As you read this, there are tens of millions of people in China, India and dozens of third world nations who would love to do your job for one-tenth the pay. They are willing to work 12 hours a day. They don’t expect a benefits plan or a pension package. They aren’t going to waste countless hours chatting on their cell phones or updating their Facebook profiles. All they want is a chance. And increasingly, the big global corporations that dominate the world economy are giving it to them. It is called outsourcing, and if you don’t believe that it can happen to your job, you might want to think again. It is not just Americans who are chasing after the American Dream these days. We now live in a global economy with a global workforce and the rules of the game have fundamentally changed. (Read More...)
Economic Crisis
10 Reasons Why We Might Not See Anything Less Than A Trillion Dollar Deficit For Decades To Come
Do you know how enormous one trillion dollars is? If you were alive when Christ was born, and on that day you started spending a million dollars every single day, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now. If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you over 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars. A trillion $1 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 38 times. That is how big one trillion dollars is. But right now, if the U.S. government could actually reduce the federal budget deficit to one trillion dollars that would be a major victory. In 2009, the U.S. government ran a budget deficit of more than 1.4 trillion dollars. The U.S. government will run a budget deficit of more than 1.4 trillion dollars in 2010. Not only that, the Obama administration is already admitting that the budget deficit will be over 1.4 trillion dollars again in 2011. In fact, the truth of it is that we are looking at trillion dollars deficits for as far as the eye can see. In the process we are piling up the biggest mountain of debt the world has ever seen. What we are doing to future generations is unfathomable. Servicing this monolithic debt is going to devastate the U.S. economy and is going to absolutely crush the American Dream for future generations of Americans. But we can’t seem to help ourselves. We just keep spending. (Read More...)
BP Caught Exploiting Cheap Prison Labor To Clean Up The Oil Spill
BP has been caught red-handed using dirt cheap prison labor to clean up the oil spill along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico as thousands upon thousands of non-inmates beg for work. So why would BP use prison labor when there are so many others who would gladly do the work? Well, prison labor costs far, far less of course. As bad as this is for BP’s public image, the truth is that we should not be too hard on them. After all, exploiting cheap labor around the world has become an obsession for the big global corporations that dominate our economy. To these gigantic global predators, the American Dream is not about providing good jobs so that middle class Americans can buy homes and send their kids to college. No, to these behemoths the goal is to find the closest thing to slave labor that they can so that they can dramatically increase their profits. (Read More...)
10 Incredible Statistics About America’s Coming Retirement Crisis That Will Blow Your Mind
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...)
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like 1930
An increasing number of economists, world leaders and financial columnists are beginning to acknowledge that our current economic crisis bears a striking resemblance to what was going on about the time the Great Depression of the 1930s started. Just like the “Roaring 20s”, the American people over the last couple of decades have been getting into massive amounts of debt in pursuit of the American Dream. But just like the early 1930s, we are now experiencing a severe credit crunch and the process of deleveraging this gigantic mountain of debt promises to be at least as painful as the deleveraging that took place throughout the 1930s. It seems like almost everyone is using words like “double dip” and “recession” now, and a lot of analysts are even starting to utter even more dreaded words like “deflation” and “depression”. Even the Federal Reserve, usually one of the biggest cheerleaders for the economy, is now saying that the U.S. economic system may not recover for another five or six years. If that is what the Federal Reserve is admitting to, then how bad are things really? The truth is that it really is beginning to look a lot like 1930 out there. (Read More...)
22 Statistics That Prove That The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and “free trade” that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the “global economy” would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough. The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new “global” labor pool. (Read More...)
Money Crunch! How Can An Economy Built On Debt Function If Nobody Can Get Loans?
Over the past several decades, the U.S. economy has become increasingly reliant on debt. The vast majority of people take out a mortgage when they purchase a home, the vast majority of people require a big loan in order to buy a vehicle, and the number of Americans who use credit cards to make purchases at retail stores has skyrocketed over the years. It has gotten to the point where credit is the life blood of the U.S. economic system. Unless your business is a convenience store or a fast food joint, being able to accept credit cards or arrange credit for your customers is absolutely crucial. In fact, the economic boom that the United States has experienced over the last 30 years has been largely due to a rapidly expanding pool of credit. Americans have gone deeper and deeper in debt with each passing year as they pursue the American Dream. But now that so many lending institutions have substantially tightened their lending standards and now that so many Americans have such low credit scores, how is the U.S. economy going to function? (Read More...)
Illinois Bankrupt?
Is the state of Illinois bankrupt? Well, if Illinois is not totally broke already it is certainly well on its way. The state government has now quit paying even the most essential bills. It spends three dollars for every two dollars that it takes in. The state of Illinois now ranks eighth in the world in possible bond-holder default. That is actually one spot ahead of the state of California. As much of a mess as California is (as we have previously detailed at length), Illinois is in even worse shape. Every major rating agency has downgraded Illinois debt, and Illinois now pays millions of dollars more to insure its debt than any other state in the nation. So yes, the state of Illinois is a complete and total basket case. For a long time, many analysts had expected California to be the first state to go “belly up” financially, but now Illinois seems to be the favorite. Not that Illinois is alone. Thousands of state, city and local governments across the United States are facing massive debt problems. All of the borrowing that was done to push communities towards achieving the American Dream is now coming back to haunt localities with a vengeance. Debt is a very seductive and yet very cruel master, and the government of Illinois is rapidly finding out just how painful it can be to drown in a sea of debt. (Read More...)