The Greatest depression is coming, are you ready?

It is clear that the Left is going to gaslight us on this issue of inflation. They'll tell you things are better in the US than other countries (of course, that is the benefit of being the reserve currency, the world has to help support our excess, however, that is also why they are forming BRICS because enough is enough). We know how bad it is here, so if it is much worse in other countries that is something that will lead to war. People would rather fight and die in a war than die slowly of starvation.

They will tell you that the US economy is strong. Most of that is phony data. They have lied about unemployment and they don't talk about the 1.7 million excess deaths since the vaccines were mandated. If you added 1.7 million to the unemployment roles everyone would know we are in a terrible depression, but since they died they aren't "unemployed". The issue should be tax revenue, that would show you how well the economy is doing. Look at corporate tax revenue by year. 2007 was a high point, it cratered and wasn't until 2015 that it came close to 2007 levels but plunged again hitting another low in 2020. In 2022 we exceeded the revenue from 2007 but that does not take into account inflation. I will use Gold as a measure of intrinsic worth. My graph only goes back to 2009, but at that point gold was $923 an ounce, and today it is $2,543 an ounce. So a dollar today is worth 36% of what it was worth in 2007. In 2023 we had $420 billion in corporate tax revenue. In 2009 dollars that would be $152 billion. That would be about half of the tax revenue in 2008. So remember, inflation makes it look like everything is "up". But once you adjust for inflation you can see the reality.

They will tell you that they are fighting inflation, but that is absurd. Inflation is caused by the government printing money without any real asset or GDP behind the money. This year so far the government has created a new $1.5 trillion in debt and we are set to break records in spending and creating new debt. So they are not fighting inflation, on the contrary there will be winners and losers and they know it. If the government creates $1.5 trillion in debt whoever gets that handout can then buy assets which will rise with inflation while the dollar sinks. This is why they are so desperate to be on the winning side of the election and why these campaigns are now spending a billion dollars. The winners of the election get the government pork, everyone else loses. If the government stops handing out pork then you will know it because donors will stop giving these big checks and campaigns will stop costing a billion dollars.

The US dollar is solid they will tell you, and most of the world trusts in the dollar. This is true, the US dollar is like an iceberg. It is melting quickly and most of the world is stuck on top of this melting iceberg. But that is why they are creating BRICS, they are abandoning the iceberg.

They will tell you that this is just "Chicken Little" saying the sky is falling. OK, that also is true. Chicken Little was a propaganda movie made by Disney and released in 1943. The goal was to shut people up about the war. But the holocaust was real and the atomic bomb was real.

Hi @ZNP

Well, yes; I do take what people post on these boards to heart and there are things that we can tell from others based on their words and deeds. Of course, that's one of the problems of internet social media, we can't really ever know that we know anything about anyone. We are a few hundred/throusand people scattered across the world and conversing with each other based on knowing nothing about them but what their words say. Our only real connection of any kind is our stated faith in Jesus as our Savior and Lord.

The second problem with what's going on here is that we are in the political boards and they always get testy. You can go look around at any christian site that you'd like and you'll find that if there is a political discussion section... it gets testy a lot of times.

In the few weeks that I've been here, yes, you and I have conversed on several threads and we've had back and forths. Yes, I admit that there are some things that a determine about people on internet forums that are based on just how they present their words. What issues are important to them. And yes, your OP does sound a tad anxious. You seem to be warning about some great depression that is coming and the tenor of your post, certainly to me, sounds anxious.

If I have made some incorrect assumptions about your understanding of things, my apologies. I'm sorry to have offended you in that way.

God bless and vote wisely,
Ted

It's not just a claim, it's backed up by the data (as I've posted here).

Inflation has been declining consistently for some time now, to the point where it's within target range and the Fed is likely to start cutting interest rates next month. Not sure why you think that would result in wars and famine.

Do you have any support for that, or is this your opinion?

Why are you assuming they would be unemployed if they were alive?

Why? It's a commodity. You might as well use timber as a measure.

Why? It's been declining for some time and is currently near target levels of less than 3%. So it looks like whatever "they" did worked.

Not in this case. It was largely due to two factors: 1) a rush of consumer demand after the pandemic while supply chains hadn't fully ramped up yet, and 2) the global price of crude oil rising after Russian invaded Ukraine.

Are you opposed to all federal subsidies, targeted tax breaks, incentives, etc.?

Funny, I've been hearing conservatives cry that the dollar is surely about to collapse my entire life, every time a Dem is in the White House, yet here we are. We were told that Obama's quantitative easing was guaranteed to crash the US dollar, but it didn't.

The thing you seem to be overlooking is that the Fed can both inject and remove money from the economy.

Sure, one incorrect assumption is that this thread is about some Great depression. Look at the title, it is about "the greatest" depression. As in Muhammed Ali claiming "he is the greatest". It is mocking the gaslighting that is going on.

Because I take Putin seriously as well as Iran, N. Korea, Venezuela and China.

Consider the self checkout at the grocery store. It is like the self serve pumps at the gas station. Have you noticed how the guys who used to pump gas and check your oil no longer have jobs? In the same way cashiers are being replaced.

Now it is reasonable and logical to say "this has happened before" and we didn't lose jobs. So let's consider that.

Yes, the industrial revolution brought in big machines to do work and yet people still had jobs. That is true, but cows, horses, oxen, donkeys, they all lost their jobs. We have a few racehorses to entertain the rich and all the cows and oxen are for eating.

What about the computer age and internet age, we didn't lose jobs there either. The computer and internet don't "take anyones job" they are simply a better, faster way to communicate. It made the world smaller. You could buy a Mac or a PC, it didn't do anything without someone on it. Yes it was faster and more efficient and so we became more productive. But you couldn't do anything without people. So perhaps it put the post office out of business because letters and post cards dropped dramatically. But FedEx and other businesses thrived.

But AI is different. It uses a tremendous amount of energy and must be run on very big and powerful and expensive computers. The justification is that one person can do the job of two with it, eliminating 50% of jobs. There is a cost benefit analysis and the only way to you can get a return on investment with AI is to replace workers with it. Now imagine you have an AI designed to do the work of a paralegal. The lawyer gives an assignment to a paralegal to research something and write him up a report. AI can do it faster, better and less expensive. That paralegal works 40 hours a week. But if a law firm gets the AI they will use it 24 hours a day seven days a week. So it doesn't replace one paralegal it replaces four. But it is even better than that because AI can do the work in a fraction of the time as a paralegal so it is really replacing 8 not four. So just like self checkouts at the grocery store you will see the job of paralegal disappear very quickly. But AI right now is operating at the level of a college graduate that scores in the top 10% range in every exam. Imagine a lawyer that is also a CPA and Doctor and Mathematician. You might still reasonably think there are college graduates, perhaps 5% that would look better than AI, but that would be wrong, because AI went from very smart HS graduate to very smart college graduate in one year. So in six months the AI will be ahead of anyone that it is behind today. I am not talking about a lawyer with thirty years experience. I am talking about college graduates. Why hire anyone new? On the contrary with AI your existing lawyers can do twice and three times the work. But this is true of any white collar job. Why hire a kid out of college when the AI can do the job faster, better and cheaper? Not everyone works in a cubicle, there are jobs that computers don't do. For example, an auto mechanic. But this is where Tesla robots come in. They are teaching them to be maids, and cooks and mechanics. They cost $120k, but the plan is to lease them for $30k a year. Sounds competitive with other minimum wage workers, however, the robot can work four shifts a week. Is anyone going to do a 40 hour a week job for $7.5k a year? They don't get sick, don't do drugs, don't steal from you, don't make viral videos that will destroy your business. Perhaps people don't want a robot doing these jobs. They built a McDonalds in California that is completely automated, no person works there. It was much more profitable than a regular McDonald's and it got more customers, not less, because people have more trust in the AI making their food than some teenager. This doesn't mean it will replace every restaurant worker, but it does mean that it can easily replace 50% of them and do the job better, faster, cheaper and more reliably.

You might think that some jobs will be lost and some jobs created. For example what happens if the robot stops working correctly? The robots are leased, so a service rep will come out and fix it like the guy who fixes the Xerox copier at work. The service agreement for a Xerox copier indicates you would have one service rep for 50-100 Xerox machines (simply looking at the contract and assuming 50% of the money goes to labor and the service reps salary is 60k a year). So you will get 1 or 2 jobs for every 100 jobs that the robots take. With the AI software it will probably be the same ratio for the first year or two until most of the training jobs are eliminated.

So then the question becomes what jobs can't AI do? It is very limited. You can imagine that there will be some people that a large firm would want to keep for another ten years. But during that same time you can also imagine that 80% of the workers can be replaced by AI and robots.

For example, suppose you want a tailor made suit. You can go to tailor, but you can also go to a scanner that will do a full body scan. You then go online choose your fabric and design and it will instantly show you how the finished product will look on you. It can then manufacture that suit specifically to your measurements faster and cheaper. Who needs salesmen and tailors if you simply go and get scanned and then order online?

This is not my imagination running amok. This is what all the leaders in this field are saying. Elon Musk says his robots will replace 100 million jobs. He says his robots are more important part of his business than self driving cars.

I appreciate your response, but it really didn't address the question I asked. Thanks anyways though.

During Trump's administration our debt to GDP ratio was 105%. Today it is 130% and may be 135% with more accurate data. That is a very big slide in just four years.

Let's take the mask off

Unemployment is calculated by looking at who is not employed and is also actively looking for a job. Our "new jobs" is looking fair, not great since the downward revision, but not horrible. However, what about the dramatic rise in excess deaths that insurance actuaries have sounded the alarm on in Fortune 500 companies. All of those people had company life insurance so all of them were working at the time. Why haven't all those deaths resulted in a huge demand for workers?

Dead people are not looking for jobs and therefore they are not "unemployed".

Generally speaking if the employed people were dying at a far higher rate than before you would think that would drive the rate of unemployment down as companies everywhere would be hiring. But that is not what we are seeing. All those deaths are doing is masking the true problem.

This is a severe problem in the data. The calculate "new jobs" without distinction to the pay, is it hourly, is it temporary, etc. But they don't calculate people who have lost their jobs in the last six months. If everything is normal then the way they calculate it would probably work, but when we have 1.7 million excess deaths from fortune 500 companies, that needs to be factored in and they aren't.

When the data does not seem to make sense, fair job growth but skyrocketing problems in the retail business then you have to dig deeper. People who die don't look for jobs, they also don't buy things in retail stores. Also the year they die they do pay taxes, but not after that. So we have some lagging indicators of 1-2 years. We would expect to see retail sales dropping and we do, we would expect to see tax revenue dropping and we do. If we adjust tax revenue with inflation we have seen at least a 33% drop in tax revenue. But there again inflation is masking that problem.

My point is not just that the government is lying to us, that is obvious every time they revise the numbers drastically. No, the point is that it is calculated. Inflation serves a purpose because it hides the incredible drop in tax revenue. For example debt to GDP is a good way to see this. When Trump was president the ratio was around 100%, today it is 130-135%. That rise is screaming out to people who monitor these things like Rickards that the US economy is collapsing.

Now inflation is up 20% since Biden took office. Do you know how they calculate "new jobs"? They look at payroll! Are they counting the people or the dollars, because if they are looking at dollars the "increase in payroll" is not keeping pace with inflation.

So then the way they calculate unemployment masks the dramatic rise in deaths, the way they calculate "new jobs" is masked by inflation, and the really big problems like debt to GDP is also masked by talking about lies rather than picking a metric that would see through the BS.

1 Corinthians 6:1 Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? 2 Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?...9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

Would you dare to have a thief rule over your bank account? What do you think happens if an idolater rules over the Olympics, or the Oscars, or the Grammy's, or the Super Bowl? Would you let fornicators and adulterers rule over the schools and the government? Don't you think fornicators and adulterers have a vested interest in legalizing abortion?

What we are seeing right now is what happens when the unrighteous rule. For example, they are now proposing to tax unrealized capital gains. Suppose you bought your house for 10k back in the 1960s. You have put a lot of work into that house over the last sixty years and now it is worth 500k. The government wants you to come up with about 70k to give them in "unrealized capital gains"? What are we talking about? That house that you bought for 10k, you can't buy a house like that for 10k today. If you adjust for inflation it would be at least 300k. So are they going to adjust for inflation? Of course not. You put a lot of money into fixing up that house, can you deduct all the money you have spent on the house for the last sixty years? Of course not. This is simply theft. If they take 75k from you and all your neighbors and everyone in the country what do you think will happen to housing prices? If they go down will you get a tax write off next year for unrealized capital losses? These laws are being proposed by thieves.

Consider Social Security. The fund is about $3 trillion dollars. All the gold in the commodity market is worth about $13 trillion. Imagine if all the money taken from Americans for Social Security had gone to buy gold. The price of gold would be much higher than it is now. Instead of $2,500 it might be $3,000 or more likely $4,000. In 1970 gold was $40 an ounce. To go from $40 to $4,000 an ounce would be better than just about any investment you could have bought in 1970. You would be assured of not losing money and instead since you knew that the fund would be buying up a lot of gold it would be safe bet you would do very well. Instead what is the fund filled with? IOU's from the US government which is run by thieves and is bankrupt. You let thieves take your retirement money. Remember, every month you paid taxes on your income and some of the money was also taken for Social Security. Well now they want to tax the Social Security! Why? You already paid taxes on that money. This is what happens when you let thieves take charge of your bank account.

Matthew 6:19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: 21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Jesus warned you. Paul warned you. Did you heed the warning?

Yo' @ZNP

Which is another reason I pick the lesser of those who take matters to court.

That's very true. Unfortunately there's only one who knows the future. Sure, we can all look back today, just as the armchair quarterback can tell you exactly how the game should have been executed the day after the game. Trust me on this please. No one in 1970 thought that gold would be $2500/oz in 2024. Financial prognosticators can't see that far into the future. So why you would be beating this generation over the head for something that now, after the events have unfolded, clearly indicate that we all should have been buying gold for all of our lives. No stock market. No bank interest loans. Everybody buys gold. Of course, the same is true for anyone who bought Microsoft stock. We should have all bought that in 1970 along with our gold deposits.

Social Security is still today, nearly 100 years after its inception, still doing exactly what it was intended to do in the beginning. Provide older Americans with at least something to live on in their old age. It wouldn't fund a lifestyle on the first day that it was paid out and it still doesn't. It was never intended to be everyone's retirement plan. And yes, we should have all gone out and bought gold in 1930 an been done with it. And every generation thereafter buy gold and more gold to fund their retirement. But unfortunately most Americans are failed human beings and they won't save for those days that they have no idea whether they will come or not. What do we do with them? Without SS do we just let them die on the side of the road because they didn't plan for the last 20-30 years of their life?

Look friend, it's easy, after the fact, to call the winner every time. BTW how much gold do you own? Gold was $36/oz in 1970 and it now stands at $2570/oz. Still a great return and had any of us known in 1970 that this would be, I'm sure we'd have all bought lots of gold. But future telling really is just a good guess for most of us.

God bless,
ted

Then we certainly can't be prioritizing giving even more tax breaks to billionaires and mega corporations. It's not as if the last time Trump did that they cut prices or raised wages, right? They mostly just pocketed the extra money, so why do they need even more?

So you won't be voting for Trump then, right?

Surely you're not going to try and say Trump is righteous, are you?

Show us the receipts. You have leveled a charge. Now show us the evidence.

The fact is, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. There was record employment rates for minorities while Trump was President. This means the companies were expanding and creating jobs. Further, Trump's energy policies created employment that the current administration halted upon coming into office. Tens of thousands of very well paying jobs were lost.

Hey @JayBird

Earlier a quote from the Scriptures was made about our not taking people into the courts. I also pointed out that, that was more a practice of the GOP candidate than anyone else. He literally has spent his entire life dragging people into courts for various and sundry grievances. Many are even for issues that are later thrown out as merely being frivolous. That's something the Scriptures tell us not to do. Although I believe that instruction is for believers.

God bless,
Ted

For what?

Um, no. Trump left office with the first net loss in jobs creation since Hoover. Under President Biden, all of those jobs were recovered plus an additional 6 million.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-leave-office-worst-jobs-030044152.html

You said those corporations put the money in their pockets. Show us.

And stop using fake news sources. @ZNP already laid out about the way this administration has lied and hidden the true employment numbers.

Hi @ZNP

Yeah, I agree with @JayBird. You can't really be seriously asking such questions and standing behind the GOP candidate. That would just be willful blindness.

God bless,
Ted

Hi @Cameron143

Any chance you could tell us what those jobs were?

God bless,
Ted

This is the problem. I've already supported one statement with a citation/source and you just waved it away as "fake news". You didn't address the info or anything, just declared it "fake" and nothing more.

So why would anyone provide more info to a person who reacts like that?

Sure. They were in the areas of the extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas, it's transportation, and refinement. Also, all those who were creating the pipelines.