Most Americans still appear to be operating under the delusion that the "recession" will soon pass and that things will get back to "normal" very soon.  Unfortunately, that is not anywhere close to the truth.  What we are now witnessing are the early stages of the complete and total breakdown of the U.S. economic system.  The U.S. government, state governments, local governments, businesses and American consumers have collectively piled up debt that is equivalent to approximately 360 percent of GDP.  At no point during the Great Depression (or at any other time during our history) did we ever come close to such a figure.  We have piled up the biggest mountain of debt that the world has ever seen, and now that gigantic debt bubble is beginning to pop.  As this house of cards comes crashing down, the economic pain is going to become almost unimaginable. 

Already, things are really, really, really bad out there.  Unemployment is at shockingly high levels.  Foreclosures and personal bankruptcies continue to set new all-time records.  Businesses are being shut down at a staggering rate, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. government continues to pile up debt at blinding speed.

There is no use sugar-coating it.

The U.S. economy is collapsing.

The following are 40 bizarre statistics that reveal the truth about the collapse of the U.S. economy....

1 - According to one shocking new survey, 28% of U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

2 - A recent Pew Research survey found that 55 percent of the U.S. labor force has experienced either unemployment, a pay decrease, a reduction in hours or an involuntary move to part-time work since the recession began.

3 - There are 9.2 million Americans that are unemployed but that are not receiving an unemployment insurance check.

4 - In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

5 - According to one analysis, the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007.

6 - China's trade surplus (much of it with the United States) climbed 140 percent in June compared to a year earlier.

7 - This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

8 - 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.

9 - According to a recent poll conducted by Bloomberg, 71% of Americans say that it still feels like the economy is in a recession.

10 - Banks repossessed 269,962 U.S. homes during the second quarter of 2010, which was a new all-time record.

11 - Banks repossessed an average of 4,000 South Florida properties a month in the first half of 2010, up 83 percent from the first half of 2009.

12 - According to RealtyTrac, a total of 1.65 million U.S. properties received foreclosure filings during the first half of 2010.

13 - The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that demand for loans to purchase U.S. homes has sunk to a 13-year low.

14 - Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

15 - 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 - a 32 percent increase over 2008.

16 - 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.

17 - According to a new poll, six of 10 non-retirees believe that Social Security won't be able to pay them benefits when they stop working.

18 - 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement.

19 - According to one survey, 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

20 - According to one recent survey, 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

21 - The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index declined sharply to 52.9 in June.  Most economists had expected that the figure for June would be somewhere around 62.

22 - Retail sales in the U.S. fell in June for a second month in a row.

23 - Vacancies and lease rates at U.S. shopping centers continued to get worse during the second quarter of 2010.

24 - Consumer credit in the United States has contracted during 15 of the past 16 months.

25 - 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.

26 - Things are now so bad in California that in the region around the state capital, Sacramento, there is now one closed business for every six that are still open.

27 - The state of Illinois now ranks eighth in the world in possible bond-holder default.  The state of California is ninth.

28 - More than 25 percent of Americans now have a credit score below 599, which means that they are a very bad credit risk.

29 - On Friday, U.S. regulators closed down three banks in Florida, two in South Carolina and one in Michigan, bringing to 96 the number of U.S. banks to be shut down so far in 2010.

30 - The FDIC's deposit insurance fund now has negative 20.7 billion dollars in it, which represents a slight improvement from the end of 2009.

31 - The U.S. federal budget deficit has topped $1 trillion with three months still to go in the current budget year.

32 - 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.

33 - The M3 money supply plunged at a 9.6 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2010.

34 - According to a new poll of Americans between the ages of 44 and 75, 61% said that running out money was their biggest fear. The remaining 39% thought death was scarier.

35 - One study found that as of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

36 - The bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

37 - The number of Americans with incomes below the official poverty line rose by about 15% between 2000 and 2006, and by 2008 over 30 million U.S. workers were earning less than $10 per hour.

38 - According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.

39 - For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

40 - A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey has found that just 23% of American voters nationwide believe the federal government today has the consent of the governed.

America's national debt is exploding out of control, and still most politicians in Washington D.C. don't really seem that interested in doing anything about it.  Why?  Well, the truth is that if the U.S. government reduces government spending that will slow down the economy, and if the economy slows down then Americans will blame the politicians, and if Americans are angry at the politicians then they will be less likely to vote them back into office.  So we actually have a system where our politicians have an incentive not to do anything about the national debt.  Meanwhile, the exploding debt continues to become a colossal long-term problem that threatens to destroy not only our economy, but our entire way of life.  The federal budget deficit has topped $1 trillion with three months still to go in the current budget year.  It is projected that the final budget deficit for 2010 will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 to 1.5 trillion dollars.  But can we really afford to keep having deficits that are over a trillion dollars every single year?

No, we can't.

In fact, Democrat Erskine Bowles, one of the heads of Barack Obama's national debt commission, recently told the National Governors Association that the U.S. national debt "is like a cancer".

How much of a cancer?

Well, according to Bowles, if the U.S. government does not make any changes it will be spending $2 trillion just for interest on the national debt by 2020.

2 trillion dollars.

The entire U.S. government will only spend somewhere between 3 and 4 trillion dollars in all of 2010.

Yes, that is how desperate the situation is becoming.

If something is not done about this horrific debt it is going to swallow our nation alive financially.

The following are 11 facts about America's national debt in 2010 that should alarm us all....

*On June 1st, the U.S. National Debt was $13,050,826,460,886.

*From the founding of the United States until Ronald Reagan took office we accumulated a total of about 1 trillion dollars in debt.  Now the U.S. national debt is over 13 trillion dollars.

*It is projected that the U.S. government will issue nearly as much new debt in 2010 as the rest of the governments of the world combined.

*If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.  But somehow the U.S. government has accumulated a debt that is over 13 trillion dollars.

*If you do the math, the truth is that it is simply not possible to pay off the U.S. national debt.  In fact, if you took every single dollar out of every single bank and out of every single wallet there wouldn't be anywhere close to enough money to do it.

*According to an official U.S. government report, rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019.  That is before one penny is spent on anything else.

*Back in 1950, each retiree's Social Security benefit was paid for by approximately 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.

*According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2010 the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes.  That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016.

*Over 40 million Americans are now on food stamps and the U.S. Department of Agriculture is projecting that more than 43 million Americans will be on food stamps by the end of 2011.

*Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama's 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf.

*A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times.  That amount of money would still not be enough to pay off the U.S. national debt.

Please send this out to everyone that you can, and if you have an opinion about all this debt please feel free to leave a comment below....

The U.S. Supreme Court has just issued a decision which is going to further push Christian groups on college campuses into the background.  In a 5 to 4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a state law school can refuse to recognize a Christian student group that "discriminates" against gay students and other non-Christians.  While this decision is not going to change that much in the short-term, the truth is that it sets the stage for some earth-shattering legal decisions in the future.  For example, the Supreme Court could use the same reasoning to rule that any church that "discriminates" against homosexuals should not receive an income tax exemption because it does not comply with anti-discrimination laws.  Also, localities across the country could decide to start refusing to give building permits to churches because they openly "discriminate" again homosexuals and it looks like the U.S. Supreme Court is going to back them up.  The truth is that the implications of this decision are absolutely staggering.

So exactly what were the facts of this case?   

Well, this case had originally been brought by the Christian Legal Society at the University of California-Hastings College of Law.

School officials had refused to recognize the Christian Legal Society and grant it student-activity funding, meeting space and other privileges because they said that the group "discriminated" against gays students.

But the group did not specifically "discriminate" against homosexuals.  What they did was require that group members adhere to standards of Christian morality which included not being involved in sexual immorality.

But today if you insist on sexual morality that means that you are a bigot.

This is what America is turning into.

Dissenting from the Supreme Court decision were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Writing for the dissenters, Alito states that this new decision, "arms public educational institutions with a handy weapon for suppressing the speech of unpopular groups."

Indeed it does.

Christian groups all over the United States are now going to be pushed off campus.

But that is only the beginning.

Eventually churches and Christian organizations across the United States are going to lose their tax exemptions because they supposedly "discriminate" against gay people.

That is where things are headed.

Taking a stand on sexual immorality is going to increasingly get Christians into trouble in the years ahead. 

So decide right now where you are going to stand.  Because things are not going to get any easier.

The U.S. government has been so negligent when it comes to illegal immigration that it has created a law enforcement crisis of unprecedented proportions in many areas of the southwest United States.  Authorities in Arizona are now openly admitting that Mexican drug cartels totally control some areas of the state.  Local police are outgunned, outmanned and are increasingly being shot by Mexican drug smugglers.  Yet the U.S. government continues to do nothing to secure the border.  The truth is that our insane immigration policy makes legal immigration incredibly difficult but does next to nothing to stop all the gang members, serial criminals, drug smugglers and terrorists that are regularly crossing the Mexican border whenever they want. 

The video posted below should absolutely shock you.  Law enforcement authorities in Arizona are now openly announcing that the Mexican drug cartels totally control a drug smuggling corridor that extends from the Mexican border all the way up to Phoenix.

As you watch the video below, take special note of the following incredibly shocking quotes from Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu....

"Drug cartels control this area."

"Local law enforcement cannot handle and stop this on our own."

"We are outgunned, we are outmanned and we don't have the resources here locally for us to fight this."

The following is another video news report that discusses how the U.S. government has now made some parts of Arizona off limits to U.S. citizens because of the threat of violence from Mexican drug smugglers....

So where is the federal government?

Local officials are crying out for assistance.

Talk about dropping the ball!

One of the things that the federal government is actually supposed to do is to secure our borders.

But years of neglect on the borders has created an illegal immigration nightmare as a Frosty Woolridge article pointed out recently....

Examples explode across America: 76 percent dropout rate in Detroit, Michigan high schools. Entrenched poverty. An astounding $35 million in goods shoplifted every day in America, honor killings of women now in America, mosques growing like flies in a barnyard, Muslim shootouts with FBI agents, first call for Sharia Law to be implemented in Detroit, Islamic calls to worship sounding over the once all American city. Another city, Los Angeles slowly returns to Mexican authority, language and culture. Every girl past 15 features a baby and most of those mothers cannot read past the fourth grade or work simple math. The Mexican “18th Street Gang” of 20,000 illegal aliens controls the drug trade in much of LA and police will not venture into their ghettos. MS-13 now in 40 American states. Millions of pounds of trash must be picked up as it is tossed all over LA. Chicago, Miami and Houston feature gangs, drugs and worse—all caused by mass immigration. Phoenix, Arizona features an astounding annual car theft rate of 57,000 vehicles to become the new “Car Theft Capital of the World.”

Things have gotten so bad that some states have taken matters into their own hands. 

But when Arizona recently passed a watered-down anti-illegal immigration law in an attempt to do something about this security nightmare, the pro-illegal immigration community exploded in outrage.

To get an idea of how absolutely vicious the backlash has been against this new law in Arizona, just check out the following video....

But do these protests reflect the will of the American people?

Well, no.

The truth is that the American people overwhelmingly want something to be done about this horrific illegal immigration crisis.

One recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that almost two-thirds (64 percent) of voters in Arizona favor the new law.  Another recent Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that 60% of American voters nationwide favor an anti-immigration law like Arizona just passed, while just 31% are opposed.

Talk about a consensus.

But the U.S. government refuses to do anything.

In our recent article entitled "The Truth About Securing The Border" we noted that the U.S. seems more than happy to help other nations secure their borders and yet refuses to secure our own.... 

Is there a reason why the U.S. government refuses to secure our border with Mexico?

After all, we seem more than happy to help other nations secure their borders.

In fact, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has just agreed to help Saudi Arabia secure its dangerous border areas near Yemen.

Not only that, we have secured the border between South Korea and North Korea so well that not a single North Korean has crossed over the border illegally in over 50 years.

And yet we continue to leave our border with Mexico completely wide open.

Not only is doing so insanely bad public policy, it also greatly endangers our national security.

Border officials tell us that a growing number of radical Muslims are sneaking over the Mexican border into the United States.

And we are doing almost nothing to stop them.

This is a national nightmare and it is getting worse by the day.

If we do not do anything, crime will continue to get worse, gang violence will continue to get worse, drug dealing with continue to get worse and more law enforcement authorities will continue to be killed.

This is a desperate national security problem that needs an urgent solution.

But as long as Barack Obama is in the White House, nothing is going to be done about illegal immigration.

So if you live in an area that is crawling with Mexican drug smugglers, the truth is that you only have two options.

Either get used to it or move somewhere else.

Barack Obama's latest nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, is almost certain to be confirmed, and that is truly frightening news for America.  Why?  Because the truth about Elena Kagan is beyond shocking.  When she is confirmed, she will become the most liberal member of a Supreme Court that is already extremely liberal.  She is radically pro-abortion, extremely sympathetic to the gay agenda and has no respect for life whatsoever.

Just consider a few of the startling facts that have come out about Elena Kagan....

*After the election of Ronald Reagan, a young Elena Kagan openly yearned for a more "leftist left".

*As an aide to President Bill Clinton, Kagan took a lead role in fighting a Republican bill to limit abortion.

*Kagan once referred to the Pentagon's Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy as "a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order".

*One newly produced document from the Clinton archives has revealed that Kagan once defended ex-President Bill Clinton's veto of a bill to ban partial-birth abortions.

*White House memos from 1997, when Elena Kagan was a top domestic policy advisor to President Clinton, show that she recommended that the Clinton administration permit cloning of human embryos for research purposes.

Cloning of human embryos for research?

Is that the kind of future we are headed towards?

Well, the answer is yes if Elena Kagan has anything to say about it.

The truth is that Elena Kagan would give new meaning to the term "liberal activist judge".  Between Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the Democrats now have a liberal core of judges on the Supreme Court that could last for decades.

America cannot afford for Elena Kagan to be confirmed, but with the Democrats firmly in control that is exactly what is going to happen.

This is yet another indication of just how far America has fallen.

The United States is heading straight into the moral toilet, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves. 

What a horrible nation we are becoming.