First, an excerpt for a post by Janice Shaw Crouse, second, an infographic from the Heritage Foundation:
The economic picture in the United States gets worse with each passing day of the Obama administration, and families are especially hard-hit. While the damage is already devastating, the ramifications will continue wreaking havoc on today’s children when they are adults starting their own families.
Comedians refer back to President Obama’s 2008 campaign theme, “Hope and Change,” declaring that most of us can only hope to have some change left after paying bills. A survey of 1,100 Americans taken in October 2012 showed that 41 percent of respondents did not have more than $500 in savings at the time of the survey, which included “dual-income earners with … big mortgages and big credit card bills.” Further, 54 percent had no savings plan, and 45 percent thought they would never be able to save money.
The picture did not look any better in June 2013, when a survey of 1,000 adults found that 76 percent are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Half of those surveyed had less than a three-month cushion in savings, and 27 percent had no savings at all.
It’s even worse for the federal government. Just click on the Debt Clock to see profligate spending in real time. The U.S. national debt is just shy of $17 trillion! That amounts to a debt per citizen of $53,431 — that means every man, woman and child who is a United States citizen would need to pay that much money each to retire our current national debt. The debt per taxpayer is a whopping $148,091.
From the Heritage Foundation: