Fact: We Are NOT In a "Silent Depression"

People have been seeing the silent depression reels going around and you know I was thinking if you have a silent depression and side hustles, everybody seems to have a side hustle now. Like oh I sell this stuff on Amazon, I do a YouTube show, I sell stuff at events, you know and the real question is do people need the side hustles? Do they want the side hustles and are they really helping people or are they just taking away from what you would consider family time, traditional development? How does it really work out for individuals when they're putting together their side hustles? I mean so I don't know if you've seen this reel with the silent depression. I heard a new term on TikTok today that made me stop in my tracks. We are living in the silent depression. This guy believes we are not just living in worse than the great depression, we're living in the silent depression. The average annual income in 1930 for an American individual was a little over $4,800. Sounds like nothing but if you adjust that for inflation, a little over $4,800 a year in 1930 is equivalent to almost $85,000 annually for the average salary for one person. Right now the average annual salary is $56,000 a year. We currently are making less than the height of the great depression. In 1930, gas was on average 10 cents a gallon. That would be about $1.73. In case you haven't filled up your car lately, average cost of a gallon of gas is $3.55. To buy a new car in 1930 would have been about $860, worth about 15 grand. The average cost of a new car today is $48,000 and of course the most coveted aspect of the American dream, being able to buy a house in 1930 cost about $3,900, less than $70,000. I spend way too much time on Zillow, so maybe this isn't surprising to me, but the average price of a home in America today is $416,000. How could we be living through worse cost of living and wages than 1930? And no politician, no media outlet, no one is talking about it. That's Fidenomics. A growing economy by strengthening the middle class. It's really interesting when you look at that and you think like, whoa, is that really real? Are we living in a silent depression? So I was like, let me just go through and look at what the depression was. So when you talk about the depression and you say $4,800 was the average income. That was based on the IRS's revenue in 1930 with 1.7 million people submitting their income to them. The truth is, is if you look at the numbers, it was more like $1,300. And then if you look into it a little bit more deeply, the actual unemployment rate during 1920, 1930 was at 18%. That is one out of five people didn't have a job and claimed that they were unemployed. Now if we had that happen today, we would see a complete collapse of our economy. One out of five people couldn't find a job. So to really say that we're living in a silent depression is a bit of a stretch. Now don't get me wrong. Inflation is a hidden tax and the way that our money is chewed up by the government is pretty ridiculous. But how the Great Depression happened is it was kind of like the perfect storm, right? 1929, you have the stock market crash, famous, infamous 1929 stock market crash. The stock market literally goes from 300 points down to 180 one day, done. So almost half of the stock market evaporates overnight. And then you have what's called the Smooth Holly Act, which broke down international trade, put crazy tariffs on everything and made it pretty ridiculous. And then you have the worst drought the United States has ever seen. Take the plains where all of our food and a lot of our economy and a lot of our GDP came from at the time was selling food. So you kind of had this perfect storm for the Great Depression. Now whether that was orchestrated by some powers, I don't know. But what I'm saying is, is it was a perfect storm and it allowed for our entire country to get hit. Now the factors that really happened is, is by 1933, our international trade had gone down 76% from its height in 1929. That right there is a ridiculous amount. The world GDP fell 15% in those four years. Now we went through a great recession. Some of you might remember it. Our GDP in the world went down 1%. We're talking 15% GDP worldwide. The whole world basically economically collapsed for an entire decade. And so when you talk about the cost of living and things like that, people weren't even registering and purchasing homes. People were living on the plains building homes. They were buying kits from Sears and Roebuck to build houses on their land without any type of permits or any type of things that were needed to build a home. So to compare apples to apples from that time period to ours is almost unrealistic. You're talking about a hundred year time gap. Now do I think that we're living in a time period where our financial worlds are being suppressed and that our money is being taxed beyond recognition and that we're constantly paying for goods that we don't need, that we're creating an entire society that revolves around money worship? Yeah, of course. But really, to compare our finances now and say we're in a silent depression, I mean, in the Great Depression, it was hard to get food at times. I am yet to find somebody that is truly having a difficult time to feed themselves in the United States. Now I've seen people that don't eat because they have addiction issues. They choose to live a certain way. But if they needed food, most of the time people have access to it. There's food shelters, there's food cards that are available state to state, federally. There's a lot of different welfare programs in the United States that allow people to feed themselves. Back then, there weren't any. And people were struggling just to survive, considering that they couldn't even grow foods because there was a drought where the breadbasket of the world was. So there's a lot of different things to think about when you're comparing apples to apples or oranges to apples. I would say this is more of like a watermelon comparison to a grapefruit. They're both fruits, but really it's not something that you can say is equally understood. So when you see silent depression, think a little bit more outside the box and look at it from a fundamental perspective. Educate yourself a little bit more on the Great Depression, how it looked, how it started. Our country was roaring in the 20s and then it just fell apart. I think there's a lot more to that. Maybe I'll dive into it on another show.