It is some time now since I formed the view that President Obama is a pathological liar.
Yesterday Obama gave the "State of the Union" address to Congress, and I saw some of it on television. As I expected, it was an absolute pack of lies, and it perhaps says something of the arrogance of the governing class that they believe they can tell blatant lies and get away with it.
Remember, Obama was supposed to be the champion of the middle class and the underprivileged.
The biggest lie was that the United States has undergone an economic recovery, and that the economy is strong and to the benefit of all Americans. All lies. There has been no recovery, only bloated stock market prices caused by the Federal Reserve printing money for Wall Street (not for infrastructure or for ordinary Americans). The economy is not strong, it is on the brink of a collapse that will rival the Great Depression. All Americans have not benefited from Obama's economic policies, only the top 1%.
Here are some very sobering facts that were not mentioned in the State of the Union address:
#1 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale now earn less money than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.
#2 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale have a lower net worth than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.
#3 According to a Washington Post article published just a few days ago, more than 50 percent of the children in U.S. public schools now come from low income homes. This is the first time that this has happened in at least 50 years.
#4 According to a Census Bureau report that was recently released, 65 percent of all children in the United States are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.
#5 In 2008, the total number of business closures exceeded the total number of businesses being created for the first time ever, and that has continued to happen every single year since then.
#6 In 2008, 53 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be “middle class”. But by 2014, only 44 percent of all Americans still considered themselves to be “middle class”.
#7 In 2008, 25 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket considered themselves to be “lower class”. But in 2014, an astounding 49 percent of all Americans in that age range considered themselves to be “lower class”.
#8 Traditionally, owning a home has been one of the key indicators that you belong to the middle class. So what does the fact that the rate of homeownership in America has been falling for seven years in a row say about the Obama years?
#9 According to a survey that was conducted last year, 52 percent of all Americans cannot even afford the house that they are living in right now.
#10 After accounting for inflation, median household income in the United States is 8 percent lower than it was when the last recession started in 2007.
#11 According to one recent survey, 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.
#12 At this point, one out of every three adults in the United States has an unpaid debt that is “in collections“.
#13 When Barack Obama first set foot in the Oval Office, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job. Today, that number is sitting at only 59.2 percent.
#14 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen from 19.8 weeks to 32.8 weeks.
#15 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
#16 At the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office, the yearly trade deficit with China was 226 billion dollars. Last year, it was more than 314 billion dollars.
#17 When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent. Today, it is over 101 percent.
#18 The U.S. national debt is on pace to approximately double during the eight years of the Obama administration. In other words, under Barack Obama the U.S. government will accumulate about as much debt as it did under all of the other presidents in U.S. history combined.
#19 According to the New York Times, the “typical American household” is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago.
#20 The poverty rate in the United States has been at 15 percent or above for 3 consecutive years. This is the first time that has happened since 1965.
#21 From 2009 through 2013, the U.S. government spent a whopping 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs.
#22 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from 32 million to 46 million.
#23 Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had full-time jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have full-time jobs.
#24 One recent survey discovered that about 22 percent of all Americans have had to turn to a church food panty for assistance.
#25 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.
#26 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are living with only one parent are living in poverty.
#27 According to a report that was released late last year by the National Center on Family Homelessness, the number of homeless children in the United States has reached a new all-time record high of 2.5 million.
The policies of Obama and the Wall Street / Federal Reserve cronies that control him are leading to disaster. And this disaster will make all of the above statistics pale into insignificance.
There is a great quote from Mike Whitney that summarises the madness of the current American financial system:
"But can you believe it? These are the same worthless, zombie banks we bailed out just four years ago to the tune of many trillions of dollars and they’re back on the ropes again? How does that happen? And all the while the Fed has been lending them gobs of money at zero percent, loading them with trillions in reserves, pumping up their stock prices with a small ocean of free liquidity, and they still can’t hack it. They must have the shittyest business model in history. Either that, or crime doesn’t pay after all.
The fact is, the banks are dragging down the entire economy and everyone with it. You simply can’t restructure the whole system to accommodate bumbling imbeciles whose only strategy for survival is mooching off the government. Four years into the so-called recovery and bank lending is still contracting. This is ridiculous. These chiselers make their dough trading derivatives and moving loan loss provisions into the profit column to buffalo shareholders. It’s a big freaking game. We should have shut down these zombies when we had the chance. Now they’ve BECOME the government. And that’s why the economy is headed for another slump".
Unfortunately Australia is not immune. When the house of cards comes down, we will go down with it.
I believe the debt is at a point of no return - in excess of the abilities of anything other than extraordinary growth, which is no longer possible in a global economy. I think the only way out of it is serious tax reform, and there is no way the rich will stomach that. I do not believe we will see a US default in our lifetime (given they can print money), I do think there will be a liquidity collapse when other nations decide not to hold any more US debt. That will not be until Chinese growth slows, perhaps at the end of this decade.
Posted by: PythonMagus | Thursday, 22 January 2015 at 09:53 PM
I saw this comment: "we should have made clear the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt. A deficit occurs when the government takes in less money than it spends in a given year. The debt is the total amount the government owes at any given time. So the debt goes up in any given year by the amount of the deficit, or it decreases by the amount of any surplus. The debt the government owes to the public decreased for a while under Clinton, but the debt was by no means erased". Perhaps the diagram should have been labelled debt? In any case, both debt and deficit have blown out of all proportion now after Bush (Republican) and Obama (Democrat).
Posted by: Paul | Thursday, 22 January 2015 at 08:09 PM
Btw, I thought Clinton got the budget back into surplus, the last president to do so. Researching this finds lots of Republican ratbag publications trying to disprove this embarrassing fact. I assert he reduced the deficit so I now question your chart. Was it designed by a certain Lord Monckton?
Posted by: PythonMagus | Thursday, 22 January 2015 at 07:22 PM
I think "crime doesn’t pay after all" should be "crime does pay after all".
I love to regularly check http://www.usdebtclock.org/index.html and watch the millions click by.
The most amazing thing about these modern economies is the way the practitioners say "This is just the way it works" until it doesn't. As long as China wants to keep buying US debt, everyone will keep playing the game. Should China's growth stutter, we will see a domino of collapses to equal that of the declarations of war in 1914. That is the day we buy tinned food!
Posted by: PythonMagus | Thursday, 22 January 2015 at 05:41 PM