We live in a country where almost everyone is drowning in debt and where most people are either flat broke or very close to flat broke, writes the site The Economic Collapse. Instead the “economic recovery” in fact things in many ways just continue to get even worse. The following are 21 ways to end the pop-show phrase “Americans are so broke that”…
1. …about a third of them have debt collectors on their heels. One recent study discovered that more than one out of every three adults in the United States has an unpaid debt that is “in collections”. That is a total of 77 million people. In other words, the debt collection business in America is absolutely booming.
2. …Congress is now actually considering allowing post offices to provide payday loans and check cashing services.
3. …are keeping their vehicles longer than ever. The average age of vehicles on America’s roads recently set a new all-time high of 11.4 years.
4. …car dealers are having to go to extreme lengths to get new customers. Last year, one out of every four autoloans in the U.S. was made to someone with subprime credit.
5. …52% of them cannot even afford the homes that they are living in right now.
6. …they are falling farther behind on their student loans than ever. The total amount of student loan debt in the U.S. has now reached a whopping $1.2 trillion, and approximately 7 million Americans are in default on their student loans at this point.
7. …half of all college graduatesare still relying on their parents financially when they are two years out of school.
8. …only 36% of American adults under the age of 35 currently own a home. That is the lowest level that has ever been recorded.
9. …many of them can’t even afford to shop at Wal-Mart and dollar stores anymore. Discount stores are slowly dying. There’s just not enough money deployed by American families to keep all the discount chains in business.
10. …they are running up record levels of debt. Overall, U.S. households are $11.68 trillion in debt right now.
11. …the wealth of the “typical American household” has fallen by 36% over the past decade.
12. …one out of every four part-time workers in America is living below the poverty line.
13. …more than 37 million Americans are now being served by food pantries and soup kitchens.
14. …there are 49 million Americans that are dealing with food insecurity.
15. …the number of people on food stamps has increased by about 14 million while Obama has been in the White House. Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin. But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have jobs.
16. …the U.S. government has had to spend an astounding $3.7 trillion on welfare programs over the past five years.
17. …more than 20% of all children in the U.S. are living in poverty.
18. …we have a record number of kids sleeping in the streets. In fact, we have more than a million public school children that are homeless at this point.
19. …76% of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
20. …26% of Americans have absolutely no emergency savings whatsoever.
21. …approximately 2/3 of all Americans do not have enough money saved up to cover six months of expenses if an emergency arose.
If things are this bad now, during the so-called “economic recovery”, how bad will things get during the next major economic downturn? When the next crisis arrives, all of the numbers in the list above are going to rapidly get a lot worse. So enjoy the rest of this “bubble” while you still can. It certainly will not last for too much longer.