So You Didn’t Get Rich… | International Man

So You Didn’t Get Rich…

Editor’s Note: Today we’re taking a look at a legendary essay on wealth-building by our friend Mark Ford. Many folks who read this essay call it an “eye-opener.” In it, Mark explains how to consistently build your wealth, even in a terrible economy.

Mark has more insight into this than most. He’s built dozens of businesses from scratch… creating millions of dollars of wealth in the process. Mark knows more about building wealth than just about anyone.

Today, he explains how you can gain financial independence… even if you think it’s too late.

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Waa! It’s not fair!

We baby boomers were told that if we worked hard and saved, we could spend the last quarter of our lives living comfortably and free from financial worries. Our parents told us. Our employers told us. Even the government told us.

How often, during our years of toil, did we daydream about those future days? The leisurely breakfasts, the afternoons golfing, dinners with friends, weekends with our grandchildren…

(Note to younger people: Don’t stop reading. What I’m saying here applies to you too—in spades!)

But now that we are reaching retirement age, the promise is beginning to feel like a fraud.

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HOGS TO SLAUGHTER « The Burning Platform

HOGS TO SLAUGHTER

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

America is a third world country, it’s just not ready to accept that reality yet. Politically it is thoroughly corrupted, economically it is too deeply indebted to ever extricate itself, morally it is without direction, rudderless in dangerous seas and heading for the rocks.

The divides between the wealthy and the impoverished too wide to ever cross, the races and generations set against one another deliberately, provoked hourly by the very people who should be doing everything possible to unite them, armed to the teeth, seething with rage, neutered or enraged by pharmaceuticals, depending upon the age and gender, divided by sex, generations of fatherless children at every level raising up children who have no connection to anything that isn’t coming from a glowing screen- and all the while deliberately it seems, provoking hostility with every nation, every race, every people and persuasion in order to stir up a seething cauldron of slights and revenge for the coming reckoning.

Those once magnificent buildings will burn and the swarms that dwelt there will fan out, like flames across the face of the old nation looking to settle the score, imagined or real.

Last night I had a dream. One of the last things I did before I called it quits just after dark was to feed the hogs. I stood on the tailgate of the truck and emptied bags of watermelon rinds and soft mangoes, wilted heads of lettuce, bunches of carrots, apples, sweet yellow hothouse peppers imported from Holland, strawberries by the gallon, string beans, potatoes, cabbages and onions. The sows stood up on the fence rails and lifted their snouts to me to pet, their way of thanking me for the meal although they’d waited all day long for it.

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Cassandra's Legacy: Social Equality and the Destruction of the Planet

Social Equality and the Destruction of the Planet


In this post, Jacopo Simonetta asks a fundamental (and politically incorrect) question: are we sure that social equality would be good for the environment? The answer turns out to be not politically very correct. (U.B.)

by Jacopo Simonetta


Exaggerated inequality is surely a major problem in today's societies, and it keeps increasing. I, too, certainly believe that this scandal must end, but the topic of the article is another one: is it true that redistribution of wealth would have a good effect on the Earth health? Many very influential people believe this, but I am not so sure.

Evidently, affluent people consume much more than poor people do, but how much? As far as I know, there are no studies correlating the environmental impact and social classes but, as starting point, we could compare how CO2 emissions change with income. (data Word Bank and Wikipedia respectively).  


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The Archdruid Report: Retrotopia: Diminishing Returns

Retrotopia: Diminishing Returns

This is the nineteenth installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. Our narrator, forced to grapple with the cognitive dissonance between everything he believes about progress and the facts of life in the Lakeland Republic, tries to evade the issue for an evening—and ends up even deeper in perplexity...

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The next day was Saturday, and for a change, I didn’t have anything planned. The marathon sessions of negotiation with President Meeker’s staff, exhausting though they’d been, had taken up less of my time in Toledo than I’d expected; even if I sat on my rump in my room until it was time to catch the train home Wednesday, I’d still get back to Philadelphia with everything taken care of that I’d officially been asked to do. That was comforting—or it should have been.

As it was, I woke up in a foul mood, and things didn’t get any better as I went through my morning routine and then stared at the window, trying to decide what to do with the day. Partly, I was annoyed at the way the evening had gone, annoyed with myself for almost getting into a fight with Melanie Berger, and with her for almost getting into a fight with me. The worst of it, though, was the bizarre logic she’d used to brush aside my concerns about the Lakeland Republic’s survival. Her notion that progress had somehow turned into the enemy of prosperity and the source of most of the world’s problems—I could barely frame the idea in my mind without shaking my head and laughing, it was so obviously wrong.

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15 Facts About The Imploding U.S. Economy That The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want You To See | Zero Hedge

15 Facts About The Imploding U.S. Economy That The Mainstream Media Doesn’t Want You To See

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

You are about to see undeniable evidence that the U.S. economy has been slowing down for quite some time.  And it is vital that we focus on the facts, because all over the Internet you are going to find lots and lots of people that have opinions about what is going on with the economy.  And of course the mainstream media is always trying to spin things to make Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton look good, because those that work in the mainstream media are far more liberal than the American population as a whole.  It is true that I also have my own opinions, but as an attorney I learned that opinions are not any good unless you have facts to back them up.  So please allow me a few moments to share with you evidence that clearly demonstrates that we have already entered a major economic slowdown.  The following are 15 facts about the imploding U.S. economy that the mainstream media doesn’t want you to see…

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How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard Of Living? | Zero Hedge

How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard Of Living?

Submitted by Tom Chatham via Project Chesapeake,

The forces are mounting that will eventually overwhelm most Americans and send their standard of living to unknown depths.Americans that have only known the post WWII prosperity are ill equipped and educated to deal with depression level living. Easy credit and instant gratification have created a nation of whining, self absorbed, entitlement minded people with no moral or mental toughness.

Doug Casey believes we are headed for what he calls a super depression created by the ending of a debt super cycle. The bigger the debt cycle the bigger the depression that follows. That’s how reality works and most people are not prepared for reality.

When this depression, which has already started, gets momentum, it will overwhelm the plans of a society that is expecting to get things like social security, pensions and payouts from retirement plans they have paid into for many years. All of those things will disappear almost overnight and leave society gasping and stupefied over what to do. Their reactions will be to yell and scream and try to identify who to blame but the only person they should blame is the one in the mirror.

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Tyranny Of The PhDs | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Tyranny Of The PhDs

by David Stockman • June 14, 2016

Sad to say, you haven’t seen nothin’ yet. The world is drifting into financial entropy, and it is going to get steadily worse. That’s because the emerging stock market slump isn’t just another cyclical correction; it’s the opening phase of the end-game.

That is, the end game of the PhD Tyranny.

During the last two decades the major central banks of the world have been colonized lock, stock and barrel by Keynesian crackpots. These academic scribblers and power-hungry apparatchiks have now pushed interest rate repression, massive monetization (QE) and relentless rigging of the financial markets to the limits of sanity and beyond. Honest, market-driven price discovery is dead as a doornail.

No more proof is needed than the “matrix” below. The very thing that financial history proves, above all else, is that governments can’t be trusted to honor their debts.  And that cardinal fact is supposed to be embodied in the yield.

In fact, modern welfare state democracies have a veritable fiscal death wish.

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ClubOrlov: The Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction


The Law of Attraction is a staple of motivational speakers. The premise is that thoughts determine outcomes. If you can visualize a better future, and conceive of the steps you need to take to reach it, a potential future magically pops into existence. 

In reality, change requires more than positive thinking. There is a feedback loop between thinking and acting. If we think differently, we must also act differently, and only by acting differently can we hope to achieve something new. In turn, new achievements lead to new experiences, which may cause us to think even more differently, revise our plan, try acting even more differently, and so on.

One of the issues we face in addressing massive, overwhelmingly complex problems such as, just to rattle off a few, climate change, economic inequality and social and political dysfunction, is that it is hard for us even to conceive of a better way of doing things. Not knowing what to do is bad enough; not knowing what to think is even worse!


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The Archdruid Report: They Died of Progress

They Died of Progress

I'd intended this week’s post here on The Archdruid Report to continue the discussion of education that got started two weeks ago, but that’s going to have to wait a bit. As my readers have doubtless learned over the last ten years, whichever muse guides these essays is a lady of very irregular habits, and it happens tolerably often that what she has to say isn’t what I had in mind. This is one of those times.

In last month’s installment of my ongoing Retrotopia narrative, one of the characters summed up her position in a bit of intellectual heresy that left the viewpoint character flummoxed. Her argument was that progress has become the enemy of prosperity. That’s something you can’t even suggest in today’s society; the response of the viewpoint character— “With all due respect, that’s crazy”—is mild compared to the sort of reactions I’ve routinely fielded whenever I’ve suggested that progress, like everything else in the real world, is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

Nonetheless, the unspeakable has become the inescapable in today’s world. It’s become a running joke on the internet that the word “upgrade” inevitably means poorer service, fewer benefits, and more annoyances for those who have to deal with the new and allegedly improved product. The same logic can be applied equally well across the entire landscape of modern technology.  What’s new, innovative, revolutionary, game-changing, and so on through the usual litany of overheated adjectives, isn’t necessarily an improvement. It can be, and very often is, a disaster. Examples could be drawn from an astonishingly broad range of contemporary sources, but I have a particular set of examples in mind.

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PICTURE OF DECLINE « The Burning Platform

PICTURE OF DECLINE

A population of illiterate, non-thinking morons can’t possibly obtain good paying jobs. This country spends $12,000 per public school student per year on education and this is the outcome? The factual data presented below paints a picture of an empire in rapid decline. We are too far gone. No amount of money or presidential election is going to change this course. We chose this path in the 1960s and now we will reap the consequences.

Education

• In a study of literacy among 20 ‘high income’ countries; US ranked 12^th

• Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 44 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.

• 50% of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level

• 45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level

• 44% of the American adults do not read a book in a year

• 6 out of 10 households do not buy a single book in a year

Economy

• According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle-class households declined by 4 percent from 2000 to 2014.

• The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle-class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.

• There are still 900,000 fewer middle-class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but the population has grown significantly larger since that time.

• According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

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

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.

• In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.

• The median net worth of families in the United States was $137, 955 in 2007. Today, it is just $82,756.

The Only Thing That Grows Is Debt - The Automatic Earth

The Only Thing That Grows Is Debt

Two months ago, there was a referendum in Holland about an association agreement between the EU and Ukraine. A relatively new Dutch law states that with an X amount of signatures a referendum can be ‘forced’ by anyone. Before, during and -especially- after the vote, its importance was -and is actively being- pooh-poohed by both the Dutch government and the EU. That in itself paints the issue better than anything else. Both the call and the subsequent support for the referendum stem from resistance against exactly that attitude.

The Dutch voted No to the EU/Ukraine agreement. It was with a turnout not much above the validity threshold, but a large majority of those who did vote agreed they want no part of the deal. This puts Dutch PM Rutte in an awkward position, he can’t be seen ignoring the population. Well, at least not openly. The EU can’t validate the agreement, and with Holland still holding the chair of the Union until July 1, a meeting on the topic has been pushed forward until the last weekend of June. With Rutte still in charge, but only just, and with the June 23 UK Brexit vote decided.

Brussels is frantically looking for a way to push through the agreement despite the Dutch vote, and likely some sort of bland compromise will be presented, which Rutte’s spin doctors will put into words that he can -with a straight face- claim honor the vote while at the same time executing what that same vote specifically spoke out against.

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Why 'Robbing Peter' To 'Pay Paul Something-For-Nothing' Doesn't Work | Zero Hedge

Why 'Robbing Peter' To 'Pay Paul Something-For-Nothing' Doesn't Work

Authored by Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man's Pater Tenebrarum),

From Subject to Citizen

On June 5th, the Swiss cast their votes and registered their opinions: “No,” they said. We left off yesterday wondering why something for nothing never works. Not as monetary policy. Not as welfare or foreign aid. Not in commerce. Not never, no how. But something for nothing is what people most want.

The future Switzerland just managed to dodge… for now

The Swiss voted against awarding all citizens a “universal basic income” of about $30,000 a year, regardless of whether they have work or not. But the idea is unlikely to go away.

Two-thirds of British voters say they are in favor of the idea. And Canada’s Ontario province is set to try something similar. If you’ve been following these Diary entries, you know how and why we have a welfare state.

It’s not because our leaders are more thoughtful and caring than those in the past. Instead, the French and American Revolutions showed the relative greater value of “citizens” over “subjects.”

When people thought they were in charge of a government, rather than merely subject to it, they no longer found it absurd to ask not what the government could do for them, but what they could do for it! The elite, who control the government, had a quick response: You can pay higher taxes!

And you can get yourself blown up in one of our self-serving foreign wars. Instead of being dragooned to serve in the king’s army, in other words, citizens enlisted, willingly.

And because their money was now used for only projects that benefited them – as selected by their elected representatives – they’d pay more for them. At least, that was the theory.

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The Seneca Cliff: The Seneca Cliff goes mainstream

The Seneca Cliff goes mainstream

The concept of the "Seneca Cliff" seems to have gone mainstream. Below, it is mentioned in a recent post by Dennis Coyne on "peakoilbarrell" as an obvious concept. Just as when you say "Gaussian Curve", you don't have to specify what shape the curve has, so it is for the "Seneca Curve". It looks like I started some kind of avalanche with my 2011 post when I introduced the term. See also my blog wholly dedicated to the subject.

Here, the projections by AEO (annual energy outlook) seem to me very optimistic; can production really keep growing until 2035-2040? If that were to happen, however, the subsequent collapse would be truly abrupt.


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Demagoguery, Duopoly, & The Death Of America's Body Politic | Zero Hedge

Demagoguery, Duopoly, & The Death Of America's Body Politic

Authored by Ben Tanosborn,

It seems such an improbability, impossibility at times, that such a diverse population in ethnicities, races, religions and ideologies be politically housed in two tents.  But this United States of America for all its diversity, and at times forced accommodation, did manage early on in its history to develop an economic critical center of gravity – a large, unprecedented economic marketplace – that kept the nation un-fragmented, magically glued principally because of a single reason: an unrivaled economic prosperity that the United States maintained for its people vis-à-vis other economies in the world. 

However, that unique economic and political America that Alexis de Tocqueville would describe almost two centuries ago [Democracy in America] may have had its incredible seven-generation run, and be now ready for a meltdown; for the patent to that magic glue held by America has now expired, free for all to emulate via globalization.  And, ‘though the international playing field has yet to become competitively flat, we might just be a short generation away from that occurring; and the miracle that once was America could soon become but a memory of recent past.

Poof… goes the American mythic star!  The diamond-studded American exceptionalism, together with the touted and revered American dream – dual virtuosity that we were made to believe came from above… from a god who prejudicially played favoritism on our behalf – are rapidly coming to an end, as we begin to recognize and acknowledge that our lucky star was mainly the result of an unprecedentedly large marketplace that industrious Americans created in their westward territorial expansion… something which de Tocqueville clearly saw and aptly described in the 1820’s.

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : The Keynesians Stole The Jobs

The Keynesians Stole The Jobs

Late last week the markets were shocked by a surprisingly bad May jobs report – the worst monthly report in nearly six years. The experts expected the US economy to add 160,000 jobs in May, but it turns out only 38,000 jobs were added. And to make matters worse, 13,000 of those 38,000 were government jobs! Adding more government employees is a drain on the economy, not a measure of economic growth. Incredibly, there are more than 102 million people who are either unemployed or are no longer looking for work.

Gold reacted to the report quickly and decisively, gaining 2.5 percent to $1,243 per ounce on Friday. Gold mining stocks also saw significant gains on the day.

As recently as late May, there was confident talk about a rate increase when the Federal Reserve meets in June. Transcripts of the Federal Reserve’s April meeting showed that the central bank was seriously considering a June rate hike. With last week’s jobs report and other bad news, that is increasingly unlikely. In fact, citing the weak May employment numbers, Goldman-Sachs is now predicting that there is a zero percent chance of a rate hike in June. Of course they also see this as a temporary blip in an otherwise robust economy, predicting a 40 percent chance of a rate hike in July.

I don’t mean to rain on Goldman’s parade, but there are no miracles between now and July that will propel the economy to where according to their terms a rate hike would be appropriate.


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Introducing Europe's Frightening New Tax Directive | Zero Hedge

Introducing Europe's Frightening New Tax Directive

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

In a bizarre story disclosed over the weekend, we learned that Belgium’s Princess Astrid was robbed by two assailants on a motorbike.

The thieves apparently approached her while she was sitting in traffic, smashed in her window, snatched the Royal Handbag, and sped off with over 2,000 euros in cash.

I have no doubt that was a harrowing experience for the princess, as it would be for anyone.

But as I researched a bit more, I learned that Belgium’s royal family is lavishly paid, particularly for a small country of just 11 million people.

King Philippe of Belgium receives more than 10 million euros per year. His father, the ‘retired’ king receives a pension of nearly 1 million euros annually.

Princess Astrid, the King’s sister, receives about 300,000 euros per year, in addition to usage rights of the royal properties.

In order to pay for this largesse, Belgium suffers some of the highest tax rates in the world, as high as 50% if you earn even a modest income.

In addition there’s 13% employee contributions to Social Security (plus employer contributions of 35%), and a Value-Added Tax of 21%.

Businesses in Belgium are subject to a 30% corporate tax rate, a 3% ‘crisis surcharge’, and my personal favorite, a 5% ‘fairness tax’.

In total the Belgian government’s tax revenue eats up about 45% of GDP, which means that the government takes almost half of all economic output.

This is an astounding figure… though it’s less than other governments in Europe like France or Denmark.

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8 Lessons That We Can Learn From The Economic Meltdown In Venezuela | Zero Hedge

8 Lessons That We Can Learn From The Economic Meltdown In Venezuela

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

We are watching an entire nation collapse right in front of our eyes.  As you read this article, there are severe shortages of just about anything you can imagine in Venezuela.  That includes food, toilet paper, medicine, electricity and even Coca-Cola.  All over the country, people are standing in extremely long lines for hours on end just hoping that they will be able to purchase some provisions for their hungry families.  At times when there hasn’t been anything for the people that have waited in those long lines, full-blown riots have broken out.

All of this is happening even though Venezuela has not been hit by a war, a major natural disaster, a terror attack, an EMP burstor any other type of significant “black swan” event.  When debt spirals out of control, currency manipulation goes too far and government interference reaches ridiculous extremes, this is what can happen to an economy.  The following are 8 lessons that we can learn from the epic economic meltdown in Venezuela...

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How To Spot Bullshit - Princeton Professor Explains Why Ignorance Of The Truth Matters | Zero Hedge

How To Spot Bullshit - Princeton Professor Explains Why Ignorance Of The Truth Matters

Princeton Professor Harry Frankfurt provides a succinct primer on why truth needs to prevail over bullshit - something that could be helpful for many.

"People should care about the truth, because the truth is the truth about how things are and it's important us to recognize how things are, not to pretend that it's something else. If you have the truth you know what reality is like, if you don't you're ignorant of reality"

"We are living in an age in which there's another alternative to the truth, and that's bullshit"

"The reason why there's so much bullshit I think is that people just talk. If they don't talk they don't get paid. The advertiser wants to gain sales, the politician wants to get gain votes. Now, that's ok, but they have to talk about things that they don't really know much about. So since they don't have anything really valid to say, they just say whatever they think will interest the audience, make it appear that they know what they're talking about - and what comes out is bullshit."

"The danger is that there will be a loss of concern for the truth, and that I believe is an insidious assault on the fundamental principles of society."