25 Horrible Statistics About The U.S. Economy That Barack Obama Does Not Want You To Know

 

The human capacity for self-delusion truly is remarkable.  Most people out there end up believing exactly what they want to believe even when the truth is staring them right in the face.  Take the U.S. economy for example.  

Barack Obama wants to believe that his policies have worked and that the U.S. economy is improving.  So that is what he is telling the American people.  The mainstream media wants to believe that Barack Obama is a good president and that his policies make sense and so they are reporting that we are experiencing an economic recovery.  A very large segment of the U.S. population still fully supports Barack Obama and they want to believe that the economy is getting better so they are buying the propaganda that the mainstream media is feeding them.  But is the U.S. economy really improving?  The truth is that it is not.  The rate of employment among working age Americans is exactly where it was two years ago and household incomes have actually gone down while Obama has been president.  Home ownership levels and home prices continue to decline.  Meanwhile, food and gasoline continue to become even more expensive.  The percentage of Americans that are dependent on the government is at an all-time record high and the U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars under Obama.  We simply have not seen the type of economic recovery that we have seen after every other economic recession since World War II.

The horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that you are about to read are not talked about much by the mainstream media.  They would rather be "positive" and "upbeat" about the direction that things are headed.

But lying to the American people is not going to help them.  If you are speeding in a car toward a 500 foot cliff, you don't need someone to cheer you on.  Instead, you need someone to slam on the brakes.

The cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy is in far worse shape than it was four or five years ago.

We have never come close to recovering from the last recession and another one will be here soon.

The following are 25 horrible statistics about the U.S. economy that Barack Obama does not want you to know....

#1 The percentage of Americans that own homes is dropping rapidly.  According to Gallup, the current level of home ownership in the United States is the lowest that Gallup has ever measured.

#2 Home prices in the U.S. continue to fall like a rock as well.  They have declined for six months in a row and are now down a total of 35 percent from the peak of the housing bubble.  The last time that home prices in the United States were this low was back in 2002.

#3 Last year, an astounding 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.

#4 Back in 2007, about 10 percent of all unemployed Americans had been out of work for 52 weeks or longer.  Today, that number is above 30 percent.

#5 When Barack Obama first became president, the number of "long-term unemployed workers" in the United States was 2.6 million.  Today, it is 5.3 million.

#6 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is about three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

#7 Despite what the mainstream media would have us to believe, the truth is that the percentage of working age Americans that are employed is not increasing.  Back in March 2010, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed.  In March 2011, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In March 2012, 58.5 percent of all working age Americans were employed.  So how can Barack Obama and the mainstream media claim that the employment situation in the United States is getting better?  The employment rate is still essentially exactly where it was when the last recession supposedly ended.

#8 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#9 In 1962, 28 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.  In 2011, only 9 percent of all jobs in America were manufacturing jobs.

#10 In some areas of Detroit, Michigan you can buy a three bedroom home for just $500.

#11 According to one recent survey, approximately one-third of all Americans are not paying their bills on time at this point.

#12 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the price of gasoline has risen by more than 100 percent.

#13 The student loan debt bubble continues to expand at a very frightening pace.  Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.

#14 Incredibly, one out of every four jobs in the United States pays $10 an hour or less at this point.

#15 Household incomes all over the United States continue to fall.  After adjusting for inflation, median household income in America has declined by 7.8 percent since December 2007.

#16 Over the past several decades, government dependence has risen to unprecedented heights in the United States.  The following is how I described the explosive growth of social welfare benefits in one recent article....

Back in 1960, social welfare benefits made up approximately 10 percent of all salaries and wages.  In the year 2000, social welfare benefits made up approximately 21 percent of all salaries and wages.  Today, social welfare benefits make up approximately 35 percent of all salaries and wages.

#17 In November 2008, 30.8 million Americans were on food stamps.  Today, more than 46 million Americans are on food stamps.

#18 Right now, more than 25 percent of all American children are on food stamps.

#19 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, today 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that receives some form of benefits from the federal government.

#20 Over the next 75 years, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars.  That comes to $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.

#21 During the first quarter of 2012, U.S. public debt rose by 359.1 billion dollars.  U.S. GDP only rose by 142.4 billion dollars.

#22 At this point, the U.S. national debt is rising by more than 2 million dollars every single minute.

#23 The U.S. national debt has risen by more than 5 trillion dollars since the day that Barack Obama first took office.  In a little more than 3 years Obama has added more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined.

#24 The Federal Reserve bought up approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department during 2011.

#25 The Federal Reserve continues to systematically destroy the value of the U.S. dollar.  Since 1970, the U.S. dollar has lost more than 83 percent of its value.

But the horrible economic statistics only tell part of the story.

In communities all over America there is a feeling that something fundamental has changed.  Businesses that have been around for generations are shutting their doors and there is a lot of fear in the air.  The following is a brief excerpt from a recent interview with Richard Yamarone, the senior economist at Bloomberg Brief....

You have to listen to what the small businesses are telling you and right now they are telling you, ‘Hey, I’m the head of a 3rd or 4th generation, 75 or 100 year old business, and I’ve got to shut the doors’ or ‘I’ve got to let people go. And if I’m hiring anybody back, it’s only on a temporary basis.’
Sometimes they do this through a hiring firm so that they can sidestep paying unemployment benefit insurance. So that’s what’s really going on at the grassroots level of the economy. Very, very, grossly different from what you’re seeing in some of these numbers coming out in earnings releases.”

All over the country, millions of hard working Americans are desperately looking for work.  They have been told that "the recession is over", but they are still finding it incredibly difficult to find anyone that will hire them.  The following example is from a recent CNN article....

Joann Cotton, a 54-year-old Columbus, Mississippi, resident, was one of those faces of poverty we met on the tour. Unemployed for three years, Joann has gone from making "$60,000 a year to less than $15,000 overnight." Her husband is disabled and dependent on medicines the couple can no longer afford. They rely on food stamps, which, Joann says, "is depressing as hell."

Receiving government aid, however, has not been as depressing as her job search. Joann says she has applied for at least 300 jobs. Even though she can barely afford gas, she drives to the interviews only to learn that the employers want to hire younger candidates at low wages.

The experiences have taken a toll: "I've aged 10 years in the three years that I've been looking for a job," Joann told us. "I want to get a job so I can just relax and exhale ... but I can't. After a while you just give up."

Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his family continue to live the high life at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.

Even many Democrats are starting to get very upset about this.  The following is from a recent article by Paul Bedard....

Blue collar Democratic voters, stuck taking depressing “staycations” because they can’t afford gas and hotels, are resentful of the first family’s 17 lavish vacations around the world and don’t want their tax dollars paying for the Obamas’ holidays, according to a new analysis of swing voters.

It simply is not appropriate for the Obamas to be spending millions upon millions upon millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars on luxury vacations when so many Americans are deeply suffering.

But Barack Obama does not want you to know about any of this stuff.

He just wants you to buy his empty propaganda one more time so that he can continue to occupy the White House for another four years.

Original article by End of The American Dream

 

Economic Armageddon and You (Video)

A quick lesson in economics and how the US is applying it..

Wake Up, America! You’re Falling Behind!!

Note: The following is an edited portion of an interview with Kishore Mahbubani, the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Mahbubani previously served for 33 years in Singapore’s diplomatic service and is the author of The New Asian Hemisphere, Can Asians Think? and Beyond the Age of Innocence.

Every time the United States or the West steps into an Islamic country it presents a major geopolitical gift to China. (When the U.S. decided to intervene in Libya) China was saying, “Great, go ahead! Go into more Islamic countries. Make my day.”

If you’re a logical, long-term, hard-headed geopolitical realist thinker from America it is very, very clear that the only country that can overtake the United States in absolute power - militarily, economically, in every sense - is China.

The Islamic world will not overtake America– not in my lifetime and not in your lifetime.  So America should be devoting 90% of its resources on managing China and 10% of its resources on managing the Islamic world.

Instead it is spending 90% of its resources getting involved in the Islamic world - whether it is Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine or Libya– and 10% of its time managing China.

The U.S.should engage China more seriously and try to work out a long-term, viable, geopolitical partnership with China.  It should also give up its dream of achieving democracy in China.  It should stop believing that a “Jasmine Revolution” is on the way and realize that this government in China is going to survive and possibly do very well.

You may wish for all kinds of worst-case scenarios for China, but as a geopolitical planner you should plan for the best-case scenario.

China is going to go from strength to strength. And if China is going to go from strength to strength and you spend all your time either in the Islamic world or having this absolutely stupid domestic debate about how to cut the deficit, you’re just buying time for China.

A lot of my writings are intended to serve as a wake-up call to the West. I’m not anti-West nor am I anti-American - even though many people think I am. I’m actually just telling the West that you are acting against your own long-term geopolitical and economic interests in your policies towards the rest of the world. There was a time - and it lasted only 200 years - when the West could make decisions and the rest of the world had to comply. That era is gone, finished – poof!

Now the West has got to learn to understand what the rest of the world wants and pragmatically adjust. The biggest advantage that Asian countries have over the United States and other Western countries is that they’re very pragmatic and flexible and America has become ideological and dogmatic. America needs to become pragmatic and flexible too.

Unfortunately, American public intellectuals have an incestuous, self-referential discourse among themselves saying, “Aren't we the greatest in the world? Gee, aren't we wonderful?” And they don’t realize that Western power - American power - is receding steadily in the world.

Look at Southeast Asia.  After the U.S.won the Cold War, (Southeast Asia) was frankly an American lake. And then suddenly Americans became very arrogant and they said, “Hey, we don’t need the world; forget you.”

You do what you want to do and slowly, steadily,China is (advancing). I admire what the Chinese have done. It’s amazing how careful, deliberate, and systematic they are in their policies towards the rest of the world and how arrogant and ignorant American policies are.

If you want to learn about how to grow a country’s economy right, don’t go to Europe, don’t go to America; go to Asia.  Frankly, the best governed country in the world - and I can say this somewhat immodestly - is Singapore. Or even go to China.

Let me give you a very simple example. The most shocking thing I’ve learned recently for someone who lived in New York for 10 and a half years is that the Tappan Zee Bridge which carries thousands of cars can only survive another 10 years. Isn't that shocking? In the meantime, while you can't hold up one bridge across one river, guess what,China is building the world’s fastest trains and the world’s best airports.

I’ve flown several times, just by chance, directly from Shanghai to JFK (airport in New York). And when you fly from Shanghai airport to JFK, you’re flying from the first world to the third world. And yet Americans are not aware of how far they’ve fallen behind. The Americans cannot conceive of the idea that you can learn about governance from the rest of the world. Chinacan and Chinadoes. China spends so much time studying best practices in the rest of the world and America spends no time studying best practices in the rest of the world.

So my message to America is that the clock is ticking. Time is no more on your side. And fortunately even today there’s a huge reservoir of goodwill towards America in the world.  Try to figure out how you can use this reservoir of goodwill for the long-term benefit of America. Don’t waste it.

Article by Global Public Square

Those Who Do Not Learn From History...

This cartoon was published in the Chicago Tribune in 1934. We all know what was happening to our country during that time. 

Are we so ignorant as to not have learned our lesson from history? 

 

Click on image to enlarge

Wake Up America!

Retired Marine Sergeant R. Lee Ermey Tells It Like It Is (Video)

On the last day of 2010 let's throw out the old and bring in the new. Retired Marine Sergeant R. Lee Ermey does not mince any words on what needs throwing out in this country. You tell 'em Sarge! Oooooooo Raaaaahhhhhh!!

Retired drill instructor R. Lee Ermey took an opportunity to rail against the Obama administration during an appearance at a live broadcast to benefit the USO.

The retired Marine vet stressed that the Marines’ Toys 4 Tots program was working through the struggling economy to bring holiday cheer to young boys and girls, but also delivered a political punch to the Obama administration which he claimed was trying to destroy the country by imposing socialism. 

God Bless The United States Marine Corps, Sgt. Ermey, and God Bless America!!

Here's Wishing For A Happy New Year Full of Hope and Change (Not The Obama Kind Either!)

The Fate of America? (Video)

Wake Up Americans or You Will Find Yourself Kow-Towing To a New Master!

Reality Check

 

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.'Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected.

They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each paying man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now pa id $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,' but he got $10!'

'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!'

'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking at another bar where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics, University of Georgia

For those of you who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

Even Tony Robbins Is Alerting That An Economic Collapse Is Coming (Videos)

It seems like almost everyone is warning of a coming economic collapse these days.  Do you remember Tony Robbins?  He is probably the world's best known "motivational speaker" and his infomercials dominated late night television during the 80s and 90s.  He was always urging all of us to "unleash the power within" and to take charge of our lives.  Well guess what?  

Now Tony Robbins is warning that an economic collapse is coming. In fact, he has issued a special video warning about what he believes is about to happen. Considering the incredible connections that he has at the highest levels of the financial world, it makes a lot of sense to consider what he is trying to warn us about. Robbins says that a "major retracement" is coming to financial markets and that the coming collapse is going to be a "painful process" as we go through it.  

Those familiar with Tony Robbins know that he always goes out of his way to stress the positive, so if even he is openly warning the public about a coming economic nightmare than you know that things are starting to get really, really bad out there.

Video 1

Video 2

Theeconomiccollapseblog

"That's interesting. I hadn't heard that."

When President George was taking questions today regarding U.S. economic woes (ones his administration are primarily responsible for) and asked about the prospect of $4 a gallon gas prices, he uttered with typical Dubya wisdom, "That's interesting. I hadn't heard that."

This coming from the same intellectual dwarf, who defies even his own personally appointed Chairman of the Fed, in viewing an impending recession with all prevailing indices at his disposal. Bush’s theory of economics states, “we’re only going through a slow down.” As akin to a skydiver whose tangled chute is slowed down, Mr. Prez?

I myself subscribe to the Rip Van Winkle theory of economics..I’ll just fall asleep and wake up 20 years from now when this whole Bush fiasco is but a bad dream.

Hey Brother, Can You Spare a Rupee?

The Bush administration’s dismal economic policies have reached a new low. How low? Well let’s just say that when the mighty Indian rupee has more respect than the US dollar, our respect in the monetary world is swiftly swirling down the toilet.

For those who haven’t heard this latest gem, India's tourism minister, Ambika Soni, said Thursday that U.S. dollars will no longer be accepted at the country's heritage tourist sites, like the famed Taj Mahal.

For years the dollar was worth about 50 rupees and tourists visiting most sites in India were charged either $5 or 250 rupees. But with the dollar at a nine-year low against the rupee — falling 11 percent in 2007 alone and now hovering at around 39 rupees — that deal has become a losing proposition for the tourism industry.

According to the minister, the decision was only in part a reaction to the currency's plunging value. "Before the dollar lost its value, there was a demand to have (admission tickets) just in rupees," Soni said that charging only rupees would not only be more practical, but would save money because "the dollar was weaker against the rupee."

How do you say, “bullshit” in Hindi? This is but a glossed over attempt by the minister to politely say, “take your puny dollar and shove it!”

The Taj Mahal, India's famed white marble monument to love, which had charged tourists $15 or 750 rupees, has been refusing to accept dollars since November. The move makes visits pricier for American tourists, who now have to shell out nearly $20. And it's likely to get worse.

While the mighty buck has fallen against most major currencies, it has lost ground against the rupee due to an influx of foreign capital into India. "We expect a slight appreciation of the rupee to continue, although it won't be as dramatic as last year," said Agam Gupta, head of foreign exchange trading at Standard Chartered Bank in India.

Don’t know about you, but I am feeling a wee bit embarrassed about this. It was not too long ago that a pocket full of America dollars in any foreign country was cause for envy. Now we have to glance out the corners of both eyes before reaching into our pockets and purses to pull out a few greenbacks. It almost feels dirty.

Thanks Bush. Again you have proved you aren’t worth a falling dollar.

See No Evil

http://illuminated1.blogspot.com/