Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
As a nation, we have literally been in the process of committing financial suicide for decades. Sadly, some people have responded to the new administration’s efforts to get debt levels under control by committing acts of extreme violence. Our society is deeply addicted to debt and that must stop. The 7 economic charts that you are about to see are incredibly shocking. If you know anyone that still does not believe that the United States is in the midst of a long-term economic decline, just show them these charts. Sometimes you can quote economic statistics to people until you are blue in the face and it won’t do any good, but when those same people see charts and pictures suddenly it all sinks in. What is great about charts is that you can very easily demonstrate what has been happening to the economy over an extended period of time. As you examine the economic charts below, pay special attention to what has been happening to the U.S. economy over the last 30 or 40 years. The truth is that what is wrong with the U.S. economy is not a great mystery. All of the economic problems that we are experiencing now have taken decades to develop. Hopefully the charts in this article will help people realize just how nightmarish our economic problems have become, because until people start realizing how incredibly bad things have gotten they will never be willing to accept the dramatic solutions that are necessary to fix our financial system.
The sad fact of the matter is that we are living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. All of this debt has made the present more pleasant, but it has also destroyed the bright economic future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to enjoy. If they have the opportunity, future generations of Americans will look back on what we have done to them in absolute horror.
The 7 economic charts posted below are meant to shock you. Most Americans today need to be shocked before they will be motivated to take action. Please share these charts with as many people as you can. If we can wake enough people up, hopefully something will be done about all of these problems while there is still time.
1 – Government spending is expanding at an exponential rate. As you can see from the chart below, federal spending is now roughly 14 times higher than it was back in 1980. And federal spending is about three trillion dollars higher per year than it was during the last full year before the pandemic. Once the pandemic subsided, federal spending went down a bit, but now it is starting to rise at an exponential rate once again…
2 – U.S. government debt is absolutely exploding. The United States government is 36 trillion dollars in debt. How insane is that? Our national debt is approximately 36 times larger than it was when Ronald Reagan first entered the White House. Unfortunately, it continues to grow at breathtaking speed. Even with the budget cuts we are witnessing, we will add trillions more to the debt this year. Can we afford to continue to accumulate debt at this rate?…
3 – The growth of our money supply is a horror show. Just look at how rapidly M1 has been skyrocketing over the last couple of years. During the pandemic, M1 went from about 4 trillion dollars to more than 20 trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve is clearly guilty of economic malpractice. Is there any way that we are going to be able to avoid paying a very serious price for all of this reckless money printing?…
4 – Household debt has soared to almost unbelievable levels over the last 30 years. The sad truth is that it is not just the U.S. government that has a massive debt problem. U.S. households have also been accumulating debt at a staggering rate. Total household and nonprofit organization debt did not pass the 2 trillion dollar mark until the mid-1980s, but now total U.S. household and nonprofit organization debt has surpassed the 20 trillion dollar mark. Household debt alone accounts for approximately 18 trillion dollars of this total…
5 – The total of all debt (government, business and consumer) in the United States is now well over 100 trillion dollars. If anyone doubts that our society is addicted to debt, just show them this chart. This is a debt bubble that is absolutely unprecedented in U.S. history…
6 – More than 100 million U.S. adults that do not have jobs are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When a U.S. adult is not working, they are put into one of two buckets. For years, government bureaucrats have kept the number of Americans that are “officially unemployed” at a very low level, while the number of Americans that are dumped into the bucket labeled “not in the labor force” has just kept going up and up. During the Great Recession, the number of Americans that were considered to be “officially unemployed” plus the number of Americans that were considered to be “not in the labor force” never exceeded 100 million. Today, the number of Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force” alone exceeds 102 million…
7 – The price of gold has gone absolutely nuts, and that is not a good sign. When instability hits the financial markets, many investors flock to gold. This is especially true in inflationary times. Since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by close to 99 percent. One of the reasons given for the creation of the Federal Reserve was that the Fed was supposed to help control inflation. But that didn’t exactly work out too well. The truth is that the United States never had consistently rampant inflation until the Federal Reserve took control. In particular, once the U.S. totally went off the gold standard in the 1970s inflation really started escalating out of control. When the gold standard ended, an ounce of gold was worth 35 dollars. Today, an ounce of gold is worth more than 3,000 dollars…
Needless to say, if the economic trends documented by the charts above continue to persist, we will have an enormous nightmare on our hands.
The U.S. economy as it currently exists is unsustainable by definition. It is only a matter of time before we slam into an economic brick wall.
We have developed an economy that cannot function without massive amounts of debt, and at this point it seems like almost everyone is drowning in red ink. The federal government is massively overextended, most of our state and local governments are massively overextended, most of our major corporations are massively overextended, and the majority of U.S. consumers are massively overextended.
The only way that the game can continue is for our leaders to continue to borrow and spend increasingly larger mountains of money.
But no debt spiral can go on forever. At some point this entire house of cards is going to collapse.
When that happens, there is going to be economic pain that is greater than anything that this country has ever seen before.
Everything that I have been warning about for more than a decade is playing out right in front of our eyes.
We can’t keep piling up debt like this.
We just can’t.
But look at what has happened as a result of Elon Musk and his team making some modest cuts to government spending.
A significant portion of the population is losing their minds.
Our society cannot handle large spending cuts, and our society cannot handle what will come after a financial crash either.
We are in far more trouble than most people realize.
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Michael’s blockbuster entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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