags — I need every New Yorker to know — 40 percent of New York City veterans are relying on soup kitchens and pantries.”

Purvis says that there are 95,000 vets relying on food banks in New York City alone.

That is a lot of people.

And while Barack Obama may trot out a few vets on national holidays and promise that “we will never forget” them, the truth is that most of the time the federal government treats our military veterans like human garbage. If you doubt this, please see my previous article entitled “25 Signs That Military Veterans Are Being Treated Like Absolute Trash Under The Obama Administration“.

Meanwhile, anger and frustration with the economy are starting to rise to very dangerous levels in this nation.

In a previous article, I noted that violent crime in America rose by 15 percent last year. One of the primary reasons for this is the economic despair that we see in our streets.

As the economy gets even worse, people will become even more desperate. We will start to see even more flash mob crimes like we saw in Chicago recently. Posted below is a video news report that shows footage of a flash mob in Chicago dragging entire racks of merchandise out of a Sports Authority store…

When you watch stuff like this, it helps to explain why demand for armored vehicles among the ultra-wealthy in America is skyrocketing.

Unfortunately, most Americans cannot afford armored vehicles and walled vacation homes in the middle of nowhere.

Most Americans are going to have to live right in the middle of all of this as it happens.

A volcano of anger, frustration and despair is simmering just below the surface in America.

When that volcano finally erupts, it is going to be a very frightening thing to behold.

29 Incredible Facts Which Prove That Poverty In America Is Absolutely Exploding

October 27, 2013October 27, 2013 by Michael

Did you know that the number of Americans on welfare is higher than the number of Americans that have full-time jobs? Did you know that 1.2 million public school students in the U.S. are currently homeless? Anyone that uses the term “economic recovery” to describe what is happening in the United States today is being deeply insulting to the nearly 150 million Americans that are considered to be either “poor” or “low income” at this point. Yes, things are great in New York City, Washington D.C. and San Francisco, but almost everywhere else economic conditions continue to steadily get worse. The gap between the wealthy and the poor is at a level that America has never seen before, and this is beginning to create a “Robin Hood mentality” that could cause a tremendous amount of social chaos in the years ahead. Anger at the “haves” in America continues to rise at a very alarming pace, and the “have nots” are becoming increasingly desperate. At some point all of this anger is going to boil over, and you won’t want to be anywhere around major population centers when that happens. Despite unprecedented borrowing by the federal government in recent years, and despite unprecedented money printing by the Federal Reserve, poverty in the United States keeps getting worse with each passing year. The following are 29 incredible facts which prove that poverty in America is absolutely exploding…

1. What can you say about a nation that has more people getting handouts from the federal government than working full-time? According to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people receiving means-tested welfare benefits is greater than the number of full-time workers in the United States.

2. New numbers have just been released, and they show that the number of public school students in this country that are homeless is at an all-time record high. It is hard to believe, but right now 1.2 million students that attend public schools in America are homeless. That number has risen by 72 percent since the start of the last recession.

3. When I was growing up, it seemed like almost everyone was from a middle class home. But now that has all changed. One recent study discovered that nearly half of all public students in the United States come from low income homes.

4. How can anyone deny that we are a socialist nation when half the people are getting money from the federal government each month? According to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program.

5. Signs of increasing poverty are even showing up in the wealthiest areas of the nation. According to the New York Post, New York subways are being “overrun with homeless“.

6. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately one out of every six Americans is now living in poverty. The number of Americans living in poverty is now at a level not seen since the 1960s.

7. The gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is at an all-time record high. The wealthy may not consider this to be much of a problem, but those at the other end of the spectrum are very aware of this.

8. The “working poor” is one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population. At this point, approximately one out of every four part-time workers in America is living below the poverty line.

9. According to numbers provided by Wal-Mart, more than half of their hourly workers make less than $25,000 a year.

10. A recent Businessweek article mentioned a study that discovered that 300 employees at one Wal-Mart in Wisconsin receive a combined total of nearly a million dollars a year in public assistance…

“A decent wage is their demand—a livable wage, of all things,” said Representative George Miller (D-Calif.). The problem with companies like Wal-Mart is their “unwillingness, not their inability, to pay that wage,” he said. “They hand off the difference to taxpayers.” Miller was referring to a congressional report (PDF) released in May that calculated how much Walmart workers rely on public assistance. The study found that the 300 employees at one Supercenter in Wisconsin required some $900,000 worth of public assistance a year.

11. The stock market may be doing great (for the moment), but incomes for average Americans continue to decline. In fact, median household income in the United States has fallen for five years in a row.

12. The quality of the jobs in America has been steadily dropping for years. At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.

13. According to a Gallup poll that was recently released, 20.0% of all Americans did not have enough money to buy food that they or their families needed at some point over the past year. That is just under the record of 20.4% that was set back in November 2008.

14. Young adults are particularly feeling the sting of poverty these days. American families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.

15. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, one out of every five households in the United States is on food stamps. Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps.

16. The number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the entire population of Spain.

17. According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

18. We are told that we live in the “wealthiest nation” on the planet, and yet more than one out of every four children in the United States is enrolled in the food stamp program.

19. The average food stamp benefit breaks down to approximately $4 per person per day.

20. It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps before they reach the age of 18.

21. Today, approximately 17 million children in the United States are facing food insecurity. In other words, that means that “one in four children in the country is living without consistent access to enough nutritious food to live a healthy life.”

22. It may be hard to believe, but approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are currently living in homes that are considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

23. The number of children living on $2.00 a day or less in the United States has grown to 2.8 million. That number has increased by 130 percent since 1996.

24. In Miami, 45 percent of all children are living in poverty.

25. In Cleveland, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty.

26. According to a recently released report, 60 percent of all children in the city of Detroit are living in poverty.

27. According to a Feeding America hunger study, more than 37 million Americans are now being served by food pantries and soup kitchens.

28. The U.S. government has spent an astounding 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs over the past five years.

29. It has been reported that 4 out of every 5 adults in the United States “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives”.

These poverty numbers keep getting worse year after year no matter what our politicians do.

So is there anyone out there that would still like to argue that we are in an “economic recovery”?

And as I mentioned above, the “have nots” are becoming increasingly angry at the “haves”. For example, just check out the following excerpt from a recent New York Post article…

The maniac who butchered a Brooklyn mom and her four young kids confessed that he did it because he was jealous of their way of life, a police source told The Post on Sunday.

“The family had too much. Their income (and) lifestyle was better than his,” the source said.

The bloody suspect was caught holding the kitchen knife he used during the Saturday night rampage inside the Sunset Park apartment where he had been staying with the victims, the source added.

Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. All over the western world, a “Robin Hood mentality” is growing. This is something that I am so concerned about that I made it a big part of my new book. At this point, even wealthy Hollywood-types such as actor Russell Brand are calling for a socialist-style “revolution” and a “massive redistribution of wealth“.

Perhaps Brand does not understand that what he is calling for would mean redistributing most of his own wealth away from him.

When the next major wave of the economic collapse strikes, I fear that all of this anger and frustration that are growing among the poor will boil over in some very frightening ways. I believe that we will see a huge spike in crime and that we will eventually see communities all over America looted and burning.

But I am not the only one that is thinking along these lines. A new National Geographic Channel movie entitled “American Blackout” attempts to portray the social chaos that could erupt in the event of an extended national power failure…

American Blackout, National Geographic Channel’s two-hour, edge-of-your-seat movie event imagines the story of a national power failure in the United States caused by a cyberattack — told in real time, over 10 days, by those who kept filming on cameras and phones. You’ll learn what it means to be absolutely powerless.

You can view a clip of the film that was made available by NatGeo for the SHTFplan.com community right here.

What would you do if something like that happened to you?

How would you handle desperate, hungry people at your fence asking for food?

And what if those people were armed and were not “asking nicely” for your food?

Don’t ignore what is happening in America right now. It is setting the stage for some very chaotic times.

Get ready while you still can.

12 Shocking Clues About What America Will Look Like When The Next Great Economic Crisis Strikes

October 20, 2013 by Michael

The collapse of American society is accelerating. For the moment, much of our social decay is being masked by the tremendous level of affluence that we are experiencing. It has been reported that 4 out of every 5 adults in the United States “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives”, but in general Americans still enjoy a debt-fueled standard of living that is far beyond what most of the rest of the world enjoys. When that debt-fueled standard of living permanently disappears, it is going to unleash chaos unlike anything that America has ever seen before. Right now, economic conditions in this country are not anywhere close to where they were before 2008, but this is just the beginning. We are in the midst of an ongoing economic collapse which is going to get much, much worse in the years ahead. When the next major wave of the economic crisis strikes, millions of people are going to become extremely desperate. And desperate people do desperate things. We are already starting to see this play out all over the nation, but this is only a preview of coming attractions. What we are going to witness in future years is going to be almost too horrible for words.

So how can I be so sure that this is going to happen? After all, the United States didn’t descend into complete and utter chaos during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Wouldn’t an economic depression unfold in a similar manner today?

Unfortunately, a lot has changed since then. A lot more Americans were self-sufficient back in those days, and the truth is that the character of our nation has been rotting and decaying for decades. In a previous article, I described it this way…

“We are simply not the same country that we used to be. Americans are proud, selfish, greedy, arrogant, ungrateful, treacherous and completely addicted to entertainment and pleasure. Our country is literally falling apart all around us, but most Americans are so plugged into entertainment that they can’t even be bothered to notice what is happening.”

Just last weekend, there were “mini-riots” in several U.S. states when “technical issues” caused the food stamp system to go haywire for a few hours.

What would have happened if there had been an extended outage or if the political crisis in D.C. had caused food stamps to be completely cut off at some point in November?

Let’s be thankful that we did not have to find out.

But even though major food stamps riots may have been averted (at least for now), there are a whole host of other signs that America is going to become a very unstable place during the next major economic downturn. The following are 12 shocking clues about what America will look like when the next great economic crisis strikes…

#1 Would you continue to work as a bus driver if you were stabbed while driving or if a passenger poured urine all over you? Just check out what has been going on in Detroit lately…

After two drivers were recently stabbed and another had urine poured on her by an angry rider, union officials representing bus drivers for the city of Detroit are set to protest in front of city hall at 10 a.m. on Monday.

#2 We are starting to see a lot of “group crimes” happen all over America. For example, just the other day in Brooklyn, New York a gang of 10 young thugs dragged a young couple out of their vehicle and brutally beat them…

Ronald Russo was dragged to the ground. Then he was punched and kicked in the head. He felt more blows all over his body, investigators said. He suffered a fractured nose, a broken septum, a blood clot and abrasions to his shoulder. He was treated and released from Beth Israel Medical Center.

In the midst of the attack, there was a steady chorus of epithets. “White motherf—–!” screamed the attackers, who ranged in age from 12 to 18.

Alanna Russo, 30, was calling 911 when the 12-year-old girl pulled the woman’s hair and threw her to the ground. The victim’s head slammed into the concrete. She suffered a black eye, bleeding and difficulty breathing, prosecutors said, but she refused medical attention.

#3 A lot of people assume that they are perfectly safe inside their own vehicles but that is not the case at all. A story in the New York Post about a gang of bikers that ruthlessly hunted down a young family that was driving an SUV made national headlines a few weeks ago…

A gang of bikers terrorized a dad driving with his wife and baby daughter on the West Side Highway — chasing after their SUV and then dragging the man out and beating him to a pulp in front of his horrified family, authorities said.

When the bikers caught up with this family they showed the father of the baby daughter absolutely no mercy…

One biker can be seen on the video ripping off his helmet and using it to bash in Lien’s driver’s-side window.

The crew pummeled Lien on the pavement in front of his wife, Rosalyn Ng, and their 2-year-old daughter, police sources said.

Lien, who also was slashed during the melee, was rushed to Columbia University Medical Center. He needed stitches to his face and chest and had two black eyes.

#4 We are living at a time when hearts are becoming very cold. Some Americans are becoming so desperate for money that they will do almost anything to get it. In fact, one couple in Tennessee has actually been charged with selling their four daughters for use in sex films…

An East Tennessee couple is facing a list of charges, accused of selling their children to take part in sex films.

Connie Sue McCall, 40, and her husband, Ronnie Lee McCall, 61, of Johnson City have been charged by a federal grand jury.

Paperwork shows the couple was selling their four daughters.

Prosecutors say the four girls were between the ages of 5 and 16 when this happened.

Could you imagine such a thing happening in your neighborhood?

Perhaps it is happening, but you just don’t know that it is going on.

#5 And it is not only older people that are having their hearts grow cold. It is happening to young people too. Last week, a 17-year-old girl was caught carrying around a dead baby (which she probably gave birth to) in a shopping bag in a Victoria’s Secret store right in the heart of Manhattan…

The dead baby found in the teen’s shopping bag at a Victoria’s Secret store in Manhattan was born alive and then asphyxiated, police said Friday, as the macabre discovery turned toward a possible homicide case.

Police believe 17-year-old Tiana Rodriguez gave birth to the baby at a friend’s house and that the infant was later asphyxiated. However, the city medical examiner’s office said an autopsy was inconclusive, and more tests were needed.

Who does something like that?

#6 Sadly, a lot of mothers appear to be losing the natural affection that they should have for their children. Just check out another incident that happened in New York City recently…

So much for no child left behind.

A stroller-toting mom who used her 1-year-old son as cover during a massive candy shoplifting spree at a downtown Duane Reade used the tot’s pram as a battering ram when workers confronted her — and then ran away without the baby, the NYPD said.

#7 One of the clearest signs that American society is decaying is the fact that groups of kids are banding together and agreeing to commit absolutely horrible crimes. We have seen this with the “flash mob” robberies that are plaguing many cities, but what is even worse is when groups of kids band together to commit violent acts. In Pennsylvania recently, a group of teens cheered on attackers as they beat up a 15-year-old girl…

Speaking exclusively to CBS 3, a 15-year-old high school student, whose identity we are concealing, described a terrifying attack by a gang of at least nine teenage boys as she was leaving an Interboro High School football game Monday night.

The teenage victim described first being taunted by the attackers, who followed her down a neighborhood street, cursing and spitting at her, before she was repeatedly kicked and punched, suffering at least one blow to her head.

The attackers even tried to throw her in front of a passing vehicle and nobody tried to stop them…

The victim says as at least two of the teenagers pummeled her, the others cheered them on shouting, “Come on, let’s get her!” At one point, the victim says, the gang tried to throw her under the wheels of a passing car, which swerved, narrowly missing her.

What is happening to this country?

#8 We have also been hearing about a lot of “gang rapes” lately as well. The following is an excerpt from a first-hand account from a 14-year-old girl in Missouri that experienced this type of horrible ordeal…

About five shots tall, I drank it. I guess I didn’t know how badly it would mess me up. But the boys who gave it to me did.

Then it was like I fell into a dark abyss. No light anywhere. Just dark, dense silence — and cold. That’s all I could ever remember from that night. Apparently, I was there for not even an entire hour before they discarded me in the snow.

You can read the rest of her sobering story right here.

Are you starting to understand why I am so convinced that we have a major problem with our young men in America today?

Instead of raising young gentlemen, we are raising wild animals that seem to have very little self-control.

#9 And sometimes the public does not do anything to stop sexual assaults even when they happen on public streets. In a recent incident in Athens, Ohio, not only did the public not stop a sexual assault, many actually took photos of the assault and posted them on social media websites…

Horrific photos of an alleged rape in progress have been shared on social media after crowds at a college homecoming celebration chose to take pictures and videos of the sex act rather than stopping it.

Would such a thing have happened in our country 50 years ago?

Of course not.

We need to come to grips with how far we have fallen.

#10 In America today, young kids can beat a homeless man to death and it barely even makes a blip on the news. I’ll bet hardly any of you have heard about what happened recently to a homeless man in New Jersey…

Three teenagers were in custody Saturday morning, on charges of beating a homeless man to his death in Hoboken, N.J.

As CBS 2’s Janelle Burrell reported, Hudson County Acting Prosecutor Gaetano T. Gregory said two 13-year-olds and a 14-year-old were charged in the Sept. 10 death of Ralph Eric Santiago, 46.

What would cause 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds to behave so savagely?

Could it be because we are raising them in a society where basic morality is not taught any longer?

#11 Our young people certainly do not have much respect for the very elderly anymore either. Instead, the elderly are looked at as “weak” and “easy prey”. Just check out what recently happened to a 70-year-old man in upstate New York…

A 70-year-old man was seriously injured early Saturday morning after being attacked outside of a 7-Eleven in Syracuse.

Police say James Gifford had just left the store at the intersection of Valley Drive and South Street just after 6:00 a.m. and was attacked by a group of five or six black males, according to Syracuse Police.

Police also said this appears to be an unprovoked incident with an innocent victim.

#12 In this day and age, it is very hard to tell who you can trust. You might meet someone on the street and they might smile and seem very nice, but inside they may be full of all kinds of garbage. For example, just check out what one man in the Boston area planned to do…

A Boston-area man, who was planning to kidnap children, lock them in a basement dungeon, rape and eat them, should be imprisoned for at least 27 years, federal authorities said in court documents filed this week.

Geoffrey Portway pleaded guilty in May to distribution and possession of child pornography and solicitation to commit a crime of violence, according to court documents. He is scheduled to be sentenced on September 17.

“Portway has pled guilty to some of the most vile and heinous crimes known to our society,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing recommendation.

This is how twisted and perverted our society has become.

A lot of Americans believe that if we could just elect “the right politicians” or if we could just change our economic system or if we could just fix one particular issue that everything would be right in America again.

Unfortunately, what we are facing is not so simple. Our problems are not just in Washington D.C. or on Wall Street. The truth is that our biggest problem is what is going on inside of us.

America is rotting and decaying on the inside, and the next great economic crisis is going to reveal just how bad things have gotten.

Or could it be possible that I am overstating things? Please feel free to share what you think about the ongoing collapse of our society by posting a comment below…

The Coming Food Stamp Riots

October 16, 2013October 16, 2013 by Michael

It may not happen this month, or even this year, but food stamp riots are coming to America. In fact, we got a small preview of the coming food stamp riots this past weekend when a “temporary system failure” caused food stamp cards to stop working in 17 U.S. states. Within hours, there were “mini-riots” at Wal-Marts and other retailers that rely heavily on food stamp users. So what would happen if food stamp benefits were cut off or reduced for an extended period of time? As you will see below, if Congress had not pushed through a “deal”, the USDA would have started cutting off food stamp benefits on November 1st. Considering the fact that 47 million Americans are on food stamps and more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government, that could have sparked massive rioting. So the good news is that the coming food stamp riots will probably not happen in November. The bad news is that the “deal” in Congress only delays the political fighting until after Christmas. In just a few months we will be dealing with a potential “government shutdown” and a debt ceiling deadline once again.

Most Americans have no idea what almost just happened. According to Reuters, the state of North Carolina had already cut off some welfare benefits for the month of November…

North Carolina has become the first state to cut off welfare benefits to poor residents in the wake of the partial federal government shutdown, ordering a halt to processing November applications until a deal is reached to end the federal standstill.

More than 20,000 people – most of them children – receive monthly benefits aimed at helping them buy food and other basic supplies through North Carolina’s welfare program, called Work First, which is fully funded by the federal government. Recipients must reapply each month.

And as Mac Slavo recently detailed, the USDA was already planning to cut off food stamp assistance to millions of Americans on November 1st…

We say next month because the USDA, which oversees the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), has just issued an order to SNAP agency directors calling for their respective States to implement an emergency contingency program because of government funding issues. In a letter obtained by the Crossroads Urban Center food pantry, the USDA is directing state agencies to, “delay their November issuance files and delay transmission to State Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) vendors until further notice.”

What this means is that should Congress fail to increase the debt ceiling this week, come November there will literally be millions of people in the United States who will have exactly zero dollars transferred to their EBT cards.

What will happen to the nearly 50 million people who depend on these benefits to survive?

In fact, there have been quite a few news reports that have confirmed this…

In Utah, Fox News 13 in Salt Lake City reported that a local provider recently received a letter from the USDA sticking to the November 1 cut-off date.

“This is going to create a huge hardship for the people we serve here in our food pantry,” Bill Tibbits, Associate Director at Crossroads Urban Center, told Fox News 13.

“What this means [is] if there’s not a deal, if Congress doesn’t reach a deal to get federal government back up and running, in Utah about 100,000 families won’t get food stamp benefit,” added Tibbits.

The USDA letter says in part, “in the interest of preserving maximum flexibility, we are directing states to hold their November issuance files and delay transmission to state electronic benefit transfer vendors until further notice.”

So what would have happened if tens of millions of Americans suddenly had their food stamp benefits cut off without warning?

Well, what happened last weekend can give us a few clues. Just check out what happened at one Wal-Mart in Mississippi…

Customers staged a disturbance then walked out of a Mississippi Walmart store with groceries that hadn’t been paid for Saturday night after a computer glitch left them unable to use their food stamp cards.

People in 17 states found themselves unable to buy groceries with their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cards after a routine check by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a temporary system failure.

Shortly after the mini-riot, managers decided to temporarily close the store, citing customer safety.

Due to this technical glitch, many parents were left wondering how they were going to feed their families. If this is the kind of anger that is unleashed over a single failed trip to the grocery store, what would we see if this kind of thing went on for an extended period of time?

At some Wal-Mart stores down in Louisiana, EBT cards were not showing any limits on Saturday night, and within two hours many store shelves in the grocery section were completely cleared of merchandise…

Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.

The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.

Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd confirms they were called in to help the employees at Walmart because there were so many people clearing off the shelves. He says Walmart was so packed, “It was worse than any black Friday” that he’s ever seen.

Sadly, this was only a very small preview of the massive food stamp riots that are eventually coming to America. I like how Mike Adams explained what we are likely to see in the future…

Why does any of this matter? Because this is exactly the same way these people will behave when the federal government goes into default and nearly 50 million EBT cards stop working nationwide.

Fifty million. Consider that for a moment. Most of those 50 million people live in high-density cities. Many are proud owners of Obama phones, Obama food stamps, Obama unemployment checks and Obama subsidized housing. They have absolutely no clue that the government upon which they wholly depend to put food on the table is teetering on the verge of permanent collapse. (Seriously, they cannot conceive of the idea of government “running out of money” because they do not understand where money comes from.) Because of this distorted belief, they do not prepare for any future events other than more Obama handouts. Their entire “preparedness” plan is to vote for Democrats, because that’s who they know will give them the most handouts. And they will always win the popular vote, too, because any politician promising to restore responsible fiscal spending to the government by cutting programs will be viciously accused of being “mean” or involved in “hating poor people.” So the government handouts will only ratchet higher and higher, ensnaring more and more people, until the entire system is unsustainable and collapses under its own weight.

When that system of dependence fails, those who depend on it will panic in mere hours. As proof of this, consider the fact that this mass looting of Wal-Mart stores happened in less than three hours after the Saturday EBT card glitch struck. Police had to be called in to prevent the situation from getting completely out of control, and it was offline for only part of one day.

Now imagine what will happen when EBT cards go offline for 24, 48 or even 72 hours. And imagine it happening in every U.S. city simultaneously.

Of course not all Americans would go wild when food stamp benefits are cut off.

Other Americans express their desperation in other ways. According to Bloomberg, an increasing number of people are starting to sell hair, breast milk and their own eggs in a desperate attempt to make ends meet…

Hair, breast milk and eggs are doubling as automated teller machines for some cash-strapped Americans such as April Hare.

Out of work for more than two years and facing eviction from her home, Hare recalled Louisa May Alcott’s 19th-century novel and took to her computer.

“I was just trying to find ways to make money, and I remembered Jo from ‘Little Women,’ and she sold her hair,” the 35-year-old from Atlanta said. “I’ve always had lots of hair, but this is the first time I’ve actually had the idea to sell it because I’m in a really tight jam right now.”

The mother of two posted pictures of her 18-inch auburn mane on www.buyandsellhair.com, asking at least $1,000 and receiving responses within hours. Hare, who also considered selling her breast milk, joins others exploring unconventional ways to make ends meet as the four-year-old economic expansion struggles to invigorate the labor market and stimulate incomes.

We have moved into a time when things are becoming increasingly unstable and when people are becoming increasingly desperate.

In an attempt to keep order, the authorities will become increasingly forceful in the years ahead. At this point, many law enforcement officers already believe that there is very little that they cannot do to exert their “authority” over the rest of us. Just check out video of a drunk off-duty police officer “arresting” a woman that refused to go out on a date with him right here. Sadly, this type of behavior is becoming way too common these days.

And it looks like major financial institutions are getting ready for the chaos that is eventually coming as well. In fact, according to an article by Paul Joseph Watson, Chase Bank is now placing a limit on cash withdrawals and is banning business customers from sending wire transfers out of the country…

Chase Bank has moved to limit cash withdrawals while banning business customers from sending international wire transfers from November 17 onwards, prompting speculation that the bank is preparing for a looming financial crisis in the United States by imposing capital controls.

Numerous business customers with Chase BusinessSelect Checking and Chase BusinessClassic accounts have received letters over the past week informing them that cash activity (both deposits and withdrawals) will be limited to a $50,000 total per statement cycle from November 17 onwards.

Fortunately, the chaos that would have been unleashed if Congress had not made a deal has now been delayed for a few months.

But by kicking the can down the road, our politicians continue to make our long-term problems even worse. Either we are going to have tremendous pain now, or we are going to have even worse pain later. Peter Schiff explained the choice that we are facing this way…

If Republicans were to inexplicably prevail, and the federal government were to cut spending so that its expenditures matched its tax revenues (a truly radical idea) the country’s financial mess would be laid bare. The government would have to weigh the relative costs and benefits of making interest payments on Treasury debt (primarily to foreign creditors) or to trim entitlements promised to U.S. citizens. But those are choices we will have to make sooner or later anyway. In fact we should have dealt with these issues years ago. But generations of mechanistic debt ceiling increases have allowed us to perpetually kick the can down the road. What could possibly be gained by doing it again, particularly if it is done with no commitment to change course?

The Democrats’ argument that America needs to pay its bills is just hollow rhetoric. Paying off one’s Visa bill with a new and bigger MasterCard bill can’t be considered a legitimate payment of debt. At best it is a transfer. But in the government’s case, it doesn’t even qualify as that. Treasury debt is primarily bought by the Fed, foreign central banks, and major financial institutions. None of that will change with a debt ceiling increase. We will just go to the same people for greater quantities. So it’s like paying off your Visa card with a bigger Visa card.

We are living on borrowed time that has been purchased by stealing money from future generations.

We are literally destroying the future in order to make the present more palatable.

But whether it is this year, or next year or the year after that, at some point we are going to experience the pain that results from decades of incredibly foolish decisions.

I hope that you are getting ready.

The Percentage Of Americans That Consider Themselves To Be “Lower Class” Is At An All-Time High

September 16, 2013September 16, 2013 by Michael

Do you consider yourself to be “lower class”? Most Americans wouldn’t dream of thinking that way. Even at the toughest times of my own life, I always considered myself to be “middle class”. Traditionally, the vast majority of Americans have described themselves as either “middle class” or “working class”, but now we are witnessing a huge shift. According to survey results that were just released, the percentage of Americans that identify themselves as “lower class” is now at an all-time high. It is still only 8.4 percent of the country, but the fact that this number is rapidly growing shows that something is changing on a very fundamental level. In America today, less people than ever believe that they have the opportunity to make a better life for themselves, and according to a brand new Gallup poll that was just released, 20 percent of all Americans did not have enough money to buy food that they or their families needed at some point over the past year. We have 47 million people on food stamps and we have more than 100 million Americans enrolled in at least one welfare program, and that does not even count Social Security or Medicare. We have gone from a “land of opportunity” to a land where tens of millions of people are being crushed by the system.

When I mentioned above that “less people then ever believe that they have the opportunity to make a better life for themselves”, perhaps you doubted that statement.

And I wish that it was not true.

But according to the Los Angeles Times, that is exactly what one new survey shows…

Last year, less than 55% of Americans agreed that “people like me and my family have a good chance of improving our standard of living,” the lowest level since the General Social Survey first asked the question in 1987.

And even those that are “educated” are becoming more pessimistic…

From 2002 to 2012, the “lower class” among Americans with one to four years of college more than doubled — from 2.6% to 5.8%.

So what about you?

Would you describe yourself as “lower class”?

Not that there is anything wrong with that. It can be very hard to be optimistic about your economic situation when you are trapped in poverty and everyone around you is trapped in poverty.

Even as Barack Obama boldly proclaims that we are in the midst of an “economic recovery”, poverty continues to grow. In New Jersey, poverty hit a 52-year high in 2011, and when the final numbers for 2012 come out it is anticipated that they will be even worse…

Poverty in New Jersey continued to grow even as the national recession lifted, reaching a 52-year high in 2011, according to a report released today. The annual survey by Legal Services of New Jersey found 24.7 percent of the state’s population — 2.1 million residents — was considered poor in 2011. That’s a jump of more than 80,000 people — nearly 1 percent higher than the previous year and 3.8 percent more than pre-recession levels. ”This is not just a one-year or five-year or 10-year variation,” said Melville D. Miller Jr., the president of LSNJ, which gives free legal help to low-income residents in civil cases. “This is the worst that it’s been since the 1960 Census.” And it may get worse: The report warned Census figures for 2012 to be released this month may be higher.

There are two Americas today. In the “good America”, stock values are soaring and almost everyone has a job. People from that America openly wonder why everyone is so concerned about the economy.

In the “bad America”, unemployment is rampant and poverty is everywhere. At this point, low income households have an unemployment rate that is over 21 percent, and there is not much help on the horizon.

In the old days, if the wealthy wanted to get wealthier, they needed the rest of us to run their businesses and work in their factories.

But today, they have figured out that they can make much larger profits by replacing us with computers, robots and machines. They have also figured out that they can ship millions of our jobs to the other side of the planet where it is legal to pay slave labor wages with no benefits.

This is putting a huge squeeze on average American workers. For most Americans, the only thing that they have to offer in the marketplace is their labor. Unfortunately, that labor is not valued as much as it used to be.

Yes, the elite still need us to do service jobs for them. Those are not easily replaced by technology or shipped overseas. So they still need us to cut their hair and flip their burgers.

But without a doubt we have a structural problem with unemployment. As the Brookings Institution recently discovered, it would take 8 million more jobs before we could say that we have “recovered” from the last recession…

Last month, the unemployment rate fell to 7.3% from 8.1% a year ago. That might signal progress, but the share of workers with jobs was 58.6%; it has remained close to that for several years. The unemployment rate is inherently flawed and isn’t the best measure of economic progress; it counts only those with jobs or actively looking for work.

And in a frustratingly slow economic recovery that has discouraged countless workers, it risks ignoring these missing workers — an estimated 6 million, according to the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.

The Washington-based think tank has come up with what it calls the “jobs gap,” or the number of jobs it would take to offset the effects of the Great Recession. Factoring in the millions of jobs lost during the Great Recession and the number of jobs needed to absorb new workers, the nation needs 8.3 million jobs to fully recover from the recession.

And of course the quality of our jobs continues to decline as well. In America today, only 47 percent of adults have a full-time job, and one out of every ten jobs is now filled by a temp agency.

Unfortunately, thanks to Obamacare this trend is going to get a lot worse. Millions more Americans are going to be forced into part-time employment. For example, just check out what Trader Joe’s is doing…

Trader Joe’s, the grocer once lauded for providing health care coverage to its part-time workers, is about to push those employees off its plan.

According to a memo obtained by the Huffington Post, the company will stop covering employees who work less than 30 hours per week.

The change is set for the start of 2014. Instead of insurance, workers instead will get a check for $500 in January.

“Depending on income you may earn outside of Trader Joe’s, we believe that with the $500 from Trader Joe’s and the tax credits available under the [Affordable Care Act (ACA)], many of you should be able to obtain health care coverage at very little if any net cost to you,” said Trader Joe CEO Dan Bane in the memo.

I wish that there was better news to report, but we have to be very honest about where we are at as a nation.

In order for there to be a thriving “middle class”, there needs to be lots of middle class jobs.

Sadly, the number of breadwinner jobs that the middle class depends upon is shrinking.

Unless a miracle happens, the percentage of Americans that consider themselves to be “lower class” is probably going to continue to grow.

So how would you solve this problem?

Please feel free to share your ideas by posting a comment below…

If You Could Make More Money By Going On Welfare Instead Of Working, Would You Do It?

August 21, 2013 by Michael

If you could stay home and relax all day and actually make more money than you do at your current job, would you do it? That sounds crazy, but this is actually a very real dilemma for millions upon millions of Americans. According to a shocking new study that was just released by the Cato Institute, people on welfare are actually better off than minimum wage workers in 35 U.S. states. And in 13 states, those on welfare actually do better than those making $15 an hour. So why bother? It is very difficult to find a job in this economy, especially a good one. As I mentioned yesterday, seven out of every eight jobs that have been “created” since Barack Obama has been president have been part-time jobs. Why slave away flipping burgers, stocking shelves for some retail giant or working for some temp agency when you could just sit home and make more money collecting government checks? Yes, there is definitely a minority of Americans that hate the idea of becoming dependent on the government and would never want to take advantage of the system like that, but that minority seems to be shrinking. At this point, about half the country gets money from the government each month anyway, so why not collect “your share”? If someone is offering to give you something for free, it is only human nature to be at least a little bit tempted. And right now the federal government is making it extremely tempting to give up on work entirely and become a permanent welfare check collector.

Before people start getting really upset, let me once again reiterate that most of the people that are receiving financial assistance from the government actually need it. Not everyone is abusing the system, and not everyone is using their food stamps to buy lobster.

Poverty in the United States has absolutely exploded in recent years, and our economy simply does not produce enough jobs for everyone anymore. We certainly do not want those without jobs to go hungry or to be sleeping in the streets.

But what we have today is a situation where there is a huge incentive in many states to actually give up on work entirely and become a dependent of the state instead.

According to the Cato Institute, someone in the state of New York that goes on welfare can bring home more in money and benefits than an entry-level school teacher makes in an entire year…

The federal government funds 126 separate programs targeted towards low-income people, 72 of which provide either cash or in-kind benefits to individuals. (The rest fund community-wide programs for low-income neighborhoods, with no direct benefits to individuals.) State and local governments operate more welfare programs. Of course, no individual or family gets benefits from all 72 programs, but many do get aid from a number of them at any point in time.

Today, the Cato institute is releasing a new study looking at the state-by-state value of welfare for a mother with two children. In the Empire State, a family receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, public housing, utility assistance and free commodities (like milk and cheese) would have a package of benefits worth $38,004, the seventh-highest in the nation.

While that might not sound overly generous, remember that welfare benefits aren’t taxed, while wages are. So someone in New York would have to earn more than $21 per hour to be better off than they would be on welfare. That’s more than the average statewide entry-level salary for a teacher.

If you are going to live off of welfare, the key is to pick the right state. Not all states offer the same level of benefits.

In some states, you have to make far more than the minimum wage before it pays not to be on welfare. In fact, there are 12 different states where you actually have to make more than $15 an hour before you start doing better than welfare recipients…

Nationwide, our study found that the wage-equivalent value of benefits for a mother and two children ranged from a high of $60,590 in Hawaii to a low of $11,150 in Idaho. In 33 states and the District of Columbia, welfare pays more than an $8-an-hour job. In 12 states and DC, the welfare package is more generous than a $15-an-hour job.

Of course not all welfare recipients take advantage of all of the programs that they are eligible for. But if you do know how to work the system, you can live very comfortably at the expense of the government in many states.

So what is the solution?

Well, it would be great if we had enough jobs for everyone, but that is definitely not the case. In fact, the U.S. economy is probably going to continue to lose good jobs in the years ahead if current trends continue.

Unfortunately, that also means that poverty and dependence on the government are likely going to continue to grow, especially when the next major wave of the economic collapse strikes.

If you want to get an idea of where we are headed, just look at Detroit. Once upon a time, Detroit actually had the highest per capita income in the entire country. But now it is a rotting, festering, bankrupt hellhole where tens of thousands of stray dogs freely roam the streets…

As many as 50,000 stray dogs roam the streets and vacant homes of bankrupt Detroit, replacing residents, menacing humans who remain and overwhelming the city’s ability to find them homes or peaceful deaths.

One Humane Society official that recently visited the city to help deal with the dog crisis described what she witnessed as “almost post-apocalyptic“…

The number of strays signals a humanitarian crisis, said Amanda Arrington of the Humane Society of the United States, based in Washington. She heads a program that donated $50,000 each to organizations in Detroit and nine other U.S cities to get pets vaccinated, fed, spayed and neutered.

Arrington said when she visited Detroit in October, “It was almost post-apocalyptic, where there are no businesses, nothing except people in houses and dogs running around.”

“The suffering of animals goes hand in hand with the suffering of people.”

But don’t laugh at Detroit.

The rest of the country is going down the exact same path.

Just recently, Charles Nenner told Newsmax TV that another recession is rapidly approaching that that it is “going to be bad”…

Technical analyst Charles Nenner didn’t mince words when asked about the United States facing another recession.

“It’s going to be bad,” Nenner told Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.

And it looks like the folks in Washington are getting very concerned about all of the economic warnings signs that we have been seeing as well.

Just this week, Barack Obama “held a special, closed door meeting with the heads of the U.S. government’s financial, monetary and oversight agencies. It included members of the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the CFTC, the SEC, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency.”

So why did Obama gather all of the top financial officials for a secret closed door meeting?

John Embry told King World News that he thinks it is because the administration is deeply alarmed about what is happening in the financial markets…

I firmly believe the reason the President has called this meeting today is because if interest rates in the U.S. continue to rise, it could really unleash something disastrous. We are talking here about the possibility of a meltdown. It’s interesting that the President would call in that many big hitters, the head of every significant financial agency in the United States, as well as the Fed and the Comptroller of the Currency, etc — this is a very large meeting today.

I’ve always believed that the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the opener. We have now bought the better part of 5 years now through unlimited money creation. But as we head into this next massive, and what I believe will be a larger round of destabilization, I want KWN readers around the world to understand that the central planners don’t have the same weapons to fight this global financial crisis. This is why I believe they are desperately attempting right now, today in this meeting, to stave off this crisis.

And the truth is that our “leaders” in Washington have good reason to be concerned. If interest rates keep going up rapidly we are going to be in for a world of hurt.

Sadly, most Americans seem to have already forgotten how painful 2008 was, and that was only a preview of coming attractions.

The worst economic crisis in the history of the United States is on the horizon, and most people are going to be absolutely blindsided by it.

I hope that you are getting prepared while you still can.

+ More