Things just continue to get even worse for the U.S. housing industry. New homes sales have been absolutely plummeting, homebuilder stocks have lost over a third of their value, and existing home sales just posted their biggest decline since 2014. For years, we had been witnessing a real estate boom in the United States, but now that has officially ended. It is starting to feel like 2008 all over again, and many of those that work in the industry are really starting to freak out. The Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising interest rates, and it is having the exact same effect on the housing industry that it did just before the last recession. (Read More...)
The U.S. Economy
U.S. Job Losses Accelerate: Here Are 10 Big Companies That Are Cutting Jobs Or Laying Off Workers
Job cuts and layoffs are coming fast and furious now as the U.S. economy really starts to slow down. We haven’t seen anything like this since 2008, when millions of Americans lost their jobs in just a matter of months. Things are certainly not that bad yet, but there has been a very noticeable shift over the last couple of months. Back during the summer, everyone was talking about how well the U.S. economy was doing, but now things have dramatically changed. At this point, economic activity has slowed down so much that even Jim Cramer of CNBC is admitting that the U.S. economy has “cooled”. If current trends continue, things will certainly get even worse, and the job losses in this article will be just the tip of the iceberg. (Read More...)
Why Does America Have 13 Million Households That Don’t Have Enough Food To Eat?
Have you ever had a day when your children were crying due to hunger but the cupboards were completely bare and your bank account was empty? If you haven’t, you should consider yourself to be extremely blessed, because this is what real life feels like for millions upon millions of Americans in 2018. As you will see below, a third of all Americans cannot even afford “the basics” each month, and 13 million households are officially considered to be “food insecure”. In other words, they don’t have enough to eat. Many parents out there choose to skip a meal (or two) each day just so that their kids can have full stomachs. But sometimes the money runs out completely, and that is when it gets really tough. (Read More...)
The Republicans In Congress Have Betrayed Us Again
I guess by now we should be accustomed to politicians lying to us. For years, Republicans have been promising to repeal Obamacare if we would just give them control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. We did that, and now they are breaking that promise. Because even if “Obamacare 2.0” miraculously gets through the Senate, most of the essential elements of Obamacare will survive. If you look at the latest Senate bill, most of the Obamacare subsidies are still in there, many of the Obamacare taxes are still in there, and most of the Obamacare regulations are still in there. On top of everything else, the bill would create an absolutely massive health insurance company bailout superfund, and that is something that the Democrats never even dared to do. The bill being pushed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t actually fix much of anything, and it certainly cannot be called a “repeal” of Obamacare. (Read More...)
5 Trends That Are Destroying The Middle Class In America
The middle class in America has been shrinking for decades, and our leaders seem powerless to do anything about it. Two years ago, the middle class became a minority in this country for the first time ever. In other words, the middle class now accounts for less than 50 percent of the population. But back in the early 1970s, the middle class made up more than 60 percent of the population. I have often compared being in the middle class to playing a really bizarre game of musical chairs. When the music stops playing each month, more chairs are being pulled out of the middle class, and most of us are just hoping that we will still have a chair for the next go around. (Read More...)
Stories Of Despair From The Forgotten People That The U.S. Economy Has Left Behind
There is so much economic despair in our country today, but if you have a good job and if you live in a good neighborhood you might not ever encounter it. There really are “two Americas” in 2016, and they are getting farther and farther apart with each passing year. On the one hand, you have lots of people smiling in New York City these days because of the stock market boom, and property values have soared to ridiculous levels in San Francisco because of the tech bubble. But in between the two coasts there are vast stretches of forgotten people that the U.S. economy has left behind. In this article I am going to share some of their stories with you. (Read More...)
If You Want To Know The Truth About The Unemployment Rate Read This Article
The Obama administration is telling us that the unemployment rate in the United States has fallen to 5.1 percent, but does that number actually bear any resemblance to reality? On Friday, news outlets all over America celebrated the fact that the U.S. economy added 173,000 jobs in August. We were told that the unemployment rate has fallen to a seven year low and that wages are going up. So everything must be getting better for the middle class, right? After all, isn’t that what the official numbers are telling us? (Read More...)