Once upon a time in America, virtually anyone with a high school education and the willingness to work hard could get a good job. Fifty years ago a “good job” would enable someone to own a home, buy a car, take a couple of vacations a year and retire with a decent pension. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. Every single year the number of “good jobs” in the United States actually shrinks even as our population continues to grow. Where in the world did all of those good jobs go? Economists toss around terms such as “outsourcing” and “offshoring” to describe what is happening, but most ordinary Americans don’t really grasp what those terms mean. So what is outsourcing? Well, it essentially means sending work somewhere else. In the context of this article I will be using those terms to describe the thousands of manufacturing facilities and the millions of jobs that have been sent overseas. Over the past several decades, the U.S. economy has become increasingly merged into the emerging “one world economy”. Thanks to the WTO, NAFTA and a whole host of other “free trade” agreements, the internationalist dream of a truly “global marketplace” is closer than ever before. (Read More...)
American Hellholes
The U.S. economy is dying and we are heading for the next Great Depression. The talking heads in the mainstream media love to spin the economic numbers around and around and they love to make it sound like the economy is improving, but the truth is that it doesn’t take a genius to see what is happening to the U.S. economic system. All over the nation many of our greatest cities are being slowly but surely transformed into post-apocalyptic wastelands. All over the mid-Atlantic, all along the Gulf coast, all throughout the “rust belt” and all over the entire state of California cities that once had incredibly vibrant economies are being turned into rotting, post-industrial hellholes. In many U.S. cities, the “real” rate of unemployment is over 30 percent. There are some communities that will start depressing you almost the moment that you drive into them. It is almost as if all of the hope has been sucked right out of those communities. If you live in one of those American hellholes you know what I am talking about. Sadly, it is not just a few cities that are becoming hellholes. This is happening in the east, in the west, in the north and in the south. America is literally being transformed right in front of our eyes. (Read More...)
24 Signs Of Economic Decline In America
The United States is in the middle of a devastating long-term economic decline and it is getting really hard to deny it. Over the past year I have included literally thousands of depressing statistics in my articles about the U.S. economy. I have done this in order to make an overwhelming case that the U.S. economy is in deep decline and is dying a little bit more every single day. Until we understand exactly how bad our problems are we will never be willing to accept the solutions. The truth is that our leaders have absolutely wrecked the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen. Most Americans just assume that we will always experience overwhelming prosperity, but that is not anywhere close to the truth. We are not guaranteed anything. Our manufacturing base has been gutted, the number of jobs is declining, more Americans are dependent on government handouts than ever before, our dollar is dying and as a nation we are absolutely drowning in debt. The economists that are trumpeting an “economic recovery” and that are declaring that the U.S. economy will soon be “better than ever” are delusional. We really are steamrolling toward a complete and total economic collapse and our leaders are doing nothing to stop it. (Read More...)
Even Ben Stein Is Warning That An Economic Collapse Is Coming
He sure has come a long way since “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”. During a recent television segment for CBS, Ben Stein declared that “the tea leaves are ominous” and he warned that an economic collapse may be coming. In particular, Ben Stein is deeply concerned about inflation. During his recent appearance on CBS, Stein proclaimed that the Federal Reserve is “just shoving money out the door as fast as it can” and that this could have horrific consequences for the U.S. financial system. Sadly, Ben Stein is exactly right on this point. The Federal Reserve has already injected enough money into the financial system to create an inflationary disaster. Fortunately most of this liquidity is still being held by the banks (this will be further explored below), but once all of that money starts getting released into the financial system it is going to unleash economic chaos. (Read More...)
20 Signs That A Horrific Global Food Crisis Is Coming
In case you haven’t noticed, the world is on the verge of a horrific global food crisis. At some point, this crisis will affect you and your family. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is going to happen. Crazy weather and horrifying natural disasters have played havoc with agricultural production in many areas of the globe over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the price of oil has begun to skyrocket. The entire global economy is predicated on the ability to use massive amounts of inexpensive oil to cheaply produce food and other goods and transport them over vast distances. Without cheap oil the whole game changes. Topsoil is being depleted at a staggering rate and key aquifers all over the world are being drained at an alarming pace. Global food prices are already at an all-time high and they continue to move up aggressively. So what is going to happen to our world when hundreds of millions more people cannot afford to feed themselves? (Read More...)
Political Theater: It Turns Out That The Republicans And The Democrats Were Both Lying To Us And That The Real Budget Cut Number Is Far Less Than $38.5 Billion
Guess what? The Democrats and the Republicans are both lying to us again. So what else is new? The truth is that the great “budget crisis” which supposedly took us to the verge of a government shutdown was just a whole bunch of political theater. Even the Associated Press is declaring that our politicians used “accounting sleight of hand” to reach the $38.5 billion budget cut figure. Not that $38.5 billion was an impressive number to begin with. $38.5 billion would just be one percent of the federal budget. But once you strip away the accounting charades, the real budget cut number is somewhere around 14 billion dollars. It turns out that the “budget cuts” include money left unspent from previous years, earmarks that were going nowhere, unused census money and programs that Obama was already planning to cut. The more you examine the “budget deal”, the more it becomes obvious that the Republicans and the Democrats had no intention of doing anything serious about our debt problems. The U.S. government is still going to run a record-setting budget deficit in 2011 and both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame. (Read More...)
65 Ways That Everything That You Think That You Own Is Being Systematically Taken Away From You
Everything that you own is slowly being taken away from you. It is being done purposely and it is being done by design. Many Americans like to think of themselves as “well off”, but as will be demonstrated below, we don’t “own” nearly as much as we think that we do. The truth is that most of us have to frantically run around accumulating wealth as rapidly as we can so that we can somehow stay ahead of the rate that wealth is being taken away from us. The entire system is designed to take what you have away from you. There are many ways that this is accomplished – taxation, inflation, debt, interest, fines, fees, tickets, government seizures and good old-fashioned corporate greed. If you tried to just sit back and do nothing but hold on to the wealth that you already have you would find out that it would disappear rather quickly. When you take the time to really analyze our system the conclusion is undeniable – everything that you think that you own is being systematically taken away from you. (Read More...)
Money Problems That Never Seem To End: 25 Reasons To Be Absolutely Disgusted With The U.S. Economy
It seems like wherever you turn there is bad news for the U.S. economy. Unemployment is rampant, the cost of gasoline is going up, the cost of food is going up and American families are getting poorer. Millions of jobs continue to leave the country and everyone is wondering why it seems like the “American Dream” is dying. American consumers are absolutely swamped with staggering levels of credit card debt, student loan debt and mortgage debt and each year the consumer debt crisis only seems to get worse. For millions of American families the money problems never seem to end. Meanwhile, our politicians are doing next to nothing to fix our horrific national debt problem. So yes, there are a whole lot of reasons to be absolutely disgusted with the U.S. economy. We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and anyone with half a brain can see that we are heading for complete and total disaster. (Read More...)