The Economic Outlook for 2017 Could be Quite Good Under the New Administration

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The Economic Outlook for 2017 Could be Quite Good Under the New Administration

The Fed won't be the only cause for higher interest rates in the coming year… Selling more treasury bonds will require higher rates. That will have a spillover effect on all borrowing.

Higher interest rates aren't all bad. They'll benefit those who have saved and invested money. It's been very hard to safely earn much on invested money since 2008. CD and bond rates are almost non-existent. Boomers and retirees especially will be glad to see their CDs actually earn something for a change.

I expect economic activity to increase in 2017. I'll probably get some pushback on this, but cutting regulations will allow businesses to spend more on their product/services and less on satisfying regulators. You can argue that those regulations are needed, but needed or not, the cost of those regulations is less economic growth.

Getting people back into the civilian workforce will continue to be a challenge. The percentage of people working has dropped from over 66% in 2006 to less than 63% today. The incoming President may be able to keep some companies in the U.S., but technology will continue to replace many jobs. We see it all around us. Self-checkout in some stores. Screens in restaurants that take the place of a server or order taker. It'll be especially noticeable in lower skill jobs.

At some point, we'll recognize that we can't continue the guaranteed student loan/college merry-go-round. For decades, we've been pouring more and more money into higher education. The colleges add amenities and raise their prices, and grads can't find high paying jobs. Those who drop out are in a worse position. The number of people who aren't repaying their student loans on schedule is around 40%. Young people are being financially handcuffed, and forgiving the loans isn't an option. The government doesn't have the $1.3 trillion that would take.

I don't know when, but sooner or later, all the money that's flooded the stock and housing markets will leave. And prices will drop. Perhaps dramatically.
President Elect Trump is slowly piecing a plan which promises a renewed prosperity and better jobs for America and of course, we hope he’s able to pull it off…the current president never lived up to the promise of fixing our infrastructure but rather, helped cut industries which fueled our growth such as the coal industry.
The federal deficit will continue to increase. Lowering taxes should increase economic activity (if past experience is a guide), but tax cuts don't automatically pay for themselves. Eventually those in government will need to spend less or admit they won't and raise taxes to pay for what they spend.

The Crash Course has provided millions of viewers with the context for the massive changes now underway, as economic growth as we've known it is ending due to depleting resources.

But it also offers real hope. Those individuals who take informed action today, while we still have time, can lower their exposure to these coming trends -- and even discover a better way of life in the process. We'll show you how.

 

What should I do to prepare?

https://www.peakprosperity.com/page/what-should-i-do

 

The Crash Course

https://www.peakprosperity.com/crashcourse

Resolve to Stash More Cash in the New Year

Some people are born savers. Others can't seem to save at all and are often reduced to living paycheck to paycheck. These 8 steps can help those who struggle to save

 

Here's the average American household income: How do you compare? (USA Today): "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average household income was $73,298 in 2014, the latest year for which complete data is available. However, this doesn't tell the whole story.  Depending on your family situation and where you live, average household income can vary dramatically."

 

 

Yours for another revolution,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

Post Script…

Contributors and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays & free reports that I provide annually. It is for this reason they are Heroes and Heroines of New Media. Without your financial support, the free content would disappear for the simple reason that I cannot keep body and soul together on my meager book sales & ecommerce alone.  You can make a donation at top of this page via PayPal.

 

Additional Resources

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival

Credit Karma to Offer Free Tax Software

In 2017, there will be a newcomer to the market of tax filing services. Credit Karma has recently announced that it’ll be offering a free tax filing service for the 2017 tax season.

 
A Different Kind of Financial Security

How can you make yourself more financially secure? Here are 3 practical ways you won't hear from many financial planners.

 

 

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PM’s Guide to Home Defense

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Alive After Crisis: A comprehensive guide for emergency planning & crisis survival PLUS BONUSES

 

·         How to Build Your Own Panic Room for Under $500

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The Death of the American Dream for Some-But Not for Others

 

Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…

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ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 

 

 The American Dream is dying, but government handouts for Amazon & Others Increase While it Steals from You!

  President Obama was notorious for distributing financial goodies, grants, tax breaks and so forth to his supporters including such liberals as Al Gore, Steven Spielberg, Ronald Perelman, George Kaiser, Elon Musk, George Soros, General Motors and plenty of others have started businesses [many of which failed] at taxpayer expense…

Amazon too has grown at the expense of thousands of mom-and-pop shops.  Consumers may not realize it, but we helped build the e-commerce giant by funding the state and local tax breaks that have made the company so competitive.  Amazon received $760 million in taxpayer assistance between 2005 and 2014, equal to 17% of the company’s global profits during that time.  More than half the company’s fulfillment centers were built with public subsidies.

Amazon has for years aggressively played local governments against one another, striking deals to avoid sales and property taxes and using the enticement of jobs as leverage.  Some communities have benefitted from an Amazon presence.  But the tax giveaways have also undercut local businesses, which don’t have the political clout to negotiate such deals.  Brick and mortar retailers vacated 135 million square feet of space in 2015 alone equal to roughly 22,000 Main street shops!

For communities, that means fewer jobs, lower tax revenues, and emptier downtowns.

Ninety-four percent of the 10 million net new jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were either temporary or contract-based, not traditional 9 to 5 positions according to a study by Princeton and Harvard economists.

For most the American Dream really is dying.  A study by economist Raj Chetty has quantified what many Millennial have experience for years:  It’s becoming increasingly difficult for young people “to climb the economic ladder and achieve more than one’s parents did.”  People born in the 1940s, Chetty found, had a 92 percent chance of earning more than their parents did at age 30.  For people born in the 1980s, by contrast, the chances were just 50-50.  Why?  Economic growth has slowed from 4 and 5 percent in past decades to just 2 or 3 percent today, so there’s less of the pie to go around-and fewer corporations offer decent benefits, such as retirement and healthcare like those of their parents.  More importantly, almost all of the benefits of the growth that does occur are going to top earners, with people in the lower income brackets stuck with stagnant wages.  Americans in the bottom 50 percent make an average of just $16,000 annually, while the top one percent make an average of $1.3 million.  And this inequality gap keeps widening every year [despite Obama’s assurances that it isn’t]. 

The result:  A society in which most of the will stay poor, and rich stay rich…this lack of upward mobility has not been seen since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, the top-earning 400 US households reported 20 percent more income on their tax returns in 2014 than in 2013 according to the IRS.  The 400 paid 2.13 percent of all individual income taxes that year, and required $128.8 million in gross income to make the list.

On the other hand, roughly 6 million people with credit scores lower than 620 are at least 90 days late on their last car payment, according to data from the Federal Reserve.  That’s the highest delinquency rate for subprime auto loans since the 2008 financial crisis.  [According to a report in Time Magazine last year, more people are ‘upside down’ in auto loans which have now reached up to eight years in length in some areas]!

Disparity in salaries continues also…the average annual salary for a first-year worker at a Silicon Valley tech firm is more than $105,000, plus a nearly $13,000 stock bonus and almost $26,000 cash bonus.  The national average salary is $48,098 [barely enough to keep your head above water for a family of four in San Francisco] according to the Social Security Administration.

Finally, as I predicted a few issues ago, expect the Fed to raise interest rates soon [and they did soon after I wrote this] especially when [as expected] President-elect Trump’s agenda of infrastructure improvement spending and tax cuts brings strong economic growth-for the average consumer, it means savers might finally start getting closer to a decent return on their bank accounts.

Finally, according to the BEA's Journal of Economic Growth, government regulations have cut your annual salary by $277,000 annually. If you make $53,000 per year, you would be making $330,000 each year!

Two independent economists think those numbers are low. John Dawson of Appalachian State University and John Seater of North Carolina State constructed an index of federal regulations. They did this by tracking the growth in the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations since 1949. The number of pages in 1949 was 19,335 pages. In 2005, there were 134,261 pages. That's a six-fold increase. (By 2011, the number of pages had risen to 169,301 – almost a nine-fold increase.)

Dawson and Seater say that annual output in 2005 was 28% lower than it would have been if regulations stayed at the 1949 level. And GDP in 2011 would have been $53.9 trillion instead of the $15.1 we saw. That means government regulations stole $38.8 trillion out of our economy in those 62 years. In 2011, that was enough to pay off the national debt twice.

 

 

Post Script

Attend FreedomFest This Year

A dark cloud is hanging over the lives of freedom lovers these days. It seems all the news is bad. It’s hard to take. And the personal anxiety it causes, it’s just too much. Every day we are being buffeted about bad ideas coming from the left, from the right, and back again. And contest is dragging down the prospects for freedom itself.

https://fee.org/articles/lift-your-spirits-attend-freedomfest/

 

Yours for better living,

Bruce , the Poor Man

 

Additional Resources

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Prepper’s Home Defense: Security Strategies to Protect Your Family by Any Means Necessary

Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival

First in, first out pantry storage solutions

 

Learning to Be Self-Sufficient How to Make Homemade Bread 7 Simple Living Lessons from Grandma

 

 

 

FREE: DYI Personal EMP Defense System

www.independentlivingnews.com.com/emp1

 

 

 

Arm Up System-Defense Without Regulation
PM’s Guide to Home Defense

It is a crazy world out there with plenty of violence and everyone knows you that under most circumstances, police usually arrive after the fact. Your rights to defend yourself are often under attack, even for non-lethal self-defense tools…Includes 2 books and 3 bonus CD ROMS

http://www.bonanza.com/listings/Guide-to-Home-Defense-Arm-Up-System-Defense-W-out-Regulation-Bonuses/370808566

 

{Note:  We also offer a Three Set CD-ROM-only version at a lesser price for those with limited budgets]

 

 
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Has the CIA Always Been Incompetent?

Poor Man Survival

Self Reliance tools for independent minded people…

www.poormansurvivor.net

ISSN 2161-5543

A Digest of Urban Survival Resources

 

In terms of serving the American people, yes, the CIA has always been incompetent.

In terms of lying, drug-running, spreading fake news and a florid variety of other forms of malfeasance, well, they’ve been pretty “on fleek” over the years. 

Which, of course, means that when the CIA claims that Russia “hacked” the U.S. election, your B.S.-detector should fly off the charts.

(To be clear, not in support of Trump. But in support of the truth.)

The (mostly fake) outrage over this Russian “scandal,” though, even if it were true, is comical. The information (which was leaked) showed American people truth. It didn’t propagandize. It merely lifted the veil and shined a few spotlights on the cockroaches.

And if it is, indeed, true that Fake News and Russia are responsible for the downfall of the Hilldabeest, what, pray tell, does the government plan to do about either of those things in terms of prevention?

“It is laughable,” one wise commenter, known only as Mark S., writes on Mises.org, “to believe that government could or would do anything to investigate, prosecute or deal with Russian hackers and scammers or keep us safe from (or simply prosecute) cybercriminals. They are ten steps behind guys in India working in a boiler room call center in a strip mall. They cannot stop scammers from the third-world impersonating IRS agents, spreading ransomware and all sorts of malware. The Chinese hacked into and stole 20+ million top secret personnel files and not only did the intelligence community fail to protect such records, the government which claims to protect us did nada la squada.

“Likewise, state actors were believed to have stolen 500 million Yahoo accounts, but when the news cycle moved on to something else, everyone forgot to ask folks in the intelligence community like the CIA ‘So what did you do about that?’ Then, there's guys like Edward Snowden who manage to steal NSA records without much difficulty.”

 

 

The CIA Has Always Been Incompetent

Ryan McMaken

 

One of the nicer side effects of the 2016 election has been the trashing of the reputations of US intelligence agencies, specifically the FBI and the CIA. During the election, of course, it became apparent that there was some sort of tug-of-war within the FBI which led James Comey to first declare that no "reasonable" prosecutor would ever go after Hillary Clinton. Then, as election day approached, Comey came back and, contrary to the usual protocol, waged a PR war against Clinton, implying that this time, new evidence suggests she is, in fact a crook. Naturally, the Democratic party has declared the FBI to be corrupt and has even accused FBI director James Comey of covering up Russian crimes.

In the wake of the election, the CIA has now decided that the Russians were influencing the election and an attempt to cast doubt on the validity of the election itself. In response, Donald Trump simply dismissed the CIA as incompetent, declaring "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." It is entirely possible that the Russians attempt to influence American elections. Unfortunately, the CIA is not exactly a reliable source from which to draw any conclusions.

Today, the FBI and the CIA remain at war, with the FBI slamming the CIA's "fuzzy" and "ambiguous" remarks about the elections.

Indeed, the whole CIA story remains primarily based on nameless sources and leaked comments, with no evidence provided. Even the Washington Post admits the CIA functions on a model of "drawing inferences" and isn't overly concerned with presenting actual facts.

The lesson to be learned from all of this is that the CIA and the FBI are nothing more than typical government agencies that spend much of their time fighting little battles on Capitol Hill and are motivated primarily with protecting their own agendas, their own budgets, and their own empire-building. As with the FBI, the CIA behaves exactly as Public Choice theory tells us a self-interested collection of government bureaucrats would behave.

For far too long has the intelligence community received a free pass from astoundingly naive advocates for "free markets" who claim for be for limited government one minute, and then sit back and blithely defend everything the CIA does the next minute because "they keep us safe."

While obviously motivated by his own self interest, Donald Trump has nevertheless been right to not regard the CIA as a sacred cow, especially since his attacks on the CIA's questionable record are based in reality.

Iraq and the Bay of Pigs

Trump's mockery of the CIA for its position on Iraqi weapons is at least partially true. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the CIA did indeed emphasize Iraqi capability for non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In careful CYA language, however, the CIA did refrain from concluding that the Iraqi state had nuclear capability. That claim was a complete fabrication by the Bush administration. Nevertheless, the CIA invented many fictions of its own, including the much-touted "mobile biological labs" in which Saddam Hussein was busy cooking up bio-weapons.

What the report perhaps told us more than anything was how useless the CIA is in time of urgently needed intelligence. A RAND report on the CIA intelligence at the time concluded that "Human intelligence was scarce and unreliable."

But in the big scheme of enormous glaring CIA failures, the WMD report isn't even the worst on the list, although it is arguably worse than the CIA's planned Bay of Pigs Invasion in which the CIA decided that a small force of Cuban exiles would invade Cuba and lead an uprising of locals. It was the 1960s version of "we'll be greeted as liberators."

 

 

The CIA's Failure to Understand the Soviet Union

The worst CIA failure would have the CIA's utter inability to comprehend the internal economic situation in the Soviet Union as the Soviet economy went into steep decline.

Right until the very end, the CIA insisted that the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse that was poised to overpower the United States.1

Even by the 1980s, it was clear that the CIA was too incompetent to provide respectable analysis on the situation inside the Soviet Union. Among the Agency's harshest critics was New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In a lengthy analysis, Marc Trachtenberg writes:

Indeed, Moynihan felt, the CIA had done such a poor job in this area that he thought the Agency should be abolished. The CIA, in his view, had utterly failed to see how serious the USSR’s economic problems were, and he made that point over and over again. “For 40 years,” he wrote in 1990, “we have hugely overestimated both the size of the Soviet economy and its rate of growth. This in turn has persistently distorted our estimates of the Soviet threat—notably, in the 1980s when we turned ourselves into a debtor nation to pay for the arms to counter the threat of a nation whose home front, unbeknownst to us, was collapsing.”

Moynihan boasted later that year that he had been able to see as early as 1979 that “Soviet economic growth was coming to a halt,” and that “the society as well as the economy was sick.” “But our intelligence community,” he said, “just couldn't believe this. They kept reporting that the economy was soaring!” In the public discussion, and to a certain extent even in the scholarly literature, such claims were treated as established fact.

“As the Bay of Pigs was to intelligence operations,” the columnist William Safire wrote in the New York Times in 1990, “the extended misreading of the Soviet economic debacle is to intelligence evaluation.” According to a 1992 article in the Wall Street Journal, the CIA’s track record “on the really big developments” was “hit-or-miss at best,” with “the downward spiral of the Soviet economy” counting as one of the “more spectacular misses.”

In 1994 a Newsweek columnist noted in passing that the CIA story was “one of repeated intelligence failures,” culminating in the “monumental miscalculation of the size of the Soviet economy, which the CIA judged to be three times as big as it really was.” And in 1995 the Washington Postcolumnist Mary McGrory asked rhetorically whether any government department had “goofed up more than the Central Intelligence Agency?” “Their most egregious and expensive blunder about the Soviet economy we are still paying for.”

The importance of this failure for the CIA cannot be overstated. After all, during the Cold War, the primary purpose for the CIA's existence was to collect intelligence on the Soviet Union and analyze the situation in that country. Thus, the agency's abject failure in its primary mission was indeed a good reason for Moynihan to call for the Agency's abolition.2

Later, the CIA's defenders attempted to make excuses for the agency by claiming that no Western economists had figured out that the Soviet economy was slowing down. In other words, they claimed, the CIA was just like everyone else.

In fact, numerous economists — not counting the pro-Soviet Keynesian Paul Samuelson — had observed the Soviet decline:

Was it true, as many observers have claimed, that the academic economists had failed to see what was going on with the Soviet economy, that the CIA analysts had presented much too rosy a picture, and that the Soviet leadership itself did not really understand what was going on? If true, that conclusion would have a major bearing on how we should interpret the period. But is it in fact correct?

In a word the answer is no. There is, for example, no basis for the claim that western economists had failed to “‘diagnose observable tendencies,’ such as the continued decline of economic growth rates.” Experts in this area had little trouble recognizing that the Soviet growth rate was falling. It was widely understood by the mid-1960s that the Soviet economy was growing less rapidly than in the past. As the CIA’s leading expert on the Soviet economy, Rush Greenslade, pointed out in 1966, “the slowdown of economic growth in the U.S.S.R. is now a well-known story,” and Abram Bergson, Professor of Economics at Harvard and the most prominent scholar working in this area, referred to it in a 1966 roundtable as a “very familiar fact.”

That general point, moreover, was commonly noted in the press at the time. Even a casual reader of the New York Times, for example -- someone who merely glanced at the headlines -- could scarcely fail to note that the Soviet growth rate had declined. Subsequent calculations simply underscored the basic point here.

In other words, a casual reader of American newspapers probably had a better sense of the Soviet economy than the CIA.

But, then as now, the CIA lived in its own little elite bubble where it credulously imbibed foreign propaganda and repeated it as fact. In other cases, as in the case of both Iraq and the Bay of Pigs, the CIA credulously accepted the testimony of Iraqi and Cuban exiles and repeated that as fact.

As Trachtenberg recognizes, the debate over just how wrong the CIA was continues to be debated among academics today. There is no denying however, that at the core of the CIA's assumptions were the fact that the CIA, just like the Ivy League elite from which CIA agents are drawn, believed that Soviet-style socialism was probably working pretty well, and it was perfectly plausible to believe that the Soviet Economy could indeed overtake that of the US.

Put another way, the CIA is infected by all the same political and ideological biases and errors harbored by the political elites in general. This should shock no one who takes a realistic view of Washington politics, although it will no doubt continue to surprise — and by denied by —those who fancy themselves as the "adults in the room" who advocate endlessly for ever more spending for military and intelligence agencies.

After all, the CIA's enormous failure on the Soviet Union did not come without serious effects. As Moynihan pointed out, the US "turned [itself] into a debtor nation" to fight an allegedly implacable foe that was actually collapsing.

How nice for the CIA, though, that its fifth-rate intelligence made it easier for the CIA to claim that more funding was needed for the CIA's budgets.

Nowadays, the Russians are yet again the CIA's looming threat. But does the Agency have any actual evidence to present? "Just trust us" seems to be all the CIA can muster.

 

Yours for another revolution,

Bruce ‘the Poor Man’

 

Post Script…

Contributors and subscribers enable the Poor Man Survivor to post 150+ free essays & free reports that I provide annually. It is for this reason they are Heroes and Heroines of New Media. Without your financial support, the free content would disappear for the simple reason that I cannot keep body and soul together on my meager book sales & ecommerce alone.  You can make a donation at top of this page via PayPal.

And a Merry Christmas to All!

 

Additional Resources-Free!

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster

Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival

Classic books by Ralph Borsodi…FREE!

 

FLIGHT FROM

THE CITY

AN EXPERIMENT

IN CREATIVE LIVING

ON THE LAND

https://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/GoodBooks/Borsodi-%20Flight%20From%20The%20City.pdf

  

The Ugly Civilization

http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/ugly-civilization.pdf

 

 

Credit Karma to Offer Free Tax Software

In 2017, there will be a newcomer to the market of tax filing services. Credit Karma has recently announced that it’ll be offering a free tax filing service for the 2017 tax season.

A Different Kind of Financial Security

How can you make yourself more financially secure? Here are 3 practical ways you won't hear from many financial planners.

 

 

Arm Up System-Defense Without Regulation
PM’s Guide to Home Defense

It is a crazy world out there with plenty of violence and everyone knows you that under most circumstances, police usually arrive after the fact. Your rights to defend yourself are often under attack, even for non-lethal self-defense tools…Includes book and 3 bonus CD ROMS

http://www.bonanza.com/listings/Guide-to-Home-Defense-Arm-Up-System-Defense-W-out-Regulation-Bonuses/370808566

 

 
Support our efforts by shopping my storefront…

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A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production