A third of Americans delinquent on debt:
Now this is news that is not really news! Naturally like all statistics, some of these folks have some bills that "got lost" and went into collections and may be able to pay. It however doesn't include such things as the infamous "payroll loans", so it may be even worse, who knows?
I also ran into this little gem of job switch from '90 to '13 . Essentially, most of the people still working are working in healthcare. Not a lot of news there either from a town where in '90 something like 7K were working at IBM and maybe 10K at Mayo. Today less than 2K are at IBM and slipping fast, while Mayo is 35K and rising.
We are a nation something like 17T in debt with something like 60T in unfunded liabilities for FICA, Medicare and now BOcare coming due over the next 20-30 years.
On top of that, our people are largely operating on debt because they have an extreme belief that they are entitled -- not surprisingly since that is what our schools teach and is pounded into their heads every day by the MSM and The Party (Democrat). Something less than 25% of age 50 people even have a positive net worth, let alone being on any path to anything but being a ward of the state when they can't work.
The "whys" here are pretty obvious, but we will cover them again:
EVERYaction that government takes as MANY at least supposedly unintended (or at least hidden) effects.
- FICA leads people to believe that they need to do less for their retirement -- so they work less, save less, etc.
- Medicare put a huge amount of guaranteed money into healthcare for the elderly -- so the medical industry is incented to come up with ways to get that money. The results are similar to throwing an ever increasing amount of gasoline on a fire.
- BOcare will do the same thing as medicare for the general population as it gets moving.
- BOcare will also do what the combination of welfare and high tax rates do. It is mostly a transfer of wealth from those that make more than the subsidy values to those that make less ... so people will increasingly target making less money in order to get the subsidy. (and the government will borrow an increasing amount to pay the subsidy)
This is of course only the very tip of the iceberg, and ONLY the extremely limited effects that can be discerned by destruction of the natural desire of people to compete, succeed, be responsible, etc.
The US has the highest corporate taxes in the world, PLUS, we are the ONLY nation that taxes profits made in other nations! Other than our historical stability relative to social unrest and out and out nationalization of business, we have become the worst place to do business on the planet!
Unsurprisingly, we have a LOT less business -- but we DO have a TON of "healthcare" ... funded largely by government debt.
Environmentalists have been telling us about all sorts of things being "unsustainable" since Malthus -- we have been "out of trees", "out of oil", "out of water", "out of cropland", etc, etc for 100's of years according to their calculations -- who knows, they may eventually be right. Currently the big deal is "Global Warming" (or climate change, or climate disruption -- depending on how cold it is).
They say that "in a hundred years", the temp will be "something between a few tenths of a degree to maybe as much as a couple degrees" warmer ... and that is a catastrophe. Maybe so.
My prediction is that in 5, 10, or maybe if you are a REAL optimist, 20 years, the "Government bubble" will burst, because fewer and fewer people working at all, those that are working being mostly in healthcare, and paying for those few working with ever larger piles of debt is not "sustainable".
I'm just a curmudgeon I guess.
'via Blog this'
