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Author Thomas Philippon, a French professor at New York University, recently set out on a journey to try and figure out just how the intricacies of business works in America.

Upon the conclusion of his research, he determined that the U.S. economy simply isn’t as free – or as competitive – as many think, according to FT. What he found was that over the last 20 years, competition and competition policy have “atrophied” with ugly consequences. 

“America is no longer the home of the free-market economy,” he concludes. The country isn’t as competitive as Europe, its regulators are not more proactive and its new companies aren’t much different from their predecessors. 

His book, The Great Reversal, argues for the importance of competition and summarizes the results of his findings:

“First, US markets have become less competitive: concentration is high in many industries, leaders are entrenched, and their profit rates are excessive. Second, this lack of competition has hurt US consumers and workers: it has led to higher prices, lower investment and lower productivity growth. Third, and contrary to common wisdom, the main explanation is political, not technological: I have traced the decrease in competition to increasing barriers to entry and weak antitrust enforcement, sustained by heavy lobbying and campaign contributions.”

His argument is backed up by evidence. Broadband access in the U.S. costs about double what it costs in comparable countries. Profits per passenger on airlines are also far higher in the U.S. than they are overseas.

His analysis shows that “market shares have become more concentrated and more persistent, and profits have increased.”

And, more concentration then translates to higher profits. This has lead to post-tax profit share in the U.S. gross domestic product nearly doubling since the 1990s. 

The increase in market concentration in places like manufacturing can be attributed to competition from China, which drove weaker competitors out of the market. Companies like Walmart, in the 1990s, drove the rate of investment and productivity growth higher in the 1990s while the opposite happened in the 2000’s: rising market concentration drove the profits of entrenched companies up and both the investment rate and productivity lower. 

This ugly form of increased concentration means that entry of new businesses has diminished and that the U.S. economy has seen a significant reduction in competition and a corresponding rise in monopoly and oligopoly.

The book often turns to comparisons with the EU. For instance, real GDP per head rose 21% in the U.S. between 1999 and 2017. In the EU, this number stood at 25%. Even in the Eurozone, this number was 19% despite the damage done by its “ineptly handled financial crisis”.

Even inequality levels and trends and income distribution are less adverse in the EU. The comparisons seem justified, according to FT: 

In short, comparisons between the EU and the US are justifiable. These show that neither profit margins nor market concentration have exploded upwards in the EU as they have done in the US. The share of wages and salaries in the aggregate incomes — so-called “value-added” — of business has fallen by close to 6 percentage points in the US since 2000, but not at all in the eurozone. This destroys the hypothesis that technology is the main driver of the downward shift in the share of labour incomes. After all, technology (and international trade, as well) affected both sides of the Atlantic roughly equally.

Competition in product markets has become far more effective in the EU over the course of the last 20 or 30 years. It is reflective of purposeful deregulation and a more aggressive and independent competition policy than in the U.S.

But the EU has established more independent regulators than the U.S. would: what is being called a “healthy result” of a mutual distrust within the EU. 

Individual states fear the idea of being vulnerable to the practices of fellow members when it comes to regulation, which is beneficial to countries with weak national regulators. The independence of EU regulators also means that lobbying is far less of a problem overseas. 

Evidence shows that “the higher an EU member country’s product market regulation in 1998, the bigger the sub­sequent decline in such regulation”. And the effect is more robust for those in the EU than non-EU members.

Lobbying has much more of an effect in the U.S. Evidence supports that lobbying works, which is exactly why large corporations in the U.S. continue to rely on it. This all boils down to a larger problem of the role of money in U.S. politics. FT writes that “members of Congress spend about 30 hours a week raising money.”

The Supreme Court even ruled in 2010 that “companies are persons” and “money is speech”. Former representative Mick Mulvaney summed it up in 2018: “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”

Corporate lobbying is two to three times bigger in the U.S. than in the EU. Campaign contributions are about 50 times larger. 

The book also looks at finance, healthcare and technology. In finance, the book finds that the cost of taking in savings and transferring it to end users has stayed at about 2% for a century, regardless of technological developments. The book calls call the industry a “rent-extraction machine”.

In healthcare, the book looks at why the U.S. spends far more on healthcare, but has far worse health outcomes than any other high-income country. The book says it is due to “rent-extracting monopolies” in the industry – all the way from doctors, to hospitals, to insurance companies to pharmaceutical businesses. 

In the world of tech, the book touches on the size of major players like Google, Amazon and Apple. The book says that while the weight of these mega-huge companies is no bigger than that of giants in the past, their links to the economy as a whole are far smaller than they ever were.

Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

The Federal Reserve is the federal entity charged with determining the quantity of money in the American economy. To boost the economy, it expands the money supply. If the economy gets too “overheated,” it slows the rate of increase.

In other words, the Fed is the government’s monetary central planner. It plans the monetary affairs of hundreds of millions of people through monetary manipulation.

Central planning is a core principle of socialism. Central planning rejects the concept of economic liberty and free markets, which rely on the absence of government interference. Instead, it relies on a board of government officials who make economic decisions for hundreds of thousands or millions of people in a top-down, command-and-control manner.

As anyone from Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea can attest, socialist central planning always produces crises. That’s because the central planners can never attain the required knowledge to  plan a complex market, especially one involving hundreds of millions of participants engaged in countless economic transactions. This is especially true given that people’s subjective valuations are constantly changing. There is no way that the planners can keep up with those changes in valuations.

That’s what produces the crises. Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning libertarian economist, called it the “fatal conceit” of the planner, the mindset that convinces the planner that he has the requisite knowledge to plan a complex, ever-changing market.

For more than 100 years, the official money of the United States was gold coins and silver coins, as established by the Constitution. During most of that entire time, there was no Federal Reserve or central bank.

That gold-coin, silver-coin standard provided the soundest money in history. Along with a system based on no income taxation, no immigration controls, no welfare state, no warfare state, and very few economic regulations, America’s monetary system was a major factor in the tremendous increase in rise of the standard of living of the American people in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the early 1900s, Americans began giving serious consideration to socialist ideas. The enactment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 was part of that trend. So was the adoption of the federal income tax that same year.

in the 1920s, the Fed began experimenting with expanding the supply of U.S. debt instruments, which promised to pay gold coins and silver coins. When holders of such debt instruments began redeeming their debt instruments by demanding gold and silver, the Fed panicked because they didn’t have the money to honor all the debt instruments they had issued. They began contracting the money supply and ended up over-contracting. Their monetary central planning led to the 1929 stock market crash and then the Great Depression.

Americans were told that the crisis was caused by the failure of America’s free-enterprise system. It was a lie. The crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve, which was a socialist institution. But it was a lie that Americans believed because in their minds, the Federal Reserve had become a part of America’s free-enterprise system.

The Franklin Roosevelt administration used the crisis to destroy the monetary system on which America had been established — the gold-coin, silver-coin standard. Roosevelt replaced that system with a pure paper-money system, one in which federal debt instruments would no longer be redeemable. The money became promises to pay nothing.

Over time, the Fed began expanding the paper money to fund the ever-increasing expenditures for welfare and warfare. All that “bad money” would ultimately drive out of circulation the “good money” that the Constitution had established.

As the system became wash with paper money, the booms and busts that monetary manipulation caused would become a standard part of American life. The economic bubbles and deep recessions were said to be a part of America’s “free-enterprise system.”

Over the decades the Fed became a principal way for federal officials to plunder and loot people through monetary debasement and devaluation. Public officials would spend and borrow to finance their ever-burgeoning welfare-warfare programs, knowing that the Fed would cover their debts by essentially printing the money to pay for them. The losers would be the American people, whose money would be constantly devalued over the decades.

The best part of the Fed system, from the standpoint of public officials, was that many people would not realize that the Fed was behind the monetary debasement that was looting them. When prices would rise across society, people would blame it on rapacious businessmen, not realizing that the price rises were actually just the manifestation of Federal Reserve destruction of the value of money.

A necessary prerequisite to establishing a free and prosperous society is a free-market monetary system, one in which there is a total separation of money and the state. That necessarily means bringing the Fed and its system of socialist central planning to an end.

China’s economy is quickly decelerating, and data last month shows GDP could slip under 6% in 2020.

A structural decline, blended with a global synchronized slowdown, and accelerated by trade tensions with the US, have been blamed for China’s deteriorating industrial sector.

New evidence from research firm Antaike, via Reuters, shows China’s aluminum consumption is likely to decline for the first time in 30 years as domestic demand plunges and exports slump.

Antaike’s senior analyst Shen Lingyan stated at a conference in China’s Qingdao city on Wednesday that consumption of aluminum in China would be around 36.55 million tons this year, down 1.2% YoY.

“The first reason is domestic consumption, which will decline by 0.9%. Exports will fall 3%,” Shen said at the China Aluminium Week conference.

October export data of China’s unwrought aluminum fell to 431,000 tons, the lowest levels since February.

The output of aluminum in China this year has recorded the sharpest decline on record, down 1.6% to 36 million tons, Shen told the conference.

Shen forecasts a 3% increase in aluminum output in 2020 to 37.2 million tons — though there are currently no signs the global economy is bottoming.

Factory activity in China contracted for a sixth straight month in October. It’s likely that in the coming quarters, GDP will dive under 6% as cooling in the manufacturing sector continues.

China Association of Automobile Manufacturer has said the decline of aluminum demand could be linked to the weak automobile sector.

When the world’s top aluminum producer records the first consumption decline in nearly three decades — this should mean the global economy continues to worsen.

As for the global rebound in the economy, one where equity markets around the world have already priced in, it seems that China is no longer able to reflate its all too critical credit impulse, which means the 2016-style rebound everyone was expecting might not exactly happen in early 2020.

 

Authored by Adrian Zmudzinski via CoinTelegraph.com,

Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro announced that the Christmas bonus of the country’s retirees and pensioners will be paid to them in the national cryptocurrency Petro.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

The Twitter profile of local news outlet Venepress reported on Maduro’s remarks on Nov. 17. This particular instance is not the first time that Venezuela pushes Petro into the wallets of pensioners so far.

As Cointelegraph reported in December last year, Venezuela back then has automatically converted pensioners’ bonuses for the year into Petro.

Petro, the future for Venezuelan economy?

The crypto asset in question has been first launched for a pre-sale in February last year and raised concerns among foreign observers from the start. In late August last year, Petro was already scathingly denounced as an opaque “stunt” backed by a centralized and debt-saddled entity.

Still, the national cryptocurrency and cryptocurrencies as a whole are being increasingly pushed by the local government.

As Cointelegraph Spain reported on Nov. 13, the Deputy of the National Constituent Assembly of Venezuela, Francisco Torrealba, said that he believes all currencies will be replaced by cryptocurrencies.

Speaking about Venezuela, Torrealba claimed that the country is facing a great change and Maduro is making a “great contribution” to the country by creating the Petro. He concluded his interview by saying that “everything will be from this currency [the Petro].”

In a widely anticipated move, just after 6pm ET on Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill, S.1838,  showing support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong by requiring an annual review of whether the city is sufficiently autonomous from Beijing to justify its special trading status. In doing so, the Senate has delivered a warning to China against a violent suppression of the demonstrations, a stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s near-silence on the issue, the result of a behind the scenes agreement whereby China would allow the S&P to rise indefinitely as long as Trump kept his mouth shut.

As we reported last week, the vote marks the most aggressively diplomatic challenge to the government in Beijing just as the US and China seek to close the “Phase 1” of their agreement to end their trade war. The Senate measure would require annual reviews of Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law to assess the extent to which China has chipped away the city’s autonomy; in light of recent events, Hong Kong would not pass. It’s unclear what would happen next.

As Bloomberg notes, the House unanimously passed a similar bill last month, but slight differences mean both chambers still have to pass the same version before sending it to the president.

”The United States has treated commerce and trade with Hong Kong differently than it has commercial and trade activity with the mainland of China,” said Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the bill’s lead sponsor. “But what’s happened over the last few years is the steady effort on the part of Chinese authorities to erode that autonomy and those freedoms”, he added on the Senate floor.

The Senate bill passed by unanimous consent, which means there was no roll call vote because no senators objected to it. Rubio said on Twitter before the vote Tuesday that the bill, S. 1838, will “head over to the U.S. House & then hopefully swiftly to the President.”

That is one option: The House could simply take up the Senate bill. The other option would be to reconcile the differences between the two versions and have both chambers vote on the compromise bill. New Jersey Representative Chris Smith, the lead Republican sponsor of the House bill, said he expects the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees to go for the latter option to work out the slight differences. He said the resulting compromise could be included in a defense bill slated for a vote later this year.

* * *

The legislation comes at a difficult time for Trump as his administration is trying to complete the first phase of a long-awaited trade deal with China. Earlier on Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence said that it would be difficult for the U.S. to sign a trade agreement with China if the demonstrations in Hong Kong are met with violence.

“The president’s made it clear it’ll be very hard for us to do a deal with China if there’s any violence or if that matter is not treated properly and humanely,” Pence said in an interview with Indianapolis-based radio host Tony Katz.

Another prominent Republican, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urged Trump to personally voice support for the protesters on Monday, which Trump has refused to do.

“We have to get it passed and we have to get it passed quickly,” Smith said. The legislation tells protesters that “Congress has their back, that we are fully supportive of democracy and rule of law in Hong Kong.”

“It tells Xi Jinping that there’s a price,” Smith said of China’s president. “There’s one provision after another that says, ‘we’re not kidding.’” The bill would also sanction Chinese officials deemed responsible for undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy.

The bit question now is how will China react: the Chinese Foreign Ministry has repeatedly warned that there would be “strong countermeasures” for passing such legislation. That could complicate the delicate negotiations between the world’s two largest economies to get the trade deal over the finish line.

“What was already complicated just got more complicated, and the bill’s passage adds to the growing list of political reasons why Xi and Trump are unlikely to find a compromise,” said Jude Blanchette, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “While Xi has more control over the domestic political environment in China, he’s not immune from the bad optics of negotiating with a government that he claims is tampering with his own political system.”

* * *

It remains unclear whether Trump will veto the bill, opening himself up to accusations he has been in bed with Beijing all along. So far Trump has not indicated whether he would sign the legislation if it gets to his desk.

Another complication: the timeline for completing the trade agreement could collide with this legislation landing on Trump’s desk. A congressional aide told Bloomberg the Senate measure was drafted with help from Treasury and State Department officials, but a senior administration official on Monday cautioned that Trump’s seal of approval is the only one that matters.

Because the Hong Kong bill passed both the House and the Senate without a single lawmaker objecting, there would probably be enough support to override a presidential veto.

“Today’s vote sends a clear message that the United States will continue to stand with the people of Hong Kong as they battle Beijing’s imperialism,” said Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. “The Chinese Communist Party’s quest for power across the region is a direct threat to America’s security and prosperity.”

S&P futures dipped modestly on the news of the bill’s unanimous passage…

… although that isn’t saying much for a market that is so hypnotized by the Fed’s “NOT QE” that it barely if ever responds to any actual news.

When it comes to the generational conflict at the heart of America’s inequality split, there is no contest: the elderly – those between the ages of 65 and 75 who own the bulk of financial assets – have over 13 times as much wealth as America’s Millennials (see chart below), young people between 25 and 35, who may not be rich, but have come up with a biting, witty response to their much richer elders: “Ok, Boomer.”

Unfortunately for America’s youth, who may have been hoping to get rich quick when they inherit the wealth of their aging parents, we have some very bad news.

While it is true that an unprecedented $36 trillion – roughly a third of total US household wealth – will flow from one US generation to another over the next 30 years with the pace of bequests already surging as Americans inherited $427 billion in 2016, up 119% from 1989, it’s not the Millennials who stand to benefit.

Instead, the beneficiaries of this inheritance tsunami are quite old themselves; according to the the study, from 1989 to 2016 U.S. households inherited more than $8.5 trillion. Over that time, the average age of recipients rose by a decade to 51. Fast forward a few more years, and now, more than a quarter of bequests now go to adults 61 or older.

In other words, America’s again rich are about to get even richer as their parents pass away.

“Wealth equal to nearly two times the size of the U.S. GDP is expected to be gifted to charities and heirs over the next few decades,” said United Income founder Matt Fellowes. “It’s a historically unprecedented amount that is almost incomprehensibly large.” However, “instead of diapers and school, inheritances are increasingly going toward medical bills and retirement savings,” Fellowes said.

The irony is that in addition to virtually every other aspect of US life, one can now add inheritances to the dynamic that’s widening the wealth gap between generations.

As we noted last week, Americans younger than 50 held just 16% of all investable assets in 2016, down from 31% in 1989, the Fed’s latest triennial Survey of Consumer Finances found, leaving the rest to households 50 and older. It also means that the bulk of America’s “Top 1%” also happens to be 50 or older.

However, age inequality is most dramatic when comparing the oldest and youngest adults. In 1989, the median household age 65 to 75 held almost eight times more wealth than families headed by 25- to 35-year-olds. By 2016, according to an analysis by the St. Louis Fed, the median baby boomer had close to 13 times more wealth than the typical millennial.

Even more ironic: while boomers as a group inherited trillions from their parents, most members of the postwar generation got nothing. That’s about to change, however, as about 20% of households have received inheritances, United Income’s analysis shows, a share that while flat over the past 30 years, is set to soar.

These generational gifts are coming in handy, with the median recipient getting about $55,000, which is more than double their typical retirement savings. “Most inheritances are going to older adults who have little in the way of retirement savings,” said Fellowes, a former Brookings Institution scholar. “People receiving inheritances are pretty middle class.”

Except, when they are not, of course.

Meanwhile, the size of the average inheritance received in 2016 was about $295,000, sharply higher from $169,000 in 1989.

Why is this notable? Because contrary to popular opinion, as elderly Americans receive an “unexpected” gift, they don’t rush to spend it, but instead since more Americans live longer without the safety net of a traditional pension, they’re spending frugally to make sure their wealth lasts. The result is more Americans dying before they can spend all of their savings. Amusingly, financial advisers told Bloomberg they often need to encourage affluent clients to enjoy their wealth rather than hoarding it.

Some more details: only about 9% of estates consist entirely of a house or other property; the average estate is 46% stocks, bonds, cash and other liquid investments, giving an immediate boost to recipients’ own retirement planning at a key time.

That said, the data is likely skewed even more in favor of the older rich: according to Bloomberg, United Income’s estimates don’t include gifts made during donors’ lifetimes – a typical move in estate planning for the ultra-high net worth cohort, often using trusts.

Even so, it still found a widening gulf between the super rich and everyone else: the median inheritance has risen only about $15,000 in three decades, while they’ve more than doubled for the 0.3% of Americans receiving at least $1 million. In 1989, their inheritances averaged an inflation-adjusted $2.7 million. By 2016, they were each getting an average of $6.6 million.

To summarize: America’s Millennials may be ridiculing the country’s boomers with the rather nonsensical “Ok, Boomer’ tagline that has gone viral, but not only are the Boomers getting the final laugh, they are getting richer as America’s youth gets progressively poorer.

Authored by Adam McCann via WalletHub.com,

Las Vegas isn’t the only “Sin City” in America.

In other cities, bad things happen and stay there, too. From beer-loving Milwaukee to hedonistic New Orleans, the U.S. is filled with people behaving illicitly. No place is innocent. We all have demons…

But at some point, we all have to pay for our vices. Gambling addiction, for instance, leads to over $100 billion in losses for U.S. consumers every year. In 2018, identity theft and fraud took a toll of $14.7 billion. And every year, smoking burns an over $300 billion hole in Uncle Sam’s wallet.

Luckily for the saints among us, all American sins are not created, or distributed, equally. In order to identify the darkest corners of America, WalletHub compared more than 180 U.S. cities across 39 key indicators of evil deeds. Our data set ranges from violent crimes per capita to excessive drinking to adult entertainment establishments per capita.

So much for drawing down in the Middle East. President Trump notified Congress on Tuesday that more American troops are en route to Saudi Arabia, which will bring their overall numbers to about 3,000 in the kingdom. 

“These personnel will remain deployed as long as their presence is required to fulfill the missions described above,” the president said in a letter.

The official White House notification of Congressional members described the American military presence there as essential in countering Iran’s influence in the region.

Forces were deployed “to assure our partners, deter further Iranian provocative behavior, and bolster regional defensive capabilities,” the letter addressed to the House of Representatives stated.

Last month the Pentagon announced the extra troop deployments as well as military hardware, including Patriot missiles to the kingdom, after the prior September drone attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities.

Interestingly, that prior announcement took place just as Trump controversially pushed to withdraw US forces from Syria, something which ended in merely moving troops from the Turkish border and into Syria’s oil fields east of the Euphrates. 

“Iran has continued to threaten the security of the region, including by attacking oil and natural gas facilities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on Sept. 14, 2019,” Trump said in the letter.

Today U.S. Navy’s USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) – a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier – escorted by air defense and guided missile destroyers- enters the Strait of Hormuz. Abe Lincoln can field up to 90 aircraft pic.twitter.com/ugYqVlRJeV

— Nader Uskowi (@nuskowi) November 19, 2019

The president said missiles and radar equipment will “improve defenses against air and missile threats” and includes expeditionary wing to assist Saudi aircraft (which, it should be noted, were also purchased from the US).

All remaining forces will be in place “in the coming weeks” he told Congress, which will cap out at “approximately 3,000” according to the letter.

Crucially, this also came as the US aircraft carrier strike group Abraham Lincoln entered the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, where US forces will continue to deter any acts of Iranian ‘aggression’ against international shipping. 

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

The American people have wasted the last three years.  If you don’t know what I am talking about, stick with me, because you will definitely get my point by the end of this article.  Three years ago, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in one of the greatest election upsets in American history.  Many conservatives have used the word “reprieve” to describe what happened, but the truth is that it was actually an opportunity.  It was an opportunity for this nation to move in a fundamentally different direction culturally, but it would be up to the American people to decide if that would actually happen or not.  Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.  Instead, just about every form of evil that you can possibly imagine is running rampant in our society, and things are getting worse with each passing day.  No matter who wins the next presidential election, and no matter who controls Congress, there is no future for our country if we stay on the path that we are currently on.  Our culture is steadily swirling down the toilet, and most Americans don’t seem to care.

On Monday, we witnessed a watershed cultural moment that perfectly illustrates what I am talking about.

For many years, Chick-Fil-A was one of the few major corporations in America that was openly resisting the rising forces of political correctness.  They literally became a heroic counter-cultural symbol for many of us, because they were willing to take a bold stand for the truth even as they endured endless attacks from rabid politically correct militants.

But now Chick-Fil-A has unconditionally surrendered to the politically correct crowd.  On Monday, the company announced that they would no longer be donating money to The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.  And CNBC is reporting that this decision was made because both of those organizations “have a history of opposing same-sex marriage”…

Chick-Fil-A said on Monday that it has stopped funding two Christian charities after coming under fire in recent weeks from LGBTQ activists.

The fast-food chain’s foundation has donated millions of dollars to The Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Both organizations have a history of opposing same-sex marriage.

Seriously?

Has our society gone so far down the toilet that it is now considered to be “evil” to give money to The Salvation Army?

Are you kidding me?

Look, the truth is that the Salvation Army is not even remotely a radical organization, and yet the politically correct crowd all over America is calling on everyone to boycott it.

Is this really where our society is heading?

Needless to say, a lot of conservatives were absolutely outraged by Chick-Fil-A’s decision.  For example, this is what Allie Beth Stuckey had to say about it on Twitter…

Really @ChickfilA? This is the direction you want to go? You’ve garnered the unconditional support of millions not in spite of but BECAUSE OF your stances, which is the sole reason you’re successful. Idiocy. Bye!

I totally agree with her.

I will no longer be eating at Chick-Fil-A either, and I hope that millions of other outraged Americans will make the same decision.

Sadly, virtually every single day there are more examples in the news of the extreme moral decay that is eating away at the fabric of our society like a very aggressive form of cancer.

And we can see examples of this all around us.

For instance, a business owner in Denver was recently fined for refusing to pick up the poop and discarded needles that drug addicts were continually leaving in front of his store…

One businessman in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood is being fined by the city for his refusal to pick up human waste. He believes the problem goes deeper than just what’s happening on the sidewalk outside his business.

Jawaid Bazyar has seen it all out side of his business near Curtis St. and 24th in Denver’s Five Points Neighborhood.

“There’s food, trash, drug deals. In the alley, we get the defecation, drug needles,” he told CBS’s Dominic Garcia.

In the past, many Americans tended to look down upon “third world countries”, but the truth is that we are literally becoming a third world country.

In Oakland, the number of homeless people has risen by 47 percent over the past two years, and this is causing all sorts of social problems.  The following comes from Fox News…

Freddie lives in a hole in Oakland. The middle-aged, longtime heroin addict has no running water, electricity or a bathroom. He does have six pigeons and a feral cat that keep guard over his belongings and hiss at strangers who get too close. He sleeps on a bed of trash and his open-air home is a hodgepodge of reminders that Freddie is not OK. He spends most days cleaning up the sidewalk opposite his home. On days when the drugs really kick in, he can be seen sweeping dirt from one side of a dirt lot to the other.

There are a lot of Freddies in Oakland — people who are down on their luck or pushed out of their homes and struggling with mental illness who find it easier to turn to drugs than face reality.

And this is actually happening in one of the most prosperous areas of the entire country.

In fact, no city in America has prospered more during the Internet era than San Francisco, and it has literally become a cesspool of human degradation.  If you can believe it, during the first 10 months of this year there have been 25,084 official complaints about feces in the streets…

The City of San Francisco’s Department of Public Works responded to tens of thousands of “human or animal waste” reports in the first 10 months of 2019, according to the city data.

The department responded to 25,084 such cases from January through October of this year, according to the city’s 311 data portal.

I find it highly ironic that the city at the epicenter of America’s tech boom is literally being used as a toilet.

Sadly, these examples from Denver, Oakland and San Francisco are not even worth comparing to the absolutely disgusting cesspools of filth and corruption that the halls of power in Washington and New York have become.

Our nation is speeding toward a date with destiny, and the road that we are on only leads to one destination.

Last month I wrote an article entitled “The Book Is About To Close On The Late Great United States Of America”, and in that article I tried to get people to understand how late the hour has become.

We are running out of time, and yet our society continues to refuse to change course.

In the end, we will reap what we have sown, and nobody will be able to argue that we do not deserve our fate.