What'd you say? I'm too busy playing fantasy football.

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What'd you say? I'm too busy playing fantasy football.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

No kidding, and the NFL draft is right around the corner too. Debt, schmebt ... I gotta get back to my online gaming, and living beyond my means....

 

I just don’t know I’ve been prepping for a long time , I just think there has been now way to
fix this problem .
I don’t know why no one talks about it .
Maybe they are just going to keep printing money for ever ?
It seams that way .
All I know is the life is getting sucked out of my retirement ☹
It mite be a big Monopoly game when it’s over all the bills go back in the box and we start over 👍

 

I just don’t know I’ve been prepping for a long time , I just think there has been now way to
fix this problem .
I don’t know why no one talks about it .
Maybe they are just going to keep printing money for ever ?
It seams that way .
All I know is the life is getting sucked out of my retirement ☹
It mite be a big Monopoly game when it’s over all the bills go back in the box and we start over 👍

The banks print the majority of the money, not the US Gov't; 99% to be more precise

Every time you use your credit card, the bank is printing money. That "fake money" then gets deposited in to the other person's account, and gets confused with "real funds".

The money ledger is then made correct when you pay back your loan and "destroys" the new money that was debited to the other person's account.

So, if you truly believe in "printing" being the cause of inflation, then things like loans need to stop being made.

However, once you stop the loans, you will increase the defaults.

The problem with defaults is repayment is not made. Repaymet is the mechanism where the "printed" money is "destroyed".

Where repayment fails, the government has the tool of taxation to pull money out of circulation as a means to curb inflation.

Very few people understand the life cycle of the dollar I wrote above.

 

Economic collapse appears more and more likely

All I can say is, do not put all of your eggs in one basket. We own a little money, a few stocks, some land (My home and a BOL),

We paid off our cars ASAP, because if we had to move to find a job we could take our equity with us. We could not always avoid having a balance on the credit cards, but we tried.

Now that we are retired we are drawing SS, live in a paid-for home, and are wanting to use some of our money to improve our BOL a bit: we got city water in and now we want a driveway and a large shed.

Because the OP is right: the gov is printing more and more money and how long can they kick the can down the road? And so we wish to have less in savings and more in real estate, and so we are developing the real estate some.

Also we are gardening, of course. The gov is diluting to value of money, but a potato is still a potato and will retain its value

 

Economic collapse appears more and more likely

All I can say is, do not put all of your eggs in one basket. We own a little money, a few stocks, some land (My home and a BOL),

We paid off our cars ASAP, because if we had to move to find a job we could take our equity with us. We could not always avoid having a balance on the credit cards, but we tried.

Now that we are retired we are drawing SS, live in a paid-for home, and are wanting to use some of our money to improve our BOL a bit: we got city water in and now we want a driveway and a large shed.

Because the OP is right: the gov is printing more and more money and how long can they kick the can down the road? And so we wish to have less in savings and more in real estate, and so we are developing the real estate some.

Also we are gardening, of course. The gov is diluting to value of money, but a potato is still a potato and will retain its value

Normally I would agree.

But to be honest, if something happens, money wont be worth the paper its on and moreover, who is going to be around to either collect or sue you for nonpayment?

I grasp what some say, but if things suddenly go boom, paying off credit cards is not really on the list.

 

We will just print a $30T dollar bill and pay off the debt. . .

 

Then we will have hyperinflation and you’ll need a wheelbarrow of cash to buy load of bread.

 

While it might seem likely to doomers and preppers, that does not mean that it will happen.

 

"While it might seem likely to doomers and preppers, that does not mean that it will happen."

- Every Dead Person on the RMS Titanic

...wonder if good ol' Klaus Schwab and his buds have this all planned out. Remember their motto: You will own nothing and be happy.

Precisely This ^. Classic 'Hegelian Dialectic' - Problem / Reaction / Solution - but Their "Solution" is 100% Total Control - of Everything - with Us all (at least those that Survive..) as the 'Batteries' to power what's left.. Which - because 'The Machine' they envision will All be 'smaller' - will be Much easier to Control, than the World / Societies are, now.. And why, Look! Even the Planet is seeing the "benefits" of a few-Billion less People! 'Glowbull Warming' is 'cured'!

..Wish this was all just 'tinfoil', but This Is what they all Want. Whether they'll Get it / Achieve it, is the TBD. I'm still betting on We The People.

In the short-term.. 'Beware the CBDC's.. We're 'converting' as Much Cash into 'tangibles' as we Possibly-can, and Only saving a 'bit' for (possibly) some More Land, but.. We'll see..

.02
jd

 

$242,500 per tax payer?

I wonder if good ol' Klaus Schwab and his buds have this all planned out. Remember their motto: You will own nothing and be happy.

Could mean we are offered a "wonderful" way to get the country and ourselves out of debt: all debts are forgiven, in exchange for some entity (WEF?) owning it all. All mortgages on residential and commercial properties and all loans (car, college, etc) get converted to rentals that we pay THEM every month.

The younger generation will LOVE this idea! The rest of us will have to learn to live in shackles.

Already own your home/vehicle/commercial property? I have no idea how they would snatch those out from under you. But, I would not be surprised if they tried to justify it "for the greater good".

 

Already own your home/vehicle/commercial property? I have no idea how they would snatch those out from under you. But, I would not be surprised if they tried to justify it "for the greater good".

Property tax increases until it becomes unaffordable. Mandatory “inspections”, insurance cost increases, etc.

 

It continually amazes me that this economic house of cards remains standing. I think it’s really about consumer confidence in the economy and in the dollar. There’s no value in a piece of paper and yet we continue to behave as though there were. Once our foreign investors start calling in their investments in American debt, the game will be over. Our future is literally in the hands of foreign nations who don’t like us very much. Uncertainty seems the hallmark of our future.

 

Along time ago a very wise man, small town local banker told me that consumer sentiment was the determining factor in most if not all m9ney matters. If people believe the economy is healthy then the economy booms. If people believe stocks are worth more than the current list price then the stocks go up (on the average). could it be that right now the economy stays afloat when common sense and economic theory says it should be collapsing because people believe it’s going to survive? Because they have faith in it surviving? I’m not talking about the BS consumer sentiment polls that the government or its minions put out. I believe those polls and measures are about as accurate as the 8% inflation we are currently seeing I.e not very. Just a thought.

 

I decided to propare for a big economic correction in Jan.

IMO we have had them before but I doubt this will be the end all.

 

Agree with much of what you wrote. Inflation is running much higher than the official numbers -- most of what I buy has increased at least 50%. And it shows no sign of stopping -- if anything, the problems seem to be spiraling into more problems.

Not sure of how big the economic troubles will get -- it might just be a recession, and might only affect certain countries. Or it could be a full-blown Great Depression 2 -- or worse.

It's difficult to say what's actually going on in the world nowadays, but I think an economic war is part of the mix (much like the collapse of the USSR). Not sure who's winning, or even what the sides are.

 

The big risk is that enough countries will start using rubles/yuan to pay for oil and natural gas. Saudi Arabia isn't taking calls from Biden after he declined to sell them more Patriot missiles recently. And they are in talks with China to begin accepting yuan for oil. The dollar was always stabilized by countries being forced by the Saudis to buy oil in dollars or they would flood the market. Now that is going away with China, India, and several lesser countries paying Russia in non-dollars for their gas and oil. Once this becomes more widespread, the dollar is done and Amerika becomes a second world country unable to afford anything from overseas. And now food shortages and mass immigration are on the horizon. This is a perfect storm of treasons against the people spoiling the nation's future. Only fools believe that there will be no consequences for such. Just a matter of timing for when the dollar is no more.

 

The big risk is that enough countries will start using rubles/yuan to pay for oil and natural gas. Saudi Arabia isn't taking calls from Biden after he declined to sell them more Patriot missiles recently. And they are in talks with China to begin accepting yuan for oil. The dollar was always stabilized by countries being forced by the Saudis to buy oil in dollars or they would flood the market. Now that is going away with China, India, and several lesser countries paying Russia in non-dollars for their gas and oil. Once this becomes more widespread, the dollar is done and Amerika becomes a second world country unable to afford anything from overseas. And now food shortages and mass immigration are on the horizon. This is a perfect storm of treasons against the people spoiling the nation's future. Only fools believe that there will be no consequences for such. Just a matter of timing for when the dollar is no more.

Mass immigration has been ongoing since Biden took over and changed the rules. If our dollar and economy crash I would believe that immigration may be reversed and they may begin leaving for the greener grass back home across the border. The dollar crash would not affect Mexico as much as here and so far the prices and availability for food and fuel there have not risen like they are here.

The US could very well be amongst the hardest hit countries on the globe if our petrol dollar crashes.

 

Its better to have stuff on hand than money in their bank (because its their money while its in their bank). Things that will help you live better off grid - some solar panels and some Eneloops, other stuff that will run on 12VDC like a laptop. Blankets/sleeping bags to keep you warm at night at 30 below without a fire. Solar shower bag to keep yourself clean, can help with clothes or do dishes.

 

If they wipe out cash, which I believe they are trying to. Then they will insert a crypto coin. Then the fun begins. They can decide what you can buy and where you can buy it from.
they scan your wallet to pay a toll to get into a town or city. They can take your money for what ever reason they want

that is the end game.

 

Things are crazy now , I can’t even see how people are building now.
Thing cost so much more , lumber is crazy ply wood 1/2” 3 ply 60 bucks a sheet osb 54$
2x4 studs 9$
wire went from 89 bucks to 249 ? For a 250’ roll .
I just don’t see how people are building for 30/40% more ? I’m a builder 🤷‍♂️
I have some construction project on hold for myself , and i cut the lumber my self .
Every thing else is also very expensive .

 

Things are crazy now , I can’t even see how people are building now.
.., lumber is crazy ply wood 1/2” 3 ply 60 bucks a sheet osb 54$
2x4 studs 9$
wire went from 89 bucks to 249 ? For a 250’ roll .

..Have ya priced typical Iron 'gas pipe' lately?? Yah, they Should put it in the same aisle as the 'K-Y'..

.03
jd

 

We officially started building our retirement home in the Ozark’s in January of 2020. Three thousand square feet in the middle of nowhere Arkansas on 11 acres I have been updating since we bought it in 2012. Well was put in, pole building built, and numerous other small projects completed before January of 2020. The house was finally completed in June of 2021 for @ 25% more than was originally estimated. Everything to build a house was in short supply and increasing in price it seemed daily. It took three months for the contractor to accumulate sheet rock to finish the inside. He would “find” two pieces one week, then 8 pieces the next then OMG he found 12 pieces one week. Very frustrating and very very expensive. The house is finished and very nice but NOT what we originally planned for. Some materials and or labor were just not to be found for any price during COVID. I have kept in touch with the contractor and he relays it’s over 12 months for a new build start. Plus the prices have kept going up and labor has gotten even more scarce. Glad we are finished.

 

Really 25% is not terrible if you got every thing you wanted .
I’m think it’s way more in my area , every thing I buy is 25% now and convert and lumber is more then double sheet goods are triple .
building supply go up and 10% in regular times .

 

These insane tax value increases are a huge problem. One reason I think so many are going to RV'S. My MIL retired from the Park Svc about 4 yrs ago. She has a good pension, I think she was GS 12 (park administrator).

She bought a big MH, a rolling garage (covered car trailer) and a Jeep and now she just drives around the country visiting friends and family. Spends winter either out here eating my preps... or at the beach in FL, and summers at my SIL's farm where she has a dedicated shaded parking spot by their stream.

This might be an option for some. Nomadding has some advantages, but you lose at lot of prepping abilities.

 

This might be an option for some. Nomadding has some advantages, but you lose at lot of prepping abilities.

That's why she has you....

 

Ya it’s crazy , I do a lot of gas pipe , under ground service and boiler water heater stove
installations .
it’s obscene the amount of $ I charge and I’m still by far the least expensive guy

 

I haven’t Sean any big tax increase yet , we will see how it gos .
tax’s are so much here they don’t go up very often

 

I doubt that anything can be done to stop the day of reckoning that is headed our way. Your thoughts?

The government and the Fed have painted themselves into a corner now. For decades, they have believed in Modern Monetary Theory, in which deficits and debt are not important and that spending to keep the economy going is all that matters. Currency and interest rates are just "tools" that can be manipulated to get a desired result. That thinking has gotten to a point of no return now.

People don't get that money is a commodity, just like gold, wheat, oil and soybeans. It has to have intrinsic value in order to be used in trade. When you create money (currency) out of nothing, it has no intrinsic value. The only thing propping up its value is that the other western countries with whom we trade are doing the same thing to their currency. It's a fantasy world that's been created. But it's starting to come apart. The sheer magnitude of U.S. and world debt has grown to a point where you can't just keep creating paper to fund it all.

So yes, a day of reckoning is coming. It will be a time of hyperinflation and devaluation of the dollar. Anything you have that is purely dollars on paper or in a bank account or mutual fund will slowly, but surely, become worthless. The only reliable stores of value will be hard assets like gold, silver, land, food, commodities, ammunition, etc.

 

As has often been said, "Ammunition will be the currency of the 21st century." Those of us who are along in years and who depend on Social Security and a pension will instantly be completely "broke." But unemployment (if it is honestly counted) will likely be in the range of 40-50 percent when the economy goes down. If society actually collapses, then everyone will be unemployed and we'll all be in the same boat. Part of the issue is that the world's economy is now so completely interdependent, that if America's economy collapses, then so will everyone else's. It will likely be a depression that will make the 1930's seem like a cake walk. There will initially be runs on banks like the one displayed here in the 30's, but all they will be able to get is worthless paper.

 

Overall debt started to shoot up after 1981:

Krugman and the Pied Pipers of Debt

Investors are celebrating an incipient “recovery,” but the interventions that were responsible for it are sowing the seeds of a more violent contraction down the road.

seekingalpha.com

I think trade deficits became chronic after 1971 (the year after U.S. conventional oil production peaked), and economic growth rate slowed down after 1961.

Both parties can't reverse any of these because the dollar is used as the global reserve currency, which means exports are expensive for many countries but importing for the U.S. is cheap, and because of that the country has to borrow and spend heavily to cover high costs.

The country can reverse debt but only by cutting down its costs, but it can't and doesn't want to do that. Every sector in the graphic above needs and wants to earn and spend more.

Some reasons:

Look at the level of waste. In the past, there were reports of college kids leaving their clothes in dorms for the holidays, only to come back to school with a new set of clothes. That's generally unheard of in many parts of the world.

Up to 40 pct of food is wasted, and even unsold food is drenched in lime so that homeless people won't eat them.

And that's not limited the U.S. I read that in Japan many products (some barely used or not even opened) are discarded because of the belief that the new year should come up with new things. Many of these goods are shipped to poorer countries and resold. They also have low levels of pollution because cars can't be registered after a certain number of years, which means they are shipped to poorer countries.

Imagine the amount of resources and energy needed to support a resort town or U.S. towns and cities that are far away from each other. One article states that food on the table has to travel an ave. of 2,000 miles. To increase food productivity something like a thousand tons of water is needed to produce a ton of grains, etc. In general, it's an economy that only has around 5 pct of the world's population but must spend on up to 20 pct of world oil production to power up, among others, a quarter of the world's passenger vehicles and light trucks, or basically one vehicle for every adult citizen.

And the result, as this article points out, is a population characterized by growing narcissism, self-entitlement, materialism, and even sociopathic behavior.

 

Another aspect that will play into this is the social rating and application of a grade scale to individuals. An individual's grade will determine their ability or lack of (discrimination) to do/buy/participate/own. Already being practiced in China. It was a topic of discussion on a conservative talk show I listen to, but I do not recall the acronym nor the title.

 

Caste system? And that works sooooo well for India.

 

Credit system plus pecuniary emulation, or keeping up with the Joneses. The phenomenon stems all the way back to the early part of the twentieth century, when Henry Ford struggled to increase production. He brought in Frederick Taylor, an expert of a growing discipline called "scientific management," and found out that they could increase production many times over by turning workers into cogs of the machine. That time, cars were produced by teams of workers, and they found out that they put workers in assembly lines and let each focus on only one task repeatedly, more cars would be produced.

It was a massive success, but workers complained that they were still being paid the same. So Ford increased their wages in exchange for not complaining and putting part of their higher wages into savings which could serve as collateral for layaway plans to get what they wanted, which turned out to be....cars. And iceboxes, record players, and many other nice stuff. Of course, that also meant job security, which wasn't difficult if all workers had to do was the same thing repeatedly daily.

But at least they got their cars and iceboxes and toasters, etc., and which is what Ford and many other businesmen needed if he wanted to earn more by selling more cars, because it turned out that his customers were also his workers. One thing they couldn't get rid, though, was the workers' mental issues as they were stuck doing the same things repeatedly in assembly lines. But they held out because of the mortgage on the home, the appliances, etc., which made the U.S. worker the envy of the world. The government helped a lot by making higher education to workers' children.

With that, just as more Americans moved from farms to factories to find better jobs, more moved from factories to the service sector for the same reason. Meanwhile, those businessmen started outsourcing manufacturing to other countries because the customer markets were located there, anyway, and those countries were experiencing the same things as the U.S. For example, after WW2, Japanese kids finished school after the age of 15 in order to move to cities to find work in factories. Because they were minors, factory owners had to build large workers' dormitories to house them, and imposed the same rules as if they were still at home, e.g., curfews, segregation by gender, etc. Meanwhile, the gov't set up public housing near these areas in order to decrease the presence of shanties and to allow even more people (including the kids' relatives) to move to cities to also find work. Like Americans, but in poorer circumstances they worked until they retired in permanent, full-time jobs in order to pay for three-room flats, as their grand kids then went off to receive better education, and moved from factory workers to salarymen.

The result of all that was the same credit system and pecuniary emulation, which is why similar is also taking place in China. Of course, if there's any other way to make money faster than working long hours on the factory floor or doing back office work like tallying up figures in ledger sheets, it's number crunching derivative instruments in a financial corporation and figuring out how to make a killing, and then dream of retiring early and finding some nice real estate. Even better is hiring others to do that, and then earn billions of dollars even during a pandemic.

Until all of the energy and resources that act as a base for those go to pot, which is what economic collapse is ultimately about.

 

TPTB works for an even higher power: the richest in the world. They are owners of the top corporations--mostly financial--that dominate the global economy itself:

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst...

www.newscientist.com

They earn not through taxation or even high prices but through financial speculation. That's why the five richest people on earth saw their net worth increase significantly even during the pandemic. That's why the stock market saw a constant rise even during a decade of high oil prices.

In short, they and the governments they influence want more economic activity: more earning, borrowing, spending, and financial gambling. And when financial crises take place due to fallout from speculation, they use the same governments to create more credit to bail them out, which is exactly what happened after 2008:

The Fed's $16 Trillion Bailouts Under-Reported

Image by telmo32 via Flickr The media’s inscrutable brush-off of the Government Accounting Office’s recently released audit of the Federal Reserve has raised many questions about the Fed’s goings-on since the financial crisis began in 2008. The audit of the Fed’s emergency lending programs was...

www.forbes.com

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. What maintains the value of all that credit (worldwide, totaling over $1 quadrillion) are large amounts of oil, minerals, arable land, fresh water, and more needed to continue increasing economic activity. The effects of the physical limitations of the biosphere and of pollution on that will make economic collapse look like a walk in the park.

 

One of the reasons I believe we're headed for trouble, another Great Depression, is how far the standard of living has fallen for the average worker. For much of my childhood, one person working hard could afford a car and an apartment in a safe neighborhood. They would work steadily, save up money, and some even saved enough for a down payment. There was very little credit except for rich people, because with thrift and prudence you could afford the basics of life like food, clothing, gas and a little recreation on weekends. You saved up for large purchases like a washer and dryer, which is why there were laundromats in strip malls -- not everyone had those at home. But you could live decently on one person's salary. A moderate sized family could get by on a factor worker's wage.

Now single people have to double, triple or quadruple up to afford an apartment. Saving for a house takes decades, if there isn't a student loan to be paid. If you buy a computer, an appliance, a car you saved up for, it starts breaking down within a few years -- you're certainly not going to give it to your son or daughter. Housing prices are so high that we've gone from "Can I afford a house?" to wondering when we can afford an apartment by ourselves. And those aren't just people who partied away their income. It's anyone who works in a warehouse, as a waiter or in an office. More and more places are going to "gig" jobs that don't have health benefits or paid days off.

I told a much younger friend that when I started working my work day was eight hours. We got two fifteen minute breaks and an hour for lunch, all paid. We got two weeks of paid vacation a year, and paid holidays. We had full medical insurance; my copay for visits was $10 and medications $3. She just laughed and said her boss recently announced that to cut costs workers would have to bring their own water as the company would only be supplying water at the sink in the breakroom. Her lunch is unpaid and she has 30 minutes to run from her workstation (5 mins each way), wait in line to pay at the cafeteria or go further to her locker to get a bag lunch, then eat, go to the bathroom, and get back to her workstation before the clock runs out. Essentially when she takes her lunch she has 15 minutes to eat. When she takes breaks, it's the same distance to the breakroom so she basically gets 5 minutes off her feet. No paid holidays, no set work schedule, no benefits. And when things slow down, she's out of work until the employer decides to bring her back.

At her age I had a studio apartment to myself in a decent neighborhood. She shares a two bedroom apartment that takes up 50% of her salary for rent and utilities with three other girls and they love it since it's only two to a room and they have two bathrooms to share plus a balcony, unlike friends who are juggling bathroom schedules in the morning between several people. She also has a student loan. She takes the bus because between the loan and rent there's no way she can afford a car. She's working harder than I did at her age, with much less savings to show for it. I paid off all my nursing student loans within a year of employment; hers are projected to last at least 25 years into the future. Talking to her makes me understand why so many people are calling this the "Resignation Generation". I worked hard at her age, but in return I was able to take a vacation out of town once in a while, afford books and movies from time to time, and I had some holidays and weekends to myself. She's on an endless treadmill of rotating days/hours and no certainty of employment in the future, and what money she makes is immediately eaten by her basic needs. Her idea of a good time is when the girls pool their money to buy a special meal and a six pack and stream a movie together. On and on and on with no security and not much hope of better days.

Between disposable consumer goods people can't afford to keep buying, low wages, high cost of living, no safety net of insurance or benefits, and continual disruptions, at lot of working people who should have earned stability are really living on the edge. We dodged a bullet with Covid which was much less severe than the 1918 flu. We've managed so far to cope with supply chain breaks and the rising cost of fuel. How will we do with the next epidemic, major supply shortage or natural disaster? And will the kids who have very little actual reward for their hard work agree to keep doing it to shore everything up?