As election season 2010 draws near, the Obama administration has finally realized that the Democrats could actually lose both the House and the Senate in November. Suddenly all Obama wants to talk about is his wonderful new plan for the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, what he is suggesting is far too little and far too late. Anything Obama is proposing now will not be passed by Congress before the upcoming elections, and that is bad news for the Democrats. The American people tend to vote based on their wallets, and right now the American people are not happy. They desperately want someone to "fix" what is wrong with the economy. Obama is running around the country trying to convince people that he is the man to restore the American Dream, but at this point the American people have less faith in his economic policies than ever. The White House is insisting that Obama's new economic plan is not a new "stimulus package", and that is actually true. Obama's new plan will not stimulate much of anything. The truth is that Obama's new economic plan is really just a cruel joke on those who are willing to have faith in Obama's ability to somehow turn the dying U.S. economy around. Unfortunately, throwing several hundred billion more dollars at the problem is not going to do anything to fix the foundational problems that are destroying our economic system. (Read More.....)
Once upon a time, private industry was the engine of the great American economic machine. From coast to coast, expanding industries spawned massive cities filled with optimistic Americans who were able to achieve middle class lifestyles on the good jobs that American companies were providing for them. The largest middle class in the history of the world had been created and it seemed possible for just about everyone to live the American Dream. But today all of that has changed. The private sector is being dominated by gigantic global corporations that have shown absolutely no hesitation to ship jobs overseas. Millions upon millions of good jobs have been sent to China, India and the third world and they are never coming back. Pay and benefits for middle class Americans working in private industry have been slowly eroding and are now at dangerously low levels. Meanwhile, working as a "government servant" has never been more rewarding. Today, the average government worker makes far more than the average worker in the private sector does. (Read More.....)
America is facing a retirement crisis that is so colossal that it threatens to collapse the entire financial system. Millions upon millions of Baby Boomers are preparing to retire, but when you take a close look at the numbers it quickly becomes clear that it is mathematically impossible for us to keep the financial promises that we have made to them. The truth is that the days when tens of millions of elderly Americans could enjoy a very comfortable retirement are rapidly drawing to a close. Why? Well, because there is no money. The U.S. government is supposed to have 2.5 trillion dollars in the Social Security trust fund for all of these retiring Baby Boomers, but they "borrowed" all of that money over the past 30 years to pay other bills. Hundreds of other government and corporate pension programs across the United States are either severely underfunded or are not funded at all. Meanwhile, American workers have been contributing pitifully small amounts to their own retirement funds. Americans have been too busy drowning in debt as the pursue the American Dream to worry about putting away anything for the future. So where does all of that leave us? It leaves us with a complete and total financial nightmare on our hands. (Read More.....)
The United States financial system is facing a retirement crisis of unprecedented magnitude in the coming years. Social Security and Medicare are both on the verge of collapse, and both private and public pension funds all over America are massively underfunded. Now new data is revealing that the number of Americans who have virtually nothing saved up for retirement continues to grow at a rapid pace. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute's annual Retirement Confidence Survey, the percentage of American workers who have less than $10,000 saved for retirement has grown to 43%. The number of American workers who say that they have less than $1,000 saved for retirement has grown to 27%. But perhaps this should be no surprise considering the fact that tens of millions of Americans are just trying to figure out how to get through each month financially. After all, it is really hard to plan for retirement when you can barely pay your mortgage. (Read More.....)