How A North Korean Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Could Kill Millions And Turn America Into A Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

This is why North Korea’s test of an intercontinental ballistic missile is so important.  North Korea had test fired a total of 22 missiles so far this year, but this latest one showed that nobody on the globe is out of their reach.  In fact, General Mattis is now admitting that “North Korea can basically threaten everywhere in the world”, and that includes the entire continental United States.  In addition to hitting individual cities with nukes, there is also the possibility that someday North Korea could try to take down the entire country with an EMP attack.  If the North Koreans detonated a single nuclear warhead several hundred miles above the center of the country, it would destroy the power grid and fry electronics from coast to coast.

I would like you to think about what that would mean for a few moments.  Suddenly there would be no power at home, at work or at school.  Since nearly all of our vehicles rely on computerized systems, you wouldn’t be able to go anywhere and nobody would be able to get to you.  And you wouldn’t be able to contact anyone because all phones would be dead.  Basically, pretty much everything electronic would be dead.  I am talking about computers, televisions, GPS devices, ATMs, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, credit card readers, gas pumps, cash registers, hospital equipment, traffic lights, etc.

For the first couple of days life would continue somewhat normally, but then people would soon start to realize that the power isn’t coming back on and panic would begin to erupt.

The intercontinental ballistic missile that North Korea just launched traveled almost 1,000 kilometers and reached a maximum altitude of 4,500 kilometers.  We have been told for decades that this would never be allowed to happen, but now it has happened

This is concerning for one big reason: according to General Mattis, the North Korean ICBM “went higher, frankly, than any previous” and “North Korea can basically threaten everywhere in the world.” This was confirmed by North Korea missile analyst, Shea Cotton, who cited Allthingsnuclear author David Wright, and who told the BBC that the initial estimates of the ICBM test mean that North Korea can now reach New York and Washington DC.

If we had been working hard to develop our anti-missile technology all these years, this wouldn’t be a problem.

But at this point we are way behind the Russians in this regard, and there is a very real possibility that a missile launched by the North Koreans could make it through the very limited anti-missile defenses that we do have.

Once upon a time, discussions about a North Korean EMP threat were mostly hypothetical, but now that has completely changed.  North Korea has clearly demonstrated that they are able to deliver such an attack, and last September Kim Jong Un publicly admitted that North Korea intended to develop this capability

But most reporters missed a key threat that appeared at the bottom of Kim’s public statement, when he bragged that North Korea had harnessed “a multi-functional thermonuclear nuke with great destructive power which can be detonated at high altitudes for super-powerful EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attack according to strategic goals.”

So now we know. Launching an electromagnetic pulse attacks against its enemies is one of North Korea’s strategic goals. And for North Korea, the United States is the top enemy.

And like I said earlier, all it would take would be a single well placed nuclear detonation to fry electronics from coast to coast.  The following comes from the Daily Mail

Theoretically, a sufficiently powerful bomb detonated at an altitude of 249 miles would wipe out all electronics in the US, save the southernmost top of Florida and the easternmost states – as well as affecting Canada and Mexico.

Without power, nothing would get distributed.  That means that very rapidly there would be no food, no water and no medicine available in your community.  An article posted by Fox News this week used the term “post-apocalyptic” to describe what we would be facing…

It all starts to sound very post-apocalyptic when you realize this means no lights or other electric-powered devices in homes and businesses, no water filtration, no regional food hubs, no transportation grid – none of the things we take for granted in modern civilization.

Like I stated earlier, things would be relatively fine for a few days, but then once everyone realizes that the power isn’t coming back on there would be chaos on a scale unlike anything we have ever seen before.  The following comes from an article by Mac Slavo

The first 24 – 48 hours after such an occurrence will lead to confusion among the general population as traditional news acquisition sources like television, radio and cell phone networks will be non-functional.

Within a matter of days, once people realize the power might not be coming back on and grocery store shelves start emptying, the entire system will begin to delve into chaos.

Within 30 days a mass die off will have begun as food supplies dwindle, looters and gangs turn to violent extremes, medicine can’t be restocked and water pump stations fail.

So what kind of a “mass die off” would we be talking about?

Well, some of the top experts in the field believe that “up to 90 percent of all Americans” could end up dead if the power outage lasted long enough…

William Graham, chairman of the former EMP commission and its former chief of staff, Peter Vincent Pry, warned the hearing that such an attack could “shut down the US electric power grid for an indefinite period, leading to the death within a year of up to 90 percent of all Americans.

Others believe that the figure would be lower, but pretty much everyone agrees that the death toll would be in the millions.

This is one of our greatest strategic vulnerabilities, and our power grid could be hardened against an EMP attack for just a few billion dollars.  This is something that I am pushing very hard for, but right now it is just not a priority for our leaders in Washington.

In fact, they have actually pulled funding from the commission that was looking into the EMP threat…

On Sept. 30, the Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat of Electromagnetic Pulse to the United States of America shut its doors after a failure to secure funding from Congress.

Sometimes I find it difficult to come up with the words to describe how incredibly foolish Congress is being.

An EMP attack is a greater threat than ever before, and yet Congress didn’t even want to come up with a little bit of funding for the commission that was working on a plan to protect us.

This is yet another example that shows that we need new leadership on Capitol Hill, because right now the people that we have “representing” us in Washington seem to be completely and utterly clueless about almost everything.

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

The Globalists Are Systematically Destroying America’s Middle Class

When people are dependent on the government they are much easier to control.  We are often told that we are not “compassionate” when we object to the endless expansion of government social programs, but that is not how the debate should be framed.  In America today, well over 100 million people receive money from the federal government each month, and the number of Americans that are truly financially independent is continually shrinking.  In fact, only 25 percent of all Americans have more than $10,000 in savings right now according to one survey.  If we eventually get to the point where virtually all of us are dependent on the government for our continued existence, that would give the globalists a very powerful tool of control.  In the end, they want as many of us dependent on the government as possible, because those that are dependent on the government are a lot less likely to fight against their agenda.

Back in 1992, the bottom 90 percent of American income earners brought in more than 60 percent of the country’s income.  But last year that figure slipped to just 49.7 percent.  The wealth of our society is increasingly being concentrated at the very top, and the middle class is steadily being eroded.  Surveys have found that somewhere around two-thirds of the country is living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time, and so living on the edge has become a way of life for most Americans.

Earlier today, I came across a Business Insider article that was bemoaning the fact that the U.S. economy seems to be rather directionless at this point…

  • We do not have a real plan for health care, and costs continue to gobble up American wages.
  • We do not have a plan for dealing with globalization and economic change, but that change continues to shape our economy.
  • We don’t have a plan to update our decrepit infrastructure.
  • The one plan we did have — the Federal Reserve’s post-financial crisis program — is about to be unwound, marking the end of the last clear, executable plan to bolster America’s economy.

Ultimately, the truth is that we don’t actually need some sort of “central plan” for our economy.  We are supposed to be a free market system that is not guided and directed by central planners, but many Americans don’t even understand the benefits of free market capitalism anymore.

However, that Business Insider article did make a great point about globalization.   Most people don’t realize that our economy is slowly but surely being integrated into a global economic system.   This is really bad for American workers, because now they are being merged into a global labor pool in which they must compete directly for jobs with workers in other countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.

Even down in Mexico, many autoworkers are only making $2.25 an hour

Most of the workers at the new Audi factory in the state of Puebla, inaugurated in 2016 and assembling the Audi Q4 SUV, which carries a sticker price in the US of over $40,000 for base versions, make $2.25 an hour, according to the Union.

Volkswagen, which owns Audi, started building Beetles in Puebla in 1967 and has since created a vast manufacturing empire in Mexico, with vehicles built for consumers in Mexico, the US, Canada, and Latin American markets.

Volkswagen, Ford, GM, or any of the global automakers, which can manufacture just about anywhere in the world, always search for cheap labor to maximize the bottom line.

Would you want to work for $2.25 an hour?

Over time, millions of good paying jobs have been leaving high wage countries and have been going to low wage countries.  The United States has lost more than 70,000 manufacturing facilities since China joined the WTO, and this is one of the biggest factors that has eroded the middle class.

In a desperate attempt to maintain our standard of living, we have gone into increasing amounts of debt.  Of course our federal government is now 20 trillion dollars in debt, but on an individual level we are doing the same thing.  Today, American consumers are over 12 trillion dollars in debt, and it gets worse with each passing day.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and most Americans have become debt slaves at this point.  This is something that Paul Craig Roberts commented on recently

Americans carry on by accumulating debt and becoming debt slaves. Many can only make the minimum payment on their credit card and thus accumulate debt. The Federal Reserve’s policy has exploded the prices of financial assets. The result is that the bulk of the population lacks discretionary income, and those with financial assets are wealthy until values adjust to reality.

As an economist I cannot identify in history any economy whose affairs have been so badly managed and prospects so severely damaged as the economy of the United States of America. In the short/intermediate run policies that damage the prospects for the American work force benefit what is called the One Percent as jobs offshoring reduces corporate costs and financialization transfers remaining discretionary income in interest and fees to the financial sector. But as consumer discretionary incomes disappear and debt burdens rise, aggregate demand falters, and there is nothing left to drive the economy.

This debt-based system continuously funnels wealth toward the very top of the pyramid, because it is the people at the very top that hold all of the debts.

Each year it gets worse, and most Americans would be absolutely stunned to hear that the top one percent now control 38.6 percent of all wealth in the United States…

The richest 1% of families controlled a record-high 38.6% of the country’s wealth in 2016, according to a Federal Reserve report published on Wednesday.

That’s nearly twice as much as the bottom 90%, which has seen its slice of the pie continue to shrink.

The bottom 90% of families now hold just 22.8% of the wealth, down from about one-third in 1989 when the Fed started tracking this measure.

So how do we fix this?

Well, the truth is that we need to go back to a non-debt based system that does not funnel all of the wealth to the very top of the pyramid.  Unfortunately, most Americans don’t even realize that our current debt-based system is fundamentally flawed, and it will probably take an unprecedented crisis in order to wake people up enough to take action.

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

The Middle Class Is Being Destroyed: Now Only 25 Percent Of All Americans Have $10,000 Or More In Savings

We just got more evidence that the middle class is being systematically eviscerated.  According to a GOBankingRates survey that was just released, more than half the country has less than $1,000 in savings.  So in the event of a major economic disaster of some kind, over 50 percent of the nation is going to be completely out of cash almost immediately.  For years I have been writing about the steady decline of the middle class in the United States, but I still get astounded by numbers such as these.  According to this new survey, only 25 percent of all Americans have $10,000 or more in savings at this point…

$0 saved: 39 percent
Less than $1,000 saved: 18 percent
$1,000 to $4,999 saved: 12 percent
$5,000 to $9,999 saved: 6 percent
$10,000 or more saved: 25 percent

Other surveys have come up with similar results.  One discovered that about two-thirds of the country is living paycheck to paycheck, and another which was conducted by the Federal Reserve found that 44 percent of all U.S. adults do not even have enough money “to cover an unexpected $400 expense”.

Most of us have grown accustomed to barely scraping by from month to month.  But that is not what being “middle class” is supposed to be about.  If you are in the “middle class” you should be making more than you are spending and building long-term wealth.

But just like our federal government, most of us are spending money like there is no tomorrow.  If we don’t have quite enough money for what we want to do, we just borrow more.  Right now, U.S. consumers are more than 12 trillion dollars in debt, and it is impossible to build any real wealth when you are constantly drowning in red ink.

We are willingly enslaving ourselves, but most people were never even taught about the dangers of going into too much debt.

Another major factor in the decline of the middle class is the fact that we have been shipping millions of good paying jobs overseas.  We have lost more than 70,000 manufacturing facilities since China joined the WTO, and we have been replacing good paying manufacturing jobs with low paying service jobs.

Without enough good paying jobs, our middle class has been steadily shrinking.  In 2015, the middle class became a minority of the population in the United States for the first time ever recorded.

If you go back to the early 1970s, the middle class was well over 60 percent of the population, but now that number is hovering in the high 40s.

And things continue to get even worse.  For example, NBC News recently reported that the number of Americans that can’t afford to be living in their own homes has more than doubled since 2001…

Over 38 million American households can’t afford their housing, an increase of 146 percent in the past 16 years, according to a recent Harvard housing report.

Under federal guidelines, households that spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs are considered “cost burdened” and will have difficulty affording basic necessities like food, clothing, transportation and medical care.

But the number of Americans struggling with their housing costs has risen from almost 16 million in 2001 to 38 million in 2015, according to the Census data crunched in the report. That’s more than double.

If we want to turn things around for the middle class, we need more entrepreneurs and more small businesses.

Small businesses have traditionally been the primary engine for job growth in this country.  But instead of encouraging small businesses to start and grow, the federal government has been absolutely killing small businesses with red tape and high taxes.

If I win my election, I am going to do all that I can to fight for entrepreneurs and small businesses.  Today, the percentage of Americans that work for themselves is close to a record low, and we desperately need to get that turned around.

So I I go to Congress, one of the first things I plan to do is to push for the elimination of the “self-employment tax”.

If you are an entrepreneur, then you already know how painful that particular tax can be.

We have got to get this economy growing again.  Barack Obama was the only president in our entire history never to have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least 3 percent, and overall we have not had a year when our economy grew by at least 3 percent in over a decade.

And as I noted earlier this week, “our economy has still only grown at an average rate of just 1.33 percent a year over the last 10 years.”

Is that acceptable to you?

I hope not, because it sure is not acceptable to me.

What we have been doing is simply not working.  In fact, if we were not propping up the economy with the greatest debt binge in human history, we would be a in a rip-roaring economic depression right now.

If we want America to once again become the greatest economic machine on the planet, we need to do the things that made us great in the first place.  We need an extremely limited federal government that stays out of the way of business, and we need to once again embrace the principles of free market capitalism.

Free markets work tremendously well if you allow them to do so.

But if we continue to march down the road toward big government socialism, we will get what we deserve, and it won’t be pretty.

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

Hillary Almost Proposed ‘A Universal Basic Income’ In 2016, And The Idea Is Catching Fire Among Grassroots Democrats

Should you get free money from the U.S. government every month simply for being alive?  That may sound like a crazy idea to many of us, but the truth is that this will likely be one of the biggest political issues in the 2020 presidential election.  At this point, 40 percent of all Americans already “prefer socialism to capitalism”, and the concept of a “universal basic income” is starting to catch fire among grassroots Democrats.  Many liberals are convinced that the time has come to fight for the right to “a minimum standard of living”, and one study by a “left-leaning” group found that giving every adult in the country $1,000 each month would increase the size of the U.S. economy by more than 2 trillion dollars

Giving every adult in the United States a $1,000 cash handout per month would grow the economy by $2.5 trillion by 2025, according to a new study on universal basic income.

The report was released in August by the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. Roosevelt research director Marshall Steinbaum, Michalis Nikiforos at Bard College’s Levy Institute, and Gennaro Zezza at the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio in Italy co-authored the study.

What an incredible idea, eh?

All we have to do is give out free stuff and the economy grows like magic.  And the study also discovered that the larger the universal basic income is, the more the economy would grow.

So why not make it $10,000 a month for everyone?

Well, it turns out that there is a catch.  According to the study, the economy only grows if the universal basic income is funded by deficit spending.  If we have to raise taxes to pay for it, there is no positive benefit to the economy at all

These estimates are based on a universal basic income paid for by increasing the federal deficit. As part of the study, the researchers also calculated the effect to the economy of paying for the cash handouts by increasing taxes. In that case, there would be no net benefit to the economy, the report finds.

Oh.

What a bummer.

Getting free stuff from the government always sounds like a great idea until you realize that we are going to end up paying for it one way or another.

Unfortunately, that little detail isn’t stopping potential Democratic presidential candidates such as Mark Zuckerberg from “exploring” the idea.  And actually, it is being reported that Hillary Clinton almost made a “universal basic income” part of her platform in 2016

In her new book “What Happened,” and in a recent subsequent interview with Vox Editor-in-Chief Ezra Klein, Clinton explains how she seriously considered including a version of universal basic income — a radical solution to poverty, currently being tested in cities and countries around the world — as one of her platforms in the 2016 US presidential election.

The platform would have been called “Alaska for America,” in homage to the state’s Permanent Dividend Fund. Every year since 1982, Alaskans have received a yearly check — typically ranging from $1,000 to $2,000 — as a kickback from the pot of money that has been set aside in case oil reserves dry up.

If the left is ever able to get this implemented, do you think that we will ever be able to take it away?

Over time, government just keeps getting bigger and bigger and so does our national debt.  In fact, we just hit a major milestone in that regard.  According to CNS News, we just surpassed the 20 trillion dollar mark for the first time ever…

The federal debt officially surpassed $20 trillion for the first time on Friday, as the debt subject to the legal limit set by Congress jumped $317,645,000,000 in one day–following President Donald Trump’s signing of a spending-and-debt-limit deal that will fund the government through Dec. 8.

If the left wants a “universal basic income”, they are going to have to get the money from somewhere.  Our budget deficit is already larger “than the entire GDP of Argentina”, and hard working Americans are already being taxed to death.

The truth is that the money simply isn’t there.  As it is, we need to dramatically cut back our borrowing because the path that we are currently on leads to national suicide.  Just consider the following numbers

Here’s the problem: the national debt is growing MUCH faster than the US economy. In Fiscal Year 2016, for example, the debt grew by 7.84%.

Yet even when including the ‘benefits’ of inflation, the US economy only grew by 2.4% over the same period.

This is not even close to the realm of being sustainable.  We are steamrolling toward an inevitable financial collapse, and yet most Americans don’t seem to care.

And thanks to our rapidly aging population, our entitlement spending is set to absolutely explode in coming years.  The following comes from David Stockman

The Federal spending machine is almost entirely on autopilot and heading for disaster owing to ballooning populations and debt. Ten years from now the combined cost of mandatory programs and debt service will reach $5.12 trillion compared to just $2.87 trillion during FY 2018.

Entitlement spending will be nearly double — even if Congress took a 10-year recess!

As shown below, that means the Federal spending share of GDP is now inexorably climbing toward 30% owing to baby boom retirements, even as revenue under current law is stuck at about 18% of GDP. The CBO’s latest projection of the widening fiscal gap — soon more than 10% of GDP annually — leaves nothing to the imagination.

There is no such thing as “free money”.  In the end, we all have to pay for any “free stuff” that the government gives out.

But the “free stuff army” is going to continue to demand more free stuff from the government, and the Democrats are going to be more than happy to give it to them.

To many of you this may sound like complete and utter insanity, but the truth is that the path that we are already on is completely insane as well.  If we don’t find a way to right the ship, it is just a matter of time before it goes under, and anyone that tries to tell you otherwise is not being straight with you.

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

Debt Nightmare: Does Anyone Actually Care That Our Exploding National Debt Is Destroying Our Future?

When will America finally wake up?  The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we now have a colossal 20 trillion dollar chain around our collective ankles.  We have willingly enslaved ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, and yet our addiction is so insatiable that we continue to add more than 100 million dollars to our debt load every single hour of every single day.  The national debt is sitting at a grand total of $20,162,176,797,904.13 at this moment, but now that the debt ceiling has been lifted that number is expected to shoot up very rapidly toward 21 trillion dollars by the end of the year.  The national debt had been held down by accounting tricks to keep it under the debt limit for many months, but every time this has happened before we have seen the national debt absolutely explode back to projected levels once the debt ceiling was raised.

But very few of our “leaders” in Washington seem to care that we are in the process of committing national suicide.  There is no possible way that we will be able to continue to be the most powerful economy on the planet if we continue down this road.  During Obama’s eight years in the White House, we added more than 9 trillion dollars to the national debt.  That certainly improved things in the short-term, because if we could go back and take 9 trillion dollars out of the economy over the past 8 years we would be in an absolutely nightmarish economic depression right now.

But even with all of this borrowing and spending, our economy has still only grown at an average rate of just 1.33 percent a year over the last 10 years.

And by going into so much debt, we are literally destroying the future for our children and our grandchildren.

What we are doing to them is beyond criminal, and people should be going to prison over this.  But instead we just keep rewarding these Congress critters by sending the same cast of characters back to Washington over and over again.

Are we insane?

The feds are now projecting that the official yearly budget deficit will reach 1.4 trillion dollars by 2027.  Of course federal projections always end up being far more optimistic than reality.

And we are already spending about 500 billion dollars a year just on interest on the national debt, and by 2027 that number is projected to jump to 760 billion dollars a year.

This is complete and utter insanity, and yet we just can’t control ourselves.  The government continues to throw around money as if there is no tomorrow, and our tax dollars are being wasted on some of the most ridiculous things imaginable.

For instance, the U.S. military is spending 42 million dollars each year on Viagra.

We must stop this madness, and we must stop it now.  I really like how an editorial in the Houston Chronicle made this point…

Tax-and-spend politics are bad, but borrow-and-spend is worse. While we have some control over whether our lawmakers raise taxes, our children and grandchildren don’t get a vote on whether we burden them with debt.

Over the long run, huge government debt takes cash out of the economy and drives up interest rates, slowing economic growth and hurting private enterprise.

To protect the U.S. economy, Republicans need to nip plans to eliminate the debt ceiling in the bud and then get to work balancing the federal budget.

Will we ever learn?

Since the beginning of our nation, many of our most prominent statesmen have been warning about the dangers of accumulating government debt.  For example, during his farewell address President George Washington instructed the country to “avoid … the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions to discharge the debts, no throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”

And Thomas Jefferson famously said that he wished that he could have added one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would have banned government borrowing…

“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 it’s constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.”

This is one of the primary reasons why we must abolish the Federal Reserve system.  The Federal Reserve was actually designed to create a government debt spiral from which we could never possibly escape.  That is why the size of our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger since 1913, and we are never going to permanently solve our national debt problem until we get rid of the Fed.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but the path that we are currently on is not sustainable by any definition.  Debt levels are growing much, much faster than GDP, and that is a recipe for disaster.  The following is an excerpt from one of my previous articles

We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world.  In 1980, total government and personal debt in the United States was just over the 3 trillion dollar mark, but today it has surpassed 41 trillion dollars.  That means that it has increased by almost 14 times since Ronald Reagan was first elected president.  I am searching for words to describe how completely and utterly insane this is, but I am coming up empty.  We are slowly but surely committing national suicide, and yet most Americans don’t even understand what is happening.

According to 720 Global, total government debt plus total personal debt in the United States was just over 3 trillion dollars in 1980.  That broke down to $38,552 per household, and that figure represented 79 percent of median household income at the time.

Today, total government debt plus total personal debt in the United States has blown past the 41 trillion dollar mark.  When you break that down, it comes to $329,961.34 per household, and that figure represents 584 percent of median household income.

Sadly, most people are entirely clueless about what we are doing to ourselves.  Investors are the most optimistic that they have been in years, and most of the talking heads on television seem to believe that the party can go on indefinitely.

But that is simply not possible.

And the same thing is true from a global perspective as well.  The following comes from Chris Martenson

First: our entire economic model, which dependent on borrowing at a faster rate than income (GDP) grows, is something that simply cannot be maintained at its current rate or level. Check.

Second: depleting species, soils and aquifers are all wildly unsustainable practices that are accelerating. Check.

Last (and most glaring of all): the world’s leadership (and we use that term very loosely) continues to insist on adhering to the indefensible idea that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible  Checkmate.

The clock is ticking, and disaster awaits at the end of this road.

Will somebody please do something?

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

Would You Like To Steal 128 Million Dollars?

What would you do with 128 million dollars?  Many people like to daydream about winning the lottery, and I have to admit that when I was much younger I would do the same thing.  If you were suddenly financially set for life, you could quit your job, buy your dream home, travel the world and spend your days doing whatever you felt like doing.  We only get one trip through this crazy journey called life, and an enormous mountain of cash could make the journey a whole lot nicer.  So if you could steal 128 million dollars and be absolutely certain that you could get away with it, would you do it?

You would probably be surprised at how many people out there would answer that question affirmatively.  Money is a very powerful motivator, and if the fear of getting caught was out of the equation a lot of people out there would certainly be willing to “bend the rules” for a cool 128 million dollars.

But let’s turn this around for a moment.

What if someone stole 128 million dollars from you?

How would you feel about that?

Every crime has a victim, and losing that amount of money would be unimaginable.

Perhaps you think that this scenario is way too outlandish to even be considering.  After all, who in the world could steal 128 million dollars from someone and get away with it?

Well, what if I told you that this has been happening every day?

And what if I told you that this has actually been happening every single hour of every single day for many years?

When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. national debt was just over 10.6 trillion dollars, and when he left the White House 8 years later it was sitting just shy of 20 trillion dollars.

So during those 8 years more than 9 trillion dollars was added to the national debt.  But for purposes of this example we will round down to an even 9 trillion dollars.

When you divide 9 trillion dollars by 8, you get an average of 1.125 trillion dollars that was added to the national debt per year during the Obama era.

Dividing that figure by 365, you find that an average of $3,082,191,780 was added to the national debt every single day during the Obama administration.

And since there are 24 hours in a day, that means that an average of $128,424,657 was stolen from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day while Barack Obama was president.

When you borrow and spend 128 million dollars that you do not have every single hour of every single day, of course that is going to have a huge impact on the economy.  I am often asked why we are not in a horrendous economic depression yet, and this is one of the biggest reasons.  If we were to go back and take 9 trillion dollars of government spending out of the economy over the last eight years, we would be in the worst depression in American history right now.

But even with all of this added debt, the U.S. economy has still only grown at an average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent over the past 10 years, and that is absolutely terrible.

Our leaders in D.C. were able to prop things up in the short-term by going on the greatest debt binge in U.S. history, but of course they have also made our long-term financial problems much, much worse in the process.

Many people don’t realize this, but the growth of the national debt was actually accelerating as the Obama era drew to a close.  In fact, we added more than 1.4 trillion dollars to the debt during fiscal year 2016.

Once upon a time a lot of people out there would get really upset about the growth of our debt, but these days most Americans seem to have accepted that this is how we do things.  This fiscal liberals seem to have won, and our nation is steamrolling down a road toward financial oblivion.

When you point out the economic disasters in Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, it doesn’t seem to register with most Americans that our country is on the exact same path.

By borrowing money, you can live way above your means for a while, but eventually you have to pay a price for being so reckless.  This has been true all throughout human history, and it will be true in our case as well.

In a letter to John Taylor on November 26th, 1798, Thomas Jefferson explained that he wished that he could have added one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution…

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 it’s constitution; I mean an additional article taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

Jefferson wrote extensively about how government debt is a way for one generation to steal money from another generation.

And what we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is absolutely inexcusable.

The term “child abuse” is not nearly strong enough to describe what is taking place, and I don’t know why more people are not seething with anger over what is being done to them.  I am going to do whatever I can to stop this madness, and I hope that you will help me.

Have you ever run up a lot of credit card debt?  If you really wanted to, you could go out today and start living like a millionaire by running up huge credit card balances.  But eventually a day of reckoning would arrive, and you would get to a point where your debts were no longer sustainable.

It is the same thing on a national level.  We have been living way beyond our means for quite a while, but we have been stealing from future generations in order to do it.

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

Cashless Society Alert: Visa Will Be Giving Up To $500,000 To Restaurants That Go ‘100% Cashless’

The push toward a cashless society is becoming more of a shove.  Before today I had never heard of “The Visa Cashless Challenge”, but after reading about it I have to say that I am quite alarmed.  Visa is trying to “encourage” businesses to go cashless, and one of the ways that they will be doing this is by “awarding up to $500,000 to 50 eligible US-based small business food service owners who commit to joining the 100% cashless quest”.  The food industry is still one of the last bastions where cash is used very heavily, and so it makes sense that Visa would want to target that segment.  Of course the more people that use cards to pay for meals, the more money that Visa will make.

When I go to restaurants, I almost always use cash, and I know a lot of other people that very much prefer to use cash in those situations as well.  But if Visa has their way, soon all of us will be forced to use some form of digital payment instead.  The following is an excerpt from the press release that Visa issued about this new “challenge”…

Today Visa (NYSE:V) announced it is launching a major effort to encourage businesses to go cashless. Aiming to create a culture where cash is no longer king, the program will give merchants increased ability to accept all forms of global digital payments. Visa will be encouraging and helping merchants go cashless by using innovation to their advantage in order to stay competitively connected to their customers.

To encourage businesses to go cashless, Visa is announcing The Visa Cashless Challenge, with a call to action for small business restaurants, cafés or food truck owners to describe what cashless means for them, their employees and customers. Visa will be awarding up to $500,000 to 50 eligible US-based small business food service owners who commit to joining the 100% cashless quest.

“At Visa, we believe you can be everywhere you want to be, and that it should be easy to pay and be paid in more ways than ever – whether it’s a phone, card, wearable or other device,” said Jack Forestell, head of global merchant solutions, Visa Inc. “With 70% of the world, or more than 5 billion people, connected via mobile device by 20201, we have an incredible opportunity to educate merchants and consumers alike on the effectiveness of going cashless.”

Visa would love to eliminate the use of cash entirely because it would mean much bigger profits for them.

And of course cashless systems hold a lot of appeal for governments as well because such systems would allow them to monitor and track the behavior of their citizens much more closely.

As our society transitions in that direction, we will be told that it is all about fighting money laundering, tax evasion and terrorism, but there are other ways to combat those issues.

In the end, many people like to use cash because of the privacy that it offers, and there are very powerful forces that would like to eliminate that privacy.

For now, however, advocates of a cashless society are pushing the economic benefits of such a system.  Here is more from Visa’s press release

Visa has recognized the net benefits for merchants when they reduce dependency on cash transaction. Visa recently conducted a study that found that if businesses in 100 cities transitioned from cash to digital, their cities stand to experience net benefits of $312 billion per year. According to this study, in New York City alone, businesses could generate an additional $6.8 billion in revenue and save more than 186 million hours in labor, by making greater use of digital payments. This amounts to more than $5 billion annual costs savings for businesses in New York. The complete results with the benefits of going cashless for businesses will be included in the “Cashless Cities: Realizing the Benefits of Digital Payments” report that will be released by Visa later this year.

And of course the push toward a cashless system is not just happening in the United States.

Over in Sweden, many banks will no longer take or give out cash, and about 95 percent of all retail transactions in the entire country are now cashless.

Of course the EU as a whole is rapidly moving in the direction of phasing out cash.  Not too long ago, the European Commission released an “Action Plan” which instructed member states to explore the possibility of “potential upper limits to cash payments”.

Some of the member states have already adopted such “upper limits” on cash transactions, and by slowly lowering those limits over time those countries could eventually phase out cash completely.

And down in Australia, a “Black Economy Taskforce” has been established to go after tax evaders

The Black Economy Taskforce has been established to develop an innovative, forward-looking whole-of-government policy response to combat the black economy in Australia, recognising that these issues cannot be tackled by traditional tax enforcement measures alone.

The black economy refers to people who operate entirely outside the tax and regulatory system or who are known to the authorities but do not correctly report their tax obligations.

Of course this represents a major crackdown on cash, because most people that operate in the “underground economy” tend to use cash very heavily.  According to Martin Armstrong, there has even been a proposal in Australia to put “nano-chips” into large notes for tracking purposes…

Michael Andrew, the head of this 1984 style Taskforce to spy on citizens, has proposed that the government should keep track of your $100 and $50 notes by implanting hi-tech nano-chips. He could simply scan your house to see where you are hiding money that the government can confiscate.

Many of us are alarmed by the rise of a cashless society because we know where it could eventually lead.

If government authorities can watch, track and monitor everything that we do and everywhere we go, that opens the door for great tyranny.

And going cashless would also potentially allow government authorities to act as “gatekeepers” for the system.  In other words, the government could require all of us to meet certain conditions before we were allowed to participate in the cashless system, and if we refused to meet those conditions we would be unable to buy, sell, open a bank account, get a job or do much of anything else in society.

The potential dangers to our liberties and freedoms are great, and hopefully we can get more people to understand what going to a fully cashless society could ultimately mean for all of us.

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

Is This The Generation That Is Going To Financially Destroy America?

Did you know that the federal government is going to spend more than 4 trillion dollars this year?  To put that into perspective, U.S. GDP for the entire year of 2017 is going to be somewhere between 18 and 19 trillion dollars.  So when you are talking about 4 trillion dollars you are talking about a huge chunk of our economy.  But of course the federal government doesn’t bring in 4 trillion dollars a year.  At the beginning of Barack Obama’s first term, we were 10.6 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt.  That means that we have been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt.  When you break that down, that means that we have essentially been stealing more than a hundred million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day to pay for our debt-fueled lifestyle.  Even Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is warning that this is not sustainable, and yet we just keep on doing it.

Nobody can pretend that what we have today is the kind of limited federal government that our founders intended.  When federal spending accounts for more than 20 percent of GDP, it is hard to argue that we haven’t moved very far down the road toward socialism.  As I mentioned above, total federal spending will surpass 4 trillion dollars for the first time ever in 2017…

Both the Congressional Budget Office and the White House Office of Management and Budget project that federal spending will top $4 trillion for the first time in fiscal 2017, which began on Oct. 1, 2016 and will end on Sept. 30.

In its “Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2017 to 2027” published last week, CBO projected that total federal spending in fiscal 2017 will hit $4,008,000,000,000.

I was recently asked how we are going to pay for a 4 trillion dollar government if we abolish the income tax like I am proposing.

Well, the truth is that we would have to dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government.  Our founders always intended for the individual state governments to be much stronger than they are right now, and it is time for us to restore that constitutional balance.

Something desperately needs to be done, because we have a federal government that is completely and totally out of control.  Even the Congressional Budget Office agrees that we are headed toward absolute disaster if our leaders in Washington don’t start displaying some fiscal responsibility…

A large and continuously growing federal debt would increase the chance of a fiscal crisis in the United States. Specifically, investors might become less willing to finance federal borrowing unless they were compensated with high returns. If so, interest rates on federal debt would rise abruptly, dramatically increasing the cost of government borrowing. That increase would reduce the market value of outstanding government securities, and investors could lose money. The resulting losses for mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, banks, and other holders of government debt might be large enough to cause some financial institutions to fail, creating a fiscal crisis. An additional result would be a higher cost for private-sector borrowing because uncertainty about the government’s responses could reduce confidence in the viability of private-sector enterprises.

It is impossible for anyone to accurately predict whether or when such a fiscal crisis might occur in the United States. In particular, the debt-to-GDP ratio has no identifiable tipping point to indicate that a crisis is likely or imminent. All else being equal, however, the larger a government’s debt, the greater the risk of a fiscal crisis.

The likelihood of such a crisis also depends on conditions in the economy. If investors expect continued growth, they are generally less concerned about the government’s debt burden. Conversely, substantial debt can reinforce more generalized concern about an economy. Thus, fiscal crises around the world often have begun during recessions and, in turn, have exacerbated them.

I get so frustrated with Republicans in Congress, because they are supposed to be watching out for us.

During the 2010 elections, one of the biggest mid-term landslides of all time gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives and they have had it ever since.  One of the pillars of the “Tea Party revolution” was fiscal responsibility, but the national debt has just continued to explode.

When the Republicans took control of the House in early 2011, we were about 14 trillion dollars in debt, and now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt.

We have been betrayed, and those that have done this to us need to be held accountable.

Of course the big reason why our politicians never want to control spending is because they know what it will do to our economy.

During the Obama years, we spent more than 9 trillion dollars that we didn’t have.  If we could somehow go back and take 9 trillion dollars out of the economy over those 8 years, we would be in the worst depression in U.S. history right now.

Nobody in Washington wants to be responsible for plunging us into an economic depression, and so they just keep stealing from the future in order to prop things up in the short-term.

And a similar thing could be said about central bank intervention.  If the Federal Reserve and other global central banks had not pumped trillions upon trillions of dollars into the financial system over the past 8 years, we would be in the midst of a horrific economic nightmare right now.

But now all of that “hot money” has created epic financial bubbles all over the planet, and when they finally burst the ensuing crisis will be far, far worse than if they had never intervened in the first place.

Global central banks now have more than 20 trillion dollars in assets on their balance sheets and the world is more than 217 trillion dollars in debt.  The desperate measures that national governments and central banks have been taking have delayed the coming crisis, but they have also guaranteed that it will be far worse than it could have otherwise been.

The stage is set for the worst financial crisis in world history, and the only way that it can continue to be delayed is for our leaders to continue to inflate the bubbles larger and larger and larger.

But of course no bubble can last forever, and the bigger they become the harder they burst.