Money

If The Clintons Are Worth 50 Million, Why Do They Get Nearly A Million A Year From The Taxpayers?

June 24, 2014 by Michael

Since leaving the White House, the Clintons have earned at least 100 million dollars and currently have a net worth of up to 50 million dollars. So why in the world do the taxpayers need to give Bill Clinton $944,000 to fund his extravagant lifestyle in 2014? If ordinary Americans truly understood how much money many former politicians are being handed every year they would go bananas. According to a Congressional Research Service report that was published earlier this year, the federal government has given a total of nearly 16 million dollars to Bill Clinton since 2001. Each one of those dollars is a dollar that some U.S. taxpayer worked really hard for or that we had to borrow. Yes, we don’t want our former presidents to go broke for a whole bunch of reasons, but it is absolutely absurd that we are showering them with millions upon millions of dollars.

Yesterday, I wrote about the trouble that Hillary has caused for herself by claiming that the Clintons were “dead broke” when they left the White House.

The way things have been set up, there is no way in the world that any former president is going to be “dead broke” ever again unless the law is changed.

According to the Washington Post, Bill Clinton has been receiving about a million dollars a year “for office space, staff, and a pension” since he left office…

According to an April report from the Congressional Research Service, Bill Clinton has received nearly $16 million in pensions and benefits from the federal government since leaving office. That includes $944,000 in fiscal year 2014 for office space, staff, and a pension.

That is insanely wasteful.

But wait, there’s more.

George W. Bush is actually receiving more money from the taxpayers than Clinton is each year…

Bush the younger is costing taxpayers $1.28 million this year, and averages 4 per cent more annual than Clinton.

The government’s General Services Administration inexplicably budgeted $102,000 for Bush’s telephone expenses in 2014, and planned to spend $135,000 more on furniture, computers, office supplies and other miscellany.

How in the world is George W. Bush racking up $102,000 in phone expenses a year?

Does he have the world’s worst calling plan?

And of course what we spend on our former presidents is peanuts compared to what we spend on our current president.

According to author Robert Keith Gray, approximately 1.4 billion dollars is spent on the Obamas every year. Here are just a few nuggets from his book…

-The Obamas have the “biggest staff in history at the highest wages ever“.

-Obama has 469 senior staff working directly under him, and 226 of them make more than $100,000 a year.

-There is always at least one projectionist at the White House 24 hours a day just in case there is someone that wants to watch a movie.

-The “dog handler” for the family dog Bo reportedly makes $102,000 per year and sometimes he is even flown to where the family is vacationing so that he can care for the dog.

Yes, the White House needs a large staff.

But at this point we spend more on our presidents than any nation on the planet does on their entire royal families.

Over the years, the political elite have tilted the rules of the game dramatically in their favor. Neither political party objects because they both benefit from riding on the endless gravy train.

If you can believe it, there are close to 15,000 retired federal employees that are currently collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. This list includes names such as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.

And most people are astounded to hear that more than 4 million dollars a year is spent on the “personal” and “office” expenses of each U.S. Senator.

Not that they need the money. As I wrote about recently, more than half of the members of Congress are millionaires at this point, and nearly 200 of them are multimillionaires.

Politics in America has become a game that is played by the elite for the benefit of the elite. If it seems like they are “out of touch” with ordinary Americans that is because they are.

Meanwhile, things just continue to get even tougher for the middle class. Even though money is flowing like wine in Washington D.C. for the moment, a brand new Gallup survey discovered that 58 percent of Americans believe that the economy is getting worse.

It is shameful that our politicians are living like rock stars while tens of millions of American families are suffering so deeply. For example, consider the case of Andrew and Kristen Cummins…

Andrew and Kristen Cummins and their 8-year-old son Colton have been in and out of homelessness for the past four years.

It all started when Andrew moved to Indiana for a temporary warehouse job that was supposed to turn into a full-time job. But instead he said he was let go as soon as the company would have had to start providing him with full-time benefits.

Since then, he has worked at several other temporary jobs that haven’t turned into full-time work either.

Kristen has been in the same position: She has also had temporary jobs, but nothing has stuck.

So for now, the three stay at a local homeless shelter called the Haven House. Since women and men are required to sleep in separate areas, Andrew doesn’t get to see his wife or son after 9 p.m. each night.

There are millions of other families just like them that are scratching and clawing their way through life the best that they can.

Perhaps our politicians should actually do something to help them instead of sitting back and living the high life at our expense.

15 Quotes From Our Founding Fathers About Economics, Capitalism And Banking

June 9, 2014June 9, 2014 by Michael

Why have we turned our backs on the principles that this nation was founded upon? Many of those that founded this nation bled and died so that we could experience “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. And yet we have tossed their ideals aside as if they were so much rubbish. Our founders had experienced the tyranny of big government (the monarchy) and the tyranny of the big banks and feudal lords, and they wanted something very different for the citizens of the new republic that they were forming. They wanted a country where private property was respected and hard work was rewarded. They wanted a country where the individual was empowered, and where everyone could own land and start businesses. They wanted a country where there were severe restrictions on all large collections of power (government, banks and corporations all included). They wanted a country where freedom and liberty were maximized and where ordinary people had the power to pursue their dreams and build better lives for their families. And you know what? While no system is ever perfect, the experiment that our founders originally set up worked beyond their wildest dreams. But now we are killing it. Why in the world would we want to do that?

Most people are under the illusion that the United States has a “capitalist economy” today, but that simply is not accurate. At best, we have a “mixed economy” that is becoming a little bit more socialist with each passing day. We pay dozens of different types of taxes each year, and some Americans actually end up giving more of their earnings to the government than they keep themselves. But that is still not enough, and so our state governments have accumulated astounding amounts of debt, and our federal government has amassed the largest single debt that the world has ever seen. If future generations of Americans get the chance, they will curse us for the chains of debt that we have placed upon their shoulders.

So what do our government officials do with all of this money?

Well, today approximately 70 percent of all federal government activity involves taking money from some Americans and giving it to other Americans.

Despite this unprecedented wealth-redistribution program, poverty is absolutely exploding in this country and 49 million Americans are dealing with food insecurity.

Meanwhile, the bankers have been getting fabulously wealthy from all of this debt. The Federal Reserve system was designed to trap the U.S. government in an endless spiral of debt from which it could never possibly escape, and that mission has been accomplished. In fact, the U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created a little more than 100 years ago.

Most people like to think of big banks as “capitalist” institutions, but that is not really accurate. In the end, giant corporate banks like we have in the United States are actually collectivist institutions. They tend to greatly concentrate wealth and power, and socialists find those kinds of banks very useful.

In fact, Vladimir Lenin once said that “without big banks, socialism would be impossible.”

While there may be a bit of animosity between big government and big banks once in a while, the truth is that they are usually very closely tied to one another. We saw this close relationship very clearly during the financial crisis of 2008, and it is no secret that there is a revolving door between the boardrooms of Wall Street and the halls of power in Washington. The elite dominate both spheres, and it is not for the benefit of the rest of us.

In America today, government just keeps getting bigger and the banks just keep getting bigger. Meanwhile, the percentage of self-employed Americans is at an all-time low and the middle class is steadily dying.

What we are doing right now is clearly not working.

So why don’t we go back and do the things that we were doing when we were extremely successful as a nation?

In case you don’t know what those things were, here are some clues…

#1 “A wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” — Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

#2 “A people… who are possessed of the spirit of commerce, who see and who will pursue their advantages may achieve almost anything.” – George Washington

#3 “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses. This being the end of government, that alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own.” – James Madison, Essay on Property, 1792

#4 “Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.” – John Adams

#5 “To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816

#6 “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.” — John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1787

#7 “I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements.” – Thomas Jefferson

#8 “Beware the greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.” – Thomas Paine

#9 “If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.” – Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, November 29, 1802

#10 “All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in the Constitution or Confederation, not from a want of honor or virtue so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.” – John Adams, at the Constitutional Convention (1787)

#11 “The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” – Thomas Jefferson

#12 “Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.” – John Adams, 1765

#13 “If ever again our nation stumbles upon unfunded paper, it shall surely be like death to our body politic. This country will crash.” – George Washington

#14 “I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.” – Thomas Jefferson

#15 “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” — Benjamin Franklin

Greed Is Good? Where Will America’s Sick Obsession With Wealth And Money End?

June 5, 2014 by Michael

Everywhere you look, Americans appear to be extremely obsessed with wealth and money. These days, networks such as CNN endlessly run “news stories” with titles such as “Best cars for the super rich“. We have television shows where people proudly show off how wealthy they are, and it seems like Hollywood is putting out an endless parade of movies that glorify the lifestyles of the elite. We have hordes of motivational speakers and “life coaches” that will teach you how to be “more successful” in life, and every small movement in the stock market is carefully monitored by the mainstream news media. Even in the world of faith, we have an entire class of ministers known as “prosperity preachers”, and many of those ministers wear that label quite proudly. Yes, those that grew up in the 1980s may have been the “greed is good” generation, but the truth is that they didn’t have anything on us. As a society we love money, and we are not ashamed to admit it. In fact, there are times we absolutely revel in it. For example, Time Magazine published an article this year entitled “Science Proves It: Greed Is Good” and hardly anyone even raised an eyebrow. But where will America’s sick obsession with wealth and money end? Could it end up destroying us?

I got the idea for this article when I was browsing through CNN’s website. The following are eight “news stories” about wealth that were featured on CNN just on Thursday alone…

#1 “The richest Americans in history”

#2 “How much do you need to be happy?”

#3 “Where are the super rich?”

#4 “From broke to billionaire”

#5 “Homes: What $25 million buys around the world”

#6 “Best cars for the super rich”

#7 “America’s homes are bigger than ever”

#8 “Mega yacht with a movie theater”

This is what passes for news these days?

It has been said that we tend to talk about the things that we are obsessed with.

And CNN is clearly obsessed with wealth.

Not that there is anything wrong with having money.

If none of us had any money, we would all be homeless and starving. So the truth is that money can be very useful. But when it becomes an idol, that is when it becomes a problem.

And because we have taught entire generations of Americans that becoming wealthy is one of the primary goals in life, it is creating a tremendous amount of envy, jealousy, frustration and anger among those that have not been able to become wealthy.

In recent years, the level of bitterness and resentment that the rest of the nation has toward the very wealthy has risen to an unprecedented level. It has become exceedingly apparent that the system is designed to funnel wealth to the very top of the food chain, and many of those at the bottom of the food chain are starting to become extremely upset about this.

Since the last financial crisis, almost all of the income gains have gone to the top one percent of all income earners. The following comes from a recent Huffington Post article…

Economic statistics show that incomes for the top 1 percent of U.S. households soared 31 percent from 2009 through 2012, after adjusting for inflation, yet inched up an average of 0.4 percent for those making less. Many economists are sounding alarms that the income gap, greater now than at any time since the Depression, is hurting the economy by limiting growth in consumer spending.

And income inequality has become such a hot topic that it has even produced a New York Times bestseller by a French economist named Thomas Piketty. This is what CBS News recently had to say about his book…

His book has landed on that debate like a bomb. Piketty’s thesis: that the rate of return on capital, such as real estate, dividends and other financial assets, is racing away from the rate of growth required to maintain a healthy economy. If that trend continues for an extended period of time — if wealth becomes ever more concentrated in the hands of a few — then inequality is likely to get worse, says Piketty, 43, who started his academic career as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who now teaches at the Paris School of Economics.

Another reason “Capital” has caught the public’s attention is that inequality is evident in what are by now a host of familiar symptoms. Stagnant pay, except among the super-rich. Soaring health care and education costs. The diminished expectations commonly found in young, especially those lacking college degrees, and old alike, as retirement becomes something to endure rather than to enjoy.

It would be foolish to deny that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. Even as the stock market reaches unprecedented heights, the middle class is dying and one out of every five children in America is living in poverty.

On a global scale, the wealthiest one percent now have 65 times more wealth than the entire poorest half of the global population does.

That is an astounding figure.

Most people don’t realize this, but the ultra-wealthy have approximately 32 trillion dollars (that we know about) stashed in offshore banks around the planet. That amount of money would almost be about enough to pay off the entire U.S. national debt and buy every good and service produced in the United States for an entire year.

Meanwhile, the poorest half of the world’s population only owns about 1 percent of all global wealth, and about a billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry every night.

If greed was going to save the world, it would have done it by now. At this point, the wealthy have accumulated more wealth than they ever have before. For example, according to Zero Hedge the total amount of wealth in the U.S. has just hit a brand new record high…

Earlier today the Fed released its latest Flow of Funds report, which showed that in the first quarter household net worth rose from last quarter’s $80.3 trillion to a new record high of $81.8 trillion, driven by a $1.5 trillion increase in total assets while household liabilities were virtually unchanged in the quarter. And since the Fed is onboarding all the liabilities why should households bother with debt: that’s what the central bank balance sheet is for.

As for the proceeds, they go to the mega rich: of the $81.8 trillion in net worth, 70.4% of the total amount or $67.2 trillion, was in financial assets: the higest it has ever been courtesy of just one person: Ben Bernanke, and to a far lesser extent Janet Yellen who however is tasked with picking up Bernanke’s pieces.

But of course most people who are rich are only rich on paper.

As noted above, 67.2 trillion dollars of the total of 81.8 trillion dollars of wealth in this nation is made up of financial assets.

So what happens if there is a major financial crisis (such as the derivatives bubble bursting) which causes the total amount of financial wealth in the United States to drop by 50% or more?

What would such an event do to our country?

We are so obsessed with wealth and money that it is truly frightening to think about how we would react as a society if it was taken away.

But this current financial bubble will not last forever.

At some point it will come to an end.

When it does, will our society throw a massive temper tantrum?

Dust In The Wind: Dust Bowl Conditions Have Returned To Kansas, Oklahoma And North Texas

May 27, 2014 by Michael

In early 1978, a song entitled “Dust in the Wind” by a rock band known as Kansas shot up the Billboard charts. When Kerry Livgren penned those now famous lyrics, he probably never imagined that Dust Bowl conditions would return to his home state just a few short decades later. Sadly, that is precisely what is happening. When American explorers first traveled through north Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, they referred to it as “the Great American Desert” and they doubted that anyone would ever be able to farm it. But as history has shown, when that area gets plenty of precipitation the farming is actually quite good. Unfortunately, the region is now in the midst of a devastating multi-year drought which never seems to end. Right now, 56 percent of Texas, 64 percent of Oklahoma and 80 percent of Kansas are experiencing “severe drought”, and the long range forecast for this upcoming summer is not good. In fact, some areas in the region are already drier than they were during the worst times of the 1930s. And the relentless high winds that are plaguing that area of the country are kicking up some hellacious dust storms. For example, some parts of Kansas experienced a two day dust storm last month. And Lubbock, Texas was hit be a three day dust storm last month. We are witnessing things that we have not seen since the depths of the Dust Bowl days, and unless the region starts getting a serious amount of rain, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get any better.

Over the past two months, very high winds and bone dry conditions have made the lives of ordinary farmers in the state of Kansas extraordinarily difficult. Just check out the following excerpt from a recent article posted on Agriculture.com…

The dust has settled, but for how long no one can be sure. At any moment, the winds may blow, moving the topsoil — soil that took Mother Nature generations to craft — even farther from its origin.

One farmer reckons that precious topsoil, native to his farm in Kearny County, Kansas, now sits in a field at least 200 miles away, blown there by the relentless winds of March and April 2014.

Affecting counties in western Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and eastern Colorado, it was reminiscent of what folks in the same region faced 80 years ago.

“There were several days we couldn’t see 100 yards in front of us,” says Tom Hauser, a farmer near Ulysses, Kansas. “We didn’t know where the dust was coming from. It was moving in here from somewhere else, just like it did back in the 1930s.“

When heavy winds blow day after day but there is no rain, it creates ideal conditions for dust storms. According to the same article that I just mentioned, the average wind speed in the little community of Syracuse, Kansas has been over 50 miles an hour so far this year…

Since the beginning of 2014, the average maximum daily wind speed in Syracuse, Kansas, is 50.6 miles per hour, according to the Kansas State University Weather Data Library. In that same time, Syracuse has received just 1 inch of total precipitation.

That is a recipe for disaster.

“I’ve had to chisel more ground this year than the last 20 years put together,” says Gary Millershaski, who farms near Lakin in Kearny County. Chiseling the ground roughs it up, and helps prevent soil from blowing – at least for a little while.

I couldn’t imagine living somewhere with such high winds day after day.

But this is what farmers in the High Plains have to deal with on a constant basis.

And needless to say, when things are this dry those kinds of winds can kick up some immense dust storms. In fact, a dust storm in late April was so large that it covered most of the region…

Monday’s dust storm was so large it covered most of Kansas, western Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle and eastern Colorado, said weather service meteorologist Jeff Hutton in Dodge City. Tuesday’s dust cloud was more localized, only found in some parts of Kansas.

“That is what happens when you get drought, a lack of vegetation and you have wind,” Hutton said. “I mean, that is just the nature of the High Plains. And then that dirt that was lofted is eventually carried into eastern Kansas.”

When one of these dust storms strikes, you want to get indoors and stay there. It isn’t even safe to be driving. When you can’t even see five feet in front of you, the odds of getting into a fatal accident rise exponentially. Just check out what happened earlier this year near the little town of Liberal, Kansas…

At least 12 vehicles were involved in an pileup accident near Liberal, Kansas.

The accident happened around 1:40 p.m., nine miles southwest of Liberal. It appears that blowing dust limited visibility so severely that it cause vehicles to not see each other until it was too late and they collided. One report states that visibility was less than five feet.

According to Chief Anthony Adams of the Tyrone Fire Department in Oklahoma, six of the vehicles involved were cars and trucks, the other six were tractor trailers.

As bad as things are in Kansas right now, the truth is that things are probably even worse down in Texas. Amarillo has had 10 dust storms so far this year, and Lubbock has already had 15 days of dust storms in 2014…

The number of dust storms seems to rise with the length of the drought. Amarillo has had 10 this year; it had none in 2010. The city is about 10 percent drier now than the 42 months that ended April 30, 1936, and drier than the state’s record drought in the 1950s.

Lubbock already has seen 15 days with dust storms this year, the National Weather Service said.

And remember, we haven’t even gotten to the summer months yet.

As conditions get even worse in the heartland of America, it is going to end up deeply affecting all of us. The farmers and ranchers that live there provide a tremendous amount of food for the rest of the country, and food prices are already starting to rise at an alarming pace.

So what is going to happen if this drought extends for several more years or even longer?

Some experts such as paleoclimatologist Edward Cook have suggested that we could be in the midst of a “megadrought” that could last for decades or even centuries.

Many of those that were convinced that we could never see a return of the Dust Bowl days are now being forced to reevaluate their beliefs. According to the National Weather Service, parts of Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma are already drier than they were in the 1930s. The following is an excerpt from a recent National Geographic article entitled “Parched: A New Dust Bowl Forms in the Heartland“…

Four years into a mean, hot drought that shows no sign of relenting, a new Dust Bowl is indeed engulfing the same region that was the geographic heart of the original. The undulating frontier where Kansas, Colorado, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma converge is as dry as toast. The National Weather Service, measuring rain over 42 months, reports that parts of all five states have had less rain than what fell during a similar period in the 1930s.

It is hard to put into words how incredibly serious this all is.

A few years ago, when I wrote articles with titles such as “20 Signs That Dust Bowl Conditions Will Soon Return To The Heartland Of America“, a lot of people laughed.

Not that many people are laughing now.

The truth is that we are now in the midst of the worst drought crisis since the days of the Great Depression.

Fortunately, over the past week or so there has been some rain in some of the hardest hit areas. Let us hope that this is a sign of better things to come.

Because if this drought does not come to an end, it is going to become much, much more expensive for Americans to feed their families.

And considering the fact that 49 million Americans are already facing food insecurity, that is a threat that should not be taken lightly.

Obama Should Apologize For Treating Military Veterans Like Garbage For The Past 5 Years

May 25, 2014May 25, 2014 by Michael

This Memorial Day, Barack Obama and members of Congress will honor our veterans by wearing ribbons and laying wreaths, but what they should really do is apologize to the entire nation for treating them like human trash for the past five years. You see, the truth is that this VA scandal is nothing new. The problems at the VA hospitals have been documented over and over again for years. When Barack Obama was a U.S. senator, he served on the Veterans Affairs Committee. So as he entered the White House, he was supposed to be an expert in this area. And back in 2008, he pledged to “make the VA a leader of national health care reform so that veterans get the best care possible“. But of course that never happened. And now Obama is claiming that he only learned of the “secret waiting lists” at VA hospitals by “watching television“, and his staff says that he is “madder than hell” about it. So now that he has been publicly shamed, will Obama actually do something about it? Because our military veterans deserve far better care than what they have been getting.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but members of al-Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay actually receive far better medical treatment than our military veterans do. Just consider what former Pentagon spokesperson J.D. Gordon had to say about the matter…

Doctors and medical personnel are at their beck and call. Got a cold, a fever, a toothache, a tumor, chest or back pain, mental health issues, PTSD? No problem, come right on in. Military doctors are waiting to see you.

The VA and Gitmo eligible patient-to-health care provider ratios speak volumes.

While the Gitmo ratio is 1.5 to 1, for America’s 9 million veterans receiving VA health care and 267,930 VA employees, the ratio is 35 to 1.

Because there are not nearly enough doctors for our veterans, many of them end up waiting for months just to get an appointment with one. It was CNN that blew the lid off this story when they reported that at least 40 military vets had died while waiting for appointments in the Phoenix area…

At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.

The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor, according to a recently retired top VA doctor and several high-level sources.

For six months, CNN has been reporting on extended delays in health care appointments suffered by veterans across the country and who died while waiting for appointments and care. But the new revelations about the Phoenix VA are perhaps the most disturbing and striking to come to light thus far.

CNN was reporting on this for months, but Obama only learned about this just recently?

Considering that he is the chief executive of the entire system, how in the world is that possible?

And of course this has not just been happening in Phoenix. The following is an excerpt from a news story about a vet that died in Houston while waiting for the VA system to take care of him…

George Barraza love two things in this life: playing the electric guitar with all his heart and this country.

During the Vietnam War, Barraza proudly served in the U.S. Army.

But on April 16, Barraza, a father of three girls, a chef and an American veteran, died waiting for an appointment at the VA Medical Center in Houston.

At the time of his death, Barraza was battling heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. But his problems became much worse in September when he went to the Michael Debakey VA Medical Center in terrible pain and unable to move his hands at all.

“They said, ‘Oh, that looks like it hurts, let me give you some pain medication and send you on home,'” said Barraza’s daughter, Georgia Barraza who complains the VA staff did not treat her father’s problem that day by admitting him and caring for him, but instead gave him pain medication and an appointment to come back.

You can read the rest of this incredibly sad story right here.

And here is an example from Seattle…

Donald Douglass had a small spot on his forehead when he went to the Seattle Veterans Affairs hospital in 2011.

A biopsy confirmed it was cancerous. But it was four months before the hospital scheduled an appointment for him to have it removed — and by then, it had spread, wrapping around a facial nerve and eventually getting into his blood.

The delay proved fatal, his lawyer said — and it mirrors concerns being raised about the VA system nationally.

In fact, veteran deaths like this have been documented all over the nation. After sacrificing so much, our vets are being horribly neglected.

It is a national disgrace.

And of course the problems go far beyond waiting times. For example, down in Miami illegal drug dealing is rampant at VA facilities…

When asked why he would risk his job and speak publicly, Detective Thomas Fiore considered the question carefully before answering.

“People are dying,” he finally said, “and there are so many things that are going on there that people need to know about.”

Fiore, a criminal investigator for the VA police department in South Florida, contacted CBS4 News hoping to shed light on what he considers a culture of cover-ups and bureaucratic neglect. Among his charges: Drug dealing on the hospital grounds is a daily occurrence.

“Anything from your standard prescription drugs like OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet, and of course marijuana, cocaine, heroin, I’ve come across them all,” he explained.

And what one whistleblower at a VA hospital in North Carolina says is going on is beyond repulsive…

The whistleblower, who wishes to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, works at a large 250 acre VA hospital in North Carolina. He presented his credentials to us which checked out. The VA employee lifted the lid on a number of shocking details during an interview with Sgt. Joe Biggs.

“Recently there’s been a very rapid race to move records, boxes, change labels, whatever it may be, they’re putting them in rooms that nobody would look in….and there’s multiple times that I have seen in the past week or so them moving boxes….so apparently they’re hiding their tracks somewhere,” stated the VA employee, adding that the activity preceded an inspection of the facility, suggesting it was part of an effort to conceal evidence in the aftermath of the secret waiting list scandal.

Even more chilling was a warning sent out to VA employees at the facility which, according to the whistleblower, was meant to get across the message, “Do you see what happens to the people that try to get things straight around here, they’re not here anymore,” a tone the whistleblower described as “pretty telling.”

The employee also revealed the shocking attitude of one supervisor at the hospital towards older veterans, who asserted that older vets “should be taken outside and shot in the head because they’re worthless.” The individual still works at the hospital and was not disciplined for his comments.

What is happening to this nation?

How can we treat our military veterans like this?

The respect for veterans has gotten so low in this country that sometimes it takes more than a year to bury their dead bodies…

The bodies of 28 veterans at the L.A. County Morgue were finally moved Friday for burial to the Riverside National Cemetery.

CBS2/KCAL9 pressed the L.A. County Coroner’s Office Thursday to find out why the bodies had not yet received a proper burial after a source indicated there may have been as many as 60 veterans at the morgue for the past year and a half.

The morgue says the bodies were unclaimed and they don’t know how long the veterans were there.

The law states veterans are supposed to receive a proper burial.

Barack Obama is acting like all of this is a huge surprise to him.

Even though he worked on these issues as a U.S. Senator, and even though he has been the top executive in charge of the system for five years, he claims complete ignorance about what has been going on.

I find this very hard to believe.

The truth is that the news media has been reporting about these kinds of abuses for ages.

And personally, I have been writing about these things for years. Here are some examples…

2013: “There Already Is A Government Health Care System In America And It Is The Medical Version Of Hell”

2013: “25 Signs That Military Veterans Are Being Treated Like Absolute Trash Under The Obama Administration”

2012: “Why Does The U.S. Government Treat Military Veterans Like Human Garbage?”

2010: “Memorial Day Shocker: How The U.S. Government Really Handles Veterans Benefits – Deny, Deny, Deny Until They Die”

So how is it possible that so many people could have been talking about these things for so many years and yet Obama knew nothing?

Come on.

The truth is that Obama does not want to take any responsibility for this scandal or any other scandal.

He wants to continue to be a teflon politician that nothing ever sticks to.

But now he has absolutely no excuse for not taking action.

Military veterans are dying right now, and they need medical attention.

Hopefully Obama will step up to the plate and do the right thing.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Is The Mainstream Media Dying?

May 18, 2014 by Michael

Ratings at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have all been plummeting in recent years, and newspaper ad revenues are about a third of what they were back in the year 2000. So is the mainstream media dying? Despite what you may have heard, the mainstream media is certainly not completely dead just yet. The average American watches approximately 153 hours of television a month, and as I pointed out in a previous article, about 90 percent of the “information” that is endlessly pumped into our heads through our televisions is controlled by just six gigantic media corporations. However, there are a whole host of signs that things are changing – especially when it comes to news. More Americans than ever are losing faith in the establishment-controlled media and are seeking out alternative sources of information. Is this a trend that the big media companies are going to be able to reverse at some point?

For years, the “news business” has been dominated by CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. But now all three channels are rapidly losing viewers. According to a recently released Pew Research study, the number of prime time viewers for all three networks combined fell by 11 percent last year…

In 2013, the cable news audience, by nearly all measures, declined. The combined median prime-time viewership of the three major news channels—CNN, Fox News and MSNBC—dropped 11% to about 3 million, the smallest it has been since 2007. The Nielsen Media Research data show that the biggest decline came at MSNBC, which lost nearly a quarter (24%) of its prime-time audience. CNN, under new management, ended its fourth year in third place, with a 13% decline in prime time. Fox, while down 6%, still drew more viewers (1.75 million) than its two competitors combined (619,500 at MSNBC and 543,000 at CNN).

And the decline is far more dramatic when you look at just the key 25 to 54-year-old demographic.

From November 2012 to November 2013, CNN’s ratings for that demographic dropped by a staggering 59 percent, and MSNBC’s ratings for that demographic dropped by a staggering 52 percent.

Is this a sign that Americans are finally getting fed up with the endless propaganda being spewed by those establishment mouthpieces?

A recent survey conducted by a liberal polling firm would indeed seem to indicate that this is the case. That survey found that only 6 percent of Americans consider MSNBC to be their most trusted source for news…

NBC News and sister cable network MSNBC rank at the bottom of media outlets Americans trust most for news, with Fox News leading the way, according to a new poll from the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.

In its fifth trust poll, 35 percent said they trusted Fox news more than any other outlet, followed by PBS at 14 percent, ABC at 11 percent, CNN at 10 percent, CBS at 9 percent, 6 percent for MSNBC and Comedy Central, and just 3 percent for NBC.

And of course it is not just the big mainstream news networks that are in decline.

A recently released Pew Research study discovered that the decline of America’s newspapers continued in 2013 as well…

The Newspaper Association of America has stopped compiling quarterly reports on advertising revenue. According to its annual numbers, which were released in April 2014, overall revenue for newspapers in 2013 was $37.6 billion, a decrease of 2.6% from 2012. Within that total, combined print and digital ad revenue decreased by 7%—to $20.7 billion.

Seven percent may not sound like much, but you have to realize that these declines have been happening year after year. When you look back over a longer time frame, it really puts the massive decline that we have witnessed in advertising revenues in perspective…

It took a half century for annual newspaper print ad revenue to gradually increase from $20 billion in 1950 (adjusted for inflation in 2013 dollars) to $65.8 billion in 2000, and then it took only 12 years to go from $65.8 billion in ad revenues back to less than $20 billion in 2012, before falling further to $17.3 billion last year.

Even when revenues from digital advertising and other categories described by the NAA as “niche publications, direct marketing and non-daily publication advertising” are added to print ad revenue (see red line in chart), the combined total revenues for print, digital and other advertising last year was still only $23.56 billion in 2013 dollars, which was the lowest amount of annual ad revenue since 1954, when $23.3 billion was spent on print advertising alone.

Yes, you read those numbers correctly. As you can see from this chart, newspaper ad revenues are now about a third of what they were back in the year 2000.

That is not just a “shift” – that is a massive tsunami.

Needless to say, the big newspapers are quite distressed by all of this.

For example, “the Grey Lady” herself is essentially in a state of panic at this point. Just recently, a 96 page internal New York Times report was obtained by BuzzFeed that basically skewers the company’s current strategy when it comes to the Internet…

A 96-page internal New York Times report, sent to top executives last month by a committee led by the publisher’s son and obtained by BuzzFeed, paints a dark picture of a newsroom struggling more dramatically than is immediately visible to adjust to the digital world, a newsroom that is hampered primarily by its own storied culture.

But they still don’t understand the true cause of their decline.

It isn’t the fact that they haven’t adapted to the Internet very well that is the primary reason for their decline.

Rather, it is the fact that the American people are losing faith in the New York Times and other similar establishment mouthpieces.

News magazines are also experiencing a dramatic multi-year decline. Ad revenues are way down across the entire industry, and any publication that can keep their yearly losses to the single digits is applauded for it…

For a third year in a row, news magazines faced a difficult print advertising environment. Combined ad pages (considered a better measure than ad revenue) for the five magazines studied in this report were down 13% in 2013, following a decline of 12.5% in 2012, and about three times the rate of decline in 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Again, hardest hit was The Week, which suffered a 20% drop in ad pages. The Atlantic fell 17%, The Economist 16%, and Time about 11%, while The New Yorker managed to keep its ad pages losses in single digits (7%).

Mainstream media executives appear to be optimistic that they can reverse these declines at some point, but they simply don’t realize that there has been a fundamental paradigm shift when it comes to the news media in the United States.

The general population has lost a tremendous amount of faith in the mainstream media. They are increasingly becoming aware that it is deeply controlled by the establishment.

At this point, the charade is so out in the open that even reporters are talking about it. For example, former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson says that the “influence on the media” by political and corporate interests is “unprecedented”…

“There is unprecedented, I believe, influence on the media, not just the news, but the images you see everywhere. By well-orchestrated and financed campaign of special interests, political interests and corporations. I think all of that comes into play.“

Wow.

Remember, this is not just some outsider that is saying these things. Attkisson worked in the industry for more than 30 years.

And the American people know that they are getting very little truth from the establishment media these days. A recent Gallup survey found that only 23 percent of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the mainstream media at this point. Increasingly, Americans are turning to other sources for news and information.

This is fueling an unprecedented alternative news boom, and more Americans than ever are relying on the Internet as their main source of news. If you doubt this, just check out this chart.

30 years ago, you would have never been able to read this article. It never would have gotten past the gatekeepers that had almost total control over what Americans read, watched and listened to.

But now things have changed. The Internet has allowed ordinary Americans to communicate with each other on a scale that has never been possible before. As we share information with each other, we are increasingly becoming aware that we don’t need the mainstream media to define what reality is for us after all.

If the mainstream media really wants to keep from dying, they should at least try to start telling us the truth.

Unfortunately, that simply is not going to happen. The political and corporate interests that control the big media corporations have way too much to lose.

So we will have to continue to learn to think for ourselves and to share news and information with each other over the Internet.

In the end, we will all be much better off being unplugged from “the matrix” anyway.

The Meat Crisis Is Here: Price Of Shrimp Up 61% – 7 Million Pigs Dead – Beef At All-Time High

May 15, 2014 by Michael

As the price of meat continues to skyrocket, will it soon be considered a “luxury item” for most American families? This week we learned that the price of meat in the United States rose at the fastest pace in more than 10 years last month. Leading the way is the price of shrimp. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of shrimp has jumped an astounding 61 percent compared to a year ago. The price of pork is also moving upward aggressively thanks to a disease which has already killed about 10 percent of all of the pigs in the entire country. And the endless drought in the western half of the country has caused the size of the U.S. cattle herd to shrink to a 63 year low and has pushed the price of beef to an all-time high. This is really bad news if you like to eat meat. The truth is that the coming “meat crisis” is already here, and it looks like it is going to get a lot worse in the months ahead.

A devastating bacterial disease called “early mortality syndrome” is crippling the shrimping industry all over Asia right now. According to Bloomberg, this has pushed the price of shrimp up 61 percent over the past 12 months…

In March, shrimp prices jumped 61 percent from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The climb is mainly due to a bacterial disease known as early mortality syndrome. While the ailment has no effect on humans, it’s wreaking havoc on young shrimp farmed in Southeast Asia, shrinking supplies.

This disease has an extremely high mortality rate. In fact, according to the article that I just quoted, it kills approximately nine out of every ten shrimp that it infects…

Cases of early mortality syndrome, which destroys the digestive systems of young shrimp, were first reported in China in 2009, said Donald Lightner, a professor of animal and comparative biomedical sciences at University of Arizona in Tucson.

The disease, which kills about 90 percent of the shrimp it infects, traveled from China to Vietnam to Malaysia and then to Thailand, he said. Cases also were reported in Mexico last year, Lightner said.

A different disease is driving up the price of pork in the United States. It is known as the porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, and in less than a year it has spread to 30 states and has killed approximately 7 million pigs.

The price of bacon is already up 13.1 percent over the past year, but this is just the beginning.

It is being projected that U.S. pork production could be down by as much as 10 percent this year, and Americans could end up paying up to 20 percent more for pork by the end of 2014.

The price of beef has also moved to unprecedented heights. Thanks to the crippling drought that never seems to end in the western half of the nation, the size of the U.S. cattle herd has been declining for seven years in a row, and it is now the smallest that is has been since 1951.

Over the past year, the price of ground chuck beef is up 5.9 percent. It would have been worse, but ranchers have been slaughtering lots of cattle in order to thin their herds in a desperate attempt to get through this drought. If this drought does not end soon, the price of beef is going to go much, much higher.

As prices for shrimp, pork and beef have risen, many consumers have been eating more chicken. But the price of chicken is rising rapidly as well.

In fact, the price of chicken breast is up 12.4 percent over the past 12 months.

Unfortunately, this could just be the very beginning of this meat crisis. As I wrote about recently, some scientists are warning that we could potentially be facing “a century-long megadrought“.

And right now, there are no signs that the drought out west is letting up. Just check out the map posted below. It comes from the U.S. Drought Monitor, and it shows how the drought in California has significantly intensified since the beginning of the year…

And considering how much the rest of the nation relies on the agricultural production coming out of California, it is very alarming to see that the drought is getting even worse.

Right now, things are so bone dry in most of the state that it is easy for wildfires to get out of control. In fact, Governor Jerry Brown has just declared a state of emergency in San Diego County because of the vicious wildfires that are raging there…

Officials ordered another round of evacuations early Thursday north of San Diego as gusty winds and near 100-degree temperatures offer little relief from at least nine fires that have consumed a 14-square mile area of Southern California.

Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Diego County, which frees up special resources and funding for the firefight.

The fires, coming earlier than normal in the wildfire season, are being fed by brush and trees left brittle by prolonged drought. They are also being whipped by a Santa Ana wind system that reverses the normal flow of wind from the Pacific Ocean and creates tinderbox fire conditions.

For the first time in its 14-year-history, the U.S. Drought Monitor, a federal website that tracks drought, designated the entire state of California as in a severe (or worse) drought.

If you do not live out west, you may have no idea how very serious this all really is.

For years, I have been warning about the potential for dust bowl conditions to return to the western half of the country.

Now it is actually starting to happen.

And we already have tens of millions of people in this country that are struggling to feed themselves. If you doubt this, please see my previous article entitled “Epidemic Of Hunger: New Report Says 49 Million Americans Are Dealing With Food Insecurity“.

So what happens if drought, diseases and plagues continue to cause food production in this country to plummet?

Those that have studied these things tell us that there is a clear correlation between food prices and civil unrest. For example, the following is a short excerpt from a recent Scientific American article…

Since the beginning of 2014, riots have occurred in countries including Thailand and Venezuela. Although they’re different cultures on different continents, these mass protests movements may all have one commonality; increasing food prices may have contributed to their occurrence. The cost of food has been steadily increasing in both Thailand and Venezuela; last month demonstrators in Caracas took to the streets marching with empty pots to protest food shortages. According to Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam and fellow researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), events such as these may be anticipated by a mathematical model that examines rising food costs.

The events of 2014 aren’t without precedent; the price of food has provoked (and placated) throughout history, beginning in Imperial Rome when Augustus introduced grain subsidies. In recent years, the Middle East has been particularly affected by the cost of grain. Centuries after Egypt developed bread as we recognize it, the nation experienced a bread intifada – the country rioted for two days in January 1977 following Anwar Sadat’s decision to drastically decrease food subsidies. More recently, under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, the price of grain rose 30 percent between 2010 and 2011. Then, on January 25, 2011 a new revolution began in Egypt.

Could rapidly rising food prices cause civil unrest in the United States eventually?

It won’t happen today, and it won’t happen tomorrow, but some day it might.

Meanwhile, you might want to start carving out a significantly larger portion of the family budget for food for the foreseeable future.

The Economics Of Marriage

May 7, 2014 by Michael

The marriage rate in the United States has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded. So why is this happening? Well, the truth is that there are a lot of reasons why so many young people are choosing not to get married today. One big reason is money. Young adults in the U.S. are really struggling to find good jobs, and many are hesitant to take a big step like marriage without achieving a certain level of financial security first. And as you will see below, many young adults (especially women) do not even want to date someone that is not employed. In this harsh economic environment, money makes a big difference in the world of romance. Another big reason for the decline of marriage in America is a seismic shift in cultural attitudes. Americans (especially young people) do not place the same kind of importance on marriage and having children that they once did. Instead, more Americans are choosing to “move in together” than ever before. But if the percentage of Americans that choose to get married continues to decline, what is that going to mean for our future, and what is our country going to look like moving forward?

According to a startling new study conducted at Bowling Green University, the marriage rate in America has fallen precipitously over the past 100 years.

In 1920, there were 92.3 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women. In 2012, there were only 31.1 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women.

That is not just a new all-time low, that is a colossal demographic earthquake.

That same study found that the marriage rate has fallen by an astounding 60 percent since 1970 alone.

As a result, U.S. households look far different today than they once did.

Back in 1950, 78 percent of all households in the U.S. contained a married couple. Today, that number has declined to 48 percent.

That is a very troubling sign if you consider the family to be one of the fundamental building blocks of society.

When young people are asked why they are delaying marriage today, one of the things that always seems to get brought up is money. There is a feeling (especially among men) that you should achieve a certain level of financial security before making the big plunge.

And it is a fact that the more money you have, the more likely you are to be married. Just check out the following stats about income and marriage from a recent Business Insider article…

83% of 30- to 50-year-old men in the top 10% of annual earnings are married today, whereas only 64% of median earners and half of those in the bottom 25th percentile are hitched.

Now, compare that to men in 1970, whose marriage rates were 95% (top earners), 91% (median earners), and 60% (bottom 25th percentile of earners), respectively.

A lot of people like to think that “love is the only thing that matters” when it comes to marriage, but the cold, hard numbers tell a different story. In fact, one very shocking survey discovered that 75 percent of all American women would have a problem even dating an unemployed man…

Of the 925 single women surveyed, 75 percent said they’d have a problem with dating someone without a job. Only 4 percent of respondents asked whether they would go out with an unemployed man answered “of course.”

“Not having a job will definitely make it harder for men to date someone they don’t already know,” Irene LaCota, a spokesperson for It’s Just Lunch, said in a press release. “This is the rare area, compared to other topics we’ve done surveys on, where women’s old-fashioned beliefs about sex roles seem to apply.”

Unfortunately for American men, there simply are not enough good jobs to go around. In fact, the number of working age Americans without a job has increased by 27 million since the year 2000, and businesses in the U.S. are being destroyed faster than they are being created.

Due to a lack of economic opportunities, a rising percentage of our young people have been giving up on the “real world” and have been moving back in with Mom and Dad. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “29 Percent Of All U.S. Adults Under The Age Of 35 Are Living With Their Parents“. And when you break down the numbers, you find that young men are almost twice as likely to move back in with their parents as young women are.

But economic factors alone certainly do not account for the tremendous decline in the marriage rate that we have witnessed in this country. Shifting cultural attitudes also play a huge role.

A whole host of opinion polls and surveys show that Americans simply do not value marriage and having children as much as they once did. For example, the Pew Research Center has found that the younger you are, the more likely you are to believe that “marriage is becoming obsolete” and that “children don’t need a mother and a father to grow up happily”.

In fact, an astounding 44 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket now believe that “marriage is becoming obsolete”.

And why should they get married? Our movies and television shows constantly tell them that they can have the benefits of being married without ever having to make a lifelong commitment.

This sounds particularly good to men, since they can run around and have sex with lots of different women without ever having to “settle down”.

But there are most definitely consequences for this behavior. The “sexual revolution” has left behind countless broken hearts, shattered dreams, unintended pregnancies and devastated families.

In addition, the U.S. has become a world leader when it comes to sexually-transmitted disease.

It is hard to believe this number, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approximately one-third of the entire population of the United States (110 million people) currently has a sexually transmitted disease.

So nobody should claim that the “sexual revolution” has not had any consequences.

But most Americans don’t actually run around and sleep with lots of different people at the same time. Instead, most Americans seem to have adopted a form of “serial monogamy“.

In America today, most people only sleep with one person at a time, and “living together” is being called “the new marriage”.

According to the CDC, 74 percent of all 30-year-old women in the U.S. say that they have cohabitated with a romantic partner without being married to them, and it has been estimated that 65 percent of all couples that get married in the United States live together first.

Many believe that by “trying out” the other person first that it will give them a much better chance of making marriage work if they eventually do choose to go down that path. Unfortunately, that does not seem to work out very well in practice. In fact, the divorce rate for couples that live together first is significantly higher than for those that do not.

And when it comes to divorce, America is the king.

For years, the U.S. has had the highest divorce rate in the developed world.

But it wasn’t always this way. Back in 1920, less than one percent of all women in the United States were currently divorced or separated. Today, approximately 15 percent of all women in the United States are currently divorced or separated.

So why are so many people getting divorced?

Of course there are a lot of factors involved (including money), but a big one is cheating. According to one survey, 41 percent of all spouses admit to infidelity. Many Americans simply find it very difficult to stay committed to one person for an extended period of time.

As a result of what I have discussed so far, it is easy to see why people in our society are so lonely and so isolated. Less people are getting married, more divorces are happening and couples are having fewer children. This means that our households are smaller and we have far fewer family connections than we once did.

100 years ago, 4.52 people were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.

That is an astounding figure.

And the United States has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.

But we weren’t meant to live alone. We were meant to love and to be loved.

Often, those that are being hurt the most by our choices as a society are the children. They need strong, stable homes to grow up in, and we are not providing that for millions upon millions of them.

When you look at just women under the age of 30 in the United States, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.

That would have been unimaginable 100 years ago.

And of course when there is no marriage involved, a lot of times the guy does not stick around. At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father, and in many impoverished areas of the country the rate is well over 50 percent.

In addition, women are waiting much longer to have children than they once did.

In 1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4 years old. Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6 years old.

The biggest reason for this, once again, is money…

In the United States, three-quarters of people surveyed by Gallup last year said the main reason couples weren’t having more children was a lack of money or fear of the economy.

The trend emerges as a key gauge of future economic health — the growth in the pool of potential workers, ages 20-64 — is signaling trouble ahead. This labor pool had expanded for decades, thanks to the vast generation of baby boomers. Now the boomers are retiring, and there are barely enough new workers to replace them, let alone add to their numbers.

We are waiting longer to have children and having fewer of them, but those children are needed for the economic future of this country.

Fifteen years from now, one out of every five Americans will be over the age of 65. All of those elderly Americans are going to want the rest of us to keep the financial promises that were made to them. But that is going to turn out to be quite impossible. We simply do not have enough people.

In the end, the economics of marriage does not just affect those that are thinking of getting married or those that are already married.

The truth is that the economics of marriage affects all of us.

So what do you think is in store for the future of the institution of marriage in this country?

Please feel free to share what you believe by posting a comment below…

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