Posted on 08/18/2024 9:18:00 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The wealthy are doing just fine at the moment, but they don’t seem to understand that much of the country is deeply hurting right now. 59 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is currently experiencing a recession, and that is because most of them are personally experiencing economic pain. Literally just about everything is substantially more expensive in 2024, more major layoffs are being announced with each passing day, and thousands of businesses are going bankrupt. We haven’t seen a tsunami of economic suffering like this in a long time.
If you live in a wealthy area in a good part of the country, you may wonder what all of the fuss is about.
If you and everyone around you is still doing well, life may still seem quite good.
But the truth is that there are vast stretches of this country that are so depressed that they literally look like something out of a horror movie.
There are many communities that are so plagued by poverty, drugs, homelessness, violence and theft that it seems like there is no possible way that things could ever turn around.
A man named Drew Binksy recently visited one of the poorest parts of West Virginia, and he discovered that most of the people there are living in poverty…
‘Most of [the residents] live below the poverty line and life expectancy is well below the national average.
‘Many families rely on Government assistance just to get by and there’s limited access to healthcare.’
Today, tens of millions of Americans are heavily dependent on the checks that they get from the government each month.
In areas where most people have lost hope of ever finding a better life, drug addiction often runs rampant, and that is precisely what Binksy witnessed…
He also notes that ‘crystal meth and Fentanyl addictions run wild’ in the state, while many people are ‘living so isolated, they have their own dialect.’
The content creator starts his journey in Bluefield and as he wanders through the once prosperous manufacturing city, he says it feels like he has stepped into ‘a forgotten world.’
He continues: ‘Empty streets and closed shops stretch as far as the eye can see. It’s like life just stopped.’
This is where the entire country is heading.
Just a few days ago, I wrote about the “retail apocalypse” that is rapidly spreading across America.
Thousands upon thousands of stores are closing, and most of those abandoned stores will not be filled any time soon.
But at least they will make convenient locations for drug addicts to gather.
According to one woman that Binksy interviewed, 30 percent of the people in her community are into illegal drugs…
One woman in the store tells the camera crew: ‘We’re the poorest county in the United States or we were.
‘About 30 per cent of our community are dopers, druggies… more than 30 per cent!’
The same conditions are being repeated in rural community after rural community all over America.
Sadly, the standard of living in our rural communities is going to continue to go down because the cost of living just keeps going up…
The cost of frozen noncarbonated juices and drinks has risen by 19.2 percent from July 2023 – the most of any grocery item.
Eggs, meanwhile, have increased by 19.1 percent in price, and frankfurters are now 9.7 percent more expensive.
The cost of bacon, beef roasts, pork chops and butter have also risen notably in the last year.
In terms of non-food items, car insurance is the biggest riser in the last year – with an 18.6 percent price hike.
We have already reached a stage where a large portion of the population cannot even afford the basics.
As I shared yesterday, I was absolutely shocked to learn that 39 percent of Americans have been forced to skip meals so that they will have enough money to make their housing payments…
39% of Americans say they’ve skipped meals to make housing payments, per Clever Real Estate survey.
And among millennials, that figure rose to 44%. Among Baby Boomers, it was 20%.
It is no wonder why so many voters are so deeply frustrated with the current state of the economy.
This is our country now, and the outlook for the future is not positive at all.
In fact, it appears that very alarming changes are starting to happen in the employment market as large companies lay off large numbers of workers…
Another domino falls for recession as job creation turns negative for small businesses, which employ nearly half of all Americans.
In the past year, payrolls for companies with under 50 employees plunged by nearly 100,000, while job trends were flat for midsized businesses up to 500 employees.
The only bright spot was big businesses—which might be changing, given recent layoff announcements, including 2,500 at Chrysler, 4,000 at Cisco, 12,000 at Dell, and 15,000 at Intel. Paramount and the left-wing Axios both cut 10% to 15% of their workforce.
20 years ago, most American families were clearly thriving.
Today, most American families are clearly struggling.
This change occurred so gradually that most people didn’t even realize what was happening.
The gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is now larger than ever, and our major cities are teeming with millions of highly desperate people.
This story is not going to end well, but most of you already knew that.
When people feel like they have nothing left to lose, it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge.
Unfortunately, it appears that the next few months represent a major tipping point, and it won’t be too long before all of the frustration that has been building up in this country starts to boil over.
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Remember all those people in surveys who have never heard of the bad side of Biden-Harris? Around 20-30% know.
These scenes should be in GOP ads all over the place.
Near me, the Denny’s and the big pet supply warehouse closed, now a Big Lots and every one of the Rite Aids in Michigan are closing down. Maybe they can bring in mattresses for illegals to sleep there.
Happy days?
Once wealth starts accumulating in the hands of the wealthy, it starts concentrating. As one millionaire put it, “It’s hard work to invest where you become worth $1 million. You can’t make many mistakes. However, it’s inevitable to increase your wealth once you hit $100 million.
A reset is coming, whether we like it or not. It’s just another sign of the end of our age.
“ We have already reached a stage where a large portion of the population cannot even afford the basics.”
But they can afford drugs.
Bs article.
Yes, our house and land is going up in value. And that means our taxes are going up and up. Which is not a good thing if you are on a fixed income. Yes, you can sell the land and house and.... do what? Live in your car? Live with someone because you can not afford to buy another residence? How is that doing well?
And the majority of people who own stock are people who have 401Ks or IRAs. Dipping into those or borrowing against them comes with huge tax penalties and it is just another debt you have to repay at a high interest rate. You don't do it unless it is a dire emergency.
One of the things I find interesting about this election year is that for the first time in a while it seems like there is a bit of a light being shown on the poor who are not urban. People who are struggling to get by. People that the rest of the country acted like did not exist for the past 30 years at least.
And the majority do not take them.
That’s in large part because people have abandoned faith in God. There are many parts of the world where the poverty rate is far worse, and they are not in the depths of despair or turning to drugs.
Even during the Great Depression people didn’t respond as they do today.
The other thing is, the image we’re seeing is selected by the MSM. If Trump was president, be sure you’d be seeing our screens flooded with images showing this.
As it is, we’re being gaslit into believing that under democrat governance, everyone is happily and safely strolling down clean, homeless free city streets in bright, sunny utopias happily scrolling through their cell phones.
Good food for thought.
As you said they can afford drugs.
And if we are starting to skip meals I suppose the obesity epidemic is ending?
I don’t deny that there is poverty. But a lot of these folks could stop drinking smoking and doing drugs, and many of us should be skipping some meals here and there. We have a ways to go.
The media talks about food insecurity.
I don’t see it.
Who is poor and who is not, I can’t say.
I see young working age folk who I know don’t have a job, but they don’t look hungry.
They drive a car and got a cellphone and go to fast food joints.
In fact I see a lot of fat and sassy women who live off having kids with ADC or whatever they call it these days.
My worry is the folk that I don’t see.
I worry about old folk trying to live on a fixed income who have to make decisions about their prescriptions or food.
I believe under the Democrats a big chunk of what was once the middle class has become the working poor.
I believe retired folk trying to get by on just SS are struggling mightily.
But under the Marxists being a non working person of a working age times have never been better whether you be a natural born citizen or an illegal invader.
Working hard and playing by the rules is no longer the key to prosperity under this illegitimate Marxist regime in occupation of the once great nation’s capitol.
No tattoo parlors going out of business either.
Recession accounts for increase of Walmart shoppers.
Also, American refugees moving from crime to non-crime (hopefully) - Americans fleeing (liberals/realtors narrative/spin ignores).
Votes - and willful submission to the true pandemic - have consequences.
The time to start worrying is when the coffee shops begin to close for other than ‘safety’ or ‘union’ matters.
Oops:
Meanwhile at all the Free Grocery places, all the cars in the parking lot are nice new or recent shiny models. Mostly Hondas, Accords, Toyotas, Lexuses, and so forth. But one guy was having a Heck of a time trying to stuff all of his newly-acquired Free Groceries into his nice new car. Difficult because it was so itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny. Porsche.
“But they can afford drugs.”
Like the bums around where I live always have money for cigarettes.
And drugs, by implication.
Thousands of small towns in America are dying. They are slowly becoming ghosts as their populations continue on a long decline. This includes the small town in Eastern Washington where my German ancestors settled in the 1870’s. A hundred years ago 1,500 people lived there. Today, only 120 remain. Businesses, stores and schools have closed, reducing employment opportunities. Farm mechanization was the initial cause and it remains a major factor today. Most of the people who remain are poor, with limited access to goods and services.
I don't believe that. Nutritious food can be incredibile inexpensive.
I think there is a better than even chance that these are precisely the images that will flood our screens because there is a better than even chance that when Donald Trump takes the oath he will have inherited a giant, stinking turd of a rapidly sinking economy, soaring unemployment, tax shortfalls and kinetic threats abroad. It may come at a point when merely reviving the energy sector, cutting regs and taxes cannot become effective in time to write our sinking fiscal ship.
These remedies might well come too late to restore the nation's capacity to borrow because the nation has lost credibility altogether, leaving us with no capacity even when we, presumably, have the desire to borrow and spend our way past this next crisis.
Images of bread lines which confronted my parents in the 1930s are quite conceivable considering the precarious state of our federal, state and local finances. Sadly, our government institutions are no more profligate than our personal finances. Our credit card accounts, automobile repossessions, mortgage foreclosures, and general personal indebtedness data constitute but the tip of an iceberg of visible and submerged debt.
Our financial world is grotesquely leveraged in conventional terms but I for one cannot even begin to understand or contemplate the dimensions of our leveraged liabilities lurking in the dark corners of the world of derivatives.
Trump might inherit the bitter harvest of Democrat profligacy but have very few effective levers with which to work. Even if he knows what to do he might be prevented from doing that which he knows is necessary by a leftist Congress operating selfishly under air cover provided by the media.
A hardscrabble situation in which the rest of the country begins to look like those parts afflicted with the images described in this article means that Trump would likely be confronted with a desperate and disaffected citizenry that will turn not to the economics of the von Mises Institute but to the siren of Marxist class warfare.
The history of people in distress in modern times shows them turning reflexively not to the right but to the left. We have virtually no institution today in the United States upon which we can rely that will stand against the tide of demagoguery which must inevitably surge. One is hard-pressed today to name a single institution upon which we might rely today while the music still plays on so one is even more hard-pressed to conceive of an institution upon which we might rely in a world of want and hunger.
When Donald Trump lifts his hand from the Bible he might find he has very few cards to play.
Wow! When you consider that the homeownership rate in the U.S., as of 2021, stood at 65.5%, and many of those homeowners have already completely paid off their mortgages, that must mean that the overwhelming majority of American homeowners admit to "skipping meals" in order to make their house payments.
But what, exactly, do they mean by "skipping meals?" Do they perhaps mean not dining out as frequently? Then: Bravo!
Also, in view of obesity rates in America... Bravo!
Regards,
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