Michael Panzer of Financial Armageddon presents Pictures of Hopelessness, reproduced below.
One of the reasons many of us fortunate enough to not be caught up in joblessness and homelessness do not understand the gravity of the situation is because we don’t see food lines like those of the Great Depression. That is because food lines have been “privatized” and effectively made invisible.
Instead of soup kitchens, we now hand out the equivalent of debit cards which are used in grocery stores. That is much more efficient in terms of food delivery.
It is also more convenient for a government trying to convince us things are getting better. I wonder whether the real lines are longer today than what they were in the 1930s.
Talk about losing hope.
A new survey of unemployed Americans from Rutgers’ Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, entitled “The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in their Futures,” documents dramatic erosion in the quality of life for millions of Americans.
According to the report’s authors,
their financial reserves are exhausted, their job prospects nil, their family relations stressed and their belief in government’s ability to help them is negligible. They feel hopeless and powerless, unable to see their way out of the Great Recession that has claimed 8.5 million jobs.
Indeed, one doesn’t even have to read through the entire 45 pages of the report to see just how bad things have gotten for so many individuals and families; these three charts just about say it all:
That last chart, which highlights the fact that more than half of those polled believe a recovery is at least three to five years away, is particularly depressing.
Still, the good news is that Wall Street is happy — right?
More on this topic (What’s this?)USA Today; American Workforce Graying as the YoungIncreasingly Locked Out of Workforce (Fund my Mutual Fund, 12/15/10)SPECIAL REPORT: Online Employment 2010 Review and Future Predictions About the State of the Borde… (Wall St. Cheat Sheet, 12/10/10)Investor Alert: It Isn’t Just Borrowers That Are Suffering At Servicer Hands (naked capitalism, 10/18/10)
