The Economy

15 Examples That Show Many Americans Have Become So Desperate That They Will Do Just About Anything For Money

More Americans than ever are desperate for money and many of them will do just about anything to get it.  The crumbling U.S. economy has pushed millions of ordinary Americans to the brink of utter desperation.  When it comes time to choose between being able to survive or breaking the law, many people are choosing to break the law.  These days it seems like Americans will do just about anything for money.  All over the country, there are areas where just about anything that is not bolted down is being stolen.  A lot of people have resorted to making money however they can – selling drugs, selling their bodies, shoplifting, invading homes, taking bribes, running credit card scams and even stealing from their own family members.  You will have a hard time believing some of the things that you are about to read below.  When people have their backs pushed up against the wall, often they find that they are willing to do things that they never imagined that they would do.  Things are getting crazy out there on the streets of America, and as the economy continues to decline things are going to get a lot crazier.

The following are 15 examples that show many Americans have become so desperate that they will do just about anything for money….

#1 In Utah, one unemployed 28 year old man is offering to be “human prey” for hunters for the bargain price of $10,000.  For an additional $2,000, he will let people hunt him down while he is running around naked.

#2 The Huffington Post is reporting that there has been an epidemic of air conditioning thefts all over the United States….

Across the country, in states like Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Florida, there have been reports of thieves stealing unsecured air conditioning units weighing as much as 125 pounds.

#3 In Corpus Christi, Texas thieves have actually been breaking into funeral homes in order to steal the embalming fluid.

#4 Even police officers are committing desperate acts these days.  Just check out what one police officer in Chicago is charged with doing….

A Chicago Police officer stole $50,000 from his ailing elderly father to pay off his bills and gambling debts and unsuccessfully attempted to swipe his dad’s retirement savings by impersonating him

#5 Nothing is off limits to thieves these days.  Criminals recently broke into a southwest Atlanta beauty supply store and took off with $30,000 in hair extensions.

#6 In another area of Atlanta, thieves have been breaking down walls and busting bathroom fixtures with sledgehammers in order to get their hands on copper, brass and steel….

Kids in two Atlanta communities won’t have their neighborhood pools to help beat the summer heat, at least for now. Thieves used what is believed to be sledge hammers to bust walls and break fixtures in bathrooms at Adams and South Bend parks to steal copper, brass and steel.

#7 One grandmother in Florida has been accused of trying to sell her newborn grandson for $75,000.

#8 In Antioch, California a total of approximately 300 power poles were recently knocked down by thieves and stripped of their copper wiring.

#9 In Minnesota recently, a mob of teen girls brutally pummeled a mother and her two daughters until they were black and blue.  Apparently the mob of teen girls was enraged over a pair of missing sunglasses.

#10 In Asheville, North Carolina thieves recently took off with 4 metal tables and 16 metal chairs that were sitting outside a pizzeria.

#11 In Florida, thieves have actually been stealing storm drain covers.

#12 In Oregon, thieves recently broke into a Salvation Army community center and stole 3 large air conditioning units.  Now all the people that come to that facility for help and for community programs this summer will be absolutely sweltering.

#13 In the Cleveland area, two young boys that had set up a lemonade stand were robbed in broad daylight.  The crooks got away with approximately 12 dollars.

#14 In Oklahoma, thieves recently broke into a church and stole “arts and crafts supplies meant to help teach bible stories to children“.

#15 A 59 year old man from North Carolina named Richard James Verone was so desperate for money that he actually robbed a bank and got caught on purpose so that he could be put in prison and be given free health care.

One day Verone walked into an RBC Bank in North Carolina, handed a clerk a note demanding exactly one dollar and sat down and waited for the police to arrive and arrest him.

Verone has a growth on his chest and two ruptured disks but he does not have any health insurance.  He is hoping that in prison he will get the medical treatment that he needs.

As society continues to unravel, prison is going to look like an appealing option for more and more people.

At least in prison you get fed, you have a roof over your head and they will take care of your medical needs.

For a whole lot of Americans, that would be a major step up.

Have you noticed that the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear?

America is becoming a cold, cruel place and lawlessness is everywhere.

For many more signs that our society is starting to crumble, please see these two articles….

*”18 Signs The Collapse Of Society Is Accelerating”

*”12 More Signs That Society Is Collapsing”

For ages, Americans have looked down on the crime and the depravity that goes on in other areas of the world.

Well, now America has all of the crime and depravity it can handle and it is going to get a lot worse as millions of formerly middle class Americans descend into poverty.

A regular commenter on my website who identifies himself as “El Pollo de Oro” recently described the kind of chaos that he believes is coming to the streets of America….

I live in Philadelphia, a city that used to have a ton of blue-collar manufacturing jobs as well as a great deal of white-collar employment, but the blue-collar manufacturing jobs have disappeared–and on the white-collar side, a college degree isn’t necessarily the ticket to prosperity it once was. Philly has its share of nasty, dangerous ghetto areas as well as ritzy, upscale areas like Rittenhouse Square. But then, there are parts of Mexico City that look like Beverly Hills except that the signs are en español. A minority of Chilangos are filthy rich, which is what you expect in a Third World country: an uber-rich minority and a poor majority. And when The Banana Republic of America (formerly the USA) signed on for globalism and ignored Ross Perot’s warning, it opted to become a Third World country—which means that you can kiss the American middle class goodbye.

But there will be some growth industries in The Banana Republic of America: kidnapping, drug smuggling, murder for hire, carjacking, armed robbery. And if you want a taste of what life will be like in American cities in the future, just spend a few weeks in Guatemala City, Johannesburg or Caracas—all of which have the type of horrible crime rates that BRA cities can look forward to in the future. Desperate people do desperate things, and hardcore desperation will be in the norm in the BRA. It won’t be fun (unless, of course, being robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight is one’s idea of a good time).

Welcome to life in a rotting, decaying Third World hellhole. Welcome to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Welcome to life in The Banana Republic of America, formerly the USA.

America is changing.  The safe, secure environment that we all used to take for granted is dying.  The number of truly desperate people rises by the day, and many of those desperate people are willing to do just about anything for money.

The United States used to have a thriving middle class, but our economic system has been so manipulated over the decades that now almost all of the economic rewards go to the very top of the food chain.

25 years ago, the wealthiest 12 percent of all Americans controlled 33 percent of all the wealth.  Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans control 40 percent of all the wealth.

In the United States today, we are actually witnessing the death of the middle class.  Our jobs have been shipped overseas, the banks have enslaved us to debt, the government keeps finding more ways to tax us and the Federal Reserve keeps debasing our currency.

Everywhere you go, despair is in the air.  According to a brand new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 63 percent of Americans believe that the nation is on the wrong track.

Fortunately, many Americans are responding to these signs of trouble by preparing.

One local Oklahoma newspaper recently did an article that profiled a few of the growing number of Americans that are preparing for hard times….

Rod and Lauretta Smith estimate they could survive a year without going to the grocery store.

A large garden on their 5-acre property in south Tulsa produces hundreds of quarts of canned and frozen beans, tomatoes and other vegetables. Chickens provide eggs.

The Smiths are among a small but growing number of people stocking up on food to become more self-reliant in a time marked by natural disasters and economic uncertainty.

The truth is that all of us should try to become less dependent on the system.  The Democrats, the Republicans, the Federal Reserve and the big corporations are not there to help you.  They are not going to come riding to the rescue if you lose your job and your home.

We all need to do what we can to become more independent and to prepare ourselves and our families for the incredibly difficult economic times that are inevitably coming.  Those that have faith that their jobs will always be there or that the government will always take care of them will be deeply disappointed.

The system is dying and society is coming apart.

The only rational thing to do is to prepare for what is coming.

 

The State Of The Economy

The U.S. economy is like a rubber band that is being pulled in several different directions at the same time.  Everyone knows that at some point it is going to snap, but nobody is quite sure exactly when it is going to happen.  Right now, the state of the economy is not good, and it is going to get a whole lot worse.  Sadly, most Americans don’t even understand the economic fundamentals well enough to be able to ask the right questions to our politicians.  Today, the United States consumes far more wealth than it produces every single month.  That means we are continually getting poorer.  U.S. debt is also rising at a far greater rate than U.S. GDP is.  On an individual level, if your assets were going down every single month and if you were going into more debt every single single month it would be easy to understand what was happening.  However, most Americans can’t really seem to grasp what is taking place on a national level.  Our politicians and the mainstream media just keep telling them that everything is going to be okay and they just keep believing it.

These days our leaders are resorting to increasingly desperate measures in order to help revive the economy.  On Thursday, Barack Obama decided to release 30 million barrels of oil from the U.S. strategic oil reserve.

Yes, that will drive down oil prices for a few days, but what is going to happen someday if we actually need to use that strategic oil reserve?

But in many ways you can’t blame Obama for trying.  He desperately wants to get reelected and he knows that his campaign will be highly dependent on the state of the economy.  Look for Obama to pull out all the stops as we get closer to the fall of 2012.

Sadly, the truth is that it almost does not matter what the Democrats or the Republicans do at this point.  The long-term trends are so powerful now that it would take a miracle to reverse them. We are facing an “economic tsunami” that is just going to keep on destroying middle class America.

If you went to a store today, and there were two somewhat similar products sitting on the shelf and one cost ten times more than the other one, which one would you buy?

Well, that is the situation facing American workers today.  They have been pushed into one giant globalized labor pool, but big corporations are allowed to pay workers on the other side of the globe slave labor wages.  It costs ten times more (at least) to hire a blue collar American worker than it does to hire a blue collar worker in most areas of Asia.

As a result of the globalization of labor, we have seen a mass exodus of jobs out of the United States, and wages for many of the jobs that remain have been significantly depressed.

There simply are not nearly enough jobs for all Americans at this point.

Recent college grads are finding this out.  A new study that was conducted by Rutgers University discovered that over 30 percent of all those that graduated from college between 2006 and 2010 were not able to get a job within six months of graduation.

But unemployment is only part of the story.  There are millions upon millions of Americans that are “underemployed” today.

There are hordes of highly educated, hard working Americans that are working temporary or part-time jobs at close to minimum wage because that is all they can get.

With good jobs being so scarce, American families are finding it more difficult than ever to make ends meet.

One recent survey found that 9 out of 10 U.S. workers do not expect their wages to keep up with the rising cost of basics such as food and gasoline over the next year.

I talked about the rising cost of food in my recent article entitled “Why Are Food Prices Rising So Fast?”  Today, one out of every seven Americans is already on food stamps, and if the cost of living keeps rising this quickly we are going to see millions more of our fellow citizens clamoring for government assistance.

The decline of the American consumer is having other effects as well.

For example, pre-orders for Christmas toys from China are way down.

It looks like this holiday season is not going to be as “merry” as usual.

It would be nice if we could say that the economy is improving, but that simply is not the case.

American households are in a far different place than they were prior to the recent recession.

For example, did you know that home values in the United States have plummeted $6.6 trillion since the peak back in 2007?

U.S. homeowners have taken the brunt of that decline.  According to the Federal Reserve, average home equity has fallen from 61 percent in 2001 to 38 percent in the first quarter of 2011.

That is a colossal shift.

If U.S. homeowners only own 38 percent of their homes, then who owns the rest?

The banks do.

Doesn’t that just make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

Health care is another area where American families are getting squeezed.

Today, the United States spends more on health care per person than any other country in the world.

Sadly, we are also one of the sickest populations on the planet.

What is up with that?

Once upon a time the United States had a middle class that was the envy of the entire globe.

Now it is being ripped to shreds at every turn.

Today, approximately half of all Americans say that they could not come up with $2,000 within 30 days without selling away some possessions.

The vast majority of us are basically flat broke and surviving from month to month.

Meanwhile, our vaunted financial system just may be on the verge of another meltdown.

There has been all sorts of volatility in the marketplace recently and there are all kinds of signs that Wall Street is about to go into panic mode.

For example, Moody’s recently warned that it may downgrade the debt ratings of Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo.

Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley are all either already laying workers off or are rumored to be considering it.

Frank Davis, director of sales and trading with LEK Securities, says that there is a lot of pessimism on Wall Street right now….

“There’s a lot of emotion in this market at the moment, and the conversations among traders are nearly all leaning toward the bear side”

As the financial system spins out of control, the Federal Reserve is increasing the number of workers that it is “embedding” at the big Wall Street banks.

I guess the Fed wants to keep a closer eye on things as they come crashing down.

Sadly, so much of this would be much easier to fix if our nation was not drowning in debt.

Since Barack Obama was elected, the national debt has increased by nearly 4 trillion dollars. If you and I went out today and started repaying that 4 trillion dollars at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 120,000 years to do it.

Most Americans have a hard time comprehending these kinds of numbers. Janet Tavakoli tried to put our debt situation into perspective in her latest column….

David Walker, the former U.S. comptroller general, says it’s even worse than that. When he takes into account future obligations for Medicare, Social Security, Federal debt, Military retirement, Civil servant retirement, and more, we owe $546,663 per household. That doesn’t even include your local debt — it may not be as bad as if you lived in Illinois, but it’s substantial nonetheless — and personal debt including mortgages and consumer debt that average more than $120,000 per household.

But you don’t have to toss wild numbers around to get an idea of how much trouble we are in.

As I have written about recently, there is increasing evidence all around us that the collapse of society is accelerating.  We are seeing disturbing reports of civil unrest pop up all over the U.S. at an alarming rate.

According to a CBS affiliate in Chicago, earlier this week approximately 50 young people conducted a shocking mob robbery of a drug store located on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago….

Some 50 young people barged into a Walgreens at Michigan and Chicago on the Magnificent Mile on Tuesday afternoon. They took bottled drinks and sandwiches off the shelves, then ran off, CBS 2′s Suzanne Le Mignot reports.

When large groups of young people get together and agree to commit crimes that should be a huge red flag for all of us.

We are a nation that is deeply, deeply divided.  Hatred is growing and the love of most Americans is growing cold.

As I have written about previously on “The American Dream“, the American people are actually encouraged to hate one another these days….

The truth is that the “establishment” is constantly trying to divide us and get us fighting with one another.  They pit the Republicans against the Democrats (even as though control both sides).  They pit one race against another.  They pit one gender against another.  We are told that the rich are against the poor, the north is against the south, urban is against rural and that there are even “generational battles” going on.  Frustration and hate are rapidly growing in the United States today, and a lot of that frustration and hate is unfortunately aimed at the targets that the mainstream media has programmed all of us to hate.  Meanwhile, those at the top of the pyramid who are controlling the whole game love it when we are divided because we can never become united and challenge their control.

We need to come together as a nation.  If we don’t, we are going to face an unprecedented nightmare when the economy collapses.

So what do you think about the state of the economy?  Please feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below….

50 Things Every American Should Know About The Collapse Of The Economy

Right now, we are witnessing a truly historic collapse of the economy, and yet most Americans do not understand what is going on.  One of the biggest reasons why the American people do not understand what is happening to the economy is because our politicians and the mainstream media are not telling the truth.  Barack Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keep repeating the phrase “economic recovery” over and over, and this is really confusing for most Americans because things sure don’t seem to be getting much better where they live.  There are millions upon millions of Americans that are sitting at home on their couches right now wondering why they lost their jobs and why nobody will hire them.  Millions of others are wondering why the only jobs they can get are jobs that a high school student could do.  Families all across America are wondering why it seems like their wages never go up but the price of food and the price of gas continue to skyrocket.  We are facing some very serious long-term economic problems in this country, and we need to educate the American people about why the collapse of the economy is happening.  If the American people don’t understand why they are losing their jobs, why they are losing their homes and why they are drowning in debt then they are going to keep on doing all of the same things that they have been doing.  They will also keep sending the same idiot politicians back to Washington to represent us.  There are some fundamental things about the economy that every American should know.  The American people need to be shocked out of their entertainment-induced stupor long enough to understand what is really going on and what needs to be done to solve our nightmarish economic problems.  If we do not wake up enough Americans in time, the economic collapse that is coming could tear this nation to shreds.

The U.S. economy was once the greatest economic machine in modern world history.  It was truly a wonder to behold.  It worked so well that entire generations of Americans came to believe that America would enjoy boundless prosperity indefinitely.

But sadly, prosperity is not guaranteed for any nation.  Over the past several decades, some very alarming long-term economic trends have developed that are absolutely destroying the economy.  If dramatic changes are not made soon, a complete and total economic collapse will be unavoidable.

Unfortunately, the American people will never agree to fundamental changes to our economic and financial systems unless they are fully educated about what is causing our problems.  We have turned our backs on the principles of our forefathers and the principles of those that founded this nation.  We have rejected the ancient wisdom that was handed down to us.

It has been said that those that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind.

We are about to experience the consequences of decades of really bad decisions.

Hopefully we can get the American people to wake up.

The following are 50 things that every American should know about the collapse of the economy….

#1 Do you remember how much was made of the “Misery Index” during the presidency of Jimmy Carter?  At that time, the “Misery Index” was constantly making headlines in newspapers all across the country.  Well, according to John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, if we calculated unemployment and inflation the same way that we did back during the Carter administration, then the Misery Index today would actually be higher than at any point during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

#2 According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of about 5 million Americans were being hired every single month during 2006.  Today, an average of about 3.5 million Americans are being hired every single month.

#3 According to the Wall Street Journal, there are 5.5 million Americans that are currently unemployed and yet are not receiving unemployment benefits.

#4 All over America, state and local governments are selling off buildings just to pay the bills.  Investors can now buy up government-owned power plants, prisons and municipal buildings from coast to coast.  For example, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey recently sold off 16 government buildings (including the police and fire headquarters) just to pay some bills.

#5 When Americans think of “government debt”, most of them only think of the federal government, but it is not just the federal government that has a massive debt problem.  State and local government debt has reached an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP.

#6 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.

#7 Credit card usage in the United States is on the increase once again.  During the month of March, revolving consumer credit jumped 2.9%.  Sadly, it looks like Americans have not learned their lessons about the dangers of credit card debt.

#8 Last year, Social Security ran a deficit for the first time since 1983, and the “Social Security deficits” in future years are projected to be absolutely horrific.

#9 The U.S. government now says that the Medicare trust fund will run out five years faster than they were projecting just last year.

#10 Right now we are watching what could potentially be the worst Mississippi River flood ever recorded play out right in front of our eyes.  One agricultural economist at Mississippi State University believes that this disaster could do 2 billion dollars of damage just to farms alone.

#11 The “tornadoes of 2011” that we just saw in the southeast United States are being called the worst natural disaster that the U.S. has seen since Hurricane Katrina.  It has been estimated that up to 25 percent of all of the poultry houses in Alabama were either significantly damaged or destroyed.  It is also believed that millions of birds were killed.

#12 The economic effects of the BP oil spill just seem to go on and on and on.  The number of very sick fish in the Gulf of Mexico is really starting to alarm scientists.  The following is how one local newspaper recently described the situation….

Scientists are alarmed by the discovery of unusual numbers of fish in the Gulf of Mexico and inland waterways with skin lesions, fin rot, spots, liver blood clots and other health problems.

#13 The number of “low income jobs” in the U.S. has risen steadily over the past 30 years and they now account for 41 percent of all jobs in the United States.

#14 All over America, hospitals that care for the poor and needy are so overwhelmed and are so broke that they are being forced to shut down.  Recently, a local newspaper in Florida ran an article about two prominent charity hospitals in Illinois that have served the poor for more than 100 years but are now asking for permission to shut down….

Two charity hospitals in Illinois are facing a life-or-death decision. There’s not much left of either of them – one in Chicago’s south suburbs, the other in impoverished East St. Louis – aside from emergency rooms crowded with patients seeking free care. Now they would like the state’s permission to shut down.

#15 The U.S. dollar is in such bad shape that now even Steve Forbes is predicting that the U.S. is “likely” to go back to a gold standard within the next five years.

#16 Most Americans don’t realize how much the U.S. dollar has been devalued over the years.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $115.93 today.  An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $454.36 today.

#17 Over the past 12 months the average price of gasoline in the United States has gone up by about 30%.

#18 U.S. oil companies will bring in about $200 billion in pre-tax profits this year.  They will also receive about $4.4 billion in specialized tax breaks from the U.S. government.

#19 It is being projected that for the first time ever, the OPEC nations are going to bring in over a trillion dollars from exporting oil this year.  Their biggest customer is the United States.

#20 According to the Pentagon, there are minerals worth over a trillion dollars under the ground in Afghanistan.  Now, J.P. Morgan is starting to tap those riches with the help of the U.S. military.

#21 Speaking of J.P. Morgan, most Americans don’t realize that they are actually the largest processor of food stamp benefits in the United States.  In fact, the more Americans that go on food stamps the more money that J.P. Morgan makes.

#22 When 2007 began, there were about 26 million Americans on food stamps.  Today, there are over 44 million on food stamps, and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#23 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.  Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#24 Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

#25 The financial system is more vulnerable today than it was back in 2008 before the financial panic. Today, the world financial system has been turned into a giant financial casino where bets are made on just about anything you can possibly imagine, and the major Wall Street banks make a ton of money from this betting system.  The system is largely unregulated (the new “Wall Street reform” law has only changed this slightly) and it is totally dominated by the big international banks. The danger from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”. It is estimated that the “derivatives bubble” is somewhere in the neighborhood of a quadrillion dollars, and once it pops there isn’t going to be enough money in the entire world to bail everyone out.

#26 Between December 2000 and December 2010, the United States ran a total trade deficit of 6.1 trillion dollars with the rest of the world, and the U.S. has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976.

#27 The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, and the U.S. trade deficit with China is now 27 times larger than it was back in 1990.

#28 In 2010, the number one U.S. export to China was “scrap and trash”.

#29 All over the United States, many of our once great manufacturing cities are being transformed into hellholes.  In the city of Detroit today, there are over 33,000 abandoned houses, 70 schools are being permanently closed down, the mayor wants to bulldoze one-fourth of the city and you can literally buy a house for one dollar in the worst areas.

#30 During the first three months of this year, less new homes were sold in the U.S. than in any three month period ever recorded.

#31 New home sales in the United States are now down 80% from the peak in July 2005.

#32 America’s real estate crisis just seems to get worse and worse.  U.S. home prices have now fallen a whopping 33% from where they were at during the peak of the housing bubble.

#33 According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, the average CEO made 343 times more money than the average American did last year.

#34 The European debt crisis could cause a global financial collapse like the one that we saw in 2008 at any time.  The world economy is incredibly interconnected today, and the United States would not be immune.  A recent IMF report stated the following about the growing sovereign debt crisis in Europe….

Strong policy responses have successfully contained the sovereign debt and financial-sector troubles in the euro area periphery so far. But contagion to the core euro area and then onward to emerging Europe remains a tangible risk.

#35 According to one study, the 50 U.S. state governments are collectively 3.2 trillion dollars short of what they need to meet their pension obligations.

#36 A different study has shown that individual Americans are $6.6 trillion short of what they need to retire comfortably.

#37 The cost of college tuition in the United States has gone up by over 900 percent since 1978.

#38 According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5% of all personal consumption back in 1980.  Today they account for approximately 16.3%.

#39 One study found that approximately 41 percent of working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.

#40 The combined debt of the major GSEs (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Sallie Mae) has increased from 3.2 trillion in 2008 to 6.4 trillion in 2011.  Thanks to our politicians, U.S. taxpayers are standing behind that debt.

#41 The U.S. government is over 14 trillion dollars in debt and the budget deficit for this year is projected to be about 1.5 trillion dollars.  However, if the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion each and every year.

#42 Most Americans don’t understand that the Federal Reserve and the debt-based monetary system that it runs are at the very heart of our economic problems.  All of this debt is absolutely crushing us.  The U.S. government spent over 413 billion dollars on interest on the national debt during fiscal 2010, and it is being projected that the U.S. government will be shelling out 900 billion dollars just in interest on the national debt by the year 2019.

#43 Standard & Poor’s has altered its outlook on U.S. government debt from “stable” to “negative” and is warning that the U.S. could soon lose its AAA rating.

#44 In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7% of all income.  Today, government transfer payments account for 18.4% of all income.

#45 U.S. households are now receiving more income from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

#46 59 percent of all Americans now receive money from the federal government in one form or another.

#47 According to Gallup, 41 percent of Americans believed that the economy was “getting better” at this time last year.  Today, that number is at just 27 percent.

#48 The wealthiest 1% of all Americans now own more than a third of all the wealth in the United States.

#49 The poorest 50% of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

#50 The percentage of millionaires in Congress is more than 50 times higher than the percentage of millionaires in the general population.

Losing Faith (In The U.S. Economy)

Are the American people losing faith in the U.S. economy?  The statistics that you are about to read might surprise you.  Not everyone believes that the U.S. economy is dying (there are still millions out there that will swallow anything that the mainstream media tells them), but the reality is that there is a growing chunk of the population that has completely lost faith in our leaders and in our economic system.  A brand new Gallup poll has found that the number of Americans that believe that we are in a “depression” is actually larger than the number of Americans that believe that the economy is “growing”.  That is absolutely shocking because according to official government figures, the U.S. economy is growing right now and virtually nobody in the mainstream media or the government has used the term “depression” to describe the economic downturn that we went through recently.  In fact, according to Gallup a total of 55% of the American people believe that we are either in a recession or a depression right now.  This is clear evidence that the American people are losing faith in U.S. government economic statistics and instead they are basing their opinions on what they see in their own communities.  Despite the pablum about an “economic recovery” constantly being spewed by Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama, faith in our economic system continues to decline.  The truth is that the American people are not stupid.  They can see what is happening to the economy.

Back when I was a teenager, one day I walked over to the local McDonald’s and filled out an application and was immediately hired.

But that is not how it works today.

Recently, McDonald’s made headlines when they held a National Hiring Day.  Some commentators pointed to that event as evidence that the economy was recovering.

Well, you know what?  McDonald’s ended up receiving approximately one million applications.

So how many of those people did McDonald’s hire?

They hired about 62,000 people.

That means that somewhere around 938,000 eager job applicants were turned away.

Just think about that.

Only about 6.2 percent of those that applied for a job at McDonald’s were accepted.

As Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider recently pointed out, that means that Harvard now has a higher acceptance rate than McDonald’s does.

Harvard accepts about 7% of those that apply to go to school there.

Who ever thought we would see the day when a higher percentage of applicants get accepted into Harvard than get hired at McDonald’s?

Sadly, the number of jobs continues to shrink.  The competition for good jobs has become absolutely crazy.

Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

So why is this happening?  Well, there are a lot of reasons, but as I have written about previously, the fact that millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas is a huge factor.

Without good jobs, an increasing number of Americans are being forced to turn to government assistance in order to survive.

Today, more than 44 million Americans are on food stamps.  In addition, government transfer payments now make up 18 percent of all personal income in the United States.

That is frightening.

Things have gotten so bad that now even Wal-Mart is warning that their customers are running out of money.

A large percentage of Wal-Mart customers are just surviving month to month and Wal-Mart has been noticing a huge drop off in sales towards the end of the month when their customers run out of cash.  The following is what the CEO of Wal-Mart had to say about this phenomenon recently….

“Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year.”

People are starting to get desperate.  When economic times get tough, crime tends to increase.  Sadly, as a report in USA Today recently noted, thefts of gasoline are increasing all over the nation.

We never had this kind of a problem back when a gallon of gas only was about a dollar a gallon.

Do you remember those days?

They weren’t that long ago.

Now it takes some people over a hundred dollars to fill up their gas tanks.

Our leaders keep promising that they know what is happening and that they are going to fix things, but most Americans are not buying it.  Many Americans are completely losing faith in the system altogether.

Our economic decline has been one of the things that has fueled the growth of the prepper movement.  Millions of Americans have decided that they want to start becoming independent of the system.  One recent article described what some residents of Colorado are doing to prepare, but the truth is that this phenomenon is happening all over the nation….

A Black Forest resident has erected a geodesic dome on her 5-acre spread to grow vegetables, keeps horses for emergency transportation, in case she can’t get gasoline for her car, and plans to acquire chickens and goats as food sources.

A husband and wife who have a cabin on 100 acres of secluded land in Park County have weaned their property from the electric grid, acquired a three-year food supply and taken other measures to become self-sufficient.

Of course the mainstream media loves to portray preppers as “crazies”, but as the U.S. economy continues to die it would be a bit crazy not to prepare.

No job is completely safe today.  Millions of Americans that assumed that their “good jobs” would always be there have had their lives shattered over the past couple of years.

There is nothing wrong with trying to become more self-sufficient.

Everyone should be thinking about either starting up a business or developing alternative sources of income.  Yes, it can be exhausting to work on a side business during evening and weekends, but the time for loafing is over.  Those that are going to make it through the times ahead are those that are going to be willing to work really hard.

People need to start thinking about becoming less dependent on “the system” however they can.  One way to insulate yourself against rising food prices is to learn how to grow your own food.

Even if you only have a very small amount of room you can still grow your own food.  For example, there is one family that is actually producing 6000 pounds of produce on just 1/10th of an acre right in the middle of Pasadena, California.

Just because we have lost some of the basic skills that previous generations possessed doesn’t mean that we can’t get them back.  Back during World War II, “victory gardens” enabled Americans to grow 40 percent of all the vegetables that they needed.  Those gardens greatly contributed to the war effort and helped Americans get through some very difficult times.

There are a lot of preppers out there that are totally out of debt, that own their own land, that are entirely off the electrical grid and that grow most of their own food.  Many Americans would look at such people as “crazies” but those preppers will be in a much better position than most people when the economy totally collapses.

Don’t wait until it is too late to prepare.  Millions of Americans are completely losing faith in our economic system.  People are smart.  They can see that we are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world.  They can see that the guts of our economic infrastructure are being ripped out and shredded.  They can see that the number of people living in poverty continues to increase year after year.  They can see the the number of good jobs continues to decrease year after year.

When you see a horrible storm coming the rational thing to do is to prepare.  Just think about all of those tornadoes that ravaged the southeast U.S. the other day.  Most of the people directly in the path of those tornadoes did whatever they could to survive when they realized the twisters were about to hit.

Well, a horrific economic storm is coming.  Every American will be affected by this economic storm at least to some extent.  We all need to prepare while we still can.

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