Is America About To Reach A Breaking Point? Anger Grows As Unemployment Benefits Get Cut

The Economic Collapse
December 31, 2013

Breaking PointIn America today, there are close to 50 million people living in poverty and there are more than 100 million people that get money from the federal government every month.  As the middle class disintegrates, poverty is climbing tounprecedented levels.  Even though the stock market has been setting record high after record high, the amount of anger and frustration boiling just under the surface in our nation grows with each passing day.  And now extended unemployment benefits have been cut off for 1.3 millionunemployed Americans, and it is being projected that a total of 5 millionunemployed Americans will lose their benefits by the end of 2014.  In addition, as I have written about previously, 47 million Americans recently had their food stamp benefits reduced.  The conditions for a "perfect storm" are certainly being created.  So how much longer will it be until we see all of this anger and frustration boil over in the streets of our major cities?  Is America about to reach a breaking point?

Vladimir Putin vows 'total annihilation' of terrorists after Volgograd bombings

Telegraph
December 31, 2013

Russian president vows relentless pursuit of those behind suicide attacks as city begins to bury its dead

Vladimir Putin has vowed to pursue terrorists to their “total annihilation”, in his first public comments since the Volgograd suicide bombings.
In his traditional New Year's Eve address, which was broadcast at midnight from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, (5pm in Moscow), he praised Russia’s unity in the face of both terrorism and natural disasters and promised to continue an unrelenting fight against the bombers.
“In the past year we have faced problems and serious challenges including the inhuman terror attacks in Volgograd and unprecedented disasters in the Far East,” he said.
“Dear friends, we bow our heads in memory of the victims of these terrible attacks. We will strongly and decisively continue the battle against terrorists until their total annihilation,” he said.
Mr Putin earlier provoked a storm of condemnation on the Russian internet on Sunday after the message broadcast an hour earlier in Kamchatka, Russia’s most easterly timezone, made no mention of the attacks.

REPORT: THE NSA CAN SECRETLY ACTIVATE AN IPHONE’S MICROPHONE, CAMERA… AND THAT’S NOT ALL

The Blaze
December 30, 2013

The National Security Agency can remotely activate an iPhone’s camera and microphone without the user knowing, according to a leaked document obtained by German news magazine Der Spiegel.
The NSA Can Reportedly Secretly Activate An iPhones Microphone, Camera
According to a leaked document, the NSA can secretly activate an iPhone’s microphone or camera. (Image source: Shutterstock)
The spy agency can also interrupt text messages, access contact lists and use cell towers to identify the location of the phone, according to The Daily Dot:
According to leaked documents, the NSA claims a 100 percent success rate when it comes to implanting iOS devices with spyware. The documents suggest that the NSA needs physical access to a device to install the spyware—something the agency has achieved by rerouting shipments of devices purchased online—but a remote version of the exploit is also in the works.
Here is the leaked doc:
The NSA Can Reportedly Secretly Activate An iPhones Microphone, Camera
(Image source: Der Spiegel / The Daily Dot)
The security researcher that initially obtained the documents noted that this presents one of two possibilities.
“Either [the NSA] have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce, and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves,” Jacob Appelbaum said at a conference.
“Do you think Apple helped them with that?” he asked. “I hope Apple will clarify that.”
Follow Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) on Twitter

Media Disinformation and the Framing of the Syrian War

Global Research
December 30, 2013
The architects of our modern system of manufactured consent and official propaganda have long known the importance of the mass media in framing public opinion on any given event. To the pathocrats who blazed the trail toward our modern era of information warfare and opinion control, facts themselves were malleable, subject not to objective reality but to the way they were perceived and internalized by a credulous public. As Ivy Lee, the man that the Rockefellers hired to invent the modern PR industry after the Ludlow massacre, put it:
“It is not the facts alone that strike the popular mind, but the way in which they take place and in which they are published that kindle the imagination…Besides, what is a fact? The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to…give you my interpretation of the facts.”
Read the entire article 
This article was first published on December 20, 2013

'Volgograd bombings terror message to Russia's position on Syria'

RT News
December 30, 2013




Many are speculating that the terror attacks in Volgograd were specifically planned to target Russia ahead of the upcoming Winter Games in Sochi. It's not the first terror attack that's been linked to Olympic events. Back in July 2005, a series of suicide attacks hit London, a day after it won the chance to host the Olympics. For more on this I can talk to James Corbett, editor of the independent news website The Corbett Report.

Read More:http://on.rt.com/z22bcf Live Updates: http://on.rt.com/87ixo9

Going Under: Over One Million Lose Unemployment Benefits – Will Hit Five Million By End of 2014

SHTFPlan.com
December 30, 2013
Earlier this year government benefits for nutritional assistance were reduced after the expiration of emergency legislation that was enacted following the 2008 financial collapse.
Image: US Dollars (Wikimedia Commons).
Nearly all of the 48 million people receiving food stamp distributions were affected. The move led to warnings from food pantries and recipients around the country who said that the $40 billion in cuts would leave many American families without the ability to put food on dinner tables across America. According to Feed America, the roughly $29 per family that would no longer appear on their EBT cards will amount to about 1.5 billion meals in 2014.
But that was just the beginning.
Because the government now claims that we are in a period of economic growth we will see more cuts to emergency assistance over the course of the next year.
And it starts today.
As of midnight Saturday some 1.3 million Americans who lost their jobs in the last two years and were left with no choice but to collect unemployment benefits due to the worst jobs market since the Great Depression have now seen their benefits expire.
Long-term unemployment benefits for 1.3 million Americans expired Saturday after Congress failed to pass an extension. Reinstating those benefits is expected to be one of the first priorities for congressional Democrats in the new year.
“Extending unemployment insurance is the right thing to do for millions of Americans who are trying to support their families,” Democratic National Committee chairwoman and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in a statement Saturday. “What makes matters worse, the loss of benefits comes just a few days after the holidays.”
This morning, the President placed separate telephone calls to Senator Jack Reed and Senator Dean Heller to offer his support for their proposal to extend emergency unemployment benefits for three months,” White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a statement.
“The President said his administration would, as it has for several weeks now, push Congress to act promptly and in bipartisan fashion to address thisurgent economic priority.”
Obama says the abrupt cut-off in cash assistance during the holidays will hurt economic growth and jobs.
Here’s the kicker. By the end of 2014 the number of Americans who will lose access to long-term unemployment benefits will be five times higher:
By July, another 1.9 million people will get the boot from extended benefits. By the end of 2014, 1.6 million more will be kicked off, totaling about 5 million Americans.
Five millions Americans will be losing access to what essentially amounts to their paycheck. And we’re not talking about a $29 cut to food stamps. We’re talking about a mortgage payment, a healthcare payment, and funds to pay for essential utilities.
All of it will be vaporized by the end of the year. This will affect not just those five million people, but their dependents as well, which amounts to at least an additional 5 – 10 million people.
Congress and the President propose to extend these benefits for another three months, and most would suggest that this will avert the emergency.
That notion is laughable.
What happens after we kick the can down the road for another three months? Will President Obama somehow magically create 1.3 million shovel-ready jobs?
The problem is that there are no meaningful jobs available. So you can extend these benefits for six months, or even two more years, and we’ll be right back where we started once they expire – perhaps even worse off as prices for everything from food to utilities to health care rise unabated.
When a DHS Insider warned recently of a crisis of unprecedented magnitude within the United States he noted that we are in the midst of a long-term economic collapse.
Given what is transpiring around us, can anyone honestly say that our economy is actually recovering?
President Obama claims that failing to extend the unemployment benefits for these 1.3 million people will hurt economic growth and jobs. He has just broadcast the severity of the situation we face.
It should be clear that without government intervention and backroom machinationsthe entire system will come unglued. Stocks would crash, millions would be starving in the streets, and the violence that the Department of Homeland Security and US military have been preparing for would take hold across the streets of America.
That may sound sensational, but consider that just one week ahead of the cut to food stamp benefits of $29 per family the Department of Homeland Security spent $80 million to beef up security in New York City with the expectation that those who lost their benefits would start rioting. They know that we are rapidly approaching a breaking point, otherwise why would they be preparing for it?
The government has no choice but to keep pumping out money and emergency assistance, whether that be to people who have lost their jobs or the banks that provide the lending. The second (literally) that they pull back on the monetary, financial and economic intervention we will see a catastrophe that few can imagine.
It’s coming.
If you’re paying attention you can’t go a day without seeing the signs.
The only question is: Are you prepared for when it happens?

Volgograd trolley blast: Terror attack hits southern Russia day after railway station bombing

RT News
December 30, 2013

A terrorist attack in the Russian city of Volgograd has killed at least 10 passengers on a trolley bus. The explosion comes a day after a suicide bombing in the city which killed 17 people and injured scores of others.


Media Isn't Controlled? Not Told What to Say? Not on the Same Script?..... Think Again

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!!!
Mark Matheny
December 30, 2013

Here is a compilation done on the Conan Show as comedy showing local news agencies all following the same script when it comes to news reporting.



Here is another example where the Pentagon also gets in on the deal and uses media to peddle war through Military Analysts. It was exposed by the New York Times....


These are just a couple of examples.

That's why television is called the "boob tube".......

It is meant to program you - not educate and inform.

Exposed: The Soviet Union spent $1 billion on mind-control program

News.com AU
December 29, 2013


Dr. Bill van Bise, electrical engineer, conducting a demonstration of Soviet scientific data and schematics for beaming a mag...
Dr. Bill van Bise, electrical engineer, conducting a demonstration of Soviet scientific data and schematics for beaming a magnetic field into the brain to cause visual hallucinations. Source: CNN Source: Supplied
THE race to put man on the Moon wasn't enough of a battle for the global super powers during the Cold War.
At the time, the Soviet Union and the United States were in an arms race of a bizarre, unconventional kind - that has been exposed in a new report.
Beginning in 1917 and continuing until 2003, the Soviets poured up to $1 billion into developing mind-controlling weaponry to compete with similar programs undertaken in the US.
While much still remains classified, we can now confirm the Soviets used methods to manipulate test subjects' brains.
The paper, by Serge Kernbach, at the Research Centre of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science in Stuttgart, Germany, details the Soviet Union's extensive experiments, called "psychotronics". The paper is based on Russian technical journals and recently declassified documents.

Passage of Budget Bill Is NOT a Victory for the American People … Only for the Military-Industrial Complex

Washington's Blog
December 26, 2013

Matheny's Note: I reported on this subject in 2012:




Preface: D.C. and the mainstream media are trumpeting the passage of a budget bill as a victory for bipartisanship and the American people. But the truth is very different.

Military Spending Is Destroying Our Economy

We’ve repeatedly documented that military waste and fraud are the core problems with the U.S. economy.
For example, we’ve noted that we wouldn’t be in a budget crisis in the first place if we hadn’t spent so much money on unnecessary wars … which are killing our economy.
For example, homeland security agencies wasted money on seminars like “Did Jesus Die for Klingons Too?” and training for a “zombie apocalypse” instead of actually focusing on anti-terror efforts.
Republican Senator Tom Coburn notes that the Department of Defense can reduce $67.9 billion over 10 years by eliminating the non-defense programs that have found their way into the budget for the Department of Defense.
BusinessWeek and Bloomberg point out that we could slash military spending without harming our national security. Indeed, we could slash boondoggles that even the generals don’t want.
BusinessWeek provides a list of cost-cutting measures which will not undermine national security. American Conservative does the same.
Moreover, we’ve shown that the military wastes and “loses” (cough) trillions of dollars.  See thisthis,thisthisthisthisthisthisthisthisthis and this.
Reuters notes:
$8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China’s economic output last year.

The People Want Peace, But D.C. Wants War

For the first time, a majority of Americans think that we should never have started the war in Afghanistan. As the Washington Post reports:
Americans express near-record discontent and regret over the 13-year war in Afghanistan, during which 2,289 U.S. troops have died and more than 19,000 have been wounded, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Fully 66 percent of Americans say the battle, which began with nearly unanimous support, has not been worth fighting
***
In a separate Associated Press-GfK poll released Wednesday, 57 percent of Americans said the United States did “the wrong thing” in going to war with Afghanistan, with mixed feelings toward keeping troops in the country past 2014.
The same is true in Iraq.
And the American people don’t want to go to war against SyriaIran or anywhere else.
But D.C. politicians do a lot of fundraising from defense contractors and make a lot of money from inside trading related to military spending.
And war helps distract people from the economic mess that the politicians are largely responsible for (the old distraction trick.)

Be prepared: Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse

Washington Examiner
December 26, 2013
Photo:www.thesurvivalistblog.net


A top financial advisor, worried that Obamacare, the NSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a “bug-out bag” that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.
David John Marotta, a Wall Street expert and financial advisor andForbes contributor, said in a note to investors, “Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list. There are some terrible people in this world. And you are safer when your trusted neighbors have firearms.”
His memo is part of a series addressing the potential for a “financial apocalypse.” His view, however, is that the problems plaguing the country won't result in armageddon. “There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely,” said the Charlottesville, Va.-based president of Marotta Wealth Management.
Marotta said that many clients fear an end-of-the-world scenario. He doesn’t agree with that outcome, but does with much of what has people worried.
“I, along with many other economists, agree with many of the concerns expressed in these dire warnings. The growing debt and deficit spending is a tax on those holding dollars. The devaluation in the U.S. dollar risks the dollar's status as the reserve currency of the world. Obamacare was the worst legislation in the past 75 years. Socialism is on the rise and the NSA really is abrogating vast portions of the Constitution. I don't disagree with their concerns,” he wrote.
In his latest note, he said that Americans should have a survival kit to take in case of a financial or natural disaster. It should be filled with items that will help them stay alive for the first 72-hours of a crisis, including firearms.
“A bug-out bag is a good idea depending on where you live even if the emergency is just power outages, earthquakes and hurricanes. And with your preparedness you will be equipped to help others who might be in need,” he wrote. “Be prepared. Especially because it keeps you from being scared.”
He provided a list of items and even a link to bug-out bags on Amazon.
Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted atpbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.

Demand for food stamps soars as cuts sink in and shelves empty

theguardian.com
December 24, 2013
For Denise Acosta, it was being laid off for the first time. For Diana Martinez, it was the death of her mother, leaving her as the sole carer for her severely disabled younger brother. For Johnny Hill, it was having to take responsibility, a year away from retirement, for her two young granddaughters.
Each of these hard-working women from San Antonio, Texas, have fallen victim to circumstances that turned their lives upside down, robbing them of their full-time jobs, the paychecks they once enjoyed and, in Acosta’s case, her home. Their stories vary, but they all belong to a growing group, America’s working poor, for whom the journey from getting by to hunger can be brutally short.
Deep cuts to the US food stamps programme, designed to keep low-income Americans out of hunger in the aftermath of the economic recession, have forced increasing numbers of families such as theirs to rely on food banks and community organisations to stave off hunger.

Read the entire article

Head of UN Mission Investigating Syrian Chemical Weapons Debunks One of America’s Main Arguments

Washington's Blog
December 24, 2013

Press Reprises Its Iraq War Propaganda Role

We noted yesterday that the American case against Syria’s Assad as the culprit of chemical weapons attacks has fallen apart.
Former Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry has an update today:
Ake Sellstrom, the head of the United Nations mission investigating chemical weapons use in Syria, agrees that the vector analysis – at the heart of the New York Times’ indictment of the Syrian government for the deadly Aug. 21 Sarin gas attack –doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
In a little-noticed comment at a UN press conference on Dec. 13, Sellstrom disputed claims that the launching point for the two missiles, which were recovered after the Aug. 21 attack, could be traced back following the angles of their final descent until they intersected at a Syrian military base about 9.5 kilometers away.
Instead, Sellstrom said he accepted as accurate other analyses that estimated the range of the rockets at about two kilometers. “Two kilometers could be a fair guess,” he said, noting that the UN team had consulted its own missile experts on the subject. “If you simulate the flight path, it seems not to meet as may be indicated in the report.”
In other words, the lead author of the UN report on the Aug. 21 incident has contradicted the much-touted “vectoring” claims of a New York Times front-page story and Human Rights Watch, which has been pushing for a U.S. military intervention in Syria. Their “vector analysis” of the two flight paths implicated an elite Syrian military unit, the 104th Brigade of the Republican Guard, based northwest of Damascus, near the Presidential Palace.
Since the two short-range rockets had a maximum range much less than 9.5 kilometers – and one of the rockets clipped a building during its descent making any assumptions about its flight path unreliable – the Times’ and the HRW’s “vector analysis” has essentially been debunked, although the Times and other major U.S. news outlets have been hiding that revelation from the American public.
…. Most of the mainstream U.S. media have simply reprised their propaganda roles played so disastrously a decade ago in the run-up to the Iraq War.
***
The UN inspectors have voiced uncertainty about who carried out the attack. At the press conference, Sellstrom admitted, “I don’t have information that would stand in court.” He also told Wall Street Journal writer Joe Lauria that both sides in the conflict had the “opportunity” and the “capability” to carry out chemical weapons attacks. [See WSJ, Dec. 16, 2013]
***
The Times’ front-page “vectoring” article of Sept. 17, thus, is reminiscent of its infamous “aluminum tube” story in September 2002, a highly misleading article that neatly dovetailed with President George W. Bush’s public relations strategy for manipulating the American people into supporting an unprovoked invasion of Iraq. Now, the Times is playing a similar propaganda role in connection with Syria.
To meet even minimal standards of journalistic ethics, the Times should publish a new article incorporating the emerging consensus – now including the head of the UN investigative team – that the “vectoring” story was nonsense. But the Times has simply continued to present one-sided articles blaming the Assad regime for the Aug. 21 attack.
As we’ve previously documented, Obama’s “case” for war against Syria was Iraq 2.0 … and even though Obama has pulled back from the brink of an imminent war, the lies are still being perpetuated by his administration and the mainstream media, which could conceivably set up a future attack.

Obama Suppresses Bush Torture Files

The LipTV
December 24, 2013

Matheny's Note: Obama's Just looking out for his good ole' cousin

Warning: Some Explicit Language 

New York Times: Obamacare Decimates Middle Class

breitbart.com
December 23, 2013
The New York Times has finally conceded what critics of Obamacare have been claiming–the so-called “Affordable Care Act” devastates the country’s middle class families who “are caught in the uncomfortable middle: not poor enough for help, but not rich enough to be indifferent to cost.”
The Times profiles a family of four in New Hampshire with an annual income of around $100,000. Right now, “the cheapest insurance plan” they can find on the exchanges is about $1,000 a month. But if “they made just a few thousand dollars less a year — below $94,200 — their costs would be cut in half, because a family like theirs could qualify for federal subsidies.”
“Many of the biggest provisions of the Affordable Care Act are aimed squarely at the poorest of Americans,” the Times writes. “Under the law, states have the option of expanding Medicaid to a larger pool of people with the lowest incomes. To those earning more, the law provides subsidies to people earning up to four times the federal poverty level, or $45,960 for an individual and $62,040 for a couple.”

What's the Deal with "Duck Dynasty" ?

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!!!
Mark Matheny
December 22, 2013

Mark Matheny discusses the Latest News about the Duck Dynasty Controversy, and gives his thoughts on this.....
Tune in!!!



New Politics Podcasts with Mark Matheny on BlogTalkRadio

U.S.-EU Trade Pact Accelerates Economic and Political Integration

The New American
December 23, 2013
U.S.-EU Trade Pact Accelerates Economic and Political Integration
Negotiators in Washington, D.C. are working on a trade pact this week, and it isn’t the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Representatives from the United States and the European Union are hammering out the details of a purported trade pact called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Despite its name, this bundle of commercial compromises has little to do with trade and a lot to do with the slow transfer of sovereignty to bodies of globalists outside the United States.
Notably, the men and women chosen to enforce the myriad TTIP provisions will be unelected by the American people and consequently unaccountable to them. This is in direct violation of the Constitution’s grant of sole legislative power to the Congress of the United States.
On December 16, The New American was invited to participate in a telephone press conference discussing troubling details of the TTIP agreement. 
To begin the conference, it was admitted that in the official document outlining the deal, the Obama administration has made clear that an agreement will not be chiefly focused on matters related to international trade, but rather “behind-the-border” (read: domestic) policies such as health, environmental, and monetary policy. As with so many of the other panoply of recent trade deals, multinational corporations operating within the United States and the EU are achieving quasi-governmental power and using that authority to limit the ability of U.S. and EU courts to enforce domestic laws, particularly those that the corporate interests deem detrimental to their bottom line.
During the press conference, several civil society groups from the United States and Europe briefed reporters on significant threats to individual liberty lurking within the TTIP.
Leaders with Public Citizen, Sierra Club, Consumer Federation of America, and Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue voiced concerns about the effects of the TTIP on consumer rights, privacy, communities, and the environment. 
“U.S. and EU negotiators are clear that their purpose in negotiating [the TTIP] is to remove ‘regulatory barriers’ to trade,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Big Business is clear about what this means; giant corporations hope to use [the TTIP] as a way to roll back or stall a vast swath of consumer and environmental regulatory protections in the United States and Europe — involving everything from food safety to privacy, consumer finance to chemical safety.” 

Comparing the inflated cost of living today from 1938 to 2013: How the US Dollar has lost incredible purchasing power since 1938.

MyBudget360
December 23, 2013

Money is only as useful as to what it can purchase.  The Fed has created a system where debt is now equal to money.  This is why big purchases like cars, housing, and even going to college are only feasible by mortgaging your future for many decades.  Since the payments are broken down into tiny monthly installments many people pay little attention to the true cost of things over their lifetime.  Yet over this time, the U.S. dollar has lost a tremendous amount of purchasing power due to inflation.  Inflation slowly eats away at your purchasing power yet having access to debt has given the middle class the false impression that they are still protected from the unraveling impacts of inflation.  Someone sent over a photo posted over on the popular Reddit website that shows the cost of living for people back in 1938.  You would think that people in 2013 would have more purchasing power than those living through the Great Depression.  Adjusting for inflation you would be surprised what has happened in the last 75 years.
The cost of living between 1938 and 2013
The picture in question has prices for living from 1938.  It includes important items like a new home, income, new car, rent, and extreme purchasing examples like tuition for Harvard:
cost of living
Source:  Reddit
You can normalize costs over time through adjusting for inflation.  Back in 1938 a new home cost about two times the annual average income.  A new car was only about one-third the cost of the annual average income.  These figures are important because back in 1938, using credit was only a small factor in purchasing goods.  The middle class didn’t start blossoming until after World War II so you would expect that things were still tough for regular households.  What we find though is that compared to the typical income, buying a new home or buying a car was relatively doable for most households.
Now adjusting all these figures for inflation shows how much more expensive things have become and how dependent we now are to financing purchases with debt (created by the banking system):
inflation and actual prices
This chart shows the impact of inflation and the declining purchasing power of the US dollar.  For example, a new home adjusting for inflation (using the BLS calculator) should cost around $64,597 per year.  The current cost of a new home?  $245,800.  The average income has stayed about the same normalizing for inflation (doesn’t say much since we are going back to the Great Depression here).  A new home today costs nearly 10 times the annual average income of a worker.  The two income trap has largely hidden this inflation since it now takes two households to accomplish what one income was able to do 75 years ago.  On top of that, people now need to go into massive debt just to purchase a home.  
Take a look at the cost of a new car as well.  In 1938 a worker was able to purchase a new car with one-third of their annual income.  Today a new car is more expensive than the annual average income.  This is why in 2013 one of the top growing consumer debt sectors was with automobile loans.  If things stayed the same, the cost of attending Harvard for one year in 2013 would be closer to $7,000 per year (the current tuition is $54,496 per year).  It isn’t only Harvard charging incredibly high tuition around the country.  Of course the higher education bubble is one of the most pressing issues around creating a $1.2 trillion student debt market 
Rent, movie tickets, and even gasoline are much more expensive today adjusting for inflation.  This puts a heavier strain on the pocketbook of most Americans.  It also has created a dependency on debt.  We do have stronger safety nets so we don’t have the “in your face” poverty of the Great Depression.  Yet we still have close to 48 million Americans on food stamps.  The area that has seen prices become more affordable is with food.  This however is largely derived from better access to food and products and the mass production of this commodity.  Yet the bigger costs of living in housing, cars, rent, and going to college are all much more expensive today.  It may feel cheaper to some if they only look at their monthly debt payment but the true costs have increased.
The impact of a falling dollar
The trend of the US dollar is pretty clear since the Federal Reserve took the helm of the ship:
us dollar
Without a doubt, life has gotten better since 1938 in terms of healthcare, technology, cars, sanitation, and overall quality of life.  Yet this may be a false comparison argument assuming that this only came about because of the Fed.  Quality of life had already started improving before this as well via the Industrial Revolution and these things were happening regardless of the money system.  What this current debt based system has created is a massive increase in the price of goods through long-term financing.  Should people only have the ability to go to college if they assume mountains of debt?  For the average worker this may be the only road.
The US dollar even in the past few decades has taken a big hit:
us dollar
Why does it feel like things are more expensive?  Because they are.  You may not feel the impact of inflation in one year but over time, it has a dramatic and obvious effect.  The fact that the Fed now has $4 trillion on their balance sheet and continues this QE experiment reflects an addiction to easy debt.  The addiction now truly benefits a very small segment of our society and that is why inequality is worse today than it was in 1938.  It should tell you something where regular purchases from 1938 are now only feasible by going into massive debt.