15 Economic Statistics That Just Keep Getting Worse

Dear Friends:

A few weeks ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner penned an article for the New York Times entitled “Welcome To The Recovery” in which he touted the great strides that the U.S. economy was making. But with unemployment still dangerously high and with foreclosures and personal bankruptcies continuing to set all-time records, should we really be talking about a “recovery”? The truth is that the numbers don’t lie, and statistic after statistic shows that the economic fundamentals continue to get progressively worse. The U.S. government can continue to try to pump up the economy with more debt, but the reality is that there is not going to be a legitimate “recovery” until consumer spending rebounds. Consumer spending makes up the vast majority of U.S. GDP. But without good jobs, consumers are not going to be able to spend money. Unfortunately, our jobs base continues to erode as millions upon millions of middle class jobs are shipped over to China, India and dozens of third world nations by the global predator corporations that now dominate the world economy.

The U.S. government cannot create real wealth out of thin air. It can borrow even more money and flood the economy with even more paper currency, but the short-term “buzz” that creates does absolutely nothing to solve our long-term economic problems.

It is the private sector that actually creates wealth. But unfortunately, over the last several decades we have allowed that wealth to become highly concentrated. Now the giant global predator corporations have decided that American workers aren’t really that desirable after all. They are slowly taking away their factories and their offices and they are moving them to where people are willing to work for one-tenth the pay.

So where does that leave middle class American “consumers”?

Well, it leaves us in a world of hurt.

The following are 15 key economic statistics that just keep getting worse and which reveal the horrific economic plight in which we now find ourselves….

1 - The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May 2010. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has set a new all-time record for 18 months in a row. But there is every indication that things are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the number of Americans on food stamps will increase to 43 million in 2011.

2 - The U.S. economy lost 131,000 more jobs during the month of July 2010. But the truth is that the U.S. economy has been bleeding jobs for a long time. According to one analysis, the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007. Meanwhile, immigrants (both legal and illegal) continue to pour into this nation in unprecedented numbers.

3 - Americans who are out of work are finding it incredibly difficult to get back into the workforce. In the United States today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to an all-time record of 35.2 weeks.

4 - The U.S. government keeps trying to pump up the economy with debt, and in the process things are getting wildly out of control. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.

5 - The interest on all of this debt is becoming increasingly oppressive. As of July 1, 2010, the U.S. government had spent $355 billion so far in 2010 on interest payments to the holders of the national debt. The total for 2010 should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion. According to Erskine Bowles, one of the heads of Barack Obama’s national debt commission, the U.S. government will be spending $2 trillion just on interest on the national debt by 2020. Keep in mind that the entire U.S. government budget is less than $4 trillion for the entire year of 2010.

6 - If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion.

7 - Social Security will pay out more in benefits in 2010 than it receives in payroll taxes. This was not supposed to happen until at least 2015. In the years ahead, these new “Social Security deficits” are projected to be absolutely catastrophic.

8 - There are simply far too many retirees and not nearly enough workers to support them. Back in 1950 each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.

9 - Wealth continues to become highly concentrated at the top. Since 1973, the average CEO’s salary has increased from 26 times the median income to over 300 times the median income.

10 - According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

11 - The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10% of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one mortgage payment during the January 2010 to March 2010 time period. That was a new all-time record and represented an increase from 9.1 percent a year ago.

12 - A recent survey of last year’s college graduates found that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up substantially from 63 percent in 2006.

13 - During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.

14 - The total number of U.S. bank failures passed the 100 mark in July 2010. In 2009, the total number of U.S. bank failures did not pass the century barrier until October.

15 - The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value. An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $112.35 today. An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $440.33 today.

Any rational observer (and clearly U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner does not qualify) can see that the foundations of the U.S. economy are coming apart. The rapidly accumulating mountain of debt that has fueled our “prosperity” is impossible to repay and is going to progressively choke the life out of our economic system. The good jobs that we have allowed to be shipped out of our country are never coming back. Every single day, more wealth flows out of this country than flows into it.

Anyone who claims that things are getting “better” is either ignorant, completely deluded or is purposely lying.

The U.S. economy is not getting “better”.

The U.S. economy is dying.

You should adjust your plans accordingly.

Respectfully,

Mark

Missionaries of the Ax

Dear Friends:

Located in the very heart of modern-day Germany, in the province of Hesse, is a small humble town of only about 15,000 inhabitants. In the middle of that town stands an imposing old cathedral built in the 12th-14th centuries of reddish stone. Situated in front of that cathedral is the statue of a man in a monk’s garb on a stump of a freshly felled oak, with a huge Saxon ax in his hand.

The humble town is Fritzlar, called Gaesmere in ancient times. It is known in Germany as the birthplace of two beginnings: Here began the Christianization of Germany, and here’s where the German Empire was born as a political entity. The statue is that of the Anglo-Saxon monk and missionary Wynfrith, also known as St. Boniface, the patron saint of Germany and the Netherlands. And the stump is the remains of the tree that belonged to the highest German god, the Oak of Thor. The Oak of Thor was the center of the pagan religion of the local tribe of the Hessians, and the most pagan Germans at the time.

In 723, on his way to Thüringia, St. Boniface stopped at Gaesmere. He had worked for five years as a missionary in Frisia, Hesse, and Thüringia, and he had some limited success. Unfortunately, as his biographer Willibald relates, those Germans that converted were never too stable in the faith; while giving lip service to Christ, they would secretly go back to their pagan ways, bringing sacrifices to the pagan gods, practicing divination and incantations, etc. Boniface decided to deal with the problem once and for all by attacking at the very center of their pagan religion. One morning he appeared at the Oak of Thor with an ax in his hand, surrounded by a pagan crowd who cursed him and expected the gods to intervene and kill him. He raised his hand against Thor and delivered the first blow. According to Willibald, immediately a strong wind came and blew the ancient oak over. Seeing that Thor failed to protect his holy tree and to kill Boniface, the Hessians converted to Christ. This event is considered the beginning of the Christianization of Germany. From Hesse, word spread, and other German tribes turned to Christianity. Boniface went to many places, destroying the altars and high places of the pagans, proving the superiority of the risen Christ over the blood-thirsty German deities. By 754, when he was martyred by a group of pagan Frisian warriors, Boniface was the archbishop and metropolitan of all Germany, with several bishoprics and other mission sites established by him, and all German tribes with the exception of the Saxons and the Frisians were converted to Christ.

What made Boniface expose himself to the wrath of the pagan Hessians and risk being slain by them for violating the central shrine of their religion?

The first five years of failures obviously taught Boniface a lesson: No matter how many personal conversions a missionary is able to produce, if they do not challenge the central idol of the culture, the new converts will fall away and go back to paganism. Every pagan culture has its central idol or idols. That central idol defines and determines every relationship, every practice, every institution, every word and sentence, every legal rule, every scientific and educational standard. The new converts, even while professing faith in Christ, are forced to define and determine all their relationships and practices according to the central idol in their society, and that is their main battle, their main source of stumbling blocks to fall away from the faith. The contradiction of believing in Christ while living according to an idol’s prescriptions for a society is the greatest struggle for those new believers.

Therefore, a missionary who doesn’t do his best to challenge the central idol of a culture is producing future apostates, not true believers. Boniface learned it the hard way. Therefore, he changed his strategy. He wasn’t a missionary to the individual souls of the Germans anymore; he was a missionary to Germany herself. And he challenged the central idol of Germany. To save his spiritual children from apostasy, he had to take on the chief adversary: Thor himself. Instead of breaking the twigs one by one, he laid his ax at the very root of the German pagan culture. And the result was the turning of whole tribes to Christ.

Boniface wasn’t the first to understand this important principle. The earliest church, as recorded by Luke in Acts, was not concerned only about fixing the personal morality and the private religious life of the new converts. The early church was not persecuted for producing worshippers of Christ, neither was it persecuted for the individual moral purity of its members. It was the bold and uncompromising declaration that “there is another King, one Jesus” that earned the Christians the privilege to be food for the lions and to become living torches for the Emperors’ parties. The Christian Gospel was specifically directed against the central idol in that society – the cult to the Emperor – in its declaration that Jesus Christ was the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Only in the context of such a comprehensive challenge against the central dogma – or idol – of the social order can an individual soul find the emotional fuel and the strength to remain faithful to their Lord and Savior in their practical daily life; and only in the context of a comprehensive worldview as opposed to the dominant worldview of the culture can a believer find his place in the Kingdom of God as a civilization alternative to the wicked parody of civilization he has around himself. A Christian with a theology for the salvation of his soul only, without a theology for the reformation of his culture to challenge the idols of the day, is a Christian living a double life: His spirit will serve God while his body and mind and money and work and relationships will serve the idols. Eventually, if he is not equipped with the knowledge that will close this gap, he will be severely tempted to let his spirit follow his mind and body and money and work and relationships, and he will submit to idols.

That’s what happened to St. Boniface’s spiritual children after his first five years on the field. He learned his lesson, and so he acted accordingly.

Very few missionaries today understand this important truth of foreign missions. Missions today are not comprehensive missions to the nations; they are missions only to “save souls.” You will be hard pressed to find any mission organizations that train or encourage their missionaries to identify or confront the central idols of a culture. Very few precious missionaries ever confront cultural idols; most are only focused on the mantra of “saving souls.” As if it’s possible to separate the soul of a man from his culture, from his relationships, and from the legal, economic, and political reality of his culture.

Societies today have their sacred oaks. The more developed and advanced a society is, the more sophisticated and refined its idols are, and more subtle and more devious their hold on men’s souls is. Societies like Europe, Latin America, or East Asia – and even the United States – don’t have official sacred shrines anymore. They have replaced them with a more sophisticated idol: the idol of the welfare state. It has no sacred oaks, no visible and material shrines, no official sacrifices or divinations or incantations. But it has its invisible sacrifices and shrines. Whole cultures that pretend to be “rationalistic” and “scientific” are caught in the nets of this most irrational of all idols in history; its power is so strong over the minds of men that in those societies there is no opposition to it. Even when the socialist welfare state proves completely incapable to deliver even a single one of its promises, the men and women of these societies still keep laying their trust and hope at the feet of the idol, not even thinking for a moment that their faith is misguided and deceitful.

And yet, we seldom see missionaries who challenge that central idol of societies. No wonder Europe – where it has taken the strongest hold on society – is believed to be “the graveyard of missionaries.” Missionaries would go and do evangelism, plant churches, convert souls, and establish regular services. And when they went back home, it was only a matter of a couple of years before those churches disintegrated. And no wonder: A new convert worships Christ on Sunday morning, but then starting from Monday morning through Saturday night his life is shaped, defined, and controlled by the idol of the almighty welfare state. And because the missionary is usually silent and never challenges this central idol, the new believer has no ideology, no worldview, and no alternatives, and he is left without any means to oppose that control.

Eventually, like St. Boniface found out, the god of Monday morning takes over, and the God of Sunday morning remains only an empty religious shell. A believer left without means to defend his faith against a powerful idol will eventually give in. And when thousands of missionaries in a culture see the fruit of their diligent work destroyed, they declare that culture a “graveyard for missionaries.”

But such description is wrong. No culture is a “graveyard for missionaries.” The fault lies with the missionaries themselves. The truth is, they never even started the real missionary work. A missionary is not a missionary until they set their ax against the roots of the culture’s sacred oaks. They are not a missionary until they have issued a challenge against the central idols of that culture. A mission that only addresses the individual soul and never the society in which that soul operates is an exercise in futility. Only a comprehensive challenge, a message that proclaims Jesus Christ as Lord over everything – including rulers and powers – can win a nation for Christ.

That is a lesson that modern missionaries need to learn.

St. Boniface’s strategy to destroy the shrines of the pagan gods cost him his life. Thirty years after felling the Oak of Thor, the aged archbishop was attacked by pagan Frisians, whose shrines he had destroyed a few days earlier. His biographer claims that they only wanted the treasures he carried in his chests. When they opened the chests, however, they discovered only the books he carried with himself.

But we’ll leave books and missions for another article.

Respectfully,
Mark

Taxing and Regulating Us to Death

Dear Friends:

Isabel Paterson writes in her book The God of the Machine, “Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.”1 Thomas Sowell described this motivation as the “Vision of the Anointed”:

Although Adam Smith regarded the intentions of businessmen as selfish and anti-social, he saw the systematic consequences of their competition as being far more beneficial to society than well-intentioned government regulation…. The vision of the anointed is one in which ills as poverty, irresponsible sex, and crime derive primarily from “society,” rather than from individual choices and behavior. To believe in personal responsibility would be to destroy the whole special role of the anointed, whose vision casts them in the role of rescuers of people treated unfairly by “society.”2

The Bible establishes the right of governmental authorities to exist: “Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God” (Romans 13:1). Our forefathers understood that governmental power ultimately was established by God, and they structured our nation accordingly, even those who were not Christians. They also understood that giving unlimited power to any man-made institution, even an institution established by God, can result in tyranny. Saul (I Samuel) and Ahab (I Kings 21) are textbook examples that have lost none of their applicational lessons for our day.

Power is most dangerous in the hands of people who believe what they are doing is for our well being because they contend that their intentions to help the less fortunate are righteous and just. It’s the intention to do good things that counts. The results are less important even if those receiving the government benefits are actually hurt by the programs. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the power of the ring is not something to be desired even by good people. It’s no wonder that Gandalf and the elves shun the power of the ring. Tolkien is doubtful that any person has the ability to resist the temptation of absolute power promised by the ring, even if that power is used for good. Attempts to stop slavery, an exceedingly righteous and needed endeavor, had been done in ways that made the cause seem fanatical. Here’s how Murray Rothbard described it in his article on “Just War”:

The Northern war against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle and the birth of a perfect world. The Yankee fanatics were veritable Patersonian humanitarians with the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, of their era.

They are the philosophical descendants of Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), France’s Voice of Virtue, who thought the guillotine would contribute to the nation’s salvation. “The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God…. Of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.”3 America never saw a guillotine. Blood did not run in the streets. There were no attempts to compel equality of outcome. The Constitution was not designed to save everyone or anyone. How times have changed. Here’s how Thomas J. DiLorenzo puts it:

According to the doctrine of “collective salvation,” a Christian cannot be saved and go to Heaven unless one first embarks on a crusade to have government “save” the “oppressed” of society by expanding the welfare state, raising taxes, making taxation more “progressive,” adopting more racial hiring quotas, and regulating and nationalizing as much of private industry as possible. It is a variant of “liberation theology” which, according to Pope John Paul, II, is essentially Marxism masquerading as Christianity.

There is no need for a guillotine when you have the punitive taxing power of the State, regulatory agencies who answer to no one, and a willing voting public to game the system for personal benefit at the expense of others.

The written Constitution “checks” the powers of the federal government by carefully delineating and specifying the powers of each branch. If the Constitution does not grant the federal government power to perform a particular activity, the government cannot legally perform it: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” (Tenth Amendment). This becomes an extremely important point when any discussion of taxation arises. The federal government’s authority to tax is only as great as its stated function. If the Constitution does not specify a particular function for the federal government to perform then the United States Congress has no Constitutional right to collect taxes from citizens for the proposed unconstitutional activity even if the policy is designed to save us.

The State has failed to heed the Bible’s warning: “Except the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain that build it” (Psalm 127:1). Civil government cannot save no matter how much it taxes the citizens in an attempt to fulfill its political dream of heaven on earth. “In the United States, federal tax policy illustrates the government’s unconscious rush to be the god of its citizens. When a provision in the tax law permits the taxpayer to keep a portion of his money, the Internal Revenue Service calls this a ‘tax expenditure,’ or an ‘implicit government grant.’ This is not tax money that the state has collected and expended but money it has allowed the citizen to keep by not taking it. In other words, any money the citizen is permitted to keep is regarded as if the state had graciously given it to him. Everything we have is from the state, to which we owe gratitude. In fact, we are the property of the state, which therefore has the right to the fruit of our labor.”4 Civil government must be returned to its delegated and limited function under God, to punish the evil doer and praise the good and not act like the Roman Caesar Domitian who demanded that the people address him as dominus et deus, “my lord and god.”

God warned the people in Samuel’s day that their rejection of Him as their true King would mean the confiscation of their property by an oppressive state: “And [the king] will take the best of your fields and your vineyards and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. And he will take a tenth of your seed and of your vineyards, and give to his officers and to his servants … He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his servants” (I Samuel 8:14-17). The day is long past when we can say that the Federal Government of the United States has taken a tenth of what we own. The percentage is much greater. What will the judgment be?

SOURCES:

1 Isabel Paterson, “The Humanitarian with the Guillotine” in The God of the Machine (1943), 235.

2 Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as the Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 126, 203.

3 Paterson, The God of the Machine, 241.

4 Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, [1983] 1993), 187.


Respectfully,
Mark