I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.
Scott Adams
The following is abridges. For the full Commentary, use the link at the bottom
The following are 25 stats that prove that the American Dream is being systematically destroyed…
1. According to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program.
2. The U.S. government has spent an astounding 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs over the past five years.
3. An increasing number of employers are encouraging their low wage employees to supplement their wages by going on government welfare programs. For example, McDonald’s workers that need help making ends meet are being instructed to go on food stamps…
4. Total consumer credit has risen by a whopping 22 percent over the past three years.
5. Student loans are up by an astounding 61 percent over the past three years.
6. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income in the United States has fallen for five years in a row.
7. Right now the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
8. Ordinary Americans are being priced out of the housing market. Today,nearly half of all home purchases are all-cash deals.
9. The homeownership rate in the United States is now at the lowest level it has been in nearly 18 years.
10. The gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is at an all-time record high.
11. U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
12. Every single day, thousands of Americans are receiving letters in the mail informing them that their old health insurance policies have been canceled. According to a recent Kaiser Health News article, some companies have already sent out hundreds of thousands of cancellation notices…
13. Those that are losing their current health insurance policies will have to replace them with new policies that are often much more expensive. According to health policy expert Bob Laszewski, 16 million people could ultimately have their health insurance policies canceled because of Obamacare…
14. Back in 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 54.9 percent of all Americans are covered by employment-based health insurance.
15. More Americans than ever find themselves forced to turn to the government for help with health care. At this point, 82.4 million Americans live in a home where at least one person is enrolled in the Medicaid program.
16. The U.S. labor force participation rate is at a 35 year low.
17. Only 47 percent of all adults in America have a full-time job at this point.
18. It is hard to believe, but in America today one out of every ten jobs is now filled by a temp agency.
19. Approximately one out of every four part-time workers in America is living below the poverty line.
20. After accounting for inflation, right now 40 percent of all U.S. workers are making less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.
21. Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
22. At this point, almost half of all public school students in America come from low income homes.
23. The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
24. Right now, one out of every five households in the United States is on food stamps.
25. An increasing number of Americans do not even believe that they have a pleasant retirement to look forward to. One recent survey found that the percentage of middle class Americans that “plan to work until they die” is now higher than ever.
Other authors, wiser according to the opinion of many, count six kinds of governments, three of which are very bad, and three good in themselves, but so liable to be corrupted that they become absolutely bad. The three good ones are those which we have just named; the three bad ones result from the degradation of the other three, and each of them resembles its corresponding original, so that the transition from the one to the other is very easy. Thus monarchy becomes tyranny; aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy; and the popular government lapses readily into licentiousness.
Niccolo Machiavelli to Zanobi Buondelmonte and Cosimo Rucellai
Without checks and balances, monarchy becomes despotism (tyranny), aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos, and dictatorship.
Will Durant
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Aristotle
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You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
Harlan Ellison