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Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
For Independent Minded People!
ISSN
2161-5543
"When you run in debt; you give
to another power over your liberty."
-- Benjamin Franklin
-- Benjamin Franklin
The Frozen Dog
Ranch Files
In
This Issue:
1. Stop Feeding the Beast-Shattered Dreams in
America
2. Choose Homesteading Today
3. 11 Ways to earn money quickly
4. Debt: the good, the bad, the ugly
5. Obama still collecting your private info
without a warrant
Shattered Dreams…
The way things
were supposed to be or how the Middle Class got left behind.
The financial crisis, despite what news reports tell us, has gotten worse since the $700 billion bailout package was initiated, and it threatens to squeeze the middle class like never before, robbing people of homes, life savings and the economic security that has long been a staple.
Already, real income (which adjusts for inflation) has been stagnant since the 1970s, straining middle-class budgets and pushing wealth and power into the hands of the very few. Now some economists and sociologists fear the current crisis could make it all even more inequitable, putting the American Dream, the inspirational foundation of the middle class, at risk.
The White House and Congress are still bankrupting the nation with its fear-mongering security and spy programs rather than focus on rebuilding our nation. Despite massive amounts of money fed into our educational system, it is still failing. Our infrastructure is decaying (but we can spend trillions fighting undeclared wars).
We’ve lost an estimated 10% of our middle class beginning in the 1980s when firms such as General Electric led the way in off shoring US middle class jobs. Wall Street started our demise with Blue Collar workers and then white collar jobs began to get shipped to India and other countries.
When I first began writing about this in the mid 1980s I cautioned the Fortune 1000 (in a Wall Street Journal article and in a business column I wrote at the time) that “Burger flippers can’t afford $40K cars.” My predictions came true when the housing market and employment picture in the United States fell apart.
"The major reason I think the middle class is
threatened is because most of the things we describe as revolving around the
American Dream — owning a house in a good neighborhood and sending your
children to good schools, owning and paying for a car or two, and saving money
for retirement — all of that depends on having steady jobs with incomes that
rise," said Kevin Leicht, a sociologist at the University
of Iowa. "People are supposed to accumulate … a lot
of debt when they're young and gradually pay it off as they age, and go less
and less into debt."
The middle income is now between $46,000 and $54,000 a
year, a surprise perhaps to countless people who make significantly more
and yet struggle to pay their bills.
Inflation, especially in areas such as fuel, health care costs and
groceries have risen significantly since Obama took office and the number of
families requiring food stamps is now near 50 million – not a good indicator of
well employed nation.
Census data and other demographic and economic statistics, paint a picture of today's middle-class American:
- 14 percent of the middle class lost their jobs in the past year. About 7 percent of the middle class say they fear they'll lose their job in the year ahead.
- 39 percent of the middle class said (when the survey was done earlier this year) they are "living comfortably," and about a quarter say they are just able to meet expenses or fall short.
- 40 percent of middle-class homeowners have paid off less than half of the money they owe on their homes.
- 67 percent of the middle class say they are doing better than their parents. But only about half expect their children to do better than they're doing, down from 61 percent in 2002.
- Baby Boomers are particularly morose compared to younger and older generations, with 55 percent of Boomers saying their income won't keep up with the cost of living in the coming year.
On the threatened list
At this point, due to Wall Street greed and stupid government policies, the middle class as we know it may go the way of the dodo.
"Certainly the current financial crisis represents a substantial threat to a lot of people in the middle class because it threatens their savings; it threatens their wealth, mainly the homes they own, because that's the principal wealth of most families," Sullivan said. "And if there's widespread job loss, and it's not clear there will be, but if there is, it'll threaten income as well."
Inequality between income brackets has shot up in the past few decades. Between 1969 and 1997, the share of total household income controlled by the lowest income group has decreased from 4.1 percent to 3.6 percent, while the share to the highest income group increased from 43 percent to 49 percent, according to the Census Bureau.
In 2006, the top 5 percent of households in terms of income were making some $297,405, compared with the lowest fifth of the population, who had an average household income of $11,352, according to Census data.
Such concentrated wealth was seen right before the Great Depression, said Richard Levins, professor emeritus in the department of applied economics at the University of Minnesota. "And then it gradually became spread out more during the 60s and 70s. "By the 70s, we had a very different distribution of income and wealth that, in my view, favored middle class."
But by 1980, Levins said, "that trend has gone back the other way to where we have a very large percentage of income and wealth in the hands of barely one percent of the people."
No More Gold Watch or
Pension
Stop feeding the beast. If enough Americans would stop financially
supporting the two parties, they might finally wake up and stop screwing the
people they serve.
PM’s Roundup of Useful Resources…
Choose
Homesteading Today
Homesteaders
find the lifestyle fulfilling with good neighbors, wonderful farmers’ markets,
and seedlings for transplanting.
Do
you dream of your own homestead? From last year’s Homesteaders of the Year come
six inspiring stories of those who have made the change and are loving every
minute of it. Thomas, writing in his A Homesteading Grimoire blog, calls
homesteading a lifestyle, and Meg wants her children to know where their food
comes from and how to enjoy the homesteading life. The Homestead Redhead finds
her lifestyle fulfilling and full of purpose, and believes you would too. Shana
relates how her good country neighbors helped out during an equine emergency,
and a Good Old Days letter allows you to catch a glimpse of the festivities
surrounding an old-fashioned husking bee. Bring home fresh produce from the
farmers’ market for these 11 great recipes. Check out GRIT’s LIVE brooder
webcam to watch the roaming hatchlings this week, and read Hank’s tips for
transplanting seedlings before you watch the gardening episode of TOUGH GRIT.
Read more: http://www.grit.com/community/people/choose-homesteading-today-zwaz13ztel.aspx#ixzz2XW3xG6d3
Read more: http://www.grit.com/community/people/choose-homesteading-today-zwaz13ztel.aspx#ixzz2XW3xG6d3
Fast Food
"Recent research by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development found that Americans
spend 1 hour and 14 minutes eating each day.
We're the third fastest eaters amongst those in the 34 countries
studied. Turks, the slowest eaters, spend an average of
2 hours and 42 minutes eating per day. The French also
take their time at the table, spending an average of 2 hours
and 15 minutes daily".
Source: http://www.livescience.com/33657-8-weird-statistics.html
"Recent research by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development found that Americans
spend 1 hour and 14 minutes eating each day.
We're the third fastest eaters amongst those in the 34 countries
studied. Turks, the slowest eaters, spend an average of
2 hours and 42 minutes eating per day. The French also
take their time at the table, spending an average of 2 hours
and 15 minutes daily".
Source: http://www.livescience.com/33657-8-weird-statistics.html
You may think that money is invented to make exchange
easier. You could imagine that at some point in prehistory. A hunter just shot
a deer and a farmer has some carrots and they want to exchange but the meat is
worth much more than the carrots. Watch now...
Our economy is like a tattooed thug living
in Detroit. In between burning broken-down cars and selling crack, he makes $16,000
a year working "security" at a local nightclub. Outside of busting
heads, he has no real skills.
The Nanny State-We love our government
DHS
Report Points To Armageddon Scenario
With something that can impact millions of people in the US alone it's amazing that few people have heard that such a report exists.
Just Another Small Town FEMA Camp...
In getting footage for a mini-doc we're working on, we passed the small town of Taylor, Texas and came across one of our nation's many lovely Homeland Security family detention facilities.
With something that can impact millions of people in the US alone it's amazing that few people have heard that such a report exists.
Just Another Small Town FEMA Camp...
In getting footage for a mini-doc we're working on, we passed the small town of Taylor, Texas and came across one of our nation's many lovely Homeland Security family detention facilities.
In
the U.S., median wages are declining. Taxes are rising. Healthcare costs are
increasing. Education costs are through the roof. Most of the new jobs created
are low wage and part time.
The
Parting Thought – Not to worry in the land of the free!
Obama Collecting Citizens’ Financial Info Without
Warrants
Judicial Watch never rests, and they announced today
that they’ve obtained records from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
(CFPB) exposing that millions of dollars have been spent by the agency on the
warrantless collection and analysis of Americans’ financial transactions
The full extent of the CFPB personal financial data
collection program is revealed in a document obtained by Judicial Watch
entitled “INDEFINITE-DELIVERY INDEFINITY-QUANTITY (IDIQ) STATEMENT OF WORK.”
According to the IDIQ document’s stated Objective: “The CFPB seeks to acquire
and maintain a nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy
research projects… The panel shall be a random sample of consumer credit files
obtains from a national database of credit files.”
Read more: http://conservativebyte.com/2013/06/obama-collecting-citizens-financial-info-without-warrants/#ixzz2XWnt73nS
Read more: http://conservativebyte.com/2013/06/obama-collecting-citizens-financial-info-without-warrants/#ixzz2XWnt73nS
“Until the next revolution”, the Poor Man
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