Under the surface, our economy is badly damaged and suffering internal bleeding from the effects of a national depletion of wealth caused by decades of over consumption. The harsh reality is that we cannot pay back the money that we borrowed from the rest of the world. The world has been slow to catch on and in many ways is still resisting accepting the truth that America is broke. The day of reckoning is come as we are running on borrowed time and borrowed money.
The natural healing process that the economy needs so badly is a chance to rest and sleep it off. But a recession is very bad for politics, especially in an election year. So, the corrective recession has been postponed by a massive injection of billions of dollars into the economy. At a time when the economy needs some serious physical therapy, the government injected the economy with massive pain killers to try to keep it going.
The damage is only getting worse and the recovery process will likely take even longer. In the next few years, we may see the economy drop into a deep coma, and it’s anybody’s guess as to when it will awake. The coming economic coma is going to bring many difficult problems including, high unemployment, high inflation, high taxes and more government intervention. The stagflation of the 70’s may pale in comparison to what we are about to go through.
We have but a few months before the Presidential elections are over and many of the temporary means to prop up the economy will be removed. If you have not started preparing yet, perhaps today is as good a day as any. The economic storm that is building strength off our coastal shore is likely to cause the largest cultural shift in several decades as consumer credit comes to an end, leaving 70% of the economy in total disarray.
When I started this blog, almost a year ago, I picked the domain name PennyJobs because I saw these economic problems coming and that jobs were going to become one of the biggest issues within the next few years. Today, the unemployment rate jumped to 6.1%, with 84,000 jobs lost in August and over 350,000 jobs lost so far this year.