1. A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
2. Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be “low income” or impoverished.
3. If the number of Americans that “wanted jobs” was the same today as it was back in 2007, the “official” unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.
4. The average amount of time that a worker stays unemployed in the United States is now over 40 weeks.
5. One recent survey found that 77 percent of all U.S. small businesses do not plan to hire any more workers.
6. There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.
7. Since December 2007, median household income in the United States has declined by a total of 6.8 percent once you account for inflation.
8. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.6 million Americans were self-employed back in December 2006. Today, that number has shrunk to 14.5 million.
9. A Gallup poll from earlier this year found that approximately one out of every five Americans that do have a job consider themselves to be underemployed.
10. According to author Paul Osterman, about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.
11. Back in 1980, less than 30 percent of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40 percent of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
12. Back in 1969, 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job. In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.
13. One recent survey found that one out of every three Americans would not be able to make a mortgage or rent payment next month if they suddenly lost their current job.
14. The Federal Reserve recently announced that the total net worth of U.S. households declined by 4.1 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2011 alone.
15. According to a recent study conducted by the BlackRock Investment Institute, the ratio of household debt to personal income in the United States is now 154 percent.
16. As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.
17. The U.S. Postal Service has lost more than 5 billion dollars over the past year.
18. In Stockton, California home prices have declined 64 percent from where they were at when the housing market peaked.
19. Nevada has had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for 59 months in a row.
20. If you can believe it, the median price of a home in Detroit is now just $6000.
21. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 18 percent of all homes in the state of Florida are sitting vacant. That figure is 63 percent larger than it was just ten years ago.
22. New home construction in the United States is on pace to set a brand new all-time record low in 2011.
23. 19 percent of all American men between the ages of 25 and 34 are now living with their parents.
24. Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
25. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, health care costs accounted for just 9.5 percent of all personal consumption back in 1980. Today they account for approximately 16.3 percent.
26. One study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either have medical bill problems or are currently paying off medical debt.
27. If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
28. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.
29. It is being projected that the U.S. trade deficit for 2011 will be 558.2 billion dollars.
30. The retirement crisis in the United States just continues to get worse. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, 46 percent of all American workers have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, and 29 percent of all American workers have less than $1,000 saved for retirement.
31. Today, one out of every six elderly Americans lives below the federal poverty line.
32. According to a study that was just released, CEO pay at America’s biggest companies rose by 36.5 percent in just one recent 12 month period.
33. Today, the “too big to fail” banks are larger than ever. The total assets of the six largest U.S. banks increased by 39 percent between September 30, 2006 and September 30, 2011.
34. The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percent of all Americans combined.
35. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data done by the Pew Research Center, the median net worth for households led by someone 65 years of age or older is 47 times greater than the median net worth for households led by someone under the age of 35.
36. If you can believe it, 37 percent of all U.S. households that are led by someone under the age of 35 have a net worth of zero or less than zero.
37. A higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty (6.7 percent) than has ever been measured before.
38. Child homelessness in the United States is now 33 percent higher than it was back in 2007.
39. Since 2007, the number of children living in poverty in the state of California has increased by 30 percent.
40. Sadly, child poverty is absolutely exploding all over America. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, 36.4 percent of all children that live in Philadelphia are living in poverty, 40.1 percent of all children that live in Atlanta are living in poverty, 52.6 percent of all children that live in Cleveland are living in poverty and 53.6 percent of all children that live in Detroit are living in poverty.
41. Today, one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps.
42. In 1980, government transfer payments accounted for just 11.7 percent of all income. Today, government transfer payments account for more than 18 percent of all income.
43. A staggering 48.5 percent of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits. Back in 1983, that number was below 30 percent.
44. Right now, spending by the federal government accounts for about 24 percent of GDP. Back in 2001, it accounted for just 18 percent.
45. For fiscal year 2011, the U.S. federal government had a budget deficit of nearly 1.3 trillion dollars. That was the third year in a row that our budget deficit has topped one trillion dollars.
46. If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
47. Amazingly, the U.S. government has now accumulated a total debt of 15 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
48. If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt.
49. The U.S. national debt has been increasing by an average of more than 4 billion dollars per day since the beginning of the Obama administration.
50. During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more debt than it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that Bill Clinton took office
Tag Archive: government
The OWS crowd, although a motley group of malcontents, does make one thing clear, the high cost of higher education is not worth the price based on the current job market. They say, like the homeowners, that they are underwater with their college loans. The OWS protestors say that what they owe on their college loans far exceeds what they are able to earn in the marketplace.
Doesn’t this sound familiar? People are given government guarenteed loans to attend college not based on their ability to pay but in order to subsidize the cost of that education. The only way these colleges can continue to charge more and more each year for their education is because the government makes it too easy for the student to get the money to attend. If colleges had to prove VALUE for their educational dollars in a real world scenario, where the cost of tuition was based on the actual value attained by graduating from the college and the marketable skills produced we would see a far more equitable price structure. But since colleges do not have to justify their high tuition costs because the government guarentees they get paid regardless of the situation of the student, these same colleges will continue to bilk the taxpayer out of more and more money.
What section of the Constitution permits the Federal Government to be LANDLORD? Could someone share that information with me please? Thank you.
Obama’s bureaucrats claim they want to protect prairie chickens and sand dune lizards, but this proposed land grab is really another salvo in the administration’s war on private property rights and domestic energy production. In fact, a secret Department of Interior memo leaked a year ago proposes seizing properties that are “currently under the threat of oil and gas development.”
In other words, the government wants to take land that the private sector wants to use to create jobs and lower energy costs — two goals that are clearly not on Obama’s agenda.
“Considering the size of the federal government’s existing real estate portfolio, there is no need to continue unilaterally acquiring new lands without any regard to state’s rights or economies,” U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx recently noted.
Foxx is absolutely correct. The federal government currently owns 1.2 million properties and 650 million acres of land — or 30 percent of the total land area of the United States. Another ten percent of the nation’s total land area — roughly 220 million acres — is owned by state or local governments. That’s almost three acres of government-owned land for every man, woman and child in America.
If American politicians wish to be taken seriously when they talk about creating jobs, reducing our nation’s dependence on foreign oil and getting government out of the way of the private sector — then there is no better place to start than the 40 percent of our nation that’s directly owned by the government.
“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; But when a wicked man rules, the people groan” (Prov 29:2
, NKJV).
Image via Wikipedia
Political correctness is the liberal buzz word of the day. It would appear we must be sensitive to every special interest group or ideology, no matter how that group or ideology might negatively impact our lives or violate ethical or moral laws; more importantly God‘s laws. When God created the earth, he did not care what people thought of his policies. His policy was THE way!
God laid down rules in the Garden of Eden for Adam and Eve to follow. As long as they followed these rules, they would reign over every living creature. These laws were representing the Creator in all aspects. God‘s government was being expressed through his Nature and Nature’s Laws. He was and is the ultimate righteous ruler.
In the founding of this great nation, our founding fathers recognized this divine rule of God when they penned these words:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,…
In addition these words have formed the foundation of our form of Government and recognized the importance of God-given rights to all individuals, the Declaration of Independence states
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…
Our founders recognized God’s granted authority, and held to the position that it was God who granted freedom to all people and that government should defend those rights granted to the people by God, not pass laws that limit the freedom of the people. The Declaration of Independence then lists all the usurpations of the King over the free citizens of the not yet formed United States. It is this foundation that birthed the United States of America and later led to the writing of the Constitution. Until recently the Constitution was defended and upheld as the final authority and the supreme law of the land.
Since Adam’s Smith’s famous metaphor of the “Invisible Hand,” economists in the classical liberal tradition have known that decentralized, competitive capitalism harnesses the self-interest of ambitious and talented individuals. Rather than using their powers to dominate others, extraordinary individuals in a free-market setting stay up worrying at night about how to please their customers.
In contrast, the government bureaucrat doesn’t have the same incentive structure.
A sophisticated critic might agree that in general, markets outperform government agencies. However, the critic could argue that this general presumption fails when it comes to energy markets, because of the threat of climate change. Here—the argument goes—capitalism’s normally efficient outcome is perverted, because businesses and consumers aren’t taking into account the impact of their actions on future generations.
Even if we accept the basic premise of “market failure,” we must balance it against the undeniable prevalence of “government failure. For example, if a cap-and-trade program ever went through, it would not be a textbook plan devised by academics. On the contrary, it would contain all sorts of loopholes and handouts of permits to favor politically connected groups.
When it comes to mundane items like restaurant meals and iPods, most people recognize the tremendous superiority of the free market versus government bureaucrats. Yet this conclusion doesn’t magically flip when we switch to the crucial area of energy. But it should because energy is so vital to our standard of living, we need to remove government interference and free entrepreneurs to serve consumers in this sector as well. Read the full story at:
Thoughts and views as seen from the resident raptor. Reflecting on life and the world as I see it.
