BIDEN WATCH: 9.30.23 - Life In America Has Never Been More Unaffordable

 Life In America Has Never Been More Unaffordable Than It Is Right Now- by Michael Snyder - http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/life-in-america-has-never-been-more-unaffordable-than-it-is-right-now/ Our standard of living is being systematically destroyed, but for a lot of years many Americans didn’t fully understand what was taking place because it was happening so slowly. Butnow we have reached a stage where the purchasing power of our money is collapsing and the cost of living has become exceedingly painful. Thanks to our rapidly rising cost of living, the middle class is becoming “the impoverished class”, and the poor are increasinglybeing pushed out into the streets. If we do not find a way to turn these trends around, it won’t be too long before we have tremendous societal turmoil on our hands. Earlier today, I came across an article about a woman that found a receipt from Burger King that was dated August 10, 1986. At that time you could buy a Whopper for just $1.54. Today, that same Whopper will cost you $6.79… A woman has been left stunned after discovering a retro Burger King receipt from the 1980s which reveals the staggering price increases that the fast food chain has implementedover the past four decades. US-based Liza took to social media to share the receipt after her mother found it in a box in the garage while remodeling her home. The faded paper from the fast food chain dates back to August 10, 1986, and lists three Whopper burgers purchased for $4.62 – which works out at $1.54 each. A single Whopper burger currently costs $6.79 in today’s money – over four times the price listed on the vintage receipt. In other words, if you had $6.79 back then, you could buy four whoppers and you would still have money left over. This is what inflation does. It destroys our purchasing power. Another woman named Melanie that makes 34 dollars an hour is so stressed financially that she literally tries to make one loaf of rye bread last her for the entire week… “What I’ve started doing is I buy a loaf of rye bread, and I work really hard to keep that one loaf of rye bread lasting me the whole week. And I eat peanut butter, so I’lleat peanut butter toast whenever I’m hungry.” In the old days, if you were making 34 dollars an hour you were living the high life. But now most people making 34 dollars an hour are just barely scraping by from month to month. Of course it isn’t just food that has become absurdly expensive. At this point, homes in the U.S. have never been more unaffordable than they are right now. The following was recently posted on Twitter by The Kobeissi Letter… Inflation adjusted home prices are now 85% above their average dating back to 1900. Even after accounting for inflation, home prices have never been more expensive than they are now. In fact, inflation adjusted home prices are now 20% above their 2008 peak, the previous all time high. The median home now sells for an alarming 530% of the median annual income. Meanwhile, the median house payment is now a record 49% of median PRE-TAX income. Affordability has never been worse. We have never seen anything like this in the entire history of our country. Since the beginning of 2019, the median price of a home in the U.S. has risen by more than a hundred thousand dollars… In fact, comparing present prices to levels before the virus panic, St. Louis Fed numbers show a median priced U.S. home rose from $313,000 in the beginning of 2019 to $416,000today. Rental prices have gone completely nuts as well. As I discussed last week, the median asking rent in the United States is now over $2,000 a month. Over the past couple of years we have seen unprecedented rent hikes, and vast numbers of renters have been getting the boot. In fact, we are seeing a tsunami of evictions in the Los Angeles area right now… With COVID-era protections gone, the number of renters facing eviction in Los Angeles continues to climb by the thousands each month. From February through the end of August, approximately 50,000 eviction notices were filed by landlords in the city, according to figures released on Monday by the L.A. Controller’sOffice. A spokesperson said 96% of them involve non-payment of rent, and landlords were owed $186.5 million collectively. So where will all these people go? If they are young enough, perhaps they can live with their parents. But many will not have that option. Up to this point in 2023, homelessness in the United States has been rising at the fastest pace ever recorded, and a lot more Americans will find themselves without a homebetween now and the end of the year. Meanwhile, those that are still scraping by will find it harder and harder to make ends meet. The average rate of interest on our credit card balances has risen from about 16 percent in February 2022 to more than 22 percent today. As a result, an increasing number of Americans find themselves unable to keep up with their payments, and it is being reported that credit card losses are rising at the quickestrate since the last financial crisis… Credit card companies are racking up losses at the fastest pace in almost 30 years, outside of the Great Financial Crisis, according to Goldman Sachs. Credit card losses bottomed in September 2021, and while initial increases were likely reversals from stimulus, they have been rapidly rising since the first quarter of 2022.Since that time, it’s an increasing rate of losses only seen in recent history during the recession of 2008. It is far from over, the firm predicts. More Americans are going bankrupt as well. In fact, the number of bankruptcy cases in August 2023 was 18 percent higher than it was in August 2022. Millions upon millions of Americans have been turning to debt in order to keep up with the cost of living, but as economic conditions deteriorate financial institutions arestarting to get much tighter with their money. So we are moving into a time when U.S. consumers will find it much more difficult to take on new debt… Nearly 60% of the respondents in a New York Fed consumer expectations survey said it’s harder to get credit cards, mortgages and other loans than it was a year ago. It wasthe highest level since the New York Fed started the data series back in 2013. Another Fed survey of loan officers reveals their fears aren’t unfounded. Banks reported that lending standards tightened across all consumer loan categories and all categoriesof residential real estate (RRE) loans. Meanwhile, the number of banks reporting tighter standards for credit cards rose by 36%. Banks have also significantly tightened standards for business loans. This is a recipe for disaster. That is definitely true. Without a doubt, this is certainly a recipe for disaster. But there is no going back now. In fact, the rising price of oil is going to cause enormous inflationary pressures throughout our entire economic system in the months ahead. On Tuesday, a senior market analyst at OANDA warned that it appears that “nothing is going to get in the way of this oil price rally”… “It looks like nothing is going to get in the way of this oil price rally,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst at OANDA, in emailed comments on Tuesday. “Energy tradersknow a bullish trend when they see one and it will take a lot more than a strong dollar, softer Russian ban, and weakening demand, to disrupt this rally.” When the price of oil reaches 100 dollars a barrel, that will be painful, but we can handle that. But the chief executive of Continental Resources is projecting that the price of oil could eventually reach 150 dollars a barrel… That’s Doug Lawler, chief executive of Continental Resources, the shale-drilling giant controlled by billionaire Harold Hamm, telling Bloomberg News on Monday that crude pricesare set to remain elevated and could press to the $120- to $150-a-barrel range without new production. More price pressure is coming, he said, unless policies are put in place to encourage more output. If the price of oil reaches 150 dollars a barrel and stays there, it will be an unmitigated disaster for our economy, and the cost of just about everything will jump substantially. That is because just about everything that we buy and sell has to be transported. We need cheap energy in order to have a high standard of living, but unfortunately the era of cheap energy is coming to an abrupt ending, and that means that none of our liveswill ever be the same again. I kept warning my readers that a lot of the long-term trends that I have been writing about would catch up with us eventually, and now that time has arrived. So enjoy the current economic conditions while you still can, because they will soon go from bad to worse. --------------------------------------------------- Our Nation Has Pushed God To The Outskirts Of Society� And The Results Have Been Devastating � By Tony Perkins - https://harbingersdaily.com/our-nation-has-pushed-god-to-the-outskirts-of-society-and-the-results-have-been-devastating/ Our nation is in crisis. It isn�t a gun crisis. Or fentanyl crisis. It�s not a border crisis � or even a government funding crisis. It is a moral and spiritual crisis. A sickening video that went viral last weekend fully displays it. The video was of two 17-year-old males, who were apparently identifying as heartless, demon-possessed thugs,recording their joyride in a stolen car. The video shows the two cheering as they ram and force one car off the road. Then they spotted 64-year-old Andreas Probst, a retired police officer, taking his morning bike ride. The driver asked his passenger if he was ready to capture their featon camera. Swerving into the bike lane behind Probst, they blew the horn and then plowed into the back of him, throwing him onto the windshield, over the car, and onto the pavement asthey accelerated. The punk in the passenger seat turned to catch on camera Probst bounce onto the road, who died of his injuries that day. The driver was arrested shortly after and taken to the juvenile detention center. The Clark County District Attorney�s Office has announced it will try the teenagers as adults. Don�t expect the White House or others, who see violent crime as little more than justification to grab more power over law-abiding citizens, to pay any attention to a drive-overkilling. However, this crime is so shocking some are asking how we arrived at such a place where cold-blooded murder is callously carried out like a virtual video game. But should we really be surprised? As a nation, we�ve pushed God to the outskirts of society. Instead of teaching our children that they are created in the image of God andtherefore have value, we are telling them they come from animals, and then we are shocked when they act like animals. This is a moral and spiritual crisis. But don�t expect political leaders, especially on the Left, to acknowledge that fact because they refuse to look beyond the symptoms. Take the Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, who is calling for city-owned grocery stores to be placed in neighborhoods that have become what he calls �food deserts� afterWalmart and Whole Foods shuttered their stores because of unsustainable losses. Retailers nationwide are going under and shutting their doors because of a $100 billion-dollar shoplifting epidemic. It�s gotten so bad here in Washington, D.C. that almosteverything is behind locked plexiglass. Commentators and conservatives point to lax policies like California�s Prop 47, which reduced theft from a potential felony to a misdemeanor. These lenient policies only compoundthe lawlessness fostered by depleted and demoralized police departments in the wake of the Left�s Defund the Police movement. But it�s not just civil government that has facilitated this moral and spiritual crisis that threatens the future of our country. I�ve often been asked this question whilein conversation with political leaders. �Tony, why do pastors want us to vote on and speak about issues they won�t preach about from the pulpit?� To be sure, many pastors are preaching on these issues; some were at Family Research Council�s recent Pray Vote Stand Summit: Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, CornerstoneChapel�s Gary Hamrick, Bishop Vincent Mathews, and others. But far too many fail to see their God-given role to not just preach the truth but challenge people to live by the truth in every area of life. In the church, pastors must rediscover their propheticvoice to address this moral and spiritual crisis. Yes, the lawless, anti-God policies of government have fostered this violent and deadly environment, and the church has, for the most part, only whispered its objections.But where are the parents? I know the government has usurped the role of moms and dads in many ways, hiding critical information from them about their children�s mental and spiritual well-being at school.In some cases, they�ve refused to allow parents to get counseling for their children if it is not in lockstep with leftist ideology. But a recent report from King�s College London suggests parents in the United States are not concerned with their children being civil or even obedient. Coming in nearly deadlast in the two dozen surveyed countries, only 21% of American adults said obedience was a priority for children. What did rank near the top of priorities? Tolerance. There was little tolerance for Mr. Probst. To 21st century ears, it is archaic to quote a Founding Father. But considering that they did craft what has become the longest-surviving written charter of government inthe world, maybe we can learn from them how to keep this experiment in liberty going. John Adams, America�s second president, warned, �Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.� In other words, if we don�t go beyond the litany of crises facing our nation, which are just symptoms � whether it be the border, fentanyl, guns, or stolen cars used to runover innocent people � to see what is truly at the heart of this crisis, we will lose this country as we have known it, because we will miss the moral and spiritual crisis confronting us. We must return to God and to His word. -------------------------------------------