Posted on 05/01/2017 6:10:01 AM PDT by blam
The Fed likes to brag about the “We saved the world” recovery.
However, the unfortunate truth of the matter is a record Half of American Families Live Paycheck to Paycheck.
Does it Matter? Let’s investigate.
Unprepared for Nearly Anything
* 50% are woefully unprepared for a financial emergency.
* Nearly 1 in 5 (19%) Americans have nothing set aside to cover an unexpected emergency.
* Nearly 1 in 3 (31%) Americans don’t have at least $500 set aside to cover an unexpected emergency expense, according to a survey released Tuesday by HomeServe USA, a home repair service.
* A separate survey released Monday by insurance company MetLife found that 49% of employees are “concerned, anxious or fearful about their current financial well-being.”
Deleveraging? Where?
A Fed study shows U.S. Households Will Soon Have as Much Debt as They had in 2008.
“The Federal Reserve announced Friday that the U.S. has $1 trillion in credit-card debt. Consumers hit that number in the fourth quarter of 2016, but eased on revolving credit during January 2017. The Fed announcement showed revolving consumer credit hit more than $1 trillion once again in February 2017.
“Credit card debt is rising quickly, but delinquencies are still really low,” said Matt Schulz, a senior industry analyst at the credit cards site CreditCards.com. “Many Americans are doing a good job of controlling their debts, but eventually with big debts and rising interest rates, it’s likely that something will have to give.””
Paycheck to Paycheck “Good Job”
Excuse me for asking but if half the nation lives paycheck to paycheck, is that really indicative of doing a good job at managing debt.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at mishtalk.com ...
I keep one thing in mind.
It only takes 90 days to starve.
Here is an “untabulated” statistic that Cletus is familiar with:
Americans who have scraped down their 401-K funds to pay bills while they were seeking ‘gainful’ employment in the last year.
CORRECTION: 99.5% of Americans do not matter.
Well, they pay no taxes.
And get the welfare and give-away’s (except for the ultra-rich who donate to democrats.)
But they vote for more welfare and more give-away’s. (Every time and as many times as possible.)
I’d say they matter. A lot.
I’d like to see the personal budgets of a majority of those “bottom 50%” of Americans. My guess is that they are living higher (no pun intended) than their pocketbooks allow.
A pretty accurate assessment.
I am not surprised. Everything that the globalist Cheap Labor express has done in the last 40years has been to undermine the earning potential of Americans. Welcome to the third world.
Ben Franklin
It only takes 90 days to starve.
This ties in with your post. This shows how the elite liberals have rigged the game in their blue state policies.
The Arrogance of Blue America
The Daily Beast ^ | 5/1/17 | Kotkin
Posted on 5/1/2017, 6:28:14 AM by pabianice
If you want to see the worst impacts of blue policies, go to those red regions—like upstate New York or inland California—in states they control.
The fondest hope among the blue bourgeoise lies with the demographic eclipse of their red-state foes. Some clearly hope that the less-educated “dying white America,“ already suffering shorter lifespans, in part due to alcoholism and opioid abuse, is destined to fade from the scene. Then the blue lords can take over a country with which they can identify without embarrassment.
If you want to see worst impacts of blue policies, go to those red regions—like upstate New York—controlled by the blue bourgeoise. Backwaters like these tend to be treated at best as a recreational colony that otherwise can depopulate, deindustrialize, and in general fall apart. In California, much of the poorer interior is being left to rot by policies imposed by a Bay Area regime hostile to suburban development, industrial growth, and large scale agriculture. Policies that boost energy prices 50 percent above neighboring states are more deeply felt in regions that compete with Texas or Arizona and are also far more dependent on air conditioning than affluent, temperate San Francisco or Malibu. Six of the 10 highest unemployment rates among the country’s metropolitan areas are in the state’s interior.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3549015/posts
Plus, 15-20% inflation since then. Means, inflation adjusted, per capita debt is down 25-30% compared to 2008.
Part of this is due to the dumbing down of Americans in math at public schools.
This was a subtle and yet dangerous action. One of our sons got impacted with 3 new maths in 3 years of school, decades ago. He was making A’s in the new math, and he could not do basic math.
Fortunately, one of our friends was a retired math teacher. We hired him for private lessons. He brought him up to average.
Later this son got a job delivering pizza’s and as a driver for a pharmacy’s home delivery. He was short changed by several customers in his first week of work.
I bought him a pocket calculator to help. He used it for a couple of weeks and returned it to me.
So I asked him why, and he said now he knew why math was important. When people tried to short changed him, he turned the tables on them. His future careers involve using real math daily, and he was/is able to do that without any problems.
Grandkids of another son, were top math students, and when we questioned them re real math like balancing check books, cooking measurements and temps. They just looked at my wife and I like we were speaking Russian to them.
Their parents started having discussions with them at dinner and other times re real world math. They started them with savings accts and part of the real world. We have followed up with them on trips re mph and distance covered and to be covered. My wife asked them to measure ingredients in recipes that needed to multiplied or divided for the number of eaters.
Last but not least we taught our kids that as adults they needed a 6 month salary in a savings account as an emergency fund.
None of the above is taught or covered by schools today.
If you want kids to learn things like “real math like balancing check books, cooking measurements and temps”, why not teach them yourself?
I personally think they are a waste of time. High end math students get their time wasted learning banal things like cooking measurements under your scheme.
Whatever.
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