The Chicken or the Egg. An Excellent (and Frightening) Post from DTG.

Reblogged from Defensive Training Group.

Text in bold is mine.

The figures below are very telling.

Dave Hodges from SHTF Plan has an interesting article, here.

“America only has to look at three economic indicators to know that we are in a lot of trouble, The budget deficit is $17 trillion dollars, unfunded (partially or otherwise) mandated social programs constitutes another $222 trillion dollars and the credit swap derivatives total between $1 quadrillion dollars to $1.5 quadrillion dollars. Based upon these numbers, America has clearly been set up to fail.

When we look at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all the government programs that we all take for granted, the price tag is a whopping $222 trillion dollars. These numbers are going to be exacerbated and grow exponentially because the bulk of the baby boomers are entering retirement age. Even if we took every single penny that the federal government takes in and devote it to paying off these social programs, it would take 111 years to pay off this debt.

In the United States, credit swap derivatives created national debt totals of over one quadrillion dollars. That is one thousand trillion dollars! The entire GDP of the planet is estimated at $66 trillion dollars. And somehow, in the infinite wisdom of Congress in 2008, we falsely and naively believed that a $750 billion transfer of wealth (i.e., Bailout #1) was magically going to save the economy and the collective futures of the American middle class. In short, the debt created by futures speculation is approximately 16 times greater than the sum total of the entire wealth on the planet! And we think we are going to climb out of this? We could fund 1,000 bailouts and the eventual outcome will be the same, slavery by debt. We are being held in place, while our financial assets are being separated from our soon-to-be dead corpses.”

So when you objectively consider the mounting evidence that something significant is going to happen, and the country is on the brink of several differrent types of calamities all of which have a signficant level of intensity, you still put off training, PT, marksmanship, preps, and meaningful networking, like in the III Percent Society for America?

Seriously?

I have long held to the belief that the arc of the United States follows much like any great civilization of the world. There is a rise, peak, plateau, and ultimately a decline preceding the fall. No civilization has been immune to this. The problem in forecasting the timeline is that no single one thing results in the downfall of a civilization. Very rarely does it happen very quickly as well. It is generally the perfect storm of several stresses all happening at the same time when the society is already at the tipping point due to other troubles that have manifested themselves at the time. However, due to the technological age we live in, timelines do seem to compress quite a bit. Rome contracted itself over the period of centuries. We today do not have that luxury.