Poor America: 7 in 10 Americans have less than $1,000 in savings

By Joseph Jankowski

All day the political class will talk down to the American public about how they have the drive to cause an economic turnaround inside the U.S. and restore prosperity. Wielding their statist solutions to every government created distortion in the economy, the rhetoric from Washington dogmatizes an ongoing “recovery” produced by those that call themselves leaders.

“Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” President Obama said in his State of the Union address earlier this year.

This week Obama came out and said that his administration has created a “more durable, growing economy” with “15 million new private-sector jobs since early 2010” in an essay in the Economist.

But as most people are aware by now, the government-calculated numbers are always twisted in order to create the illusion of economic recovery. Just take the jobs report produced for July, where some 200,000 jobs created were the product of a virtual reality created by a faulty model and the manipulation of seasonal adjustments.

“The gimmicked, headline payroll gain of 255,000 more realistically should have come in below zero, net of built-in upside biases,” John Williams of Shadow Stats said about the July figure.

If there is a recovery, people would have money in their savings, right? Savings is undoubtedly an indicator of wealth.

It turns out that 7 in 10 Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings account.

From USA Today:

Last year, GoBankingRates surveyed more than 5,000 Americans only to uncover that 62% of them had less than $1,000 in savings. Last month GoBankingRates again posed the question to Americans of how much they had in their savings account, only this time it asked 7,052 people. The result? Nearly seven in 10 Americans (69%) had less than $1,000 in their savings account.

Breaking the survey data down a bit further, we find that 34% of Americans don’t have a dime in their savings account, while another 35% have less than $1,000. Of the remaining survey-takers, 11% have between $1,000 and $4,999, 4% have between $5,000 and $9,999, and 15% have more than $10,000.

Let’s reiterate a figure shown above: 34% of Americans don’t have a dime in their savings account. When applying this number to the total population of the United States, there are over 108 million people who have no savings whatsoever.

There cannot possibly be an economic recovery going on when a third of the population has no money to fall back on. And considering that savings is essential for capital investment, it’s obvious that the average person is contributing nothing to growth.

This is a sign that the United States, the so-called nation of economic opportunity and prosperity, is economically broken.

The US Census Bureau released numbers just a year ago which found that 47 million Americans fall below the poverty threshold of about $24,000 of median household income a year.

Welcome to poor America.

Here are some more shocking statistics that prove the U.S. is NOT in a recovery and average Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

Courtesy of Michael Snyder of the Economic Collapse Blog:

– Other numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau are also very disturbing.  For example, in 2007 about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps.  Today, that number is one out of every five.

– According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a new book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day.  That number has doubled since 1996.

– 46 million Americans use food banks each year, and lines start forming at some U.S. food banks as early as 6:30 in the morning because people want to get something before the food supplies run out.

– The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.

– According to Poverty USA, 1.6 million American children slept in a homeless shelter or some other form of emergency housing last year.

– Police in New York City have identified 80 separate homeless encampments in the city, and the homeless crisis there has gotten so bad that it is being described as an “epidemic”.

– If you can believe it, more than half of all students in our public schools are poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies.

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– According to a Census Bureau report that was released a while back, 65 percent of all children in the U.S. are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.

– According to a report that was published by UNICEF, almost one-third of all children in this country “live in households with an income below 60 percent of the national median income”.

– When it comes to child poverty, the United States ranks 36th out of the 41 “wealthy nations” that UNICEF looked at.

– The number of Americans that are living in concentrated areas of high poverty has doubled since the year 2000.

– An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.

– 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are being raised by a single parent are living in poverty.

– An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.

– There are simply not enough good jobs to go around anymore.  It may be hard to believe, but 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

– There are 7.9 million working age Americans that are “officially unemployed” right now and another 94.7 million working age Americans that are considered to be “not in the labor force”.  When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 102.6 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.

– Owning a home has traditionally been a signal that you belong to the middle class.  That is why it is so alarming that the rate of homeownership in the United States has been falling for eight years in a row.

– According to a recent Pew survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans believe that “debt is a necessity in their lives”.

– At this point, 25 percent of all Americans have a negative net worth.  That means that the value of what they owe is greater than the value of everything that they own.

– The top 0.1 percent of all American families have about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent of all American families combined.

If we truly are “the greatest nation on the planet”, then why can’t we even take care of our own people?

To give an answer to Mr. Snyder’s question mentioned above, a huge reason “the greatest nation on the planet” cannot take care of its own people is because there is a giant government on its back, infested with special interests, sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy every quarter.

Inflation-adjusted federal tax revenues hit a record $765 billion for the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, while the federal government still ran a $215 billion deficit during that time, according to a Treasury Department statement.

Whenever you hear a politician speak of economic recovery, without the mention of shrinking the size of government, just understand it is not possible and that special interests are siphoning the life right out of your economy.

Joseph Jankowski is a contributor for Planet Free Will.com. His works have been published by recognizable alternative news sites like GlobalResearch.ca, ActivistPost.com, Mintpressnews.com and ZeroHedge.com. 

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