This is the worst year in the US stock market since 1969. The S&P 500 is down 24% year-to-date, and the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index has surrendered about 16%.
The job market is actually much worse than the Government has let on, because they have been using larger than normal “seasonal adjustments” to hide the fact that the job market is worse than it actually is. Through the first nine months of the year, seasonal adjustment has boosted private payrolls by 851,000. That’s a half-million extra jobs compared to the average seasonal adjustment from 2013 to 2021. The gap is even higher over the past seven months, with this year’s seasonal adjustment providing an average boost of 539,000 more jobs than the average seasonal adjustment over the prior nine years. This is causing the numbers to appear far better than they are. For example, this year private-sector employment fell by 2.4 million jobs, but the Labor Department reported a gain of 492,000 private jobs after “seasonal adjustment.” A swing of nearly 3 million jobs.
The average price of gasoline in the US was $2.33 per gallon in January 2021. It hit a peak of $4.93 in June, but then Biden began artificially manipulating the price by releasing oil from the SPR. The price now stands at $3.70 per gallon, and more than half of our petroleum reserves are gone.
Inflation is running wild. That’s causing the IRS to have to increase the standard deduction and adjust ta brackets by far more than the previous few years. Social Security is increasing its payments by large amounts. The Biden administration is playing this as a good thing, but that has caused the Fed to massively increase interest rates.
In the past three weeks, our national debt has increased by a quarter of a trillion dollars.
Crime is up. For 2021, the number of murders reported in the U.S. rose by 4.3% since 2020, according to the FBI. 2020 itself was a record, with the murder rate rising by 29.4% from 2019 to 2020.Â
But leading officials do not believe this is an accurate picture, since only 11,794 of 18,806 law enforcement agencies chose to submit expanded homicide data. With 52% of law enforcement agencies nationwide reporting, this means roughly 48% of law enforcement agencies across the country did not submit any data in 2021, leaving significant gaps in coverage. The FBI has concluded that participation for 2021 remained “below a statistically acceptable level to be nationally representative,” meaning that crime is likely even higher.
The CDC thinks that it is even worse. They think that US firearm homicide and suicide rates each increased by more than 8% from 2020 to 2021. CDC researchers estimated that there were over 20,000 firearm homicides and over 26,000 firearm suicides in the United States in 2021. This means that the US had more homicides than in any year in over 25 years.
Our border is not so much a sieve as it is simply wide open.
Name one thing that has improved in this country in the past 36 months.