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Page added on April 12, 2016
19 Signs That American Families Are Being Economically Destroyed
The systematic destruction of the American way of life is happening all around us, and yet most people have no idea what is happening.
Once upon a time in America, if you were responsible and hard working you could get a good paying job that could support a middle class lifestyle for an entire family even if you only had a high school education. Things weren’t perfect, but generally almost everyone in the entire country was able to take care of themselves without government assistance.
We worked hard, we played hard, and our seemingly boundless prosperity was the envy of the entire planet. But over the past several decades things have completely changed.
We consumed far more wealth than we produced, we shipped millions of good paying jobs overseas, we piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and we kept electing politicians that had absolutely no concern for the long-term future of this nation whatsoever. So now good jobs are in very short supply, we are drowning in an ocean of red ink, the middle class is rapidly shrinking and dependence on the government is at an all-time high.
Even as we stand at the precipice of the next great economic crisis, we continue to make the same mistakes. In the end, all of us are going to pay a very great price for decades of incredibly foolish decisions. Of course a tremendous amount of damage has already been done. The numbers that I am about to share with you are staggering. The following are 19 signs that American families are being economically destroyed…
#1 The poorest 40 percent of all Americans now spend more than 50 percent of their incomes just on food and housing.
#2 For those Americans that don’t own a home, 50 percent of them spend more than a third of their incomes just on rent.
#3 The price of school lunches has risen to the 3 dollar mark at many public schools across the nation.
#4 McDonald’s “Dollar Menu & More” now includes items that cost as much as 5 dollars.
#5 The price of ground beef has doubled since 2009.
#6 In 1986, child care expenses for families with employed mothers used up 6.3 percent of all income. Today, that figure is up to 7.2 percent.
#7 Incomes fell for the bottom 80 percent of all income earners in the United States during the 12 months leading up to June 2014.
#8 At this point, more than 50 percent of all American workers bring home less than $30,000 a year in wages.
#9 After adjusting for inflation, median household income has fallen by nearly $5,000 since 2007.
#10 According to the New York Times, the “typical American household” is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago.
#11 47 percent of all Americans do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.
#12 One survey found that 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.
#13 According to the U.S. Department of Education, 33 percent of all Americans with student loans are currently behind on their student loan debt repayments.
#14 According to one recent report, 43 million Americans currently have unpaid medical debt on their credit reports.
#15 The rate of homeownership in the U.S. has been declining for seven years in a row, and it is now the lowest that it has been in 20 years.
#16 For each of the past six years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened. Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.
#17 According to the Census Bureau, 65 percent of all children in the United States are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.
#18 If you have no debt at all, and you also have 10 dollars in your wallet, that you are wealthier than 25 percent of all Americans.
#19 On top of everything else, the average American must work from January 1st to April 24th just to pay all federal, state and local taxes.
All of us know people that once were doing quite well but that are now just struggling to get by from month to month.
Perhaps this has happened to you.
If you have ever been in that position, you probably remember what it feels like to have people look down on you. Unfortunately, in our society the value that we place on individuals has a tremendous amount to do with how much money they have.
So if you don’t have much money, there are a lot of people out there that will treat you like dirt. The following excerpt comes from a Washington Post article entitled “The poor are treated like criminals everywhere, even at the grocery store“…
Want to see a look of pure hatred? Pull out an EBT card at the grocery store.
Now that my kids are grown and gone, my Social Security check is enough to keep me from qualifying for government food benefits. But I remember well when we did qualify for a monthly EBT deposit, a whopping $22 — and that was before Congress cut SNAP benefits in November 2013. Like 70 percent of people receiving SNAP benefits, I couldn’t feed my family on that amount. But I remember the comments from middle-class people, the assumptions about me and my disability and what the poor should and shouldn’t be spending money on.
Have you ever seen this?
Have you ever experienced this yourself?
These days, most people on food stamps are not in that situation because they want to be. Rather, they are victims of our long-term economic collapse.
And this is just the beginning. When the next major economic crisis strikes, the suffering in this country is going to go to unprecedented levels.
As we enter that time, we are going to need a whole lot more love and compassion than we are exhibiting right now.
As a nation, we have made decades of incredibly bad decisions. As a result, we are experiencing bad consequences which are going to become increasingly more severe.
The numbers that I just shared with you are not good. But over the next several years they are going to get a whole lot worse.
Everything that can be shaken will be shaken, and life in America is about to change in a major way.
13 Comments on "19 Signs That American Families Are Being Economically Destroyed"
george on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 6:57 am
LMAO
oracle on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 7:04 am
Well said. Sorry about your experiences at the grocery store.
IMHO, the lack of love and compassion is rooted in fear.
steveo on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 7:55 am
Sure sucks to live in an empire in decline doesn’t it?
makati1 on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 8:04 am
steveo, I wouldn’t want to live there.
http://www.internationalman.com/articles/comparing-the-1930s-and-today
And: “-This year, Tax Freedom Day falls on April 24, or 114 days into the year (excluding Leap Day).
-Americans will pay $3.3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.6 trillion in state and local taxes, for a total bill of almost $5.0 trillion, or 31 percent of the nation’s income.
-Americans will collectively spend more on taxes in 2016 than they will on food, clothing, and housing combined. … “A List Of 97 Taxes Americans Pay Every Year“”
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/hate-taxes-you-certainly-are-not-alone
Serf or slave. You decide.
Davy on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 8:10 am
Stevi, sucks to live on a earth in decline who gives a shit about a “has been” empire when the whole friggen world is flying apart.
eugene on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 8:49 am
I’m an old man so do the “how we used to live” routine but I do think there is some validity to it. One thing I believe for sure is we didn’t “ship our jobs overseas”. We lost our jobs overseas to people who simply out competed us. I stopped buying American cars in 1971 for the simple reason Jap cars were better and cheaper.
We need to look at what we call normal. “In my day” there was one phone, cars simple enough we could fix our own, houses were half the size, two wheel drive was normal, we rolled up/down our own car windows, a car radio was a luxury, if you owned a boat it was a battered 14 footer with a used 10HP, no globe trotting military, no electronic gadgets for everything, no credit cards, didn’t have the money did without, etc, etc. The differences are massive. Is this the answer? Hell, I don’t know.
I know I’ve been watching this coming on for decades. Old grouch has been mumbling about it for decades. I know Trump is not the answer. He’s just a screamer about what everybody is pissed about. Hillary is just more of the same old shit. I think we have painted ourselves into a corner.
Kenz300 on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 8:50 am
I wouldn’t want to live there………..
Poverty in the Philippines –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XldM4DtlA-Y
joe on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 8:52 am
You will be when oil is E250 a barrell.
makati1 on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 9:05 am
Kenz, poverty is many things to many people, but Americans are in poverty and chains and do not even know it.
The average life expectancy here in the PS is only about 8 years less than that of Americans. But they are good years NOT spent chained to a desk for 40-50 hours a week and then have to fork over half of their income to the government. Most here do not even have a bank account, credit card or loan. Does that make them ‘poor’? No, it make them free. Most pay little or no taxes other then when they buy something.
People here have fun and enjoy life more than Americans. American kids need expensive I-toys to ‘play’. Filipino kids can have fun all afternoon kicking a half inflated balloon around or flying folded paper airplanes. I know, I see it everyday.
That video was perhaps factual in their numbers, but not in their presentation. By their standards, I grew up in ‘poverty’ for the first few years of my life and my childhood was not much better. I worked for the things I wanted or I would not have had them.
Americans today want to see the poverty in other lands but refuse to see it in their own country. Pull out the government teat and the US would look like the Ps. You better prepare because the teats is about dry. Americans are soon going to get a severe shock as they wake up in the 3rd world.
Pennsyguy on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 1:20 pm
If Filipino kids are running around OUTSIDE, they are already richer than American kids. For Americans who need more depression, read “Dreamland” about the rise of heroin addiction in the Heartland. It’s all getting too weird.
Anonymous on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 2:36 pm
Things weren’t perfect, but generally almost everyone in the entire country was able to take care of themselves without government assistance.
We worked hard, we played hard, and our seemingly boundless prosperity was the envy of the entire planet. But over the past several decades things have completely changed.
Few things. Americans even back in the ‘golden’ era, were still dependent on the uSgov for their well-being in myriad ways whether they know or admit it or not. That comment, is a screed against ‘welfare’. Well, it was corporate-financier policies that created the vast underclass in the first place. Welfare was designed to make sure the stayed underclass.
The ‘prosperity’ was an illusion. A temporary one. That Prosperity’ was fueled by the resources of the entire planet, either stolen via FTA’s, military occupation, and installing corrupt puppets whose sole purpose was to facilitate the transfer of resources to the empire. Having its industrial competitors own economies trashed by war didn’t hurt either. Nor did dollar dominance. A war the amero-zionists did everything to encourage and profit from. And it wasn’t envy the world was feeling, it was mostly anger at seeing their resources and wealth being shipped off to provide ‘prosperity’ for fat, lazy americans while the people it was taken from got scraps and a military dictatorship that shot and tortured them, armed and trained by uS ‘advisors’.
Rose-colored glasses scarcely describes the intro to this ECB article…
Go Speed Racer on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 3:13 pm
What Eugene said.
Also, in 1970’s grade school we laughed how stupid were all the American Indians to give away their whole country for some bags of colored beads.
Fast forward to the stupid fat Americans, they gave away their whole country for some cheap Chinese salad shooters, cellphones, and some LCD flat screens that are already broken and tossed into the dump.
Eugene described a practical, frugal, self-sufficient people. My grandparents in the 1970’s recycled every last tin can, that was before there was a recycling program. They repaired their lawnmowers, changed their oil, fixed their cars.
Today’s USA slobs do none of these things. Why should anybody care. Such slob people, who cares what happens to them. So the fat entitled Americans get pushed into the Atlantic ocean and replaced by Chinese and Koreans. Looks like good news.
Pennsyguy on Tue, 12th Apr 2016 3:37 pm
“…and yet most people have no idea of what is happening.” Most people are experts at finding scapegoats though. That’s a blessing for would-be fuhrers.