Here"s How Much Retirees Are Spending To Support Their Adult Kids

At one point in time in America, living at home with mom and dad after crossing out of your teenage years and into your 20s was embarrassing and something that was generally avoided at all costs.  And while hard times come and go, 20-somethings who were forced back into their parents" care worked their tails off until they could save up enough money to once again regain their freedom.

But, these days millennials seem to be embracing the free room and board provided by their parents.  According to a new study from the Census Bureau, roughly one-third of all millennials live at home with their parents and one-fourth of them can"t be bothered with enrolling in school or finding a job.

Of course, while living at home can help millennials cut down on costs, according to a new study from Nerd Wallet, it can also have a devastating impact on the retirement savings potential of their overly accommodating parental units...to the tune of a quarter million dollars.  Here are some of the key takeaways from Nerd Wallet"s survey:

• Parents could miss out on almost a quarter-million dollars in retirement savings by paying their adult kids’ expenses: According to NerdWallet analysis, a parent’s retirement savings could be $227,000 higher if they chose to save the money that would otherwise go to their child’s living expenses and tuition.

 

• Parents paying college costs could be missing out on almost $80,000 in retirement savings: More than a quarter of parents of children 18 and older (28%) are paying or have paid for their adult children’s tuition or student loans. The average parent takes out $21,000 in loans for their child’s college education, but the hit to retirement savings is almost quadruple that amount.

 

• Most adult children are living with their parents for more than a year after they turn 18: Almost 3 in 5 parents with kids 18 and older (59%) have had adult children living with them for more than a year; over 1 in 5 (23%) have had adult children living with them for more than five years. On average, these parents say the longest period of time they have had their adult children living with them is 4.5 years.

 

• Parents expect their kids to help them financially during retirement: Almost a quarter of parents saving for retirement (23%) expect their children to provide financial support for them after they retire. Millennial parents are most likely to say this (44% vs. 25% of Generation X parents and 5% of baby boomer parents), despite saving more than parents from other generations.

So where is the money going..

Many parents of children 18 and older are paying or have paid for their adult children’s basic living costs, including groceries (56%), health insurance (40%) and rent or housing outside the family home (21%). Some parents are also covering or have covered their adult child’s cell phone bill (39%) and car insurance (34%). But it’s important for parents — especially those who are behind in saving for retirement — to note that those same dollars could significantly grow their nest eggs over time.

 

In addition to these living costs, some parents of children 18 and older are paying or have paid for other expenses, such as clothing (32%), entertainment (20%), an allowance (10%) or a car loan (10%).

So, how long can your adult children be expected to interrupt your golden years? According to Nerd Wallet, 1 in 5 households surveyed said their adult children lived with them for more than half a decade.

Frankly, we continue to be shocked that all of those kids out there with $250,000 Art and Anthropology degrees are finding it difficult to land their dream jobs...

Defaulting on Student Loans Can Mean Loss of Jobs

The following states have laws permitting suspension of professional or driver’s licenses of individuals defaulting on student loans – compounding a deplorable racket:

Alaska, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

Maybe others will join them, part of a great wealth transfer swindle, shifting it inexorably from most Americans to its privileged class, ongoing for years.

The student loan racket is a disturbing government/corporate partnership. Students are exploited for profit. Providers are enriched.

For many, rising tuition and fees make higher education unaffordable. Others need large loans to attend, forced into burdensome debt bondage. For many, it’s crushing.

For too many, it’s permanent, amounts owed unforgiven. Declaring bankruptcy doesn’t end the obligation.

Lenders thrive on defaults. Wages can be garnished. So can Social Security and disability income, along with other retirement benefits. Liens can be placed on property owned. Tax refunds can be seized.

A conspiratorial alliance of lenders, guarantors, servicers, and collection companies profit from debt service and inflated collection fees – a deplorable predatory system.

Principal, accrued interest, late payment and collection agency penalties create enormous burdens to repay.

Once entrapped, escape is impossible. Unless repaid, future lives and careers are impaired.

Outstanding student loan debt exceeds $1.5 trillion, second only to household mortgages – nearly equal to credit card and auto loan debt combined, the amount increasing by an astonishing $3,000 per second, $180,000 per minute, $10,800,000 per hour, over 259,000,000 daily, around $100 billion annually – why it’s so lucrative for lenders and collection companies.

The New York Times addressed the issue, saying “(f)all behind on your student loan payments, lose your job.”

“Firefighters, nurses, teachers, lawyers, massage therapists, barbers, psychologists…real estate brokers (and others) have all had their credentials suspended or revoked.”

Numbers of individuals affected aren’t known because states don’t keep records. Loss of jobs means lost income, for many desperation, many others unable to work in their chosen field, disrupting their lives and welfare.

Failure to make payments on time affects credit ratings, harming the ability to get future loans.

In 1990, the Department of Education urged states to deny professional licenses to student loan defaulters, or revoke them from individuals having them.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten called suspending or revoking licenses “tantamount to modern-day debtors’ prison.”

Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts and Washington aren’t using their laws. Oklahoma and New Jersey eliminated earlier ones enacted into law.

Where enforced, the livelihood of anyone failing to maintain repayments as required is jeopardized.

If out of work because of failure to keep up and having licenses suspended, how is future debt service possible without employment providing income?

Congress bears full responsibility for increasing debt bondage. It ended bankruptcy protections, refinancing rights, statutes of limitations, truth in lending requirements, fair debt collection ones, and state usury laws when applied to federally guaranteed student loans.

Millions of graduates and families are harmed, many relegated to years of debt bondage, for some a lifetime – through legalized wealth extraction, a congressionally sanction extortion racket.

The post Defaulting on Student Loans Can Mean Loss of Jobs appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Attendance At Baltimore City Schools Crashes To 13 Year Low Just As Juvenile Crime Spikes

Project Baltimore, an investigative reporting series conducted by a local Fox affiliate in Baltimore City, has sifted through over a decade of high school records and discovered that attendance at city high schools in 2017 suddenly dropped to a 13-year low of just 76%.  Just to state the obvious, the average high school in Maryland has around 1,200 students so that means that, on an average day, nearly 300 of them don"t bother to show up.

Adding insult to injury, Baltimore City Police Spokesman T.J. Smith told Fox 45 that it"s no coincidence that violent crime is spiking in the city just as more and more teenagers are opting to skip class.

From violent attacks on Halloween night, to a terrifying carjacking and a man pushed into the Inner Harbor. Baltimore City is under siege by criminals that, police say, are teenagers.

 

“Every single one of them involve juveniles, who are all walking the streets today because they are probably not in school, where they belong.”

Meanwhile, Project Baltimore found that 39% of Baltimore City high school students were technically considered "chronically absent," a threshold that should result in fines or even jail time for parents...that is, if school administrators actually fulfilled their reporting requirements.

As we kept digging, we discovered this: In Baltimore City, 39 percent of high school students are considered chronically absent, or truant, by missing more than 20 days. That’s 8,400 teenagers who regularly are not going to school.

 

“Hearing that number, that’s a lot of young people who could have something to do during those hours that might be on the street doing something they shouldn’t be doing,” said Smith.

 

If a child between 5 and 18-years-old doesn’t go to school, state truancy laws hold parents accountable with up to $500 in fines or jail time.

Of course, as we noted previously, another Fox 45 investigation found that truant kids are being routinely passed through Baltimore City schools even if they don"t bother to show up for a single day of class during an entire school year (see: "It"s Very Common": Baltimore Teacher Admits To Passing Students That Never Showed For A Single Day Of Class)

But this teacher says grade changing at Calverton goes much further than just taking a failing grade and making it a 60. Some students who pass, according to this educator, don’t even have grades because they’ve never showed up to class.

 

“There were students on my roster all year that I had never met, had never seen. On paper they passed my class and passed onto the next year.”

 

“I love my job and I love my students,” concluded the teacher. “I want to see the students at Calverton and other schools across the city, get a fresh start. And it’s going to be hard because the students are used to this now. But the students deserve better and our city deserve better.”

And, lest you think a 76% attendance rate is "normal", surrounding counties were found to be over 90%.

Not surprisingly, when asked about the excessive absences, a local high school in Baltimore City responded with nothing more than a generic sentence, undoubtedly drafted by an expensive, taxpayer-funded attorney, regarding the importance of regular attendance.

With nearly 40 percent of all city high schoolers truant, Fox45 asked North Avenue if it’s enforcing state law by reporting parents to police. We didn’t get an answer. Instead, we got a statement:

 

“Strong attendance is essential for students’ success, and the district has a longstanding commitment to ensuring that barriers to attendance are removed.” – Baltimore City Public Schools

 

The statement lists steps the District has taken to get kids to school, which include fostering strong relationships, providing laundry services, on-site childcare and running a re-engagement center to recruit dropped outs.

Of course, despite their poor attendance records, we"re almost certain that Baltimore City students will have unlimited access to $1,000 of dollars worth of student loans to attend whatever institution of higher indoctrination their hearts desire upon graduation in just a few short years...

Our Crazy-Making, Profiteering Education-Career Maze

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The answer is not another $1 trillion in student loan debt to pay for another raft of declining-value credentials.

So let"s say we want to set up a system to help students choose a career that fits their aptitudes and interests. What would we do? How about:

1. Give them zero (or superficial) aptitude and career-related tests.

2. Provide a few minutes with a counselor who knows nothing about them, their aptitudes or potential career-related interests.

3. Design the high school education system to provide near-zero knowledge of finance, debt, economics, how the economy functions and what the world of work demands of workers.

4. Denigrate (subtly or directly) non-college career options, channeling those who aren"t sure into 4-year colleges, higher education paid with student loans designed to maximize profiteering.

5. Force them to choose a major or field of study at 17 or 18 years of age, despite their lack of real-world experience and objective knowledge of how the economy functions and their own aptitudes/character traits.

6. Disconnect this higher education from real-world work places so they exit higher education with little actual knowledge of the skills employers need.

7. When the student graduates after borrowing a fortune and discovers their diploma has low value in the marketplace or is in a field they"ve found they loathe, then suggest the "solution" is to borrow another fortune and invest more years in obtaining another credential.

This is the American education-career maze--ineffective, self-defeating, wasteful, irrational, and apparently designed to maximize student confusion, poor choices and profiteering by higher education and the student-loan racketeers.

As if this wasn"t bad enough, what do we decide to teach our students if careers might be significantly different in 10 or 20 years? Yes, math, the basics of science and communication skills will remain useful as a foundation, but these basics aren"t enough to prepare students for a fast-changing emerging economy/4th Industrial Revolution.

Clearly, it would be enormously beneficial to teach the skills needed to learn on one"s own and adapt successfully to changing circumstances. The current system is a hierarchy of credentialing that enriches those dispensing and funding the credentialing.

Our system"s response to those left behind, those with inadequate skills and those who chose unwisely is always: get another credential, at enormous expense. Nobody tells students that credentials are in over-supply and are therefore losing their value.

Value and profits flow to what"s scarce and in demand. Trying to reach the top of the credential pyramid is a crowded race, and the losers are left with debt and wasted years they could have spent actually learning useful knowledge bases and skills--in effect, pursuing a self-directed path of accrediting yourself.

The education-career maze doesn"t have to be so self-defeating, costly, convoluted or ineffective. My book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy lays out a model of higher education based on workplace apprenticeships in all fields, from carpentry to chemistry to sociology, from Day One, a structure that dramatically lowers costs while providing an education based on real-world acquisition and use of knowledge and skills in the workplace, not sitting in a chair watching a lecture.

Technology is a core part of improving results while lowering costs by 90%. Consider this article: Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers.

I describe the process of accrediting yourself in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, which also details the eight essential skills needed to navigate the emerging economy.

What"s the emerging economy/4th Industrial Revolution? It"s not so much the replacement of human labor by robots as the augmentation of human skills with technology, and the focus on a simple but profound source of value creation: what"s scarce and in high demand? What"s abundant and not in demand?

The point of my book is to lay out a pathway of learning how to learn on our own and acquiring the soft skills needed to collaborate, communicate and manage teams/projects effectively, regardless of the field of endeavor.

How can we expect young students with little life experience to choose wisely when they don"t even understand how the economy works? The current education-career maze assumes that some basic math and science knowledge is all students need to figure out their role in a fast-changing economy that they don"t even understand.

The inadequacy of our crazy-making education-career maze boggles the mind. We need to do much, much better, not just for our students but for our society. The answer is not another $1 trillion in student loan debt to pay for another raft of declining-value credentials. We need a new system, and fast. Solutions abound, but not within the current crazy-making education-career maze.

Here"s a snapshot of the workforce"s education level:

Even the most credentialed workers" earnings have stagnated:

And here"s your wunnerful federal government, enforcing debt-serfdom on college students to maximize the profits of the student-loan racket:

If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

If Student Loans Were Honest

Hey, a lot, and enough beer and good jokes will purchase you pussy, but i"m paying my student loans off steadily and quickly and will be done before age 30 (much earlier if i stop being lazy). My car will be paid in a year and a half, got it half a year ago unlike these 72 month idiots, and it"s a fast german one.

I grew up with basically no money (worked as a dishwasher at age 16 which is the minimum here and even that was killer). $7 an hour and even then i knew how stupid the fkin minimum wage was. My parents paid a very small fraction of my college cost. This is definitely NOT to excuse our moneyprinting communist satanic NWO overlords for roping 18 year olds with IQ"s equal to their age in years into $100k loans, just saying that some people can leverage loans properly, even in a bullshit fed-induced bubble climate. They can distort the market, but we are smarter (especially here at ZH!).

BTW Manthong, you are one of the best posters on here, and i"m in agreement with you here. Just felt like riffing off what you were saying.

U.S. Restaurant Industry Stuck In Worst Collapse Since 2009

Shortly after we reported that the "restaurant industry hasn"t reported a positive month since February 2016", we can add one more month to the running total: according to the latest update from Black Box Intelligence"s TDn2K research, in July both same-store sales and foot traffic declined once again, and this time the slide was more pronounced, tumbling by -2.8% and -4.7% compared to declines of "only" -1% and -3% in June, respectively, in the process extending the stretch of year-over-year declines for the US restaurant industry to 17 consecutive months - the longest stretch since the financial crisis.

Source: @GS_CapSF

Sales rose in only 12 markets while declining in 183 with the Midwest - the worst region in the US - suffering a 3.6% and 5.2% decline in sales and traffic respectively, while even the best region, California", posted a decline in both sales (-0.7%) and traffic (-3.6%).

Source: TDn2K

Unlike last month, not even Black Box Intelligence"s TDn2K research tried to spin the data, noting that the "sales rebound optimism was short lived" as "July restaurant sales tumbled."

“July proved to be a tough month for chain restaurants,” said Victor Fernandez, Executive Director of Insights and Knowledge for TDn2K.

“Based on recent trends, we were cautiously optimistic that the tide was turning a bit, especially since brands were comparing against weaker comps in 2016.” But not so much any more.

According to Black Box, calculated on a two-year basis, sales in July 2017 were down -4.2% compared with July of 2015, in other words there has been no growth in over two years. The data is even worse for same-store traffic, which was down -8.7% for that same period. These are the weakest two-year growth rates in over three years, additional evidence that the industry has not reversed the downward trend that began in early 2015.

In light of the surprisingly poor monthly results, the consultant appear to have not only given up on any recovery in the restaurant sector, but are now extrapolating the weakness to the broader economy.

"While the economy keeps growing at a moderate pace and job gains remain strong, the consumer seems to be on vacation – literally and figuratively,” said Joel Naroff, President of Naroff Economic Advisors and TDn2K economist whose Industry Snapshot tracks sales at 27,000 restaurant units from 155 brands, generating $67 billion in annual revenue. That’s about 10% of total “eating and drinking places” revenues as tracked by the Commerce Department

“One of the clearest indicators that households are spending cautiously is the softening of big-ticket purchases. In July, for the eleventh month out of the last twelve, vehicle sales were below the rate posted the year before. Home sales, while still trending up, are now expanding at a decelerating pace.”

While food and alcohol sales were down, prices once again rose, with the the average amount per check rising 1.8% in July, which once again was not enough to make up for the decline in customer count, confirming that restaurants have little to no pricing power to even stay up with inflation. Black Box adds that the growth in check averages has slowed in recent months "as brands fight the tide of continuing traffic declines."

Check increases in 2015 and 2016 were largely an effort to maintain margins in the face of higher labor costs. The slowdown in check growth may be a combination of value platforms and increased deal activity aimed at increasing visitation frequency. It may also be recognition that top-line increases are under more scrutiny despite the potential impact to operating margins. Given that grocery prices have been dropping year over year, it is no surprise that restaurants have been compelled to review their value proposition

More troubling, Naroff pointed out something we first observed two weeks ago: the dramatic revision lower in the US personal savings rate, which wiped out $250 billion from what the Department of Commerce had previously calculated was a healthy personal savings backdrop:

“Households are currently maintaining their lifestyles by reducing their savings rate and that is likely restraining spending on discretionary goods. We may have to wait until the fall or early winter, assuming wage gains accelerate by then, to see any pick up in restaurant sales.”

Here, as Wolf Richter laconically adds, "everyone is waiting for wage increases for the lower 80% of the wage earners that will finally outgrow inflation. That’s all it would take to crank up the economy, and even the restaurant business. People have been waiting for years for these real wage increases. But it’s just not happening."

Furthermore, it goes without saying that the above assumption is a substantial problem for the roughly half of American households who have no savings in which to "dip" and fund discretionary purchases.

Meanwhile, as the vast majority of the US population struggles to make ends meet and digs into their meager savings, the far smaller group of high wage earners continue to spend generously at fine dininf establishments. Indeed, fine dining was the only segment up in July (0.4 percent) even as upscale casual was down fractionally. Still, the slowdown in fast casual sales noted in the past continued in July, as did softness for quick service. While much of fast casual’s headwinds are a result of rapid segment growth, the steady performance decline in lower PPA segments will be important to follow. Both segments outperformed the industry in 2015 and 2016, but trail through July of this year.

As reported last month, the pain among chain restaurants is due to a combination of factors, including:

• The surge of independent restaurants, from high-end to delis.


• “Grab-and-go” prepared foods available at every grocery store.


• VC-funded meal replacement kits, such as Blue Apron, one of the most anticipated IPOs this year that has now totally crashed.


• Convenience stores and food trucks

Meanwhile, as the government reported recently, June sales for "food service and drinking places" held at $56.0 billion, were flat with November 2016, a period of 8 months without growth. They were down 0.6% from January but still up 1.7% year-over-year. This weakness in nominal sales is also evident in the latest retail sales data which has been on a steady decline for the past two years.

... a fact corroborated by Bank of America"s internal spending data

Ironically, in addition to challenges from falling guest counts, the inability to pass through price increases, rising competition and declining overall spending, strong challenges continue to confront restaurants in both staffing and retaining enough qualified workers.   We say ironically, because as we showed after the latest jobs report, restaurant/fast food/waiter/bartender hiring remains the only strong spot in the US labor market. As the chart below shows, starting in March of 2010 and continuing through June of 2017, there have been 89 consecutive month of payroll gains for America"s waiters and bartenders, an unprecedented feat and an all time record for any job category. Putting this number in context, total job gains for the sector over the past 7 years have amounted to 2.4 million or over 14% of the total 16.7 million in new jobs created by the US over the past 89 months. Needless to say, these jobs fall within leisure and hospitality, that sector pays the worst wages, an average of $13.35 an hour, and $331.08 a week

And yet, according to BlackBox, restaurant operators are pessimistic regarding the difficulty of recruiting in the upcoming quarters. According to TDn2K’s People Report, 63 percent of companies reported an increase in difficulty recruiting qualified employees to staff their restaurants during the second quarter of 2016. Additionally, the expectations component of the index predicts continued job growth for the industry, with 47 percent of restaurant companies anticipating an increase in their number of hourly jobs. 42 percent reported an expected increase in their net number of restaurant management jobs.

As a result, retention continues to be a major challenge for the industry. Both restaurant management and hourly employee turnover increased again during June. However, the latest indicators may be hinting that increasing turnover rates are beginning to taper off. Still, even if turnover rates reach a plateau at their current levels, which is likely to be the best case scenario, they will remain at record high levels and continue to be a source of headaches for restaurant operators forced to keep raising wages to retain waiters and bartenders.

Putting it all together, we give the last word to Wolf Richter who summarizes the unsustainable situation as follows: "so credit card debt, at $1.02 trillion, has hit an all-time high. Auto loan balances, at $1.13 trillion, have far surpassed any prior all-time high. Housing costs are eating up an ever larger share of incomes. Healthcare costs are soaring. Households with kids in college are paying a big price. Many millennials, even those with good jobs, are buckling under their student loans, which have skyrocketed 164% over the past ten years to $1.45 trillion. And inflation-adjusted discretionary spending such as for restaurants by people at the lower 80% of the income scale is taking a hit. Something has to give. It’s the description of a messed-up economy."

Facebook Employee Lives Out Of Car, Can't Afford Housing

Google employees aren’t the only tech workers struggling to afford Silicon Valley rents. One (alleged) Facebook employee recently confessed to a local TV station that she cannot afford the Bay Area’s $2,000 a month rents, forcing her to live out of her car. Unique Parsha, the employee in question, opened up about her situation to local Fox affiliate KTVU, hoping to start “a real dialogue about the high cost of living in the Silicon Valley” (although as readers will quickly realize, there is a very real chance that either KTVU, or everyone else has been part of an elaborate trolling scheme).

“Parsha"s nickname is "Pinky"- she has pink hair, a pink car, and even a pink dog. But she says, things aren"t always as rosy as they appear.

Parsha says, "I tell people all the time, stop looking at what somebody got and what you see on the outside".

On the outside, Parsha is a model Facebook worker, who runs a non-profit in her spare time. But she"s been living out of her car since April.”

Well, at least we now know why Americans spent so much money on RVs in the first quarter, it was the biggest source of GDP growth in the first three months of 2017.

Parsha says her coworkers would be “shocked” to discover her living situation. However, her student loans and medical debt have made paying for an apartment impossible. Rents in the Bay Area have risen too quickly, while wages for technology workers have failed to keep up, she said.

When she’s desperate for a good night’s sleep, Parsha spends the night at a hotel.

“Parsha decided that now is the time to start talking about her situation, in the hopes of opening a real dialogue about the high cost of living in the Silicon Valley. "I think that companies need to look at the salaries. Are we paying employees enough to survive?"

Tonight, Parsha broke down, renting a hotel room so she can get a real night"s sleep.”

Allegedly, Parsha has been "working at Facebook for only two months" but she says she’s already contemplating taking a second job. KTVU didn’t disclose her title, the nature of her work at Facebook, or the model and make of her vehicle.

“She says she"s trying to stay positive and that a home is just around the corner - and the security that comes with it.”

While liberals have dismissed President Trump’s calls to restrict the number of H1-B visas supplied to American tech firms as xenophobic, even the New York Times admits that many tech firms abuse the program to help keep labor costs low. More than any other industry in the US, tech companies depend on the 85,000 H1-B visas awarded by the US government every year.

Tech companies say there’s a shortage of American workers with the skills necessary to do the work. What they really mean is that there’s a shortage of American workers willing to work for the wages being offered. Parsha’s case is one such example.

America’s tech companies have demonstrated that they’re willing to do almost anything to keep wages low, even if it means engaging in blatantly anti-competitive practices. Back in 2015, Amazon, Apple and a few other tech companies agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the companies colluded to leep wages low by creating “no poach” lists of senior engineers.

Luckily for the remaining members of San Francisco’s long-suffering middle class who’ve managed to hang on despite spending well over half their income on rent, relief may be on its way in the form of an incipient housing bust. Data released by the Federal Housing Agency show that, after five years of posting some of the highest YoY pricing growth of any market in the country, single-family home prices in San Francisco and San Mateo counties dropped 2.5% YoY in Q1 2017, making it the worst-performing market of the 100 largest US metropolitan areas.

Strip-Mining The World

Authored by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,

The richest vein in the history of predatory mining is just about played out.

A gigantic mine engages in every conceivable destructive practice—strip mining, heap leaching, tailings dams and ponds and so on. It pays such low wages its workers only make ends meet by borrowing from the company at usurious rates. The mine has befouled the air and poisoned the water. Many workers are chronically sick and their children are afflicted with birth defects. The mine’s absentee owners know that the mine is played out and the tailings dam is structurally unsound. They close the mine, count their profits, and move on. A month later the dam gives way. A deluge of noxious sludge inundates the town below the dam, sparing no one and rendering the area uninhabitable.

The government is a strip mining operation, plundering the dwindling residual value of a once wealthy America. Forget ostensible justifications, policy is crafted to allow those who control the government to maximize their take and put the costs on their victims, leaving devastation in their wake.

Wars are no longer about defending the country or even making the world safe for democracy. They are about appropriations, not to be won, but profitably prolonged. The Middle East and Northern Africa have been a mother lode. You would think their sixteen-year war in backward and impoverished Afghanistan would be a shameful disgrace for the military and the intelligence agencies. It’s not. They’ve milked that conflict for all its worth, and now brazenly talk about a “generational war”: many more years of more of the same.

We can also look forward to generational wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. The strip miners are agitating for an Iranian foray. That’s got Into The 22nd Century written all over it, a rich, multi-generational vein, perhaps America’s first 100-year war.

The only rival for richest mother lode is medicine. Health care is around 28 percent of the federal budget, defense 21 percent. Medical spending no longer cures the sick; it’s the take for insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital rackets. The US spends more per capita on health care than any other nation (36 percent more than second-place Switzerland) but quality of care ranks well down the list.

In education there is the same gap between per capita spending (the US ranks at or near the top) and value received, in this instance as measured by student performance. What’s paid is out of all proportion to what’s received, especially at a time when computer and communications technology should be driving down the costs of education across the board.

Indoctrination factories formerly known as schools, colleges, and universities dispense approved propaganda. For students, higher education is now on the government-sponsored installment plan. There’s a litany of excuses why Johnny, Joan, Juan, Juanita, Jamal and Jasmine can’t read, compute, or think, but lack of funding and student loans don’t wash. Education dollars fund teachers’ unions, their pensions, administrators, and edifice complexes; learning is an afterthought. This vein will play out as the pensions funds, and the governments that have swapped promises to fund them for educators’ votes, go bankrupt. Probably around the same time as the student loan bubble pops.

Money itself has become a faith-based construct, a strip mining operation jointly owned by the government, the central bank, and the banking cartel it supports. Replacing gold with paper promises, monetizing debt, interest rate suppression, inflation of the money supply and the central bank’s balance sheet, macroeconomic meddling, maintenance of a bankers’ cartel, and insider dealing within the cartel have immeasurably increased the wealth and power of the entire banking complex.

Twenty trillion dollars in debt, two-hundred-plus trillion in unfunded liabilities, and an economy that has barely cruised above stall speed for eight years are core samples indicating the mine is exhausted. The tailings dam has sprung visible leaks. However, the townspeople below the dam remain willfully oblivious to the danger.

Recognizing reality and doing something about it are hallmarks of mental toughness, once considered a virtue. Now, in various tangible and virtual sanctuaries against facts and logic, the demand is made for reality to conform to the delusions of those who refuse to confront it. In the safe space between their ears, the only danger is someone warning of danger.

Lower even than the level of mental fortitude is physical toughness. When the dam breaks, the obese, opiated, otiose endomorphs resting their girths on couches across America will have no chance of escaping the sludge, even with their motorized carts. President Kennedy christened the President’s Council on Physical Fitness to address what he saw as a soft and flabby America. Fifty years later, America is exponentially softer and flabbier—physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Most Americans are in no condition to handle the emotional and physical stresses crises will bring.

It’s viciously ironic that many of them will look to the strip miners for salvation. A captive government that has turned America into a field of rackets, its string-pullers extracting power and wealth while ordinary people have seen their incomes stagnate, their meager savings dwindle, and opportunities shrink, is somehow going to make financial and economic catastrophe all better.

In one sense Hillary Clinton’s use of the term “deplorable” was unfortunate, in that it implies that the strip miners care enough about the townspeople to deprecate them. They don’t. The townspeople have had their uses, but they’re expendable once the mine is played out. Let someone else worry about pulling them from the sludge, or just leave them buried. The strip miners chose America first because it had the richest vein, now exhausted. The strip miners will move on to other, albeit less lucrative, lodes. That is what is meant by globalization.

US Restaurant Industry Stuck In Worst Collapse Since 2009

One month after we reported that the "restaurant industry hasn"t reported a positive month since February 2016", we can add one more month to the running total: according to the latest update from Black Box Intelligence"s TDn2K research, in June both same-store sales and foot traffic "growth" declined once more, dropping by -1% and -3%, respectively, extending the longest stretch of year-over-year declines for the US restaurant industry to 16 consecutive months - the longest stretch since the financial crisis - with sales rising in 45 markets while declining in 150 with Texas, the worst region in the US, suffering a 2.2% and 4.1% decline in sales and traffic respectively.

Source: TDn2K

As Black Box adds, "bad news is same-store sales and traffic growth were still negative in June and the second quarter of 2017; and year-over-year, same-store sales have been declining for the last six consecutive quarters."

While there was some offsetting "good news", namely that "June results were the best for the industry for both sales and traffic growth since January" - in other words a 3% decline in traffic is now spun as "good" -  it may have been due to a calendar effect and certainly was not enough to offset growing concerns about the relentless deterioration in the space.

“This is likely the result of a combination of factors,” commented Victor Fernandez, Executive Director of Insights and Knowledge for TDn2K. “While economic indicators have been pointing to some improved conditions this year, the reality is that we are also lapping over some weak results in 2016 which make the comparisons much easier for the industry in 2017.”

More importantly, on a topic that is especially dear to the Fed"s heart now that inflation has missed for 4 consecutive months, average guest checks grew at the same rate in Q2 as Q1, or 2.2%, still unable to offset the decline in overall traffic. What is concerning is that check averages have been growing more slowly since 2015, when the average check was up 2.8%, well above core inflation.

And in the biggest red flag for the Fed, Black Box" Fernandex confirmed that the Fed"s fears about lack of pricing power, at least in the restaurant sector, are justified, as “brands seem to be reluctant to implement significant price increases given the current environment." Making matters worse, in order to boost traffic, "price promotions have been widely utilized, especially by struggling brands and segments” said Fernandez. “Average guest checks for the ‘bar and grill’ sub-segment of casual dining remain flat year over year for the first two quarters of 2017, while casual dining overall has seen its guest checks grow by only 1.2 percent.”

According to Joel Naroff, chief economist at TDn2K, while employment continues to grow at a robust pace, a disconnect has emerged as "consumption, meanwhile, has slowed and vehicle sales have faltered." This is also evident in the latest retail sales data which has been on a steady decline for the past two years.

... a fact corroborated by Bank of America"s internal spending data:

In an effort worthy of a Fed economist, Naroff tried to spin that data, saying that "this is good news for other retail sectors, including restaurants, as credit growth is moderating. The rise in debt payments has funneled money from spending on other goods and services." Odd, it"s almost as if he is saying that savings and living within one"s means - two ideas that are anathema to any Keynesian - are... good. Still, he does admit that while the outflow from restaurants is ending, "an uptick in demand has yet to appear.”

Digging through the data, reveals that the decline is not uniform, and that affluent consumers are enjoying the recent promotional scramble, responding positively to those brands that provide a more experience-driven dining occasion. "Fine dining was the best performing segment based on same-store sales growth in the second quarter, followed by upscale casual. These were the only two segments with positive sales. They were also the top performing segments in the first quarter."

Here, too, a problem emerges because as the report admits, the ranks of the "affluent" are not growing: even those segments with positive growth in their same-store sales are doing so through increases in average guest checks and not through driving incremental guest visits.

In fact, all segments experienced a fall in their guest counts year over year during the quarter. The deteriorating traffic was attributed to increased competition for dining from within the industry (independent operators) and from other sectors (grab-and-go prepared food options, meal replacement kits, and other players like convenience stores and food trucks) which continue to grab additional share from traditional chain restaurants. The weakest segments based on second quarter results were fast casual and the ‘bar and grill’ sub-segment within casual dining.

Meanwhile, in a potential threat to the likes of McDonalds and Shake Shack, quick service, which was the top-performing segment in 2016 and was among the top three segments in 2015, is now struggling to keep up building on that rapid growth. The segment has now experienced three consecutive quarters of negative same-store sales growth, although one wouldn"t know it by looking at McDonalds" share price.

* * *

Ironically, in addition to challenges from falling guest counts, the inability to pass through price increases, rising competition and declining overall spending, strong challenges continue to confront restaurants in both staffing and retaining enough qualified workers. We say ironically, because as we showed after the latest jobs report, restaurant/fast food/waiter/bartender hiring remains the only strong spot in the US labor market. As the chart below shows, starting in March of 2010 and continuing through June of 2017, there have been 89 consecutive month of payroll gains for America"s waiters and bartenders, an unprecedented feat and an all time record for any job category. Putting this number in context, total job gains for the sector over the past 7 years have amounted to 2.4 million or over 14% of the total 16.7 million in new jobs created by the US over the past 89 months.

And yet, according to BlackBox, restaurant operators are pessimistic regarding the difficulty of recruiting in the upcoming quarters. According to TDn2K’s People Report, when it comes to finding enough qualified employees to staff the restaurants and retaining them once they are hired, the industry is still facing an uphill battle with rolling-12-month restaurant hourly employee turnover increased again in May. Turnover for restaurant managers is also on the rise and is tracking at a 10-year high, with brands reporting that the majority of applicants are coming from competing restaurants.

And while one has yet to see it emerge in average hourly earnings, the result is - at least according to Black Box - pressure on restaurant wages, "which are expected to increase in the upcoming quarters." Almost 75% of restaurant companies report that they are offering higher wages as an incentive for potential employees.

Meanwhile, as the restaurant industry is stuck in its longest slump since the "second great depression", US consumer spending continues to decline, with declines not just across the chain restaurant space, but also at food and beverage stores...

... hammered by rising healthcare, housing and college costs, even as the broader US population is now burdened by a record $1.4 trillion in student loans.

In such an environment restaurants - from mediocre QSRs to the upscale sector - will continue facing challenges in both traffic and pricing.

As Black Box" Naroff concludes in an attempt to put a silver lining on the situation, "the summer season should be solid as people have money to spend. Unfortunately, until wage gains improve, which so far continue to be disappointing, no major acceleration in spending at restaurants should be expected.”

White House Reveals Budget Deficit Will Be $250 Billion Greater Due To "Mistake"

On Thursday, we first discussed that in its latest monthly budget report for the month of June, the US Treasury reported a massive outlier that has largely been ignored by the general press: in June total US government spending hit $429 billion, the biggest one-month outlay on record, and 33% higher than the $323 billion spent a year ago.

As explained,  the main reason for the outlier print was that outlays increased by roughly $60 billion in "other" items relative to baseline because the Treasury revised up its estimates of the subsidy cost of student loans, and to a lesser extent housing, it guarantees. And, as we further noted, based on the CBO revisions, "it appears that the deficit for the fiscal year, which has three months left, will be in the $650 billion to $700 billion range, if not even higher, mostly due to the surge in "subsidy costs of housing and student loans" guaranteed by the Treasury."

This was troubling: as we stated "what the unexpected surge in government spending means is that quietly and mostly behind the scenes, the student debt bubble has begun to burst, and the Treasury is "provisioning" for it in real time, with all US taxpayers once again on the hook."

There was more: while outlays surged, revenue growth failed to keep up...

...which taken together led to our conclusion that "while many analysts had a deficit base case for fiscal 2017 at roughly $575BN (the year ends on Sept 30), the CBO recently revised its projection for the fiscal 2017 up by $134 billion to $693 billion. Most of the CBO revision reflects weaker than expected revenues, which means it will be even more surprised when it finds out what is going on with outlays."

As it turns out we were right, because just one day later, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, warned that the budget deficit for Trump"s first two years in office will be nearly $250 billion higher than initially estimated "due to a shortfall in tax collections and a mistake in projecting military healthcare costs," according to Reuters.

The problem first emerged in late May, when Mulvaney submitted the OMB"s first spending plan to Congress. It now appears that, as Thursday"s data confirmed, the projections were overly optimistic and on Friday Mulvaney said the deficit projected for the current fiscal year has increased by $99 billion, or 16.4 percent, to $702 billion, a miss which was virtually in line with what we calculated two days ago. It doesn"t stop there, however, and Mulvaney said that for 2018, the deficit will be $149 billion more than first expected, increasing by 33 percent to $589 billion.

In other words, a budgeting "mistake" just shy of $250 billion.

In an amusing twist, AP added that the White House kept its budget report to a bare-bones minimum and cast blame on "the failed policies of the previous administration" although whether this gambit of "blaming Obama" for budget errors, even as the president is all too happy to take credit for the market"s all time highs, will work remains to be seen. 

As Reuters further adds, the figures come as the administration is facing "widespread doubts among economists and analysts that it can erase government deficits largely by boosting economic growth and changing laws like the Affordable Care Act. ACA reform is facing a difficult path in Congress, and the Congressional Budget Office on Thursday said the administration"s growth and deficit reduction plans were optimistic."

Worse, it means that far from balancing the budget, as the Trump administration had hoped to do over the next decade, the budget will drift well wide of even the latest "optimistic" CBO projections, which saw Trump"s proposed budget cutting on the baseline number by a cumulative 33% over the next ten years.

And while spending took a back seat in Mulvaney"s letter, he blamed the bulk of the budget shortfall this year and next on lower-than-expected tax collections. Specifically, individual and corporate income taxes and other collections for this year are expected to be $116 billion less than the administration anticipated in May. Tax receipts in 2018 are expected to be $140 billion less than initially estimated.

We also touched on this two days ago when we said that "one theory explaining the shortfall in revenues reflects taxpayers delaying the recognition of income in 2016, anticipating tax cuts this year. That revenue should eventually be recovered" however as we cautioned, this may be an overly optimistic scenario, and the underlying reality may be that tax receipts are set for a structural decline as US workers and corporations earn less, and as a result, remit less in the form of taxes. According to the Mulvaney letter, it was this more adverse case, that is emerging as the likely explanation.

The OMG chief did touch on spending, which he said in 2017 would be $17 billion less than expected, and would have been even lower if not for the use of "erroneous outlay rates" used in estimating costs of health programs for the U.S. military, i.e., another mistake, and one which did not take into account the surge in subsidy costs for student loans, i.e., the marking-to-market of student loan writeoffs and discharges which the government will be forced to do over the coming years as the student loan bubble bursts.  Furthermore, costs for the defense health program will be $19 billion higher in 2017 and $9 billion higher in 2018 than initially expected. As a result, overall spending in 2018 will rise by $10 billion; our calculations suggest the final number will be substantially greater.

There is still a chance that the latest budget "mistake" will be rectified: the latest estimates are "based on existing law and do not include any proposed changes to health, welfare or other programs" however with virtually all policies proposed by Trump halted by the gridlock in Congress, it is unlikely that many, if any, proposed changes will be implemented.

It Takes Most Students Twice As Long As They Hoped To Pay Off Their Student Loans

About 70% of college students – equal to about 44 million Americans - owe a collective $1.4 trillion in student debt. And while the standard repayment plan for federal loans suggests that they should take no more than 10 years to pay back, in reality, it regularly takes twice that long.

“Research from Citizens Financial Group suggests that 60 percent of student debt borrowers expect to pay off their loans in their 40s. Data collected at the state level supports these findings. A study from the OneWisconsin Institute finds that it takes graduates of Wisconsin universities 19.7 years to pay off a bachelor"s degree and 23 years to pay off a graduate degree.”

Meanwhile, the Fed reports that there are 6.8 million student loan borrowers between the ages of 40 and 49 and that together, these graduates hold a collective $229.6 billion in debt. That means that Americans in their 40s with student loan debt each have an average balance of $33,765, according to CNBC.

Many predict that the long-lasting effects of student debt threaten US housing prices as fewer millennials will be able to afford a home, while also delaying retirement.

“The Federal Reserve Board of Washington, D.C. found that an increase in student debt has led to a decrease in home ownership, and a study from NerdWallet predicts that students who graduated from college in 2015 will have to delay retirement until the age of 75, in part because of the increasing burden of student debt.”

CNBC points out that students should plan out how long it will take for them to pay off their loans, but this is easier said than done: Today"s graduates face an uncertain job market, which is forcing more young Americans – members of the so-called millennial generation – to live with their parents for want of work.

Perhaps, more students should consider trade schools, which are cheaper and can often lead to steady career-track work. And as we reported last week, many manufacturing companies are recruiting heavily for well-paying management jobs that don’t require a college degree.

"Colleges Are Preparing Kids For An Economy That No Longer Exists" As They Continue To Scam Parents And Students

Authored by Daniel Ameduri via FutureMoneyTrends.com,

As I sat down to enjoy some smoked salmon at a recent BBQ I attended, I ended up at a table with two recent high school graduates.

To my disappointment, when I asked them what their plans were for the summer and beyond, both said they were heading to college.

With student loans and a wasteful four years in front of them, I couldn’t help but ask why.

Is there really anything that takes 4 to 8 years to learn or become an expert in?

Seriously, what a waste of time. Even Ham, the first ape that went into space, only trained for 2 years.

Colleges have convinced nearly everyone that you need a degree to be an effective employee or higher-income adult, but this is just not true.

I can tell you as an employer that I’ve never asked a single person what their grades were and I’ve never asked to see a degree.

The ugly truth is the ones with college degrees usually end up writing SEO articles for $15 an hour and the skilled workers who’ve been writing code as a hobby or editing videos for years on a MAC end up as managers making $75+ per hour.

Young people today who sign up for college are committing to 3 things.

1. Debt: It’s pure insanity that you’re required to pay for information that is freely available to all.

Think about it: a Google search, a 6-week or 6-month course, on the job training… All of these beat the price of college tuition.

Why anyone would borrow money for a college degree makes no sense. Unless the government has screwed your industry with a mandatory college degree in order to get some sort of license, like to practice medicine or law, what exactly is it that you need to pay the college for?

2. Four unproductive years: Ouch! One of the biggest negative effects is that you’re detouring a life for 4 full years or more.

It’s totally unnecessary at this point. When I was 18 years old, I made $55,000 while my peers sat in a classroom learning things that were forgotten before they even left the campus that day.

By the time I was 22 years old, instead of having a degree, I had made $260,000 working at a job for the past four years, I owned two businesses that cash-flowed, and I had over 10 rental properties, not including about $400,000 I had made from flipping homes as a side gig.

3. A workforce that isn’t there: Let’s be honest, colleges are preparing our young people for an economy that no longer exists!

We live in a global freelance economy. Employers want results for the lowest possible price, and they have the entire world to hire from.

The entitlement mindset and enormous false expectations a college puts in a person’s mind are only setting them up for failure.

Summary: The disservice in teaching people that education comes only from school has put millions of families in debt.

The college bubble — both the 1.2 trillion worth of student loans and the lie that you need a degree — is literally coming apart at the seams.

If you know a young person, help them get ahead by not going to college.

Americans Are Dying With An Average Of $61,500 In Debt

According to a recent study, the average total household debt in America is just over $132,500, broken down as per the chart below...

... and thanks to the Fed"s recent and ongoing rate increases, the repayment of said debt will become increasingly more difficult. So difficult, in fact, that most Americans will be saddled with a sizable chunk of it at the time of their death.

Actually, most already are.

According to December 2016 data from credit bureau Experian provided to credit.com, 73% of American consumers had outstanding debt when they were reported as dead. Those consumers carried an average total balance of $61,554, including mortgage debt. Without home loans, the average balance was $12,875.

As credit.com reports, the data is based on Experian’s FileOne database, which includes 220 million consumers. (There are about 242 million adults in the U.S., according to 2015 estimates from the Census Bureau.) To determine the average debt people have when they die, Experian looked at consumers who, as of October 2016, were not deceased, but then showed as deceased as of December 2016.

Among the 73% of consumers who had debt when they died, about 68% had credit card balances. The next most common kind of debt was mortgage debt (37%), followed by auto loans (25%), personal loans (12%) and student loans (6%).

The breakdown of unpaid balances was as follows: credit cards, $4,531; auto loans, $17,111; personal loans, $14,793; and student loans, $25,391. And, as a reminder, debt doesn’t just disappear when someone dies.

What happens to that debt when you die, aside from it continuing to accrue interest until someone remembers to inform the creditors?

“Debt belongs to the deceased person or that person’s estate,” said Darra L. Rayndon, an estate planning attorney with Clark Hill in Scottsdale, Arizona. If someone has enough assets to cover their debts, the creditors get paid, and beneficiaries receive whatever remains. But if there aren’t enough assets to satisfy debts, creditors lose out (they may get some, but not all, of what they’re owed). Family members do not then become responsible for the debt, as some people worry they might.

That’s the general idea, but things are not always that straightforward. The type of debt you have, where you live and the value of your estate significantly affects the complexity of the situation. For example, federal student loan debt is eligible for cancellation upon a borrower’s death, but private student loan companies tend not to offer the same benefit. They can go after the borrower’s estate for payment.

To be sure, things can get messy. If your only asset is a home other people live in, that asset must be used to satisfy debts, whether it’s the mortgage on that home or a lot of credit card debt, meaning the people who live there may have to take over the mortgage, or your family may need to sell the home in order to pay creditors. Accounts with co-signers or co-applicants can also result in the debt falling on someone else’s shoulders. Community property states, where spouses share ownership of property, also handle debts acquired during a marriage a little differently.

“It’s one thing if the beneficiaries are relatives that don’t need your money, but if your beneficiaries are a surviving spouse, minor children — people like that who depend on you for their welfare, then life insurance is a great way to provide additional money in the estate to pay debts,” Rayndon said.

The best option, of course, is just to pay it all off while one is alive, however in a nation with over $15 trillion in household debt, that is increasingly unlikely. And, if the Fed normalizes rates as it promises, which for some odd reason means interest on savings accounts doesn"t budge even as the interest due on debt ticks up with ever move of the Fed Funds rate, it means that the only possible debt discharge for tens of millions of Americans, will increasingly be the most terminal one too.

It remains unclear if debt incurred in this life carries over into the next one.

69 Percent Of Americans Do Not Have An Adequate Emergency Fund

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Do you have an emergency fund?  If you even have one penny in emergency savings, you are already ahead of about one-fourth of the country.

I write about this stuff all the time, but it always astounds me how many Americans are literally living on the edge financially.  Back in 2008 when the economy tanked and millions of people lost their jobs, large numbers of Americans suddenly couldn’t pay their bills because they were living paycheck to paycheck.  Now the stage is set for it to happen again.  Another major recession is going to happen at some point, and when it does millions of people are going to get blindsided by it.

Despite all of our emphasis on education, we never seem to teach our young people how to handle money.  But this is one of the most basic skills that everyone needs.  Personally, I went through high school, college and law school without ever being taught about the dangers of going into debt or the importance of saving money.

If you are ever going to build any wealth, you have got to spend less than you earn.  That is just basic common sense.  Unfortunately, nearly one out of every four Americans does not have even a single penny in emergency savings…

Bankrate’s newly released June Financial Security Index survey indicates that 24 percent of Americans have not saved any money at all for their emergency funds.

This is despite experts recommending that people strive for a savings cushion equivalent to the amount needed to cover three to six months’ worth of expenses.

For years, I have been telling my readers that at a minimum they need to have an emergency fund that can cover at least six months of expenses.  It is great to have more than that, but everyone should strive to have at least a six month cushion.

Unfortunately, that same Bankrate survey found that only 31 percent of Americans actually have such a cushion…

The June survey also found that 31 percent of Americans have what Bankrate considers an ‘adequate’ savings cushion — six or more months’ worth of money to pay expenses — which means that nearly two-thirds of the country isn’t saving enough money.

That means that a whopping 69 percent of all Americans do not have an adequate emergency fund.

So what is going to happen if another great crisis arrives and millions of people suddenly lose their jobs?

Just like last time, mortgage defaults will start soaring and countless numbers of families will lose their homes.

If you do not have anything to fall back on, you can lose your spot in the middle class really fast.  And in the case of a truly catastrophic national crisis, trying to operate without any money at all is going to be exceedingly challenging.

Just recently, the Federal Reserve conducted a survey that discovered that 44 percent of all Americans do not even have enough money “to cover an unexpected $400 expense”.

That is almost half the country.

And a different survey by CareerBuilder found that 75 percent of all Americans have lived paycheck to paycheck “at least some of the time”.

Unfortunately, in a desperate attempt to make ends meet many of us continue to pile up more and more debt.  According to Moneyish, Americans have now accumulated more than a trillion dollars of credit card debt, more than a trillion dollars of student loan debt, and more than a trillion dollars of auto loan debt.

We’ve racked up $1 trillion in credit card debt — and that’s just a fraction of what we owe. That’s according to data released this year from the Federal Reserve, which found that U.S. consumers owe $1.0004 trillion on their cards, up 6.2% from a year ago; this is the highest amount owed since January 2009. What’s more, this isn’t the only consumer debt to top $1 trillion. We now also owe more than $1 trillion for our cars, and for our student loans, the data showed.

Overall, U.S. consumers are now more than 12 trillion dollars in debt.

We often criticize the federal government for being nearly 20 trillion dollars in debt.  And that criticism is definitely valid.  What we are doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.

But are we not doing something similar to ourselves?

When you divide the total amount of consumer debt by the size of the U.S. population, it breaks down to roughly $40,000 for every man, woman and child in our country.

When someone lends you money, you have to pay back more than you originally borrow.  And in the case of high interest debt, you can end up paying back several times what you originally borrowed.

If you carry a balance from month to month on a high interest credit card, it is absolutely crippling you financially.  But many Americans don’t understand this.  Instead, they just keep sending off the “minimum payment” every month because that is the easiest thing to do.

If you ever want to achieve financial freedom, you have got to get rid of your toxic debts.  There are some forms of low interest debt, such as mortgage debt, that are not going to financially cripple you.  But anything with a high rate of interest you will want to pay off as soon as possible.

And everyone needs a financial cushion.  Unless you can guarantee that your life is always going to go super smoothly and you are never going to have any problems, you need an emergency fund to fall back on.

Yes, you may need to make some sacrifices in order to make that happen.  Nobody ever said that it would be easy.  But just about everyone has somewhere that a little “belt tightening” can be done, and in the long-term it will be worth it.

When you don’t have to constantly worry about how you are going to pay the bills next month, it will help you sleep a lot easier at night.  Many of us have put a lot of unnecessary stress on ourselves by spending money that we didn’t have for things that we really didn’t need.

And now is the time to get your financial house in order, because it appears that another major economic downturn is not too far away.

British Media Reporting London Bridge Attacks as 'Crude' Team of Lone Wolves

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

Aren"t you glad to have that giant ocean between you and the nutjobs in Europe?

Three men mowed people down and exited their clowncar on the London Bridge and began knifing people to death -- screaming "this is for Allah" -- and the British media is reporting this as a "team" of lone wolves committing a rather crude, yet heinous, act of terror on the British people. The fellow in the beginning of this clip was rather impressed by the "rapid" response by the British police, only taking 8 fucking minutes to arrive at the scene, where 6 people were murdered, 30 injured.

#LondonAttacks #LondonBridgeAttack British Media reporting terror attack done by a "team" of lone wolves. pic.twitter.com/Mk7QDUga3N

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) June 4, 2017

Multiculturalism is necessary, so that banks can issue credit cards and student loans. Anyone who views this attack as some sort of depraved Islamic orgy of human sacrifice isn"t seeing the profit opportunity of having these pavement apes man factory machinery and bankrupt themselves under a mountain of 35% yielding plastic card bank debt.

Eyewitness accounts

"3 men of Mediterranean colouring"

Is Your Cost Of Living Rising? Why The Elites Aren't Worried About Inflation

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

If you want to understand why we"re fragmenting as a society, start by looking at the asymmetric burdens imposed by inflation.

In our household, we measure real-world inflation with the Burrito Index: How much has the cost of a regular burrito at our favorite taco truck gone up?

The cost of a regular burrito from our local taco truck has gone up from $2.50 in 2001 to $5 in 2010 to $6.50 in 2016.

That’s a $160% increase since 2001: 15 years in which the official inflation rate reports that what $1 bought in 2001 can supposedly be bought with $1.35 today.

My Burrito Index is a rough-and-ready index of real-world inflation. To insure its measure isn’t an outlying aberration, we also need to track the real-world costs of big-ticket items such as college tuition and healthcare insurance. When we do, we observe results of similar magnitude.

Our money is losing its purchasing power much faster than the government would like us to believe.

According to official statistics, inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the dollar by a mere 6% since 2011: barely above 1% a year. We’ve supposedly seen our purchasing power decline by 27% in the 12 years since 2004—an average rate of 2.25% per year.

But our real-world experience tells us the official inflation rate doesn’t reflect the actual cost increases of everything from burritos to healthcare.

The cost of a regular taco was $1.25 in 2010. By official standards, it should cost a dime more. Oops—it’s now $2 each, a 60% increase, six times the official rate.

The cost of a Vietnamese-style sandwich (banh mi) at our favorite Chinatown deli has jumped from $1.50 in 2001 to $2 in 2004 to $3.50 in 2016. That $1.50 increase since 2004 is a 75% jump, roughly triple the official 27% reduction in purchasing power.

So let’s play Devil’s Advocate and suggest that these extraordinary increases are limited to “food purchased away from home,” to use the official jargon for meals purchased at fast-food joints, delis, cafes, microbreweries and restaurants.

Well, how about public university tuition? That’s not something you buy every week like a burrito. Getting out our calculator, we find that the cost for four years of tuition and fees at a public university will set you back about 8,600 burritos. Throw in books (assume the student lives at home, so no on-campus dorm room or food expenses) and other college expenses and you’re up to 10,000 burritos, or $65,000 for the four years at a public university.

University of California at Davis:
2004 in-state tuition $5,684
2015 in state tuition $13,951

That’s an increase of 145% in a time span in which official inflation says tuition in 2015 should have cost 25% more than it did in 2004, i.e. $7,105. Oops—the real world costs are basically double official inflation—a difference of about $30,000 per four-year bachelor’s degree per student.

Here’s my alma mater (and no, you can’t get a degree in surfing, sorry):

University of Hawaii at Manoa:
2004 in-state tuition: $4,487
2016 in-state tuition: $10,872

Sure, some public and private universities offer tuition waivers and financial aid to needy or talented students, but the majority of households/students are on the hook for a big chunk of these costs. And remember that many students are paying living expenses, which doubles the cost of the diploma.

If you think I cherry-picked these two public universities, check out this article.

So the divergence between real-world costs and official inflation isn’t limited to burritos; it’s just as bad in items that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

As for healthcare: feast your eyes on this chart of medical expenses.

According to official inflation calculations, the $12,214 annual medical costs for a family of four in 2005 "should cost" around $15,000 today.

Oops—the actual cost is $25,826, $10,826 higher than official inflation, which adds over $100,000 in cash outlays above and beyond official inflation in the course of a decade.

So let’s add the $30,000 per university student above and beyond inflation for two college students over a decade and the $100,000 in healthcare costs that are above and beyond inflation over that decade, and we get $160,000.

Since deductions for education and healthcare don’t completely wipe out income taxes, the household has to earn close to $200,000 more over the decade to net out the $160,000 to pay typical college and healthcare costs above and beyond what education and healthcare “should cost” if inflation in big-ticket items had actually tracked official inflation.

$100,000 here, $100,000 there and pretty soon you’re talking real money in a nation in which median household income is around $57,000 annually.

So if a household’s income kept up with official inflation over a decade, that household would have to earn at least $20,000 more per year just to keep pace with real-world, big-ticket cost increases.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? If the household’s wages only kept up with inflation, there isn’t another $20,000 a year in additional income needed to pay these soaring big-ticket costs. So the shortfall has to be borrowed, burdening the household with debt and interest payments for decades to come, or the kids don’t attend college and the household goes without healthcare insurance.

Once again, real-world costs have soared at a rate that is almost six times higher than the official rate of inflation.

The reality is real-world inflation in big-ticket essentials is crushing every household that doesn’t qualify for government subsidies of higher education, rent and healthcare.

No wonder the political and financial Elites don"t care about inflation: their incomes have soared far above mere inflation. When you"re skimming millions, who cares about a mere $150,000 for a university education, or $25,000 for healthcare insurance?

Do you reckon the lobbyists for Big Pharma and the rest of the healthcare racket are spending millions lobbying politicians to slash the soaring costs of healthcare? Do you think all the universities collecting billions in government-guaranteed student loans are lobbying politicos to reduce loans to debt-serf students? Sorry, but that"s not how pay-to-play "democracy" works.

In pay-to-play "democracy," the goal is to raise prices without improving service, and have the federal government enforce this racket on powerless debt-serfs.

If you want to understand why we"re fragmenting as a society, start by looking at the asymmetric burdens imposed by inflation. The Elites aren"t worried about inflation because they don"t even feel it. And since they rule to benefit the top 5%, they don"t really care what the bottom 95% are experiencing.

In other words, "Let them eat cake."