The Coming Economic Crisis/Program 1

By: Dr. David Jeremiah; ©2011

In these three programs, you’ll hear the research behind the fall of the American economy and why the nation’s current progression will lead to disaster. You’ll also learn about the emerging global government.

Contents

Introduction

Announcer: Nations across North Africa and the Middle East are erupting in bloodshed and revolution. Japan continues to confront its largest crisis since WWII. And America’s economy, along with the economies of the world, stand on the verge of crisis. Just a few months ago, President Obama’s bi-partisan Debt Commission warned in its report: America faces staggering deficits. This coming year, for every dollar, the US Government plans to spend, it will have to borrow 40 cents to do so. Interest on the debt could rise to nearly $1trillion by 2020 – just 8 years from now. And by 2025, our total revenue will be able to finance only 4 things: the interest payments on our debt; Medicare; Medicaid; and Social Security. Every other Federal Government activity, from National Defense and Homeland Security and to transportation and energy, will have to be paid for with borrowed money. Is the world stage being set for the endtime events the biblical prophets predicted? Are we beginning to see a world-wide, economic Armageddon? My guest today, is Dr. David Jeremiah Senior Pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, CA; and founder and speaker of the popular radio and television ministry, Turning Point. We invite you to join us for this special edition of the John Ankerberg Show.

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John Ankerberg: Welcome to our program. My guest today is Dr. David Jeremiah, Senior Pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, California, and the founder and speaker on Turning Point, the very popular television and radio program heard around the world. Folks, this is going to be a great program today. David is the author of the best-selling book, The Coming Economic Armageddon, which is on the New York Times best-seller list. And, David, I’ve asked you to talk today in this first program, about part of the picture you put in the book, which is entitled, “The Fall of the American Economy”. And, you start us off by talking about Bernard Madoff and Charles Ponzi, to introduce some of the policies our American Government has enacted. Tell us why you think we’re witnessing the fall of the American Economy and how this ties in with biblical prophecy.

David Jeremiah: Well, you know I got started on this study, right at the time when all of the Bernard Madoff stuff was in the news. And somebody handed me a book, I’ll never forget the title of the book, John, it was called Madoff with the Money. And I realized that that was about as clean a title as you could get for what he had done. He actually extorted $65 billion from famous people like Zsa Zsa Gabor and Larry King, and Sandy Koufax. Even took $3 million from his own sister. And what he did was, he, he just used a Ponzi scheme to make himself wealthy. He took money, told them he was investing it, and he was not investing it at all, he was just pouring it into his own account. And when I realized that he had taken control of all this money, and he had used it for his own purposes, I realized that he was an example of what was going on in our own country. The Ponzi scheme that he perpetuated will probably be the record keeper, but it’s not anything like what’s happened in America.

Ankerberg: Tell us about Charles Ponzi.

Jeremiah: Well, he, uh, he’s the person, who years before that, was uh, promising people 90% return on their money. He was telling them that if they would give him money, he would turn it around. And what he would do is, he would take the money of investors and he would, and he would fund the new money into paying the old investors. So, as long as he kept money flowing in, he was OK, but when the money started to slow down and these people wanted their returns, it collapsed and he was expelled from the United States and he ended his life in prison.

Ankerberg: And then you say, “Hey, that’s what the government’s doing, and you start off with Social Security as an example. Now, how do you link those two together?

Jeremiah: You know, when I began to study this, I don’t consider myself an economist, so I read every book I could find on the economy and one of my first surprises was the background story of Social Security, which we hear so much about in our news today. First of all, I was surprised at how young that system is, 1935, under Roosevelt. And you know the start of Social Security, John, was really a noble effort, on the part of our country to try to provide some sort of retirement for people when they get past 65. But, like anything else we seem to do, it wasn’t around very long before they started adding things to it. Social Security no longer was anything close to a retirement program, and all of these other entitlement programs were married to Social Security, until there was no possible way for it to be funded.

Ankerberg: Yeah. You said in 2008, Social Security and Medicare obligations had become $1 trillion or 1/3 of the Federal Budget.

Jeremiah: Yeah. And so, I think a lot of people, early on, thought Social Security was a private fund, that the money was put into a lock-box someplace and it was there and it was safe. But, what we know is, that didn’t happen. It was just funneled into the general fund, so to speak, and that money was being spent for other things. So, here we are right now, getting ready to go into 2012, and the perfect storm is about to happen.

Ankerberg: You got 80 million American baby-boomers that are coming in, in 2012, alright. And they’re expecting, and some of you folks that are watching, you’re expecting, that you’ve paid in all of these years, that when you finally get to that spot, you’re going to want your Social Security check and you’re going to want Medicare benefits. And you’re going to stop working, and paying into the system. And so the fact is, all of the sudden, you have no money coming in and you got all of these drawing on that and the fact is there’s no money in the till.

Jeremiah: Yeah. That’s right. And it’s getting worse because now we’ve added all of the Medicare systems to it. We’re getting ready to add all of the health care system, which we’re not sure where that is right now, or what’s going to happen with the new congress. But, John, what’s happening, we’re digging a hole that is so deep, under any kind of rationale, how do we get out of it? How do we dig ourselves out?

Ankerberg: Yeah. I thought the facts you put, the current unfunded liability for Social Security is 17.5 – not million, not billion, $17.5 trillion, that should be there, it’s not there. Where are we going to get this money?

Jeremiah: You know, and that’s part of the problem. We talked this last year, about how now our Government has a debt of $14 trillion, and that’s staggering. Unfortunately, that’s not the whole truth.

Ankerberg: Right.

Jeremiah: I remember, and I think in the book there’s a, there’s a picture of an iceberg and the iceberg shows the visible debt of 14, or 12, or whatever it is now, and then underneath that are all of the invisible entitlement programs, like Social Security, Medicare, and the 3 systems of Medicare, and it totals up to somewhere in the neighborhood of $120 trillion.

Ankerberg: In fact David, let’s talk about the 3 parts of Medicare that are unfunded and are coming up, they’re due, and there’s no money there.

Jeremiah: Well, you know, when I started to dig into this, I knew about Medicare. I guess I didn’t realize it was broken down into 3 categories. The first is Part A, which takes care of hospital visits, and that’s $36.7 trillion.

Ankerberg: Unbelievable.

Jeremiah: The second part, Part B is for doctors, and that’s 37 trillion. And then you have to add to that, the part that was voted in during George W. Bush’s rule, and that is for prescriptions, and that’s $15.6 trillion.

Ankerberg: Yeah. And if you add all of those up, you get to $89.3 trillion, that’s unfunded. Where’s that money going to come from?

Jeremiah: Well, you know, John, I think that’s the question that nobody knows the answer to. We don’t, we don’t have the ability to tax our way out of it, we can’t work our way out of it, we can’t grow our way out of it, so, we try to borrow our way out of it. And we’re just… somebody said, if you know you’re digging a hole in the wrong place, the first thing you should stop doing, is stop digging. And we just keep digging and there seems to be no end to it.

Ankerberg: Yeah. Let’s add the other parts to this. If you add the unfunded liability of Social Security to it, then you’re up to $106.8 trillion and you add that to the National Debt, which they are talking about, is $14 trillion, the total unfunded liability, as you said, is $120.8 trillion. We only brought in, in like 2009, $900 billion. So, we were close to a trillion, in terms of coming in. You got 1 trillion that’s coming in over here, and you owe $120 trillion over here and it’s still growing.

Jeremiah: And that amounts to a debt-load that’s easy to see, when you say it’s $383,000 per person, per citizen in the United States. And if you happen to be a family of 4, it’s $1.5 million for that group. And that’s, that’s staggering.

Ankerberg: Let’s take another category, David. We have to talk about the cost of National Defense. You have found out some staggering information. Tell us about it.

Jeremiah: Well, you know, you almost feel guilty, even bringing this up because if you’re a patriot and I am…

Ankerberg: Yep.

Jeremiah: You stand for a strong country and I want a strong military, we all do. But, here is the number that I found, that just really, I couldn’t believe – 41% of all of the money spent in the entire world on the military is spent by the United States. We spend more money on our military than China, than Russia, Europe, and several other nations combined.

Ankerberg: Yeah. It’s unbelievable. What actually are the numbers that we’re spending on it?

Jeremiah: Well, you know, in 2009 our defense budget was $642 billion, second only to Social Security, which is $677 billion. And those two items together account for roughly 2/3 of the American Budget. So, if you put Social Security and the military together, you’ve spent 2/3 of all the money we have in our budget.

Ankerberg: Yeah, our friend, Joe Belz, editor of World magazine, put this into focus for us. Tell us what he said.

Jeremiah: Well, you know, John, one of the real problems when you deal with this kind of money is to try to figure out how to get it into a package that you can comprehend. And he did this for me. He said that to fund one soldier for a year, in Iraq or Afghanistan it costs $1 million; $1 million per soldier, per year, to fight the war we’re fighting. And that’s just mind boggling.

Ankerberg: David, one of the things that you said which was really eye-opening is how much money, how much we’re paying to service the debt that we already have, just the interest, not to pay it down, just to keep it going. Talk about those numbers.

Jeremiah: Well, in 2009, it cost the government $202 billion to service our debt, that’s just not paying any principal, just pay the interest on it. And the White House estimates that by 2019, it will cost $700 billion in interest payments alone on our $12 trillion, we have in debt.

Ankerberg: Yeah. And we’ve already raised it up to $14 trillion, we’re adding, like 2 or $3 trillion each year, with our eyes open, to this debt that we have. And if you take their numbers, if by 2019, we’re $700 billion in interest, just to pay, service the debt of interest alone, not paying anything down, and you’re only bringing in $900 billion, that means you’ve got $200 billion left for the military, for Social Security, for running the country, for doing everything else. You can’t do that.

Jeremiah: No. And you know one of the hardest things about writing this book, John, was that every time we’d finish it, within a few days, the debt would go up and we had to keep recalibrating all of this. And so even though this is a very recent book, some of it’s out-of-date already because we have spent money in the last 2 years like we have never spent money in the history of our country.

Ankerberg: Alright. We’re going to take a break and when we come back, there’s something else that was really bothersome to me when I read it. And that is who we are borrowing the money from and how much money we owe different nations in the world, some that we have never borrowed money from before. Folks, stick with us, we’re going to be back in just a moment here and you won’t believe this information.

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Ankerberg: Alright. We’re back and we’re talking with Dr. David Jeremiah about his new book, The Coming Economic Armageddon, and we’re talking about the debt that America is piling up and the financial crisis that we’re facing. We’re looking at this thing, straight, head-on and one of the things that was brought up in the book, was the fact of who do we owe this money to? And we used to have the debt taken up by Americans.

Jeremiah: Yeah. I remember. Yeah, I remember when I was growing up, we had bonds that my parents bought to help fund the war and that sort of thing. But now, John, the scary thing now, is 50% of the money we owe, we owe to foreign countries.

Ankerberg: Unbelievable. And it’s even more unbelievable of who we have borrowed that money from. Who are some of the countries?

Jeremiah: Well, we owe almost $800 billion to China; we owe $746 billion to Japan; we owe $230 billion to the United Kingdom; and there’s a long list of them. One of the new players on the list is Russia – number 8. Back in 2007, we didn’t owe them anything, but now we owe Russia $122 billion, that we borrowed to try to keep up with the spending beyond our means.

Ankerberg: Yeah. I mean, if we owe $800 billion, just to China, Okay, and we only bring in $900 billion in taxes, a whole year of taxes, I mean, would just pay for that. We have nothing left for our budget.

Jeremiah: And the problem that we’re facing now is, these countries are less and less willing to loan money to us, and if they do, the interest they’re charging us is way, way beyond the norm.

Ankerberg: What would happen if they raised it just 1%, where we’re at right now?

Jeremiah: If we raised our debt 1%, it would cost an extra $80 billion a year for us to fund it.

Ankerberg: David, economists are saying that we’re going to have an explosion of inflation up ahead. What is inflation?

Jeremiah: The best way for me to explain inflation is to remind you of what it says in the rulebook in the game of Monopoly: the banker has the right to print money, if you run out of money, he can print money on any kind of paper that he needs, in order for there to be enough money to complete the game. We’ve been playing Monopoly, when we run out of money, we print more money. And inflation is simply this, it is printing money that has nothing behind it. And the reason we call it inflation is when there are more dollars, they’re worth less, so it costs more dollars to buy the goods that we need. But, inflation isn’t just prices going up, inflation is printing money that has nothing behind it.

Ankerberg: Let’s explain to the folks what a trillion dollars is. I mean, how much, I mean we’re throwing these numbers around and people don’t have an idea of how much money a trillion dollars is.

Jeremiah: Well, you know, in numbers, a trillion dollars is a million, million, a thousand billion, or it’s one followed by 12 zeros. But here are a couple of illustrations that bring it down to our ability to comprehend that kind of, that kind of number. It’s, once again I found this, I think, in World Magazine. If you think of it in seconds, going back in time, 1 million seconds would take you back 12 days. 1 billion seconds would take you back 30 years. And 1 trillion seconds would take you back 32,000 years. And I think you said before the program, that’s before we started…

Ankerberg: Before recorded history.

Jeremiah: Yeah.

Ankerberg: I mean, you know, it’s way back there.

Jeremiah: Well, here’s another way to look at it. If you spend $1 million every day, all the way back to the time of Christ, you have still have not yet spent $1 trillion.

Ankerberg: Yeah. And we owe $120 trillion right now and it’s growing. Now, let’s tie this to biblical prophecy. You’ve said that the economic picture for the future for America is not, not great right now. OK. We haven’t come up with any ideas in terms of the solutions of what we’re going to do for all of these unfunded liabilities that are coming in. And we’re borrowing and the debt’s going up. As soon, as somebody will not loan us the money, everything comes crashing down and we’re bankrupt. OK. We’re fast getting to that spot and you know, we don’t see any light in the tunnel, yet. You have said that the main question that people ask in prophecy conferences is this one. Where is America in end-time events?

Jeremiah: Well, you know it’s interesting, John, that in the Book of James it talks about our eroding wealth in the last days, and exploding wickedness. We’re living in those times. When people ask me why America is not in prophecy, I used to have a litany of answers. Perhaps it’s because we have, we’ve fallen on our own moral sword, we are morally bankrupt and the nation disintegrates. Maybe we have been invaded from an outside power and in some way, destroyed that way. Some people think we become a part of the coalition of the European economy and the European nations. Before this book, I was pretty convinced that the lack of mention of the United States in prophecy, was due to the rapture. That when the rapture takes place, which is before all these events happen, the church is going to be taken away, the Holy Spirit will be removed from society as we know it today and there will be an incredible breakdown in American culture, which means it may cease to be a power. But, I have to honestly tell you, after I wrote this book, I cannot help but wonder if the reason America’s not in prophecy, if we could get that look from there. Is that we have allowed ourselves to become so financially bankrupt that we are just kind of absorbed into the New World Order and we lose our identity.

Ankerberg: David, give me the conclusion of where we’re going, in terms of the fall of the American economy. And then, for Christians that are listening to this, what is the hope that the Bible, that Jesus Christ, Himself, offers to us, living in this situation?

Jeremiah: You know, John, that has been the great quest that I’ve had through all of this and that is to make sure people understand, we’re not left without options. So, I’d like to suggest something, as we close this program, today. First of all: I want to remind people that it’s important for us to keep our head in the game. And a lot of Christians say, I don’t like the news, the news is bad, it scares me, I’m not going to listen to it. So they just bury their head in the sand, as if they don’t need to know anything about what’s going in. That’s wrong and I don’t think the Bible gives us permission to do that. So, you’re not only, we’re not going to become economists, I don’t expect you to read as many books on the economy, as I did, in order to write this one. But keep your head in the game.

Number two: keep your house in order. You know people say to me, they’re really frustrated because they can’t do anything about the White House. Well, that’s not our problem right now. Our problem is to do something about our own house. And while we may not be able to keep this nation from going into debt, we can deal with it in our own lives. We can keep ourselves organized. I remember one of the things Dawn and I did, when we were going through this, is, we did a little inventory, just to see where we were. And you know, you may not like what you see, but at least you know the truth and you can go someplace for the truth.

Third: keep your heart in your faith. Some Christians, when they get discouraged they just drop out, they don’t do anything. And I want to encourage you not to do that. And then, finally, and here’s the most important thing. Keep your hope in God. We were never made to find our hope in this world, John. We were made to find our hope in God. And isn’t it interesting, as things get darker, a little bit here, we find our own hearts beating for the things of God in a way they have never before experienced. And that’s what’s happening to me. I find a new sense of urgency, a new determination to live the rest of my days for the world that I’m heading to, not the world that I’m leaving.

Ankerberg: Yes siree, we’re looking for Jesus’ return and thinking about heaven more and more. And it really looks good, but meantime, you’ve got this idea that you put in the book, that God chose this time for us to live.

Jeremiah: Absolutely.

Ankerberg: He could have chosen us to live in the time of Rome, in terms of the Caesars or Napoleon, or you know, the first part of an American history. But He chose us to live right here.

Jeremiah: And we need to embrace that, John. I think we need to accept that. And, frankly, I’m more excited about it than I can tell you. I don’t like all the stuff that’s going on around us, I don’t know where it’s all going. But I know God and I know God’s up to something and uh, I remember in the study of the Book of Daniel, they were in a similar period and there’s a verse in there that I’ve grabbed hold of. It says, “And they, who knew their God, they were strong and they did exploits.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s what I want to do.” In the midst of all of this chaos, I want to be strong and I want to do exploits for God. That’s what I think He’s called us to do.

Ankerberg: Folks, this is great stuff. Next week, I hope you’ll join us, we’re going to talk about the New World Order. Why are so many people, including politicians, presidents, statesmen and even religious leaders, calling for a New World Order? You won’t believe how many folks are calling for this. We’re going to give you their quotes and their names and we’re going to talk about where that’s heading and how this ties into biblical prophecy. It’s going to be great stuff, I hope that you’ll join us then.

Read Part 2