Since the founding of the nation, the press was intended to be the unofficial fourth branch of the United States government. Members of the media were expected to keep a close eye on public officials and essentially put the federal, state and local governments under a microscope. For viewers of CNN, CBS, ABC, FOX, NBC and MSNBC, the networks have become essentially havens for left and right politics.
For the past decade, especially under this administration, there are fantastic amounts of statistics that point to a collapse of the U.S. economy. Whether it’s a conservative or a liberal news outlet, there are facts that are usually omitted in news reports and television broadcasts. The question of why can certainly be debated among the nation’s public and pundits.
With that being said, mainstream news reporters, most anyway, tend to avoid asking the hard hitting questions that get to the meat and potatoes of real news stories: the Federal Reserve being one and how the Congress deliberately invalidates the Constitution on a daily basis with its many laws and regulations.
Perhaps this is the culprit of the rise of alternative media. No longer are CNN and FOX on top of the major or minor news stories of the day. A blogger behind a computer desk, an attendee of a city council meeting or someone who has gone to a protest can be just as efficient as a journalist, especially in today’s technological climate.
Even if reporters are indoctrinated at school with leftist economic theory, the purpose of their job is to report facts that are important for the general public to understand, such as the interest on the national debt, the overwhelming growth of the federal government and inflation.
Here are 30 shocking economic collapse statistics the mainstream media will not report on.
1. National debt interest payments are roughly $220 billion each year (2012 figures). These interest payments are the fourth largest budgetary item. The interest on the nation’s debt is expected to climb to $1 trillion by 2020, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
2. The U.S. has more debt per capita ($44,215) than the nations of Ireland ($43,887), Italy ($40,475), Greece ($38,937), France ($33,491), Portugal ($19,989) and Spain ($18,395). This figure is expected to hit $75,000 by 2022.
3. Total personal debt is close to $16 trillion – nearly as much as the national debt. This includes nearly $13 trillion in mortgage debt, $1.01 trillion in student loan debt and more than $865 billion in credit card debt. This debt equates to $50,000 per citizen.
4. If the federal governments taxed 100 percent of all millionaires’ and billionaires’ incomes it would only keep the doors of Congress open for an additional 90 days.
5. U.S. credit card 30-day delinquency rate was nearly three percent in Jan. 2012.
6. One out of seven Americans has 10 credit cards and another one in seven Americans uses at least half of the credit balance.
7. U.S. total debt (household, business, state, local, federal and financial institutions) is $58.1 trillion and this number continues to grow $30,000 each second. This is an outstanding $184,463 debt per citizen.
8. A large number of U.S. households are receiving more from the government than they are paying in with taxes.
9. The national savings rate is between four and five percent of income, compared to China’s 52 percent, India’s 30 percent and Australia’s 12 percent.
10. The real unemployment rate is about 23 percent as opposed to the government’s 7.8 percent unemployment rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not include persons who have stopped looking for work for more than one year, individuals who work part-time but are still seeking full-time employment or those who have quit the workforce entirely and hit retirement.
11. There are 12.3 million Americans unemployed. That’s more than the entire populations of Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
12. 44 percent of American households are one financial emergency away from economic collapse.
13. According to the New York Federal Reserve, 11 percent of student loans were 90 days or more past due in the third quarter of 2012, up from 8.9 percent in from the previous quarter and 8.8 percent in 2011.
14. The average university graduate leaves school with $28,700 in debt, up 31 percent from 2007.
15. Half of college undergraduates had four or more credit cards in 2008, up from 43 percent in 2004 and 32 percent in 2000.
16. Seniors graduated school with more than $4,000 in credit card debt, while about 20 percent of seniors maintained balancers greater than $7,000.
17. More than 5,000 PhDs work as janitors, 16 percent are bartenders and 13 percent are waiters and waitresses.
18. Roughly 25 million American adults are living with their parents.
19. Nearly 48 million Americans are on food stamps. This figure has soared from 33.4 million when President Barack Obama took office in 2009.
20. In the future, half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once in their lifetime (90 percent of black children will be on this program at least once).
21. There are 13 states that have at least one million users of food stamps: Arkansas (1.1 million), California (3.96 million), Florida (3.3 million), Georgia (1.9 million), Illinois (1.86 million), Michigan (1.8 million), New York (3.07 million), North Carolina (1.66 million), Ohio (1.8 million), Pennsylvania (1.8 million), Tennessee (1.3 million), Texas (4.03 million) and Washington (1.1 million).
22. More than 128 million Americans receive assistance from at least one federal program. With a population of roughly 311 million Americans, that’s 41 percent of the nation. Since 1988, the index of dependence on government score grew 180 percent, while the number of people in federal programs jumped 61 percent.
23. The subprime mortgage crisis has led to 1,000 foreclosure actions in the U.S. every hour during the working day.
24. Homeowners are paying more than $750 million in mortgage payments for non-existent housing value (amount of mortgages that vanished when the bubble burst in the 2007/2008 financial collapse).
25. Value in total homes lose more than half a million dollars each hour.
26. The Federal Reserve is not a government agency and no other government branch, department or agency can overrule the Fed. Here is an excerpt from its website:
“The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation’s central banking system, are organized much like private corporations–possibly leading to some confusion about “ownership.” For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.”
27. Since the inception of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. dollar has lost more than 90 percent of its value. Due to the Fed’s constant expansion of the money supply, the value of the nation’s currency will continue to erode.
28. The U.S. debt is 4,700 times larger than when the Fed was first instituted.
29. The real consumer inflation rate is close to six percent rather than the Federal Reserve’s number of two percent (based on 1980 inflation models).
30. During the height of the 2007/2008 economic collapse, the Fed handed out more than $16 trillion in secret loans:
Citigroup: $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley: $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC: $868 billion
Bear Sterns: $853 billion
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland: $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion
Deutsche Bank: $354 billion
UBS: $287 billion
Credit Suisse: $262 billion
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion
Bank of Scotland: $181 billion
BNP Paribas: $175 billion
Wells Fargo: $159 billion
Dexia: $159 billion
Wachovia: $142 billion
Dresdner Bank: $135 billion
Societe Generale: $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers”: $2.639 trillion
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