40 Statistics About The Fall Of The U.S. Economy

[BrotherKantu]

40 Statistics About The Fall Of The U.S. Economy That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe

By Michael, on May 26th, 2013
If you know someone that actually believes that the U.S. economy is in good shape, just show them the statistics in this article. When you step back and look at the long-term trends, it is undeniable what is happening to us. We are in the midst of a horrifying economic decline that is the result of decades of very bad decisions. 30 years ago, the U.S. national debt was about one trillion dollars. Today, it is almost 17 trillion dollars. 40 years ago, the total amount of debt in the United States was about 2 trillion dollars. Today, it is more than 56 trillion dollars. At the same time that we have been running up all of this debt, our economic infrastructure and our ability to produce wealth has been absolutely gutted. Since 2001, the United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities and millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas. Our share of global GDP declined from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011. The percentage of Americans that are self-employed is at a record low, and the percentage of Americans that are dependent on the government is at a record high. The U.S. economy is a complete and total mess, and it is time that we faced the truth.
The following are 40 statistics about the fall of the U.S. economy that are almost too crazy to believe...
#1 Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars...

#2 During Obama's first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
#3 The U.S. national debt is now more than 23 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.
#4 If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
#5 The federal government is stealing more than 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day.
#6 Back in 1970, the total amount of debt in the United States (government debt + business debt + consumer debt, etc.) was less than 2 trillion dollars. Today it is over 56 trillion dollars...

#7 According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001. That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011.
#8 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#9 According to The Economist, the United States was the best place in the world to be born into back in 1988. Today, the United States is only tied for 16th place.
#10 Incredibly, more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities in the United States have been permanently shut down since 2001.
#11 There are less Americans working in manufacturing today than there was in 1950 even though the population of the country has more than doubled since then.
#12 According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.
#13 When NAFTA was pushed through Congress in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. By 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
#14 Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was approximately 6 million dollars (million with a little "m") for the entire year. In 2012, our trade deficit with China was 315 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#15 Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the world since 1975.
#16 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the United States is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
#17 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.
#18 At this point, an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
#19 Small business is rapidly dying in America. At this point, only about 7 percent of all non-farm workers in the United States are self-employed. That is an all-time record low.
#20 Back in 1983, the bottom 95 percent of all income earners in the United States had 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned. By 2007, that figure had soared to $1.48.
#21 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
#22 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.
#23 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the bottom one-third of all Americans combined.
#24 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either "poor" or "low income".
#25 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that receives direct monetary benefits from the federal government. Back in 1983, less than a third of all Americans lived in a home that received direct monetary benefits from the federal government.
#26 Overall, the federal government runs nearly 80 different "means-tested welfare programs", and at this point more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one of them.
#27 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid, and things are about to get a whole lot worse. It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#28 As I wrote recently, it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
#29 At this point, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for every single household in the United States.
#30 Right now, there are approximately 56 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits. By 2035, that number is projected to soar to an astounding 91 million.
#31 Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.
#32 Today, the number of Americans on Social Security Disability now exceeds the entire population of Greece, and the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the entire population of Spain.
#33 According to a report recently issued by the Pew Research Center, on average Americans over the age of 65 have 47 times as much wealth as Americans under the age of 35.
#34 U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#35 As I mentioned recently, the homeownership rate in America is now at its lowest level in nearly 18 years.
#36 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.
#37 45 percent of all children are living in poverty in Miami, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty in Cleveland, and about 60 percent of all children are living in poverty in Detroit.
#38 Today, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. This is the first time that has ever happened in our history.
#39 When Barack Obama first entered the White House, about 32 million Americans were on food stamps. Now, more than 47 million Americans are on food stamps.
#40 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of "Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming."

May 26th, 2013 | Tags: Debt, Dependent On The Government, Economic Decline, Economic Infrastructure, Global GDP, Long-Term Trends, Manufacturing, Produce Wealth, Self-Employed, Statistics, The U.S. Economy, This Debt, U.S. National Debt, Wealth | Category: Commentary, Government Debt, The Next Great Depression, Trade

 

[hans]

Now compare this to Pakistan. Compare Pakistan 25 years back with what's its today.

 

[BrotherKantu]

Now compare this to Pakistan. Compare Pakistan 25 years back with what's its today.

Almost all countries are doing the same thing except may be Japan, Brazil and few other. Concept is that when world economy go belly up, every country will be in the same position. In either way it will be a horrific situation for people who still think everything is going hunky-dory. Converting your FIAT in to GOLD is the last option left right now. The moment China raise its GOLD reserve to 4000 tonnes, Monday after that will be the dooms day.
​

 

[angryoldman]

countries with natural resources are much stable comparatively with low exporting countries. and countries like Canada who have strict economic policies and controlled economy like controlled slave people numbered with their SIN.(social insurance number)

 

[LivePakistan]

USA will not sink easily. It is like a titanic which will take time to sink economically. Every nation has rise and fall cycle and US has no exception.

 

[janaan]

My friends USA have 13 thousand billion dollars reserve and the closest country is Japan with 3 thousand dollars. In Taxes they have caverns.for crude oil and processed gas storages enough for two hundreds years. This is just rumors about usa it is sinking....off-course she will sink but after all countries

 

[Pakistani92]

Now compare this to Pakistan. Compare Pakistan 25 years back with what's its today.

:P

 

[karachiwala]

When I visited detroit, what I saw makes sense to me
According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.

 

[سعد]

I am sure that the graph about the fall of the Pakistani economy would absolutely same

 

[AsifAmeer]

Some interesting comments there.. I saw this article on Zerohedge but didnt bother posting because it felt a bit too technical for this website. But I am glad you posted it.

Kantu, I do not know your background. Thing about Gold, there are 2 camps - Inflation (Schiff camp) & deflation (Hudson camp). Gold will do good in inflation. But we face deflation as outstanding debt is written off. And till the asset prices dont fall, there is going to be no borrowing by businesses. And in that case, Gold is going to crater, which it has. Mind it, I too have lost my clothes in Gold positions.

Almost all countries are doing the same thing except may be Japan, Brazil and few other. Concept is that when world economy go belly up, every country will be in the same position. In either way it will be a horrific situation for people who still think everything is going hunky-dory. Converting your FIAT in to GOLD is the last option left right now. The moment China raise its GOLD reserve to 4000 tonnes, Monday after that will be the dooms day.
​

Commodities markets have had their run which tend to be decade long cycles. This commodity cycle is ending. Commodity currencies (Aussie Dollar, MidEast nations) will find it challenging in the coming years.

countries with natural resources are much stable comparatively with low exporting countries. and countries like Canada who have strict economic policies and controlled economy like controlled slave people numbered with their SIN.(social insurance number)

Now you know that the US can "print" dollar reserves right? Again, when you say dollar reserves in the US, it means the M1 - the money parked at the Fed by the Commercial banks.

My friends USA have 13 thousand billion dollars reserve and the closest country is Japan with 3 thousand dollars. In Taxes they have caverns.for crude oil and processed gas storages enough for two hundreds years. This is just rumors about usa it is sinking....off-course she will sink but after all countries

Thats Unions holding tight to the labor/manual/old jobs of the 20th century. Compare Detriot to Seattle or San Franscisco during the last 40 years.. More than labor, knowledge worker is more valuable today as production gets automated.

When I visited detroit, what I saw makes sense to me
According to the New York Times, there are now approximately 70,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit.

 

[FA Malik]

Some interesting comments there.. I saw this article on Zerohedge but didnt bother posting because it felt a bit too technical for this website. But I am glad you posted it.

Kantu, I do not know your background. Thing about Gold, there are 2 camps - Inflation (Schiff camp) & deflation (Hudson camp). Gold will do good in inflation. But we face deflation as outstanding debt is written off. And till the asset prices dont fall, there is going to be no borrowing by businesses. And in that case, Gold is going to crater, which it has. Mind it, I too have lost my clothes in Gold positions.





Commodities markets have had their run which tend to be decade long cycles. This commodity cycle is ending. Commodity currencies (Aussie Dollar, MidEast nations) will find it challenging in the coming years.



Now you know that the US can "print" dollar reserves right? Again, when you say dollar reserves in the US, it means the M1 - the money parked at the Fed by the Commercial banks.



Thats Unions holding tight to the labor/manual/old jobs of the 20th century. Compare Detriot to Seattle or San Franscisco during the last 40 years.. More than labor, knowledge worker is more valuable today as production gets automated.

• 
• [h=3]David
  McWilliams[/h]
• Economist, broadcaster,
  bestselling author

[h=1]Wealth gap can't keep growing[/h]
The top 1 per cent of Americans now own a staggering 40 per cent of the country’s $54 trillion of wealth. This is an extraordinary figure. When taken together with the fact that wages as a proportion of national income have been falling in the US since the 1980s, we see a vision of a society where the average person’s income is faltering, yet the wealth of the super-rich has never been more extreme. As a result of the fall in the share of output represented by wages, the share represented by profits has gone up sharply, and corporate America is now sitting on more cash than ever before.
This can’t continue. The pendulum will move back in favour of the average worker. The only questions are how . . . and when? Will it be gradual or sudden? Remember, the last time we saw such disparities between the hyper-rich and the average guy was at the beginning of the Great Depression.
The following three decades saw policies introduced by Washington to narrow this gap, ushering in a period of the American Renaissance during which levels of education and opportunity for all increased dramatically. This was truly the era of the American Dream.
The American Dream is now broken, but the aspiration is not extinguished. It is this aspiration that will be the driving force behind the move to narrow the gap between the super-rich and the average.
The re-emergence of the ordinary Joe is not just a political question; it is a question of economic survival, too. After all, where does corporate America think consumer demand comes from? It comes from the income of the average guy – and wages are his income.

At the moment, high-end goods are selling well in the US. Look at the chart for Porsche sales above. They are booming. Who is buying these Boxsters and Cayennes? It’s certainly not the average dude. Yet it is the average dude that Ben Bernanke is hoping to help by his policy of printing money. Bernanke is on record as saying he wants to drive up stock prices, to create a wealth effect for Americans, making them feel wealthy, coaxing them to spend and, in so doing, kick-starting the economy.
It is against the background of income disparities that I would like to look at the present policy of the world’s central banks.
The policy of printing money and pumping up the stock market has two very serious dangers for the rich all over the western world, but in America in particular.
First, the policy is making the rich very much richer because they own the assets that are rising in value and more and more money is pumped into the financial markets. This obviously exacerbates the gap between rich and poor. It also greatly increases the risk of a market crash because, if the only thing keeping stockmarkets at historically high levels is cheap money, then how do the central banks turn off the taps without precipitating a crash?
The second dilemma for the rich is that, as the gap widens between them and the rest of humanity, the natural human craving for fairness and having a slice of the pie will mean that, if the system crashes, the appetite for political forgiveness could be finite.
The first dilemma is something that is perplexing many investors.
We know that printing money by the trillions of dollars raises the prices of stocks and bonds. This forces down the rate of interest, which slashes the cost of servicing government debt. So all looks OK. But it’s hard to imagine the slowing or stopping of quantitative easing (QE) without major adverse effects on the prices of stocks and bonds and the performance of the economy.
But what if only the super-rich benefit and the average Joe is terrorised by rapacious management at home and globalisation abroad, both forcing down his wage?
In such circumstances, the economy doesn’t recover because the income of the regular dude remains suppressed. Then, as the famous investor Paul Singer said last week, “the exit from QE is somewhere on the continuum between problematic and impossible”.
The central banks of the world are then caught in a classic catch-22 situation. They can’t stop printing money because this would cause the whole deck of cards to come crashing down; they can’t keep printing money because this only creates the conditions of an even bigger stock and assets price crash.
The problem is that, at current growth rates, the world economy is far too weak to support current asset prices without more central bank credit easing. Unless that changes, an attempted exit would cause a massive correction in risk assets.
Such a crash would mean a return to depression-like economic conditions. The alternative is, of course, to keep printing irrespective of inflationary consequence, maybe leading to stagflation – a situation where inflation rises and output falls.
The problem now for the global markets is a bit like the problem in the Irish housing market when we were getting close to the top. Most analysis suggests that the credit explosion is driving the rise in prices, but what if it’s the other way around?
What if the rise in stock prices is driving the lending? At the top of the boom in Ireland, the rise in houses prices prompted further lending, because the rise in prices validated the next bout of reckless lending.
The balance sheet began playing tricks on both lender and borrower. As asset prices rose, imprudence began to look like prudence, recklessness like sanity. As house prices rose, more and more ‘equity’ was released, pushing prices yet higher.
Given these risks, you would imagine that the central bankers might sound a bit worried about everything. But every time I listen to Draghi et al, all I hear is swaggering masters of the monetary universe. Maybe they know where all this is leading, but calamity in a few years becomes a secondary consideration when compared with the desire to avoid immediate pain and, most of all, blame.
All the while, for the super-rich, the chance of a gradual, gentle pendulum swing back to the average guy diminishes – and something much more violent becomes possible.

 

[nvra911]

...The moment China raise its GOLD reserve to 4000 tonnes, Monday after that will be the dooms day...​

LOL. Pointless childish school ground talk.

China is as much tangled in the global economy as Germany, Japan, UK or the US. Chinese are not children like you, my dear friend.

Only a true fanatic Pakistani would make such a childish comment as if China was some superman and it is all some action movie.

Grow up dude, and live in reality.

 

[AsifAmeer]

And he is right.. Debt-based inflation caused asset price inflation. Now that debt is no longer serviceable and needs to be liquidated, banks arent writing it off because if they dont, every western bank goes up in flames.

Also, it has to do with financialization of assets with negative cashflow. I wrote about it for Tribune at
http://tribune.com.pk/story/499408/...the-world-reserve-currency--root-of-all-evil/

• 
• David
  McWilliams
• Economist, broadcaster,
  bestselling author

Wealth gap can't keep growing


The top 1 per cent of Americans now own a staggering 40 per cent of the country’s $54 trillion of wealth. This is an extraordinary figure. When taken together with the fact that wages as a proportion of national income have been falling in the US since the 1980s, we see a vision of a society where the average person’s income is faltering, yet the wealth of the super-rich has never been more extreme. As a result of the fall in the share of output represented by wages, the share represented by profits has gone up sharply, and corporate America is now sitting on more cash than ever before.
This can’t continue. The pendulum will move back in favour of the average worker. The only questions are how . . . and when? Will it be gradual or sudden? Remember, the last time we saw such disparities between the hyper-rich and the average guy was at the beginning of the Great Depression.
The following three decades saw policies introduced by Washington to narrow this gap, ushering in a period of the American Renaissance during which levels of education and opportunity for all increased dramatically. This was truly the era of the American Dream.
The American Dream is now broken, but the aspiration is not extinguished. It is this aspiration that will be the driving force behind the move to narrow the gap between the super-rich and the average.
The re-emergence of the ordinary Joe is not just a political question; it is a question of economic survival, too. After all, where does corporate America think consumer demand comes from? It comes from the income of the average guy – and wages are his income.

At the moment, high-end goods are selling well in the US. Look at the chart for Porsche sales above. They are booming. Who is buying these Boxsters and Cayennes? It’s certainly not the average dude. Yet it is the average dude that Ben Bernanke is hoping to help by his policy of printing money. Bernanke is on record as saying he wants to drive up stock prices, to create a wealth effect for Americans, making them feel wealthy, coaxing them to spend and, in so doing, kick-starting the economy.
It is against the background of income disparities that I would like to look at the present policy of the world’s central banks.
The policy of printing money and pumping up the stock market has two very serious dangers for the rich all over the western world, but in America in particular.
First, the policy is making the rich very much richer because they own the assets that are rising in value and more and more money is pumped into the financial markets. This obviously exacerbates the gap between rich and poor. It also greatly increases the risk of a market crash because, if the only thing keeping stockmarkets at historically high levels is cheap money, then how do the central banks turn off the taps without precipitating a crash?
The second dilemma for the rich is that, as the gap widens between them and the rest of humanity, the natural human craving for fairness and having a slice of the pie will mean that, if the system crashes, the appetite for political forgiveness could be finite.
The first dilemma is something that is perplexing many investors.
We know that printing money by the trillions of dollars raises the prices of stocks and bonds. This forces down the rate of interest, which slashes the cost of servicing government debt. So all looks OK. But it’s hard to imagine the slowing or stopping of quantitative easing (QE) without major adverse effects on the prices of stocks and bonds and the performance of the economy.
But what if only the super-rich benefit and the average Joe is terrorised by rapacious management at home and globalisation abroad, both forcing down his wage?
In such circumstances, the economy doesn’t recover because the income of the regular dude remains suppressed. Then, as the famous investor Paul Singer said last week, “the exit from QE is somewhere on the continuum between problematic and impossible”.
The central banks of the world are then caught in a classic catch-22 situation. They can’t stop printing money because this would cause the whole deck of cards to come crashing down; they can’t keep printing money because this only creates the conditions of an even bigger stock and assets price crash.
The problem is that, at current growth rates, the world economy is far too weak to support current asset prices without more central bank credit easing. Unless that changes, an attempted exit would cause a massive correction in risk assets.
Such a crash would mean a return to depression-like economic conditions. The alternative is, of course, to keep printing irrespective of inflationary consequence, maybe leading to stagflation – a situation where inflation rises and output falls.
The problem now for the global markets is a bit like the problem in the Irish housing market when we were getting close to the top. Most analysis suggests that the credit explosion is driving the rise in prices, but what if it’s the other way around?
What if the rise in stock prices is driving the lending? At the top of the boom in Ireland, the rise in houses prices prompted further lending, because the rise in prices validated the next bout of reckless lending.
The balance sheet began playing tricks on both lender and borrower. As asset prices rose, imprudence began to look like prudence, recklessness like sanity. As house prices rose, more and more ‘equity’ was released, pushing prices yet higher.
Given these risks, you would imagine that the central bankers might sound a bit worried about everything. But every time I listen to Draghi et al, all I hear is swaggering masters of the monetary universe. Maybe they know where all this is leading, but calamity in a few years becomes a secondary consideration when compared with the desire to avoid immediate pain and, most of all, blame.
All the while, for the super-rich, the chance of a gradual, gentle pendulum swing back to the average guy diminishes – and something much more violent becomes possible.

 

[Bunna]

چالیس خواہشیں ایسی کہ ہر خواہش پر دم نکلے

بیچارے
خود تو کچھ کر نہیں سکتے
بس کچھ بھی ہو مگر امریکا ٹوٹ جائے
​

 

[awam]

Your are correct but there is lot more to the topic. I live in Canton which is 30 miles west of Detroit. Forget abandon house you can't even find a decent house for under 400K here. Houses in Detroit are abandon because of crime not because of economy.

Thread like this one shows that people still care about US. Keep dreaming about fall ;)