Grrr is I missed out on alot of action on the thread so Im going to try and address each thing here. First off oil. Oil prices are risen and lowed by speculators. Now thats fine but there are alot of unregulated exchanges ICE for example is one. Now oil has remained steady with inflation......LOL....I'm not sure how anyone can say that. The price of oil has doubled in the past year. Why because these speculators are going in and driving up the market. They use excuses like hurricanes. Like this year there were threats of hurricanes so they used that as an excuse to drive up the prices of oil but when they never came do u think the prices went down? Not at all. Thats just one of many examples but I dont want to spend to much time on this because next I want to go into minimum wage.

Im not sure if I understood a previous poster but yes minimum wage does drive inflation. But I dont think that gives an excuse to never raise it. Once again I go back to everything else is already going up. Have you been to a store and see what a gallon of milk costs. $4.99 here in Florida where I am. Thats one hours worth of work for your typical minimum wage person. Now I will say that most places do not pay minimum wage Im very well aware of this but even $7.20 which is where they want to raise it too. Its still way behind the curve. Thats $288.00 a week. Take that times 4 thats $1152.00 a month. That is what I pay in health insurance a month. How can people survive. Now we are in a capitalist society and I understand competition and mabey these guys put themselves in this position but that doesnt mean we leave the working class out of the loop.

Another person says the government cant manipulate the data. Ok well you keep believing that but let me throw this at you. Jobs numbers that come out always gets reconfigured from the previous month. Example when the jobs reports came out in august it showed we had a job loss of 20,000 jobs which gave the fed the room to cut 50 basis points. When next months numbers came out it was revised to actually a gain of like 80,000 or something to that effect dont hold me to the numbers exactly because Im going on memory and frankly dont have the initiative to look it up. The government can do whatever they want and Im quite shocked that an ATS member would come out and say trust the government all their numbers are par.

Anyways this thread was started not to have arguments on weather or not this was started to let people know just be prepared and dont trust the government trust yourself.

Outsourcing has been going on en masse since the early 1990's. Is there any evidence to show that this somehow creates a huge impact on the economy now? I do not find any evidence for that. While when a company outsources it does leave people out of jobs, government routinely steps in and retrains people to be able to get jobs in a knowledge economy. I am not sure that shifting away from industrial complexes and into the knowledge economy is BAD thing - seems to be a good thing, as the knowledge economy offers more jobs and better quality jobs for those who are willing to be retrained.

Well it hasnt done anything to our job market per se for 2 reasons one because countries like Japan build auto plants here and give american people jobs and reason 2 and thank goodness most of the jobs out there come from small businesses and not from big corporations (who does all of the outsourcing) But when things start to happen like what is going on now the will cease to hire and even lay off. When small biz starts hurting be ready because the big companies will not be there to save us. These 2 reasons aside it also puts us in a really crappy position look how we have to kiss chinas arse because they do a lot of our manufacturing. I mean lets put it this way. I have a customer who makes military uniforms for our government who lost a job to chinese manufacturers I mean cmon a nation that cant manufacture on its own cant stand on its own.

Light...Im very well aware that the numbers that come out or lagging indicators what Im saying is how can there be such a huge difference. But lets set that aside lets talk about the job numbers....answer me this do you understand how they come up with the numbers? You think they call every household out there ask people if they are employed or not? No this isnt how it works otherwise the employment numbers we be like we added 138,341 new jobs. But the numbers are not like that are they they come out 138,000 new jobs. Im not going to go into great detail how they do it but you can do research on the bureau of labor statistics for more info but to give you a basic gist on how they do it they do sample surveys that change every month. This is how they say that they do it. These numbers are never I repeat these numbers are never accurate. They are basically guestimates. The only way I would trust the governments numbers is if they called every household and asked. As long as they do guestimates Im sorry I just cant put my livelyhood at stake on that.

Now I will say this and Ive said it several times in this thread the job market as of now it strong and it is the only thing right now not sending us to depression. I think we are sitting in recession now. I dont believe we are at 4.7% what the government says we are I dont believe that for a minute i think we are around 5% but once the job market starts to tumble where are we gonna pick up the slack?

See I think this recession has been due for awhile because of all of the reasons i mentioned at the start but there is one thing that kept this thing going and that is real estate. All the working class people pulled money from their houses which gave them spending money and that did what most of us working class people do...when we get money we spend it. Thats what kept us afloat. Now giving the current situation the only thing that I can see saving us is our exporting due to the weak dollar. I just dont feel that is going to work. Oh and Ive been making a killing shorting stocks so I dont think it is just me that feels like the economy is in the crapper. Oh and for all of those people that say well the US economy dont matter anymore we have China and India....Let me tell you something when the US coughs the world gets the flu is the old term used and its still a fact sorry..... Last but not least this thread was to tell people to prepare. Set a little money aside..even though your dollar isnt worth as much buy that canned food and just be ready. I dont rule out we will stave off a depression but you know what its better to be prepared for the worst and hope for the best.

As far as government manipulation of numbers goes, consider this. People who's unemployment benefits have expired are no longer considered unemployed wether or not they have actually returned to work. There is no accurate way to determine the number of homeless in the U.S., conveniently enough for those in charge, so there is really no way to determine the trends of actual unemployment.

Oh and I think the real test will be holiday sales. If they come in short get ready for the sales event of the year cause everyone will be selling. And I like Ron Paul but I like Huckabee's idea of getting rid of the IRS. A consumption tax to me is the most intelligent way of fixing alot of monetary system problems...like people saving money and making sure that everyone pays their fare share of taxes. Ron's Idea of having multiple currency some backed by gold was interesting also. If those 2 ran on the same ticket P/VP they would get my vote!!!!!