50 Statistics Almost Too Crazy To Believe

By John Ballard

From Business Insider

• #1 In 2010 the U.S. government is projected to issue almost as much new debt as the rest of the governments of the world combined


• #4...if you spent one million dollars every single day since the birth of Christ, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now


•  #10 In February, there were 5.5 unemployed Americans for every job opening


•  #14 Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008. Not only that, more Americans filed for bankruptcy in March 2010 than during any month since U.S. bankruptcy law was tightened in October 2005


• #22 For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together


• #24 ...currently 18 percent of all office space in the United States is sitting vacant


• #31 Two university professors recently calculated that the combined unfunded pension liability for all 50 U.S. states is 3.2 trillion dollars


• #36 39.68 million Americans are now on food stamps, which represents a new all-time record. But things look like they are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecasting that enrollment in the food stamp program will exceed 43 million Americans in 2011


•  #42 The gap between the top 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the Roaring Twenties


•  #44 According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases in the U.S. between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of all Americans
  


• #45 Half of America has 2.5% of the wealth


• #46 If you only make the minimum payment each and every time, a $6,000 credit card bill can end up costing you over $30,000 (depending on the interest rate)

Interesting and thought-provoking list.
The rich get rich and the poor get children.
I've told my kids over and over that when you borrow money to buy something you pay twice: once for whatever you are buying and again to pay for the money you borrow to get it. 

Too bad we don't run the country with the same attention to thrift that poor people do, simply because they have no option. There is a difference between having resources and imagining you have the resources. Those are two very different realities.

That business about pension liabilities (#31) jumped off the page at me. The company I worked for nearly thirty years had an old-fashioned defined benefits pension plan. Part of the reason they went bankrupt was the pension plan had their hand out for over forty million dollars in unfunded but planned future costs. Because most people with pensions will not be receiving them for many years, many companies have been remiss in paying into them. The third-party administrators go along with that kind of irresponsibility because all they do is administer the plans. No skin off their noses. So now, when the chickens come home to roost and the companies hit a tight spot, those unfunded liabilities are what push them into bankruptcy.

Thankfully the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation, one of those socialistic government-sponsored safety nets, picks up pension plans when companies go broke. That's where my pension comes from.