America’s Mathematically Certain Nightmare

In coming years, effective tax rates may reach 50, 60, even 70 percent. This will be no socialist paradise. It will be a national nightmare, because even with confiscatory tax rates, politicians will still have no choice but to chop Medicare and Medicaid—leaving tens of millions of people without adequate health care. Retirement ages will be raised well beyond 70. And if you are in the military, start looking for another career, because everything from our aircraft carrier fleet to the man on the beat is going to be mothballed.

Sound unbelievable?

Here it is: One in seven households is on food stamps. Another one in seven Americans receives or lives with someone who gets Medicare. More than one in seven households relies on Social Security. More than one in four has at least one person on Medicaid. One in 50 households has a member relying on unemployment benefits. Thousands more have members on disability.

Add it all up and 49.1 percent—almost half—of America lives in a household where at least one member receives some type of government benefit!

Did you get that? Roughly half of America is on the government dole. Many households receive more than one government handout.

Greek historian Alexander Tyler wrote: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy ….”

The democratic process becomes one big race to vote for the politicians promising the biggest handouts. Consequently, government finances continue to erode under the pressure of fulfilling the hundreds of campaign promises necessary only to buy votes. A similar process occurs when spending bills are sent to the House and Senate. To secure the votes needed to pass legislation, each congressman and senator gets his own special spending project included in the bill, to curry his vote.

According to official government statistics, America’s total unfunded liabilities (primarily the amount we have promised voters in Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare) is now over $61 trillion. But the actuaries at the cato Institute, using real-world accounting practices that the government demands businesses use, say the shortfall is actually closer to $119.5 trillion!

Meanwhile, America’s total gdp (the value of all the goods and services produced in the entire country for the year) is only a little over $15 trillion.

USA Today reports that if the government were to actually try to balance its budget, the typical American household would have had to pay nearly allof its income in taxes! That is just to balance the budget, never mind paying down the debt.

Even if starting tomorrow America said it would spend no additional money beyond current outlays for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and so on—the nation is still on an inescapable trajectory toward bankruptcy.

America’s national debt, not including retirement liabilities, has already passed our gdp. Once a nation’s debt reaches 90 percent of gdp, the risk of total economic collapse skyrockets. That’s what happened in Greece. It is happening in Spain now.

And if nothing is done, it will happen in America soon too.

America’s debt to gdp ratio is now around 103 percent! The big expenses like ObamaCare haven’t even begun to hit yet—and already the government is forced to borrow one out of every three dollars it spends. And of those borrowed dollars, last year about 40 percent were printed up out of thin air by the Federal Reserve because America couldn’t find any borrowers to lend it money at current rates.

America faces a mathematically certain nightmare. Just like in Greece, our economy is growing too slowly and tax revenues do not get close to covering all our spending “needs.” Programs will be cut. Austerity will come to America. The government will print money. But as sure as 1 plus 1 equals 2, economic collapse is coming to America. The only question is how soon.

Robert Morley

http://www.thetrumpet.com/9481.8351.0.0/economy/americas-mathematically-certain-nightmare

It all makes sense now...

I became confused when I heard the word "Service" used with these agencies:

Internal Revenue  'Service'
U.S. Postal  'Service'
Telephone 'Service'
Cable TV 'Service' 
Civil  'Service'
State, City, County & Public 'Service' 
Customer 'Service'

This is NOT what I thought 'Service' meant.

But today, I overheard two farmers talking, and one of them said he had hired a bull to 'Service' a few cows.

BAM!!!  It all came into focus.  Now I understand what all those agencies are doing to us.

The World is Coming to an End!

One in five Americans believes the world is coming to an end; many point to 2012 prophecies
 
Mike Adams,
Natural News

Even I was surprised at the results of a recentIpsos Global Public Affairs poll of over 16,000 people around the world. The poll, underwritten by Reuters, sought to determine the percentage of people who believe the world is coming to an end in their own lifetime. Astonishingly, the two countries with the highest percentage of people who believe in such a thing were Turkey and the USA.

The nations with the lowest number of people believing the world is coming to an end (in their lifetimes) include Belgium and Great Britain.
Globally, about one in seven people believe the world is coming to an end, and about one in ten believe it will happen in 2012.

Of course, the meaning in all this is difficult to nail down, given that everybody’s definition of “the world coming to an end” is different. For some people, the shopping mall being closed is the end of their world. For many of today’s teens, the “end of the world” means losing their texting device.

In my mind, the “world coming to an end” means TEOTWAWKI, or a total grid-down situation with economic collapse, mass starvation and a massive collapse of human population. But even I don’t think that’s going to happen in 2012.

Don’t get suckered into believe the Mayan prophecies. This is a good time to remind well-informed NaturalNews readers not to get suckered into the December 2012 Mayan prophecies. Those popular predictions are based on wild misinterpretations of the Mayan calendar… combined with fantastic exaggerations of Central and South American lore.

Come December 22, 2012, we will all still be here, stuck in the same mess of a world increasingly being run by police state criminals and the global corporate elite. In some ways, the 2012 Mayan prophecies are a strategy to dis-empower the People by making them not care what happens in 2012 because “the world is coming to an end anyway.”

That’s pure foolishness. Smart people are getting well prepared for 2012 and beyond. They know there isn’t some magical universal stargate that’s going to open up and free them from all the burdens of being a human being on planet Earth. Those who are spouting the Mayan doomsday prophecies are sadly leading people in precisely the wrong direction.

The world as we know it will certainly undergo radical change Of course, in some sense, TEOTWAWKI is coming true from the mere fact that much of what goes on in our modern world is wildly unsustainable. The fiat currency system and global debt; the cancerous growth of government; the rampant destruction of the world’s natural ecosystems… these are all unsustainable things that will — and MUST — come to an end.

So the world we know today is, indeed, existing with an expiration date, and it’s not yet clear what’s going to replace it. I’m quite certain, for one thing, that the next age of human civilization will see a greatly reduced population from its current levels, meaning that at some point a mass die-off is probably in the works. (That’s the aim of the global elite, actually, including Bill Gates who is actively working to reduce human population in order to “save the planet.” Bring in the vaccines!)

So it’s not really a question of whether the world as we know it will come to an end, but how it will happen. Bill Gates is working on a “soft kill” approach, using vaccines to cause widespread infertility. Interestingly, this may be among the least cruel approaches offered by the globalists, who are also considering things like global thermonuclear war, detonation of EMP weapons to cause a “grid down” situation, and the release of a new global pandemic with a 90% kill rate.

There could also be natural events that lead to various “end of the world” scenarios, including solar flares and the eruption of the massive Yellowstone cauldron — an event that would thrust Earth into a two-year nuclear winter that would collapse the global food supply and lead to mass starvation.

But the time scale on such events is significantly larger than a human lifetime. Yellowstone Park may not blow for another fifty thousand years. A massive grid-disruption solar flare might happen every few hundred years, which IS something to consider on the scale of a human lifetime.

The far bigger threat we all face right now, by the way, is the failure of Fukushima reactor No. 4. According to UN Ambassador Murata, “the fate of the world” depends on reactor No. 4. (http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/05/02/ambassador-exaggeration-f…)
The failure of this reactor has the potential to “destroy civilization as we know it,” he says.

So it’s not irrational to think that the world (as we know it) might end in our lifetimes. In fact, given the status of reactor No. 4 — as well as the possibility of an EMP weapon causing a national grid failure http://www.naturalnews.com/033564_solar_flares_nuclear_power_plants.html — it’s surprising that only 1 in 5 Americans recognize these legitimate threats to our modern, fragile civilization.

Hyperinflation in Germany, 1914-1923

 Practically every economic good and service was costing trillions of marks. The American dollar was quoted at 4.2 trillion marks, the American penny at 42 billion marks. How could a European nation that prided itself on its high levels of education and scholarly knowledge suffer such a thorough destruction of its money? Who would inflict on a great nation such evil which had ominous economic, social, and political ramifications not only for Germany but for the whole world? Was it the victors of World War I who, in diabolical revenge, devastated the vanquished country through ruinous financial manipulation and plunder? Every mark was printed by Germans and issued by a central bank that was governed by Germans under a government that was purely German. It was German political parties, such as the Socialists, the Catholic Centre Party, and the Democrats, forming various coalition governments, that were solely responsible for the policies they conducted. Of course, admission of responsibility for any calamity cannot be expected from any political party.


The reasoning that led these parties to inflate the national currency at such astronomical rates is not only interesting for economic historians, but also very revealing of the rationale for monetary destruction. The doctrines and theories that led to the German monetary destruction have since then caused destruction in many other countries. In fact, they may be at work right now all over the western world. In our judgment, four erroneous doctrines or theories guided the German monetary authorities in those baleful years.

For Health, Education, Welfare, and Full Employment

Immediately after the war the German government, under the leadership of the Socialist Party, embarked upon heavy expenditures for health, education, and welfare...

http://mises.org/daily/2347