"Living off the Grid"? Yep. Gonna have to if you want to live at all. When government debt reaches 124% of GDP everyone will be living "off the grid" whether they want to or not.

Currently the government spends nearly 106% of GDP just to operate itself and pay for all the promises it makes. In terms of tax revenue nearly 50% of income tax filers pay nothing in because they get back more than was withheld on the wages they earned. The government cannot collect enough money to operate itself. It is printing 46 cents of every dollar it spends out of thin air. That is why it must print $400-600 billion a month just to make ends meet.

Much of the financial slight of hand that prevents economic collapse is hidden in banks and new regulations. Banks only need hold 10% of their assets in cash. That might normally be OK but it isn't because of another change in banking rules during this government directed "recovery" that isn't. It is how banks measure their assets.

A bank can lend one person $10,000 and rather than carry it as debt they can treat it as an asset. Under current rules when they lend that $10K to someone they can then lend $9,100 of that new "asset" to someone else holding 10% of the promise to pay a loan in cash. Then they lend the $9,100 to someone else and create another $8,190 loan to someone else. They can turn a $10,000 loan that isn't paid into over $300,000 in new assets. They can invest the money you promised to pay when you took out the loan even before you actually do pay it back. Your promise is to pay is golden regardless of whether you do or not. Crazy huh? But that's how it works.

The problem with generating wealth this way is that unlike an economy based on producing things of value and the creation of tangible wealth; a debt based economy is not sustainable. It will fail, always has, and always will (hello Greece with Italy, Spain, and the good old USA to follow).

All of these things that government is paying for including Medicaid, other safety net programs, and Obamacare are not funded by anything but increasing debt and borrowing what we don't have. You cannot sustain an economy by creating ever more debt borrowing against the future. It simply doesn't work, at least for long. So here we are at 106% of GDP and will hit 124% in about 2 years. The banks will close and as we saw in Greece the money that only exists on paper magically disappears.

Similarly to 1928 any money you have in the bank and not in your wallet or under your mattress will simply cease to exist overnight and without warning. You will wake up to an empty checking and savings account, your investments backed by paper including the bonds and stock market will fundamentally no longer exist. What you don't have in your physical possession will simply disappear.

Without money the stores get empty and don't refill, trucks stop moving, refineries close, companies that make food shut the doors, the electricity stops, water stops flowing, people have no where to work and employers have no way to pay them if they did. Government won't be able to even keep their own lights on. If you think people get violent fighting over deals on Black Friday, wait until they start fighting over food. Bodies will pile up faster than people will be able to get rid of them. Yep, whether you like it or not the few that manage to survive that level of chaos will definitely be off the grid.

Of course it doesn't work, but that is what they are doing. Thomas Sowell explained it eloquently and agreed. Can they do it? Yes. Does it work? No, but they can get away with it for a while.

I have thought of just running towards the mushroom cloud when the times comes. Remember, the grim reaper is going to get us sooner or later.

My mother recently asked me if I had bought a 2016 calendar. I told her no. If a bus flattens me tomorrow, I have just wasted my money on something I never got to use.

no that isn't how it works. debt can never be treated as an asset. when you borrow the 10k it becomes debt. when you loan ninety one hundred the loan becomes an asset as does the remaining cash but the entire 10k remains a liability. assets then are balanced against debt to determine net worth. were this the entire financial state of the individual his net worth would have started at zero and remains at zero.