Today, the number of American adults that can't take care of themselves is at an all-time record high.  So what are we going to do if the number of people dependent on the government keeps going up?  Some folks like to point out that most Americans that have recently become dependent on the government would rather be working, but because of a lack of jobs they have gotten into a position where they cannot take care of themselves anymore.  Some other folks like to point out that the number of Americans that abuse the system and that enjoy being dependent on the government is steadily increasing.  Sadly, both of those positions are true.  It is a fact that the percentage of working age Americans that actually have jobs has declined dramatically over the past several years because of a lack of jobs.  It is also a fact that a growing percentage of Americans believe that it is the job of the government to take care of them from the cradle to the grave.  What people need to understand is that the government is the problem and not the solution.  We desperately need more jobs in this country, but the federal government has been absolutely killing job growth, it has been creating a culture of government dependency, and it has been going into gigantic amounts of debt trying to take care of so many people.  So what are we going to do if the number of American adults that can't take care of themselves continues to set new records year after year? (Read More.....)

An economic nightmare is descending on Europe.  With each passing month, the economic numbers across Europe get even worse.  At this point it is becoming extremely difficult for anyone to deny that Europe is plunging into a full-blown economic depression.  In fact, some parts of Europe are already there.  In Spain the overall unemployment rate is over 22 percent, and in Greece one out of every five retail establishments has already been closed down.  All over Europe, economic activity is rapidly slowing down, unemployment is skyrocketing and bad debts are unraveling.  It isn't even going to take a default by a nation such as Greece or a collapse of the euro to push Europe into an economic depression.  All Europe has to do is to stay on the exact path that it is on right now and it will get there.  Normally, European governments would respond to an economic slowdown by increasing government spending.  But this time most of them are already drowning in debt.  Instead of increasing government spending, most governments in Europe are actually cutting back.  All over Europe, national governments are being encouraged to implement even more tax increases and even more budget cuts.  The hope is that all of this austerity will help solve the nightmarish sovereign debt crisis that Europe is facing.  But unfortunately, all of these tax increases and budget cuts are also going to involve a tremendous amount of economic pain. (Read More.....)

If you are an American under the age of 30, you have probably figured out by now that the entire economic system is stacked against you.  The way that our economy is structured today is ridiculously unfair to younger Americans.  First, we endlessly push our young people to go to our ridiculously expensive colleges and universities where the pile up enormous amounts of debt.  Then they get out into the real world where they find that only a handful of really good jobs are available for the vast army of college graduates entering the workforce.  Sadly, most of the jobs that our young people are working these days do not pay enough to be able to support a family or buy a decent home.  Meanwhile, our politicians are busy mortgaging their future.  Our young people are expected to support a Social Security system that will not be there when they get older, and every single day more than 2 billion dollars is added to a debt that will hang around the necks of younger Americans and their children for the rest of their lives.  If you stop and think about all of this for too long, your head might just explode with anger.  Well, not literally, but you get the point.  The truth is that this is going to be the first generation in U.S. history that is going to do significantly worse than their parents, and that is a terrible shame. (Read More.....)

Once upon a time, the people of the United States constructed beautiful, shiny cities from coast to coast that were the envy of the entire globe. We had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen and life was quite good in America.  But now all of our prosperity is coming crashing down and many of our formerly great cities are turning into open, festering sores.  Unfortunately, we are drowning in so much debt that we can barely even slow down the shocking decline of our cities.  Over the past decade, tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of good jobs have been shipped out of the United States.  As our economic infrastructure has been ripped out right in front of our eyes, an atmosphere of unemployment, poverty and despair has descended on many of our major cities like a soaking wet blanket.  Today, many of our cities that once were considered to be some of the greatest in the world have been transformed into rotting, post-apocalyptic hellholes.  When you visit many of these cities and look into the sunken eyes of the residents, you almost get the feeling that something has sucked all of the hope and all of the life right out of them.  For a while, large numbers of Americans still believed that the right politician would bring them "hope" and "change", but now crushing despair is giving way to absolute desperation for millions of people.  Desperate people do desperate things, and as our major cities continue to decay they are going to become very dangerous places to be. (Read More.....)

Are we on the verge of another Great Depression?  Christian Lagarde, the head of the IMF, said this week that if dramatic action is not taken immediately we could actually see conditions "reminiscent of the 1930s depression" and that no country on earth "will be immune to the crisis".  Right now, financial panic is sweeping across Europe, but most Americans are not too concerned about it because they simply don't understand how important the EU is.  The truth is that the EU has a much larger population than the United States does.  The EU has an economy that is nearly as large as the economies of the United States and China combined.  The EU has more Fortune 500 companies that the United States does, and the banking system of Europe is substantially larger than the banking system of the United States.  Anyone out there that believes that a massive financial collapse in Europe would not dramatically affect the rest of the globe is being delusional.  The European debt crisis is one of the biggest stories that we have seen in a long, long time and the coming financial meltdown is going to permanently change the global economy. (Read More.....)

College education in America is a bad joke.  Instead of preparing the next generation of leaders for the jobs of tomorrow, the college education "industry" has become a giant money making scam.  We constantly preach to our high school students that they "need" to go to college and we tell them to not even worry about how much it is going to cost because a college education is "always" worth the money.  Then we lend them outrageous amounts of money so that they can pay the gigantic bills for the "education" that they are receiving.  But the truth is that the quality of education at America's colleges and universities is absolutely abysmal these days.  I spent 8 years at U.S. universities, and most of the courses that I took could have been passed by the family dog.  Sadly, once our young people graduate they quickly discover that there are way too many college graduates and not nearly enough good jobs.  Today, we have millions upon millions of young Americans that are enslaved to student loan debt for the rest of their lives.  They were promised a bright future, but instead most of them are discovering that they are going to be working really hard to pay off financial predators for decades to come.  Unfortunately, for most college graduates a diploma is simply a ticket to a crappy job and a lifetime of debt slavery. (Read More.....)

It has now become very clear who dominates Europe.  As European officials prepare to gather for one of the most important summits in EU history, it has become apparent that either the German plan for a new EU treaty is going to be adopted or there is not going to be a deal at all.  Germany wants to impose strict new fiscal restraints on all of the eurozone nations.  This would include a new 3 percent budget deficit rule with automatic sanctions on any violators.  The European Court of Justice would be given power to decide whether or not an individual nation was complying with the 3 percent rule or not.  A highly controversial new tax on all financial transactions is also being proposed, along with a number of other repressive new regulations that are designed to more tightly integrate Europe.  Germany says that if all 27 EU nations are not willing to go along with a new treaty then it is prepared to strike an agreement with just the 17 nations that make up the eurozone.  But not everyone is thrilled with what Germany is trying to do.  Critics are saying that the German proposals (which are also being backed by the French) would mean a massive loss of sovereignty for most of the nations that make up the eurozone, and they would essentially turn the eurozone into "the United States of Germany". (Read More.....)

In the United States today, there is one group of people that is actually living the American Dream.  The ultra-wealthy have seen their incomes absolutely explode over the past three decades.  Meanwhile, the U.S. middle class has been steadily declining and the ranks of the poor have been swelling.  But this is what always happens when an economy becomes highly centralized.  Today, gigantic corporations and "too big to fail" banks totally dominate our economic system.  The whole game is rigged.  Our system is now designed to funnel wealth away from the bottom 90 percent of the population and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy.  When you allow a handful of giant entities to run everything, it is going to inevitably create a situation where there are a small number of very big winners and a massive amount of losers.  In America today, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.  Yes, there will always be poor people.  Yes, those that work really hard and produce something of great value for society should be greatly rewarded.  The way that our system should work is that it should empower individuals and small businesses to come up with new ideas, start companies, create jobs and produce massive amounts of new wealth.  But instead, the number of small businesses in America is rapidly declining.  The giant banks and the giant corporations that run everything are constantly running around stomping all of the "little guys" out of existence.  This has created an environment where the rich are constantly getting richer and the poor are constantly getting poorer. (Read More.....)

Yes, most Americans realize that the economy is not doing well right now, but most of them also believe that this is just a "temporary" downturn.  The mainstream media tells us over and over that a "recovery" has either already begun or that one is right around the corner.  Sadly, the truth is that the U.S. economy is in much worse shape than most Americans think.  Yes, there will be economic "peaks and valleys" as we move along, but it is absolutely imperative that all of us understand that we are in the middle of a long-term economic decline that has been caused by decades of horrendous decisions.  Thousands of businesses and millions of jobs have left the country and they aren't coming back.  Last year, 23 manufacturing facilities a day were shut down in the United States and we have lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.  Without enough good jobs to go around, millions of American families have lost their homes and millions of American families have been pushed into poverty.  Less good jobs also means that there are less people to pay the taxes we need to keep government services going.  Government debt at the local, state and federal levels has exploded as the tax base has dwindled.  We have become a nation that is very good at consuming wealth but that is not very good at creating wealth.  Just "tweaking" a couple of things here or there is not going to get our economy back "on track".  We need fundamental changes to the way that we are doing things, and there are currently no signs that this kind of change is going to happen any time soon. (Read More.....)

Do you want to feel optimistic about the U.S. economy?  If so, you might not want to read the rest of this article.  In many areas of the United States today, you can almost smell the fear and the anxiety in the air.  Survey after survey has found that the American people are extremely pessimistic about the direction the economy is headed.  In fact, many recent surveys have found that economic pessimism is at the highest levels ever recorded.  There has been an astonishing loss of faith in the system.  In general, people are extremely dissatisfied with how things are going right now, and they do not believe that things will get better any time soon.  When the majority of the population starts losing hope like that, it creates a very unstable economic environment.  Once people are gripped by desperation, they start behaving much differently.  Desperate people do desperate things, and we are already starting to see this in many parts of the country. (Read More.....)