REALITY

The year 2010 has come to a close and some of the end-of-the-year statistical information pertaining to our nation has been released. Unfortunately, none of it is good.

The best estimate for the number of "officially" unemployed Americans, as of the last day of December, is 15,439,775. Obviously the "actual" figure would be much higher if it including those citizens who are involuntarily only part time employees and those who have stopped looking for work completely. As an obvious result of this massive unemployment, at the end of 2010 some 1.6 million of our fellow citizens had filed bankruptcy during the past 12 months. Even more depressing is the news that in 2010 there were 1,058,773 residential foreclosure actions filed in American courts.

Another bare statistic pointed out that of our overall population of 310.5 million just over 64.6 million were receiving retirement/social security benefits. This fact has to make a reader question if other world dominating nations have over 20% of its population in the category of economically unproductive senior citizens. Maybe this is one reason why, until most recently, Obama was urging a death program for older Americans.

Following this same course of less than pleasing news, in 2010 there were 157 banks that failed; were closed by the federal government; and cost taxpayers a significant amount of money. This closure number was the worse since 1992 and there are literally 100s of other American banks on the same narrow edge of being closed by the federal government.

Finally, it was announced that during this past week some 409,000 new applications for unemployment benefits were filed by Americans who had lost their jobs. Remember that last week Washington was gloating over its success in lowering unemployment in that new weekly claims were, for the first time in many, many months, well below 400,000. This much lower reported unemployment figure was a Christmas holiday fluke and it is quite possible that the 409,000 figure could be a New Year holiday fluke.

The bottom line is that Obama and the Democrat House and Senate absolutely dropped the ball on economic rejuvenation for our nation. With any luck and a display of "guts" the newly installed Congress can start a real reversal and figures like those cited above will no longer be the sad truth.