Extreme Poverty Is Now At Record Levels ...

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme povertythan they have ever measured before.  In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the “very poor” soared to heights never seen previously.  Back in 1993 and back in 2009, the rate of extreme poverty was just over 6 percent, and that represented the worst numbers on record.  But in 2010, the rate of extreme poverty hit a whopping 6.7 percent.  That means that one out of every 15 Americans is now considered to be “very poor”.  For many people, this is all very confusing because their guts are telling them that things are getting worse and yet the mainstream media keeps telling them that everything is just fine.  Hopefully this article will help people realize that the plight of the poorest of the poor continues to deteriorate all across the United States.  In addition, hopefully this article will inspire many of you to lend a hand to those that are truly in need.

Tonight, there are more than 20 million Americans that are living in extreme poverty.  This number increases a little bit more every single day.  The following statistics that were mentioned in an article in The Daily Mail should be very sobering for all of us….

About 20.5 million Americans, or 6.7 percent of the U.S. population, make up the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 per cent or less of the official poverty level.

Those living in deep poverty represent nearly half of the 46.2 million people scraping by below the poverty line. In 2010, the poorest poor meant an income of $5,570 or less for an individual and $11,157 for a family of four.

That 6.7 percent share is the highest in the 35 years that the Census Bureau has maintained such records, surpassing previous highs in 2009 and 1993 of just over 6 percent.

Sadly, the wealthy and the poor are being increasingly segregated all over the nation.  In some areas of the U.S. you would never even know that the economy was having trouble, and other areas resemble third world hellholes.  In most U.S. cities today, there are the “good neighborhoods” and there are the “bad neighborhoods”.

According to a recent Bloomberg article, the “very poor” are increasingly being pushed into these “bad neighborhoods”….

At least 2.2 million more Americans, a 33 percent jump since 2000, live in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is 40 percent or higher, according to a study released today by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Of course they don’t have much of a choice.  They can’t afford to live where most of the rest of us do.

Today, there are many Americans that openly look down on the poor, but that should never be the case.  We should love the poor and want to see them lifted up to a better place.  The truth is that with a few bad breaks any of us could end up in the ranks of the poor.  Compassion is a virtue that all of us should seek to develop.

Not only that, but the less poor people and the less unemployed people we have, the better it is for our economy.  When as many people as possible in a nation are working and doing something economically productive, that maximizes the level of true wealth that a nation is creating.

But today we are losing out on a massive amount of wealth.  We have tens of millions of people that are sitting at home on their couches.  Instead of creating something of economic value, the rest of us have to support them financially.  That is not what any of us should want.

It is absolutely imperative that we get as many Americans back to work as possible.  The more people that are doing something economically productive, the more wealth there will be for all of us.

That is why it is so alarming that the ranks of the “very poor” are increasing so dramatically.  When the number of poor people goes up, the entire society suffers.

So just how bad are things right now?

The following are 19 statistics about the poor that will absolutely astound you….

#1 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of “very poor” rose in 300 out of the 360 largest metropolitan areas during 2010.

#2 Last year, 2.6 million more Americans descended into poverty.  That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

#3 It isn’t just the ranks of the “very poor” that are rising.  The number of those just considered to be “poor” is rapidly increasing as well.  Back in the year 2000, 11.3% of all Americans were living in poverty.  Today, 15.1% of all Americans are living in poverty.

#4 The poverty rate for children living in the United States increased to 22% in 2010.

#5 There are 314 counties in the United States where at least 30% of the children are facing food insecurity.

#6 In Washington D.C., the “child food insecurity rate” is 32.3%.

#7 More than 20 million U.S. children rely on school meal programs to keep from going hungry.

#8 One out of every six elderly Americans now lives below the federal poverty line.

#9 Today, there are over 45 million Americans on food stamps.

#10 According to the Wall Street Journal,nearly 15 percent of all Americans are now on food stamps.

#11 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

#12 The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.

#13 We are told that the economy is recovering, but the number of Americans on food stamps has grown by another 8 percent over the past year.

#14 Right now, one out of every four American children is on food stamps.

#15 It is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives before they reach the age of 18.

#16 More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid.  Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.  Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.

#17 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one government anti-poverty program.

#18 The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46%since 2006.

#19 It is estimated that up to half a million children may currently be homeless in the United States.

Sadly, we don’t hear much about this on the nightly news, do we?

This is because the mainstream media is very tightly controlled.

I came across a beautiful illustration of this recently.  If you do not believe that the news in America is scripted, just watch this video starting at the 1:15 mark.  Conan O’Brien does a beautiful job of demonstrating how news anchors all over the United States are often repeating the exact same words.

So don’t rely on the mainstream media to tell you everything.

In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all think for ourselves.

It is also absolutely imperative that we have compassion on our brothers and sisters.

Winter is coming up, and if you see someone that does not have a coat, don’t be afraid to offer to give them one.

All over the United States (and all around the world), there are orphans that are desperately hurting.  As you celebrate the good things that you have during this time of the year, don’t forget to remember them.

We should not expect that “the government” will take care of everyone that is hurting.

The reality is that millions of people fall through the “safety net”.

Being generous and being compassionate are qualities that all of us should have.

Yes, times are going to get harder and an economic collapse is coming.

That just means that we should be more generous and more compassionate than we have ever been before.

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Suicide Of America: Importing Endless Poverty ...

Suicide of a Superpower, A Book Review, Part 4

In his new book reporting on the imminent decline of America, Suicide of a Superpower, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote a chronology as to how and why America might not survive another 20 years. We may be hard pressed to make it through the next nine years to 2020.

Quite often, when I write about legal and illegal immigration, an angry Mexican living in California, who calls himself Subcomandante Pedro, MeCha Brown Berets Infiltration Brigades, La Alta, CA, Aztlan, otherwise known as Dominick Perez, tells me how fast his Mexican forces are taking over America by sheer birth rates. One look at the gangs, violence and breakdown in Los Angeles validates his charges. His scathing letters to me exemplify President Teddy Roosevelt’s greatest statement:

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities and languages.”

As you can see from this letter by Pedro, Roosevelt hit the nail on the head and we are well along the path of our own demise. Subcomandante Pedro mocks Americans, while, at the same time, his kids use our free lunch programs, ESL programs, schools, medical care and other welfare freebees. He agreed with part three of this book review of Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower:

“Kudos Mr. Frosty, Kudos!” said Pedro. “You hit the nail right on the head, especially the point you made about how most Americans are fat and lazy. If that ain’t the truth I don’t know what is! Perhaps that’s the reason why so many of us are allowed in here, to do the work your fellow gringos are too fat and lazy to do! I would also add that most Crackers are craven cowards. Do you think we would let you gringos come down to Mexico and take over without a shot? Hell no! We’d cut your heads off! We’re real men!

“The solutions Buchanan calls for will never happen. It’s far too late to save yourselves from the mess you allowed to be created. It is you, the American people, who continually vote our benefactors back into office over and over and over again. (Examples: Senators Harry Reid, John McCain, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Mark Udall, Mike Bennet, Charles Schumer, etc.) Now you must deal with the repercussions of your foolish actions. Maybe if there were more real men in this country, things would be different. I can almost sympathize with you. I don’t give a sh*t about this country, I’m just here to suck as much out of this bloated b*tch as I can before the collapse comes. And there are millions more here just like me! (Illegals and legal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers $346 billion annually across 15 federal welfare agencies; source:www.thesocialcontract.com with economist Edwin Rubenstein’s report) On the bright side, at least we don’t want to convert you all to Islam. Have you been to Dearbornistan lately?

He refers to Dearborn, Michigan an Islamic beachhead in America where 300,000 Muslim immigrants have now made that area a little Bagdad with honor killings, female genital mutilation, arranged marriages and women’s rights degraded back to the Dark Ages.

Buchanan says it all, “We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited — the best and greatest country on earth.”

Pedro continued, “Muslims in 21st Century America–Home Grown Terrorism, Mr. Frosty, this piece really speaks to the fact that you craven honkeys are too weak and decadent and you really don’t deserve this country. After all, Whitey is so blinded by Political Correctness and Liberalism that he cannot see the mortal danger presented by Islam. Truly pathetic! Don’t worry, the proud bronzed peoples suffer no such illusions. When we rise to power in this sh*thole of a nation, you can be sure that we will cut off their (blank) and feed them to them. We despise these sand camels even more than we do Whitey. You have my word on that.

“Have you heard about the humane bill the Honorable Luis Guiterrez of Illinois is spearheading with the full support of “your” President? Once this bill is passed and enshrined into law, our reconquista will be all but assured. God Bless America and her cowardly White citizens! We couldn’t have done it without you.”

Suicide of a Superpower, A Book Review, Part 4

In his new book reporting on the imminent decline of America, Suicide of a Superpower, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan wrote a chronology as to how and why America might not survive another 20 years. We may be hard pressed to make it through the next nine years to 2020.

Quite often, when I write about legal and illegal immigration, an angry Mexican living in California, who calls himself Subcomandante Pedro, MeCha Brown Berets Infiltration Brigades, La Alta, CA, Aztlan, otherwise known as Dominick Perez, tells me how fast his Mexican forces are taking over America by sheer birth rates. One look at the gangs, violence and breakdown in Los Angeles validates his charges. His scathing letters to me exemplify President Teddy Roosevelt’s greatest statement:

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities and languages.”

As you can see from this letter by Pedro, Roosevelt hit the nail on the head and we are well along the path of our own demise. Subcomandante Pedro mocks Americans, while, at the same time, his kids use our free lunch programs, ESL programs, schools, medical care and other welfare freebees. He agreed with part three of this book review of Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower:

“Kudos Mr. Frosty, Kudos!” said Pedro. “You hit the nail right on the head, especially the point you made about how most Americans are fat and lazy. If that ain’t the truth I don’t know what is! Perhaps that’s the reason why so many of us are allowed in here, to do the work your fellow gringos are too fat and lazy to do! I would also add that most Crackers are craven cowards. Do you think we would let you gringos come down to Mexico and take over without a shot? Hell no! We’d cut your heads off! We’re real men!

“The solutions Buchanan calls for will never happen. It’s far too late to save yourselves from the mess you allowed to be created. It is you, the American people, who continually vote our benefactors back into office over and over and over again. (Examples: Senators Harry Reid, John McCain, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Mark Udall, Mike Bennet, Charles Schumer, etc.) Now you must deal with the repercussions of your foolish actions. Maybe if there were more real men in this country, things would be different. I can almost sympathize with you. I don’t give a sh*t about this country, I’m just here to suck as much out of this bloated b*tch as I can before the collapse comes. And there are millions more here just like me! (Illegals and legal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers $346 billion annually across 15 federal welfare agencies; source:www.thesocialcontract.com with economist Edwin Rubenstein’s report) On the bright side, at least we don’t want to convert you all to Islam. Have you been to Dearbornistan lately?

He refers to Dearborn, Michigan an Islamic beachhead in America where 300,000 Muslim immigrants have now made that area a little Bagdad with honor killings, female genital mutilation, arranged marriages and women’s rights degraded back to the Dark Ages.

Buchanan says it all, “We are trying to create a nation that has never before existed, of all the races, tribes, cultures and creeds of Earth, where all are equal. In this utopian drive for the perfect society of our dreams we are killing the real country we inherited — the best and greatest country on earth.”

Pedro continued, “Muslims in 21st Century America–Home Grown Terrorism, Mr. Frosty, this piece really speaks to the fact that you craven honkeys are too weak and decadent and you really don’t deserve this country. After all, Whitey is so blinded by Political Correctness and Liberalism that he cannot see the mortal danger presented by Islam. Truly pathetic! Don’t worry, the proud bronzed peoples suffer no such illusions. When we rise to power in this sh*thole of a nation, you can be sure that we will cut off their (blank) and feed them to them. We despise these sand camels even more than we do Whitey. You have my word on that.

“Have you heard about the humane bill the Honorable Luis Guiterrez of Illinois is spearheading with the full support of “your” President? Once this bill is passed and enshrined into law, our reconquista will be all but assured. God Bless America and her cowardly White citizens! We couldn’t have done it without you.”

Read More

The New Reality For U.S. Cities: No Money For Street Lights, Roving Packs Of Wild Dogs And Open-Air Drug Markets ..

If you want to know what the early stages of an economic collapse look like, just walk around some of the downtown areas of our major cities.  Today, nearly all large U.S. cities are either flat broke or they are on the way to being flat broke.  Yes, New York City and Washington D.C. (and a few others) are still doing fairly well, but for most U.S. cities economic reality is catching up with them very quickly.  Right now, there are a number of major cities that are so broke that they cannot keep the street lights operating.  Down in St. Louis, parents in some areas are carrying golf clubs with them as they walk their kids to school in order to fend off roving packs of wild dogs.  In other major U.S. cities, open-air drug markets conduct business without fear.  All over the United States, cities that used to be clean and prosperous and full of hope are now being transformed into post-industrial wastelands.  We are certainly not in “Mad Max” territory yet, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see where all of this is headed.

I have previously written about how Detroit is literally coming apart at the seams.  Well, now in many areas of the city they can’t even keep the street lights on anymore.  There simply is not enough money, and even if there was, thieves are stealing the copper wiring out of the street lights faster than the city can repair them.

At this point, there are some neighborhoods in Detroit where up to 50 percent of the street lights are not functioning.

The following is from a recent article in The Detroit News about this crisis….

The war to keep the lights on in Detroit is a serious one. Thieves, antiquated equipment and a lack of funding have made it impossible for city officials to catch up to the problem.

City officials estimate 15-20 percent of the 88,000 lights in the Motor City are not working, and they acknowledge that figure could be as high as 50 percent in some neighborhoods.

But it is not just Detroit that is having a major problem.  Over in Highland Park, Michigan the majority of the street lights have been repossessed because the city was not keeping up with the electricity bill.

So what are residents of Highland Park supposed to do?

Are they supposed to lock themselves in their own homes at night?

In Fresno, California the theft of copper wire from street lights has become a total nightmare.  At this point, the loss of copper wire and the cost of repairing the street lights is costing Fresno about $50,000 a month.  So far, approximately 2,500 street lights have been stripped of their wiring.

Down in St. Louis they are having a different problem.  In some of the worst areas of the city, roving packs of wild dogs are a serious threat to children that are walking to school.

A recent report by the local CBS affiliate in St. Louis described the situation this way….

…Lewis Reed is sounding the alarm. “I’ve witnessed packs of dogs, 10 and 15 dogs running together, and I’ve seen all these dogs I’m talking about they don’t have collars, they don’t have tags, these are truly wild dogs,” he said.

Reed says stray dogs are terrorizing the north side. “It’s obscene that parents have to walk their kids to school, in some parts of the city, with a golf club to fend off wild dogs.”

Can you imagine that?

They say that they are going to try to put more money into animal control efforts if they can find it.  But like most major U.S. cities, St. Louis is a financial basket case.

Moving west a bit, Las Vegas is a different kind of a problem.  It was once a mighty symbol of American luxury and decadence, but now it is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with our economy.

The following description of the decline of Las Vegas comes from a recent article in The Telegraph….

But Las Vegas’s days as a boom town are long gone. At 14 percent, unemployment is the highest inAmerica (the national average is 9.1 per cent). House prices have fallen 58.1 per cent since their 2006 high – the biggest losses of anywhere in America, while according to the website RealtyTrac, which specialises in foreclosed properties, Las Vegas is the nation’s foreclosure capital. Some 70 per cent of homes in Las Vegas are thought to be ‘under water’, or in negative equity, meaning their value is worth less than the amount owed on the mortgage, while foreclosure notices have been served on one in 16 properties. A survey last year by the local Las Vegas Review-Journal and Channel 8 News Now found that 34 per cent of locals would leave Las Vegas if they could find a job elsewhere, or if they weren’t underwater on their home loan.

Last year, I wrote a piece entitled “The Death of Las Vegas“.  Since then, things have gotten even worse for the city in many ways.

Today, there are hundreds of people living in the tunnels underneath the streets of Las Vegas.  You can see CNN video of some of these people right here.

But at least the “tunnel people” have a “roof” over their heads.

Over in “Lost Angeles”, homelessness is absolutely exploding and there are thousands of people living in the streets.

The following is from a recent article by Nick Allen….

In Skid Row, a grimy pocket of downtown Los Angeles, the prostrate forms of homeless people lie strewn across the pavements.

The lucky ones have tents for shelter but others make do with a sliver of cardboard for a bed and a supermarket trolley to carry their rags.

At the last police count 1,662 people live on these streets, twice as many as a year ago.

And now amid the drug addicts and the drunks there are families who not so long ago had homes and ordinary suburban lives.

Wait, wasn’t the economy supposed to be getting better?

So why has the number of people living on Skid Row doubled over the past year?

Los Angeles, like much of California, is rapidly falling apart.  Decades of very foolish policies have turned the “California Dream” into the “California Nightmare“.

Unemployment is rampant, crime is seemingly everywhere and the gangs appear to be getting bolder by the day.  For example, 21 machine guns were recently stolen right out of an LAPD training facility.

But there are cities in California that are in even worse shape than Los Angeles is.  If you go east of Los Angeles about 100 miles, you will come to the city of San Bernardino.  34.6 percent of the residents of San Bernardino are currently living below the poverty line.  Among major U.S. cities, only Detroit has a worsepoverty rate.

Heading back to the east coast, the city of Camden, New Jersey is representative of the post-industrial hellholes that you will find all over the mid-Atlantic region and up into New England.

In an extraordinary article entitled “City of Ruins“, Chris Hedges did an amazing job of documenting how bad things have gotten in Camden.  Today it is estimated that the actual rate of unemployment in Camden is somewhere around 30 or 40 percent.  For most young people in Camden, there are very few legitimate opportunities for a better life, so many of them have resorted to selling drugs or selling their bodies in a desperate attempt to survive.

The following is a brief excerpt from “City of Ruins”….

There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city’s few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch.

The era of “American exceptionalism” is over.  We have rejected the things that made us great.  We have forsaken the truth and now we are paying the price.

At this point, we are rapidly becoming a joke to the rest of the world.

You know that things are bad when headlines such as this start showing up in major international publications: “America Must Manage Its Decline“.

Is that what we are going to tell our kids and our grandkids?

Are we going to tell them that we must “manage” our decline?

Most Americans also realize that something is fundamentally wrong.  According to a recent Time Magazine poll, 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the wrong track.

So why don’t our cities just spend more money and fix all of these problems?

Well, it is because most of them are drowning in a sea of red ink.  Instead of spending more money, most of them are desperately searching for more places to cut.  If you can believe it, 72 percent of all U.S. cities are laying workers off this year.

The federal government has been pumping massive amounts of money into state and local governments in recent years, but that can’t last much longer.  As I wrote about yesterday, the federal government is in debt up to its eyeballs.  In fact, the national debt has become so large that it threatens to collapse our entire financial system.

Sadly, the cold, hard truth is that we are now going to pay the price for decades of financial foolishness.

We thought that it would be our children and our grandchildren that would pay the price for our financial recklessness, but the reality is that we are going to pay the price too.

America is in a serious state of decline and things are going to get a lot worse in the years to come.

Take advantage of the relative prosperity that we are enjoying now to prepare for the lean years which are ahead.

Read More

The New Reality For U.S. Cities: No Money For Street Lights, Roving Packs Of Wild Dogs And Open-Air Drug Markets ...

If you want to know what the early stages of an economic collapse look like, just walk around some of the downtown areas of our major cities.  Today, nearly all large U.S. cities are either flat broke or they are on the way to being flat broke.  Yes, New York City and Washington D.C. (and a few others) are still doing fairly well, but for most U.S. cities economic reality is catching up with them very quickly.  Right now, there are a number of major cities that are so broke that they cannot keep the street lights operating.  Down in St. Louis, parents in some areas are carrying golf clubs with them as they walk their kids to school in order to fend off roving packs of wild dogs.  In other major U.S. cities, open-air drug markets conduct business without fear.  All over the United States, cities that used to be clean and prosperous and full of hope are now being transformed into post-industrial wastelands.  We are certainly not in “Mad Max” territory yet, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to see where all of this is headed.

I have previously written about how Detroit is literally coming apart at the seams.  Well, now in many areas of the city they can’t even keep the street lights on anymore.  There simply is not enough money, and even if there was, thieves are stealing the copper wiring out of the street lights faster than the city can repair them.

At this point, there are some neighborhoods in Detroit where up to 50 percent of the street lights are not functioning.

The following is from a recent article in The Detroit News about this crisis….

The war to keep the lights on in Detroit is a serious one. Thieves, antiquated equipment and a lack of funding have made it impossible for city officials to catch up to the problem.

City officials estimate 15-20 percent of the 88,000 lights in the Motor City are not working, and they acknowledge that figure could be as high as 50 percent in some neighborhoods.

But it is not just Detroit that is having a major problem.  Over in Highland Park, Michigan the majority of the street lights have been repossessed because the city was not keeping up with the electricity bill.

So what are residents of Highland Park supposed to do?

Are they supposed to lock themselves in their own homes at night?

In Fresno, California the theft of copper wire from street lights has become a total nightmare.  At this point, the loss of copper wire and the cost of repairing the street lights is costing Fresno about $50,000 a month.  So far, approximately 2,500 street lights have been stripped of their wiring.

Down in St. Louis they are having a different problem.  In some of the worst areas of the city, roving packs of wild dogs are a serious threat to children that are walking to school.

A recent report by the local CBS affiliate in St. Louis described the situation this way….

…Lewis Reed is sounding the alarm. “I’ve witnessed packs of dogs, 10 and 15 dogs running together, and I’ve seen all these dogs I’m talking about they don’t have collars, they don’t have tags, these are truly wild dogs,” he said.

Reed says stray dogs are terrorizing the north side. “It’s obscene that parents have to walk their kids to school, in some parts of the city, with a golf club to fend off wild dogs.”

Can you imagine that?

They say that they are going to try to put more money into animal control efforts if they can find it.  But like most major U.S. cities, St. Louis is a financial basket case.

Moving west a bit, Las Vegas is a different kind of a problem.  It was once a mighty symbol of American luxury and decadence, but now it is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong with our economy.

The following description of the decline of Las Vegas comes from a recent article in The Telegraph….

But Las Vegas’s days as a boom town are long gone. At 14 percent, unemployment is the highest inAmerica (the national average is 9.1 per cent). House prices have fallen 58.1 per cent since their 2006 high – the biggest losses of anywhere in America, while according to the website RealtyTrac, which specialises in foreclosed properties, Las Vegas is the nation’s foreclosure capital. Some 70 per cent of homes in Las Vegas are thought to be ‘under water’, or in negative equity, meaning their value is worth less than the amount owed on the mortgage, while foreclosure notices have been served on one in 16 properties. A survey last year by the local Las Vegas Review-Journal and Channel 8 News Now found that 34 per cent of locals would leave Las Vegas if they could find a job elsewhere, or if they weren’t underwater on their home loan.

Last year, I wrote a piece entitled “The Death of Las Vegas“.  Since then, things have gotten even worse for the city in many ways.

Today, there are hundreds of people living in the tunnels underneath the streets of Las Vegas.  You can see CNN video of some of these people right here.

But at least the “tunnel people” have a “roof” over their heads.

Over in “Lost Angeles”, homelessness is absolutely exploding and there are thousands of people living in the streets.

The following is from a recent article by Nick Allen….

In Skid Row, a grimy pocket of downtown Los Angeles, the prostrate forms of homeless people lie strewn across the pavements.

The lucky ones have tents for shelter but others make do with a sliver of cardboard for a bed and a supermarket trolley to carry their rags.

At the last police count 1,662 people live on these streets, twice as many as a year ago.

And now amid the drug addicts and the drunks there are families who not so long ago had homes and ordinary suburban lives.

Wait, wasn’t the economy supposed to be getting better?

So why has the number of people living on Skid Row doubled over the past year?

Los Angeles, like much of California, is rapidly falling apart.  Decades of very foolish policies have turned the “California Dream” into the “California Nightmare“.

Unemployment is rampant, crime is seemingly everywhere and the gangs appear to be getting bolder by the day.  For example, 21 machine guns were recently stolen right out of an LAPD training facility.

But there are cities in California that are in even worse shape than Los Angeles is.  If you go east of Los Angeles about 100 miles, you will come to the city of San Bernardino.  34.6 percent of the residents of San Bernardino are currently living below the poverty line.  Among major U.S. cities, only Detroit has a worsepoverty rate.

Heading back to the east coast, the city of Camden, New Jersey is representative of the post-industrial hellholes that you will find all over the mid-Atlantic region and up into New England.

In an extraordinary article entitled “City of Ruins“, Chris Hedges did an amazing job of documenting how bad things have gotten in Camden.  Today it is estimated that the actual rate of unemployment in Camden is somewhere around 30 or 40 percent.  For most young people in Camden, there are very few legitimate opportunities for a better life, so many of them have resorted to selling drugs or selling their bodies in a desperate attempt to survive.

The following is a brief excerpt from “City of Ruins”….

There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city’s few thriving businesses. A weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a porch.

The era of “American exceptionalism” is over.  We have rejected the things that made us great.  We have forsaken the truth and now we are paying the price.

At this point, we are rapidly becoming a joke to the rest of the world.

You know that things are bad when headlines such as this start showing up in major international publications: “America Must Manage Its Decline“.

Is that what we are going to tell our kids and our grandkids?

Are we going to tell them that we must “manage” our decline?

Most Americans also realize that something is fundamentally wrong.  According to a recent Time Magazine poll, 81 percent of the American people believe that the country is on the wrong track.

So why don’t our cities just spend more money and fix all of these problems?

Well, it is because most of them are drowning in a sea of red ink.  Instead of spending more money, most of them are desperately searching for more places to cut.  If you can believe it, 72 percent of all U.S. cities are laying workers off this year.

The federal government has been pumping massive amounts of money into state and local governments in recent years, but that can’t last much longer.  As I wrote about yesterday, the federal government is in debt up to its eyeballs.  In fact, the national debt has become so large that it threatens to collapse our entire financial system.

Sadly, the cold, hard truth is that we are now going to pay the price for decades of financial foolishness.

We thought that it would be our children and our grandchildren that would pay the price for our financial recklessness, but the reality is that we are going to pay the price too.

America is in a serious state of decline and things are going to get a lot worse in the years to come.

Take advantage of the relative prosperity that we are enjoying now to prepare for the lean years which are ahead.

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