Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Americans appear to be increasingly pessimistic about the future of America. According to a Real Clear Politics average of recent polls, 68.9 percent of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track, and only 23.1 percent of Americans believe that we are headed in the right direction. But if you have been listening to the endless parade of political speeches at the Democratic and Republican National conventions, you would be tempted to think that the greatest days for the United States are right around the corner. The politicians keep promising us that better times are coming if we will just make the “correct” choices on election day, but no matter who we send to Washington D.C. things just seem to keep getting worse and worse. Let’s take a look at just a few of the signs that indicate that our country is going in the wrong direction…

-The rise in violent crime: We haven’t seen crime rise this rapidly in our major cities in a very long time, and according to a report that was just released this week many forms of violent crime are way ahead of where they were at this time last year…

A new report published by the Major Cities Chiefs Association said that violent crime – homicides, rapes, robberies, assaults and shootings – is on the rise nationwide. The troubling results, though just one survey, could provide vindication to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. President Barack Obama has contested Trump’s assertion – made prominently in his nomination acceptance speech last week – that crime is a national epidemic and major problem. The mid-year violent crime survey, released Monday, shows 307 more homicides so far in 2016, according to data compiled from 51 law enforcement agencies from some of America’s largest cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. There have also been 1,000 more robberies, approximately 2,000 more aggravated assaults, and 600 more nonfatal shootings in 2016 compared to this time in 2015.

-Police officers are being shot at a staggering rate: The number of police officers shot in the United States during the first half of 2016 was up 78 percent compared to the exact same time period last year.

-Mass shootings: In just the past few weeks we have seen the worst mass shooting in U.S. history in Orlando, and there were mass shootings of police in Dallas and in Baton Rouge.

-The U.S. economy continues to crumble: We just learned that orders for durable goods fell again in June, Gallup’s U.S. economic confidence index just hit the lowest level so far this year, and at this moment 43 million Americans are on food stamps.

-The U.S. consumer appears to be increasingly tapped out as the middle class shrinks: Most of the country is living paycheck to paycheck these days. One recent survey found that 62 percent of all Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, and U.S. News & World Report is reporting that some analysts are projecting that we are heading for a “restaurant recession”…

Analysts are forecasting a “restaurant recession” in the U.S., which is bad news for America’s food and drink establishments and potentially even worse news for the economy at large. Paul Westra, a senior research analyst at Stifel Financial Corp., said in a research note Tuesday that he’d turned “decidedly bearish” on the restaurant industry, downgrading Stifel’s stance on 11 different restaurant stocks, including Chipotle Mexican Grill, Panera Bread and Cheesecake Factory. He and his colleagues now “confidently believe” that the weak restaurant consumer spending seen in the second quarter of the year “reflects the start of a U.S. restaurant recession.”

-Business is not booming: The total amount of stuff our businesses have been selling has been declining since mid-2014, and it is being projected that corporate earnings will be down for a fifth consecutive quarter. Earlier today, we learned that our biggest aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, has reported its first quarterly loss in nearly seven years.

-Government debt continues to explode: The U.S. national debt has hit a staggering 19.4 trillion dollars, and we have added an average of more than 1.1 trillion dollars to the debt since Barack Obama has been in the White House.

-Our politicians just continue to go from bad to worse: If you thought that the Obama years were bad, just wait until you see what Hillary Clinton can do. The woman that the Democratic Party just nominated for president of the United States is one of the most evil, wicked and corrupt politicians the nation has ever seen.

-Everywhere you look, evil is exploding: The social fabric of our nation is coming apart all around us, and most of our men are hooked on pornography…

A 2014 national survey commissioned by the organization found one-third of men ages 18-30 admitted they are either addicted to porn (23 percent) or are unsure if they are addicted (10 percent). “According to our survey, over one-half (52 percent) of men age 18-30 admit to risking their careers and livelihood by viewing porn at work within the past 3 months,” Hesch told WND. “The numbers are even higher for men ages 31-49, with nearly three-fourths (74 percent) watching porn at work.”

-Sadly, most Americans are way too addicted to entertainment to bother noticing that our nation is rapidly going down the toilet: In America today, millions of people would rather spend endless hours playing video games such as Pokemon Go on their phones rather than getting involved in their communities. And it is difficult to say that we even have “communities” anymore when most people spend far more time online than in face to face interaction with others. If you can believe it, one recent survey found that half the population of the United States and Canada uses Facebook at least once a day.

I could go on and on, but hopefully you are getting the point.

The average American spends more than five hours a day watching television, and the television is telling them that everything is going to be just wonderful and that they should go out and vote for Hillary Clinton because she would be the first woman president and that would make history.

Meanwhile, our society is falling apart in literally thousands of different ways, and most Americans know deep inside that our country is deeply, deeply broken. That is why more than two-thirds of us tell the pollsters that America is on the wrong track. Virtually all of us know that something is seriously wrong with the United States, even if we can’t always agree on what the solutions should be.

Let us work very hard to wake our fellow Americans up while we still can, because time for turning this country in the right direction is rapidly running out.

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As regular readers know, one of our favorite chartpacks to show "Obama's recovery" is the one below, presented most recently just two months ago during Obama's now almost weekly televised sermon of how the economy is great and anyone who disagrees is "peddling fiction", which using simple Bloomerg data, summarize recent changes in key economic indicators including soaring federal debt and government dependency via food stamp use, surging healthcare costs and social inequality, plunging homeownership, income, and labor force participation, and - of course - driving it all, none of the president's or Congress' actions, but the Fed's balance sheet, something even major banks admit is better known as "printing money" - money that ends up blowing one after another asset bubble unable to finds its way into the broader economy - a stigma that is now gone in a world in which helicopter money is seriously considered by lunatics in power.

To be sure, the charts do not in any way imply that Obama started any of these disastrous trends (with a few exceptions); they do however make it very clear that more than 7 years under president Obama, these same trends have not changed.

This means that while Obama may have inherited a bad economy, contrary to the endless propaganda, the economy has only gotten worse. One needs only to go on a very short drive through any of the neighborhoods of Obama's native Chicago to get a clear realization of this sad fact (while wearing a bulletproof vest).