Disaster Awaits: National Debt Will Be 6 Times The Size Of The Economy

 

Even without changes to the current spending policy, the government’s spending is on an unsustainable path. By the time a child born in 2018 reaches retirement age, the United States national debt will be six times the size of the economy according to an analysis released this week.

It Is Like A Western Movie: A Showdown Is In The Making

It has taken the US military/security complex 31 years to get rid of President Reagan’s last nuclear disarmament achievement—the INF Treaty that President Reagan and Soviet President Gorbachev achieved in 1987.

The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was ratified by the US Senate on May 27, 1988 and became effective a few days later on June 1. Behind the scenes, I had some role in this, and as I remember what the treaty achieved was to make Europe safe from nuclear attack by Soviet short and intermediate range missiles, and to make the Soviet Union safe from US attack from short and intermediate range US nuclear missiles in Europe. By restricting nuclear weapons to ICBMs, which allowed some warning time, thus guaranteeing retaliation and non-use of nuculear weapons, the INF Treaty was regarded as reducing the risk of an American first-strike on Russia and a Russian first-strike on Europe, strikes that could be delivered by low-flying cruise missiles with next to zero warning time.

Americans Live In A World Of Lies

The US government and the presstitutes that serve it continue to lie to us about everything. Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics told us that the unemployment rate was 3.9%. How can this be when the BLS also reports that the labor force participation rate has declined for a decade throughout the length of the alleged economic recovery and there is no upward pressure on wages from full employment. When jobs are plentiful, people enter the labor force to take advantage of the work opportunities. This raises the labor force participation rate. When employment is full—which is what a 3.9% unempoyment rate means—wages are bid up as employers compete for scarce labor. Full employment with no wage pressure and no rise in the labor force participation rate is impossible.

Make-Believe America

Americans live a never-never-land existance. The politicians and presstitutes make sure of that.

Consider something as simple as the unemployment rate. The US is said to have full employment with a January 2018 unemployment rate of 4.1 percent, down from 9.8 percent in January 2010. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

However, the low rate of unemployment is contradicted by the long-term decline in the labor force participation rate. After a long rise during the Reagan 1980s, the labor force participation rate peaked in January 1990 at 66.8 percent, more or less holding to that rate for another decade until 2001 when decline set in accelerating in September 2008. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/

Today the labor force participation rate is the lowest since February 1978, reversing all of the gains of the Reagan years.

The US Economy Is Failing — Paul Craig Roberts

Do the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors read their own newspaper?

The frontpage headline story for the Labor Day weekend was “Low Wage Growth Challenges Fed.” Despite an alleged 4.4% unemployment rate, which is full employment, there is no real growth in wages. The front page story pointed out correctly that an economy alleged to be expanding at full employment, but absent any wage growth or inflation, is “a puzzle that complicates Federal Reserve policy decisions.”

Dear President Trump: America is in for a Rude Awakening in January

 

Over the last couple of years I’ve been all over TV… from Fox News to CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg. I’ve been telling our fellow Americans that the financial global elite was planning to issue their own globalist currency called special drawing rights, or SDRs.

And that those elites would use this new currency to replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.

…

I’m sure some people in the mainstream media thought I was out of line — but the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have both confirmed this plan to replace the U.S. dollar is real. I’ve made this warning many times, but it seems to be falling on deaf ears. That’s why I’m writing directly to you.

Here’s the proof that the U.S. dollar is under attack, right in front of our eyes:

JPMorgan Sounds Alarm On Size Of US Debt, Warns Of Financial Crisis

 

After yesterday Goldman mocked Trump’s budget (ironic as it was Trump’s ex-Goldman Chief Economic Advisor who conceived it) and said it had zero chance of being implemented, today it was JPM’s turn to share some purely philosophical thoughts on the shape of future US income and spending, which as we learned yesterday could balance only if the US grows for 10 years at a 3% growth rate, something it has never done, while slashing nearly $4 trillion in in spending, something else it has never done.

What caught our attention in the note by JPM’s Jesse Edgerton was his discussion on the thorniest issue surrounding the US: its unprecedented debt addition, what America’s debt/GDP will look like over the next 30 years, and whether there is any chance it could decline as conservatives in government hope will happen.

Europe’s robots to become ‘electronic persons’ under draft plan

An industrial robotic arm pours a glass of beer at the Automatica trade fair in Munich on Tuesday. Photo: Bloomberg

 

Munich:   Europe’s growing army of robot workers could be classed as “electronic persons” and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation.

Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests.

The Battle to Keep the Establishment in Power

That is the last time a Republican presidential convention opened without the nominee having been decided in the primaries was 1976 and the fight was between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. There were efforts by the establishment to stop two people they regarded as outsiders before – Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976. It is looking much more difficult for Trump to nail down enough delegates to beat the Republicans at their own corrupt rules. We are more likely headed to a rigged convention and this is highly playing into the hands of the precise thing the Republicans better not do. They are sacrificing the nation for personal perks. It is not that Trump is the savior; hardly. But he would be at least a check against  these people.

Ex-GAO head: US debt is three times more than you think

The former U.S. comptroller general says the real U.S. debt is closer to about $65 trillion than the oft-cited figure of $18 trillion.

Dave Walker, who headed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said when you add up all of the nation’s unfunded liabilities, the national debt is more than three times the number generally advertised.

2015.75 Seems to be On Target

We have been warning that this turning point was different. Instead of a crash in private assets, as in 1998.55 or 2007.15 when the Case-Schiller peaked to the day, this time it was in government. Putin bombed Syria precisely on the day of the turning point (9/30/2015), but there were many stocks that bottomed with 9/30/2015.

CBO: Debt Headed to 103% of GDP; Level Seen Only in WWII; ‘No Way to Predict Whether or When’ Fiscal Crisis Might Occur Here

(CNSNews.com) – Testifying in the U.S Senate yesterday, Congressional Budget Office Director Keith Hall warned that the publicly held debt of the U.S. government, when measured as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, is headed toward a level the United States has seen only once in its history—at the end of World War II.

To simply contain the debt at the high historical level where it currently sits—74 percent of GDP–would require either significant increases in federal tax revenue or decreases in non-interest federal spending (or a combination of the two).

Historically, U.S. government debt held by the public, measured as a percentage of GDP, hit its peak in 1945 and 1946, when it was 104 percent and 106 percent of GDP respectively.

In 2015, the CBO estimates that the U.S. government debt held by the public will be 74 percent of GDP. That is higher than the 69-percent-of-GDP debt the U.S. government had in 1943—the second year after Pearl Harbor.

It’s Hard to Watch Your Country Die

An older article from 2011 that couldn’t be more relevant today.

 

The talk in global political circles is that the U.S. is washed up. America’s defense secretary, traveling to China in January, addressed the gossip. “I’ve watched this sort of cyclical view of American decline come around two or three times, perhaps most dramatically in the latter half of the 1970s,” Robert Gates said. “And my general line for those both at home and around the world who think the U.S. is in decline is that history’s dustbins are filled with countries that underestimated the resilience of the United States.”

Maybe. But it seems hard to underestimate the U.S. these days.

The secretary’s words ring especially hollow when you look at where he was heading. China has plenty cause for a low estimation of the United States. America owes it probably a trillion dollars. And China looks poised to single-handedly neutralize America’s robust, decades-long influence in the Asia Pacific thanks to a military spending binge that will yield aircraft carriers, stealth planes and aircraft-carrier-killing missiles.

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 3

You may read part one and part two here:

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 1

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 2

 

In the previous installments of this series, we discussed the hidden and often unspoken crisis brewing within the employment market, as well as in personal debt. The primary consequence being a collapse in overall consumer demand, something which we are at this very moment witnessing in the macro-picture of the fiscal situation around the world. Lack of real production and lack of sustainable employment options result in a lack of savings, an over-dependency on debt and welfare, the destruction of grass-roots entrepreneurship, a conflated and disingenuous representation of gross domestic product, and ultimately an economic system devoid of structural integrity — a hollow shell of a system, vulnerable to even the slightest shocks.

This lack of structural integrity and stability is hidden from the general public quite deliberately by way of central bank money creation that enables government debt spending, which is counted toward GDP despite the fact that it is NOT true production (debt creation is a negation of true production and historically results in a degradation of the overall economy as well as monetary buying power, rather than progress). Government debt spending also disguises the real state of poverty within a system through welfare and entitlements. The U.S. poverty level is at record highs, hitting previous records set 50 years ago during Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The record-breaking rise in poverty has also occurred despite 50 years of the so called “war on poverty,” a shift toward American socialism that was a continuation of the policies launched by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’.

Overall State of the Union – Unbiased Economics

The definition of the “rich” has become anyone who has investment income. Home ownership has declined since mortgages generally now want 20% down and taxes have risen. Of course, the socialists say this is not fair and the rich are getting richer yet this is not income from wages, but rather investment. The gains go predominantly to mutual funds and pensions not to mention foreign investment since retail participation has also declined since the Great Recession. This means the yelling and screaming is by no means reflecting a purely domestic situation. Furthermore, had Congress privatized Social Security long ago, then those funds would have been invested in the stock market so the very people they say are not participating would have a stake in the economy.