Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
The wealthy are doing just fine at the moment, but they don’t seem to understand that much of the country is deeply hurting right now. 59 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is currently experiencing a recession, and that is because most of them are personally experiencing economic pain. Literally just about everything is substantially more expensive in 2024, more major layoffs are being announced with each passing day, and thousands of businesses are going bankrupt. We haven’t seen a tsunami of economic suffering like this in a long time.
If you live in a wealthy area in a good part of the country, you may wonder what all of the fuss is about.
If you and everyone around you is still doing well, life may still seem quite good.
But the truth is that there are vast stretches of this country that are so depressed that they literally look like something out of a horror movie.
There are many communities that are so plagued by poverty, drugs, homelessness, violence and theft that it seems like there is no possible way that things could ever turn around.
A man named Drew Binksy recently visited one of the poorest parts of West Virginia, and he discovered that most of the people there are living in poverty…
‘Most of [the residents] live below the poverty line and life expectancy is well below the national average.
‘Many families rely on Government assistance just to get by and there’s limited access to healthcare.’
Today, tens of millions of Americans are heavily dependent on the checks that they get from the government each month.
In areas where most people have lost hope of ever finding a better life, drug addiction often runs rampant, and that is precisely what Binksy witnessed…
He also notes that ‘crystal meth and Fentanyl addictions run wild’ in the state, while many people are ‘living so isolated, they have their own dialect.’
The content creator starts his journey in Bluefield and as he wanders through the once prosperous manufacturing city, he says it feels like he has stepped into ‘a forgotten world.’
He continues: ‘Empty streets and closed shops stretch as far as the eye can see. It’s like life just stopped.’
This is where the entire country is heading.
Just a few days ago, I wrote about the “retail apocalypse” that is rapidly spreading across America.
Thousands upon thousands of stores are closing, and most of those abandoned stores will not be filled any time soon.
But at least they will make convenient locations for drug addicts to gather.
According to one woman that Binksy interviewed, 30 percent of the people in her community are into illegal drugs…
One woman in the store tells the camera crew: ‘We’re the poorest county in the United States or we were.
‘About 30 per cent of our community are dopers, druggies… more than 30 per cent!’
The same conditions are being repeated in rural community after rural community all over America.
Sadly, the standard of living in our rural communities is going to continue to go down because the cost of living just keeps going up…
The cost of frozen noncarbonated juices and drinks has risen by 19.2 percent from July 2023 – the most of any grocery item.
Eggs, meanwhile, have increased by 19.1 percent in price, and frankfurters are now 9.7 percent more expensive.
The cost of bacon, beef roasts, pork chops and butter have also risen notably in the last year.
In terms of non-food items, car insurance is the biggest riser in the last year – with an 18.6 percent price hike.
We have already reached a stage where a large portion of the population cannot even afford the basics.
As I shared yesterday, I was absolutely shocked to learn that 39 percent of Americans have been forced to skip meals so that they will have enough money to make their housing payments…
39% of Americans say they’ve skipped meals to make housing payments, per Clever Real Estate survey.
And among millennials, that figure rose to 44%. Among Baby Boomers, it was 20%.
It is no wonder why so many voters are so deeply frustrated with the current state of the economy.
This is our country now, and the outlook for the future is not positive at all.
In fact, it appears that very alarming changes are starting to happen in the employment market as large companies lay off large numbers of workers…
Another domino falls for recession as job creation turns negative for small businesses, which employ nearly half of all Americans.
In the past year, payrolls for companies with under 50 employees plunged by nearly 100,000, while job trends were flat for midsized businesses up to 500 employees.
The only bright spot was big businesses—which might be changing, given recent layoff announcements, including 2,500 at Chrysler, 4,000 at Cisco, 12,000 at Dell, and 15,000 at Intel. Paramount and the left-wing Axios both cut 10% to 15% of their workforce.
20 years ago, most American families were clearly thriving.
Today, most American families are clearly struggling.
This change occurred so gradually that most people didn’t even realize what was happening.
The gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is now larger than ever, and our major cities are teeming with millions of highly desperate people.
This story is not going to end well, but most of you already knew that.
When people feel like they have nothing left to lose, it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge.
Unfortunately, it appears that the next few months represent a major tipping point, and it won’t be too long before all of the frustration that has been building up in this country starts to boil over.
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Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.