Mapping The United States Of Welfare

Via HowMuch.net,

When was the last time you stopped to think about how much the government spends on welfare?

Most people probably don’t think about it too much, but we bet even for those who do, they don’t know how much their government spends, much less what the money actually pays for.

That’s why we created a new map showing you how much each state spends on the public dole.

Source: HowMuch.net

Our viz takes U.S. Census Bureau data from GoBankingRates to create a map for the entire country. Each bubble represents a state, and the size of the bubble corresponds to the size of the public expenditure on public welfare. We then color-coded each circle according to the size of the expense. Shades of blue mean that the state spends relatively little money, but pink and red indicate a higher-than-average amount. There’s a lot that you can quickly learn by breaking mapping public welfare expenses in this war.

First off, what is public welfare? This can be a controversial topic with a lot of stereotypes, so let’s get our definitions straight. If you rely on public welfare, then you turn to the government for help with paying your basic necessities, like food, housing and healthcare. The federal government runs programs that provide these types of things, and to varying degrees, so do some states. As you can clearly see, some places are more generous than others.

California is the obvious standout on the West Coast, dropping north of $100 billion on public assistance. Texas is the only other Western state with over $30 billion of expenditures, followed by Washington at under $12 billion.

There’s a significant cluster of high-spending states across the Northeast, including New York ($61.4B) and Pennsylvania ($26.8B). Florida stands out in the South at over $27B, thanks in large part to its retirement communities. There’s also a cluster of states in the Upper Midwest in light pink, where there a lot of old manufacturing cities.

We should also point out the states with much smaller expenditures, stretching across the Midwest and into the deep South. The simplest explanation for the lack of huge welfare budgets in these states has to do with geography: there just aren’t a lot of big cities in places like Iowa and Alabama compared to other states. This helps explain why California and New York spend so much on welfare. They rank first and fourth as the most populous states.

Here’s a straightforward list of the top ten states with the highest expenditures on public welfare. Note the enormous difference between California and New York and the rest of the country.

1. California - $103 Billion

2. New York - $61.4 Billion 

3. Texas - $35.4 Billion 

4. Florida - $27.2 Billion 

5. Pennsylvania - $26.7 Billion 

6. Illinois - $21 Billion 

7. Ohio - $20 Billion 

8. Massachusetts - $18.6 Billion 

9. New Jersey - $17.3 Billion 

10. Michigan - $16.3 Billion 

Here’s an interesting fact for you. The top ten states listed above spend more on public welfare ($346.9B) than all of the bottom forty states (plus the District of Columbia) combined ($262.7B). 

Regardless of how populated any particular state is, you want to pay attention to these numbers because they foreshadow future budget problems.

When you consider the fact that many states run operating deficits and have enormous debt problems, you begin to wonder if some of these numbers are sustainable for the long term.

National Rents Stall For 4th Month In A Row As Multi-Family Supply Glut Takes Its Toll

After a steady march higher in the wake of the "great recession" nearly a decade ago, a note today from Rent Cafe reveals that average rents in the United States have now stalled for 4 months in row with September"s national average coming in at $1,354 per month, which is virtually flat from the $1,350 average reached in the summer.

National rents have barely moved through the entire peak rental season and into September, marking the longest period of stagnation in recent history — 4 consecutive months. Coming in at $1,354 for the month of September, the average rent is only 2.2 percent higher than this time last year. This is the slowest annual growth rate we’ve seen in more than six years — having reached a high point of 5.5%-5.6% peak growth around two years ago — a pretty good indicator that the rental market has entered calmer waters.

Still, that doesn’t mean rents have flat-lined everywhere. Though nationally and in the most expensive cities for renters prices have finally come to a full stop, there are still some holdouts—and it seems renters in smaller and mid-sized cities are not yet getting a break, on the contrary.

As we pointed out over the summer, just like almost any bubble, stagnating rents are undoubtedly the symptom of a massive, multi-year supply bubble in multi-family housing units sparked by, among other things, cheap borrowing costs for commercial builders.  Per the chart below from Goldman Sachs, multi-family units under construction is now at record highs and have eclipsed the previous bubble peak by nearly 40%.

But, while rents are certainly slowing – and construction is indeed playing its part – the impact isn’t spread evenly across all markets as Rent Cafe notes that the construction boom in Texas has earned the state 6 out of 10 of the worst performing rental markets in the country. 

The anticipated rent drops from Hurricane Harvey have not been realized in the city of Houston, but are seen in other Texas communities, with the biggest changes being outside of Harvey’s reach, as a result of the major apartment construction taking place throughout the state. Lubbock, located on the west side of the state, came in at No. 1 for biggest year-over-year rent decreases in the nation, with rents dropping 3.4 percent since 2016.

Rents for apartments in Round Rock, a suburb outside Austin—another city barely touched by Harvey, dipped to $1,092—3.4 percent below last year’s numbers. Round Rock took the No. 2 spot for biggest rent decreases of the year.

Texas claimed the third spot, too, with McAllen’s 2.6 percent drop in rents since last year, and three other Texas towns—College Station, Waco and Plano—also made the top 10, with decreases of 2.4 percent, 2 percent, and 1.1 percent, respectively. The rest of the list was spread throughout the nation, with California’s Simi Valley taking No. 4 (down 2.6 percent), New Orleans at No. 5 (down 2.4 percent), Manhattan, NYC at No. 8 (down 1.9 percent), and Tulsa, Oklahoma at No. 9 (down 1.5 percent.)

Meanwhile, areas with stronger job markets and/or better overall affordability are still seeing demand growth which, combined with a lack of capital investment, is driving rents considerably higher.

Though smaller and mid-sized towns used to be a haven for renters looking to avoid the sky-high prices of large urban areas, it seems those days are in the past. September’s list of fastest-growing rents is dominated by small and medium-sized towns—many boasting double-digit growth since this time last year.

The Lone Star State’s Odessa and Midland—both hubs of oil and gas activity—came in at the top two spots, with jumps of 24.7 percent and 20.7 percent, respectively. Odessa rents now clock in at $1,060 per month, while Midland’s reach even higher, coming in at $1,225.

The rest of the nation’s fastest-growing rents can be found largely on the West Coast, with California, Washington, Nevada and Colorado taking up the remaining bulk of the list. The only Northeastern cities to see big year-over-year rent growth were Buffalo, New York, with an 11.2 percent jump over 2016, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, which saw rents climb 8.5 percent to $1,187.

Finally, here are the top 10 most and least expensive rental markets in the U.S. at the end of September 2017.  To our complete lack of surprise, New York and California continue to dominate the expensive list while Southern and Midwestern markets continue to provide the best value...perhaps this is why all those domestic migration studies show a mass exodus from the cities on the left to the cities on the right?  Just a hunch...

Who's The Richest Person In Your State?

The United States is known to have many millionaires and billionaires. But, as HowMuch.net details, it turns out that not all states are equal when it comes to the rich and powerful.

Where does your state fall? Take a look at the map below to see the richest person in every state.

Source: HowMuch.net

A photo of the richest person in any given state is superimposed on each state in the map, along with the person’s name and net worth. States are color coded based upon how the richest person in that state attained his or her wealth: red for self-made, blue for inherited and purple for inherited and growing. There is a total of 52 wealthy individuals on the map because there was a tie in two states. The data were collected from Forbes.

An outright majority of the richest people in the states are self-made. Nearly all of the wealthiest people in Western states are self-made, while a more mixed group is found among the richest individuals in Northeastern states. There is also a small trend found in familial ties. The wealthiest person in both Texas and Arkansas – Jim and Alice Walton - are from the family that founded retail giant Wal-Mart. The Mars family, the founders of the Mars candy company, also appears twice on the map; John and Jacqueline Mars in Wyoming and Virginia.

Although the individuals found on the map represent the wealthiest person in each state, the net worth of each person varies to a significant degree. The West Coast – California, Oregon and Washington – is home to some of the wealthiest people in the country. This includes Bill Gates, the wealthiest man in not only the U.S. but the world. The wealthiest person in states with a small population, like Midwestern America states, tend to have a relatively lower net worth compared to larger states. But there are a few notable exceptions, including the world’s third wealthiest man Warren Buffet in sparsely-populated Nebraska.

There are many millionaires and billionaires found throughout the United States. But some states, particularly highly populated states, are home to the ultra-rich, while other states with smaller populations tend to be home to individuals with relatively lower net worth. It appears that the further you go West, the more you find wealthy individuals that are self-made, rather than inheritors of large fortunes.

The Simple Reason Why A Second American Civil War May Be Inevitable

Authored by Daniel Lang via SHTFplan.com,

America has always had its divisions, and Americans have never really been a monolith. We’ve always been a nation of many nations. The culture of New England is different from the culture of the Deep South, which is different from the cultures in the West Coast or the Midwest. People living in the cities have different beliefs than people who live in the countryside. Within those areas, there are ethnic, linguistic, and religious enclaves. It’s always kind of been like that (probably to a lesser degree in the past), and somehow we’ve been able to find enough common ground to keep this country together for more than a century.

However, something has changed. You can feel it in the air. Our nation has clearly never been this divided since the Civil War. A lot of people noticed it after the last election, but the truth is that these divisions have been deepening for decades, and they’re just now reaching a very noticeable breaking point. That’s obvious enough when you look at how the left and the right have been going at each other. It used to be a war of words, but it’s turning into something very dark.

Consider what happened last week in Berkeley after Trump supporters and counter protesters clashed for the third time. 21 people were arrested and 11 were injured (that we know of), six of who had to be taken to the hospital. At least one person was stabbed. The police confiscated confiscated knives, stun guns, and poles. One Trump supporter admitted to being surrounded, pepper sprayed, and beaten with sticks by a mob of “protesters.”

But wait, that’s not the dark part. After these groups clashed, the leftist protesters took to Reddit and admitted that they lost this particular battle (I can’t believe I’m using the word “battle” to describe it), and that it was time for them to attain more combat training and better weapons, including firearms.

Do you see what’s going on here? Conservative demonstrations, which used to be placid affairs (remember the Tea Party protests?) are now turning violent as conservatives grow tired of restraining themselves, and are no longer afraid to hit back. Liberal demonstrators are responding by ratcheting up the level of force that they’re going to bring to the next street battle. It’s a tit for tat that keeps escalating, and I shudder to think of where it’s going to end up.

Honestly, I think we’re in the early stages of a second civil war. I can’t say what it’ll look like precisely, but I can tell you that our nation is on this path, and it’s not clear how we can get off of it. In fact, I fear that it may be inevitable, and there’s a very simple reason why.

It’s because Americans have been self-sorting themselves along geographic and political lines for a long time. A book titled “The Big Sort” made light of this trend back in 2008.

Basically what’s going on, is that Americans are moving to communities that align more with their politics. Liberals are moving to liberal areas, and conservatives are moving to conservative communities. It’s been going on for decades. When Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976, 26.8% of Americans lived in landslide counties; that is counties where the president won or lost by 20% of the vote.

By 2004, 48.3% of the population lived in these counties. This trend continues to worsen. As Americans move to their preferred geographic bubbles, they face less exposure to opposing viewpoints, and their own opinions become more extreme. This trend is at the heart of why politics have become so polarizing in America.

We’re also seeing the same trend emerge online with social media. Despite the fact that the internet allows us to be exposed to more opinions that ever before, people choose to follow online voices that they already agree with. They’re slipping into digital bubbles that are comparable to their geographic bubbles.

This trend is irreversible as far as I can tell. That’s because it’s tied to innovation. As our country became more interconnected with roads and Americans gained more mobility, we chose to move to like-minded places. We’re given the internet, the greatest source of information in human history, and we use it to seek out only the information that reinforces our current beliefs.

We’re self-sorting at every level. Because of this, Americans are only going to grow more extreme in their beliefs, and see people on the other side of the political spectrum as more alien.

You can see how this is creating the perfect breeding ground for a real, physical war. The polarization makes it easier to dehumanize the other side. The self-sorting creates definable geographic boundaries that are necessary for a war. It spawns two sides with beliefs that are so divergent, that they cannot coexist.

We’re becoming two distinct nations with two competing visions for what the country should be. Two visions that are diametrically opposed. We used to be a nation of many nations that was held together, because there was still some common ground on what it means to be an American above all else. Now we can’t even agree on that.

Once the last shreds of common ground and understanding dissipate, a moment that is rapidly approaching, another civil war will be impossible to avoid. I wish I knew what the solution is, but I don’t. All I can say is, unless Americans go out of their way to listen to people on other side, whatever that side may be, there’s going to be a lot of blood in the streets.

Scientists Warn That The Coming California Megaquake Could Plunge Large Portions Of The State Into The Ocean

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Over the years, many people have been shown that someday a giant earthquake will cause significant portions of California to fall into the ocean. But up until now, most scientists have disputed the idea that this could ever actually happen. Well, now all of that has changed. According to a brand new study, a megaquake along the west coast “could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly”. In fact, the researchers that conducted this study say that it is almost certain to happen eventually. Of course they probably don’t believe that such an event is imminent or else they would be moving out of the state like so many other people are.

When I came across news stories about this brand new study I was absolutely astounded. Here is a short excerpt from one of them…

The Big One may be overdue to hit California, but scientists near LA have found a new risk for the area during a major earthquake.

They claim that if a major tremor hits the area, it could plunge large parts of California into the sea almost instantly.

The discovery was made after studying the Newport-Inglewood fault, which has long been believed to be one of Southern California’s danger zones.

Could you imagine what such a catastrophe would do to our nation and how many lives would be lost if that were to happen today?

According to the study, a California megaquake would potentially cause some sections of southern California to suddenly drop by as much as 3 feet, and that could result in vast stretches of land “ending up at or below sea level”…

In total three quakes over the last 2,000 years on nearby faults made ground just outside Los Angeles city limits sink as much as 3ft.

Today that could result in the area ending up at or below sea level, said Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, who worked with the paper´s lead author, graduate student Robert Leeper.

Wow.

And we are not talking about something that would happen over a period of weeks or months. According to these scientists, it would be a “very rapid sinking”…

“It’s not just a gradual sinking. This is boom — it would drop. It’s very rapid sinking,” Robert Leeper, lead author of a new study published in Nature, carried out with the help of the US Geological Survey, told the LA Times.

So could a substantial portion of southern California someday actually slide into the ocean like we see in the movies?

The scientists that were involved in this study say that the answer is yes…

Cal State Fullerton professor Matt Kirby, who worked with the Leeper on the study, said the sinking would occur quickly and likely result in part of California being covered by the sea.

“It’s something that would happen relatively instantaneously,” Prof Kirby said. “Probably today if it happened, you would see seawater rushing in.”

Let us hope that we have as much time as possible before anything like this actually happens. But scientists are also telling us that a tremendous amount of seismic tension has built up in southern California, and that this tension could cause a major earthquake at any time. In fact, in my recent article about why people are moving out of California, I included a quote from an ABC Los Angeles story about how researchers are warning that a major earthquake in southern California is “way overdue”…

A recently published study reveals new evidence that a major earthquake is way overdue on a 100 mile stretch of the San Andreas Fault from the Antelope Valley to the Tejon Pass and beyond.

Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey released the results of the years-long study warning a major earthquake could strike soon.

Today, more than 38 million people live in the state of California, and as a population density map of the state shows, much of the population is concentrated along the coastline…

So if large sections of the California coast did end up plunging into the ocean, what would the death toll be?

Would it be in the millions?

And what would such a disaster mean for the rest of the country?

The west coast of the United States sits along “the Ring of Fire”. Roughly encircling the Pacific Ocean, this vast seismic zone contains approximately 75 percent of the active volcanoes in the world and it produces more than 80 percent of all major earthquakes.

In other words, anyone that lives near the Ring of Fire would be foolish to assume that they are immune from massive natural disasters.

In 2011, a major earthquake along the Ring of Fire on the other side of the Pacific Ocean caused a massive tsunami to wash inland in Japan for many, many miles.

If such a thing were to happen in Los Angeles or San Francisco, the death and destruction would be on a scale that would be absolutely unimaginable.

When the big Hollywood film entitled “San Andreas” came out in 2015, a lot of people mocked the idea that the things portrayed in that film could ever happen in real life.

But now scientists are telling us that a megaquake could cause large portions of California to plunge into the ocean and that it is quite likely that this will actually happen someday.

Detroit 'Wins' Award For Most Unhealthy City In The U.S.; Here's Where Your City Ranks

A couple of years ago, in the midst of its bankruptcy proceedings, we posted a series of stunning pictures illustrating the "Death And Decay Of Detroit."  Once a beacon of America"s manufacturing prowess, a series of time lapsed pictures revealed how, in just a few years following the "great recession" of 2008, the once vibrant metropolis became the poster child for urban decay. 

Unfortunately, at least according to a new study from WalletHub, Detroit"s crumbling commercial and residential infrastructure isn"t the only thing deteriorating rapidly in "America"s Comeback City."  The study, which ranks America"s 150 largest cities based on overall health, pegged Detroit "dead" last. 

Of course, in many ways, the map of America"s most healthy cities mimics an electoral college map with the Northeast and West Coast ranking generally more healthy while residents of the Southeast and Texas suffered the consequences of their love for fried foods.

Meanwhile, the map of "least healthy" cities is pretty much the inverse of the following map of the "fattest" cities.

Among other things, the health of America"s metropolitan areas was ranked by the prevalence of obese residents and access and health and wellness facilities at reasonable costs.

To reach their findings, WalletHub graded each city using 34 categories as metrics along with a specific weight for each category. The categories were split among four groups that accounted for 25 points each: health care, food, fitness, and green space. The higher the score, the healthier the city.

Categories considered in the study included mental health counselors per capita, cost of medical visit, and quality of public hospitals for health care; healthy restaurants per capita, share of obese residents, and produce consumption for categories under food; fitness clubs per capita, weight loss centers per capital, and share of residents who engage in any physical activity for categories in fitness; and quality of parks, bike score, and walking trails per capita among the categories for green space.

And here are your top and bottom 10 most/least healthy cities.  Unsurprisingly, the health conscious, liberal bastions of California dominate the most healthy cities while Texas and the Southeast dominated the least healthy cities.

Apparently people in CA, OR and WA love to eat their fruits and vegetables while the folks of LA, AL, MS and AR are still looking for a viable way to deep fry their strawberries before partaking.

But, keep you head up Detroit...we"re sure things will turn around for you at some point.

New Radiation Level at Fukushima Dwarfs the Highest Peak at Chernobyl

The Fukushima Disaster

We noted a few days after the Japanese earthquake that the amount of radioactive fuel at Fukushima dwarfs that at Chernobyl … and that the cesium fallout from Fukushima already rivaled Chernobyl (we also noted that Fukushima radiation could end up on the West Coast of North America. And see this.).

The next month, we pointed out that Tepco admitted that the radiation from Fukushima could exceed that from Chernobyl.

And that Fukushima’s reactors had actually suffered something much worse than a total meltdown: nuclear melt-throughs, where the nuclear fuel melted through the containment vessels and into the ground.   A few months later, we reported that radiation will pollute the area around Chernobyl for 5 to 10 times longer than models predicted – between 180 and 320 years.

The following year, we pointed out that the operator of the Fukushima plant admitted that they couldn’t find the  melted fuel from Fukushima reactor number 2 … and that the technology doesn’t yet even exist to clean up Fukushima.

Highest Radiation Level At Fukushima Now Dwarfs That At Chernobyl

The highest radiation levels ever measured at Chernobyl were 300 sieverts per hour … an incomprehensibly high dose which can kill a man almost instantly.

To put this in perspective, radiation is usually measured in thousandths of a sievert, called millisieverts. For example, most people receive around 2.4 millisieverts per year from background radiation, or only 0.0002739726 per hour.

But a radiation level of 530 sieverts per hour has just been measured at Fukushima’s number 2 reactor.

This new record at Fukushima is 70% higher than that of Chernobyl. (The highest level previously measured at Fukushima was 73 sieverts per hour, in March 2012.)

Postscript: For background on how this could have happened, see this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

Why Are Wal-Mart, Boeing, & Lowe's Laying Off Workers If The U.S. Economy Is In Such Great Shape?

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The stock market has been on quite a roll in recent weeks, but signs of trouble continue to plague the real economy.  Earlier this week, I talked about the “retail apocalypse” that is sweeping America.  Major retail chains such as Sears and Macy’s are closing stores and laying off workers, but I didn’t think that Wal-Mart would be feeling the pain as well.  Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening.  USA Today is reporting that approximately 1,000 jobs will be cut at Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas by the end of this month…

Walmart’s plan to lay off of hundreds of employees is the latest ripple in a wave of job cuts and store closures that are roiling the retail industry.

The world’s largest retailer is cutting roughly 1,000 jobs at its corporate headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., later this month, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak about it.

The company is saying that these cuts are necessary because Wal-Mart is always “looking for ways to operate more efficiently and effectively“.  But something doesn’t smell right here.  You don’t get rid of 1,000 employees at your corporate headquarters if everything is just fine.

I have driven past Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville a number of times, and it is in a beautiful part of the country.  Bentonville and the surrounding areas had been booming, but it looks like times may be changing.

And today Lowe"s...

Lowe’s is changing its store staffing model and will lay off “less than 1%” of its employees soon.

Lowe"s has over 285,000 workers.

Meanwhile, there are signs of trouble out on the west coast as well.  The Los Angeles Times is reporting that there is going to be a new round of engineering job cuts at Boeing…

Boeing Co. has internally announced a new round of employee buyouts for engineers companywide, including in Southern California, and warned that layoff notices will follow later this month to engineers in Washington state, where the company has a large presence.

Management did not cite a target for the number of projected job cuts.

The news comes after company Vice Chairman Ray Conner and the new chief executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, or BCA, Kevin McAllister, warned in December of the need to aim for further cuts in 2017.

And according to Boeing spokesperson Doug Alder, similar job cut announcements are coming for other classes of workers as well.

So why is Boeing getting rid of so many employees?

Well, the truth is that Boeing’s business is way down.  The following comes from Wolf Richter…

Business has been tough. In 2016, deliveries fell by 14 jets from a year ago, to 748. Net orders dropped 13% from an already rotten level in 2015, to just 668, down 53% from 2014. And the lowest level since 2010!

When the economy is doing well, air traffic tends to rise, and when the economy is doing poorly it tends to go down.

Needless to say, the fact that Boeing is doing so poorly does not bode well for the future.

In addition to Wal-Mart, another major retailer that is letting people go is Petco…

Petco is cutting 180 positions with about 50 at its San Diego headquarters, the pet supply retailer confirmed Wednesday.

The company made the cuts across its workforce and include both existing and open positions.

Petco has about 650 workers at its headquarters in Rancho Bernardo. It employs 27,000 in the U.S.

My wife and I have three cats, and even though Petco tends to be a bit overpriced we have always appreciated the work that they do.

Unfortunately, when the economy gets tough spending on pets tends to be one of the first things to get cut back, and this current trouble at Petco could be a sign that rough sledding is ahead for the entire economy.

Of course your personal perspective on these things is likely to be very heavily influenced by your immediate surroundings.  Those that live in wealthy enclaves of major cities such as San Francisco, New York City or Washington D.C. may be wondering how anyone could possibly be talking about economic trouble right now.

But if you live in economically depressed areas of Appalachia or the upper Midwest, it may seem like the last economic recession never even ended.

There have been pockets of economic prosperity in recent years, and this has resulted in some people becoming exceedingly wealthy.  Meanwhile, things have just continued to become even tougher for millions of other families as the cost of living always seems to grow faster than their paychecks do.

If you are in the top one percent of all income earners, maybe to you it seems like things have never been better.  But most of the country is living paycheck to paycheck and is just struggling to survive from month to month.  The following comes from CNN…

The rich are money-making machines. Today, the top mega wealthy — the top 1% — earn an average of $1.3 million a year. It’s more than three times as much as the 1980s, when the rich “only” made $428,000, on average, according to economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the American population earned an average of $16,000 in pre-tax income in 1980. That hasn’t changed in over three decades.

The workers being laid off at the companies discussed above are real people with real hopes and real dreams.  Perhaps many of them will be able to land other employment fairly soon, but the truth is that the job market is really tough in many areas of the country right now.

Finding a good job that will allow you to pay the bills and support your family is not easy.  You may find that out the hard way if you end up losing your current job during the economic troubles that will come in 2017.

Earlier today, I came across an excellent article by Gail Tverberg that detailed a whole bunch of reasons why a significant economic downturn appears to be imminent in 2017.  If you would like to read it, you can find it here.  She points to many of the same things that I have been pointing to for a very long time.

Even though economic conditions were fairly stable throughout 2016, our long-term problems just continued to get even worse.  So the truth is that we are more primed for a major crisis today than we have been at any point since the last recession.

My hope is that things will not be nearly as bad in 2017 as Gail Tverberg and others are projecting that they could be, but the warning signs are definitely there, and it isn’t going to take much to push the U.S. economy off the rails.

At What Age Do You Outgrow IKEA?

By Priceonomics

If you’re a twenty something, it may already have happened: that awkward moment when you realize all your friends have the same Pinsoshen coffee table from IKEA. 

The Swedish brand’s reputation for stocking stylish furniture and selling it for low prices has made it a one-stop shop for cash-strapped students furnishing their first apartments. 

But when do they leave IKEA behind in favor of something more grown-up? We wanted to find out, so we analyzed data from Earnest , a Priceonomics customer. We analyzed a dataset of more than 10,000 anonymous user responses on spending habits. When does it begin? When does it end? And where do people turn when they’re ready for something new? 

We first wanted to know how reliance on IKEA changes over a person’s lifetime, so we calculated the percent of our clients who shopped at IKEA. For the sake of comparison, we did the same for Lowe’s, a home improvement chain with similar overall popularity within our dataset.

As it turns out, age 34 is when you start to outgrow IKEA:

Data source: Earnest

It’s written in the data: you’re more likely to buy from IKEA when you’re 24 than at any other time in your life. IKEA remains popular throughout the late 20s and early 30s, but drops after age 34. We may as well call the 10-year period spanning the mid-20s and mid-30s the “IKEA decade.”

Lowe’s, meanwhile, shows the opposite trend: people are more likely to shop there as they get older. This makes sense, as increasing homeownership means more home improvement projects.

We wanted to further explore where shoppers turn once they grow out of their IKEA interiors. For each of 14 top furniture retailers, we found the age when the most respondents reported shopping at that store. We tabulated those “peak customer ages” below.

Data source:  Earnest

Not only is IKEA popular among young adults, it is the only retailer with a peak customer age below 30. 

People in their 30s are more likely to shop stores that specialize in housewares and home accessories like Bed Bath & Beyond and Williams-Sonoma - perhaps because their IKEA furniture is still serving them well. 

The oldest customers in our dataset prefer to do it themselves, favoring Home Depot and Lowe’s. When buying ready-to-use furniture, they visit big-box retailers like Ashley Furniture.

Beyond age, we were curious about which personal attributes predict furniture retailer preference. We calculated the percent of men and women in our sample claiming to shop each brand.

Data source:  Earnest

By and large, men and women visit the same stores when they go furniture shopping. And they visit IKEA in particularly even numbers. But do-it-yourself stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s are visited by men more often than women, and women visit most of the other stores we considered in greater numbers than men.

Does geographic location influence retailer preference? We next looked at the percent of respondents from each state who identified themselves as IKEA shoppers. Results are listed below for all states for which we had at least 10 respondents.

Data source:  Earnest

The Swedish brand began its North American expansion in the mid-Atlantic states, and this region still has the most IKEA brick-and-mortars. But it doesn’t lay claim to the most shoppers; that distinction goes to the Midwest and West Coast, which are home to the top 8 states.

This ranking is curiously uncorrelated to a listing of IKEA’s store locations. The top 4 states have just one store apiece. The popularity of IKEA in the west may have less to do with store ubiquity and more to do with lifestyle attributes that make the brand a natural fit.