By Michael: How can anyone not see that the U.S.
economy is collapsing all around us? It just astounds me when people try
to tell me that "everything is just fine" and that "things are
getting better" in America. Are there people out there that are
really that blind? If you want to see the economic collapse, just open up
your eyes and look around you. By almost every economic and financial
measure, the U.S. economy has been steadily declining for many years. But
most Americans are so tied into "the matrix" that they can only
understand the cheerful propaganda that is endlessly being spoon-fed to them by
the mainstream media. As I have said so many times, the economic collapse
is not a single event. The economic collapse has been happening, it is is
happening right now, and it will continue to happen. Yes, there will be
times when our decline will be punctuated by moments of great crisis, but that
will be the exception rather than the rule. A lot of people that write
about "the economic collapse" hype it up as if it will be some huge
"event" that will happen very rapidly and then once it is all over we
will rebuild. Unfortunately, that is not how the real world works.
We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and once
it completely bursts there will be no going back to how things were
before. Right now, we are living in a "credit card
economy". As long as we can keep borrowing more money, most people
think that things are just fine. But anyone that has lived on credit
cards knows that eventually there comes a point when the game is over, and we
are rapidly approaching that point as a nation.
Have you ever been there? Have you
ever desperately hoped that you could just get one more credit card or one more
loan so that you could keep things going?
At first, living on credit can be a lot of
fun. You can live a much higher standard of living than you otherwise
would be able to.
But inevitably a day of reckoning comes.
If the federal government and the American
people were forced at this moment to live within their means, the U.S. economy
would immediately plunge into a depression.
That is a 100% rock solid guarantee.
But our politicians and the mainstream
media continue to perpetuate the fiction that we can live in this credit card
economic fantasy land indefinitely.
And most Americans could not care less
about the future. As long as "things are good" today, they
don't really think much about what the future will hold.
As a result of our very foolish short-term
thinking, we have now run up a national debt of 16.4 trillion dollars. It
is the largest debt in the history of the world, and it has gotten more than 23 times larger since Jimmy
Carter first entered the White House.
The chart that you see below is a recipe
for national financial suicide...
Of course things have accelerated over the
past four years. Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S.
government has run a budget deficit of well over a trillion dollars every single year, and we have stolen more than
100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour
of every single day.
It is the biggest theft of all time.
What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal.
And now our debt is at a level that most
economists would consider terminal. When Barack Obama first entered the
White House, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent. Today, it is up to 103 percent.
We are officially in "the danger
zone".
If things really were "getting
better" in America, we would not need to borrow so much money.
Our politicians are stealing from the
future in order to make the present look better. During Obama's first
term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
That is utter insanity!
If you started paying off just the new debt
that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of
one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
So what is the solution?
Get ready to laugh.
The most prominent economic journalist in
the entire country, Paul Krugman of the New York Times, recently suggested the
following in an article that he wrote entitled "Kick That Can"...
Realistically, we’re not going to resolve
our long-run fiscal issues any time soon, which is O.K. — not ideal, but
nothing terrible will happen if we don’t fix everything this year. Meanwhile,
we face the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending
cuts.
So we should avoid that damage by kicking
the can down the road. It’s the responsible thing to do.
You mean that we might actually do damage
to the debt-fueled economic fantasy world that we are living in if we stopped
stealing so much money from future generations?
Oh the humanity!
It is horrifying to think that all that one
of the "top economic minds" in America can come up with is to
"kick the can" down the road some more.
Unfortunately, neither Paul Krugman nor
most of the American people understand that our financial system is actually designed to create government debt.
The bankers that helped create the Federal Reserve intended to
permanently enslave the U.S. government to a perpetually expanding spiral of
debt, and their plans worked.
At this point, the U.S. national debt is
more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.
So why don't the American people understand
what the Federal Reserve system is doing to us?
It is because most of them are still
plugged into the matrix. A Zero Hedge article that I came across today put
it beautifully...
US society in a nutshell: Chris Dorner has
been around for a week and has 222 million results on Google; the Federal
Reserve has been around for one hundred years and has 187 million results.
If nothing is done about our exploding
debt, it is only a matter of time before we reach financial oblivion.
According to Boston University economist
Laurence Kotlikoff, the U.S. government is facing a "present value
difference between projected future spending and revenue" of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.
So how in the world are we going to come up
with an extra 222 trillion dollars?
But it is not just the U.S. government that
is drowning in debt.
Just check out this chart which shows the
astounding growth of state and local government debt in recent years...
All over the United States there are state
and local governments that are on the verge of bankruptcy. Just check out
what is going on in Detroit. The only way that most of our state and local
governments can keep going at this point is to also "kick the can"
down the road some more.
And of course most of the rest of us are drowning
in debt as well.
40 years ago, the total amount of debt in
the U.S. economic system (government + business + consumer) was less than 2 trillion dollars.
Today, the total amount of debt in the U.S.
economic system has grown to more than 55 trillion dollars.
Can anyone say bubble?
The good news is that U.S. GDP is now more
than 12 times larger than it was 40 years ago.
The bad news is that the total amount of
debt in our financial system is now more than 30 times larger than it was 40
years ago...
At the same time that we are going into so
much debt, our ability to produce wealth continues to decline.
According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted
for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in
2001. That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011. That is not just a
decline - that is a nightmarish freefall. Just check out the chart in this article.
We are becoming less competitive as a
nation with each passing year. In fact, the U.S. has fallen in the global
economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
Most Americans don't understand this, but
the United States buys far more from the rest of the world than they buy from
us each year. In 2012, we had a trade deficit of more than 500 billion dollars with the
rest of the world.
That means that more than 500 billion
dollars that could have gone to U.S. workers and U.S. businesses went out of
the country instead.
So how does our country survive if hundreds
of billions of dollars more is flowing out of the country than is flowing into
it?
Well, to make up the shortfall we go to the
countries that we sent our money to and we beg them to lend it back to
us. If that doesn't work, we just print and borrow even more money.
Overall, the United States has run a trade
deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest
of the world since 1975.
That is 8 trillion dollars that could have
saved U.S. businesses, paid the salaries of U.S. workers and that would have
helped fund government.
But instead, our foolish policies have
greatly enriched China and the oil barons of the Middle East.
Sadly, politicians from both political parties continue to
boldly support the one world economic agenda of the global elite.
Just consider how destructive many of these
"free trade" deals have been to our economy...
When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in
1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.
By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico
of 61.6 billion dollars.
Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China
was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little
"m") for the entire year.
In 2012, our trade deficit with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the largest
trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the
world.
In particular, our trade with China is
extremely unbalanced. Today, U.S. consumers spend approximately 4 dollars on goods and services
from China for every one dollar that Chinese consumers spend on goods and
services from the United States.
But isn't getting cheap stuff from China
good?
No, because it costs us good paying jobs.
According to the Economic Policy Institute,
the United States is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
Overall, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in
the United States have been shut down since 2001. During 2010,
manufacturing facilities in the United States were shutting down at a rate of 23 per day. How can anyone say that
"things are getting better" when our economic infrastructure is being
absolutely gutted?
The truth is that there are never going to
be enough jobs in America ever again, because millions of our jobs are being
sent overseas and millions of our jobs are being lost to technology.
You won't hear this on the news, but the
percentage of the civilian labor force in the United States that is employed
has been steadily declining every single year since 2006.
Younger workers have been hit particularly
hard. In 2007, the unemployment rate for the 20 to 29 age bracket was
about 6.5 percent. Today, the unemployment rate for that same age group
is about 13 percent.
If you are under the age of 30 and you
aren't living with your parents, there is a really good chance that you are
living in poverty. If you can believe it, U.S. families that have a head
of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
Our economy has been steadily bleeding huge
numbers of middle class jobs, and many of those jobs have been replaced by low
paying jobs in recent years.
According to one study, 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last
recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have
been low wage jobs.
And at this point, an astounding 53 percent
of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
Oh, but "things are getting
better", right?
Maybe if you live on Wall Street or if you
are an employee of the federal government.
But for most families this economic decline
has been a total nightmare. Median household income in America has fallen
for four consecutive years. Overall, it
has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
Sometimes people forget how good things
were about a decade ago. About three times as many new homes were sold in
the United States in 2005 as were sold in 2012.
But we like to live in denial.
In fact, a lot of families are trying to
keep up their standards of living by going into tremendous amounts of debt.
Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all
income earners in the United States had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that
they earned. By 2007, that figure had soared to $1.48.
Fake it until you make it, right?
But how much debt can our system possibly
handle?
Total home mortgage debt in the United
States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20
years ago.
Total credit card debt in the United States
is now more than 8 times larger than it was just
30 years ago.
We are a nation that is completely addicted
to debt, but as the financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated, all of that debt can
have horrific consequences.
As the economy has slowed in recent years,
the Federal Reserve has decided that "the solution" is to recklessly print money in an attempt to
get the debt spiral cranked up again.
Have they gone overboard? You be the
judge...
And of course this won't have any affect on
the value of the money that you have been saving up all these years right?
Wrong.
Every single dollar that you own is
continually losing value...
Overall, the value of the U.S. dollar has
declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal
Reserve was first created.
As the cost of living continues to go up
and wages continue to go down, millions of American families have fallen out of
the middle class and into poverty.
If you can believe it, the number of Americans
on food stamps has grown from about 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million
today.
But "things are getting better",
right?
Incredibly, more than a million public school students in
the United States are homeless. This is the first time that has ever
happened in our history.
But "things are getting better",
right?
There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more
than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent
increase from 2001.
But "things are getting better",
right?
In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by
employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based
health insurance.
But "things are getting better",
right?
Today, more Americans than ever have found
themselves forced to turn to the federal government for help.
Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different "means-tested welfare
programs", and at this point more than 100 million Americans
are enrolled in at least one of them.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that
receives direct monetary benefits from the federal government. Back in
1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a
home that received direct monetary benefits from the federal government.
So is it a good sign or a bad sign that the
percentage of Americans that are financially dependent on the federal
government is at an all-time high?
And in future years the number of Americans
that are receiving benefits from the federal government is projected to
absolutely skyrocket.
Back in 1965, only one out of every 50
Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid,
and things are about to get a whole lot worse. It is being projected that
Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid
rolls.
If you take a look at Medicare, things are
very more sobering.
As I wrote recently, it is being projected that the number
of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
At this point, Medicare is facing unfunded
liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That
comes to approximately $328,404 for every single household in the United States.
Are you ready to contribute your share?
Social Security is a complete and total
nightmare as well.
Right now, there are approximately 56
million Americans collecting Social Security benefits.
By 2035, that number is projected to soar
to an astounding 91 million.
Overall, the Social Security system is
facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the
next 75 years.
Oh, but don't worry because "things
are getting better", right?
I honestly do not know how anyone can look
at the numbers above and come to the conclusion that the economy is in good
shape.
We have accumulated the largest mountain of
debt in the history of the world, our economic infrastructure is being gutted,
we are bleeding good jobs, government dependence is at an all-time high and we
are getting poorer as a nation with each passing day.
But other than that, everything is rainbows
and lollipops, right?
If you want to see the economic collapse, just
open up your eyes.
And if dramatic changes are not made
quickly, things are going to get much, much worse from here.
Please share this article with as many
people as possible. Time is quickly running out and there are a whole lot
of people out there that we need to wake up while we still can.
No comments:
Post a Comment