The more you read the news today the more likely you are to get really mad. The world is becoming an incredibly crazy place, and at times the amount of bad news that is coming out can seem almost overwhelming. Everywhere you look, the poor are being oppressed, our politicians are making stupid decisions and evil is on the march. The America that so many of us grew up deeply loving is literally being ripped to shreds in a thousand different ways. Unfortunately, those in power have not had any real answers for us in decades. The Democrats don’t have any real answers, the Republicans don’t have any real answers and the Federal Reserve sure as heck does not have any real answers. In fact, it seems like almost everything that our leaders actually do “accomplish” only makes things worse. The vast majority of Americans are quite busy being entertained by “bread and circuses”, but meanwhile our country is literally falling apart.
The following are 20 facts that will make you really mad if you stop and think about them for a while….
#1 Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the U.S. dollars has declined in value by over 95 percent.
#2 The difference between the budget that the “big spending Democrats” are proposing and the budget that the “big spending Republicans” are proposing is only about 32 billion dollars. Considering the fact that our national budget deficit is going to run about 1.5 trillion dollars this year, 32 billion dollars is not a whole heck of a lot to cut.
#3 Japan now manufactures about 5 million more automobiles than the United States does.
#4 China has now become the world’s largest exporter of high technology products.
#5 The U.S. government currently owes China 895 billion dollars and we are constantly sending government officials over there to beg them to lend us even more money.
#6 The President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Dennis Lockhart, says that the Federal Reserve is not responsible for the rising cost of living….
The Fed, like every other central bank, is powerless to prevent fluctuations in the cost of living and increases of individual prices. We do not produce oil. Nor do we grow food or provide health care. We cannot prevent the next oil shock, or drought, or a strike somewhere —events that cause prices of certain goods to rise and change your cost of living.
#7 The price of food is going up, the price of gasoline is going up, but home values continue to go down. According to CoreLogic, national home prices were 5.46 percent lower in December 2010 than they were in December 2009.
#8 In Osceola County, Florida 66.5% of all home mortgages are underwater. In Clark Country, Nevada 71.1% of all home mortgages are underwater.
#9 There are approximately 28 million Americans that would like full-time jobs but that don’t have full-time jobs.
#10 In a recent interview, Donald Rumsfeld said that he takes “great pride in the structures that the Bush administration put in place that this Obama administration criticized and ran against and now have retained: military commissions and indefinite detention and (the prison at) Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.”
#11 The number of net jobs gained by the U.S. economy during this past decade was smaller than during any other decade since World War 2.
#12 The Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are both declaring that the U.S. economy is in recovery mode, and yet an all-time record of 43.6 million Americans were on food stamps during the month of November.
#13 According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved individuals that actually did have health insurance.
#14 A Super Bowl television ad that encouraged people to look up John 3:16 was rejected by Fox Sports because they felt that it was “too offensive“.
#15 In Houston, Texas a couple named Bobby and Amanda Herring that had been feeding homeless people for over a year has been banned by the city from doing so. They were told that they needed a permit to feed the homeless and city officials say that they are not going to get one.
#16 A study by the World Institute for Development Economics Research found that the bottom half of the world population owns approximately 1 percent of all global wealth.
#17 Approximately 1 billion people throughout the world go to bed hungry each night.
#18 During Barack Obama’s first two years in office, the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt than the first 100 U.S. Congresses combined.
#19 An increasing number of investors are betting that the U.S. government will default on its debt. In fact, trading of U.S. credit default swap contracts has more than doubled over the last several weeks.
#20 The fastest growing portion of the federal budget is interest on the national debt.