About : gold standard used furniture
Title : gold standard used furniture
gold standard used furniture
hi, everybody! it's stefan molyneux from freedomainradio. please buckle yourselves in if you'd be so very kind, and i hope that you willmake it through this presentation. this is very, very important stuff to know. this isthe world that you're living in, the world that you're going to grow older in, and theworld that your children are going to grow up in. this is the end of america. so let's have a look at some basic facts aboutwhere we are. now, this pertains mostly to america at the moment. but europe is a littlefurther ahead. some other countries are a little further behind. we're all on the samepath in the west. it's the end of the west as we know it which has challenges but alsogreat opportunities as well.
we're generally told that that was a terriblerecession, that was the greatest recession since the great depression of the 1930s but,boy, now recovery in under way and everything is looking better. this unfortunately is nottrue. this is not the same as it was before; kind of fundamentally we know that, right? this is congress' approval rating since 1974and it's now down at around 5%; 5% percent approval rating for congress. this is nota country with great faith in its leadership and with good reason. these are things thatamericans, in general, like better than their lawmaking body. they like the tsa better thancongress. they like people who hate the olympics better than congress. they like the most dislikedcompany in america more than they like congress.
they like abortion more than congress, nixonmore than congress, banks and financial institutions more than congress, paris hilton more thancongress. and if that's not a sign of the apocalypse, i don't know what is. and theylike socialism more than congress. well, that's a two-for-one because congress is basicallysocialist. what is going on with the american economyas a whole? let's look at some information to give you the big picture, more specificdetails. and again, i really do thank you for your patience but this is a very importantstuff. this is civilian employment to populationratio. this is the percentage of working-age people who are employed. you can see in the1950s, it was 56%, 57%, 58%. why? well, because
the majority of women were not in the workforce.this is prior to the feminist revolution getting women into the workforce and so on. and thenthat labor force participation begins to really rise. and now, despite the fact that mostwomen are in the workforce, it's crashed down to 58%. 58%, this is astonishing! it meansless than 60% of working-age americans actually have a job. this counts people who are inthe public sector versus just the private sector. the public sector requires the privatesector to generate income, to have an income. so it's kind of parasitical at least ideologyaside, economically it is parasitical. and so this is really pretty terrible and as youcan see it's not getting better after the recession.
wages as a percent of the economy as you cansee from 1950, 50%, 52%, 54% and so on. now, they're down to 44%. they've really crashedand they're not recovering. this is significant because this means that a significant amountof economic activity is not wage based which means that it's less consumer demand, lessconsumer confidence and so on. we'll get into that as we go forward. so what has basically happened? well, reallysince the 1980s, there has been a massive explosion in borrowing. this is true of corporationsand households and governments and so on. there's lots of different reasons for this.certainly, computers have greatly enhanced our capacity to make up magic monopoly fiatcurrency and pretend all of this future stuff
is going on but also because wages have stagnatedor declined particularly for the poorest. they've turned to credit to maintain theirlifestyle. so household debt as you can see here from '87 and these are all in constantdollars unless otherwise notified and the sources for all of this will be in the notesof the video of the podcast. so you can see here household debt, just going up and upand up from 1977 onwards from $750 billion to $2.3 trillion. corporations, corporate debt. so you can seehere starting in the 1980s, it has just spiked like crazy. it went down a little bit duringthe recession. now it's climbing back up. and, of course, governments. this is federalgovernment debt, total public debt as you
can see again starting in 1980, in 1990 andso on particularly after y2k, it's just gone through the roof. this is not the result of savings. so if youhave a whole bunch of savings, then you can lend out more money. you can use that as collateralto borrow even more but, of course, savings rights have declined. the us government ispurposefully crushing and controlling interest rates down to the lowest conceivable levelbecause otherwise they have to pay more than a trillion dollars a year just to servicetheir debt. as interest rates decline, savings rates decline as well because you're justnot getting money back by putting it at the bank and so on. this is all coming from themagic land of type whatever you want into
your own computer to tell you how wealthyyou are which never lasts. so here's some examples of what happened inthe early 1980s. so income growth and gains between 1917 and 2008. so as you can see therichest people are gaining enormously, but the poorest, bottom 90%, it's really stagnant.when you create fiat currency, when you create money which the government does perpetuallyand horrendously, the money that you create doesn't get dropped in helicopter bags overpoor neighborhoods. the money that you create goes to those closest connected to the governmentfirst, and they get to spend it at the existing rate of dollar value. as the money that theyspend spreads throughout the economy, then what happens is inflation hits because there'stoo many dollars chasing too few goods and
services. and so the poorest get the hardesthit from inflation and the richest get the most benefit by getting their grubby handsfirst on the monopoly money that's created by the state. this is one of the reasons. there's many otherreasons but as you can see, this hasn't achieved the goal. the whole welfare state that startedin the '60s, lyndon johnson's "great society" and so on and social security which startedin the '30s, all of this was designed to close income disparities. but, fundamentally, youhave to recognize that whatever the government does is coercive in nature. at a personal level, at a private level, weall understand that violence will get you
the opposite of what you want. if you stalksomeone, well, she ain't going to love you. if you kidnap some guy's kids to get a job,you're not going to be a model employee; you're certainly not going to get employee of themonth. whatever you use violence to achieve, you will end up achieving the opposite. andwe've used the power of the state, the violence of the state, the violence of monopoly counterfeitingpowers that the federal reserve has. we've used the violence of the state to attemptto address complex social issues. and since violence always produces the opposite of whatwe claim we want, how has the war on drugs gone? how has the war in illiteracy? how wasthe war on poverty? poverty was being solved in the 1950s. about a percentage point a yearwas being reduced. the government intervened
and decided to help people. so violence willalways achieve the opposite of what we want. that's the fundamental issue that we're facingnow is you plant a demon seed you raise a flower of fire as the song goes and that'sreally what we've done. so average hourly earnings, do you ever getthat feeling that you're just not getting any richer? look at this. this is from 1964to 2008, 1964 the average hourly income in 2008 dollars is $17.54. in 2008, it was $18.52.it's really been pretty stagnant for what? 45, 46 years. and that's pretty tragic. thatis pretty tragic. this, of course, is all propped up by debt. everything that we'relooking up here is propped up by debt. so if this was your income but you were alsonow $200,000 in debt with no assets to show
for it. you were in debt to a loan shark,to some mafia boss, to a casino, to a visa, then you'd say -- well, actually, your averagehourly earnings are way down because these are all propped up by debt. this is really,really important to understand. if you put debt into the equation, this stuff looks ridiculouslyworse. so remember, in the 1960s, 1970s, all thesegovernment programs went in designed to close the income gap to make a more egalitariansociety and, of course, look what's happened. in 2011, the richest 5% share of income inthe us has increased almost 30% since 1967. the bottom 20% share of income has declined20% since 1967. so you see, whatever you try to achieve with violence, you will achievethe opposite of. this was supposed to close
the gap. violence was used. it's made it wider. what's happened, of course, since the 1960sis social programs, so medicare, medicaid and so on basically transfers. you steal fromone section of the population at gun point through taxation or you steal from the unbornthrough debt or you steal from the poor through inflation, through printing of money, throughcreation of money. and you take from one section of the population, you keep a massive overheadfor yourself. in welfare programs, it's 60%, 70%, 80% of the money is kept by the government.so you steal from one person. you keep 60 cents of every dollar and then you give 40cents or 30 cents or 20 cents to the poor. of course, the people who are bureaucratslove this kind of stuff. but here you can
see this incredible rise in social programsand this is fundamentally what's driving the deficit of the debt. social programs as a percent of the economyin 1960, 4% or 5%. now they are 16% of the gdp, our social programs. you understand,this is not wealth. this is just wealth transferred. i mean, the thief gets wealthier if he liftsyour wallet, but he's not exactly adding to the wealth of society as a whole. social programs now are consuming the mostfederal tax revenues. it's the single biggest item. so as you can see here, this graph,the blue is the receipts of tax revenues and they've remained relatively constant sincethe 1950s. it seems like government has grown
a lot but as a percentage of the economy,they have not. although the percentage of the economy is really tricky to measure becausethere's been such an expansion in government and government programs a lot of which arecounted as a measure of the economy that this graph would look a little bit different ifwe merely look at the private sector which we'll get to. but as you can see, the social programs arejust eating everything up. eating everything up and what's the result of this? well, thiscuts into everything else. things like infrastructure --roads, bridges, maintenance. i mean thebacklog of decrepitude in the public sector is just crippling. so here you can see, youincrease your social program spending and
everything else turns to crap. transfer payments,as mentioned, have now arisen and you can see here them rising, transfer payments arerising. they now consume 16% of gdp -- monstrous, monstrous item. and what does this turn into? so the totalwelfare spending that the government is lavishing upon the poor is $168 per day for every householdin poverty, right? now, this is 20% more than the median income for the entire united states.in other words, we are spending more per household; 20% more than they would earn if they weremiddle class income earners. you understand this is completely unsustainable. it trapsthe poor into a near permanent underclass, and social mobility has vastly declined sincethe introduction of the welfare state.
it really traps them because they have thishuge chasm to leap over. they got to leap over watch the work and education and experienceit takes to get to more than 20% of the income. of course, the poor aren't actually gettingall of this money. they get all this trickled down. it comes in food stamps. it comes in"free medical services and subsidized housing," and so on. this doesn't even count publicschools which is another form of welfare because it's services for the poor which have morechildren than the rich which are paid for by the rich or the middle class. so this isnot sustainable at all and incomplete and catastrophic for the poor. federal net outlays are 18 times -- 18 timeswhat they were in 1970. and again, you can
see here just this massive, massive rise.a lot of this, i mean, women go into the workforce. women need a government subsidized daycare.women go into the workforce, and they pay more in taxes which allows the governmentto use that as collateral to borrow more and print more. welfare program traps people inthe permanent underclass. and, of course, when the government starts paying bills, theprice cap of consumer resistance goes off completely. and so you can have all of thisridiculous overhead that goes into healthcare system and there's less pressure because thegovernment is now paying more than 50 cents on the dollar for healthcare. so in the 1950s, 85% of all working-age menhad a job and it's now below 65%. the other
thing, of course, with the collapse of thefamily and the catastrophic rise in divorce in the 1970s and the 1980s, one of the thingsthat made men grow up and get jobs was being a father and a head of household, but that'snot the case anymore. so since the government stepped in to take the place of fathers andproviders, male ambition has been blunted somewhat. and this is just one of six milliondifferent reasons but this is off the top of my head. so in the 1950s, 85% of all working-age menhad a job. this is now below 65% and as you can see, it dropped enormously in the lastrecession. it's not really climbing back up. this is with the public sector, the massivegrowth of the public sector swallowing up
all of these people. again, if you only lookat the private sector and if you excluded the areas of the private sector which servicethe public sector, these numbers would look enormously different. so this is employmentpopulation ratio again. as you could see, it rises up; it goes down. it is now prettylow. that's just some graphs hopefully to get yourattention. let's have a look at some facts. so we're told that we're in a recovery becausethe numbers, of course, are being manipulated. this is standard statism 101. it's just youlie and manipulate the numbers. they reclassify unemployed people as no longer unemployed.if you give up trying to get a job and you just leave the workplace, you're no longeraccounted as unemployed because you have to
be actively looking for work. i mean, i guessif you die, you're no longer sick but it does sure as hell doesn't mean that you're healthy. there's a failure to distinguish between thepublic and the private sector. so if the public sector goes on a hiring binge, then this iscounted as a reduction in unemployment even though it adds to the deficit, adds to thedebt and removes people from the workforce who might otherwise be actually producingthings of value in the private sector. if you think that the public sector is the sameas the private sector, then basically -- well, i won't give you the metaphor but it's nota good way to look at it. of course, if you ignore debt, then the numbers look a wholelot better than they actually are.
let's have a look at some of the ways in whichthe unemployed are reclassified. according to the us department of labor, 163,000 newjobs were created in july 2012. just pick a month. the reality is that the us lost over1.2 million jobs that month. now, in the five months since june, 847,000 jobs were created.but 73% of those jobs were government jobs and remember there are 150,000 people in theus entering the workforce in any given month. they're just graduating and whatever it is,turning that age. so if you take that out of the equation, the government jobs -- imean the government was working fine, it's not like they need all these new people. lordknows they have enough people already. if you don't count the government jobs, there'sbeen a half million deficit of jobs.
since january of 2009, the labor force inthe united states has increased by 827,000 but those not in the labor force has increasedby 8.2 million, you understand? people who are of working age who used to be in the laborforce who are no longer in the labor force, they've gone off. they vanished, 8.2 million.if you would have put those numbers back in, well... so barack obama has been president for i guessa little over four years now. the number of americans not in the workforce has increasedby nearly 8.5 million. they just vanished and they're no longer counted as unemployed.but they were employed and there's still at legal age to work or age to work. and so thejobs gap is not closing. that's all smoke
and mirrors. the us lost 9 million privatesector jobs during the great recession. since job growth has resumed, 5 million privatesector jobs have been created. now, some of those, of course, are there to service theincrease in the public sector; but the level of private sector jobs remains 13 millionbelow the pre-crisis trend. 150,000 jobs need to be created a month to keep up with thepopulation growth. since the recession began, 30 million jobs have been lost, let alonethe ones that needed to be created just to keep pace with the population growth. here's how it looks. this is a graph whichhas the trend going on in sort of private sector payrolls. and you can see here theblack line that it's really gone down and,
of course, it's starting to go back up whenthe government hires a whole bunch of people that stimulates private sector activity. sothe government opens up the new department of bombs, let's get everyone under 12 a mohawkdepartment of whatever, then they need to buildings, they need computers, they needtraining, they need office equipment, they need furniture, they need -- all of this stuffto stimulate but it's all nonsense. it's all smoke and mirrors and it also drives up theprice for everyone else. all this stuff that's being supplied to the new made-up governmentworkers is driving up the price for everyone else because it raises demand in an artificialway. so it harms the private sector in a huge way.
so unemployment since the recession has onlytended to drop because people are leaving the workforce, not exactly what we want. almost550,000 americans leave the labor force in any given month. here's some more numbers,of course, since january 2009; 194,000 new jobs have been created. at that time, almost15 million people have been added to the food stamp rolls. when barack obama first tookoffice, long-term unemployed workers in the us, 2.6 million. they were long-term unemployed,2.6 million. now, that number sitting at 5.6 million. there are, it depends on the numbers,you go 88, i've seen 102, 88 million working-age americans that are not employed and not lookingfor employment. just sit on that number for a second. i know it's staggering. i've doublechecked it. there are about 88 million working-age
americans not employed and not looking foremployment. so the percentage of working-age americans with a job has been under 59% for39 months in a row. now, since the recession and certainly since2000, there's a rise of manufacturing capacity and free trade in two areas, china and india.this has been massively positive. china has experienced high single, double digit growthrates; and in india, tens of thousands of people every month are being raised out ofpoverty as a result of free markets and free trade. but because america and europe havevery restrictive policies on manufacturing, lots of pseudo-environmental concerns, lotsof legalese, lots of legislation to control for health and safety stuff which is reallynot necessary, lots of things at unions and
benefits and subsidies and all of that, pensions,a lot of manufacturing has fled. in 2000, about 20% of all jobs in americawere manufacturing jobs. now, that's down to 5%. manufacturing was the root out of thelower class to the middle class. you get here, you're broke, you get a job in a factory,you work there for 40 years, your kids go to college, bingo bango bongo, you're in themiddle class. that avenue has dropped off catastrophically and it continues to do so.so 60% of the jobs last year in the last recession were mid-wage jobs, medium wage jobs. 58%of the jobs created since then are low wage jobs. so they're taking away your cell lineand giving you a half frozen vegetable patty. what's replacing what has been lost is nota one-to-one. what's replacing quality jobs
is crack jobs, service sector jobs and soon. the us economy lost almost a quarter million small businesses during the recent recession,220,000. in 2010, the number of jobs created at new businesses in the us was less thanhalf of what it was in 2000, and this is before obamacare comes in or i guess has come in.america is losing half a million jobs to china every single year. now, of course, normally, what would happenis if china was competing with you, people would get paid less in order to compete withchina or you'd find some other ways to innovate. but you're just losing job because it's illegalto pay less in many areas in the united states and, of course, the regulatory overhead isinsane.
so this is truly astounding. i mean just mullthis stuff over, particularly look at it from the standpoint of the hardworking poor orthe wannabe hardworking poor. the us has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturingjobs every single month since china joined the world trade organization in 2001 -- lost50,000 manufacturing jobs. i actually went to china in 2000 for a business for abouta month and i could see all of these activities start a gap and i was like, "ooh, i don'tknow that manufacturing is going to be a great place to be in north america anymore." i mademy career adjustments accordingly. more than 56,000 manufacturing facilitiesin the us have been shut down since 2001. so a 40-year-old or 50-year-old factory worker,what are you going to do? what are you going
to do? this is catastrophic. this is all theresult of the free market. this is the result of the statist policies which erased a protectionistwall around us manufacturing to the point where it cannot compete. we can always competewith lower wage people. i mean, you can always compete with lower wage people because it'snot like in india, the workers get 12 years full-time education paid for by the statesfor everyone who is in manufacturing there. they have massive amounts of undereducationin india. so why can't you compete? you can; it's just the government doesn't allow youto because there are too many restrictions on opening and running manufacturing facilities. about 20% of all us adults are currently workingjobs that pay poverty level wages. i mean
they're functional serfs in the economy andit's completely tragic. more than 40% of americans who actually are employed are now workingin service jobs which are often very low paying. again, really tragic. less than 25% of alljobs in the us are good jobs and that number continues to shrink. and this includes governmentjobs. again, take that out of the equation, i mean it's just catastrophic. more than halfof all small business owners in america say they would not start a business today givenwhat they know now and in the current environment. talk to doctors too. oh, my god! so we really are facing the involuntary endof employment for massive sections of the population against their will. i mean justlook at -- you ask for 300 jobs, you say,
"300 jobs are opening here," you'll get like30,000 applications. people want to work; they're just not allowed to by force. in theus more than 41% of all working-age americans are not working. how sustainable is this?if you gather together all of the workers that are officially unemployed in the us intoone nation, they would be the 68th largest country in the entire world. so the public sector has grown enormouslyand the public sector -- i mean let's just take the classic state model. i'm not a statist,but let's take the classic state model that a certain amount of the public sector is necessaryfor the economy to function. let's say that roads need to be done by the state and otherkind of things, infrastructure and so on.
so let's say that. of course, the governmentis way, way, way beyond where it used to be in terms of -- it's at least 50 to 75 timeswhat it was to provide those services in the past. so a growth in the public sector comes atthe huge expense of the private sector and that expense shows up in many ways. clearly,the private sector has to pay more taxes so there's more debt or more inflation to payfor the public sector. you have transferred people from being productive in the privatesector to being parasitical in the public sector. you've driven up prices into privatesector for all the resources devoted to the public sector. i mean the list just goes onand on. and, of course, you're training people
in skills for the public sector which if andwhen they lose their skills -- they lose their jobs in the public sector they have to beretrained. it's a whole mess. so total compensation cost for managementprofessional and related occupations. half of all state and local governments employedaveraged over $50 per hour worked and we used the word work here in the loosest possiblesense. state and local government employees spend an average of $41.56 per hour work foremployee compensation in september 2012. totally employer compensation cost for private industryworkers, instead of being $41.56 or $50.43 were $28.95, september 2012. in the us, the average federal worker workan hour 60% more than the average worker in
the private sector. and again, being a libertarianmeans always being sorry that you're right. it's like being a doctor and telling someguy, "stop smoking, stop smoking, stop smoking. oh, shit, you have lung cancer. i'm sorrythat i was right. i know i was going to be right. i'm sorry that i'm right." this isclear. there's no limit fundamentally to rising prices in the public sector. i mean there'sno competition. there's no investors who can take their money elsewhere. there's no goingout of business. so of course, they're going to earn a whole bunch more. that's how youbuy votes. this is the foundation of the democratic party. in 2006, only 12% of all federal workers madea hundred grand or more per year. now, 22%
of all federal workers do. us public pensionsare $4.6 trillion short to the amount of assets needed to cover projected liabilities. sothey got a whole bunch of money and they're supposed to invest that money and they'resupposed to pay their retirees out of that money and their way underfunded. of course,they lost a lot of money in the recession and they're allowed to do these crazy calculationswhere they're allowed to say, "ooh, i'm going to get an 8% return on investment," whichhasn't been seen for decades and they are just vastly underfunded. this is, of course,back to go and pillage the last kidney out of the last taxpayer to pay for all this nonsensebecause pensions are a way of buying peace with public sector unions and private sectorunions at the expense of the unborn who have
no say in the matter, can't vote and don'teven exist yet because you're kicking the can down the road when you give people pensionsinstead of wage increases, as is debt fundamentally. so private sector, job losses, dwarf governmentgains. since the start of the recession, the government has added 590,000 jobs and theprivate sector has lost almost 8 million jobs. since the recovery act, the government hasadded 400,000 jobs. the private sector has lost 2.65 million jobs. so the private sectoris where you really need to look for the economic recovery. you cannot get economic recoverycoming from the public sector. that's like replacing your heart with a cancer. what isthe payroll change since january of 2008? private sector has gone down minus 4%. thewhole government has gone down minus 2%. federal
government excluding the post offices hasgone up almost 12%. this is just all the manipulation. they're going to hire like crazy so they canbring their numbers down and everyone at the huffington post can pretend that socialismworks. the us share of global gdp has fallen from31.8% in 2001 to 21.6% in 2011. you understand this is a complete catastrophe. it's gonedown nearly a third in only ten years. this is an utter collapse of the economy. sixty-onepercent of all americans were middle income back in 1971. today, only 51% of all americansare. again, this includes the public sector. as we mentioned in 1950, 80% of all men inthe us had jobs. now, less than 65% of them have jobs. one out of every four americanworkers makes $10 an hour or less -- $10 an
hour or less. this is after the robot revolution,this is after the computer revolution, this is after the internet revolution, this isafter the most massive potential gains in productivity that has ever occurred in thehistory of the world, in the history of any kind of economics whatsoever. and all of thishas been diverted in a mad violent plunge to attempt to redress social problems withthe infinite brutal unsubtle club of government force. this is the result. this is not whatwas planned, but this was what was predicted by anybody who had any sense of ethics propertyin the free market. payroll change. this is from july 2012.payrollchange since january 2008, minus 5 million. in the private sector, minus 4.61 million.so total payroll change has been minus 5 million.
in the private sector, it's been the vastmajority of that. 4.6 of that five million is in the private sector. the government hasgone down, 400,000 didn't change. the federal government, as we mentioned, has gone up to225,000 people. so this is startup jobs created per 1,000americans broken down by president, bush sr., clinton, bush jr., and obama. so let's lookat how these numbers break down. bush sr., 11.3; clinton, 11.2; bush jr., 10.8; obama,7.8. and this is not to pick on obama. i mean in a sense he was promoted captain of thetitanic when it was three inches above the water, but you can see that these are reallycatastrophic numbers. seventy-seven percent of americans are livingpaycheck to paycheck at least some of the
time. this is not how it was supposed to be.medium household income in america has fallen for four consecutive years. overall, it hasdeclined by almost over $4,000 over the last four years, completely catastrophic. and thisis the time of increased debt. thirty-six percent of americans say that they don't contributeto anything to retirement savings. (a) they don't have the money; and (b) they still believein the mirage of social security. twenty-four percent of americans workers say they havepostponed their planned retirement age in the past year, the ancients in a new world.forty-three percent of americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement whichisn't going to do any good to you at all. twenty-eight percent of all americans do nothave a single penny saved for emergencies,
and this means that they're hanging by a threadabove the chasm of falling out of even the lower classes into the dependent classes. so 40, 50 years ago, america like most ofthe west launched a massive program to accelerate the end of poverty. poverty was already beingsolved in the post-war period. this was to accelerate the end of poverty. now, violenceachieves the opposite of what you wanted to achieve and what has been the result of thewar on poverty? well, in the us today, around 100 million americans are considered to bethe poor or near poor. back in 2007, 19.2% of all american families had a net worth ofzero or less than zero. by 2010, that figure had soared to 32.5%. forty percent of allamericans have $500 or less in savings. you
grow the economy primarily through puttingmoney in the bank which then gets lent to entrepreneurs who start new businesses, whoprovide new services, who invest in capital improvements to become more productive, whoinvest in education for their workers -- whatever it is. you ain't saving, you ain't growing.and you ain't saving. about 10 million household in the us don'teven have a single bank account, kind of off the grid and not because they're super wealthy.the us has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrializednation. in 2010, 2.6 million more americans fell into poverty, largest increase ever sincethe us government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959. violence achieves theopposite. you made your war on poverty, you
will swell poverty. this has huge results. i mean these kindsof catastrophic wealth losses and losses of opportunity have huge results on things asfundamental as marriage. there are now 20.2 million americans that spend more than halfof their income on housing. that's a 46% increase from 2001. only 51% of all americans thatare at least 18 years old are currently married. back in 1960, this was 72%. and marriage,of course, is the foundation for the mental, physical, social, emotional health of yourchildren and this is really -- but it's just producing people who are going to have muchhigher risk to be criminals, drug addicts, abusers, and problematic bullies and you nameit.
in 1984, the median net worth of householdsled by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households ledby someone 35 or younger. so the gap between those who'd accumulate resources over thecourse of their life and those who are kind of just starting out or in the process ofstarting out was about tenfold. now, the median net worth of households led by someone 65or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35or younger. this is why i say social security is a complete boondoggle because there's nomoney saved for it. it's basically just a dusty bunch of "i owe you's" that have tobe taken out of the kidneys of the young. so people who are much poor relative to thebaby boomer retiree population which is the
wealthiest population of the world has everseen, the young are being taxed who have much less money to pay for the retirements of theold who have way more money as a group. i mean this isn't a completely regressive tax. so debt, we had a look at this earlier. let'sbreak this down a little bit more. total consumer debt in the us has risen by 1700% since 1971.in 1983 the bottom 95% of all income earners had 62 cents of debt for every dollar thatthey earned. you want something, you pay for it. credit is the devil's handshake. at leastthat's how it was when i was growing up. so in 1983, bottom 95% of all income earnershad 62 cents of debt for every dollar that they earned. by 2007, that figure had soaredto $1.48 of debt for every dollar that you
earn. one third of all americans are currentlynot paying their bills on time. forty-three percent of all american families spend morethan they earn each year. these are just household debt, not corporate debt, not government debt. after adjusting for inflation, us collegestudents are borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago. college debtoutstanding is at around a trillion dollars. again, it's not that they have a failure tolaunch. there's just no place for them to land when they get out of college, 85% aswe'll see of college students move back in with their parents. forty-six percent of allamericans carry a credit card balance from month to month, the infinite payment of compoundinterest. of the us households that do have
credit card debt, the average amount of creditcard debt is a truly shocking $15,799 at interest rates ranging from 13% to 18% to higher percentage.that's astonishing and astounding and incredibly hard to pay off. americans are carrying a grand total of $798billion in credit card debt. so if you were alive when jesus was born, you spent a milliondollars every single day. since then you still would not have spent $798 billion by now.it's a lot of money. forty-five percent of all auto lends are made to subprime borrowers.ooh, that worked well with the housing market, didn't it? the ratio of household debt topersonal income in the us is now 154%. if that doesn't make your jaw drop and you hadto reach your bar of gold, read it again.
cancer of inequality is growing enormously.we have become a morlock kind of society. eighty-three percent of all us stocks arein the hands of 1% of the people. sixty-six percent of the income growth between 2001and 2007 went to the top 1% of all americans. only the top 5% of us households have earnedenough additional income to match the rising housing cost since 1975. for the first timein us history, banks own the greatest of residential housing net worth in the us than all individualamericans put together. the bottom 50% of income earners in the us now collectivelyown less than 1% of the national wealth. you cannot build a society on this kind ofinequality. it will fall over and it will fall on the poor as it always does. and thisis people who focus on the free market really
the only people who care about the poor. notin appeasing the poor, not in giving the poor stuff, not in dragging the poor with freestuff, but in actually creating conditions wherein the poor can help themselves. stopgiving them fish. give them the lake and the capacity to fish, they'll be fine. but thisidea that we're going to use government power to help the poor is just created a situationof imminent catastrophe for the lower classes. in the united states today, corporate profitsare in all time high. the percentage of americans that are living in extreme poverty is alsoat an all time high. and corporations are making and sitting on a hell of a lot of money,and one of the reasons they're not spending that money is something called regime uncertaintywhich is what the hell is going to happen
next from the legal system, from the law system,from the regulatory system, from the tax system, from you name it? they don't know so they'rewaiting, and there's not that much demand because there's so little money sitting outthere among the people. more than 100 million americans are enrolledin at least one welfare program run by the federal government not even counting socialsecurity and medicare. back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 americans was onfood stamps. today, about one out of every 6.5 americans is on food stamps. i mean thisis late roman empire bread and circuses crap. it's just astounding. one fourth of all childrenin the united states are enrolled in the food stamp program. hey, didn't get rid of daddy'sjust do wonderful things for the family? twenty-one
percent of all children in the us are livingbelow the poverty line in 2010, the highest rate in 20 years. this is after a 40-yearwar on poverty. median household income for families withchildren dropped by $6,300 between 2001 and 2011, and this counts public sector workerswho've had massive increases. half of all american children will be on food stamps atleast once before they turn 18. the number of americans living in poverty has increasedby about 6 million over the past four years. as we mentioned, one of every four workersin the us brings home wages that are at or below the federal poverty level. almost 60% of all children in the us are livingin homes that are either considered to be
low income or impoverished. the number ofchildren living in poverty in the state of california, for instance, has increased by30% since 2007. in the city of detroit today, the smoking crater center of experiments incentral planning and endless socialist tinkering, in the city of detroit today more than 50%of all children are living in poverty and close to 50% of all adults are functionallyilliterate. they can still vote, you see? but they're functionally illiterate whichis why you have to give them phones i guess. forty-nine percent of all americans live ina home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government.this is why you can't cut these programs. i mean the programs will be cut. mathematicswill do a fine job of cutting the programs,
but you can't cut them politically unlessyou actually have a bold face, reality-based conversation with the american voter. but,unfortunately, the american voter has been trained by the government to believe in thegovernment for 12 years. so you would first have to dismantle the propaganda and thattakes a huge amount of work certainly longer than your average election cycle. but unlessyou are willing to have an absolutely frank discussion with the neediness, dependence,and ignorance of the american voter, it's not going to change. and what politician isgoing to want to do that? so in 1983, it was less than 30% of americanslived in a home with one person receiving financial assistance. now, it's almost 50%.number of americans living in poverty rose
to a new all-time record of almost 50 million.during 2011, 53% of all americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployedor underemployed. and again, this counts those who got jobs from the public sector. eighty-fivepercent of all college seniors plan on moving back in with their parents after graduation.yay! life never starts. now, the real inflation rates had been estimatedat 10% per year. so not only is there a lot less money but the money is worth a lot lessin and of itself. so if you have a 10% inflation rate per year, the value of your money getscut in half in only seven years. it is catastrophic. so in average you could buy about ten gallonsof gas for an hour of work back in the mid '90s. now, the average hour for work willget you less than six gallons of gas. to get
the same purchasing power that you got outof $20 back in 1970, you have to have more than $116 today. do you see how much the valueof money has gone down because of all of this printing and all of this debt? and all ofthis debt and all of this printing accumulates value with the upper classes at the expenseof the lower classes and the unborn, the two most vulnerable sectors of society. the stateis an illusion and a lion that lies to you and preys on the weakest. it says it's onlycares about the weakest. people end up preying on the weakest. this, of course, is the central reason asi mentioned before why savings are so low. government debts, i.e., your children's debt.during 2012, the us government had to roll
over nearly 3 trillion dollars of all debt.the us national debt is now more than 22 times larger than it was when jimmy carter becamepresident where it was relatively peanuts. during the obama administration, the us governmenthas accumulated more debt than it did from the time that george washington took officeto the time that bill clinton took office. and please, let's not hear anything abouthow bill clinton's administration produced a surplus. that was all nonsense. that surpluswas financial scum jiggery and also because there was a huge tech boom, taxes went upbut it was all a bubble, so i hope i won't get too much nonsense about that. if the federal government began right nowto repay the us national debt, not even counting
interest at a rate of $1 per second, it wouldtake over 440,000 years to pay off the national debt; in other words, three showings of thehobbit. if bill gates gave away every single penny of his fortune to the us government,it would only cover the us budget deficit, not the debt or the operating expenses, thebudget deficit for about 15 days. it's never going to be repaid, people. the us nationaldebt is increasing by about $150 million every single hour. so i better hurry up or i'm goingto be $160 million worth of podcasting. during fiscal year 2012, 62% of the federal budgetwas spent on entitlements - entitlements. you can't cut the government without cuttingentitlements. and this whole republican plan of, well, if you don't increase taxes, youwill cut government spending; it's all nonsense.
in 1965, only about one of every 50 americanswas on medicaid. today, one out of every six americans is on medicaid. can you believeit the government program grew and went overbudget? first time for everything i guess. so thisis the greatest depression. the condition of the us economy today mirrors the economicsituation prior to the great depression. so there's slow economic growth, massive deficits,high unemployment and foreclosures and a shaky banking system. real unemployment, not the magic monkey numberingthat goes from the government statisticians, real unemployment is at the same level itwas during the great depression which is at about 25%. but now, the drop in house pricesand sales is actually worse than it was during
the great depression, and the stock markethas been dropping and stocks are currently overvalued as much as 50%. and youth unemployment,of course, in the us is now at the highest level that we've seen since world war ii.ah, but it's even worse in some ways because the great depression in the 1930s didn't haveany of the structural economic and social problems nor the massive unfunded liabilitiesand obligations. in 1929, just prior to the great depressionmanufactured by the federal reserve, america was not $16 trillion in debt. it was not facingover $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities. the amount of money that the government iscommitted to pay that it can't pay is $360,000 per citizen, not per household, not per conjoinedtwins -- per citizen. in 1929, most of the
states were not bankrupt, insolvent and dependenton government handouts to survive. one county, cook county which includes chicago,illinois now owes over $108 billion in debt, the biggest part of it in unfunded governmentemployee pensions. that bowl is still -- that's that ball still rolling down towards indianajones. his unfunded liability to the future is far worse than our existing problems. in1929, there were not 21 million government employees with bloated salaries, obscene pensionsand free healthcare for life. as i mentioned before, one out of five federal employeesearn over $100,000. in 1929, there was no such thing as socialsecurity or medicare or medicaid. the federal government did not have these obligationswritten into law that threatened to consume
the entire federal budget within a few years.so not only are we in the same place as right before the great depression of the 1930s,but we are in a far worse place because of all of the unfunded liabilities and socialprograms. while barack obama has been president, theus government has spent about $11 for every $7 of revenue that it has actually broughtin. over the past four years, welfare spending has increased by 32%. in inflation adjusteddollars, in real dollars, spending on welfare programs has risen by almost 400% over thepast 30 years. how is poverty doing? well, it's increasing. it's one of these weird things. i remember a long time ago i had a conversationwith a friend of mine. he said, they said,
"there are far few agricultural subsidiesin country x rather than here." and he's like, "well, here of course because of the agriculturalsubsidies, our food is cheaper," because that's what seems to make sense. well, we're spendingmore money on the poor; therefore, we should be solving the problem of poverty. i meanthat's how it works. when i go to buy bananas, if i spend more money in bananas, i get morebananas. but that's the free market. in the government, everything is reverse.when you put violence into the mix -- coercion, monopoly powers -- everything you spend producesthe opposite effect. it's a weird backwards, upside down universe. the moment you stoppunching your friends, they ain't so friendly, right? the moment you lock someone in thebasement, they kind of want to get out. whatever
you do using violence produces the opposite. and so, this has been predicted for many yearsby people far smarter than i. and so as you increase government spending on poverty, youwill expect a concomitant increase in the amount of poverty. when you spend governmentmoney fighting drugs, you will expect an increase in the amount of drugs being bought and sold.when you spend government money to reduce the price of healthcare, you will expect theprice of healthcare to rise. violence produces the opposite. if the federal government used gaap accountingstandards like publicly traded corporations are forced to do by the government, right?remember, the government is all about setting
up rules that exclude you. the real federalbudget deficit for 2011 would have been $5 trillion instead of $1.3 trillion. don't believeanything that they're telling you. don't believe anything that they're telling you. it is farworse. but, of course, those who were in the upper classes and the middle classes and thepolitical classes, they need you to pretend that there's a recovery; that the green shootsare not the fingers of zombies coming up to strangle you. they need you to believe thisstuff so that you won't to panic, to prop up the stock prices, to keep them going foranother year or two in office. it is the captain of the titanic telling everyone at a 30-degreeangle everything is fine. don't worry about it. it's because he wants to get to the lifeboat.don't believe anything that they're telling
you. the united states already has more governmentdebt per capita than greece, portugal, italy, ireland or spain, the pigs of europe. theus government is responsible for more than one third of all the government debt in theentire world, 5% of the population. the amount of us government debt held by foreigners isabout five times larger than it was a decade ago. and they're only holding on to that debt.they're only holding on to these bonds because the moment they start selling it, they'llhave to record the resulting last in value in their books and they'll go into heavy deficitsor even worse deficits. between 2007 and 2010, us gdp grew by 4.26%but the us national debt soared by 61%. and
again, that gdp includes crap-like healthcare.healthcare is a cost. it's not wealth and it includes government spending and governmentemployees and so on which is -- anyway, i think i've made that point. so let's start summing up. the national debtis now more than 37 times larger than it was when richard nixon took the us off the goldstandard. funny, when you can print whatever money you want, you tend to print more money.the national debt is now more than 5,000 times larger than it was when the federal reservewas first created. federal reserve, i know everyone keeps emailing me, is it a privateinstitution? it is not a private institution. it is not a private institution because ithas monopoly powers granted to it by the state.
the national debt jumped more in the veryfirst day of fiscal year 2013 than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined. let me say thatagain. it's really, really important to understand this. the national debt jumped more than thevery first day of fiscal year 2013, first day, than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined.what with a civil war and world war i and the great depression and world war ii, oneday. these are end times. my own calendar should have had an american flag on it. historically, the interest rate on ten-yearus treasury just averaged 6.68%. if the average interest rate on the government debt roseto that level today, the government would have to spend more than a trillion dollarsa year just on interest on the national debt.
you don't have a free market when two fundamentalthings are controlled by the government. you have a fascist system. if the government controlsinterest rates, you don't have a free market. if the government controls money, you don'thave a free market because money and interest are the two foundations, the two signals,the two most important elements of stability and predictability that are needed to havea free market. so once the government has those things, you know. a guy's heart beatsfor a second or two after his head gets cut off, but it doesn't mean he can win a marathonanytime soon. boston university economist laurence kotlikoffis warning that the us government is facing a gigantic tsunami of unfunded liabilitiesin the coming years; that we are counting
on our children and our grandchildren to pay.no, no, no, they won't be able to because they can't get jobs. they're living with theirparents and they have a trillion dollars of student debt to pay off. kotlikoff speaksof a fiscal gap which he defines as the present value difference between projected futurespending and revenue. his calculations have led him to the conclusion that the federalgovernment is facing a fiscal gap -- drum roll please, drum roll of death -- of $222trillion in the years ahead. the us tax code is now more than 3.8 millionwords long. william shakespeare's works are about 900,000 words long. the value of theus dollar has declined by more than 96% since the federal reserve was first created. themoney, of course, the difference goes into
the pockets of the wealthy. corporate profitsas a percentage of gdp are at an all-time high. wages as a percentage of gdp are nearan all-time low. of course, with government debt, with government manipulation of interestrates, with government printing of fiat currency, you get this whole humoresque government facingfinancial sector which is completely catastrophic for the economy as a whole. so you can just go screw around with the financialsector to get profits in the short run rather than investing in labor, capital and so on.the fact that corporate profits are going up and wages are going down is entirely theresults of this fascistic control of the economy. you see this all the time when fascism takesover. wealthiest 1% of all americans own more
wealth than the bottom 95% combined. thisis aristocracy and serfdom right back to the middle ages but with an ipad. the wealthiest400 families in the us have about as much wealth as the bottom 50% of all americanscombined. the six heirs of walmart founder sam walton have a net worth that is roughlyequal to the bottom 30% of all americans combined. so how are the american people doing? well,despite the gossamer delusion rainbow webs that the media is consistently trying to spinover your rational eyeballs, the people that are seeing through the smoke and mirrors whichis why i say, we know all this. we know all this deep down. i did a video years ago calledthere will be no economic recovery. and again, being a libertarian, being an anarchist meansalways heading to be right but knowing that
you're going to be right. more people now feel that the us is in a recessionthan they did in october of 2008. almost 70% of americans think we are in a serious ormoderate recession. well, 13% still believe it's a mild one but they all have governmentjobs, i'm sure. seventy-one percent of all small business owners believe that the useconomy is still in a recession. almost half of americans believe that another great depressionis likely within the next 12 months. a lot of the economic "growth" that we see is justbeing propped up by wild and massive government self-financing through the fed buying up awhole bunch of treasuries, and i mean it's crazy. the government through trillions ofthe giant banks, including foreign banks,
the big banks used a lot of that money tospeculating commodities including food and other items which is now driving up the priceof consumer necessities. so the government gives all this money tothe banks. the banks then use that money to speculate. they're certainly not going tolend it out to businesses who don't want to grow because of regime uncertainty. the bankswill end up speculating commodities just driving up those prices and so you pay for the moneyor your children pay for it. it goes to the banks and then you also pay for the increasedprices in whatever you buy because the banks are using your tax money to speculate in themarket. but there are some indications that we arehitting bottom and that's good. this is such
a terrible addiction, to state power and coercionand lies and propaganda and manipulation and fantasy. but eventually, all addicts if theydon't die, which is not going to happen, they hit bottom, right? they wake up with hooker'spanties next to the body of a wolf in a ditch. in vegas, they're like, "whoa! maybe i shouldcut back on the blow." so only 23% of all americans believe thatthe government is the solution to the problem and again, most of those have government jobs,i'm sure. sixty-four percent of all americans believe that the government is the problem.so we're in the beginning stages of actually admitting that there is a problem and havingsome sense of what the problem is. fantastic! congress, as we mentioned, has a 5% approvalrating so that's good.
i know this has been a hopefully not too toughpresentation to watch but this is all very, very important to know, to understand andto accept and to appreciate. these are the realities you need to take care. you needto take care to know what the truth is about the world that you're living in. you needto take care to protect yourself from what is coming as best as you can. get some gold,get some food, get friendly with your neighbors, build up a community. i think one of the majorreasons that the americans, the government wants to drive gun control is because theyknow that there's going to be a lot of problems when the money runs out and the money is goingto run out. there is no way about it. there is no way to stop it politically. it is tooclose, too big, and the population is still
too fantastical and unreal in their thinkingto be able to reason with. so this is going to have to be one of those times where itis a hard bounce to a more real and more virtuous place. so thank you so much for watching and listening.if you would like to check out more of this show and the winner of the 2012 liberty inspirationaward ahead of ron paul, tom woods and antonio buehler. thank you everyone who wrote in forthat. freedomain radio, it's my show and my listeners' show, the largest most popularphilosophy show on the web. almost 50 million downloads, i guess with you watching thisthat's 50 million and one. freedomainradio.com, if you would like to check it out. lots offree books, free materials. it's a donation
based thing so it would be really helpfulif you could help pay for some of the resources that the show requires. mostly, it's a bowlingball polish for my forehead but there are a few other costs as well. of course, thank you so much for watchingand listening. you can go to fdrurl.com/endus if you would like to get the sources for thispresentation. and i look forward to talking to you again soon. thank you so much for yourtime and attention.