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Living Beyond Our Means
00:02:47
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| Well, Pastor Jim, let's try to break this down so people can understand because in the United States today, we're living a standard of living that we don't deserve to be living. | |
| People say, well, let's make the economy better. | |
| And what they really mean is, let's make things better for ourselves right now so we have an even higher standard of living. | |
| Well, we consume far more than we produce. | |
| We use more wealth than we create. | |
| How are we able to do this? | |
| Well, let's break it down real, real simply. | |
| Because on a family level, on an individual level, you could start living like a millionaire today. | |
| All you got to do is go out, apply for a whole bunch of different credit cards, start spending money like there's no tomorrow, and you could live like a millionaire for a while. | |
| Now, a day of reckoning is going to come. | |
| Anyone who's ever gotten in trouble with credit cards knows how that feels. | |
| But for a certain amount of time, you could live like a millionaire. | |
| And collectively, of course, that's what we're doing. | |
| In fact, in the fourth quarter of last year, Christmas season, everyone loves the Christmas season. | |
| Well, in the fourth quarter of 2015, Christmas season, Americans added more to their credit card balances than they did for the entire years of 2009, 2010, 2011 combined. | |
| Just in the fourth quarter of 2015. | |
| So we're going into massive amounts of debt. | |
| Now, corporate debt as well. | |
| We are seeing the greatest corporate debt, business debt binge we've ever seen in United States history. | |
| So corporations are just going gangbusters for debt. | |
| But now the day of reckoning has started. | |
| Corporate debt defaults are the highest they've been since the last financial crisis. | |
| We're starting to have a big problem, which is causing banks and financial institutions starting to have problems because they're not getting paid back on their debts. | |
| But of course, Pastor Jim mentioned the U.S. national debt. | |
| What we're doing is we're bringing future consumption into the present. | |
| That's what debt does. | |
| We're borrowing from future generations, making things worse for them to make things better for us. | |
| So when Barack Obama entered the White House, we were $10.6 trillion in debt. | |
| Now we're $19.4 trillion in debt, an increase of $8.8 trillion. | |
| So when you break that down by year, we've been averaging an average of adding $1.1 trillion a year to the national debt since Barack Obama has been in office. | |
| We were told deficits are under control. | |
| What? | |
| Are you crazy? | |
| No, $1.1 trillion a year. | |
| That's money we're taking, consumption we're taking from the future. | |
| Standard of living we're taking from the future, bringing it into the present. | |
| That's why I'm saying we're living a standard of living we do not deserve here in the United States of America. | |
| We're stealing it from the future. | |
| What we're doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal. | |