National Debt

The Budget-Busting $1.3 Trillion Spending Bill That Was Just Passed By Congress Is A Betrayal Of The American People

I don’t know if I even have the words to express how disgusted I am with the omnibus spending bill that was just rushed through Congress. Members of the House of Representatives were given less than 24 hours to read this 2,232 page monstrosity of a bill before they were expected to vote on it, and so obviously nobody was able to read the entire thing before the vote was held. This is the kind of thing that Democrats were greatly criticized for in the past, but now it is Republicans that are doing it. The Republican Party is supposed to stand for limited government, and this is yet another example that shows how badly broken the system in Washington has become.

I am running for Congress in Idaho’s first congressional district, and I want to make it exceedingly clear that I would have voted against this bill. In addition to fully funding Planned Parenthood, this bill also funds a whole host of other liberal priorities. But other than an increase in military spending, conservative priorities are almost entirely ignored by this bill.

Over the past decade, we have been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt, and this omnibus spending bill dramatically increases government spending at a time when we should be desperately trying to get our financial house in order.

On Twitter, Rand Paul documented just a few of the examples of the tremendous waste in this bill…

o $12m for Scholarships for Lebanon
o $20m for Middle East Partnership Initiative Scholarship Program
o $12m in military funding for Vietnam
o $3.5m in nutrition assistance to Laos
o $15m in Developmental assistance to China
o $10m for Women LEOs in Afghanistan
o $1m for the World Meteorological Organization
o $218m for Promoting Democracy Development in Europe
o $10m for disadvantaged Egyptian Students
o $1.371bn for Contributions to International Organizations
o $51m to promote International Family Planning and Reproductive Health
o $7m promoting International Conservation
o $10m for UN Environmental Programs
o $5m for Vietnam Education Foundation Grants
o $2.579m for Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe
o $15m to USAID for promoting international higher education between universities
o $1m for the Cultural Antiquities Task Force
o $6.25m for the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation
o $20m for Countering Foreign State Propaganda
o $12m for Countering State Disinformation and Pressure

After it passed, Democratic leaders were jubilant. The following comes from the American Mirror…

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her esteemed counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer, are declaring the spending bill rushed through by Republicans this week as “a victory.”

“The distinguished leader has clearly put forth many of the priorities that we’re very proud of in a bill that’s one yard high,” Pelosi said of House Speaker Paul Ryan at a joint press conference with Schumer on Thursday.

Senator Schumer also admitted that the Democrats got more accomplished in this bill than they did during any of the spending bills when Barack Obama was in the White House, and Nancy Pelosi added that Republican leadership rushed this legislation through so quickly because “they didn’t want their colleagues to see what was in the bill.”

What we have in Washington D.C. today doesn’t look anything like what our founders originally intended. It is time to take our government back, and we need fresh leadership in Washington.

I am not going to Washington to be a cog in the system. Rather, I am going to Washington to drain the swamp and to turn the current corrupt system completely upside down. If you would like to learn more about what we are trying to do, please visit MichaelSnyderForCongress.com.

Michael Snyder is a pro-Trump candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District. If you would like to help him win on May 15th, you can donate online, by Paypal or by sending a check made out to “Michael Snyder for Congress” to P.O. Box 1136 – Bonners Ferry, ID 83805. To learn more, please visit MichaelSnyderForCongress.com.

Is Washington Nuts? Increasing Spending AND Cutting Taxes Will EXPLODE The Size Of The National Debt

Our national debt is rapidly approaching 21 trillion dollars, and yet Congress wants to follow up a large tax cut bill with a massive increase in federal spending. This is absolute madness, and it is going to make our long-term financial problems as a nation far worse. After passing the tax bill, the appropriate thing to do would have been to cut federal spending. Yes, that would have not been a positive thing for the economy in the short-term, but we must start addressing our long-term priorities. If we do not do something about this exploding national debt, it could potentially destroy our republic all by itself.

Earlier today, I was absolutely horrified when I learned of a budget deal in the Senate that would increase federal spending by about 200 billion dollars in each of the next two years…

The Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders unveiled a sweeping two-year budget agreement on Wednesday that would increase federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars on domestic and defense programs alike.

That deal would eliminate strict budget caps, set in 2011 to reduce the federal deficit, and would allow Congress to spend about $200 billion more in the current fiscal year and in fiscal year 2019.

Seriously?

Our federal debt is going to hit 21 trillion dollars some time this year, and they want to throw hundreds of billions of dollars more spending on top of what we are already doing?

This alone is why we need true conservatives all over the nation to run for Congress. Our endless greed is literally destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.

I don’t know if I even have the words to describe how foolish our leaders are being. If interest rates on government debt were to return to their long-term averages, the game would already be over. We should be desperately attempting to get our financial house in order, but instead we are spending money as if tomorrow will never come.

But tomorrow always arrives, and a day of reckoning is fast approaching.

Fortunately, there are some members of Congress that seem to understand that we cannot keep spending money that we do not have. The following comes from USA Today…

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who chairs the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, wants to see what comes back from the Senate, said his spokesman Ben Williamson.

“But if the numbers are as high as we’re hearing, Rep. Meadows does not support the budget deal,” Williamson said.

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., said “this spending bill is a debt junkie’s dream… I’m not only a ‘no.’ I’m a ‘hell no.'”

As a member of Congress, I would always be a resounding “no” vote on these sorts of absurd budget deals.

Whatever happened to all of the strong fiscal conservatives that we sent to Congress during the days of the Tea Party movement? So many of them seem to have been enveloped by the swamp and are now doing whatever party leadership tells them to do.

Sadly, most Americans don’t even seem to understand that we have been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt since Barack Obama first entered the White House. The following is an extended excerpt from one of my previous articles…

When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. national debt was just over 10.6 trillion dollars, and when he left the White House 8 years later it was sitting just shy of 20 trillion dollars.

So during those 8 years more than 9 trillion dollars was added to the national debt. But for purposes of this example we will round down to an even 9 trillion dollars.

When you divide 9 trillion dollars by 8, you get an average of 1.125 trillion dollars that was added to the national debt per year during the Obama era.

Dividing that figure by 365, you find that an average of $3,082,191,780 was added to the national debt every single day during the Obama administration.

And since there are 24 hours in a day, that means that an average of $128,424,657 was stolen from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day while Barack Obama was president.

Under President Trump, we should be dramatically reducing federal spending and the size of the federal government.

Yes, this would hurt the economy in the short-term, but if we continue down the road we are currently on it is a recipe for national suicide.

As interest rates rise, it won’t be too long before we are paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt. And when America plunges into a debt nightmare, there won’t be anyone in the entire world big enough to bail us out.

America cannot be great again if we are drowning in debt. What is happening in Washington is utter madness, and it should greatly anger all of us that our irresponsible politicians are systematically destroying the greatest republic that the world has ever seen.

Michael Snyder is a pro-Trump candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

A Potential Government Shutdown Is Literally Just Hours Away, But Congressional Leaders Insist That Everything Will Be Just Fine

Either the Republicans are going to give Democrats virtually everything that they want, or the federal government will shut down at the end of the day on Friday. We have been through this process time after time, and in every single instance the Republicans have always folded like a 20 dollar suit. Unfortunately, it looks like the Democrats are going to win big this time around too. The spending agreement is essentially an updated Obama budget that fully funds Planned Parenthood, that contains no money for a border wall, and that doesn’t reflect any of President Trump’s other important priorities either. On Thursday, the House is expected to pass this horrible bill, and the Senate is expected to take up the matter on Friday. According to Bloomberg, right now this plan would keep the government open through December 22nd…

The House Rules Committee approved a rule setting the bill up for a floor vote Thursday, after which the Senate will have until the end of the day Friday to avoid a partial government shutdown. A formal check of how members would vote on the Dec. 22 deadline came back showing widespread support, said Representative Dennis Ross, a member of the vote-whipping team.

So even if this plan gets through both the House and the Senate, we will be facing another government shutdown deadline in just a few weeks.

And every time one of these deadlines approaches, the Democrats use it as leverage to get what they want. In addition to getting a spending agreement that is extremely lopsided in their favor, many Democrats want to use this current deadline to pass the DREAM Act before the end of 2017. In fact, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker have all said that they will not vote in favor of any spending agreement unless it includes the DREAM Act.

Emboldened by their past successes, Democrats are asking for more than ever this time around. But if we are just going to hand the Democrats whatever they want every time, what is the point of even having elections? In 2016 we gave the Republicans control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, and yet the Democrats just keep winning over and over again. This is deeply infuriating, and grassroots conservatives all over the country are sick and tired of Republicans acting like spineless jellyfish.

Fortunately, we do have a man with a spine in the White House, and it sounds like he has absolutely no intentions of giving in on the DREAM Act. The following comes from NBC News…

“Democrats are really looking at something very dangerous for our country. They are looking at shutting down, they want to have illegal immigrants, in many cases people that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We don’t want to have that, we want to have a great, beautiful, crime-free country.”

If the Democrats stand firm on their demands, there is a very real possibility that we could have a government shutdown, and federal agencies are already preparing for one. When the government shuts down, it only affects about 13 percent of the federal government, and we don’t actually need most of that 13 percent anyway.

So even though the mainstream media would be totally freaking out, it definitely would not be the end of the world.

If you don’t remember the last government shutdown, the following is a pretty good summary of what would happen that was published by Newsweek…

If the shutdown does occur this weekend, the effects will be felt immediately. All nonessential employees of the federal government will stay home until further notice, and some will stop receiving paychecks. Refunds from the IRS could be delayed, as could the State Department’s passport service. Most air-traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration security will continue to go to work, but there won’t be as many as them so air-travel will be slower. Members of Congress will have limited staff and won’t be as responsive (well, as responsive as they normally are) to constituents. And after 10 days without a spending bill, federal courts will close.

Obviously it would be a good thing to avoid a government shutdown, but it is exceedingly foolish to give the Democrats whatever they want just to keep things functioning normally.

In case you are wondering, I would definitely vote “no” on the bill that is currently going through the House of Representatives. I will not vote in favor of a spending bill that explodes the size of the national debt, that funds Planned Parenthood and that contains no money for a border wall. I am never going to compromise on my most important principles, and any Republican that caves in and gives the Democrats whatever they want just to avoid a government shutdown should be ashamed of themselves.

Sadly, the Democrats have done a very good job of selling their story to the American people, and at this point most Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of a compromise…

Sixty-three percent say members of Congress should avoid a shutdown at all costs. Only 18 percent of voters surveyed say members should allow a temporary government shutdown if it helps them achieve their policy goals. The remaining 19 percent of voters are undecided.

Of course “compromise” means giving in to the Democrats on virtually every single point. There are many things that the Democrats will never, ever compromise on, and that is why they keep on winning over and over again.

Most Republicans have been compromising for so long that most of them don’t even stand for anything any longer.

It is time to kick out the corrupt professional politicians and replace them with a new generation of leaders that are willing to stand up for us. We will have a chance to do that in 2018, and we must not squander this opportunity.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Goodbye American Dream: The Average U.S. Household Is $137,063 In Debt, And 38.4% Of Millennials Live With Their Parents

Once upon a time the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class in the history of the world, but now the middle class is steadily being eroded. The middle class became a minority of the population for the first time ever in 2015, and just recently I wrote about a new survey that showed that 78 percent of all full-time workers in the United States live paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time. But most people still want to live the American Dream, and so they are going into tremendous amounts of debt in a desperate attempt to live that kind of a lifestyle.

According to the Federal Reserve, the average U.S. household is now $137,063 in debt, and that figure is more than double the median household income…

The average American household carries $137,063 in debt, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest numbers.

Yet the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median household income was just $59,039 last year, suggesting that many Americans are living beyond their means.

As a nation, we are completely and utterly drowning in debt. U.S. consumers are now nearly 13 trillion dollars in debt overall, and many will literally spend the rest of their lives making debt payments.

Over the past couple of decades, the cost of living has grown much faster than paychecks have, and this has put a tremendous amount of financial stress on hard working families. We are told that we are in a “low inflation environment”, but that is simply not true at all…

Medical expenses have grown 57% since 2003, while food and housing costs climbed 36% and 32%, respectively. Those surging basic expenses could widen the inequality gap in America, as a quarter of Americans make less than $10 per hour.

Getting our healthcare costs under control is one of the biggest things that we need to do. As I talked about the other day, some families have seen their health insurance premiums more than triple since Obamacare became law.

As the cost of living continues to rise, an increasing number of young people are discovering that the only way that they can make ends meet is to live with their parents. As a result, the percentage of adults age 26 to age 34 that live at home continued to rise even after the last recession ended…

The share of older Millennials living with relatives is still rising, underscoring the lingering obstacles faced by Americans who entered the workforce during and after the Great Recession.

About 20% of adults age 26 to 34 are living with parents or other family members, a figure that has climbed steadily the past decade and is up from 17% in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Trulia, a real estate research firm.

A staggering 59.8 percent of younger Millennials (18 to 25) are now living with relatives, and overall an all-time record 38.4 percent of all Millennials are currently living with family.

If so many of our young people are unable to live the American Dream, what is the future of this nation going to look like?

Consumers are not the only ones that have been struggling to make ends meet. Corporate debt has doubled since the last financial crisis, and it now stands at a record high of 8.7 trillion dollars…

Fueled by low interest rates and strong investor appetite, debt of nonfinancial companies has increased at a rapid clip, to $8.7 trillion, and is equal to more than 45 percent of GDP, according to David Ader, chief macro strategist at Informa Financial Intelligence.

According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial corporate debt outstanding has grown by $1 trillion in two years.

“Everything is fine until it isn’t,” Ader said. “We don’t need to worry about that until we’re in a slowdown and profit declines.”

And let us not forget government debt. State and local governments all over the nation have piled up record amounts of debt, and the debt of the federal government has approximately doubled over the past decade.

But the fact that we are now 20 trillion dollars in debt as a nation does not tell the full story. According to Boston University professor Larry Kotlikoff, the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 210 trillion dollars over the next 75 years…

We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt. We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books…

If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $210 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap. That’s our true indebtedness.

We were the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in the history of the planet, but that was never good for us.

We always had to have more, and so we have been on the greatest debt binge in human history.

Now a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and those that believe that we can escape the consequences of our actions are being extremely delusional.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Will America’s Prosperity Be Completely Wiped Out By Our Growing Debt?

The federal government is now 20.4 trillion dollars in debt, and most Americans don’t seem to care that the economic prosperity that we are enjoying today could be completely destroyed by our exploding national debt. Over the past decade, the national debt has been growing at a rate of more than 100 million dollars an hour, and this is a debt that all of us owe. When you break it down, each American citizen’s share of the debt is more than $60,000, and so if you have a family of five your share is more than $300,000. And when you throw in more than 6 trillion dollars of corporate debt and nearly 13 trillion dollars of consumer debt, it is not inaccurate to say that we are facing a crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

Debt cannot grow much faster than GDP indefinitely. At some point the bubble bursts, and when it does the pain that the middle class is going to experience is going to be off the charts. Back in 2015, the middle class in the U.S. became a minority of the population for the first time ever. Never before in our history has the middle class accounted for less than 50 percent of the population, and all over the country formerly middle class families are under a great deal of stress as they attempt to make ends meet. The following comes from an absolutely outstanding piece that was just put out by Charles Hugh Smith…

If you talk to young people struggling to make ends meet and raise children, or read articles about retirees who can’t afford to retire, you can’t help but detect the fading scent of prosperity.

It has steadily been lost to stagnation, under-reported inflation and soaring inequality, a substitution of illusion for reality bolstered by the systemic corruption of authentic measures of prosperity and well-being.

In other words, the American-Dream idea that life should get easier and more prosperous as the natural course of progress is still embedded in our collective memory, even though the collective reality has changed.

The reality that most of us are facing today is a reality where many are working two or three jobs just to make it from month to month.

The reality that most of us are facing today is a reality where debts never seem to get repaid and credit card balances just continue to grow.

The reality that most of us are facing today is a reality where we work day after day just to pay the bills, and yet we never seem to get anywhere financially.

The truth is that most people out there are deeply struggling. The Washington Post says that the “middle class” encompasses anyone that makes between $35,000 and $122,500 a year, but very few of us are near the top end of that scale…

It’s also situation specific. “The more people in a family, the more money they typically need to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle,” writes the Post. Likewise, the more expensive your area, the more you need to make to qualify. Overall, “America’s middle-class ranges from $35,000 to $122,500 in annual income, according to The Post’s calculation” approved by the Pew Research Center.

“The bottom line is: $100,000 is on the middle-class spectrum, but barely: 75 percent of U.S. households make less than that,” writes the Post.

In a previous article, I noted that the bottom 90 percent of income earners in the U.S. brought home more than 60 percent of the nation’s income back in the early 1970s, but last year that number fell to just 49.7 percent.

The middle class is shrinking year after year, and the really bad news is that it appears that this decline may soon accelerate. In fact, one major European investment bank is warning that the U.S. economy will “slow down substantially” in 2018.

But we can’t afford any slow down at all. As it is, there is no possible way that we are going to be able to deal with our exploding debts at the rate the economy is growing right now. According to Boston University professor Larry Kotlikoff, we are facing a “fiscal gap” of 210 trillion dollars over the next 75 years…

We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt. We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books…

If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $210 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap. That’s our true indebtedness.

Where in the world is all of that money going to come from?

Are you willing to pay much higher taxes?

Are you willing to see government programs slashed to a degree that we have never seen before in U.S. history?

If your answer to both of those questions is no, then what would you do to solve the fiscal nightmare that we are facing?

According to Brian Maher, author Robert Benchley once sat down to write an article about this fiscal mess, and what he came up with sums up the situation perfectly…

Benchley sat at his typewriter one day to tackle a vexing subject.

He opened his piece with “The”… when the full weight of his burden collapsed upon his shoulders.

He abandoned his typewriter in frustration.

He returned shortly thereafter and resumed the task anew…

With only “The” to work with… Benchley immediately knocked out the article, presented here in its entirety:

“The hell with it.”

Unfortunately, we can’t afford to say that.

Our exploding debt is a crisis that we must tackle, and the first step is to understand that our current financial system was literally designed to create as much debt as possible. Once we abolish the Federal Reserve, our endless debt spiral will end, but until we do our debt problems are only going to continue to grow until the system completely implodes in upon itself.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Debt Nightmare: Does Anyone Actually Care That Our Exploding National Debt Is Destroying Our Future?

When will America finally wake up? The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we now have a colossal 20 trillion dollar chain around our collective ankles. We have willingly enslaved ourselves, our children and our grandchildren, and yet our addiction is so insatiable that we continue to add more than 100 million dollars to our debt load every single hour of every single day. The national debt is sitting at a grand total of $20,162,176,797,904.13 at this moment, but now that the debt ceiling has been lifted that number is expected to shoot up very rapidly toward 21 trillion dollars by the end of the year. The national debt had been held down by accounting tricks to keep it under the debt limit for many months, but every time this has happened before we have seen the national debt absolutely explode back to projected levels once the debt ceiling was raised.

But very few of our “leaders” in Washington seem to care that we are in the process of committing national suicide. There is no possible way that we will be able to continue to be the most powerful economy on the planet if we continue down this road. During Obama’s eight years in the White House, we added more than 9 trillion dollars to the national debt. That certainly improved things in the short-term, because if we could go back and take 9 trillion dollars out of the economy over the past 8 years we would be in an absolutely nightmarish economic depression right now.

But even with all of this borrowing and spending, our economy has still only grown at an average rate of just 1.33 percent a year over the last 10 years.

And by going into so much debt, we are literally destroying the future for our children and our grandchildren.

What we are doing to them is beyond criminal, and people should be going to prison over this. But instead we just keep rewarding these Congress critters by sending the same cast of characters back to Washington over and over again.

Are we insane?

The feds are now projecting that the official yearly budget deficit will reach 1.4 trillion dollars by 2027. Of course federal projections always end up being far more optimistic than reality.

And we are already spending about 500 billion dollars a year just on interest on the national debt, and by 2027 that number is projected to jump to 760 billion dollars a year.

This is complete and utter insanity, and yet we just can’t control ourselves. The government continues to throw around money as if there is no tomorrow, and our tax dollars are being wasted on some of the most ridiculous things imaginable.

For instance, the U.S. military is spending 42 million dollars each year on Viagra.

We must stop this madness, and we must stop it now. I really like how an editorial in the Houston Chronicle made this point…

Tax-and-spend politics are bad, but borrow-and-spend is worse. While we have some control over whether our lawmakers raise taxes, our children and grandchildren don’t get a vote on whether we burden them with debt.

Over the long run, huge government debt takes cash out of the economy and drives up interest rates, slowing economic growth and hurting private enterprise.

To protect the U.S. economy, Republicans need to nip plans to eliminate the debt ceiling in the bud and then get to work balancing the federal budget.

Will we ever learn?

Since the beginning of our nation, many of our most prominent statesmen have been warning about the dangers of accumulating government debt. For example, during his farewell address President George Washington instructed the country to “avoid … the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions to discharge the debts, no throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”

And Thomas Jefferson famously said that he wished that he could have added one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would have banned government borrowing…

“I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of it’s constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.”

This is one of the primary reasons why we must abolish the Federal Reserve system. The Federal Reserve was actually designed to create a government debt spiral from which we could never possibly escape. That is why the size of our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger since 1913, and we are never going to permanently solve our national debt problem until we get rid of the Fed.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but the path that we are currently on is not sustainable by any definition. Debt levels are growing much, much faster than GDP, and that is a recipe for disaster. The following is an excerpt from one of my previous articles…

We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world. In 1980, total government and personal debt in the United States was just over the 3 trillion dollar mark, but today it has surpassed 41 trillion dollars. That means that it has increased by almost 14 times since Ronald Reagan was first elected president. I am searching for words to describe how completely and utterly insane this is, but I am coming up empty. We are slowly but surely committing national suicide, and yet most Americans don’t even understand what is happening.

According to 720 Global, total government debt plus total personal debt in the United States was just over 3 trillion dollars in 1980. That broke down to $38,552 per household, and that figure represented 79 percent of median household income at the time.

Today, total government debt plus total personal debt in the United States has blown past the 41 trillion dollar mark. When you break that down, it comes to $329,961.34 per household, and that figure represents 584 percent of median household income.

Sadly, most people are entirely clueless about what we are doing to ourselves. Investors are the most optimistic that they have been in years, and most of the talking heads on television seem to believe that the party can go on indefinitely.

But that is simply not possible.

And the same thing is true from a global perspective as well. The following comes from Chris Martenson…

First: our entire economic model, which dependent on borrowing at a faster rate than income (GDP) grows, is something that simply cannot be maintained at its current rate or level. Check.

Second: depleting species, soils and aquifers are all wildly unsustainable practices that are accelerating. Check.

Last (and most glaring of all): the world’s leadership (and we use that term very loosely) continues to insist on adhering to the indefensible idea that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible Checkmate.

The clock is ticking, and disaster awaits at the end of this road.

Will somebody please do something?

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

16 Facts That Prove That America Is In Deep, Deep Trouble

Is this the generation that is going to witness the end of America? If our country stays on the path that it is currently on, it is very difficult to see how we are possibly going to make it. Throughout human history every great society has eventually entered a period of decline, and sadly that is happening to us as well. My hope is that we can wake the American people up while there is still time, and that we can return to the values and the principles that this nation was originally founded upon. Below are 16 facts that prove that America is in deep, deep trouble. Many of these numbers come from my new book, and many of them seem almost too crazy to believe…

#1 When Ronald Reagan won his first election, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars. When Barack Obama entered the White House it was sitting at 10.6 trillion dollars, when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010 it was about 14 trillion dollars, and now we have nearly reached the 20 trillion dollar mark. We have been stealing money from our children and our grandchildren at the rate of more than 100 million dollars an hour, and yet most Americans don’t seem to care that we are rapidly bankrupting our nation.

#2 In 1956, approximately 5 percent of all babies in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. Today, things have obviously changed tremendously. 2008 was the very first year in United States history when 40 percent of all babies were born to unmarried mothers, and we have now stayed at that level for eight straight years.

#3 In the early 1970s, well over 60 percent of all Americans were considered to be “middle class”, but in 2015 that number dipped below 50 percent for the first time ever.

#4 In 2001, nearly 16 million Americans could not afford the homes that they were currently living in, but by 2015 that number had more than doubled.

#5 Our system of public education is a complete mess. A study of Millennials in 22 major industrialized nations conducted by the Educational Testing Service found that only two countries were worse when it comes to literacy proficiency, and we were dead last when it comes to math.

#6 In the early 1970s, 70 percent of all men in the United States from the age of 20 to the age of 39 were married, but today that number has fallen to just 35 percent. Instead of getting married and starting families, a lot of our young men are still living at home with their parents. Today, 35 percent of all young men from the age of 21 to the age of 30 “are living at home with their parents or a close relative”.

#7 Many Americans don’t realize this, but the United States has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet. But we actually have an even bigger problem with legal drugs. According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug, and an astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs.

#8 According to the CDC, 110 million Americans currently have a sexually transmitted disease, and there are approximately 20 million new STD cases in the United States every single year.

#9 Thanks to decades of unchecked illegal immigration, membership in criminal gangs has absolutely exploded all over the country. Today there are 150,000 gang members living in the city of Chicago, and they outnumber the police by more than a 10 to 1 margin.

#10 Today there are more than 4 million adult websites on the Internet, and they get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. Addiction to these websites has become a major national crisis, and yet very little is being done. One major survey found that 64 percent of all Christian men in America view “adult material” at least once a month, and a different major survey found that 68 percent of all Christian men in America view “adult material” on a “regular basis”.

#11 When a federal income tax was introduced in 1913, it was fairly simple and most taxpayers were taxed at a rate of just one percent. Today, the tax code is more than 2 million words long and the regulations are more than 7 million words long.

#12 Our government continues to waste money in absolutely insane ways. For example, the U.S. military actually spends 42 million dollars a year on Viagra.

#13 We are an extremely, extremely unhappy nation. If you can believe it, doctors in the United States write more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants each year.

#14 In 2007, 54 percent of all Americans were opposed to gay marriage and only 37 percent wanted it to be legalized. Today, 62 percent of all Americans support gay marriage and only 32 percent are still against it.

#15 The average rate of economic growth over the past 10 years has been exactly equal to the average rate that the U.S. economy grew during the 1930s. I was stunned when I discovered that the U.S. economy had only grown at an average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent over the past 10 years, and that is the exact same average yearly rate that the U.S. economy grew during the decade of the 1930s.

#16 Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, nearly 60 million American children have been murdered in America’s abortion mills. Sadly, the number of children that are aborted each day in this country is roughly equal to the number of Americans that lost their lives on 9/11. If we do not put an end to this, there isn’t going to be any sort of a future for this nation.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Total Government And Personal Debt In The U.S. Has Hit 41 Trillion Dollars ($329,961.34 Per Household)

We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world. In 1980, total government and personal debt in the United States was just over the 3 trillion dollar mark, but today it has surpassed 41 trillion dollars. That means that it has increased by almost 14 times since Ronald Reagan was first elected president. I am searching for words to describe how completely and utterly insane this is, but I am coming up empty. We are slowly but surely committing national suicide, and yet most Americans don’t even understand what is happening.

According to 720 Global, total government debt plus total personal debt in the United States was just over 3 trillion dollars in 1980. That broke down to $38,552 per household, and that figure represented 79 percent of median household income at the time.

Today, total government debt plus total personal debt in the United States has blown past the 41 trillion dollar mark. When you break that down, it comes to $329,961.34 per household, and that figure represents 584 percent of median household income.

If anyone can make a good argument that we are not in very serious debt trouble, I would love to hear it.

And remember, the figures above don’t even include corporate debt. They only include government debt on the federal, state and local levels, and all forms of personal debt.

So do you have $329,961.34 ready to pay your share of the debt that we have accumulated?

Nobody that I know could write that kind of a check. The truth is that as a nation we are flat broke. The only way that the game can keep going is for all of us to borrow increasingly larger sums of money, but of course that is not sustainable by any definition.

Eventually we are going to slam into a wall and the game will be over.

One of my pet peeves is the national debt. Our politicians spend money in some of the most ridiculous ways imaginable, and yet no matter how much we complain about it nothing ever seems to change.

For example, the U.S. military actually spends 42 million dollars a year on Viagra.

Yes, you read that correctly.

42 million of your tax dollars are being spent on Viagra every year.

And overall spending on “erectile dysfunction medicines” each year comes to a grand total of 84 million dollars…

According to data from the Defense Health Agency, DoD actually spent $41.6 million on Viagra — and $84.24 million total on erectile dysfunction prescriptions — last year.

And since 2011, the tab for drugs like Viagra, Cialis and Levitra totals $294 million — the equivalent of nearly four U.S. Air Force F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

Is this really where our spending on “national defense” should be going? We are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt, and yet we continue to spend money like there is no tomorrow. For much more on the exploding size of our national debt and the very serious implications that this has for our future, please see my previous article entitled “Would You Like To Steal 128 Million Dollars?”

I didn’t think that our debt bubble could ever possibly get this big, but I didn’t think that our stock market bubble could ever possibly get quite get this large either. For a few moments, I would like for you to consider a list of facts about this stock market bubble that was recently published by Zero Hedge…

  • The S&P 500 Cyclically Adjusted Price to Earnings (CAPE) valuation has only been greater on one occasion, the late 1990s. It is currently on par with levels preceding the Great Depression.
  • CAPE valuation, when adjusted for the prevailing economic growth trend, is more overvalued than during the late 1920’s and the late 1990’s. (LINK)
  • S&P 500 Price to Sales Ratio is at an all-time high
  • Total domestic corporate profits (w/o IVA/CCAdj) have grown at an annualized rate of .097% over the last five years. Prior to this period and since 2000, five year annualized profit growth was 7.95%. (note- period included two recessions) (LINK)
  • Over the last ten years, S&P 500 corporations have returned more money to shareholders via share buybacks and dividends than they have earned.
  • The top 200 S&P 500 companies have pension shortfalls totaling $382 billion and corporations like GE spent more on share buybacks ($45b) than the size of their entire pension shortfall ($31b) which ranks as the largest in the S&P 500. (LINK)
  • Using data back to 1987, the yield to maturity on high-yield (non-investment grade) debt is in the 3rd percentile. Per Prudential as cited in the Wall Street Journal, yields on high-yield debt, adjusted for defaults, are now lower than those of investment grade bonds. Currently, the yield on the Barclays High Yield Index is below the expected default rate.
  • Implied equity and U.S. Treasury volatility has been trading at the lowest levels in over 30 years, highlighting historic investor complacency. (LINK)

Our financial markets are far more primed for a crash than they were in 2008.

The only times in our entire history that are even comparable are the late 1920s just before the infamous crash of 1929 and the late 1990s just before the dotcom bubble burst.

A whole lot of people out there seem to be entirely convinced that things will somehow be different this time. They seem to believe that the laws of economics no longer apply and that we will never pay a significant price for decades of exceedingly foolish decisions.

Overall, the world is now 217 trillion dollars in debt. Earlier this year, Bill Gross raised eyebrows when he said that “our highly levered financial system is like a truckload of nitro glycerin on a bumpy road”, and I very much agree with him.

There is no way that this is going to end well. Yes, central bank manipulation may be enough to keep the party going for a little while longer, but eventually the whole thing is going to come crashing down in a disaster of unprecedented magnitude.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Would You Like To Steal 128 Million Dollars?

What would you do with 128 million dollars? Many people like to daydream about winning the lottery, and I have to admit that when I was much younger I would do the same thing. If you were suddenly financially set for life, you could quit your job, buy your dream home, travel the world and spend your days doing whatever you felt like doing. We only get one trip through this crazy journey called life, and an enormous mountain of cash could make the journey a whole lot nicer. So if you could steal 128 million dollars and be absolutely certain that you could get away with it, would you do it?

You would probably be surprised at how many people out there would answer that question affirmatively. Money is a very powerful motivator, and if the fear of getting caught was out of the equation a lot of people out there would certainly be willing to “bend the rules” for a cool 128 million dollars.

But let’s turn this around for a moment.

What if someone stole 128 million dollars from you?

How would you feel about that?

Every crime has a victim, and losing that amount of money would be unimaginable.

Perhaps you think that this scenario is way too outlandish to even be considering. After all, who in the world could steal 128 million dollars from someone and get away with it?

Well, what if I told you that this has been happening every day?

And what if I told you that this has actually been happening every single hour of every single day for many years?

When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. national debt was just over 10.6 trillion dollars, and when he left the White House 8 years later it was sitting just shy of 20 trillion dollars.

So during those 8 years more than 9 trillion dollars was added to the national debt. But for purposes of this example we will round down to an even 9 trillion dollars.

When you divide 9 trillion dollars by 8, you get an average of 1.125 trillion dollars that was added to the national debt per year during the Obama era.

Dividing that figure by 365, you find that an average of $3,082,191,780 was added to the national debt every single day during the Obama administration.

And since there are 24 hours in a day, that means that an average of $128,424,657 was stolen from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day while Barack Obama was president.

When you borrow and spend 128 million dollars that you do not have every single hour of every single day, of course that is going to have a huge impact on the economy. I am often asked why we are not in a horrendous economic depression yet, and this is one of the biggest reasons. If we were to go back and take 9 trillion dollars of government spending out of the economy over the last eight years, we would be in the worst depression in American history right now.

But even with all of this added debt, the U.S. economy has still only grown at an average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent over the past 10 years, and that is absolutely terrible.

Our leaders in D.C. were able to prop things up in the short-term by going on the greatest debt binge in U.S. history, but of course they have also made our long-term financial problems much, much worse in the process.

Many people don’t realize this, but the growth of the national debt was actually accelerating as the Obama era drew to a close. In fact, we added more than 1.4 trillion dollars to the debt during fiscal year 2016.

Once upon a time a lot of people out there would get really upset about the growth of our debt, but these days most Americans seem to have accepted that this is how we do things. This fiscal liberals seem to have won, and our nation is steamrolling down a road toward financial oblivion.

When you point out the economic disasters in Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, it doesn’t seem to register with most Americans that our country is on the exact same path.

By borrowing money, you can live way above your means for a while, but eventually you have to pay a price for being so reckless. This has been true all throughout human history, and it will be true in our case as well.

In a letter to John Taylor on November 26th, 1798, Thomas Jefferson explained that he wished that he could have added one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution…

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our constitution; I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of it’s constitution; I mean an additional article taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

Jefferson wrote extensively about how government debt is a way for one generation to steal money from another generation.

And what we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is absolutely inexcusable.

The term “child abuse” is not nearly strong enough to describe what is taking place, and I don’t know why more people are not seething with anger over what is being done to them. I am going to do whatever I can to stop this madness, and I hope that you will help me.

Have you ever run up a lot of credit card debt? If you really wanted to, you could go out today and start living like a millionaire by running up huge credit card balances. But eventually a day of reckoning would arrive, and you would get to a point where your debts were no longer sustainable.

It is the same thing on a national level. We have been living way beyond our means for quite a while, but we have been stealing from future generations in order to do it.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Washington D.C. Is Essentially Just A Gigantic Money Machine

If you have ever wondered why our leaders in Washington D.C. seem to act so strangely, the truth is that it almost always comes down to just one thing. It has been said that “money makes the world go round”, and that is definitely true in Washington. This year the federal government will spend more than 4 trillion dollars, and that represents well over one-fifth of our national GDP. With so much money coming in and so much money going out, the stakes are incredibly high, and that is why so much money is poured into political campaigns on the national level.

And it shouldn’t surprise anyone that those that live the closest to this gigantic money machine have benefited greatly. Forbes just released their brand new rankings for 2017, and they found that five out of the top 10 wealthiest counties in the entire country are suburbs of Washington D.C.…

Virginia’s Loudoun County holds the title of the nation’s richest county with a median household income of $125,900. While nearly 10,000 residents commute to the District, according to Forbes, about 11,700 businesses employ 161,000 county residents, with Dulles International Airport, Loudoun County Public Schools and the Department of Homeland Security leading that charge.

The nearby city of Falls Church, Fairfax and Arlington counties in Virginia and Howard County in Maryland also lead the nation based on wealth.

In general, salaries for federal workers are significantly higher than in the private sector, and benefit packages are usually much better.

But in addition to having a very high concentration of federal workers, the D.C. area is also home to hordes of lawyers, lobbyists, defense contractors and other government vendors. Big government means big business for those guys, and business has been very good in recent years…

The federal government has a lot to do with this: The Capitol and the economy orbiting around it (including lawyers, defense contractors, computer engineers along the Dulles Corridor, and doctors near NIH) attract college graduates who reliably contribute to six-figure households. Crucially, there was a $1.7 billion increase in lobbying between 1998 and 2010, as Dylan Matthews explained. With each $1 million of lobbying “associated with a $3.70 increase in the D.C. wage premium,” the money pouring into Washington wound up in the pockets of its residents.

This certainly isn’t the limited government that our founders intended.

So where did we go wrong?

One of the big turning points came in 1913. That is the year when the Federal Reserve and the modern version of the income tax were established. The Federal Reserve was designed by the elite to get the federal government very deeply into debt, and an income tax was needed to help service that debt and to help pay for the much larger government that the progressives were wanting.

Back then, D.C. was nothing like it is today. In fact, even in the 1970s there were still large farms inside the Beltway. But the federal government just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it is a four trillion dollar monstrosity.

What I believe we should do is to dismantle as much of that monstrosity as we possibly can. Instead of asking which government agencies we should close, I believe that we should be asking which government agencies we really need to leave open.

A great place to start would be by abolishing the Federal Reserve, the IRS and the income tax. Those institutions are at the very core of the Washington money machine, and so it would essentially be like tearing the heart out of big government.

And don’t worry, the federal government would still have plenty of money coming in. The individual income tax only accounts for about 46 percent of all federal revenue, and theoretically we could still have an absolutely enormous federal government without an income tax. I once wrote an article that listed 97 different ways that various levels of government get money out of us each year, and so getting rid of the federal income tax would still leave 96 ways for the politicians to extract money from us.

As I remind my readers so frequently, the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no income tax and no central bank. But I know that a lot of people out there love the 1.33 percent average yearly GDP growth rate that we have been experiencing over the past decade and would have a really hard time giving that up.

Unfortunately, it would actually be a very tough transition to a much more limited federal government because so much of our society is geared around the enormous money machine in Washington. In 2018, more than a billion dollars will be spent on the mid-term elections, and most of that money will be going to incumbents that are committed to maintaining the status quo.

If we ever want things to really start changing in Washington, we have got to start sending people there that haven’t been bought off by the big money interests.

In my congressional district there is no incumbent running in 2018, and nobody else in the race is nearly as conservative as I am. But since I can’t be bought by the special interests, I am going to have to rely on grassroots support.

Donald Trump showed us that anything is possible in American politics. When Jeb Bush decided to run for president, he had an extremely long list of endorsements and a hundred million dollars behind him, and he still got trounced by Trump because Trump had a much stronger message.

If we stand united, we can take our government back and there won’t be anything that the establishment will be able to do about it.

But if we sit back and do nothing, the cesspool of corruption in Washington D.C. will just continue to get deeper and deeper.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

One Of The Main Reasons Congress Is Getting So Little Done Is Because They Will Have 218 Days Off In 2017

Would you like to have a job that gave you 218 days off a year?  According to the official calendar put out by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the House of Representatives will only be in session for 147 days in 2017.  And that is actually an increase from last year.  In 2016, there were only 131 legislative days for the House.  So if you are wondering why Congress never seems to get anything done, this is one of the biggest reasons.  The sad truth is that members of Congress simply do not spend a lot of time doing what they were elected to do.

If you are an average American worker with a full-time job, you probably put in around 240 working days a year.  If you have to work that hard, why can’t Congress?

And actually things used to be even worse.  The New York Times looked back at 2013 once it was done, and they found that the House was only in session for 942 hours for the entire year.  When you break that down, it comes to about 18 hours a week.

If you go all the way back to 2006, there were just 104 legislative days in the House.  It is almost as if they just decided to take pretty much that whole year off.

This is what I am talking about when I say that we need to “flush the toilet”.  Those that are fortunate enough to be chosen to represent us in Washington should be some of the hardest working people in the entire country, and unfortunately we are getting just the exact opposite.

In the past there have been efforts to make members of Congress work full work weeks, but those efforts have always ended up failing…

Some attempts have been made to force members of Congress to work full weeks. In 2015, for example, a Republican lawmaker from Florida, Rep. David Jolly, introduced legislation that would have required the House to be in session 40 hours a week when members of the House were in Washington, D.C.”A work week in Washington should be no different than a work week in every other town across the nation,” Jolly said at the time. Jolly’s measure failed to gain traction.

Congress gets especially lazy during the summer months.  Many Americans don’t realize that every year Congress takes the entire month of August off.  And actually, the House will be on vacation from July 29th all the way to September 4th in 2017.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had the entire month of August off every year?

This year, U.S. Senator David Perdue is proposing that the August vacation be canceled because there is so much for Congress to do.  According to Senator Perdue, there are five major tasks that need to be accomplished by September 30th…

First, we have to complete the work on the first phase of repealing Obamacare and fixing our health care system.

Second, we have to pass a budget resolution that will work within the reconciliation process for changing the tax code.

Third, we have to use the appropriations process to fund the federal government by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Fourth, we have to deal with our debt limit. The Treasury Department has used extraordinary measures to buy time since the national debt hit its limit of $19.8 trillion in March.

Fifth, we have to finally act on our once-in-a-generation opportunity to change our archaic tax code, but we will only be able to do so if we achieve the first four priorities.

If those things don’t get done in time, members of Congress should not expect the voting public to have any sympathy for them.

Of course there are many that would argue that members of Congress actually work very hard and that they need all of that time off to “serve their constituents”.  The following comes from Snopes…

Members of Congress have two jobs: represent their constituents and govern. These responsibilities do not always go hand in hand. Representing constituents means speaking with them in person, holding town hall meetings, organizing rallies, attending to casework, and otherwise being present in the district or state they represent. This is not easily done from a Washington office. Supporting or opposing legislation is an important part of a member’s’ job. However, it does not come close to capturing members’’ range of responsibilities. This is why even when Congress is out of session, members are at work. Most members of Congress work a five-to-six-day week. The representative aspect of Congress’’s job is almost completely ignored in these statistics.

Yes, without a doubt it is important for members of Congress to go back and interact with those that elected them.

But at the end of the day their main job is to do the work that they were elected to do.

And even when they are in Washington, many of these Congress critters are spending much of their time on activities that have nothing to do with legislation.  For example, in his new book entitled “Giant Of The Senate”, Senator Al Franken admits that he often spends much of his day on the phone raising money…

“It’s not uncommon to have three straight hours of call time scheduled as part of your day. … It’s brutal.”

This is why we need federal term limits.  If members of Congress were not so busy constantly raising money for their next elections maybe they would have time to actually get something done in Washington.

In November the American people gave the Republicans control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.  Enormous amounts of time, money and energy went into those campaigns, and now we want to see some results.

Instead of flying off for a month-long vacation in August, Congress should stay in town and get to work.  The Republicans have already wasted much of the first half of 2017, and the mid-term elections are right around the corner.

It is time to change the way that Washington works, because right now we have a system that is deeply broken.

Rush Limbaugh And Ann Coulter Are Right – America Is On The Verge Of Widespread Chaos And Civil Unrest

Things will never be the same in America from this moment forward.  When 66-year-old James Hodgkinson attempted to gun down as many Republican members of Congress as possible at a baseball field in Virginia, he permanently shattered the notion that we could go back to the way that things used to be in this country.  At one time, Republicans and Democrats may have strongly disagreed with one another over the issues, but there was always a certain code of civility that everyone understood and respected.  But now that is long gone, and if our politicians and the big media outlets continue to fuel the rising hatred in this country, it won’t be too long before we are dealing with widespread chaos and civil unrest from coast to coast.

Most of the anger and frustration that we are currently witnessing is being fueled by the left.  On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh accused the left of openly promoting violence…

“I have been worried for quite a while about the cumulative effect or impact of this constant anti-Trump hysteria everywhere in mainstream media: New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC,” Limbaugh told listeners.

“It’s hysteria. It’s lies. It’s things that are completely manufactured about Trump personally, about Trump and Russia, about climate change, about any number of things.

“I have been very concerned about what all of this is doing to the average, base Democrat voter. I have sensed them getting more and more fringe and imbalanced, and the evidence for it is everywhere in the things that they tweet. They openly promote violence, and advocate some of the most despicable things happening to their political enemies.”

Someone like James Hodgkinson is not produced in a vacuum.  There has been a steady pattern of threats and violence against Republicans since the election, and all that Hodgkinson did was take things to the next level.  Breitbart has put out an article entitled “15 Times Celebrities Envisioned Violence Against Trump and the GOP”, and WND published an even longer list entitled “20 times violence threatened, used, in wake of Dems’ political collapse”.  When celebrities, politicians and media personalities constantly use language that is seething with hatred, it shouldn’t surprise us when their followers engage in violent acts.

I have warned many times in the past about the civil unrest that is coming, and now many of my fellow conservative commentators are sounding the alarm as well.  For example, in the aftermath of the attack in Virginia radio host Michael Savage made the following chilling statement to his audience: “We are at a boiling point. There’s going to be a civil war.”

No American should ever want to see such a thing happen, but the left just keeps getting more and more radical.  And even Hillary Clinton recently stated that she has joined “the Resistance”.  The following comes from Ann Coulter…

Recently, Hillary announced her steadfast opposition to the winning candidate using a military term, saying she’d joined the “Resistance.”

Imagine if Trump lost and then announced that he’d joined the “RESISTANCE.” He’d be accused of trying to activate right-wing militias. Every dyspeptic glance at an immigrant would be reported as fascistic violence.

But the media seem blithely unaware that the anti-Trump “Resistance” has been accompanied by nonstop militaristic violence from liberals.

In recent weeks, I have heard from so many people all over the nation that are extremely excited about the possibility of me running for Congress.  But anyone that is considering running for public office these days has to consider the fact that they will become potential targets for violence.  For example, just recently one very sick individual actually threatened to hang Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz…

“I feel very safe and secure at the Capitol,” Chaffetz said Wednesday. “We work in a fortress with literally thousands of people to protect us, but once we leave the Capitol, it’s a whole different equation.”

Chaffetz wants U.S. marshals to be charged with assessing threats against members of Congress and securing them in more high-profile and widely attended events.

Chaffetz was the focus of a March death threat in which a Florida man vowed in a voicemail to “hunt your a– down, wrap a rope around your neck and hang you from a lamppost,” according to court records.

Could you imagine if your wife found that voicemail before you did?

But this is what the left is becoming.  Because they don’t have any sort of a positive message to offer, they have to resort to threats, intimidation and violence.  I have been writing about this quite a bit lately, and it turns out that Rush Limbaugh very much feels the same way…

They don’t have an agenda that’s optimistic and upbeat that they can run on, and they don’t dare be honest about their real agenda. So all they can do is to continue to do what they’ve been doing, and it’s not healthy, it’s not uplifting, it’s not inspiring. It isn’t representative or reflective of any of the traditional American values that for so long have united us. A sense of optimism, a sense of can-do, a sense of unity, a sense of nationhood. All of these things are under assault.

If the left continues to go down this path, the anger and the frustration are going to continue to grow, and eventually cities all over America are going to burn.  This is the kind of a scenario that I laid out in The Beginning Of The End, and now it is actually starting to play out right in front of us.

Today, this nation is more divided than it has ever been in my entire lifetime, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.  In fact, I expect even more anger and even more hatred as the divisions deepen.

Without each passing year, the left moves even farther to the left.  It has gotten to the point where many on the far left actually refer to Hillary Clinton as a “moderate”, which is funny because at one time she was a cutting edge liberal.

On the right, there is an emerging movement to return to the values and the principles that this country was founded upon.  So if the left doesn’t like current Republican leadership, then they really aren’t going to like the hardcore constitutional conservatives that are going to start replacing them.

We are in a battle for the soul of our nation, and the future of America is literally at stake.

It is a battle that we cannot afford to lose, because if the left wins there literally will be no viable future for our country at all.

Has Kathy Griffin Produced A Defining Moment That Will Cause America To Reject The Hate-Filled Ideology Of The Radical Left?

The image of Kathy Griffin holding up a bloody mock ‘decapitated’ head of Donald Trump will be burned into our memories forever, and she may have just produced the single most destructive moment for the radical left that this country has seen in decades.  It is perfectly fine to disagree with President Trump and his policies, but to hold up his ‘decapitated head’ like an ISIS executioner would goes far beyond anything that would ever be acceptable in a civilized society.  This is a moment that absolutely screams “too far”, and I believe that it will be this moment that causes many Americans to finally realize that the hate-filled ideology of the radical left is entirely bankrupt.

At this point the radical left doesn’t have any sort of positive message to offer the American people.  They hate that wealthy people have so much money and so they want to raise taxes.  They hate capitalism and use every opportunity that they can to try to destroy it.  They hate conservative Christians and so they mock Jesus and the Christian faith every chance they get.  They pander for money and votes by pitting one racial group against another.  They are all about killing liberty, killing freedom, killing babies, and killing the values that this nation was founded upon.  And they have demonstrated over and over again that they are willing to use violence to achieve their goals.

What Kathy Griffin was attempting to communicate was so horrible and so over the top that even CNN has decided to fire her…

“CNN has terminated our agreement with Kathy Griffin to appear on our New Year’s Eve program,” spokesman Shimrit Sheetrit confirmed to USA TODAY in a statement Wednesday.

The network used even stronger language a day earlier: “We found what she did disgusting and offensive,” read a statement sent to USA TODAY Tuesday night by Sheetrit. “We are pleased to see she has apologized and asked that the photos be taken down.”

And even her old buddy Anderson Cooper denounced her on Twitter…

For the record, I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in. It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate.

It is hard to imagine that Kathy Griffin will have much of a career left after all of this, so hopefully she has been saving her money.  In fact, she has already lost a major endorsement deal…

Squatty Potty, a Utah-based business that creates and sells bathroom products — including a popular toilet stool made famous by one of the company’s well-known viral videos — has decided to pull down a new ad that Griffin stars in.

“We were shocked and disappointed to learn about the image Ms. Griffin shared today,” Squatty Potty CEO Bobby Edwards said in a statement issued to Faithwire. “It was deeply inappropriate and runs contrary to the core values our company stands for.”

I don’t know what she thought would happen.  If a conservative had done the same thing to Obama, we would probably be talking about prison time right about now.  Griffin went so far over the line that even the Church of Satan has disavowed her.

And of course this isn’t the first time that she has done something like this.  During a 2007 awards show, she openly mocked the name of Jesus.  What she said was so horrible that I do not want to repeat it.

Surprisingly, not everyone on the left is turning their backs on Griffin.  In fact, Democratic Senator Al Franken says that he is not going to cancel an appearance with Griffin that is scheduled for July.

Al Franken will be up for re-election in 2020, and I think that it is time for the people of Minnesota to find a new senator.

Of course I think that things are going to be very difficult for most liberal Democrats moving forward.  If anger and hate are the core of your message, and if you survive by constantly pitting one group against another, eventually the American people are going to see through the games and will start choosing another direction.

Whether she intended it or not, Kathy Griffin is now the poster child for the radical left in this country, and she just did Trump and the Republican Party a huge favor by showing the true face of her movement.  I really like how Mike Adams made this point…

There’s no other way to say it: Kathy Griffin and the deranged, lunatic Left are mentally ill and pose a very real danger to society. This wretched, terrorist-style beheading video posted by Griffin encourages deadly violence against Trump supporters and sends a message that murdering political opponents of the intolerant Left is a normal, acceptable activity.

That’s what the deranged Left already believes, of course. Fanned into flames by a wildly dishonest, discredited fakestream media, Trump Derangement Syndrome has now escalated into a left-wing murderous rage that now celebrates gruesome images of beheadings that were once the sole domain of fanatical terrorists. What’s even more disturbing about all this is that Kathy Griffin apparently thought posting a video showing a bloodied, decapitated Trump head in her fist would somehow be hilarious or inspiring in some twisted way.

So how should we respond to all of this?

Instead of responding to this kind of hate with even more hate, I propose that we respond with lots of love.

Let’s show the American people that there is a fundamental difference between the right and the left.  Let’s show them that true conservatives are all about loving everyone and doing everything that we can to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Let’s show them that we believe in a positive, united future for our country based on the values and principles that are enshrined in the United States Constitution.

We don’t have to attack Kathy Griffin because she has already destroyed herself and done an immense amount of permanent damage to her political movement.

The American people are going to be looking elsewhere for inspiration, and we should be ready to supply it.  If we can clearly communicate a positive, uplifting message, we can start to clear out the cesspool that Washington D.C. has become and begin to build a brighter future for all Americans.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

Is there any way to unite our country once again?  We live at a time when our nation is deeply polarized and many people have chosen to completely give in to hate.  There are a lot of Democrats that deeply hate Donald Trump with everything that they have inside of them, even though they might not be able to clearly explain to anyone exactly why they hate him so much.  And the same thing could be said about many Republicans when it comes to top politicians among the Democrats.  Yes, there are very important issues that divide us, and there are certain things where compromise simply is not an option.  But just because we disagree with others politically does not mean that we have to hate them.  The following is another excerpt from my new book, and hopefully it will inspire people to start loving their enemies (even their political ones)…

*****

What do you think would happen to our society if we decided to just start loving one another?  I am writing this at a time when the United States is the most polarized that it has been in decades.  Democrats hate Republicans and Republicans hate Democrats, but all of this hate is not really getting us anywhere.  I think that most of us have forgotten that we are supposed to love our enemies.  If we only love those that agree with us and that are just like us, what is that going to accomplish?

Following the election in November, there were news reports about leftists that were being “triggered” simply by seeing the name of Trump somewhere.  I don’t know if I have ever seen so much rage directed at a new president, and some of the things that are being said and done by those on the left are absolutely frightening.  For example, Kathy Griffin made national headlines when she posed for photographs “with a ‘beheaded’ President Trump”…

Kathy Griffin sent shockwaves through the internet when she posed with a “beheaded” President Trump.

The comedian looks somber in pictures that are reminiscent of ISIS beheading videos and photos. She holds a facsimile of Mr. Trump’s detached, bloodied head by the hair.

The photo was taken by Tyler Shields, who is known for controversial art, including a photo of Clint Eastwood’s daughter burning a $100,000 Hermes handbag.

(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kathy-griffin-takes-photos-with-beheaded-trump/)

Why would someone do such a thing?

Many of those on the left have no idea why they are feeling so much rage.  They just know that Trump is on the “wrong team” and that he supposedly stands for things that they aren’t supposed to like.  But if you would ask many of them to put their feelings into words, most of them would not be able to do so in a cohesive manner.

Of course many on the right have heaped a tremendous amount of abuse on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in recent years.  Even though they stand for things that are truly appalling, does that justify the horrible mistreatment that they have received?

You can love people without agreeing with them.  In fact, you can deeply love someone and still disapprove of every single thing that they stand for.  And even though Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both completely unfit to hold any political office anywhere in the country, that doesn’t mean that we should hate them.  Like so many other political leaders, Obama and Clinton have done some exceedingly terrible things, but that doesn’t mean that they are beyond all hope.  All of us have done things that we are now ashamed of, and all of us have needed some grace at various points in our lives.  We should always be willing to love our political enemies, to forgive them, to pray for them, and we should always want the very best for them and for their families.

As it stands, America is at a very dangerous place because of all of the anger and frustration that are boiling just under the surface.  According to a recent Reuters survey, only 25 percent of Americans believe that the country is heading in the right direction, and the protests in our streets have turned increasingly violent in recent years.

Many on the left are using terms such as “Nazi”, “racist” and “dictator” to describe Donald Trump, and that is the kind of language that can spur people to take violent action.  There are some that believe that America is heading for a “civil war”, and there are others that believe that one has already started.  But none of us should ever want that to actually happen.

In my adult life, I have never seen America so divided, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

What if we decided to start loving one another no matter what we look like, where we are from or who our ancestors were?

What if we decided to start loving one another no matter who we voted for or what our particular political beliefs may be?

What if we decided to start loving one another no matter how much the mainstream media, our politicians and the entertainment community tried to stir up hate?

Not too long ago, a distant relative decided to cut off all communication with Meranda and I simply because of a pro-Trump article that I authored.  Apparently someone must be anti-Trump in order to be loved and accepted by this particular individual.

Of course similar things are happening all over the country because of animosity toward Trump.

But if we are not willing to talk with one another, how will we ever solve any of the problems that this nation is facing?

Don’t get me wrong.  I am certainly not suggesting that we should ever compromise our most cherished values and principles.  If the left is going to hate us because we refuse to move from the values and the principles that this nation was founded upon, there isn’t much we can do about that.

But even though they may hate us, we can choose to love them.  When we do good to those that hate us, it has a far more powerful effect than if we return hate with more hate.  The following is one of the most famous quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr…

Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate;
only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate,
violence multiplies violence,
and toughness multiplies toughness
in a descending spiral of destruction….
The chain reaction of evil —
hate begetting hate,
wars producing more wars —
must be broken,
or we shall be plunged
into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Those are very wise words.

We will never defeat the leftists that are trying to destroy our nation by hating them.  But if we shower them with light and love many of them will eventually come over to our side.

I am a big believer in the marketplace of ideas, because I also believe that truth always wins in the end.  If we can respectfully engage with those that disagree with us and show them that there is a better way, we will win many of them over.

One of the reasons why the left has made so much progress in recent decades is because most of the population has abandoned the core values that once made America so great.  If we rediscover those values, they can provide a basis for healing and reuniting our broken nation.

For example, in the Declaration of Independence our forefathers declared that “all men are created equal”.  We should all be able to agree that every single individual is of immense value, and that all of us should be treated equally under the law no matter where we came from, no matter what our skin color is and no matter how much money we have.

The Declaration of Independence also tells us that we have been endowed “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.  If you follow my work on a regular basis, you know that first one is absolutely huge for me.  Elsewhere in this book I am going to spend an entire chapter on that topic.  But for the moment I want to focus on Liberty.  In every human heart there is a desire to live free.  This is one of the reasons why big government liberalism is such a bankrupt philosophy.  Big government always ends in tyranny, and I don’t know any true American that actually wants tyranny.

There are so many things that both the left and the right should be able to agree upon.

One is that Congress has become a cesspool of filth and corruption.  Can’t we agree that the way that we run our elections needs to be greatly reformed and that special interests and big donors should have much less influence in Washington D.C.?

Another thing that we should be able to agree upon is that we should have a country where freedom and liberty are maximized.  Instinctively, most of us want to live our lives without someone else constantly telling us what to do.  We all proudly sing that we are “the land of the free”, and we need to start making that a reality once again.

We should all also be able to agree that terrorism is a growing problem, and that we should do all that we can to keep our communities safe.  Of course there are disagreements about how precisely to do that, but in the face of a common enemy that is intent on destroying us the American people should be able to come together.

In addition, we should all be able to agree that we need to strengthen the Social Security system so that it will always be there for retiring Americans that need it.  Unfortunately, our politicians raided the Social Security trust fund and have badly mismanaged the system, and so now the future of the program looks shaky.  But we should be able to work together to get it back on solid ground once again.

Of course all of us want an economy that is vibrant and growing, and that hasn’t been true for a very long time.  Barack Obama was the only president in U.S. history not to have a single year when the economy grew by at least three percent, and over the past ten years U.S. GDP growth has averaged just 1.33 percent per year.  If we would just take the shackles off of the economy we could do so much better.  The greatest era of economic growth in our history was when there was no Federal Reserve, no IRS and no income tax, and we can do it again.

We all want better lives for our families and our communities, and we can make America great again if we start doing the things that made America great in the first place.

Ultimately, much of this book is about restoring American values.  It is about restoring God, family and country to their proper places and getting our priorities back in order.  It is about learning to love others the way that we love ourselves.

It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall.  And if we continue down this road of hatred and division, America will surely fall no matter what ideology eventually triumphs.

There is nothing that says that we all have to hate one another.  It doesn’t have to be this way, and we need a new generation of leaders that are willing to take us in a different direction.

Because right now what we are getting from the corporate media and most of our politicians is a steady stream of strife, discord, bitterness, resentment and hatred.

The only way that we are going to become “a shining city upon a hill” again is if we learn to love one another truly and deeply and from the heart.  To close this chapter, let me share with you what President Ronald Reagan said about this shining city during his farewell address to the American people…

The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

Reagan’s dream is still alive, but in order to live in harmony and peace we must reject hatred and division.

Just because America is deeply divided today does not mean that all hope is lost.

There is a better way, and we can get there.

It’s Time To Flush The Toilet

Is it fair to compare Congress to a toilet?  If there is one institution that embodies the corruption that permeates Washington D.C., it is the United States Congress.  Dominated by extremely selfish career politicians that are primarily interested in raising enough money to win the next election, Congress has become a cesspool of filth, fraud and malfeasance.  The American people are absolutely sick of this, and that is why approval ratings for Congress are consistently much lower than for any other political institution.  In fact, at this moment Congress has an average approval rating of just 18.3 percent according to Real Clear Politics.  Donald Trump captured the imagination of tens of millions of American voters when he pledged to “drain the swamp” during the last election, but I say that it is time to “flush the toilet” because the only way that we will ever be able to turn the federal government in a positive direction is by clearing out as many of these Congress critters as possible.

Getting Donald Trump into the White House was the biggest political miracle in American history, but now his agenda is almost completely stalled and it is Congress that is to blame.

For example, Trump repeatedly pledged that he was going to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border to combat illegal immigration, but at this point funding for that wall is being completely blocked.

What is the problem?

Congress.

Trump also pledged that Obamacare would be repealed very rapidly once he became president, but that obviously has not happened.

What is the problem?

Congress.

In fact, it is looking quite doubtful that a bill to repeal Obamacare will ever get through the U.S. Senate…

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is tempering expectations that the Senate will pass an overhaul of the nation’s healthcare system, promising his colleagues a vote but not success.

McConnell in his public comments and private conversations about the ObamaCare repeal and replace bill is painting a more sober picture than Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who in March guaranteed passage through the House.

McConnell is stopping well short of any grand pronouncement.

Trump also promised all of us that our taxes would be going way down, but even though the Republicans control both houses of Congress this also seems to be going nowhere fast.  The following comes from the Wall Street Journal…

The GOP’s dreams have collided with interest-group lobbying and the tax system’s reality. Politicians all profess to hate the tax code, but they don’t agree on exactly what they hate. Voters gripe about complexity but are wary of losing cherished breaks that are woven into the economy.

“Eventually you run out of ways to pay for your promises,” said Alan Cole, an economist at the Tax Foundation, which favors a simpler code with lower rates. “There aren’t any free obvious sources of money where you can just do the thing and nobody gets mad.”

I could bring up a whole bunch of other issues such as the national debt, trade with China, unconstitutional government surveillance, etc. but I think that you get the point.

Trump’s presidency is going to be mostly wasted if we do not get him some help.  And I am not just talking about clearing out more Democrats.  Right now the Republicans control the Senate and the House, but the problem is that most of them are “establishment Republicans”.  Career politicians from both parties have sold their souls to the special interests and big donors that fund their campaigns, and this is why such a dramatic political revolution is necessary.

Sadly, most Americans don’t realize just how deep the corruption goes in Washington these days.  To illustrate this, I would like to share just a few quotes from “The Confessions of Congressman X”.  It claims to have been written by an anonymous Democratic member of the House of Representatives, and the following quotes very much ring true to those of us that understand how things in D.C. really work in our day and age…

-“Most of my colleagues are dishonest career politicians who revel in the power and special-interest money that’s lavished upon them.”

-“My main job is to keep my job, to get reelected. It takes precedence over everything.”

-“Voters are incredibly ignorant and know little about our form of government and how it works.”

-“It’s far easier than you think to manipulate a nation of naive, self-absorbed sheep who crave instant gratification.”

-“Fundraising is so time consuming I seldom read any bills I vote on. Like many of my colleagues, I don’t know how the legislation will be implemented, or what it’ll cost.”

-“We spend money we don’t have and blithely mortgage the future with a wink and a nod. Screw the next generation. It’s about getting credit now, lookin’ good for the upcoming election.”

And it isn’t just political corruption that is the problem.  When you start peeling back the onion, you find some of the most disturbing things imaginable in political circles.  For example, just consider what police just uncovered in New York City…

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is hiring! There’s a vacancy in his administration for a computer programmer analyst, in the Department of Design and Construction. That’s because Jacob Schwartz, 29, a DNC staffer and former analyst, has been arrested and charged with being in possession of “kiddie porn” involving children as young as 6 months old.

Schwartz is also the president of the Manhattan Young Democrats and the downstate region vice president of the New York State Young Democrats. In other words, he was a “made” Democrat, part of the inner circle of budding influential NYC politicians, who was even friends with Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robbie Mook.

Schwartz was caught with 3,000 child pornography images and 89 videos on his laptop after he downloaded them from the Internet. He surrendered his laptop to police, signed a release granting them permission to do a search of his hard drive, and was subsequently arrested. He has since posted $7,500 bail.

Of course stories such as this are just the tip of the iceberg.  There is so much more out there, but we aren’t really supposed to talk about those things.

So what can be done?

Well, we can sit back and keep on complaining as our country deteriorates right in front of our eyes, or we can do something about it.

On Memorial Day back in 1982, President Ronald Reagan delivered a stirring address at Arlington National Cemetery.  The following is an excerpt from that address…

I have no illusions about what little I can add now to the silent testimony of those who gave their lives willingly for their country. Words are even more feeble on this Memorial Day, for the sight before us is that of a strong and good nation that stands in silence and remembers those who were loved and who, in return, loved their countrymen enough to die for them.

Yet, we must try to honor them—not for their sakes alone, but for our own. And if words cannot repay the debt we owe these men, surely with our actions we must strive to keep faith with them and with the vision that led them to battle and to final sacrifice.

Our first obligation to them and ourselves is plain enough: The United States and the freedom for which it stands, the freedom for which they died, must endure and prosper. Their lives remind us that freedom is not bought cheaply. It has a cost; it imposes a burden. And just as they whom we commemorate were willing to sacrifice, so too must we—in a less final, less heroic way—be willing to give of ourselves.

There is no war for us to fight, but let there be no doubt that we are in the midst of a great battle for the soul of our nation.

If this generation of Americans does not stand up and defend liberty and freedom, the forces that seek to destroy our country will win by default.

For years, many of us have been trying to persuade our leaders to do the right things, but by now it has become exceedingly clear that they simply are not listening.

So if we want the direction of our country to change, we have got to vote them out and replace them with others that will listen to the will of the people.

I am under no illusion that this will be easy.  The special interests and the big donors have a tremendous amount of money, and the mainstream media is very closely allied with the establishment.

But the election of Donald Trump showed us that anything is possible, and I choose to believe that it is possible for us to take our government back.

We just have to be willing to try.

Less Government. More Freedom.

What would America look like today if the dream of our Founding Fathers of a limited central government had actually been realized?  We have become so accustomed to big government that many of us simply assume that this is the only way that things can be done.  But the truth is that things don’t have to be this way.  We can have the kind of very limited federal government that our forefathers originally intended, but it is going to take a great deal of education and an enormous amount of political engagement in order to get there.  On this Memorial Day, we will remember those that have died for our country, but let it also be a call to action.  In every generation, Americans have had to stand up to defend the cause of liberty and freedom, and it will be no different in our generation.  Just like during the Revolutionary War, there is no guarantee that we will be able to save America from the forces that are trying to destroy it, but if we sit back and do nothing they will win by default.

Just because there is no war to fight does not mean that the threat that we are facing is any less serious than what other generations of Americans have had to face.  Over the last several decades, the U.S. Constitution has essentially been shredded, and at this point our republic is basically hanging by a thread.  If we surrender to the left in this generation, the country that our forefathers envisioned may be gone for good.

Today I would like to share with you an excerpt from my upcoming book.  It will be released about halfway through 2017, and when it is out you will be able to find it on my author page.  As you will see, limited government is something that I am quite passionate about…

*****

“Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” (George Washington)

Big government tends to suck the life out of everything.  If you doubt this, just look around the globe.  In nations where a central government dominates every aspect of society, the people seem quite lifeless.  Of course an extreme example of this is North Korea.  Their entire culture is centered around a philosophy known as “Juche”, and in this philosophy the “leader” essentially becomes an object of worship.  Literally everything in North Korea revolves around the state and the “leader”, and as a result most of the population resembles a horde of mindless zombies.

On the other hand, the most dynamic societies throughout human history have always been the ones where people have had a tremendous amount of freedom to express their passions and creativity.  There is a reason why we saw an unprecedented explosion of remarkable inventions in early America, and there is a reason why so many millions of immigrants have risked their lives to get here.  Liberty has always been such a rare commodity in our world, and almost all governments eventually become tyrannical.  That is why it is so imperative that we defend the liberty that we still have in this nation.

Our Founding Fathers envisioned a country where freedom and liberty would be maximized.  Of course there always must be some sort of government, because otherwise you would have total anarchy.  We want potential thieves and murderers to be frightened of the power of the law, and we are thankful for those that protect us from them.  But way too often it is government that becomes the greatest threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that is the sort of tyranny that we desperately wish to avoid.

Today, there are literally hundreds of thousands of statutes, rules and regulations on the federal level, and when you throw in the state and local levels you get a total that is in the millions.  Virtually every aspect of our lives is very tightly regulated and controlled these days, and this has been going on for so long that most people have begun to accept it as normal.

But the way our society works today is definitely not “normal”.  Let me share with you an example from the state of California that makes my blood boil.  If you can believe it, government officials actually fined one farmer 2.8 million dollars for plowing his own field…

The California farmer who became the poster child for EPA reform under President Donald Trump is being fined $2.8 million by state and federal regulators for plowing his own field in Tehama County.

According to a story in the Redding Record Searchlight:

“The case is the first time that we’re aware of that says you need to get a (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) permit to plow to grow crops,” said Anthony Francois, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation.

“We’re not going to produce much food under those kinds of regulations,” he said.

However, U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller agreed with the Army Corps in a judgment issued in June 2016. A penalty trial, in which the U.S. Attorney’s Office asks for $2.8 million in civil penalties, is set for August.

(http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/05/27/california-farmer-poster-child-for-trumps-epa-regulation-rollback-california-farmer-fined-2-8m-for-plowing-field/)

In early America, they would have howled with laughter if someone would have suggested that farmers should be required to get permission from the government in order to plow a field and grow food.

This is just one example that shows why I am proposing that the Environmental Protection Agency should be completely shut down.  I am very much in favor of protecting the environment, but I believe that the citizens of each state should decide how their own natural resources are managed.

And at this point it has become exceedingly clear that the EPA is wildly out of control.  Prior to the Trump administration, the EPA had been operating under Bill Clinton or Barack Obama for 16 of the previous 24 years, and it is absolutely packed with radical leftists that are obsessed with promoting their own political agendas.  Instead of trying to fire everyone, the easiest thing would be to just end the agency and start completely over.

If you are not with me yet, perhaps another outrageous example will persuade you.  The following comes from Fox News…

A Wyoming man threatened with $16 million in fines over the building of a stock pond reached a settlement with the Environment Protection Agency, allowing him to keep the pond without a federal permit or hefty fine.

Andy Johnson, of Fort Bridger, Wyoming obtained a state permit before building the stock pond in 2012 on his sprawling nine-acre farm for a small herd of livestock.

Not long after contruction, the EPA threatened Johnson with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $37,500-a-day fine — claiming he needed the agency’s permission before building the 40-by-300 foot pond, which is filled by a natural stream.

(http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/05/10/wyoming-welder-facing-16m-in-fines-beats-epa-in-battle-over-stock-pond.html)

Could you imagine being threatened with 16 million dollars in fines for constructing a pond on your own property?

This isn’t how America is supposed to operate.

I really don’t understand how we can still claim to be “the land of the free” when we allow leftist control freaks to dominate our lives down to the minutest detail.

The left always wants government to become bigger and bigger and to get more and more control.  They want a government that is going to guide them safely through life and that will give them everything that they need.  But every time government grows, liberty and freedom are diminished.

Yes, liberty and freedom can be dangerous and messy sometimes.  But living free sure beats being told what to do every single moment of every single day.

One of the things that greatly troubles me is that progressives almost completely dominate our system of public education.  Our public schools have now become liberal indoctrination centers, and survey after survey has shown that each successive generation has moved to the left compared to the preceding generation.

That is why it is so imperative that we end federal interference in education and return control of our schools back to the local level.  I would shut down the Department of Education and I would cut off every penny of funding for Common Core.

Even though we spend far more on education than anyone else in the world, we are producing absolutely disastrous results.  The following comes from a CBS News report…

Half of American Millennials score below the minimum standard of literacy proficiency. Only two countries scored worse by that measure: Italy (60 percent) and Spain (59 percent). The results were even worse for numeracy, with almost two-thirds of American Millennials failing to meet the minimum standard for understanding and working with numbers. That placed U.S. Millennials dead last for numeracy among the study’s 22 developed countries.

(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas-millennials-well-educated-but-unskilled/)

Our public schools are failing badly, and we need to get them fixed.  But we also need to greatly support parents that are pursuing other educational avenues such as homeschooling and private schools.  At this point I completely understand why any parent would want to keep their kids out of our horrific public schools, and ultimately our entire system of education needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up.

Big government sucks the life out of the economy as well.  Over the past ten years, the U.S. economy has grown at an average yearly rate of just 1.33 percent, and the only other era in U.S. history when economic growth was so bad was during the 1930s.

The business community is being absolutely strangled by rules, regulations, red tape and excessive taxes, but the Democrats always want to pile on more.  Big corporations can hire lots of people to comply with all of the demands that government places on them, but small businesses and entrepreneurs are rapidly becoming an endangered species.

Today, there are less Americans that are self-employed than there were 27 years ago.  In April 1990, 8.7 million Americans worked for themselves, but in April 2017 only 8.4 million Americans were working for themselves.

That may not sound that bad until you realize how much our population grew over that time frame.  In 1990, the population of the United States was 249 million, but today the population is 321 million.

So the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has gone way, way down.

The solution is to get the government off of our backs.  The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was between the Civil War and 1913.  During this era there was no income tax, no IRS and no Federal Reserve.  Many on the left would consider that to be a recipe for disaster, but instead there was an explosion of innovation and industry that was absolutely unprecedented.  The following is how Wikipedia describes the economic conditions during this period of time…

In the last third of the 19th century the United States entered a phase of rapid economic growth which doubled per capita income over the period. By 1895, the USA leaped ahead of Britain for first place in manufacturing output.[175] For the first time, exports of machinery and consumer goods became important. For example, Standard Oil led the way in exporting kerosene; Russia was its main rival in international trade.[176] Singer Corporation led the way in developing a global marketing strategy for its sewing machines.[177]

The greatly expanded railroad network, using inexpensive steel rails produced by new steel making processes, dramatically lowered transportation cost to areas without access to navigable waterways. Low freight rates allowed large manufacturing facilities with great economies of scale. Machinery became a large industry and many types of machines were developed. Businesses were able to operate over wide areas and chain stores arose. Mail order companies started operating.[119] Rural Free Delivery began being implemented in the early 1890s, but it was not widely implemented for a decade.[178]

Companies created a new management systems to carry out their operations on a large scale. Companies integrated processes to eliminate unnecessary steps and to eliminate middlemen.[119]

An explosion of new discoveries and inventions took place, a process called the Second Industrial Revolution. The electric light, telephone, steam turbine, internal combustion engine, automobile, phonograph, typewriter and tabulating machine were some of the many inventions of the period. New processes for making steel and chemicals such as dyes and explosives were invented. The pneumatic tire, improved ball bearings, machine tools and newly developed metal stamping techniques enabled the large scale production of bicycles in the 1890s. Another significant development was the widespread introduction of electric street railways (trams, trolleys or streetcars) in the 1890s.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United_States#Late_19th_century)

But the progressives couldn’t leave a good thing alone, and in 1913 the Federal Reserve was established and a federal income tax was instituted.

Since that time there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions, and now we are entering another one.

We are always asking our politicians to “fix the economy”, but the truth is that the best thing that they can do is to get out of the way.

If you take the shackles off, free enterprise works exceptionally well.

Those that follow my work on a regular basis already know that I believe that the Federal Reserve should be shut down, that the IRS should be phased out, and that the federal income tax should be reduced as much as possible with the eventual goal of eliminating it completely.

It has been said that nothing is inevitable except for death and taxes, but there is nothing that says that we must have an income tax.

We have had an income tax for so long that most people could not imagine life without one.  But the United States absolutely thrived without one during the decades prior to 1913, and today states such as Texas and Florida are doing quite nicely without a state income tax.

There are lots of other ways to fund the government that do not involve an income tax.  And actually only 46.2 percent of all federal revenue is brought in through taxing individual incomes.  If we cut the size of government in half, we might even have some money to spare.

Of course considering the fact that we are 20 trillion dollars in debt, the truth is that we don’t have a single penny to spare, but I think that you get my point.

I just hope that you are able to see that life is generally better when government is reduced to the proper size and scope.

We should be able to say what we want to say without fear of retribution.

We should be able to live out our convictions and worship as we please.

We should be able to protect our own homes and do what we want with our own property.

We should be able to raise our own children and make our own health decisions.

We should be able to be free from the fear that the government is watching, tracking and monitoring all of our electronic communications.

In every human heart there is a hunger to live free, and big government is the enemy of freedom.

The dreams that our forefathers once had for this nation may have faded, but they aren’t dead just yet.

A new generation of patriots is rising, and we are determined to take our country back.

Free Money: Potential Presidential Candidate Mark Zuckerberg Suggests That All Americans Should Get A ‘Universal Basic Income’

Should everyone in America receive a “basic income” directly from the federal government? Considering the fact that we are already 20 trillion dollars in debt, such a concept may sound quite foolish to many of you, but this is an idea that is really starting to gain traction in leftist circles. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that this was something that we should “explore” during the commencement speech that he just delivered at Harvard. For quite a while it has been obvious that Zuckerberg is very strongly considering a run for the presidency in 2020, but up until just recently we haven’t had many clues about where he would stand on particular issues. If he is serious about proposing a universal basic income for all Americans, that would make Zuckerberg very appealing to the far left voters that flocked to the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Yesterday, I discussed the fact that the number of Americans that are receiving money from the government each month has reached an all-time high, but Zuckerberg would take things much farther. According to Zuckerberg, society would be far better off if everyone got an income from the government…

“Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it’s time for our generation to define a new social contract,” Zuckerberg said during his speech. “We should have a society that measures progress not by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas.”

Zuckerberg said that, because he knew he had a safety net if projects like Facebook had failed, he was confident enough to continue on without fear of failing. Others, he said, such as children who need to support households instead of poking away on computers learning how to code, don’t have the foundation Zuckerberg had. Universal basic income would provide that sort of cushion, Zuckerberg argued.

Such a proposal is going to look really good to a lot of people at first glance.

But who is going to pay for this?

Of course the truth is that the money for the people that are not working would come from taxing the people that are working.

I don’t think that Zuckerberg has really thought this through. Are young people going to have an incentive to work if they can just stay home and watch movies and play video games all day while collecting their “universal basic incomes” from the government?

And why would anyone want to bust their rear ends working for a living when their incomes are just going to be taxed extremely heavily to pay for all the people that aren’t working?

We are already 20 trillion dollars in debt, but politicians on the left just want to keep giving even more free stuff to people. During his presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders suggested that everyone in America “deserves a minimum standard of living” and that every citizen is “entitled” to universal health care, free college education and basic housing…

So long as you have Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, and so long as you have a Congress dominated by big money, I can guarantee you that the discussion about universal basic income is going to go nowhere in a hurry. But, if we can develop a strong grassroots movement which says that every man, woman and child in this country is entitled to a minimum standard of living — is entitled to health care, is entitled to education, is entitled to housing — then we can succeed. We are living in the richest country in the history of the world, yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country and millions of people are struggling to put food on the table. It is my absolute conviction that everyone in this country deserves a minimum standard of living and we’ve got to go forward in the fight to make that happen.

In previous generations, very few people would have ever taken someone like Bernie Sanders seriously.

But in our day and time socialism is really starting to catch on. In fact, one survey found “that four out of every ten adults say they prefer socialism to capitalism”…

The American Culture and Faith Institute recently conducted a survey of adults 18 and older. It shows not only how deeply divided Americans are on some issues but also how their view of the nation stands in many cases in stark contrast to our nation’s founding principles. Most Americans (58 percent) see themselves as politically moderate, while a quarter identify as conservative, and 17 percent as liberal. Those who were both socially and fiscally conservative, the group tracked by the ACFI in greatest detail, were 6 percent of the population.

But those differences don’t reveal the greatest divide and danger to America’s future. “The most alarming result, according to [George] Barna, was that four out of every ten adults say they prefer socialism to capitalism,” the ACFI noted in its commentary on the poll. “That is a large minority,” Barna said, “and it includes a majority of the liberals — who will be pushing for a completely different economic model to dominate our nation. That is the stuff of civil wars. It ought to set off alarm bells among more traditionally-oriented leaders across the nation.’” That 40 percent of Americans now prefer socialism to capitalism could spell major change to the policies advanced by legislators and political leaders and to the interpretations of judges ruling on the application of new and pre-existing laws.

And as I noted yesterday, Millennials are particularly attracted to socialism. This could have dramatic implications for our society as older generations of Americans slowly die off.

Unfortunately, there is just one huge problem with socialism.

It doesn’t work.

If you want to see the end result of socialism, just move to Venezuela or North Korea for a while.

In socialist nations, there is very little incentive to work hard. Instead, people tend to become very lazy and expect the government to provide everything that they need.

When people work hard and are productive, the overall wealth of a society goes up. And when people sit around and wait for someone else to provide for them, the overall wealth of a society goes down.

Would Mark Zuckerberg have worked so hard to develop Facebook if he knew that the government would just come in and take most of the money away so that others could have a “universal basic income”?

Yes, we want to do all that we can to reduce poverty and to build a strong, vibrant middle class.

But socialism is not the answer and it never will be.

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

No More Fake Conservatives

Do you want to know why President Trump can’t seem to get much done in Congress?  It is because many of the “Republicans” in Congress are actually fake conservatives.  For decades, conservative voters have allowed these RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) to use labels such as “Republican”, “conservative” and “Pro-Life” to get votes, but then once they get into office they govern like Democrats and we never seem to hold them accountable.  So even though we have given the Republicans control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, the government continues to function pretty much as it did when the Democrats were running things.

I was ten years old when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election, and ever since that time I have regarded myself as a conservative.  But for a long time I could never understand why things never really seemed to change very much no matter which party had power.

Unfortunately, the truth is that “Republican” and “conservative” are not synonymous.  And a lot of politicians that use the word “conservative” while they are campaigning are actually quite liberal.  These con artists have fooled us over and over again, and it is time for that to stop.

Just look at what has happened to the national debt since we gave the Republicans control of the House of Representatives during the 2010 elections.  When the new session of Congress opened in January 2011, the U.S. national debt had just passed the 14 trillion dollar mark, and now we stand poised to blow past the 20 trillion dollar mark.

We sent Republicans to Washington to control government spending, and not a single dollar can be spent without the approval of the House, but somehow close to six trillion dollars has been added to the national debt since January 2011.

Are we supposed to believe that is “conservative”?

The solution is actually very simple.  The ridiculous spending demands of the Democrats need to be met with a resounding “NO” by Republicans in the Senate and the House each and every time.

During the Obama years, we added more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt, and what we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is highly immoral.

Republicans also need to learn how to say “NO” when it comes to Planned Parenthood.

A politician cannot be “Pro-Life” and vote to give Planned Parenthood hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars year after year.  For a long time a lot of fake “Pro-Life” politicians have gotten away with doing this, but we aren’t going to put up with it any longer.

From now on, many of us in the Pro-Life community are going to require that any candidate asking for our support must make a pledge never to vote for any bill that gives even one penny of funding to Planned Parenthood.

If every Republican in the House took this pledge, Planned Parenthood would be defunded automatically.  The Republicans are expected to retain control of the House in 2018, and if that happens House Republicans would be able to block every single bill that attempts to allocate any money to Planned Parenthood.

This is a moral issue that goes way beyond politics.  The blood of 60 million dead children is crying out for justice, and if we do not stop killing babies on an industrial scale there is no hope and no future for our nation.

So let me be very clear.

I will not support any Republican that will not promise to vote against funding for Planned Parenthood every single time.

Not only that, I will do whatever I can to make sure that any such politician is defeated by an opponent that is willing to make such a pledge.

And I greatly applaud President Trump for proposing a budget that would strip every single penny of federal funding from Planned Parenthood…

President Donald Trump’s budget proposal together with the American Health Care Act, which Trump’s proposal embraces, would deny all federal funding to Planned Parenthood through both discretionary Title X grants and Medicaid.

“The budget also follows through on a campaign promise and prohibits any funding in the Labor-HHS appropriations bill for certain entities that provide abortions, including Planned Parenthood,” says a fact sheet published by the Office of Management and Budget. “This prohibition applies to all funds in the bill, including Medicaid.”

And it is about time that Republicans began to rediscover the importance of limited government.  During his first inaugural address, President Reagan famously said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”.

In an article earlier today, I noted that President Trump is proposing the elimination of 66 federal programs.

That is a good start.

Our founders intended for the individual state governments to have much more power than the federal government, but instead things have been completely flipped around.  At this point, it is almost as if the 10th Amendment doesn’t even exist.

We need to start setting things in order, but for that to be possible we need to make a big move in 2018.

Unfortunately, President Trump is going to have a hard time accomplishing much of anything until we get him a lot more friends in Congress.  Even though the Republicans control the Senate, there doesn’t seem to be much hope of cobbling together enough votes to repeal and replace Obamacare any time soon.  And there are Republican members of both the House and the Senate that are determined to block Trump on a border wall, on trade, on tax reform and on desperately needed regulatory reform.

I have heard from so many people out there that want Donald Trump’s presidency to be successful.  In order for that to happen, we need to send a very large wave of true conservatives to Washington in 2018.

It may seem quite early to start thinking about the 2018 elections, but the truth is that if true conservatives are going to win those races we need to start laying the groundwork now.

If you are a true conservative, and if you are willing to always vote against funding for Planned Parenthood, I would encourage you to think about running for office.  We are going to need good candidates on the federal, state and local levels.

If good men and women sit back and do nothing, the forces that are eating away at our republic like cancer are going to win by default.

If we are going to try to turn America around, now is the time.

Getting President Trump elected was the first step, and now we need to do our part.

Handout Nation: Combined Enrollment In America’s 4 Largest Safety Net Programs Hits A Record High Of 236 Million

Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with socialism “is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”. As you will see below, the combined enrollment in America’s four largest safety net programs has reached a staggering 236 million. Of course that doesn’t mean that 236 million people are getting benefits from the government each month because there is overlap between the various programs. For example, many Americans that are on Medicaid are also on food stamps, and many Americans that are on Medicare are also on Social Security. But even accounting for that, most experts estimate that the number of Americans that are dependent on the federal government month after month is well over 100 million. And now that so many people are addicted to government handouts, can we ever return to a culture of independence and self-sufficiency?

On Wednesday, CNN ran an editorial by Bernie Sanders in which he called President Trump’s proposed budget “immoral” because it would cut funding for government aid programs.

But is it moral to steal more than a hundred million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day to pay for these programs?

Of course the answer to that question is quite obvious.

There will always be some Americans that are unable to take care of themselves, and we should want to help them.

But as millions upon millions of Americans continue to jump on to the safety net, eventually we are going to get to the point where it is going to break.

As I mentioned above, the combined enrollment in the four largest safety net programs has reached a new all-time record high…

–More than 74 million Americans are on Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program).

–More than 58 million Americans are on Medicare.

–More than 60 million Americans are on Social Security.

–Approximately 44 million Americans are on food stamps. And even though we are supposedly in an “economic recovery”, this number is still dramatically higher than the 26 million Americans that were on food stamps prior to the last financial crisis.

When you add the figures for those four programs together, you get a grand total of 236 million, and that doesn’t even count any of the other federal programs which are helping people.

Once again, there is overlap in enrollment between these various programs, but even accounting for that most experts believe that well over a third of the country is currently receiving benefits from the government each month.

How far down this road do we have to go before people start calling it “socialism”?

As I was writing this, I was reminded of one of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous quotes…

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic.”

In our country today, many politicians have discovered that one of the best ways to win elections is to promise the voters as much free stuff as possible. This is one of the primary reasons why Bernie Sanders did so well. Young people loved his socialist policies, and he received more votes from Millennials in the primaries and caucuses than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined.

As older generations of Americans continue to die off, the Millennials will just become even more powerful politically. And considering the fact that they are far more liberal than other generations, that is a very alarming prospect…

In the minds of 80 percent of baby boomers and 91 percent of elderly Americans, communism was a major problem in years past and remains a significant concern today. But millennials, aged 16 to 20 years, see it differently. Only 55 percent of the younger generation take issue with communism, 45 percent say they would vote for a socialist and 21 percent say they’d vote for a communist.

And millennials made all that clear during the Democratic presidential primary, when many of them cast their vote for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-avowed socialist. In fact, the report credits the New England lawmaker with a “bounce” that led to less than half of millennials — 42 percent — having a favorable view of capitalism.

At this point, the Republic that our founders established is barely recognizable, and if it is going to be saved we need a conservative revolution as soon as possible.

A good place to begin would be to dramatically reduce the size and scope of the federal government, and there are some promising signs in the budget that President Trump has proposed. He wants to completely eliminate 66 federal programs, and liberals are screaming bloody murder over this.

Of course Trump’s budget is “dead on arrival” in Congress because many among his own party do not support him. Most Republicans campaign as conservatives but govern like Democrats, and it is high time that we held them accountable for that. In 2018 we are going get Trump a whole bunch of friends in Congress, and a lot of those establishment Republicans that have been betraying conservatives for years are going to have to find a new line of work.

We simply cannot afford to keep sending the same cast of characters back to Washington time after time. Just look at the debacle that the effort to repeal Obamacare has become. According to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, getting any sort of bill through the Senate is going to be extremely challenging…

Referring to behind-the-scenes work among Senate Republicans on a healthcare bill, McConnell said, “I don’t know how we get to 50 (votes) at the moment. But that’s the goal.”

Under a scenario of gathering the votes needed for passage in the 100-seat chamber, Republican Vice President Mike Pence would be called upon to cast any potential tie-breaking Senate vote.

McConnell opened the interview by saying, “There’s not a whole lot of news to be made on healthcare.” He declined to provide any timetable for producing even a draft bill to show to rank-and-file Republican senators and gauge their support.

And yet somehow when Obama was in office the Republicans in the House and the Senate were able to easily pass a bill to repeal Obamacare and get it to Obama’s desk.

Why can’t they get that exact same bill to Trump’s desk?

We definitely need to “drain the swamp” in D.C., and we can start with Congress.

But the alliance between big money and big government is going to be hard to defeat, and so if we want our country back we are going to have to fight harder than we have ever fought before.

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

Should Conservative Activist Michael Snyder Run For Congress?

When the liberals find out about this, they are going to go absolutely nuts.  On Thursday, I announced that I am “very strongly considering” running for Congress in 2018.  Now that U.S. Representative Raul Labrador has announced that he is not going to run for another term so that he can run for governor instead, the race for his House seat in Idaho is going to be completely wide open.  Congressman Labrador has done such an excellent job all these years, and it is imperative that he is replaced with another very strong conservative.  The key to the race is going to be winning the Republican primary, because Republicans almost always win in general elections in Idaho.

If I run, I am going to need a lot of help, because I have never done anything like this before.  Earlier today, I shared my intentions publicly for the very first time on the Alex Jones Show…

If you have been following my work for years, you already know who I am and what I believe.

For those that are not quite so familiar with me, below is my attempt to very briefly summarize some of my positions on the key issues…

Congress: If there is one institution that embodies the corruption that permeates Washington D.C., it is the United States Congress.  Dominated by extremely selfish career politicians that are primarily interested in raising enough money to win the next election, Congress has become a cesspool of filth, fraud and malfeasance.  The American people are absolutely sick of this, and that is why approval ratings for Congress are consistently much lower than for any other political institution.  Donald Trump captured the imagination of tens of millions of American voters when he pledged to “drain the swamp” during the last election, but I say that it is time to “flush the toilet” because the only way that we will ever be able to turn the federal government in a positive direction is if we clean out the halls of power in Washington.

Limited Government: Our founders intended to create a central government with very limited powers, but instead it has evolved into an absolute monster.  We need to tame that monster and restore the constitutional balance of power that our founders originally intended.

Globalism: President Trump’s “America First” message greatly resonated with conservative voters all over the country during the 2016 election.  I am proud to stand with President Trump, and we must greatly resist the efforts of the globalists to slowly but surely erode our national sovereignty through a series of interlocking international treaties and agreements.  Instead of merging America into a “global system”, we need to focus on “making America great again”.

The Federal Reserve: The Fed is at the very heart of our debt-based financial system.  Since it was created in 1913, the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by about 98 percent and the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.  Eliminating the Federal Reserve is one of the keys to a bright economic future for America.

National Debt: Barack Obama and his friends in Congress added 9.3 trillion dollars to the U.S. national debt over eight years, and so now we are nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt.  Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said that government debt was a way for one generation to steal money from another generation, and at this point we are stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day.  This is a major national crisis that must be addressed immediately.

Planned Parenthood: Activists have documented the horrible crimes against humanity that are being committed at Planned Parenthood clinics all over the nation.  Body parts are being harvested from dead babies and sold off to the highest bidder.  I will be Planned Parenthood’s number one enemy in Congress, and I will never vote for any bill that grants them even a single penny of federal funding.  Planned Parenthood must be defunded as soon as possible, and it will be a great day in America when every Planned Parenthood clinic in the entire country is finally shut down for good.

2nd Amendment: I steadfastly oppose any efforts to restrict the freedoms guaranteed to the American people by the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution.  Gun-related crime is the worst in cities such as Chicago that have implemented extremely strict gun control measures.  When criminals know that average citizens may be armed, they are less likely to break into homes.

The Economy: I have spent many years documenting America’s economic problems.  Barack Obama was the only president in U.S. history to never have a single year when the U.S. economy grew by at least 3 percent, and economic growth has slowed down even more so far in 2017.  If we want the U.S. economy to be great again, we desperately need to start returning to free market principles.

Reducing Taxes: Lowering tax rates is not nearly enough.  Eventually, I would like to completely abolish the individual income tax and shut down the Internal Revenue Service.  The greatest era of economic growth in all of U.S. history was when there was no individual income tax, and I believe that we can eventually return to those days.  In the short-term, I will work with other Republicans to lower tax rates as much as possible, especially on the middle class, entrepreneurs and small businesses.  And those tax cuts would be paid for by reducing the size and scale of the federal government to more appropriate levels.

Social Security: Tens of millions of American rely on Social Security today, and tens of millions more are counting on it being there as they rapidly approach their retirement years.  Unfortunately, due to decades of bad decisions the future of Social Security looks bleak right now, and it is imperative that we strengthen the program so that it will be there for all of us in the future.  I also believe that the federal government should stop taxing Social Security benefits immediately.

Trade: Over the past several decades, the United States has seen tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities shut down.  We have lost millions of good paying jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue.  We will always need to trade with other nations, but we cannot afford to keep running such huge trade deficits.  I agree with President Trump that our current trade deals are very bad deals for America, and we need to replace them with balanced deals that will bring factories and jobs back to the United States.

Education: I strongly believe in parental choice when it comes to education.  Our system of public education is a giant mess, and so many parents have chosen alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools.  I would abolish Common Core and the U.S. Department of Education, and I would return full control over education to the state level.

Hardening The Electrical Grid: A massive electromagnetic pulse that could take down our national power grid for an extended period of time could be produced by a nuclear weapon, but it could also be produced by solar activity.  We have had several near misses in recent years, and scientists assure us that it is only a matter of time before another “Carrington Event” happens.  It is absolutely imperative that we spend the few billion dollars that it would take to protect our electrical grid against such a disaster.

Homeland Security: I have great respect for those that work very hard to protect us every day, but without a doubt there have been many instances of abuse over the years.  It is imperative that our security officials protect the rights and dignity of ordinary Americans at the same time that they are protecting us from terror.

The Surveillance Society: I believe that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to be monitoring our communications.  I will push to have these unconstitutional programs shut down as quickly as possible.

Foreign Policy: I believe that the United States should have the most powerful military in the entire world, but that we should also be very hesitant to become entangled in foreign conflicts.  I strongly support the fight against ISIS, but I very strongly believe that it is not in the interest of the United States to become involved in the civil war in Syria.  Whenever possible we should pursue peace with our neighbors around the world, and having a strong, prepared and vibrant military is one of the keys to achieving a long and lasting peace.

Islamic Terrorism: In this politically-correct era, many politicians won’t even say the phrase “Islamic terrorism” anymore.  That is definitely not the case with me.  The number of Islamic terror attacks just keeps rising with each passing year, and the western world must strongly confront this rising threat.

Race Relations: The Declaration of Independence says 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.”  Instead of allowing the color of our skin to divide us, we need to start learning how to love one another deeply and with sincerity.  Every precious life is of extraordinary value to God, and we should view each other the same way.

Abortion: Since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, nearly 60 million babies have been murdered in America.  I am 100% Pro-Life, and I will work tirelessly to fight the scourge of abortion in our country.  I greatly applaud President Trump for nominating judges that are Pro-Life, and any Republican politician that currently holds office in the entire nation that is not Pro-Life should be immediately challenged for their position by someone that is Pro-Life.

Health Care: I am for a 100% repeal of Obamacare.  But of course that won’t fix our rapidly failing health care system.  Ordinary families all over America are being financially crippled by rapidly rising health insurance premiums, and we need to rebuild the way that we approach health care from the ground up.  I believe that a return to true competition and free market principles would do much to lower costs and restore sanity to the system.

Health Freedom: I am a very strong advocate for health freedom.  I believe that the government should be encouraging natural health remedies instead of discouraging them, I believe that parents should always make the health decisions for their own children, and I believe that genetically-modified foods should be clearly labeled so that we can know what we are eating.

Immigration: America is a land of immigrants, but the way that we are approaching immigration today is entirely messed up.  We make it exceedingly difficult to come in legally through the front door, but meanwhile we are leaving the back door completely wide open for criminals, gang members, drug dealers and those that want to abuse the system.  So we are keeping out the hard working, law-abiding people that we should want to come to this country, and we are allowing in law breakers that are causing havoc in communities all over America.  We need to ensure that everyone comes in through the front door, and that is why I support President Trump’s call for a border wall and greatly increased border security along our southern border.

The Environment: I believe that we all have a duty to help care for the environment, but I also believe that the way that the federal government is approaching these issues is completely wrong.  The EPA has become a tool that the left has used to push a radical political agenda, and I believe that the agency should be completely abolished.  In Idaho, the EPA has done much harm to miners and loggers, and I believe that it should be up to the people of Idaho to determine how the natural resources in our state should be managed.

Agenda 21/Agenda 2030: I am very strongly against the UN’s Agenda 2030 and it’s predecessor Agenda 21.  We should not allow the UN to be setting environmental policy, and I will firmly resist any attempts to implement any UN environmental program inside the United States.

Jobs: One of the biggest problems that Idaho residents have to face is a lack of good paying jobs.  I will use the power of my office to promote economic growth and job creation in Idaho and for all Americans, and I believe that a return to free market principles will mean a more prosperous future for all of us.

Term Limits: America does not need a permanent ruling class of career politicians.  My long-term goal would be to limit all members of the House and all members of the Senate to just one term, but initially it will be a really tough fight to get members of Congress to agree to any sort of limits on their political careers.  But just because it will be tough does not mean that we shouldn’t try.

Principles & Values: I am a Bible-believing Christian.  Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior, and the principles and values that I base my decisions upon come from the Word of God.  Our founders were men of faith, and they were not ashamed of this fact at all.  In fact, the second president of the United States, John Adams, once made the following statement…

“The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity. I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”

If we truly want to make America great again, we need to return to the values and the principles that made America great in the first place.  I know that many liberals believe that those values and principles should be completely discarded in our day and time, but that is something with which I completely disagree.

Debt Insanity: Does Anyone In Washington Even Care That We Are 20 Trillion Dollars In Debt?

There has been a tremendous amount of talk about the spending deal that was just reached in Congress.  Most of the focus has been on who “won” and who “lost” politically, and if you have been keeping up with my articles you definitely know my opinion on the matter.  But what nobody is really talking about is that this deal actually increases spending at a time when our debt has been absolutely exploding.  We added more than a trillion dollars a year to the U.S. national debt during Obama’s eight years in the White House, and our debt binge actually accelerated toward the end of his second term.  In fact, the national debt increased by more than 1.4 trillion dollars during fiscal 2016…

In fiscal 2016, which ended on Friday, the federal debt increased $1,422,827,047,452.46, according to data released today by the U.S. Treasury.

At the close of business on Sept. 30, 2015, the last day of fiscal 2015, the federal debt was $18,150,617,666,484.33, according to the Treasury. By the close of business on Sept. 30, 2016, the last day of fiscal 2016, it had climbed to $19,573,444,713,936.79.

Since we are already in so much debt, we might as well shoot for the moon, right?

This new spending deal increases spending in a whole bunch of different ways, but it doesn’t do anything to raise more revenue.

At the moment, the U.S. national debt is stuck at $19,846,087,305,498.20 because the debt ceiling has not been raised.  The federal government is using accounting tricks to keep that number from moving, but the moment the debt ceiling is finally raised by Congress that number will jump up by hundreds of billions of dollars.

By the time fiscal 2017 is over, we will almost certainly have added at least another trillion dollars to the debt, and the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that an additional $10 trillion will be added to the debt over the next ten years.

These days we toss around the phrase “a trillion dollars” as if it isn’t a big deal.

But it is a big deal.

Let me share a little illustration with you to give you an idea just how much money a trillion dollars is.  If you started spending a million dollars every single day on the day that Jesus Christ was born and you kept on spending a million dollars every day since then, you still would not have spent a trillion dollars by now.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and I would say that we are enslaving ourselves, but that is not exactly accurate because we don’t actually have any intention of ever paying any of this debt back.  Instead, we plan to just keep going into more debt for years to come.

Sadly, it will be our children and our grandchildren that will have to deal with all of this debt if our nation lasts that long.  Thomas Jefferson was entirely accurate when he described government debt as a way for one generation to steal money from another, and since the day that Barack Obama first entered the White House, the federal government has been stealing more than 100 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.

Just think about that for a moment.

If some thieves could somehow get away with stealing 100 million dollars from someone, that would make headlines all over the globe.

But this is what we are doing to future generations of Americans every single hour of the day.

I have said it before, and I will say it again.  What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal, and in a just society those that are responsible for getting us into so much debt would be going to prison.

When you are in the middle of a debt binge, it can seem like there will never be any consequences, but the truth is that a day of reckoning always arrives eventually.

One of the reasons why I get so fired up about the national debt is because it could literally destroy the bright future that our descendants were supposed to have.

If you look back over the long-term, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt has been somewhere around 6 percent.

Of course at the moment we are nowhere near that level, but it is inevitable that interest rates will move back toward the long-term average eventually.

So let’s imagine that the average rate of interest got back to just 5 percent.  If that happened, we would be paying about a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt and we would be facing national bankruptcy.

Of course the Federal Reserve would likely start printing money like mad at that point, and we would rapidly become another Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

But if it is so dangerous for governments to go into so much debt, why do they do it?

Well, for one thing most politicians don’t really care about long-term considerations.  Instead, they actually want the government to spend lots of money in the short-term, because government spending always gives a boost to short-term economic activity.

And if the economy is “doing well” in the short-term, it is more likely that the voters will be in a good mood when voting time arrives.

This is something that Barack Obama understood very well.  He inherited quite an economic mess, and so he went on the greatest government debt binge in American history.  As I explained in a previous article, if we had not borrowed and spent 9.3 trillion dollars during the time that Obama was in the White House, we would be in the worst economic depression in our history right at this moment.

Of course by going into so much debt, our long-term problems have been magnified.

It had been hoped that with the Republicans in control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives that a sense of fiscal responsibility would return to Washington, but that obviously has not happened.  So now the stage is set for the kind of financial meltdown that I have been warning about for a very long time.

At one time the Republicans would at least give lip service to trying to control the debt, but now they also seem to have become convinced that our exploding national debt doesn’t really matter.

There are a few dozen members of the House and a handful of Senators that are still keeping up the fight, but they are vastly outnumbered.

Even though we were the wealthiest and most prosperous nation on the entire planet, that was never enough for us.

We always had to have more, and so we have accumulated the greatest mountain of debt in the history of the world.

There will be severe consequences for what we have done, but the warnings are being ignored, and so now all that is left is for us to reap what we have sown.

Credit Card Nation: Why The Facebook Killer And The U.S. Congress Have A Great Deal In Common

Most Americans have seemingly convinced themselves that as a society we will never pay a great price for going into so much debt and that we will never pay a great price for the horrendous crimes against humanity that we are committing on a daily basis. If you don’t understand what I am talking about, just keep reading the rest of this article. Just as there are consequences for our actions individually, so there are also consequences for our actions as a society. And although our national day of reckoning has been put off for quite some time, when it does finally arrive the pain is going to be absolutely unimaginable.

Just recently, I was astounded to learn that the total amount of credit card debt in the United States has crossed the trillion dollar mark. It boggles my mind that so many Americans could be so foolish, because credit card debt is one of the worst forms of debt in existence, and financial experts all over the country have spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy trying to get this message across to people.

But even though people know that going into credit card debt is bad, they just keep on doing it anyway. We have become a “buy now, pay later” society that gives very little consideration to long-term consequences.

On a national level, we are now nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt, and a historic showdown over government spending and debt threatens to absolutely paralyze the federal government at the end of this month. At this point many believe that it will be virtually impossible for Congress to avoid a government shutdown on April 29th, and once it begins Donald Trump’s entire agenda will come to a complete and total crashing halt until the crisis is resolved. The following comes from David Stockman…

In the meanwhile, everything else — health care reform, tax cuts, infrastructure — will become backed-up in an endless queue of legislative impossibilities. Accordingly, there will be no big tax cut in 2017 or even next year. For all practical purposes Uncle Sam is broke and his elected managers are paralyzed.

The Treasury will be out of cash and up against a hard stop debt limit of $19.8 trillion in a matter of months. But long before that there will be a taste of the Shutdown Syndrome on April 28 owing to the accumulating number of “poison pill” “riders” to the CR.

These include the virtual certainty of riders to the House bill to “defund” Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities. Other extraneous amendments will also possibly include funds demanded by the White House to start the Mexican Wall, enhance deportations and fund some of Trump’s $54 billion defense increase.

I am so glad that Stockman mentioned Planned Parenthood, because the decision whether or not to continue funding Planned Parenthood is going to be one of the central issues of this upcoming crisis.

Currently, the U.S. government gives Planned Parenthood roughly $500,000,000 a year. By law, none of that money is supposed to be used to provide abortions, but everyone knows what the real deal is.

Some Planned Parenthood clinics do provide other services, but at the end of the day Planned Parenthood’s core business is abortion. In fact, since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 they have killed far more babies than anyone else in the United States by a very wide margin.

And for decades, the U.S. government has been the number one source of funding for Planned Parenthood. In fact, there are questions as to whether or not Planned Parenthood would be able to continue as a viable business without money from the federal government.

Over the years, when members of Congress have voted to shower Planned Parenthood with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, they have not done it in the heat of the moment. Rather, their votes have been the result of cold, calculated decision-making processes.

In other words, the members of Congress that have been voting to keep funding Planned Parenthood year after year have the blood of millions of dead children on their hands, and there is very little difference between them and Facebook killer Steve Stephens.

When Stephens broadcast the cold-hearted murder of a 74-year-old man on Facebook on Sunday, he instantly became a worldwide celebrity. And even though most people in the country have now seen his face, he continues to somehow elude authorities.

What Stephens has done is absolutely horrific, and when he is finally caught he will pay greatly for his crimes.

Just like Stephens, America is on the run today. We keep thinking that we will never have to pay a price for the tens of millions of children that we have killed, and our government continues to fund the slaughtering of the innocents that goes on every single day in this nation.

But now Congress is going to be given one more chance to make the right decision.

The Republicans have control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. They have the power to defund Planned Parenthood, but it is going to take a tremendous amount of resolve.

That is because under the current rules it is going to take 60 votes to get a spending agreement through the Senate, and so the Republicans will need at least 8 Democratic votes to get any bill to Trump’s desk.

Sadly, the Democrats are pledging to stretch out a government shutdown indefinitely if Republicans try to defund Planned Parenthood.

So what will the Republicans do? Well, they could change the rules in the Senate to require only a simple majority vote on spending bills, and that would essentially be the “thermonuclear option”.

Or they could give in, but if they do that it would likely mean that Planned Parenthood will never be defunded, because the Republicans will never have a better opportunity than they do right now.

And I have a feeling that is what is going to happen. I have a feeling that the Republicans are going to give in at some point and agree to keep giving Planned Parenthood half a billion dollars a year.

If that is indeed what happens, both the Democrats and the Republicans that help pass such a bill will be cold-blooded killers just like Facebook killer Steve Stephens, only those Democrats and those Republicans will have far more blood on their hands than Stephens does.

Most people do not realize this, but without a doubt this is one of the most critical moments in modern American history. And if the funding of Planned Parenthood continues, I have a feeling that is going to mean that our national day of reckoning is much closer than most people would dare to imagine.

If we do not stop what we are doing, someday our crimes will catch up to us, and the debt that we will owe at that point will be far beyond what we can bear to pay.

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

The Debt Ceiling Deadline Has Passed, And Now The Biggest Test Of Donald Trump’s Presidency Begins…

On Wednesday, the temporary suspension of the debt ceiling ended, and so now the federal government is not going to be able to go into any more debt until the debt ceiling is raised. For the moment, the Trump administration can implement “emergency measures” to stay under the debt limit, but it won’t be too long before we get to a major crisis point because the federal government is quickly running out of cash. Already, the U.S. Treasury has less cash on hand than Apple or Google, and that cash balance is going to keep on dropping until the debt ceiling is finally lifted.

You may remember that the debt ceiling became a major issue a couple of times during the Obama years. Last time around, Barack Obama and the Republicans in Congress agreed to a horrendous deal which suspended the debt ceiling until several months after the 2016 election…

Since President Barack Obama signed the “Bipartisan Budget Act” on Nov. 2, 2015 there had been no legal limit on the amount of money the federal government could borrow until now. That law included a section entitled “Temporary Extension of Public Debt Limit.” It said that the law imposing a limit on the federal debt “shall not apply for the period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act and ending on March 15, 2017.”

During the 16 and a half months between the signing of that deal and today, the U.S. national debt rose by a whopping $1,414,397,000,000.

But now the U.S. national debt will not be allowed to rise by another penny until the debt ceiling is raised or suspended once again.

The Trump administration is pushing hard to get the debt ceiling raised, and this is a complete reversal from how Donald Trump felt about the debt ceiling back in 2013. The following comes from the L.A. Times…

Trump sided with hard-liners in 2013, publicly opposing an increase. “I cannot believe the Republicans are extending the debt ceiling — I am a Republican & I am embarrassed!” he tweeted then.

Trump was actually right about the debt ceiling in 2013, and he is wrong now.

We simply cannot afford to keep adding trillions of dollars to the national debt. What we are doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal, because we are literally destroying their future just so that we can enjoy an inflated standard of living that we do not deserve today.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has already begun to implement “extraordinary measures” to keep us under the debt ceiling. The first step that was taken was the suspension of the sale of SLGS securities…

“Today,” Mnuchin wrote, “Treasury is announcing that it will suspend the sale of State and Local Government Series (SLGS) securities. SLGS are special-purpose Treasury securities issued to states and municipalities to assist them in conforming to certain tax rules. These securities count against the debt limit. The suspension of SLGS sales will commence on March 15, 2017, and continue until the debt limit is either raised or suspended. As in the past, it is likely Treasury will utilize additional extraordinary measures.”

The federal government will be able to keep going for a little while by implementing such “extraordinary measures”, but the Treasury cash balance is going to continue to dwindle and at some point a major squeeze is going to happen.

As things get tighter and tighter, the Trump administration will become increasingly desperate to get the debt ceiling raised. As I wrote about yesterday, the key for Trump is going to be finding 218 votes in the House of Representatives that will be willing to go along with him.

You would think that since Republicans control the House that this should be easy, but the truth is that there are a lot of conservative Republicans that are not inclined to agree to a debt ceiling increase without substantial accompanying budget cuts.

The proposed budget that Trump released this week is getting a lot of criticism from the left for cuts to social programs, but the truth is that it actually doesn’t reduce the deficit at all…

President Trump’s “skinny” budget blueprint for 2018 features a proposed $54 billion increase in defense spending and an equal number of spending cuts from the smallest part of the federal budget.

That means his changes won’t add to next year’s projected $487 billion deficit. But they won’t reduce it, either.

And remember, that “$487 billion” figure is just for show. During the Obama years the U.S. national debt increased by an average of well over a trillion dollars a year, and that is almost certainly going to continue for years to come as long as the debt ceiling is raised.

Republicans are supposed to be the party of fiscal responsibility.

So now is their big test.

If they raise the debt ceiling and continue adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt, they will lose all credibility with conservative voters on fiscal issues.

But if they try to force the federal government to start living within its means that is going to severely harm the economy in the short-term.

Donald Trump is going to have to try to figure out a way to navigate this crisis. He has already promised that he will not touch Social Security and Medicare, and those are the two biggest drivers of our budget deficits. In fact, it is being projected that entitlement spending and interest on the debt will eat up every single penny that the federal government takes in within 20 years.

So if Trump won’t touch the big entitlement programs, where will he possibly find enough cuts to satisfy the fiscal conservatives in Congress?

Without them, Trump does not have enough votes to raise the debt ceiling.

In addition, many of the conservatives in Congress absolutely hate the new Republican health care plan, and they hope to use this debt ceiling crisis as leverage to change the bill.

If Trump can’t work out something with conservatives, perhaps he could turn to the Democrats. But most Democrats are extremely resistant to work with him on anything after all that has been said and done, and so for Trump to get a deal with them he would have to make extreme concessions.

This represents the biggest political test for the Trump presidency so far, and if we get down the road a couple of months and nothing gets done, this debt ceiling crisis could spark the kind of financial crisis that I describe in my novel entitled “The Beginning Of The End“.

Barack Obama pushed things right to the brink a couple of times, but he was savvy enough politically to never let things go over the edge.

Now it is Trump’s turn, and somehow he has got to find a way to get the debt ceiling raised without making extremely deep compromises that would gut the rest of his agenda.

And he had better get to work on this quickly, because time is running out and the clock is ticking…

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

$21,714 For Every Man, Woman And Child In The World – This Global Debt Bomb Is Ready To Explode

According to the International Monetary Fund, global debt has grown to a staggering grand total of 152 trillion dollars. Other estimates put that figure closer to 200 trillion dollars, but for the purposes of this article let’s use the more conservative number. If you take 152 trillion dollars and divide it by the seven billion people living on the planet, you get $21,714, which would be the share of that debt for every man, woman and child in the world if it was divided up equally.

So if you have a family of four, your family’s share of the global debt load would be $86,856.

Very few families could write a check for that amount today, and we also must remember that we live in some of the wealthiest areas on the globe. Considering the fact that more than 3 billion people around the world live on two dollars a day or less, the truth is that about half the planet would not be capable of contributing toward the repayment of our 152 trillion dollar debt at all. So they should probably be excluded from these calculations entirely, and that would mean that your family’s share of the debt would ultimately be far, far higher.

Of course global debt repayment will never actually be apportioned by family. The reason why I am sharing this example is to show you that it is literally impossible for all of this debt to ever be repaid.

We are living during the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and our financial engineers have got to keep figuring out ways to keep it growing much faster than global GDP because if it ever stops growing it will burst and destroy the entire global financial system.

Bill Gross, one of the most highly respected financial minds on the entire planet, recently observed that “our highly levered financial system is like a truckload of nitro glycerin on a bumpy road”.

And he is precisely correct. Everything might seem fine for a while, but one day we are going to hit the wrong bump at the wrong time and the whole thing is going to go KA-BOOM.

The financial crisis of 2008 represented an opportunity to learn from our mistakes, but instead we just papered over our errors and cranked up the global debt creation machine to levels never seen before. Here is more from Bill Gross…

My lesson continued but the crux of it was that in 2017, the global economy has created more credit relative to GDP than that at the beginning of 2008’s disaster. In the U.S., credit of $65 trillion is roughly 350% of annual GDP and the ratio is rising. In China, the ratio has more than doubled in the past decade to nearly 300%. Since 2007, China has added $24 trillion worth of debt to its collective balance sheet. Over the same period, the U.S. and Europe only added $12 trillion each. Capitalism, with its adopted fractional reserve banking system, depends on credit expansion and the printing of additional reserves by central banks, which in turn are re-lent by private banks to create pizza stores, cell phones and a myriad of other products and business enterprises. But the credit creation has limits and the cost of credit (interest rates) must be carefully monitored so that borrowers (think subprime) can pay back the monthly servicing costs. If rates are too high (and credit as a % of GDP too high as well), then potential Lehman black swans can occur. On the other hand, if rates are too low (and credit as a % of GDP declines), then the system breaks down, as savers, pension funds and insurance companies become unable to earn a rate of return high enough to match and service their liabilities.

There is always a price to be paid for going into debt. It mystifies me that so many Americans seem to not understand this very basic principle.

On an individual level, you could live like a Trump (at least for a while) by getting a whole bunch of credit cards and maxing all of them out.

But eventually a day of reckoning would come.

The same thing happens on a national level. In recent years we have seen examples in Greece, Cyprus, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and various other European nations.

Here in the United States, more than 9 trillion dollars was added to the national debt during the Obama years. If we had not taken more than 9 trillion dollars of consumption and brought it into the present, we would most assuredly be in the midst of an epic economic depression right now.

Instead of taking our pain in the short-term, we have sold future generations of Americans as debt slaves, and if they get the chance someday they will look back and curse us for what we have done to them.

Many believe that Donald Trump can make short-term economic conditions even better than Obama did, but how in the world is he going to do that?

Is he going to borrow another 9 trillion dollars?

A big test is coming up. A while back, Barack Obama and the Republican Congress colluded to suspend the debt ceiling until March 15th, 2017, and this week we are going to hit that deadline.

The U.S. Treasury will be able to implement “emergency measures” for a while, but if the debt ceiling is not raised the U.S. government will not be able to borrow more money and will run out of cash very quickly. The following comes from David Stockman…

The Treasury will likely be out of cash shortly after Memorial Day. That is, the White House will be in the mother of all debt ceiling battles before the Donald and his team even see it coming.

With just $66 billion on hand it is now going to run out of cash before even the bloody battle over Obamacare Lite now underway in the House has been completed. That means that there will not be even a glimmer of hope for the vaunted Trump tax cut stimulus and economic rebound on the horizon.

Trump is going to find it quite challenging to find the votes to raise the debt ceiling. After everything that has happened, very few Democrats are willing to help Trump with anything, and many Republicans are absolutely against raising the debt ceiling without major spending cut concessions.

So we shall see what happens.

If the debt ceiling is not raised, it will almost certainly mean that a major political crisis and a severe economic downturn are imminent.

But if the debt ceiling is raised, it will mean that Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress are willingly complicit in the destruction of this country’s long-term economic future.

When you go into debt there are consequences.

And when the greatest debt bubble in human history finally bursts, the consequences will be exceedingly severe.

The best that our leaders can do for now is to keep the bubble alive for as long as possible, because what comes after the bubble is gone will be absolutely unthinkable.

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

Is It Just A Coincidence That The Dow Has Hit 20,000 At The Same Time The National Debt Is Reaching $20 Trillion?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average provides us with some pretty strong evidence that our “stock market boom” has been fueled by debt. On Wednesday, the Dow crossed the 20,000 mark for the first time ever, and this comes at a time when the U.S. national debt is right on the verge of hitting 20 trillion dollars. Is this just a coincidence? As you will see, there has been a very close correlation between the national debt and the Dow Jones Industrial Average for a very long time.

For example, when Ronald Reagan took office in 1991, the U.S. national debt had just hit 994 billion dollars and the Dow was sitting at 951. And as you can see from this chart by Matterhorn.gold via David Stockman, roughly that same ratio has held true throughout subsequent presidential administrations…

Dow Fueled By Debt

During the Clinton years the Dow raced out ahead of the national debt, but an “adjustment” during the Bush years brought things back into line.

The cold hard truth is that we have been living way above our means for decades. Our “prosperity” has been fueled by the greatest debt binge in the history of the world, and we are greatly fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.

We would never have gotten to 20,000 on the Dow if Barack Obama and Congress had not gotten us into an extra 9.3 trillion dollars of debt over the past eight years.

Unfortunately, most people do not understand this, and the mainstream media is treating “Dow 20,000” as if it is some sort of great historical achievement…

The average began tracking the most powerful corporate stocks in 1896, and has served as a broad measure of the market’s health through 22 presidents, 22 recessions, a Great Depression, at least two crashes and innumerable rallies, corrections, bull and bear markets. The blue chip reading finally cracked the 20,000 benchmark for the first time early Wednesday.

During the current bull market, the second longest in history, the Dow has more than tripled since March 2009.

Since Donald Trump’s surprise election victory, the Dow has now climbed by approximately 2150 points.

And it took just 64 calendar days for the Dow to go from 19,000 to 20,000. That is an astounding pace, and financial markets around the rest of the planet are doing very well right now too. In fact, global stocks rose to a 19 month high on Wednesday.

So where do we go from here?

Well, if Donald Trump wants to see Dow 30,000 during his presidency, then history tells us that he needs to take us to 30 trillion dollars in debt.

Of course that would be absolute insanity even if it was somehow possible. Each additional dollar of debt destroys the future of our country just a little bit more, and at some point this colossal bubble is going to burst.

But you can’t tell most of the “financial experts” these things. Most of them simply believe that the “market always goes higher over time”…

The “market always goes higher over time,” Todd Morgan, chairman of Bel Air Investment Advisors. “The lesson here is that through wars, recessions, elections, impeachments, financial crises, and on and on, investing for the long term in high-quality stocks is the key to building wealth. … We are telling our clients that you can’t time the market. Think long term. Stay the course. We expect the market to see Dow 30,000 in my lifetime, and for my grandchildren to see Dow 50,000 in their lifetime.”

My hope is that the market will continue to go up. But nobody can deny that valuations are already at absurdly high levels, and the only way that this party can keep going is to continue to fuel it with more and more debt.

But for the moment, there is a tremendous amount of optimism out there, and most experts expect the Dow to continue to set new highs. In fact, CNBC says that whenever the Dow crosses a new threshold like this it usually means good things for investors…

CNBC looked at market data from the past 30 years and zeroed in on the times when the Dow has crossed levels like 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 … all the way up to the 19,000 level it hit in November. At those times, investors can typically expect traders to push it up even higher, according to data from Kensho. Not only does the Dow go up, but it outperforms the S&P 500 index along the way.

But as USA Today has explained, not all Americans are benefiting from this stock market rally…

The breakthrough came just four trading days into Trump’s presidency, a whirlwind in which the billionaire has reaffirmed his commitment to strengthen the U.S. economy and create more jobs and higher wages for workers. Still, nearly half of Americans have not benefited from the so-called “Trump Rally,” which has generated more than $2.2 trillion in paper gains for the Wilshire 5000 Total Stock Index since Election Day. The reason: only 52% of Americans polled by Gallup last April said they “have money invested in stocks” — the lowest stock ownership rate in the 19 years Gallup has tracked the data and down sharply from 65% in 2007 before the financial crisis.

Hopefully the good times will continue to roll for as long as possible.

But there is no possible way that they can keep going indefinitely.

For decades, our debt has been growing much faster than our GDP has. By definition, this is an unsustainable situation. At some point we will have accumulated so much debt that our financial system will no longer be able to hold up under the strain.

Many were convinced that we would reach that point before the U.S. national debt hit 20 trillion dollars, and yet here we are.

So how much higher can we go before the bubble bursts?

That is a very good question, and I don’t know if anyone has the right answer.

But for President Trump, this is going to present him with quite a dilemma.

Either he can keep the debt party going for as long as possible, or he can try to get us to take some tough financial medicine right now.

If an attempt is made to deal with our debt problems now, we will experience severe economic pain almost immediately.

But if the can keeps being kicked down the road, our long-term prognosis is just going to keep getting worse and worse.

And if we try to delay the inevitable indefinitely, at some point the laws of economics are going to make our hard choices for us.

So let us celebrate “Dow 20,000”, but let us also understand that it is far more likely that we will see “Dow 10,000” again before we ever see “Dow 30,000”.

Foreigners Are Dumping U.S. Debt At A Record Pace And Our $20 Trillion National Debt Is Poised To Become A Major Crisis

While most of the country has been focused on the inauguration of Donald Trump, a very real crisis has been brewing behind the scenes. Foreigners are dumping U.S. debt at a faster rate than we have ever seen before, and U.S. Treasury yields have been rising. This is potentially a massive problem, because our entire debt-fueled standard of living is dependent on foreigners lending us gigantic mountains of money at ultra-low interest rates. If the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt just got back to 5 percent, which would still be below the long-term average, we would be paying out about a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt. If foreigners keep dumping our debt and if Treasury yields keep climbing, a major financial implosion of historic proportions is absolutely guaranteed within the next four years.

One of the most significant aspects of the “Obama legacy” is the appalling mountain of debt that he has left behind. As I write this article, the U.S. national debt is sitting at 19.944 trillion dollars. During Obama’s eight years, a staggering 9.3 trillion dollars was added to the national debt. When you break that number down, it comes to more than a hundred million dollars every single hour of every single day while Obama was living in the White House. In just two terms, Obama added almost as much to the national debt as all of the other presidents before him combined.

What Obama and the members of Congress that cooperated with him have done to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.

Unfortunately, hardly anyone is talking about this right now, but the consequences are about to start catching up with us in a major way.

The only possible way that our game of “borrow, spend and stick future generations with the bill” can continue is if the rest of the world participates. In other words, we need them to continue to buy our debt.

Unfortunately for us, a major shift is now taking place. According to Zero Hedge, the most recent numbers that we have show foreigners dumping more than 400 million dollars of U.S. debt over the past 12 months…

The wholesale liquidation of US Treasuries continued in November, when according to the just released TIC data, foreign central banks sold another $936 million in US paper in November 2016, which due to an offset of $892 million in buying one year ago, means that for the 12 month period ended November, foreign central banks have now sold a new all time high of $405 million in the past 12 months, up from a record $403 million in LTM sales as of one month ago.

This isn’t a catastrophic emergency just yet, but if we continue down this road we will eventually get there. The only way that the U.S. government can continue on with business as usual is if it can continue to borrow billions upon billions of dollars at ultra-low interest rates. Now that Treasury yields are rising, some people are beginning to get quite nervous…

As we pointed out one month ago, what has become increasingly obvious is that both foreign central banks, sovereign wealth funds, reserve managers, and virtually every other official institution in possession of US paper, is liquidating their holdings at a disturbing pace, something which in light of the recent surge in yields to over 2 year highs, appears to have been a prudent move.

In some cases, like China, this is to offset devaluation pressure; in others such as Saudi Arabia and other petroleum exporting nations, it is to provide the funds needed to offset the drop in the petrodollar, and to backstop the country’s soaring budget deficit. In all cases, it may suggest concerns about a spike in future debt issuance by the US, especially now under the pro-fiscal stimulus Trump administration.

Someday historians are going to look back in horror at what took place during the Obama years.

The amount that was added to the national debt during his years comes to “approximately $75,129 for every person in the United States who had a full-time job in December”. There is no possible justification for this. But because there haven’t been any catastrophic consequences so far, most people assume that this theft from future generations of Americans must be okay.

In a previous article, I explained that government debt greatly stimulates the economy. If we had not borrowed and spent 9.3 trillion dollars over the past eight years, we would be in the worst economic depression in U.S. history right now.

But most people don’t understand this. They don’t get the fact that we are living way, way above our means. And they also don’t get the fact that the only way that Donald Trump can keep the party going is to borrow and spend just like Obama was doing.

And even with all of Obama’s recklessness, he was still the only president in all of U.S. history not to have a single year when U.S. GDP grew by at least three percent. The following comes from the Hill…

Despite the trillions of dollars in government spending pumped into the economy every year under Obama, America has never once enjoyed an annual GDP growth rate at 3 percent or higher, making Obama the least successful president—at least when it comes to economics—in modern history.

A historically sluggish GDP isn’t the only concern worth mentioning. Under Obama’s tenure, average annual food stamp enrollment has risen by more than 15 million (compared to 2008). The home ownership rate is the lowest it has been since 1995, the earliest year provided in the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports more than 590,000 Americans say they are not in the labor force because they are discouraged, a figure that’s 26 percent higher than even the worst annual average under George W. Bush. Additionally, the employment-population ratio has been continuously below the 60-percent threshold under Obama; the last time it was this low was 1985.

Now that Donald Trump is president, he is going to have some very hard choices in front of him.

If Donald Trump and the Republicans stop borrowing and spending so much money, the economy will immediately start suffering.

But if they do continue down the same path that Obama put us on, it is a recipe for national suicide.

So either we take our medicine now, or we risk completely destroying the bright future that our children and grandchildren were supposed to enjoy.

Wake up America, because time is running out.

China dumping U.S. Treasury debt in record volume… is this a prelude to the globalist assault on Trump’s economy?

China was recently the largest holder of US treasury securities, but has now lost that title to Japan after China started selling their securities rapidly. Chinese authorities are sacrificing their coveted position with significant financial and diplomatic value. They are preparing to engage in a bigger battle, to protect the Yuan’s value from plummeting. The battle is set to intensify this year, when President Donald Trump challenges the Yuan, along with China’s devaluation practices.

China’s holdings in US Treasury bonds recently fell by $66 billion. The US Treasury department said it was their 6th consecutive month of selloffs. But that’s only a fraction of their holdings, China now has their lowest amount of Treasury holdings since early 2010. Analysts predicted that trend would continue in November and December, and it did. The selloffs were a prudent move in which China needed in order to raise funds to protect the Yuan’s value, which is currently being pushed down by capital flight and the rising dollar.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

The Shocking Truth About How Barack Obama Was Able To Prop Up The U.S. Economy

barack-obama-looking-into-a-mirror-public-domain

Barack Obama is one of the biggest “Keynesians” of all time, but unfortunately most Americans don’t even understand what that means. In this article, I am going to share with you the primary reason why Barack Obama has been able to prop up the U.S. economy over the past eight years. If Barack Obama had not taken the extreme measures that he did, we would be in the midst of a historic economic depression right now. But by propping things up in the short-term, he has absolutely demolished our long-term economic future. But like most politicians, Obama has been willing to sacrifice the future for short-term political gain.

If you take any basic college course in economics, you are going to learn about John Maynard Keynes. Without a doubt, Keynes was one of the most famous economists of the 20th century, and one of the things that he believed was that governments should go into debt and spend more money when an economic downturn strikes. By injecting additional funds into the economy during a time of crisis, he believed that the severity of recessions and depressions could be reduced. This approach ultimately become known as “Keynesian economics”, and in the post-World War II era virtually the entire world embraced it at least to some degree. Here is more on Keynes from Investopedia…

An economic theory of total spending in the economy and its effects on output and inflation. Keynesian economics was developed by the British economist John Maynard Keynes during the 1930s in an attempt to understand the Great Depression. Keynes advocated increased government expenditures and lower taxes to stimulate demand and pull the global economy out of the Depression. Subsequently, the term “Keynesian economics” was used to refer to the concept that optimal economic performance could be achieved – and economic slumps prevented – by influencing aggregate demand through activist stabilization and economic intervention policies by the government. Keynesian economics is considered to be a “demand-side” theory that focuses on changes in the economy over the short run.

Keynesian economists correctly point out that there is a “multiplier effect” to government spending. In other words, when the government spends money it ends up in the hands of ordinary people. In turn, those people spend that money on various goods and services that they need, thus boosting overall economic activity. And the more the money circulates, the more the economy is stimulated. So one dollar of additional government spending does not just add one dollar to GDP. Rather, the impact on GDP is often significantly greater than that.

Of course the bad news is that whenever the government borrows money it is stealing consumption from the future. So we are literally destroying the future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have in order to make the present look a little bit brighter.

When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. was in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Bush administration had already begun to ramp up spending, but Barack Obama took “government stimulus” to ridiculous new levels. The national debt has risen by an average of more than 1.1 trillion dollars a year while Obama has been in charge, and this fiscal year we are on pace to add more than 2 trillion dollars to the debt.

At this moment, the U.S. national debt is a whopping $19,901,545,151,126.51, and it will cross the 20 trillion dollar mark by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20th.

But when Barack Obama was inaugurated, the national debt was only 10.6 trillion dollars. That means that we have added about 9.3 trillion dollars to the debt since that time.

So we have borrowed and spent 9.3 trillion dollars under Obama that we did not have. But because of the “multiplier effect”, that 9.3 trillion dollars actually had a far greater impact on the U.S. economy.

Let’s be conservative and just double that number. So that would give us an 18.6 trillion dollar overall impact on U.S. economic activity. Spread over eight years, that comes to an average GDP impact of 2.325 trillion dollars a year.

But over the last eight years U.S. GDP has only been averaging about 16 trillion dollars a year. So if you took away 2.3 trillion dollars a year, that would be about one-eighth of our entire economy.

In other words, without all of this debt that Barack Obama and Congress have been getting us into, we would be in the worst economic depression in U.S. history right now.

And I haven’t even factored in state and local government debt, corporate debt or household debt. The truth is that I am not exaggerating one bit when I say that we are enjoying a debt-fueled standard of living that we simply do not deserve.

But even with all of this debt, the U.S. economy has still not been performing really well. In fact, Barack Obama is going to be the only president in U.S. history to not have a single year when U.S. GDP grew by at least three percent.

Despite what many in the mainstream media are telling you, the reality of the matter is that Donald Trump is going to inherit an economy that is deeply troubled. If you doubt this, please see my previous article entitled “11 Very Depressing Economic Realities That Donald Trump Will Inherit From Barack Obama“.

Donald Trump is talking about cutting taxes and reducing regulations, and all of those things are good, but ultimately those measures are not going to matter that much.

What is going to matter is what Donald Trump decides to do about our exploding debt.

If Donald Trump wants the U.S. economy to continue to remain at least somewhat stable in the short-term, he is going to have to keep piling up debt like Obama has. Because if Trump and the Republicans decide that they want to get our debt under control, that will plunge us into a horrifying economic depression almost immediately.

But if Donald Trump continues to steal money from future generations of Americans at the same pace that Barack Obama has been doing, he will literally be destroying the future of America. It will be a crime on a scale that is almost beyond words, and if they get a chance to do it, future generations of Americans will look back and curse him for what he has done to us.

So Donald Trump is really in a no-win situation when it comes to the economy.

The only way that he can match Obama’s performance is to do what Obama did, but by doing so he would literally be killing the future.

As a nation we have been consuming far more wealth than we produce for a very, very long time, and the only way that we have been able to do this is because we have been able to go into so much debt.

But now a day of reckoning is fast approaching, and I am not sure if Donald Trump even realizes that he will soon be faced with some incredibly heartbreaking choices.

About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The Most Important News. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

At This Current Pace, A Record-Shattering 2.4 Trillion Dollars Will Be Added To The National Debt This Year

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Barack Obama is about to become the 20 trillion dollar man.  With less than two months to go in his second term, the U.S. national debt stands less than 150 billion dollars away from the 20 trillion dollar mark.  And at the pace that the debt is increasing, it seems almost certain that we will cross 20 trillion dollars before Inauguration Day.  After promising us that “deficits are under control”, the federal debt jumped by more than 1.3 trillion dollars last fiscal year, and so far this year it is on pace to rise by a record-shattering 2.4 trillion dollars.  This is a recipe for national suicide, and yet it wasn’t even a major issue during the recently concluded presidential campaign.

It is really, really hard to spend a trillion dollars.  For example, if you were alive when Jesus was born and you had spent a million dollars every single day since that time, you still would not have spent a trillion dollars by now.

And even though the Republicans have had control of the House of Representatives since 2010, the wild spending has not slowed down one bit.  In fact, it is actually accelerating as we near the end of Obama’s second term.  Last year’s rise in the debt of more than 1.3 trillion dollars was shocking enough, but this year we are on pace to top that number by more than a trillion dollars.  The following comes from Simon Black…

According to data released by the Treasury Department yesterday, the US national debt has soared by a whopping $294 billion since the start of the 2017 fiscal year, just 45 days ago.

That’s an annualized increase of 13%.

So if they keep up this pace, the national debt will increase by $2.4 trillion this fiscal year, surpassing $21 trillion by next September.

The only reason we have been able to go on this debt binge for as long as we have is because the rest of the world has been willing to loan us trillions upon trillions of dollars at ridiculously low interest rates that are well below the real rate of inflation.

This is a highly irrational state of affairs, and once this changes we are going to be in a massive amount of trouble.

And since Donald Trump’s election victory, we have already seen the rate on 10 year U.S. Treasury notes shoot up dramatically.

Over the long-term, the average rate of interest paid on U.S. government debt has been about 6 percent.  Right now we are way below that, but that cannot last forever.

At some point rates will rise, and if we were to just get back to the 5 percent mark we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt once the debt hits $21 trillion.

The bottom line is that we are racing toward national bankruptcy.

But instead of focusing on getting the debt under control, Donald Trump is already promising a whole bunch of new spending in addition to what is already taking place.

This week, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned Congress about what Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure spending program may mean for our financial situation…

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program to help jump-start an economy that he said during the campaign was in terrible shape.

Speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that as they consider such spending, they should keep an eye on the national debt. Yellen also said that while the economy needed a big boost with fiscal stimulus after the financial crisis, that’s not the case now.

“The economy is operating relatively close to full employment at this point,” she said, “so in contrast to where the economy was after the financial crisis when a large demand boost was needed to lower unemployment, we’re no longer in that state.”

The truth is that we simply can’t afford to keep going into so much debt.

Debt literally destroys the future, and since Barack Obama has been in the White House our government has been stealing more than 100 million dollars an hour from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.  It is a crime of such a magnitude that I don’t know if there are words to describe it, and yet only a very small fraction of the population is upset about this right now.

We have just come to accept that ripping off our children and our grandchildren is normal.  But someday if they get the chance they will curse us for what we have done to them.

In our extreme arrogance, we actually think that it is okay to saddle them with a giant mountain of debt that they will be servicing for their entire lives.  In a just society, those that have done this to future generations of Americans would be going to prison.

When you go into debt, you take consumption from the future and bring it into the present.  In essence, we are taking money that they should have been able to spend, and instead we are spending it right now.

Without a doubt, government spending helps the economy in the short-term.  When the government spends money, it gets into the pockets of ordinary Americans who in turn spend that money on goods and services that they need.  So that is why politicians like to borrow and spend – it makes the economy perform better than it otherwise would, and voters tend to vote for incumbents when “things are going well”.

If the federal government had only spent the money that it took in through taxes over the past eight years, we would be in a rip-roaring depression right now.  Barack Obama and those that work under him understand this, and that is why they were perfectly fine with running the national debt up to 20 trillion dollars.  They will take credit for “fixing the economy”, but the truth is that all they did was steal trillions of dollars from our kids and our grandkids.

And anyone that has ever gotten into trouble with debt knows that a day of reckoning comes eventually.

Could our day of reckoning be just around the corner during the Trump years?

Donald Trump will be blamed if everything crashes while he is in office, but the real blame should be placed at the feet of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and a deeply corrupt Congress that always went along with the wild spending.

About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The Most Important News. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

America The Debt Pig: We Are A ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Society – And ‘Pay Later’ Is Rapidly Approaching

America The Pig - Public Domain

If you really wanted to live like a millionaire, you could start doing it right now. All you have to do is to apply for as many credit cards as possible and then begin running up credit card balances like there is no tomorrow. At this point, I know what most of you are probably thinking. You are probably thinking that such a lifestyle would not last for long and that a day of reckoning would eventually come, and you would be exactly right. In fact, anyone that has ever had a tremendous amount of credit card debt knows how painful that day of reckoning can be. To mindlessly run up credit card debt is exceedingly reckless, but unfortunately that is precisely what we have been doing as a nation as a whole. We are a “buy now, pay later” society, and our national day of reckoning is approaching very, very quickly.

Often we like to focus on our exploding national debt, but household debt is out of control too. In fact, the total amount of household debt in the United States is now up to a whopping 12.3 trillion dolllars…

In the second quarter, total household debt increased by $35 billion to $12.3 trillion, according to the New York Fed’s latest quarterly report on household debt. That increase was driven by two categories: auto loans and credit cards.

We throw around words like “trillion” so often these days that they often start to lose their meaning. But the truth is that 12.3 trillion dollars is an astounding amount of money. It breaks down to about $38,557 for every man, woman and child in the entire country. So if you have a family of four, your share comes to a grand total of $154,231, and that doesn’t even include corporate debt, local government debt, state government debt or the gigantic debt of the federal government. That number is only for household debt, and there aren’t too many Americans that could cough up their share right at this moment.

Do you remember when I wrote about how credit card companies are specifically targeting less educated and less sophisticated consumers? Well, that is where much of the credit card debt growth has come lately. Just check out these numbers…

Now, credit cards are returning among individuals with low credit or subprime credit scores below 660. Among people with credit scores between 620 and 660, the share that had a credit card rose to 58.8% in 2015 from a low of 54.3% in 2013. Among those with scores below 620, the number of people with a credit card increased to 50% from a low of 45.6% two years ago. Both figures for 2015 are the highest since 2008.

In America today, we are enjoying a standard of living that we do not deserve.

We consume far more wealth than we produce. The only way we are able to do that is by going into debt.

Debt takes future consumption and brings it into the present. In other words, we are damaging the future in order to make the present a little bit better. On an individual level, we may enjoy the big screen television we buy with a credit card today, but we are taking away our ability to spend money later. And on a national level, what our unprecedented debt binge is doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.

Earlier this month I explained these things to a live studio audience down at Morningside, and you can view a video of that right here…

In this article I haven’t even talked about corporate debt yet. Instead of learning their lessons from the last financial crisis, big corporations have gone on the biggest debt spree of all time. If you can believe it, corporate debt has approximately doubled since the last financial crisis. In other words, since the last recession we have essentially matched the total amount of corporate debt that we accumulated from the beginning of the country up to 2009.

Unfortunately, a lot of that debt is now going bad.

In previous articles I have documented that corporate debt delinquencies are now the highest that they have been since the last financial crisis, and corporate debt defaults are also the highest that they have been since the last financial crisis.

At this point, even the mainstream media is acknowledging that we have a corporate debt “crisis”. The following comes from an article that was just put out by the Denver Post…

The number of companies that have defaulted so far this year has already passed the total for all of last year, which itself had the most since the financial crisis. Even among companies considered high-quality, or investment grade, credit-rating agencies say a record number are so stretched financially that they’re one bad quarter or so from being downgraded to “junk” status.

Companies whose debt is already deemed “junk” are in the worst shape in years. To pay back all they owe, they would have to set aside every dollar of their operating earnings over the next eight and a half years, more than twice as long as it would have taken during the 2008 crisis, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Are you starting to get the picture?

And I haven’t even started talking about our national debt yet. When Barack Obama entered the White House, we were 10.6 trillion dollars in debt. Today, we are 19.4 trillion dollars in debt. That means that we have added 8.8 trillion dollars to the national debt under Obama, which breaks down to an average of 1.1 trillion dollars of additional debt a year.

We have been taking more than 100 million dollars of future consumption and bringing it into the present every single hour of every single day during the Obama administration. That is why I am constantly referring to our “debt-fueled standard of living”. We do not deserve to live the way that we do, but since we are able to steal from our children and our grandchildren we are able to enjoy a standard of living that most people in the world can only dream about.

Of course we are literally destroying the future of America in the process, but very few people seem to care about that these days.

Without all of this debt, we would be in a very deep economic depression right now.

But even with all of this “stimulus”, we are still mired in the worst economic “recovery” since 1949. In fact, Barack Obama is actually on track to be the very first president in all of American history to not have one single year when U.S. GDP grew by 3 percent or better, and he has had two terms in which to try to get that accomplished. The percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job is way down from where it was just prior to the last recession, and in this video I explain why the employment numbers put out by the government are not nearly as good as the administration would have us believe…

If the American people would have been willing to sacrifice and make some very hard choices a long time ago, maybe we could have gotten a handle on all of this debt.

But instead we continue to rack up debt as if there is no tomorrow, and in the process we are literally destroying tomorrow.

Every dollar of debt that we accumulate now makes life worse for our children and our grandchildren.

Unfortunately, we are a bunch of debt pigs, and we just can’t help ourselves. We have come to believe that it is “normal” to go into so much debt, and as a society we continue to race toward economic oblivion.

*About the author: Michael Snyder is the founder and publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and End Of The American Dream. Michael’s controversial new book about Bible prophecy entitled “The Rapture Verdict” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.*

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