Your Standard of Living

“The foundation of our bloated service sector economy, supported by overseas savings and production, is now giving way,” wrote Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital. “It is all part of the process of an unprecedented decline in America’s standard of living, which is the inevitable result of years of living beyond our means” (emphasis mine throughout).

Schiff wrote that in April of 2008. How much worse conditions have gotten since!

Have the prophecies of Herbert W. Armstrong been fulfilled, or have they not?

You may well call him a man ahead of his time, but had any heeded Herbert Armstrong’s words back in 1980, they may well have avoided the massive losses suffered through the profligacy and mass fraud of the past 40 years that have decimated the American and British economies.

Almost 30 years ago, he wrote an article headlined, “Prepare to Greatly Reduce Your Standard of Living!” “It’s time you knew the real meaning of the present inflationary spiral, rising interest rates, and fears of entering a severe depression,” the article began.

“There is far more to all this economic concern than appears on the surface. Its roots even penetrate back into ancient history and biblical prophecy. …

“What does it all really mean? What does it portend for the relatively immediate future?

“We in the United States have enjoyed the most prosperous living standard of any nation in all the history of mankind. There is a reason for this unmatched prosperity that came to us. There also is a reason for the devaluation of the dollar in foreign markets, for our present abnormal inflation, and the fear in financial and government circles that we may well be in the beginning of the most severe economic depression in history. …

“[T]he stranglehold of inflation and other economic disturbances are tightening around our necks. This trend is going to reach out and greatly reduce your standard of living, in the next two years or more” (Plain Truth, March 1980).

For many it did, in the crisis of 1982.

But did we then see the light? Did we fully recognize the basic laws that we were flouting, the breaking of which would eventually lead to an even greater crisis in the future? No. We just cranked up the credit and began transferring our industry into foreign lands offering cheap labor, transforming our former net-export-status economy into that of a net importer—a sure recipe for disaster!

The result? Factory closures in the U.S., mass transfers of jobs offshore and the conversion of that which once constituted our own gross domestic product into the gdp of foreign countries. Their gdp skyrocketed even as ours plummeted and our national debt blew out beyond all comprehension.

Now the piper must be paid, and there’s no cash in the kitty to meet that demand!

But as Herbert Armstrong warned, “[W]hat is happening to us now is much more than purely economic causes and effects. … There is a far more important cause behind the Anglo-American rise and fall than mass machine production and labor union action producing a greater diffusion of wealth. There is a far greater cause that is now starting in rapid descent to bring down your present standard of living” (ibid.).

If only we had heeded him then! How much pain and suffering these Anglo-Saxon nations could have evaded.

But it was not to be so. Herbert Armstrong explained it thus: “The United States and the British peoples did inherit the national and material promises of the birthright promised unconditionally to Abraham. Therefore God has fulfilled His unconditional promise of the birthright to Abraham [Genesis 12:1-3].

“Once fulfilled, in the British and Americans, retention of it by us became conditional on our performance.

“And what have we done with all this vast wealth, economic prosperity and world power?

“We have made physical science the new messiah—our false god—which boasted we no longer needed to wear the swaddling clothes of superstition, or lean on the crutch of religion. Science promised to deliver us from all our troubles! But it failed utterly, and only produced the weapons of mass destruction that can now erase all humanity from the Earth.

“Our educational systems worshiped at the shrine of the false god of evolution, making it the foundational approach and basic concept upon which all knowledge is based! Evolution is the atheist’s attempted explanation for the presence of a creation without a Creator!

“Our governments have been corrupt. Our business, industrial, economic and commercial systems have been shot through with deception, dishonesty, selfishness” (ibid.).

Three decades after Herbert Armstrong penned those words, they are becoming headline news across the world!

Michael Morris, a journalist at the World Bank, in an article headlined “The Total Collapse of America,” wrote, “The root of this entire mess in America is the total collapse of the fundamental core that made America great, the morals, ethics and accountability for one’s actions that ruled our society until the recent past. The chief cause of this abandonment of these principals is our justice system and system of laws that are now governed by greed, political agendas and deception of ‘right and wrong’” (OpEdNews.com, Oct. 7, 2008).

Morris at least gets close to the real cause of America’s collapse. Yet Mr. Armstrong got to the real core of the matter, taking the argument up to the ultimate level of control over human affairs, the spiritual realm: “We have adopted the way of life of Satan—utter selfishness, lust and greed, envy and jealousy, competition in every walk of life—business, politics, sports, society—leading to violence and destruction! We have rebelled against the authority of God over us, worshiping the false gods of science, evolution and greed. We have gone the way of Satan! And Satan is the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4).

“And now, for our own good, an all-wise and all-loving God is about to punish our nations, in order finally to bring us to Him! … In Leviticus 26:19, God said of our people, today: ‘And I will break the pride of your power’” (op. cit.).

That is the reality behind America’s collapse today!

Few listened back in 1980 to Herbert Armstrong’s prophecy of the inevitable fall of the Anglo-Americans. Those few who did heed, and prove, and believe and act on those words, have been saved much of the pain and increasing suffering now being heaped upon these peoples.

Those who did not heed, or who just simply forgot, would do well to note one additional prophetic statement Mr. Armstrong made in that article that applies directly to the days we are presently living through: “I warn you, prepare to greatly reduce your standard of living! Even greater punishments are to follow!”

Request a free copy of Herbert Armstrong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy for an in-depth study of these prophecies that are leaping into full perspective.