1. Food stamp (SNAP) rolls hit 47,710,324 in September 2012, averaging $134.29 per month and totaling $77 billion per year. (Up from 27 million enrolled in 2006.)
2. Medicaid enrollment hit 59,100,000 in October 2012[1], up from 49 million in 2008 (and an estimated 16 million more under ObummerCare, by 2019): $240 billion per year.
3. Extended unemployment rolls of 2,000,000, $44 billion per year.
4. SSI (Social Security disability): 10.8 million in August 2012, up from 4.9 million in 2009: $190 billion per year.
5. Cost of expiring Bush tax cuts on families making over $250,000: $42 billion/year. (8 cents/dollar of the above spending.)
6. “Price of gold” morning of Friday, 14th of December 2012:  $1,713.  (The dollar, defined as $20/ounce until 1933 and $35/ounce from 1933-1972, is now worth    0.01168 of what it was in 1933, or just a bit more than 1 US cent in 1933, in gold.)
7. “Price of silver” morning of Friday, 14th of December 2012:  $33.26. (The dollar, defined at 0.9 ounces of pure silver until 1965, is now worth    0.0331 of what it was in 1964, or about 3 US cents in 1964, in silver.)
8. Forty billion ($40,000,000,000) of ‘quantitative easing’ each month by the Federal Reserve (i.e., printing money).
9. The fact that trillions of dollars has been spent on conquering and occupying vast lands and populations, and will continue to be so spent, instead of investing in a reasonable defense of our nation and allowing Americans traveling overseas (including merchant ships and aircraft) to arm themselves to protect against threats: further sucking life out of the economy: our “official” national debt is now at $16,369,984,159,473.81.[2]
10. Dozens of states deep in debt, with the total at $4,190,000,000 (4.2 trillion).[3]
11. Hundreds of cities deep in debt, with a total around $2 trillion; at least a dozen large cities are going bankrupt.
12. Consumer credit card debt hitting 2,754,000,000 (2.7 trillion).[4] And get this: TOTAL private-sector borrowing is 40.2 trillion!
13. Student loan debt hitting $1,054,000,000 (1.5 trillion).[5]

The surprise is that the economy has NOT crashed on the scale of Weimar Germany or the last couple of Argentine collapses; save that with the rapid and accelerating decay of the society, economic system, and government, the American collapse threatens to be spectacularly messy – and probably very bloody.  The likelihood of a “peaceful collapse” like that of the Soviet Union is low: and the potential for something far, far worse than the collapse of Yugoslavia is great.  Indeed, the Yugoslavian collapse is the more likely model:  fifty states not only fighting with the remnants of the Federal Government, but each other and gangs ranging from neighborhood street thugs to corporate bully-boys and expanding Mexican drug cartel enforcers and local police forces gone “rogue” or “feral.”

(c) 2012 by Nathan A. Barton, all rights reserved.