“We Haven’t Seen This Since The Great Depression” – Gallup CEO Destroys The “Recovery” Lie

By Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO at Gallup

The Invisible American

I’ve been reading a lot about a “recovering” economy. It was even trumpeted on Page 1 of The New York Times and Financial Times last week.

I don’t think it’s true.

The percentage of Americans who say they are in the middle or upper-middle class has fallen 10 percentage points, from a 61% average between 2000 and 2008 to 51% today.

 

Ten percent of 250 million adults in the U.S. is 25 million people whose economic lives have crashed.

What the media is missing is that these 25 million people are invisible in the widely reported 4.9% official U.S. unemployment rate.

Let’s say someone has a good middle-class job that pays $65,000 a year. That job goes away in a changing, disrupted world, and his new full-time job pays $14 per hour — or about $28,000 per year. That devastated American remains counted as “full-time employed” because he still has full-time work — although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.

More disastrous is the emotional toll on the person — the sudden loss of household income can cause a crash of self-esteem and dignity, leading to an environment of desperation that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.

Millions of Americans, even if they themselves are gainfully employed in good jobs, are just one degree away from someone who is experiencing either unemployment, underemployment or falling wages. We know them all.

There are three serious metrics that need to be turned around or we’ll lose the whole middle class.

  1. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of the total U.S. adult population that has a full-time job has been hovering around 48% since 2010this is the lowest full-time employment level since 1983.
  2. The number of publicly listed companies trading on U.S. exchanges has been cut almost in half in the past 20 years — from about 7,300 to 3,700. Because firms can’t grow organically — that is, build more business from new and existing customers — they give up and pay high prices to acquire their competitors, thus drastically shrinking the number of U.S. public companies. This seriously contributes to the massive loss of U.S. middle-class jobs.
  3. New business startups are at historical lows. Americans have stopped starting businesses. And the businesses that do start are growing at historically slow rates.

Free enterprise is in free fall — but it is fixable. Small business can save America and restore the middle class.

Gallup finds that small businesses — startups plus “shootups,” those that grow big — are the engine of new economic energy. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 65% of all new jobs are created by small businesses, not large ones.

Here’s the crisis: The deaths of small businesses recently outnumbered the births of small businesses. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the total number of business startups and business closures per year crossed for the first time in 2008. In the nearly 30 years before that, the U.S. consistently averaged a surplus of almost 120,000 more business births than deaths each year. But from 2008 to 2011, an average of 420,000 businesses were born annually, while an average of 450,000 per year were dying.

Bottom line: The two most trusted institutions in the U.S. are the military and small business. Most people know about our military’s importance, but not as many appreciate the role small business plays in creating the majority of new jobs and in national security itself.

America needs small business to boom again. Small businesses are our best hope for badly needed economic growth, great jobs and ultimately accelerated human development. When we get small business to boom, we can save America, restore our middle class and once again lead the world.

 

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kokoda - Les Deplorables
kokoda - Les Deplorables

Small business doesn’t stand a chance with massive regulations over the last 15 years, plus the tax code.

The Most Deplorable Llpoh
The Most Deplorable Llpoh

Kokoda is very right indeed.

IndenturedServant

Just once I’d like to see one of these brainiacs point out that the middle class was and has been entirely unsustainable from day one due to it being built on the fraudulent ponzi scheme of fiat money.

kokoda - Les Deplorables
kokoda - Les Deplorables

IS….beg to differ; the middle class was built on well-paying jobs sustained by a manufacturing base. Back in those days, someone that didn’t go to college but did graduate HS could go to work in a factory and make good wages. Many guys without a HS diploma could enlist in the armed forces – a number of these earned the GED certificate while in the military.

Now, try and get a job without a HS diploma, and even for the military which 90% for Tier 1 applicants require a HS diploma.

IndenturedServant

Where did the money come from to employ and provide benefits to all those well paid manufacturing employees? What about the exorbitant salaries and bennies in union shops?

Where did the money come from to feed, house and train all those military guys? What about those that did their twenty and got half pay for life plus medical? Where did that money come from?

What were wages, salaries and bennies like prior to the Fed phunney munney?

Anonymous
Anonymous

Where did the money come from?

The real goods product of what they produced.

It worked well till we decided to transfer that wealth (money) building capacity to bottom end economies overseas and south of the border. It doesn’t work well now, but it is the upper classes that are being created and financed with fiat very much more than the middle or lower classes ever have been or are now being.

IndenturedServant

kokoda, in a debt based economy, which the US has been since 1913, growth=debt.

In order to continue to grow (the Feds mandate) you absolutely MUST increase the debt. No growth=recession.

We’ve had $19,500,000,000,000 in growth under the careful guidance of the Fed. How much more can we handle? If the debt is unsustainable then so is EVERYTHING that was built upon it.

Get it?

IndenturedServant

I was told throughout my childhood that I had to go to college to get a good job. I never went to college and I always had good jobs. As a matter of fact, I continue to do very well even in this shitty economy primarily because my debt is very low and I live below my means and I’m willing to work my ass off.

I have no doubt that if I were 18 again, knowing what I now know, I could do it again and come out ahead.

Suzanna
Suzanna

ditto

Billy
Billy

12 Step program – How to fuck up your country:

1. Take one country built by other people.
2. Have a central bank debase the currency.
3. Inflict metric shit-tons of rules, regulations and taxes on the citizenry, personally.
4. Drive a stake through the beating heart of the economy – small business (See #3).
5. Import millions of illiterate, low-IQ mouth breathers from 3rd world shitholes who have no intention of assimilating or producing.
6. Dump them on the producers – the descendants of those who built the country.
7. When the citizenry have a problem with the flood of mouth-breathers, guilt them into submission. If you can’t guilt them, hoot them into silence by screaming PC-conflict epithets at them.
8. When Government can’t meet payroll – literally paying for all the Free Shit they’ve ‘promised’ to everyone – continue to take out loans you “promise” to pay back (See #2).
9. Play identity politics by pitting racial groups against each other. The winner gets privileged status. (Pro tip: There is no ‘winner’ and will never be one).
10. Use the distraction created by #9 to loot the treasury.
11. Use the friction created by #9 as an excuse to disarm the citizenry using the fig leaf of “safety”.
12. Keep the citizenry distracted by ginning-up useless foreign wars, bread, circuses and a conga-line of retards in the ‘media’…

Whoever thought that telling people they were too stupid to handle their own money, looting the treasury, telling the citizenry they were responsible for all the evils in the world, shitting on them for decades – literally generations, killing off the beating heart of the economy and making it literally possible to be within the law and in violation of the exact same law at the exact same time WAS A REALLY GOOD IDEA??

Because to me, this seems like very much NOT a good idea.

Why do you think those in places of power and influence try to hard to disarm you and anyone like you? It has nothing to do with anything they’re talking about – nothing. Crime, “safety”, the chiiiillldren, terr-risms, none of that shit.

It boils down to one concept: Self preservation.

Those in power will hold onto that power with the strength born of desperation. Well-paying, powerful jobs like “Being Better Than Everyone Else” are right thin on the ground…

But you fuck things up badly enough, the citizenry just might get it into their heads that they don’t need you anymore. And if you refuse to go? Well, from your point of view, if the citizenry don’t have pointy objects and sharp things, that’s better for you, right? Increases your chances of survival tremendously. Especially if your guards and enforcers are the only ones “allowed” to have pointy objects and sharp things…

Thing is, they’ve knocked this whole thing into a cocked hat. Every single country in the Western World is up-gunning and preparing for “civil unrest”. They know they’ve fucked up, that people are right pissed off with them. And that they are very, very close to that IDGAF moment.

And so they are trying to increase the odds of their own survival.

My people have shown they have the lowest Zero-To-Jackboots time on the planet – those in power are correct in their fears.

What goes around, comes around… create the conditions that foster desperation, shit on a proud, productive people for generations, tell them they’re responsible for all the ills in the world, then go out of your way to replace them? It’s not the barking dog you need to worry about.

You see a dog on the other side of a fence and every day you throw rocks at him, starve him, abuse him, treat him like shit, then try to replace him with another dog… that dog gets quiet… he watches you. And he waits – just looking for that opportunity. That one chance to take his shot and dish out some payback.

This started out as being some gallows humor snark, and it kinda went off on a tangent… apologies. As I write this, I’m watching footage of Charlotte NC riots… looting, burning… bricks being thrown at cops….

Forecast is for a 100% chance of Sportiness with an increased chance of Spiciness…

IndenturedServant

It’s hard to be snarky when everything you write is true!

So glad I live in a chimpout free zone! Not that we don’t have our own issues but a full on Jane Goodall documentary is not in my local future. 🙂

Stucky

“When we get small business to boom, we can save America, restore our middle class and once again lead the world. ” —- from the article

I like the author’s enthusiasm, BUT his prognostications seem a tad bit too optimistic. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

starfcker the deplorable
starfcker the deplorable

Help is on the way, november 8th

Lysander The Deplorable
Lysander The Deplorable

November 8th……..The day SMOD enters Earth’s atmosphere.

Women and minorities will suffer most.

NickelthroweR
NickelthroweR

Greetings,

Small business is also hurting because the infrastructure needed to support such endeavors has wilted away in an all too predictable feedback loop. See, when you go about making things, you depend on all of your vendors and subcontractors to not only deliver parts and materials but also to help develop better products. I think of it as a partnership.

Having someone I can speak with in person, preferably at their business location or even speaking with someone here in the United States by phone is far far far more better than having to deal with the faceless, bottomless pit that is Asian manufacturing.

Case in point: Though it is an hour away, I can drive over and speak with the owner of the company that hand wires my audio transformers. This guy forgets more before noon than I’ve learned in a lifetime. Anyway, he wants my business to be successful so he’ll suggest parts or circuits or changes in the transformer design that will help me to better achieve my goals.

This man is more than 70 years old.

Most of the vendors that I use seem to have owners that are past the age of retirement. Once these guys are gone, it will be hard for the next audio company that comes up behind me to get any traction as the knowledge base needed to grow a business will be gone. It will be in Asia.

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