Are these the signs of an American collapse?

Most of us were not alive during the Great Depression, but those who were remember how incredibly painful it was for America to deleverage and bring the economic system back into some type of balance.





So if our current debt bubble is far worse, what kind of economic horror is ahead for us?





But the truth is that we are facing some circumstances that even the folks back during the Great Depression did not have to deal with....





1 - Back in the 1930s, tens of millions of Americans lived on farms or knew how to grow their own food. Today the vast majority of Americans are totally dependent on the system for even their most basic needs.





2 - A vast horde of Baby Boomers is expecting to retire, and the "Social Security trust fund" has nothing but 2.5 trillion dollars of government IOUs in it. According to an official U.S. government report, rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. This is a financial tsunami the likes of which Americans back in the 1930s could never have even dreamed of.





3 - American workers never had to compete for jobs with workers on the other side of the world back in the 1930s. But today, millions upon millions of our jobs have been "outsourced" to China, India and a vast array of third world nations where desperate workers are more than happy to slave away for big global corporations for less than a dollar an hour. How in the world are American workers supposed to compete with that?





4 - Back in the 1930s, there was nothing like the gigantic derivatives bubble that hangs over us today. The total value of all derivatives worldwide is estimated to be somewhere between 600 trillion and 1.5 quadrillion dollars. The danger that we face from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet has called them "financial weapons of mass destruction". When this bubble pops there won't be enough money in the entire world to fix it.





5 - During the Great Depression, the United States economy was relatively self-contained. But today we truly do live in a global economy. Unfortunately that means that a severe economic crisis in one part of the world is going to affect us as well. Right now, the United States is far from alone in dealing with a massive debt crisis. Greece, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Portugal and a number of other European nations are in real danger of actually defaulting on their debts. Japan (the third biggest economy in the world) is on the verge of complete and total economic collapse. So what happens to the U.S. economy when the dominoes start to fall?





The truth is that by almost any measure, we are in worse economic condition than we were right before the beginning of the Great Depression. We have been living way beyond our means and the debts we have been piling up are clearly not anywhere close to sustainable.





Did you think that we could just continue to run deficits equal to 10 percent of GDP forever?|||All I can say is thank GOD I am in the country, where I have land, water and means of transportation when all the cities go black from Obama's Energy Policies....








just like the country song goes.... a country boy can survive.








"Because you can鈥檛 starve us out


And you cant makes us run


Cause one-of- 鈥榚m old boys raisin ole shotgun


And we say grace and we say Ma鈥檃m


And if you ain鈥檛 into that we don鈥檛 give a damn"|||More misinformation, half truths and lies.





Is that all you have to offer, you do know that those are the reason over 5,000 American troops lost their lives, and an unknown number of others will spend the rest of their lives disabled, or do you not care?|||And the root cause... %26gt;%26gt; Government|||You sound almost... triumphant.|||Gosh, that's depressing. And when global warming sets in, our quality of life will be even worse.|||Those are the signs of the GOPs collapse.





The rest of us are fine.|||yes there was a sign during the last campaign,,it said,,,"vote for change"|||I bought a farm and learned to grow food for sale and home caning use.|||no|||Japan had a similar position to where we are (minus the illegals) about ten years ago. Look where they are now. If they don't stop borrowing, their economy will collapse. And you can't borrow forever.





However, the demoncraps are about to rage this question with "racist!" and such comments.|||It is too bad that the People who are elected to Congress and the House of Representatives are not as educated as you are. In my opinion we have a bunch of morons, running our country. The government should be run the same as our families ran their budgets. I never saw anyone throwing away money. 麓麓Would you be my friend if I pay you a few million a year?麓麓 麓麓 Sure! I would be happy to be your friend if you keep the money flowing my way.麓麓|||But then, we aren't facing the Dust Bowl, which had even more devastating effects.





Every generation faces its own unique challenge, and we aren't doing a good job with ours.





Free trade is causing much of the economic devastation you mentioned in items 3 and 5. In 1930, the Smoot Hawley Tariff had disastrous effects, which is scaring people away from ending free trade today.





But our economy is fundamentally different from 1930, so this time we would get the opposite effect.





That's why the economy is swerving off into the ditch. People are trying to treat the economy like it was the Depression, when today we have the opposite problems in some respect.