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22 Facts That Prove That The Bottom 90 Percent Of America Is Systematically Getting Poorer
The mainstream media is not telling you this, but the truth is that most Americans are steadily getting poorer. The middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and poverty is soaring to unprecedented heights. The fact that 90 percent of the population is constantly sliding downhill is not good for our society. The United States is supposed to be a land of opportunity with a vibrant free market system that enables average people to make better lives for themselves. Unfortunately, free enterprise is being strangled to death in the United States today. Entrepreneurs and small business are being pounded into oblivion by rules, regulations, red tape and oppressive levels of taxation. At the same time, millions of jobs have been shipped out of the United States by corporate giants and sent to countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. All of this has happened under both Democrats and Republicans. Meanwhile, wealth and power continue to become even more heavily concentrated in the hands of big government and big corporations. Our founding fathers warned that we should not allow such large concentrations of wealth and power, because they tend to funnel the rewards of society into the hands of a select few. We need to change the rules of the game so that entrepreneurs, small businesses and average workers can thrive in this country once again. If big government and big corporations continue to gobble up even more wealth and power, the wealth inequality that we see right now will only get even worse.
The following are 22 facts that prove that the bottom 90 percent of America is systematically getting poorer…
#1 According to the Pew Research Center, the top 7 percent of all U.S. households own 63 percent of all the wealth in the country.
#2 Between 2009 and 2011, the wealth of the bottom 93 percent of all Americans declined by 4 percent, while the wealth of the top 7 percent of all Americans increased by 28 percent.
#3 On average, households in the top 7 percent have 24 times as much wealth as households in the bottom 93 percent.
#4 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
#5 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest one percent of all American households have 288 times the amount of wealth that the average middle class American family does on average.
#6 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.
#7 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the bottom one-third of all Americans combined.
#8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
#9 In the United States today, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low.
#10 In 1980, CEOs at S&P 500 companies made 42 times as much as their employees did on average. Today, CEOs at S&P 500 companies make 354 times as much as their employees do on average. In fact, there are many CEOs that make more than 1000 times what the average employees in their companies make.
#11 According to a report recently issued by the Pew Research Center, Americans over the age of 65 have 47 times as much wealth as Americans under the age of 35 on average.
#12 U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#13 Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”. Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.
#14 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.
#15 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
#16 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#17 As I mentioned yesterday, the homeownership rate in America is now at its lowest level in nearly 18 years.
#18 The United States now ranks 93rd in the world in income inequality.
#19 Approximately one out of every five households in the United States is now on food stamps.
#20 The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income”.
#22 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
Even if your income just stays the same, you are still getting poorer because inflation is a tax that is constantly chipping away at the value of every single dollar that you own. The cost of everything that we buy on a regular basis (food, gas, health insurance, etc.) is constantly going up, and if your income is not keeping pace that means that you are getting poorer.
That is just one reason why the Federal Reserve system is so insidious. They are killing the middle class with inflation. For much more on the Federal Reserve and why it should be abolished, please see this article: “10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve“.
So if most Americans are getting poorer, then why aren’t our politicians doing something to fix it?
Well, the sad truth of the matter is that the big corporations fund the campaigns of our corrupt politicians. They know that the candidate that raises the most money almost always wins, and so it provides an incentive for our politicians to be very good to those that have the money.
Plus, many of our politicians are way too busy having a good time to be bothered with doing anything for us. Take Barack Obama for example. According to The Telegraph, Barack Obama has spent twice as much time playing golf and vacationing as he has on attending economic meetings…
In an analysis of the presidential diary and newspaper reports, the Government Accountability Institute found that Mr Obama has spent 976 hours since his January 2009 election on holiday and playing golf.
In contrast, he has only spent 474.4 hours in economic meetings.
“As a government watchdog group, we just tabulate the numbers and let others decide how to interpret them,” said Peter Schweizer, president of GAI, which compiled the report.
But this is a problem that is not going away. The bottom 90 percent of the country is systematically getting poorer, and if this continues it will inevitably result in massive social problems. The video posted below does a great job of graphically illustrating the crisis that we are facing…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
22 Facts That Prove That 90 Percent Of America Is Systematically Getting Poorer
The mainstream media is not telling you this, but the truth is that most Americans are steadily getting poorer. The middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and poverty is soaring to unprecedented heights. The fact that 90 percent of the population is constantly sliding downhill is not good for our society. The United States is supposed to be a land of opportunity with a vibrant free market system that enables average people to make better lives for themselves. Unfortunately, free enterprise is being strangled to death in the United States today. Entrepreneurs and small business are being pounded into oblivion by rules, regulations, red tape and oppressive levels of taxation. At the same time, millions of jobs have been shipped out of the United States by corporate giants and sent to countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. All of this has happened under both Democrats and Republicans. Meanwhile, wealth and power continue to become even more heavily concentrated in the hands of big government and big corporations. Our founding fathers warned that we should not allow such large concentrations of wealth and power, because they tend to funnel the rewards of society into the hands of a select few. We need to change the rules of the game so that entrepreneurs, small businesses and average workers can thrive in this country once again. If big government and big corporations continue to gobble up even more wealth and power, the wealth inequality that we see right now will only get even worse.
The following are 22 facts that prove that the bottom 90 percent of America is systematically getting poorer…
#1 According to the Pew Research Center, the top 7 percent of all U.S. households own 63 percent of all the wealth in the country.
#2 Between 2009 and 2011, the wealth of the bottom 93 percent of all Americans declined by 4 percent, while the wealth of the top 7 percent of all Americans increased by 28 percent.
#3 On average, households in the top 7 percent have 24 times as much wealth as households in the bottom 93 percent.
#4 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.
#5 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the wealthiest one percent of all American households have 288 times the amount of wealth that the average middle class American family does on average.
#6 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.
#7 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have as much wealth as the bottom one-third of all Americans combined.
#8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
#9 In the United States today, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high, but wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low.
#10 In 1980, CEOs at S&P 500 companies made 42 times as much as their employees did on average. Today, CEOs at S&P 500 companies make 354 times as much as their employees do on average. In fact, there are many CEOs that make more than 1000 times what the average employees in their companies make.
#11 According to a report recently issued by the Pew Research Center, Americans over the age of 65 have 47 times as much wealth as Americans under the age of 35 on average.
#12 U.S. families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#13 Back in 2007, about 28 percent of all working families were considered to be among “the working poor”. Today, that number is up to 32 percent even though our politicians tell us that the economy is supposedly recovering.
#14 At this point, one out of every four American workers has a job that pays $10 an hour or less.
#15 Today, the United States actually has a higher percentage of workers doing low wage work than any other major industrialized nation does.
#16 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#17 As I mentioned yesterday, the homeownership rate in America is now at its lowest level in nearly 18 years.
#18 The United States now ranks 93rd in the world in income inequality.
#19 Approximately one out of every five households in the United States is now on food stamps.
#20 The number of Americans on food stamps has grown from 17 million in the year 2000 to more than 47 million today.
#21 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income”.
#22 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
Even if your income just stays the same, you are still getting poorer because inflation is a tax that is constantly chipping away at the value of every single dollar that you own. The cost of everything that we buy on a regular basis (food, gas, health insurance, etc.) is constantly going up, and if your income is not keeping pace that means that you are getting poorer.
That is just one reason why the Federal Reserve system is so insidious. They are killing the middle class with inflation. For much more on the Federal Reserve and why it should be abolished, please see this article: “10 Things That Every American Should Know About The Federal Reserve“.
So if most Americans are getting poorer, then why aren’t our politicians doing something to fix it?
Well, the sad truth of the matter is that the big corporations fund the campaigns of our corrupt politicians. They know that the candidate that raises the most money almost always wins, and so it provides an incentive for our politicians to be very good to those that have the money.
Plus, many of our politicians are way too busy having a good time to be bothered with doing anything for us. Take Barack Obama for example. According to The Telegraph, Barack Obama has spent twice as much time playing golf and vacationing as he has on attending economic meetings…
In an analysis of the presidential diary and newspaper reports, the Government Accountability Institute found that Mr Obama has spent 976 hours since his January 2009 election on holiday and playing golf.
In contrast, he has only spent 474.4 hours in economic meetings.
“As a government watchdog group, we just tabulate the numbers and let others decide how to interpret them,” said Peter Schweizer, president of GAI, which compiled the report.
But this is a problem that is not going away. The bottom 90 percent of the country is systematically getting poorer, and if this continues it will inevitably result in massive social problems. The video posted below does a great job of graphically illustrating the crisis that we are facing…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Firearms • Gun Facts You Need To Know
http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=52232
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Apr 07, 2013 3:03 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
WaPo Blogger Still Won’t Let Facts Get In Her Way
Jason Bedrick
There she goes again.
Just a few weeks ago, Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post falsely accused scholarship tax credit programs of being “welfare for the rich,” an absurd claim that was easily debunked. Now Strauss is making similarly absurd claims about voucher programs in response to the Indiana Supreme Court’s unanimous decision upholding their constitutionality:
The notion is that families deserve to have a “choice” of schools for their children. The reality is that the amount of money provided in each voucher isn’t enough to cover tuition at a great many private schools, especially the elite ones that get most of the media’s attention, such as Sidwell Friends, which the Obama daughters attend.
The implication is that since school choice programs do not provide enough funding to make all choices affordable for low-income families, they don’t really provide “choice” at all. Moreover, Strauss seems to be arguing that if we can’t afford to send every child to the same school as the children of the president of the United States, then we shouldn’t do anything to expand educational options for low-income families. One wonders if Strauss also opposes food stamps because recipients can’t afford filet mignon every night.
While hiding behind weasel words that are technically correct—a “great many private schools” are too expensive for most low-income families even with vouchers—Strauss ignores the “great many private schools” that school choice programs do make affordable for low-income families. Take, for example, this story from yesterday’s New York Times:
Some parents of modest means are surprised to discover that the education savings accounts put private school within reach. When Nydia Salazar first dreamed of attending St. Mary’s Catholic High School in Phoenix, for example, her mother, Maria Salazar, a medical receptionist, figured there was no way she could afford it. The family had always struggled financially, and Nydia, 14, had always attended public school.
But then Ms. Salazar, 37, a single mother who holds two side jobs to make ends meet, heard of a scholarship fund that would allow her to use public dollars to pay the tuition.
She is now trying to coax other parents into signing up for similar scholarships. “When I tell them about private school, they say I’m crazy,” she said. “They think that’s only for rich people.”
Excluding the nine voucher programs for students with special needs and the two for students in failing public school districts, five of the nation’s eight general voucher programs have income caps or give priority to low-income families. The more than 41,000 students participating in these means-tested voucher programs manage to afford private schools that they prefer over their local government schools. These numbers are small compared to the total number of students in those states, but I suspect that Strauss would not support lifting the caps on the number of vouchers available or increasing the voucher sizes, which range from 29 percent to 56 percent of the government schools’ operating per-pupil spending (excluding capital expenditures).
Strauss also misleadingly asserts that students participating in voucher programs do not benefit academically:
There are arguments made that students in voucher schools do better than their peers who wanted vouchers but didn’t get them and are in public schools. Research shows that that is largely not true.
Again, Strauss hides behind weasel words. Her assertion that it is “largely not true” that vouchers improve performance obscures the fact that all the randomized-controlled research shows that voucher students perform as well or better than their peers that sought vouchers but didn’t get them. Professor Patrick Wolf explains:
Nine different research teams have conducted 12 rigorous evaluations of these types of programs over the past 17 years. Eleven of those studies have reported at least some positive findings and no negative results from private school choice. People who claim there is no evidence that opportunity scholarship or “voucher” programs work clearly are not paying attention.
Wolf also cites the increased graduation rates and college enrollment that school choice programs produce at a fraction of the cost of traditional government schools. Moreover, the voucher recipients are “on average, more disadvantaged than the typical public school student and thus dramatically more disadvantaged than the average private school student.”
There are legitimate concerns about voucher programs, as with every public policy. But it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that they don’t expand educational opportunities for low-income families or to ignore the copious research showing academic benefits. Strauss should correct the record.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Religion • Facing facts on Islam
March 28, 2013
Facing facts on Islam
Thomas Lifson
In the face of the powers that be in government, education, and the media, Pamela Geller and her collaborators toil away to present a more realistic picture of the implacable Islamic religious war underway against the West for over a millennium. Their latest campaign undertaken by The American Freedom Defense Initiative is once again using transit ads in New York. Here are two of the first ads:
The New York Post writes of the campaign:
Another picture shows a woman dressed in a white burqa getting whipped above the words: "Under Islamic law rape victims are tortured or killed unless they agree to marry their rapist."
Geller said that picture is from Indonesia.
She submitted the ads to the MTA yesterday.
It’s unclear when they will go up; her ads have been approved before.
The reference to apartheid is a direct rebuttal of the American Muslims for Palestine ad, which went up on Monday – the first day of Passover – in 25 MetroNorth stations.
Geller requested her ads be hung in the same stations, which include Fordham and 125th Street.
The pro-Palestinian ads read: "Americans give Israel $3 billion per year! End Apartheid now!"
A spokesman for the Muslim group said the ads were about reclaiming their heritage.
She also said it was a coincidence that they went up on Passover.
The American establishment, focused on the money and power wielded by certain Islamic nations, clings bravely to a benign picture of the faith, as if affirming the existence of nonviolent Muslims meant that there is no danger from the rest, the ones who really embrace the injunctions of the prophet. Pamela, Robert Spencer and the others involved in the effort have truth on their side. And that actually matters.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 … z2OreSvrPA
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:28 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Enviromental News • 30 Facts About The Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The
30 Facts About The Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The Lives Of Every Person On The Planet
By Michael, on March 4th, 2013
The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at a very frightening pace, and many of the most important underground aquifers that we depend on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point, approximately 40 percent of the entire population of the planet has little or no access to clean water, and it is being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in "water-stressed" areas. But most Americans are not too concerned about all of this because they assume that North America has more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right about that, but the truth is that even North America is rapidly running out of water and it is going to change all of our lives. Today, the most important underground water source in America, the Ogallala Aquifer, is rapidly running dry. The most important lake in the western United States, Lake Mead, is rapidly running dry. The most important river in the western United States, the Colorado River, is rapidly running dry. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we are not on the verge of an absolutely horrific water crisis is not going to make it go away. Without water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support modern cities. As this global water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect every single man, woman and child on the planet. I encourage you to keep reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community understands what is happening. According to one shocking government report that was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030…
This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity’s "annual global water requirements" will exceed "current sustainable water supplies" by forty percent.
Oh, but our scientists will find a solution to our problems long before then, won’t they?
But what if they don’t?
Most Americans tend to think of a "water crisis" as something that happens in very dry places such as Africa or the Middle East, but the truth is that almost the entire western half of the United States is historically a very dry place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by drought in recent years, and many communities are on the verge of having to make some very hard decisions. For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are projecting that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems will not be limited just to Las Vegas. The truth is that if Lake Mead runs dry, it will be a major disaster for that entire region of the country. This was explained in a recent article by Alex Daley…
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam’s turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can’t build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It’s critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are you starting to get an idea of just how serious this all is?
But it is not just our lakes and our rivers that are going dry.
We are also depleting our groundwater at a very frightening pace as a recent Science Daily article discussed…
Three results of the new study are particularly striking: First, during the most recent drought in California’s Central Valley, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in the south depleted enough groundwater to fill the nation’s largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas — a level of groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second, a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains occurs in just 4% of the land area. And third, the researchers project that if current trends continue some parts of the southern High Plains that currently support irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, will be unable to do so within a few decades.
In the United States we have massive underground aquifers that have allowed our nation to be the breadbasket of the world. But once the water from those aquifers is gone, it is gone for good. That is why what is happening to the Ogallala Aquifer is so alarming. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, and U.S. farmers use water from it to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most Americans have never even heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way of life. Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is almost unimaginable.
The following are some facts about the Ogallala Aquifer and the growing water crisis that we are facing in the United States. A number of these facts were taken from one of my previous articles. I think that you will agree that many of these facts are quite alarming…
1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, "a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie" has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.
3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.
4. Scientists are warning that nothing can be done to stop the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The ominous words of David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service should alarm us all…
"Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That’s all we can do."
5. According to a recent National Geographic article, the average depletion rate of the Ogallala Aquifer is picking up speed….
Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has dropped more than 150 feet.
6. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is now the driest that it has been in 500 years.
7. Wildfires have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the central part of the United States in recent years. For example, wildfires burned an astounding 3.6 million acres in the state of Texas alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the future.
8. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it would be normal for extremely dry conditions to persist in parts of western North America for decades. The following is from an article in the Vancouver Sun…
But University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.
St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
"What we’re seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don’t last a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they’ll be semi-continental in expanse," she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.
"So it’s like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That’s what scares those of us who are in the community studying this data pool."
9. Experts tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar in the coming years. It is being projected that repairing and expanding our decaying drinking water infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next 25 years, and as a result our water bills will likely approximately triple over that time period.
10. Right now, the United States uses approximately 148 trillion gallons of fresh water a year, and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.
11. According to a U.S. government report, 36 states are already facing water shortages or will be facing water shortages within the next few years.
12. Lake Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.
13. It has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20 year supply of fresh water left.
14. It has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10 year supply of fresh water left.
15. Approximately 40 percent of all rivers in the United States and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
The 1,450 mile long Colorado River is a good example of what we have done to our precious water supplies. It is probably the most important body of water in the southwestern United States, and it is rapidly dying.
The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Jonathan Waterman about how the once mighty Colorado River is rapidly drying up…
Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.
So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water.
But of course North America is in far better shape when it comes to fresh water than the rest of the world is.
In fact, in many areas of the world today water has already become the most important issue.
The following are some incredible facts about the global water crisis that is getting even worse with each passing day…
1. Total global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years, and it is now increasing faster than it ever has been before.
2. Today, there are 1.6 billion people that live in areas of the globe that are considered to be "water-stressed", and it is being projected that two-thirds of the entire population of the globe will be experiencing "water-stressed" conditions by the year 2025.
3. According to USAID, one-third of the people on earth will be facing "severe" or "chronic" water shortages by the year 2025.
4. Once upon a time, the Aral Sea was the 4th largest freshwater lake in the entire world. At this point, it less than 10 percent the size that it used to be, and it is being projected that it will dry up completely by the year 2020.
5. If you can believe it, the flow of water along the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.
6. It is being projected that the demand for water in China will exceed the supply by 25 percent by the year 2030.
7. According to the United Nations, the world is going to need at least 30 percent more fresh water by the year 2030.
8. Sadly, it is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the children living in Africa and India have had their growth stunted due to unclean water and malnutrition.
9. Of the 60 million people added to the cities of the world each year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities whatsoever.
10. It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.
11. Sadly, according to one UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
12. Every 8 seconds, somewhere in the world a child dies from drinking dirty water.
13. Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.
14. Each year in northern China, the water table drops by an average of about one meter due to severe drought and overpumping, and the size of the desert increases by an area equivalent to the state of Rhode Island.
15. In China, 80 percent of the major rivers have become so horribly polluted that they do not support any aquatic life at all at this point.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch … the-planet
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue Mar 05, 2013 12:03 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
30 Facts About The Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The Lives Of Every Person On The Planet
The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at a very frightening pace, and many of the most important underground aquifers that we depend on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point, approximately 40 percent of the entire population of the planet has little or no access to clean water, and it is being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in “water-stressed” areas. But most Americans are not too concerned about all of this because they assume that North America has more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right about that, but the truth is that even North America is rapidly running out of water and it is going to change all of our lives. Today, the most important underground water source in America, the Ogallala Aquifer, is rapidly running dry. The most important lake in the western United States, Lake Mead, is rapidly running dry. The most important river in the western United States, the Colorado River, is rapidly running dry. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we are not on the verge of an absolutely horrific water crisis is not going to make it go away. Without water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support modern cities. As this global water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect every single man, woman and child on the planet. I encourage you to keep reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community understands what is happening. According to one shocking government report that was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030…
This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity’s “annual global water requirements” will exceed “current sustainable water supplies” by forty percent.
Oh, but our scientists will find a solution to our problems long before then, won’t they?
But what if they don’t?
Most Americans tend to think of a “water crisis” as something that happens in very dry places such as Africa or the Middle East, but the truth is that almost the entire western half of the United States is historically a very dry place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by drought in recent years, and many communities are on the verge of having to make some very hard decisions. For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are projecting that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems will not be limited just to Las Vegas. The truth is that if Lake Mead runs dry, it will be a major disaster for that entire region of the country. This was explained in a recent article by Alex Daley…
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam’s turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can’t build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It’s critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are you starting to get an idea of just how serious this all is?
But it is not just our lakes and our rivers that are going dry.
We are also depleting our groundwater at a very frightening pace as a recent Science Daily article discussed…
Three results of the new study are particularly striking: First, during the most recent drought in California’s Central Valley, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in the south depleted enough groundwater to fill the nation’s largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas — a level of groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second, a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains occurs in just 4% of the land area. And third, the researchers project that if current trends continue some parts of the southern High Plains that currently support irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, will be unable to do so within a few decades.
In the United States we have massive underground aquifers that have allowed our nation to be the breadbasket of the world. But once the water from those aquifers is gone, it is gone for good. That is why what is happening to the Ogallala Aquifer is so alarming. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, and U.S. farmers use water from it to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most Americans have never even heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way of life. Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is almost unimaginable.
The following are some facts about the Ogallala Aquifer and the growing water crisis that we are facing in the United States. A number of these facts were taken from one of my previous articles. I think that you will agree that many of these facts are quite alarming…
1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie” has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.
3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.
4. Scientists are warning that nothing can be done to stop the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The ominous words of David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service should alarm us all…
“Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That’s all we can do.”
5. According to a recent National Geographic article, the average depletion rate of the Ogallala Aquifer is picking up speed….
Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has dropped more than 150 feet.
6. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is now the driest that it has been in 500 years.
7. Wildfires have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the central part of the United States in recent years. For example, wildfires burned an astounding 3.6 million acres in the state of Texas alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the future.
8. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it would be normal for extremely dry conditions to persist in parts of western North America for decades. The following is from an article in the Vancouver Sun…
But University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.
St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
“What we’re seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don’t last a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they’ll be semi-continental in expanse,” she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.
“So it’s like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That’s what scares those of us who are in the community studying this data pool.”
9. Experts tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar in the coming years. It is being projected that repairing and expanding our decaying drinking water infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next 25 years, and as a result our water bills will likely approximately triple over that time period.
10. Right now, the United States uses approximately 148 trillion gallons of fresh water a year, and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.
11. According to a U.S. government report, 36 states are already facing water shortages or will be facing water shortages within the next few years.
12. Lake Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.
13. It has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20 year supply of fresh water left.
14. It has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10 year supply of fresh water left.
15. Approximately 40 percent of all rivers in the United States and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
The 1,450 mile long Colorado River is a good example of what we have done to our precious water supplies. It is probably the most important body of water in the southwestern United States, and it is rapidly dying.
The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Jonathan Waterman about how the once mighty Colorado River is rapidly drying up…
Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.
So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water.
But of course North America is in far better shape when it comes to fresh water than the rest of the world is.
In fact, in many areas of the world today water has already become the most important issue.
The following are some incredible facts about the global water crisis that is getting even worse with each passing day…
1. Total global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years, and it is now increasing faster than it ever has been before.
2. Today, there are 1.6 billion people that live in areas of the globe that are considered to be “water-stressed”, and it is being projected that two-thirds of the entire population of the globe will be experiencing “water-stressed” conditions by the year 2025.
3. According to USAID, one-third of the people on earth will be facing “severe” or “chronic” water shortages by the year 2025.
4. Once upon a time, the Aral Sea was the 4th largest freshwater lake in the entire world. At this point, it less than 10 percent the size that it used to be, and it is being projected that it will dry up completely by the year 2020.
5. If you can believe it, the flow of water along the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.
6. It is being projected that the demand for water in China will exceed the supply by 25 percent by the year 2030.
7. According to the United Nations, the world is going to need at least 30 percent more fresh water by the year 2030.
8. Sadly, it is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the children living in Africa and India have had their growth stunted due to unclean water and malnutrition.
9. Of the 60 million people added to the cities of the world each year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities whatsoever.
10. It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.
11. Sadly, according to one UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
12. Every 8 seconds, somewhere in the world a child dies from drinking dirty water.
13. Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.
14. Each year in northern China, the water table drops by an average of about one meter due to severe drought and overpumping, and the size of the desert increases by an area equivalent to the state of Rhode Island.
15. In China, 80 percent of the major rivers have become so horribly polluted that they do not support any aquatic life at all at this point.
So is there any hope that the coming global water crisis can be averted?
If not, what can we do to prepare?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
30 Facts About The Coming Water Crisis That Will Change The Lives Of Every Person On The Planet
The world is rapidly running out of clean water. Some of the largest lakes and rivers on the globe are being depleted at a very frightening pace, and many of the most important underground aquifers that we depend on to irrigate our crops will soon be gone. At this point, approximately 40 percent of the entire population of the planet has little or no access to clean water, and it is being projected that by 2025 two-thirds of humanity will live in “water-stressed” areas. But most Americans are not too concerned about all of this because they assume that North America has more fresh water than anyone else does. And actually they would be right about that, but the truth is that even North America is rapidly running out of water and it is going to change all of our lives. Today, the most important underground water source in America, the Ogallala Aquifer, is rapidly running dry. The most important lake in the western United States, Lake Mead, is rapidly running dry. The most important river in the western United States, the Colorado River, is rapidly running dry. Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we are not on the verge of an absolutely horrific water crisis is not going to make it go away. Without water, you cannot grow crops, you cannot raise livestock and you cannot support modern cities. As this global water crisis gets worse, it is going to affect every single man, woman and child on the planet. I encourage you to keep reading and learn more.
The U.S. intelligence community understands what is happening. According to one shocking government report that was released last year, the global need for water will exceed the global supply of water by 40 percent by the year 2030…
This sobering message emerges from the first U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security. The document predicts that by 2030 humanity’s “annual global water requirements” will exceed “current sustainable water supplies” by forty percent.
Oh, but our scientists will find a solution to our problems long before then, won’t they?
But what if they don’t?
Most Americans tend to think of a “water crisis” as something that happens in very dry places such as Africa or the Middle East, but the truth is that almost the entire western half of the United States is historically a very dry place. The western U.S. has been hit very hard by drought in recent years, and many communities are on the verge of having to make some very hard decisions. For example, just look at what is happening to Lake Mead. Scientists are projecting that Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of running dry by the year 2025. If that happens, it will mean the end of Las Vegas as we know it. But the problems will not be limited just to Las Vegas. The truth is that if Lake Mead runs dry, it will be a major disaster for that entire region of the country. This was explained in a recent article by Alex Daley…
Way before people run out of drinking water, something else happens: When Lake Mead falls below 1,050 feet, the Hoover Dam’s turbines shut down – less than four years from now, if the current trend holds – and in Vegas the lights start going out.
Ominously, these water woes are not confined to Las Vegas. Under contracts signed by President Obama in December 2011, Nevada gets only 23.37% of the electricity generated by the Hoover Dam. The other top recipients: Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (28.53%); state of Arizona (18.95%); city of Los Angeles (15.42%); and Southern California Edison (5.54%).
You can always build more power plants, but you can’t build more rivers, and the mighty Colorado carries the lifeblood of the Southwest. It services the water needs of an area the size of France, in which live 40 million people. In its natural state, the river poured 15.7 million acre-feet of water into the Gulf of California each year. Today, twelve years of drought have reduced the flow to about 12 million acre-feet, and human demand siphons off every bit of it; at its mouth, the riverbed is nothing but dust.
Nor is the decline in the water supply important only to the citizens of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. It’s critical to the whole country. The Colorado is the sole source of water for southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, which has been made into one of the most productive agricultural areas in the US despite receiving an average of three inches of rain per year.
Are you starting to get an idea of just how serious this all is?
But it is not just our lakes and our rivers that are going dry.
We are also depleting our groundwater at a very frightening pace as a recent Science Daily article discussed…
Three results of the new study are particularly striking: First, during the most recent drought in California’s Central Valley, from 2006 to 2009, farmers in the south depleted enough groundwater to fill the nation’s largest human-made reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas — a level of groundwater depletion that is unsustainable at current recharge rates.
Second, a third of the groundwater depletion in the High Plains occurs in just 4% of the land area. And third, the researchers project that if current trends continue some parts of the southern High Plains that currently support irrigated agriculture, mostly in the Texas Panhandle and western Kansas, will be unable to do so within a few decades.
In the United States we have massive underground aquifers that have allowed our nation to be the breadbasket of the world. But once the water from those aquifers is gone, it is gone for good. That is why what is happening to the Ogallala Aquifer is so alarming. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest sources of fresh water in the world, and U.S. farmers use water from it to irrigate more than 15 million acres of crops each year. The Ogallala Aquifer covers more than 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Most Americans have never even heard of it, but it is absolutely crucial to our way of life. Sadly, it is being drained at a rate that is almost unimaginable.
The following are some facts about the Ogallala Aquifer and the growing water crisis that we are facing in the United States. A number of these facts were taken from one of my previous articles. I think that you will agree that many of these facts are quite alarming…
1. The Ogallala Aquifer is being drained at a rate of approximately 800 gallons per minute.
2. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, “a volume equivalent to two-thirds of the water in Lake Erie” has been permanently drained from the Ogallala Aquifer since 1940.
3. Decades ago, the Ogallala Aquifer had an average depth of approximately 240 feet, but today the average depth is just 80 feet. In some areas of Texas, the water is gone completely.
4. Scientists are warning that nothing can be done to stop the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. The ominous words of David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service should alarm us all…
“Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That’s all we can do.”
5. According to a recent National Geographic article, the average depletion rate of the Ogallala Aquifer is picking up speed….
Even more worrisome, the draining of the High Plains water account has picked up speed. The average annual depletion rate between 2000 and 2007 was more than twice that during the previous fifty years. The depletion is most severe in the southern portion of the aquifer, especially in Texas, where the water table beneath sizeable areas has dropped 100-150 feet; in smaller pockets, it has dropped more than 150 feet.
6. According to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. interior west is now the driest that it has been in 500 years.
7. Wildfires have burned millions of acres of vegetation in the central part of the United States in recent years. For example, wildfires burned an astounding 3.6 million acres in the state of Texas alone during 2011. This helps set the stage for huge dust storms in the future.
8. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that it would be normal for extremely dry conditions to persist in parts of western North America for decades. The following is from an article in the Vancouver Sun…
But University of Regina paleoclimatologist Jeannine-Marie St. Jacques says that decade-long drought is nowhere near as bad as it can get.
St. Jacques and her colleagues have been studying tree ring data and, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver over the weekend, she explained the reality of droughts.
“What we’re seeing in the climate records is these megadroughts, and they don’t last a decade—they last 20 years, 30 years, maybe 60 years, and they’ll be semi-continental in expanse,” she told the Regina Leader-Post by phone from Vancouver.
“So it’s like what we saw in the Dirty Thirties, but imagine the Dirty Thirties going on for 30 years. That’s what scares those of us who are in the community studying this data pool.”
9. Experts tell us that U.S. water bills are likely to soar in the coming years. It is being projected that repairing and expanding our decaying drinking water infrastructure will cost more than one trillion dollars over the next 25 years, and as a result our water bills will likely approximately triple over that time period.
10. Right now, the United States uses approximately 148 trillion gallons of fresh water a year, and there is no way that is sustainable in the long run.
11. According to a U.S. government report, 36 states are already facing water shortages or will be facing water shortages within the next few years.
12. Lake Mead supplies about 85 percent of the water to Las Vegas, and since 1998 the level of water in Lake Mead has dropped by about 5.6 trillion gallons.
13. It has been estimated that the state of California only has a 20 year supply of fresh water left.
14. It has been estimated that the state of New Mexico only has a 10 year supply of fresh water left.
15. Approximately 40 percent of all rivers in the United States and approximately 46 percent of all lakes in the United States have become so polluted that they are are no longer fit for human use.
The 1,450 mile long Colorado River is a good example of what we have done to our precious water supplies. It is probably the most important body of water in the southwestern United States, and it is rapidly dying.
The following is an excerpt from an outstanding article by Jonathan Waterman about how the once mighty Colorado River is rapidly drying up…
Fifty miles from the sea, 1.5 miles south of the Mexican border, I saw a river evaporate into a scum of phosphates and discarded water bottles. This dirty water sent me home with feet so badly infected that I couldn’t walk for a week. And a delta once renowned for its wildlife and wetlands is now all but part of the surrounding and parched Sonoran Desert. According to Mexican scientists whom I met with, the river has not flowed to the sea since 1998. If the Endangered Species Act had any teeth in Mexico, we might have a chance to save the giant sea bass (totoaba), clams, the Sea of Cortez shrimp fishery that depends upon freshwater returns, and dozens of bird species.
So let this stand as an open invitation to the former Secretary of the Interior and all water buffalos who insist upon telling us that there is no scarcity of water here or in the Mexican Delta. Leave the sprinklered green lawns outside the Aspen conferences, come with me, and I’ll show you a Colorado River running dry from its headwaters to the sea. It is polluted and compromised by industry and agriculture. It is overallocated, drought stricken, and soon to suffer greatly from population growth. If other leaders in our administration continue the whitewash, the scarcity of knowledge and lack of conservation measures will cripple a western civilization built upon water.
But of course North America is in far better shape when it comes to fresh water than the rest of the world is.
In fact, in many areas of the world today water has already become the most important issue.
The following are some incredible facts about the global water crisis that is getting even worse with each passing day…
1. Total global water use has quadrupled over the past 100 years, and it is now increasing faster than it ever has been before.
2. Today, there are 1.6 billion people that live in areas of the globe that are considered to be “water-stressed”, and it is being projected that two-thirds of the entire population of the globe will be experiencing “water-stressed” conditions by the year 2025.
3. According to USAID, one-third of the people on earth will be facing “severe” or “chronic” water shortages by the year 2025.
4. Once upon a time, the Aral Sea was the 4th largest freshwater lake in the entire world. At this point, it less than 10 percent the size that it used to be, and it is being projected that it will dry up completely by the year 2020.
5. If you can believe it, the flow of water along the Jordan River is down to only 2 percent of its historic rate.
6. It is being projected that the demand for water in China will exceed the supply by 25 percent by the year 2030.
7. According to the United Nations, the world is going to need at least 30 percent more fresh water by the year 2030.
8. Sadly, it is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the children living in Africa and India have had their growth stunted due to unclean water and malnutrition.
9. Of the 60 million people added to the cities of the world each year, the vast majority of them live in deeply impoverished areas that have no sanitation facilities whatsoever.
10. It has been estimated that 75 percent of all surface water in India has been heavily contaminated by human or agricultural waste.
11. Sadly, according to one UN study on sanitation, far more people in India have access to a cell phone than to a toilet.
12. Every 8 seconds, somewhere in the world a child dies from drinking dirty water.
13. Due to a lack of water, Saudi Arabia has given up on trying to grow wheat and will be 100 percent dependent on wheat imports by the year 2016.
14. Each year in northern China, the water table drops by an average of about one meter due to severe drought and overpumping, and the size of the desert increases by an area equivalent to the state of Rhode Island.
15. In China, 80 percent of the major rivers have become so horribly polluted that they do not support any aquatic life at all at this point.
So is there any hope that the coming global water crisis can be averted?
If not, what can we do to prepare?
Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
View full post on The Economic Collapse
Other • 100 INTERESTING FACTS
100 INTERESTING FACTS
Posted on 8th February 2013 by Administrator in Economy |Politics |Social Issues
Economy
100 Startling Facts About the Economy
By Morgan Housel
February 5, 2013
In no particular order…
1. As of January 2013, there are 16 people left in the world who were born in the 1800s, according to the Gerontology Research Group. With dividends reinvested, U.S. stocks have increased 28,000-fold during their lifetimes.
2. If you divide their net worths by their age, Carlos Slim and Bill Gates have each accumulated more than $100,000 in net worth for every hour they’ve been alive.
3. According to Forbes, if a Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ) employee passes away, “their surviving spouse or domestic partner will receive a check for 50% of their salary every year for the next decade.”
4. According to the Deutsche Bank Long-Term Asset Return Study, the last time interest rates were near current levels, in the 1950s, Treasury bonds lost 40% of their inflation-adjusted value over the following three decades.
5. According to a study by Harvard professor David Wise and two colleagues, 46.1% of Americans die with less than $10,000 in assets.
6. There are 3.8 million fewer Americans aged 30 to 44 today than there were a decade ago.
7. Related: The population of Americans aged 30 to 44 is about to start increasing for the first time since 2000.
8. Since 1928, the Dow Jones has increased more than 10% in a single day eight times, declined more than 10% in a single day four times, and gone either up or down more than 5% in a single day 136 times.
9. “U.S. oil production grew more in 2012 than in any year in the history of the domestic industry, which began in 1859,” writes Tom Fowler of The Wall Street Journal.
10. “Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ) and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products,” writes The New York Times.
11. Start with a dollar. Double it every day. In 48 days you’ll own every financial asset that exists on the planet — about $200 trillion.
12. There were fewer state and local education jobs in 2012 than there were in 2005, even though the number of 5- to 18-year-olds has increased by 600,000.
13. Adjusting for inflation, Warren Buffett was a millionaire by age 25.
14. Including dividends, the S&P 500 gained 135% from March 2009 through January 2013, during what people remember as the “Great Recession.” It gained the exact same amount from 1996 to 2000, during what people remember as the “greatest bull market in history.”
15. “97% of the world’s population now lives in countries where the fertility rate is falling,” writes author Jonathan Last.
16. The U.K. economy is 3.3% smaller than it was in 2008. The U.S. economy is 2.9% larger (both adjusted for inflation).
17. In 1980, there were 15,099 Americans aged 100 years or more. By 1990, there were 36,486, and by 2012 there were 88,510, according to the Census Bureau.
18. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL ) “has spent more money on share repurchases than it earned throughout its life as a public company,” writes Floyd Norris of The New York Times.
19. From 2006 to 2011, Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ ) spent $51 billion on share repurchases at an average price of $40.80 per share. Shares currently trade at $16.50.
20. The International Labour Organization estimates a record 200 million people will be unemployed around the world in 2013. If you gave them their own country, it would be the fifth-largest in the world.
21. Despite the overall population doubling, more babies were born in the U.S. in 1956 than were born in 2009, 2010, or 2011.
22. According to The Telegraph, “Four in 10 girls born today is expected to live to 100. … If trends continue, the majority of girls born in 2060 — some 60 per cent — will live to see 2160.”
23. Apple’s cash and investments are now equal to the GDP of Hungary and more than those of Vietnam and Iraq.
24. Netflix surged more than 50% on Jan. 24 from the previous day’s low. $1,000 invested in short-term call options would have been worth $2 million in less than 24 hours. (Please don’t try this at home.)
25. In December, a start-up called Contrail Systems was purchased for $176 million two days after it launched.
26. U.S. charitable giving was $298 billion in 2011, according to the Giving USA Foundation. That’s more than the GDP of all but 33 countries in the world.
27. According to Bloomberg, “The 50 stocks in the S&P 500 with the lowest analyst ratings at the end of 2011 posted an average return of 23 percent [in 2012], outperforming the index by 7 percentage points.”
28. “Globally, the production of a given quantity of crop requires 65% less land than it did in 1961,” writes author Matt Ridley.
29. Thanks in large part to cellphone cameras, “Ten percent of all of the photographs made in the entire history of photography were made last year,” according to Time.
30. Internal emails caught a team of Morgan Stanley employees sarcastically naming a subprime CDO in 2007. “Nuclear Holocaust,” “Mike Tyson’s Punchout,” “Hitman,” “Meltdown,” and “S***bag” were all considered.
31. Since 2008, Americans have donated $19.1 million to the U.S. Treasury to help pay down the national debt.
32. Fortune magazine published an article titled “10 Stocks To Last the Decade” in August, 2000. By December 2012, the portfolio had lost 74.3% of its value, according to analyst Barry Ritholtz.
33. From 2005 to 2012, total student loans outstanding increased by $539 billion, according to the Federal Reserve.
34. According to a study by Environics Analytics WealthScapes, the average Canadian household is now richer than an average American household for the first time ever.
35. The 100 largest public pension funds alone have $1.2 trillion of unfunded liabilities, according to actuarial firm Milliman.
36. According to a study by four economists from Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, and Vanguard, “the number of investors who check their accounts drops by 8.7% following a market decline compared to a market increase.”
37. The average new American home was 1,535 square feet in 1975 and 2,169 square feet in 2010, according to the Census Bureau.
38. Cambridge Associates estimates that 3% of venture capital firms generate 95% of the industry’s returns. It adds that there is little change in the composition of those 3% of firms over time.
39. Growth in America’s energy output since 2008 has surpassed that of any other country in the world, according to energy analyst Daniel Yergin.
40. Two news headlines published on the same day last September summed up the U.S. economy perfectly: “U.S. Median Income Lowest Since 1995, ” and “Ferrari sales surge to record highs.”
41. According to ConvergEx Group, “Only 58% of us are even saving for retirement in the first place. Of that group, 60% have less than $25,000 put away. … A full 30% have less than $1,000.”
42. If you add up annual profits of the entire airline industry going back to 1948, you get -$32 billion.
43. Since 1928, the S&P 500 has closed at a new all-time high 1,024 times, or 4.8% of all trading days.
44. According to California Common Sense, “Over the last 30 years, the number of people California incarcerates grew more than eight times faster than the general population.”
45. One in seven crimes committed in New York City now involves an Apple product being stolen, according to NYPD records cited by ABC News.
46. In the first quarter of 2012, the number of iPhones Apple sold per day surpassed the number of babies born per day worldwide (402,000 vs. 300,000), according to Mobile First.
47. On Dec. 5, 2012, Apple stock lost $34.9 billion in market cap. According to CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, 417 of the S&P 500?s components had a total market cap of less than $35 billion that day.
48. According to economist Glen Weyl, “Of Harvard students graduating in early ’90s and pursuing careers in finance, 1/3 were making over $1 million a year by 2005.”
49. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, 44% of those working for minimum wage in 2010 had attended at least some college, up from 25% in 1979.
50. According to The Economist, “By 2030, 22% of people in the OECD club of rich countries will be 65 or older, nearly double the share in 1990.”
51. According to a study by two Yale economists, if state and local governments acted like they had in the last five recessions, they would have added at least 1.4 million jobs since 2007. Instead, they cut more than 700,000.
52. The number of workers aged 55 and up is about to surpass the number of workers aged 24 to 34 for the first time ever.
53. In 2011, Asia had more millionaires than North America for the first time ever, according to RBC Wealth Management.
54. According to Enerdata, the U.S. consumed less total energy in 2011 than it did in 2000.
55. The IRS estimates that illegal tax-evasion reduced government tax revenue by $450 billion in 2006 (the most recent year calculated). That’s roughly equal to what the government spends annually on Medicare.
56. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The average monthly mortgage payment on a median-price home in October, assuming a 10% down payment, fell to $720 at prevailing rates, down from nearly $1,270 at the end of 2005.”
57. According to a study by Edward Wolff published in the Bureau of Economic Research, the inflation-adjusted median net worth of American families in 2010 hit the lowest level since 1969.
58. “Household debt is now 163.4% of disposable income in Canada, close to the U.S. level at the height of the subprime crisis,” writes The Wall Street Journal.
59. In 2012, the Greek stock market (ATHEX Index) outperformed the Chinese stock market (Shanghai Composite) by 48 percentage points.
60. The International Energy Agency predicts that the U.S. will become the world’s largest oil-producer by 2020, overtaking Saudi Arabia.
61. According to CNBC wealth reporter Robert Frank, the population of millionaires in America is now at or above its 2007 high.
62. According to BetterInvesting, the number of investment clubs has declined by 90% since 1998 from 400,000 to 39,000.
63. Public filings show that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has owned stock in just one individual company over the last decade: Altria Group (which he sold in 2004).
64. Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund run by James Simons, has allegedly produced average returns of 80% a year since 1988 (before fees), according to Bloomberg. That would turn $1,000 into $2.4 billion in 25 years.
65. The S&P 500 has returned about 9% a year over the long run, but few years see returns even close to that. Since 1871, the index has risen or fallen more than 20% in one out of every three years. Less than one out of every five years sees a gain of between 1% and 9%.
66. Since U.S. markets bottomed in March 2009, more than $8 trillion of lost wealth has been recouped.
67. During the Federal Reserve’s June 2007 policy meeting, the word “recession” was used three times; the word “strong” was used 61 times. The economy entered recession six months later.
68. Last year, Franklin Templeton asked 1,000 investors whether the S&P 500 went up or down in 2009 and 2010. Sixty-six percent thought it went down in 2009, while 48% said it declined in 2010. In reality, the index gained 26.5% in 2009 and 15.1% in 2010.
69. The share of an average U.S. household budget going toward gas in 2012 was nearly 4%, tying for the highest level in almost three decades, according to Energy Information Administration figures cited by The Guardian.
70. “Of the Americans who earn over $150,000, 82 percent had a bachelor’s degree. Just 6.5 percent had no more than a high school diploma,” writes Catherine Rampell of The New York Times.
71. According to a survey by Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales, effectively all economists agreed that stock prices are hard to predict. Only 59% of average Americans felt the same way.
72. According to the IMF, if Japan’s female labor-participation rate rose to levels of Northern Europe, its per-capita GDP could be permanently increased by 8%.
73. Credit card debt as a percentage of GDP is now at the lowest level in two decades.
74. The Energy Information Administration predicts that U.S. oil imports will fall to 6 million barrels a day next year — their lowest level in 25 years.
75. According to economist Stephen Bronars, the new 39.6% federal tax bracket will only affect 0.7% of taxpayers but will hit 9.5% of aggregate personal income, as top earners earn a disproportionate share of the national income.
76. From 2001 to 2007, new-home construction outpaced household formation by more than 3 million homes.
77. According to Gallup, 51.3% of Americans consider themselves “thriving,” 45.1% say they are “struggling,” and 3.6% say they’re “suffering.”
78. An average couple will pay $155,000 in in 401(k) fees over their careers, according to Demos, reducing an average account balance from $510,000 to $355,000.
79. Related: 84% of actively managed U.S. stock funds underperformed the S&P 500 in 2011.
80. According to The Wall Street Journal, 49.1% of Americans live in a household “where at least one member received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2011.”
81. According to New York Times writer Binyamin Appelbaum: “Average months between US recessions since 1854: 42. Months since last recession: 42.”
82. With bond yields near all-time lows, Richard Barley of The Wall Street Journal writes, “For a one-percentage point rise in yields, 10-year U.S. Treasury holders now face a drop in price of nearly nine percentage points.”
83. “By 2050, workers’ median age in China and Japan will be about 50, a decade higher than in America,” writes Robert Samuelson.
84. Of the 3.1 million students who graduated high school in 2010, 78.2% received their diplomas on time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That was the highest percentage since 1974.
85. The U.S. birthrate declined 8% from 2007 to 2010, according to Pew. At 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the 2011 U.S. birthrate was the lowest since records began in 1920.
86. According to Wired magazine, “In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy. … On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 percent of their income on lotteries.”
87. According to David Wessel of The Wall Street Journal, Americans “spend about half of their food budgets at restaurants now, compared to a third in the 1970s.”
88. We are used to hearing how much faster the earnings of the top 1% grow compared with everyone else’s, but we often forget that it used to be the other way around. From 1943 to 1980, the annual incomes of the bottom 90% of Americans doubled in real terms, while the average income of the top 1% grew just 23%, according to Robert Frank.
89. According to Vanguard founder John Bogle, the average equity mutual fund gained 173% from 1997 to 2011, but the average equity mutual fund investor earned only 110%, thanks to the tendency to buy high and sell low.
90. According to David Leonhardt, median family incomes have fallen substantially over a decade for the first time since the Great Depression. “By [2011], family income was 8 percent lower than it had been 11 years earlier, at its peak in 2000.”
91. The rise in domestic energy-production has already shaved $175 billion off our annual import bill compared with five years ago, according to energy analyst Daniel Yergin.
92. Federal nondefense discretionary spending — all spending minus defense and entitlements — is on track to hit its lowest level as a share of GDP in more than 50 years, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.
93. Bonds have become so richly valued that UBS is reportedly reclassifying brokerage clients who are overweight bonds as “aggressive” investors — most likely to avoid future lawsuits if and when bonds lose value.
94. According to The Economist, “Over the past ten years, hedge-fund managers have underperformed not just the stock market, but inflation as well.”
95. According to Bloomberg, “Americans have missed out on almost $200 billion of stock gains as they drained money from the market in the past four years, haunted by the financial crisis.
96. In the 1960s, wages and salary income made up more than 50% of GDP. By 2011, it was less than 44%, as dividends, interest, and capital gains made up a growing share of the nation’s income.
97. S&P 500 companies held $900 billion in cash at the end of June, according to Thomson Reuters. That was up 40% since 2008.
98. “More than 50 million Americans couldn’t afford to buy food at some point in 2011,” writes CNNMoney, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In June 2012, 46.7 million Americans received food stamps.
99. Japan’s working-age population is on track to decline from 62.6% of its population in 2012 to just 49.1% by 2050.
100. The unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree is just 3.7% — less than half the nationwide average.
http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=48863
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Fri Feb 08, 2013 1:05 pm
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Bankrupt, Decaying And Nearly Dead: 24 Facts About The City Of Detroit That Will Shock You
If you want to know what the future of America is going to be like, just look at the city of Detroit. Once upon a time it was a symbol of everything that America was doing right, but today it has been transformed into a rotting, decaying, post-apocalyptic hellhole. Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the entire nation. It was the greatest manufacturing city the world had ever seen, and the rest of the globe looked at Detroit with a sense of awe and wonder. But now the city of Detroit has become a bad joke to the rest of the world. Unemployment is rampant, 60 percent of the children are living in poverty and the city government is on the verge of bankruptcy. They say that Detroit is just a matter of “weeks or months” away from running out of cash, and when Detroit does declare bankruptcy it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the United States. But don’t look down on Detroit, because the truth is that Detroit is really a metaphor for what is happening to America as a whole. In the United States today, our manufacturing infrastructure has been gutted, poverty is absolutely exploding and we are rapidly approaching national bankruptcy. Detroit may have gotten there first, but the rest of the country will follow soon enough.
Back during the boom years, Detroit was known for making great cars. Today, it is known for scenes of desolation and decay. It is full of vandalized homes, abandoned schools and empty factories. The following description of what Detroit looks like at this point is from an article by Barry Yeoman…
It’s hard to describe the city’s physical landscape without producing what Detroiters call “ruin porn.” Brick houses with bays and turrets sit windowless or boarded up. Whole blocks, even clusters of blocks, have been bulldozed. Retail strips have been reduced to a dollar store here, a storefront church there, and a whole lot of plywood in between. Not a single chain supermarket remains.
So what caused the downfall of one of the greatest cities on earth?
Well, here is a hint…
Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.
When you are a manufacturing area, and you lose half of your manufacturing jobs over the course of a single decade, of course things are going to get really, really bad.
So just how bad have things gotten in Detroit?
The following are 24 facts about the city of Detroit that will shock you…
#1 Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, and it was once home to close to 2 million people. But over the last several decades people have been fleeing in droves. According to the 2010 census, only 713,000 people now live in Detroit, and city officials admit that the population has probably slipped under 700,000 at this point.
#2 The population of Detroit has declined by about 25 percent over the past decade. The last time the population of Detroit was this low was all the way back in 1910.
#3 Today, Detroit is only the 18th-largest city in America. It is now smaller than Austin, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina.
#4 Back in 1960, the city of Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the United States.
#5 Today, the unemployment rate in Detroit is more than 18 percent, which is more than twice as high as the nation as a whole.
#6 According to a report that was just recently released, approximately 60 percent of all children in Detroit live in poverty.
#7 Approximately one-third of Detroit’s 140 square miles are either vacant or derelict.
#8 The city government of Detroit has closed dozens of schools and has decided to cut off public services to the “heavily blighted areas“.
#9 According to one estimate, there are 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots in the city of Detroit today.
#10 The median price of a home in Detroit is just $9,000, and there are some areas of Detroit where you can still buy a house for $100.
#11 There are more than 85,000 streetlights in Detroit, but thieves have stripped so much copper wiring out of the lights that more than half of them are not working.
#12 Mayor Bing has announced a plan to reduce the number of streetlights in the city of Detroit to just 46,000.
#13 According to one very shocking report, 47 percent of all people living in the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate at this point..
#14 The murder rate in Detroit is 11 times higher than it is in New York City.
#15 There were 377 homicides in Detroit in 2011. In 2012, that number rose to 411.
#16 Justifiable homicide in Detroit rose by an astounding 79 percent during 2011.
#17 In one recent year, the rate of self-defense killings in the city of Detroit was 2200% above the national average.
#18 Ten years ago, there were approximately 5,000 police officers in the city of Detroit. Today, there are only about 2,500 and another 100 are scheduled to be eliminated from the force soon.
#19 Due to budget cutbacks, most police stations in Detroit are now closed to the public for 16 hours a day.
#20 Crime has gotten so bad in Detroit that even the police are are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.
#21 At one point, 100 bus drivers in Detroit refused to drive their routes because they were afraid of being attacked out on the streets in broad daylight. The head of the bus drivers union, Henry Gaffney, said that the drivers were literally “scared for their lives“….
“Our drivers are scared, they’re scared for their lives. This has been an ongoing situation about security. I think yesterday kind of just topped it off, when one of my drivers was beat up by some teenagers down in the middle of Rosa Parks and it took the police almost 30 minutes to get there, in downtown Detroit,” said Gaffney.
#22 There have been reports that gangs of young men with AK-47s have been terrorizing gas stations all over Detroit.
#23 Detroit was once known for making some of the greatest cars in the world. Now, it is known around the world as a dumping ground for the dead…
From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block.
They were just the latest victims of foul play whose remains went undiscovered for days after being hidden deep inside Detroit’s vast urban wilderness — a crumbling wasteland rarely visited by outsiders and infrequently patrolled by police.
#24 Detroit’s public schools are an absolute nightmare. The following is from one of my readers that actually attended one of the “best” public schools in Detroit…
The school was a new seven story building just a couple of years old. The bathrooms would often lack toilet paper & soap beyond the second floor (the main floor), the bathroom sinks would often not work. The water fountains on north side of the building on from the third floor & up did not work. The elevators would constantly break down. I even got stuck on the elevator before. I almost tripped down a half a flight of stairs because the elastic seal (it was the metal bar at the front of a treader of I don’t know the name of it.) the stairs was not properly installed.
Students would often have sex on the stairs & throughout the school. Parents actually called the school many times & reported kids having sex on the stairs because all of them had glass windows 270 degrees.
Even over in Europe they write stories about the dramatic decline of Detroit. For example, the following is how one British reporter described his visit to Detroit…
Much of Detroit is horribly dangerous for its own residents, who in many cases only stay because they have nowhere else to go. Property crime is double the American average, violent crime triple. The isolated, peeling homes, the flooded roads, the clunky, rusted old cars and the neglected front yards amid trees and groin-high grassland make you think you are in rural Alabama, not in one of the greatest industrial cities that ever existed.
For those that want to read even more about the horrifying downfall of Detroit, there are some amazing charts that graphically show the decline of Detroit right here.
So what is the solution?
How can we fix Detroit?
Well, why don’t we just build a monorail! Of course that sounds ridiculous, but the federal government has actually committed $25 million to construct “a streetcar line” that nobody really wants and that very few people would probably actually use. Perhaps they could be excused for wasting so much money on a bad idea if there had not already been 24 failed attempts to develop a successful public transit system in Detroit over the past four decades.
Well, why don’t we just build a bunch of theme parks instead? After all, tourists would just flock to Detroit, right?
It has been suggested that Detroit would be ideal for an “automotive theme park”, and there is actually one group of investors that wants to turn some of the worst areas of Detroit into a “zombie theme park”.
What will they think of next?
Actually, a much better idea would have been to not allow millions of our good paying manufacturing jobs to be shipped to the other side of the world, but it is too late for that at this point.
But once again, please do not look down on the city of Detroit. Instead, let the city of Detroit serve as a warning for the rest of us.
The truth is that the entire U.S. economy is in an advanced state of decline…
-The percentage of the civilian labor force in the United States that is employed has been steadily declining every single year since 2006.
-An astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.
-Amazingly, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans with either Master’s degrees or Ph.D.s that are enrolled in the food stamp program at this point.
We are a nation that consumes far more wealth than we produce, we are a nation that is constantly bleeding jobs, businesses and wealth, and we are a nation that is going deeper into debt with each passing day.
Yes, Detroit may have gone over the edge into economic oblivion first, but the rest of the nation is steamrolling down the exact same path that Detroit has gone.
Is it too late for us to change direction?
Please feel free to share your thoughts on that question by leaving a comment below…
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