2016 is here, and it is going to be quite a year…
Facts show that people who believe that everything is “perfectly fine” and that we are going to come out of this “stronger than ever” maybe disappointed.
In 2015 the middle class continued to deteriorate, more Americans than ever found themselves living in poverty, and the debt bubble that we are living in expanded to absolutely ridiculous proportions.
The following is a digest of facts about the U.S. economy from 2015 that are almost too crazy to believe…
- At this point 62 percent of all Americans have less than 1,000 dollars in their savings accounts, and 21 percent of all Americans do not have a savings account at all.
- If you have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket, that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of all Americans.
- It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make each month.
- According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
- A recent nationwide survey discovered that 48 percent of all U.S. adults under the age of 30 believe that “the American Dream is dead”.
- Since hitting a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004, the rate of homeownership in the United States has been steadily declining every single year.
- For each of the past six years, more businesses have closed in the United States than have opened. Prior to 2008, this had never happened before in all of U.S. history.
- If you can believe it, the 20 wealthiest people in this country now have more money than the poorest 152 million Americans combined. The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.
- There are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day. That number has doubled since 1996.
- An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.
- In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.
- The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.
- If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.
- An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.
- 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.
- 102.3 million working age Americans do not have a job right now.
- Approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.
- Economists estimate that if the U.S. government was actually using honest numbers the unemployment rate would be 22.9 percent.
- Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, only about 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
- Wal-Mart is projecting that its earnings may fall by as much as 12 percent during the next fiscal year.
- Holiday sales have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.
- Today, the average U.S. household that has at least one credit card has approximately $15,950 in credit card debt.
- According to Dr. Housing Bubble, there have been “nearly 8 million homes lost to foreclosure since the homeownership rate peaked in 2004″.
- One very disturbing study found that approximately 41 percent of all working age Americans either currently have medical bill problems or are paying off medical debt. And collection agencies seek to collect unpaid medical bills from about 30 million of us each and every year.
- The total amount of student loan debt in the United States has risen to a whopping 1.2 trillion dollars. If you can believe it, that total has more than doubled over the past decade.
- Right now, there are approximately 40 million Americans that are paying off student loan debt. For many of them, they will keep making payments on this debt until they are senior citizens.
It appears we are in the midst of a long-term economic downturn that is beginning to accelerate once again. Our middle class is being destroyed, Wall Street has been transformed into the biggest casino in the history of the planet, and our politicians have piled up the biggest mountain of debt the world has ever seen.
Questionable decisions have culminated in a crisis, and we are now in for a shaking 2016.
Sincerely,
The MaCorr Research Team