Posted on by vinceseconomicblog

The American Dream

March 31, 2011

What in the world is happening to America? Perhaps you have asked yourself that question from time to time. Today it seems like everything is falling apart. Our economy is crumbling, our politicians are incompetent, we have just gotten involved in another war, corruption is everywhere and the Americans people are so addicted to entertainment that hardly anything can wake them from their stupor. It is enough to make you think that there is just not much hope for America. But the truth is that we should never give up. It is when the times are darkest that the greatest heroes arise. We truly do live in challenging times, but that just means that there are great victories to be won and great stories to be written. There may be a whole lot of things that are very wrong with America right now, but that doesn’t mean that the game is over quite yet.

Unfortunately, right now most Americans are completely asleep. Just like during the declining years of the Roman Empire, most people that live in the U.S. are spoiled, decadent and completely addicted to entertainment.

The following is how many Americans actually plan their weeks….

Monday: Watch Dancing With The Stars

Tuesday: Watch The Dancing With The Stars Results Show

Wednesday: Watch American Idol

Thursday: Watch The American Idol Results Show

At this point, most people in this country cannot even intelligently discuss the pressing issues of our day.

In fact, 63 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot find Iraq on a map and 90 percent of Americans in that same age group cannot find Afghanistan on a map.

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

America is in sorry shape and it desperately needs some heroes.

The following is a list of 28 things that will make you really think that there is something seriously wrong with this country….

#1 According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 25 percent of U.S. households now have zero net worth or negative net worth. Back in 2007, that number was just 18.6 percent.

#2 According to the Pentagon, the cost of the first week of attacks on Libya was 600 million dollars.

#3 The major food producers are shrinking the sizes of their packages so that they won’t have to raise prices. The New York Times recently did a story about one woman who was absolutely shocked when she started keeping track of shrinking package sizes at her local supermarket….

Ms. Stauber, 33, said she began inspecting her other purchases, aisle by aisle. Many canned vegetables dropped to 13 or 14 ounces from 16; boxes of baby wipes went to 72 from 80; and sugar was stacked in 4-pound, not 5-pound, bags, she said.

#4 It is being projected that for the first time ever, the OPEC nations are going to bring in over a trillion dollars from exporting oil this year. Their biggest customer is the United States.

#5 According to a recent census report, 13% of all the homes in the United States are sitting empty.

#6 20 percent of all the electricity in the United States is produced by nuclear power plants. Many of those plants are very similar to the damaged reactors at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan.

#7 Barack Obama promised us that radiation from the nuclear disaster in Japan would not be a problem in the United States, but already it has shown up in milk in Spokane, Washington.

#8 Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher recently said the following….

“If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when.”

Of course the Federal Reserve system was designed to get the U.S. government trapped in perpetual debt so actually he should be blaming himself and his friends over at the Fed.









#9 China produced 19.8 percent of all the goods consumed in the world last year. The United States only produced 19.4 percent.

#10 Back in 2005 at the peak of the housing bubble, the median property tax on a home in the United States was $1614. Today, even though home values have sunk like a rock, that figure has risen to $1917.

#11 In New Jersey, home owners pay an average of $7576 in property taxes every single year.

#12 According to the Federal Reserve, the adjusted monetary base has nearly tripled since mid-2008.

#13 Thanks for all the money printing Bernanke – according to one unofficial estimate, the U.S. in on track to have an 8.3 percent rate of inflation for the year.

#14 According to a recent article posted on the website of the American Institute of Economic Research, the purchasing power of a U.S. dollar declined from $1.00 in 1913 to 4.6 cents in 2009.

#15 The Ogallala Aquifer stretches from South Dakota to Texas, it is the largest underground supply of fresh water in the world, and it is rapidly running dry. So how is “America’s breadbasket” going to continue to produce massive amounts of food for the rest of the world once that happens?

#16 The number of homes that were actually repossessed reached the 1 million mark for the first time ever during 2010.

#17 The U.S. industrial base has disintegrated so badly that we could literally export our entire manufacturing output and still not balance our trade with the rest of the globe.

#18 Goldman Sachs almost always wins. According to a recent regulatory filing, Goldman Sachs lost money on just 25 days in 2010 and on only 19 days in 2009.

#19 In 1994, the top 1 percent of all income earners paid 25 percent of all state taxes in New York. Today, the top 1 percent of all income earners pay 41 percent of all state taxes in New York.

#20 The National Institutes of Health has spent approximately $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#21 According to an absolutely stunning recent poll, 40 percent of all U.S. doctors plan to leave the profession at some point during the next three years because of Obamacare.

#22 If the new health care law is so great, then why is the Obama administration allowing so many organizations to opt out of it? According to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 1,000 organizationshave received Obamacare waivers so far.

#23 Large American cattle farms actually feed chicken manure to cattlebecause it is so cheap and because we produce way too much of it to properly dispose of as fertilizer.

#24 Every single year, Americans spend approximately 7.6 billion hourspreparing their taxes.

#25 The IMF says that in order to fix the U.S. government budget deficit, taxes need to be doubled on every single U.S. citizen.

#26 Mandatory federal spending is going to surpass total federal revenue for the first time ever in this fiscal year. That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.

#27 Today, the U.S. national debt is over 14 times larger than it was back in 1981.

#28 According to the National Inflation Association, when you factor in the unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government, total federal debt obligations now come to a grand total of 76 trillion dollars.

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