Losing Faith (In The U.S. Economy)

TheEconomicCollapse.com

April 30, 2011

Are the American people losing faith in the U.S. economy?  The statistics that you are about to read might surprise you.  Not everyone believes that the U.S. economy is dying (there are still millions out there that will swallow anything that the mainstream media tells them), but the reality is that there is a growing chunk of the population that has completely lost faith in our leaders and in our economic system.

  A brand new Gallup poll has found that the number of Americans that believe that we are in a "depression" is actually larger than the number of Americans that believe that the economy is "growing".  That is absolutely shocking because according to official government figures, the U.S. economy is growing right now and virtually nobody in the mainstream media or the government has used the term "depression" to describe the economic downturn that we went through recently.  In fact, according to Gallup a total of 55% of the American people believe that we are either in a recession or a depression right now. 

This is clear evidence that the American people are losing faith in U.S. government economic statistics and instead they are basing their opinions on what they see in their own communities.  Despite the pablum about an "economic recovery" constantly being spewed by Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama, faith in our economic system continues to decline.  The truth is that the American people are not stupid.  They can see what is happening to the economy.

Back when I was a teenager, one day I walked over to the local McDonald's and filled out an application and was immediately hired.

But that is not how it works today.

Recently, McDonald's made headlines when they held a National Hiring Day.  Some commentators pointed to that event as evidence that the economy was recovering.

Well, you know what?  McDonald's ended up receiving approximately one million applications.
So how many of those people did McDonald's hire?

They hired about 62,000 people.
That means that somewhere around 938,000 eager job applicants were turned away.
Just think about that.

Only about 6.2 percent of those that applied for a job at McDonald's were accepted.
As Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider recently pointed out, that means that Harvard now has a higher acceptance rate than McDonald's does.

Harvard accepts about 7% of those that apply to go to school there.
Who ever thought we would see the day when a higher percentage of applicants get accepted into Harvard than get hired at McDonald's?

Sadly, the number of jobs continues to shrink.  The competition for good jobs has become absolutely crazy.
Only 66.8% of American men had a job last year.  That was the lowest level that has ever been recorded in all of U.S. history.

So why is this happening?  Well, there are a lot of reasons, but as I have written about previously, the fact that millions of our jobs are being shipped overseas is a huge factor.

Without good jobs, an increasing number of Americans are being forced to turn to government assistance in order to survive.

Today, more than 44 million Americans are on food stamps.  In addition, government transfer payments now make up 18 percent of all personal income in the United States.
That is frightening.

Things have gotten so bad that now even Wal-Mart is warning that their customers are running out of money.
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