Bob Barney: America, the Death of an Empire (Transcript)

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America on the decline. Hi, Bob Barney here for another edition of The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com. For those who have listened to this show now for several years, you know the idea that what’s behind this show, that God’s hand is behind the news and that you cannot understand today’s news unless you understand God’s plans and what God says about the news of today, yesterday, and again tomorrow. And you can do that many times by understanding what is in the Bible.

Much of the Bible is prophecy. Up to a third of the Bible is prophecy, two-thirds of which have not yet occurred. We keep telling our listeners out here that when you see a lot of prophecies in the Old and New Testament, realize that many of them have not come to pass. One of the prophecies that many people assume has been established and came to pass was the destruction and the enslavement of ancient Israel. Yes, that did happen with the Babylonian captivity of Judah to the south and the Assyrian captivity of the Ten Lost Tribes, what is called the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel to the north, about 2,700 years ago. But that is not the same thing as end-time prophecy, when again, in the end-time prophecy, Israel, which is just another name for the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel, headed by the tribe of Joseph, which is the United States and England in prophecy, that they would again, before the coming of the beast in the Antichrist of Revelation, be re-imprisoned or recaptured or re-enslaved, so to speak.

And so, what I’m going to talk about today is the idea that the United States of America is an empire in decline. I have been having many shows about the ills and the malaise of America and what is wrong with America and how it can be solved. And I will tell you again, right now, before I start, because it’s going to be depressing to a lot of people, but before I start, all America needs to do is turn to the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible are two distinct beings. One is called God the Father, the other is called the Word of God, who became Jesus Christ. Whenever you hear God’s voice in the Old Testament, for example, you are never listening to the voice of God the Father, because Jesus made it plain and clear in the New Testament that no person has ever seen the form of God the Father, nor heard his voice at any time.

He also said that no one has ever gone to heaven except he who came from heaven and going back to heaven as King of King and Lord of Lords after his death and resurrection from the dead, accomplished by God the Father. These are well-known phrases of the Bible that people read over and over again and spot out in churches, but they never ever think of the ramifications of what I just said. The two beings, God the Father and Jesus Christ, symbolize male and female of the human race. After all, we are made in the image of God. God is not three. That would be male, female, and it, which we know is not what God intended. God is presently two beings right now, God the Father and the Word, comprised of the Holy Spirit, as male and female are two physical beings in God’s image, that is, comprised of blood. The blood of us symbolizes the physical presence of life, whereas in God that presence of life is in their Holy Spirit. We won’t get into the Trinity matter right now, but I do want to get into the end of an era of the United States of America as being dominant, and this is very depressing news, and I’m afraid that it’s just getting worse day by day and not getting better.

Again, like I said, if people would turn to God, which I do not believe is going to happen, I hope I’m wrong and I hope it does happen, but if people would turn to God, then all things would be solved so quickly we couldn’t even believe it. But here are four or five key principles signaling the demise of the American Empire, of the American rule of the world that we once had. We were once the ruler of the world after World War II, I could even say before World War II, and in the last 20-30 years we have, like England before us, who was the world power for some 400 years, in the 1930s became a third-rate power and is so today. America is a third-rate nation right now. We are not a leading nation in the world. When I read you some of the statistics, I know a lot of people are going to be mad, they’re going to say, well, geez, Bob’s turning to be a communist on me. No, I’m not. Communism is the religion of the devil. Capitalism is the way of life of God.

You cannot read the New Testament especially or the Old Testament and not realize that God’s principles and God’s laws are based on capitalism. He who does not work, Paul says, should not eat. What does that tell you? Not get welfare. But I’m going to go through some things that no one can absolutely say I’m wrong about because these are the facts. We have an uncontrollable debt in America. The US debt clock displays inevitably the decline of the American Empire. The US debt, as we know, we hear all the time, is 37 trillion dollars, soon to be around 40 trillion or more under the new Big Beautiful Bill. It has increased some six-fold since the five trillion in the year 2000. Yes, in the year 2000, the national debt was five trillion dollars in the year 2000. Now, about 800 billion a year of that 37 trillion that we owe is in interest. You know, we are experienced, I think most of us have in our lifetime, experienced what happens when you use credit cards all the time. When you use credit cards all the time, all of a sudden, you know, it’s very easy to buy something with a credit card because you don’t have to pay for it right then. You are, but you don’t realize you are until that bill comes due. And that bill comes through and some of these credit card interest rates, I don’t care if you got great credit. I have very good credit and yet my Capital One card, that’s why I pay it off every week. I don’t even go every month because we use it for business, and I pay it off every single Friday. I don’t even let it get to be a month old. But if I did, the interest rate on my good credit, and I’m over 800 on the credit score, would be 28 and a half percent.

People in the mafia would charge that kind of interest, would go to jail for loan sharking violations. But like the irresponsible credit card user, the federal government is perpetually borrowing more and more money to make the interest payments come as they come due. And the interest payments on the newly refinanced debt will be much higher due to the rate hikes going on with interest rate hikes. One of the things happens in a poor economy when your interest rates go up is that what you owe on the national debt, the payments go up just like it does for your credit card. And there’s some even worse news than that, I’m afraid. The US government’s total unfunded liabilities debt is staggering. When you think about 37 trillion-dollar debt and people think, well maybe we get, you know, the economy, you know, I just heard that Wall Street crashed by 7,000 points and that was 8 trillion dollars. So I guess we can get our way out of it. Well, here’s the problem.

We have what’s called unfunded liabilities. It is the true national debt. Does anyone have an idea what this country really owes in the future? Well the combined amounts of payments promised without funds to pay for them of Social Security, of Medicare, of federal employee pensions, of veteran’s benefits, and the federal debt held by the public is at 222 trillion dollars. You heard that right. 222 trillion dollars and it’s rapidly increasing. For content, that number was about a hundred and twenty-two trillion as recently as 2019.So it’s probably more like 300 trillion by now. That was a 2019 statistic the last time Trump increased the debt drastically because of COVID. This is just not imaginable, this amount of money that we owe. There’s more money that we owe in the future and now than all of our income of every single American. If you confiscated all your wealth, all my wealth, all the poor people’s wealth, all the rich people’s wealth, you could not come up with 200 trillion dollars. It’s not there. We are in a state of national bankruptcy. It’s just that simple. 

A second problem that we have in this country is low student achievement. Unlike China, unlike our competitors around the world who really take educational seriously and they teach their students how to do jobs, how to do trades, how to figure out money, how to use their brain instead of worrying about global warming and social events or liberal causes, no, our nation cannot seem to dig itself out of not only the debt trap, but the idea that we do not have students prepared to enter the economy and be a useful employee. We don’t have enough. We have 500,000 open manufacturing jobs.

You have Donald Trump talking about he’s going to add 10 million manufacturing jobs. We do not have 500,000 people to fill the manufacturing jobs already here because so many Americans today simply want to be paid for not working. The people who do seem to want to work, the illegal aliens are the ones being deported. It’s going to be interesting when July and August roll around, who’s going to pick all these crops in California when the world economic food market moves from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere and much of the foods production of the world, not just America, comes out of California? Who’s going to pick all those crops? It’s a serious matter indeed.

 Unfortunately, the nation’s report card does not hint at a good optimistic future. In fact, it hints the opposite way. The National Assessment of the Educational Progress, a congressionally mandated education department program that has looked at students since 1969, finds that only 29% of fourth graders and 20% of eighth graders can even do any math skills at all. Only 8% are advanced in math of the entire public school system. Overall achievement has decreased in both reading and math compared to an already disappointing numbers of 2019.

This was in 2022 right after COVID. You know what COVID did to the schools by shutting them down, how the children had just inferior education. They bore the brunt of the COVID nonsense, and that’s what it was. Now we have an entire lost generation who do not even know how to work. I have a friend of whose daughter is an honor student at a very prestigious university who called up and could not figure out how many feet 60 inches were. Think about that. She goes to a very highly scientific college and could not figure out how many feet were in 60 inches. That’s part two of what is the decline of America and why it’s happening, and it’s very scary. And then we have the third one, and that is the wealth inequality in this country. Unfortunately, too many Americans believe, mainly mega Americans, by the way, not necessarily will I attribute too many of the so-called liberal morons in this group. You know, in the past, we only had liberal morons, maybe 20, 22% of the population. Today, we have liberal morons, and then to the right, we have mega morons who just simply are dumb people. They just listen to one point of view. They just listen to their leader, whoever it is, Bernie Sanders on the left or AOC or Donald Trump or like on the right and believe everything these people say. However, the plain truth of the matter is we have an ever-increasing income and wealth inequality in this country that is rivaling the late 1890s and the early 1900s, just before Theodore Roosevelt became president, when just a few people in America controlled about 85% of the wealth, and the majority of the Americans were barely getting by. And we’re about there now. And the subpar educational achievement of our students, where they will not be able to get a good job, is only adding to this wealth gap, which between rich and poor, which will shrink a vibrant middle class to a nothing class. I’ve said time and time again on this program that you can study world history as a struggle between the elite, we’ll call it royalty, and the middle class, the business class, the people who historically ran the butcher shops, were the carpenters, were the masons. They were the people who baked the bread or sold the goods in their stores. That was the middle class. And when you went into the dark ages, for example, in the Middle Ages after the fall of Rome, there was no middle class.

All the lords that owned the castles, owned all the bakeries, all the butcher shops, and they had their serfs, almost their peon slaves, really, doing all the work for next to nothing. And so you had like, you’re going to Haiti today, you have the ultra, ultra rich, and you have the ultra, ultra poor. There is no middle class. Well, in America today, the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, and we are seeing the decline of the middle class. A Pew Research poll talking about the middle class and middle income recently found that the vital group called the middle class, or the upper middle class, I should say, shrunk from 61% of all households in 1971 to under 50% today, and that was in 2021. And I believe it’s much lower today in 2025.Although a net increase in upper income households accounted for most of this net decline of the middle class, the latter are still bringing in a disproportionate amount of total income, national income, to the middle class, down from 62% to just 42% of the income in 2021. Think about that. 62% of all the money earned in the 1970s, or 1971, I should say, went to the middle, what we call the middle class, and today that’s down to 42%.

Who’s are the rest? Well, it’s the ultra, ultra rich, and it’s the ultra, ultra poor. We are becoming a third world nation, but we don’t want to admit it. Yes, the people now on the left want to admit it because their guy’s not in. When Biden was in, when Obama was in, they were trying to say, oh, the economy’s great. The economy’s great, even though everybody’s barely getting by, living from paycheck to paycheck. But now that Trump’s in, now the left says, oh, we’re at the verge of being Haiti, and the mega right saying, oh, no, we’re the greatest country in the world, we have no poverty, anybody collecting welfare is just lazy. And the truth, my friends, lies in between, and that’s a problem. I’m going to read something to you, a statistic, on my desk here, as Rush Limbaugh would say, his formerly nicotine-stained hands, but I don’t have nicotine-stained hands. But anyway, the extent of poverty across what we call the modern Western nations will, in my opinion, or should, in my opinion, surprise the heck out of all of us, and especially those way on the mega side who think that the whole world needs to run over out of the borders to America, because we are the best economy in the world, we’re the best place to live in the world, we have the best wealth opportunities in the world.

Okay, the country of the top Western countries with the lowest poverty rate is Iceland, and their overall poverty rate is 5.4% of the population, and the children living in poverty are 5.8% of the population. Next is Denmark, it’s about the same, with only 2.9% of their children in poverty. Finland is third at 6%. France is fourth, you know that France that we think is so comical sometimes. Netherlands is fifth, Norway is sixth, Switzerland is seventh, Sweden is eighth, and that’s still 9% poverty, that’s almost 10% of the population live below the poverty level. Belgium is 10%, Austria is 10%, Ireland’s 10%, Hungary’s 10%, Poland’s 10%, Germany’s 10%, New Zealand’s 10%, Luxembourg is 11%, the United Kingdom is 11%, Australia is 11%, Canada is 12%. Pretty high, you think, huh? We haven’t gone to America yet. Portugal’s 12%, Italy is 13.7%, Greece is 14%, Japan is 15%, and we all know Japan’s had a hard 40 years ever since Reagan time. Japan’s never recovered. China has really done Japan in economically, and it’s going to be interesting how Japan eventually gets out of this dilemma, because they will, if you understand history. Mexico, the poverty rate of Mexico is 16.6%. The people running over the border to America have a 16% poverty rate. Korea is seven, this is South Korea, is 17.4%. The United States of America’s poverty is 18%, 17.8%, rounded off to 18%. The average of all the 25 countries other than America, if you take America out of the averaging, the average of the 25 other countries’ poverty rate is 10%.

We are almost double that at 17.8%, I would say 18%, and this was from 2020. I’m sorry, yeah, from 2020. So United States leads the Western world in poverty, and I got news for you. All you got to do is drive around any town. Any town you want to go to, you’re going to see very nice-looking homes, and right next to it, you’re going to see abject poverty. I never forgot about eight years ago when we first took Auto Train to Florida to our new warehouse that we were opening up. We like to take Auto Train, and we were riding the train, and you leave at four o’clock at night in Virginia, and you get about nine o’clock in the next morning in Sanford, so you ride overnight, and you sleep for most of the trip, but I never forgot. My wife and I opened the windows at about seven o’clock in the morning coming into Sanford, but we were going through a patch of Florida, which all tree farms and truck farms and vegetable farms, and we were seeing some of the most horrible-looking shacks you have ever seen in your life with chickens on the deck and goats and sheep sitting up there on the porch, and it reminded you of a place in Haiti, and these were the farm workers working in those fields going through northern Florida in the United States of America, something that I don’t believe anybody would ever imagine is a part of this country. You don’t see it from any road.

The trains go through the harp sometimes of where no one ever sees from a road. It goes through places that only a train would see, and only the people on Amtrak would see that, but that is how abject poverty is taking over America. I got news for you, friends. If you are a country under God, and you are following God’s ways and God’s methods of success, there is no poverty in God’s world. America has always had some poverty, but for the most part, when America booms, poverty goes away, and this is not what’s happening today. We find that the United States rates of poverty are higher and more extreme than found in the 25 western modern nations of the world. It’s just unbelievable, and when you look at the poverty rates of the children, it even gets worse, because 20 percent of Americans’ children, 17.8 percent of Americans live in poverty, but 21 percent of America’s children live in poverty, and if that doesn’t bother you, I don’t know what else. The last thing I want to talk about the decline of America is the decline of patriotism and the decline of Americans who love America, and I’m not talking about MAGA people on the right who say they love America, but they stand for things that are just not American. If you stand for some of the things going on where you do not obey court orders, or you do not obey the Supreme Court, or you are acting sometimes like a fascist government, you’re not American.

You are a fascist, and I think many people in the MAGA movement, when they are in charge, they want to do the same things to the opposition that the opposition did to them. Joe Biden illegally withheld the Bill of Rights from American citizens that were arrested on January 6th, when they did nothing wrong but do their constitutional right of protesting and marching and showing resistance to what they thought, and I think to this day, was an illegally stolen election, and they lost their constitutional rights, they were held in prison without a lawyer, they did not have the right to habeas corpus. Now guess who wants to do away with the right for habeas corpus? Our president today. What difference? So when we’re in charge, we’re going to do what the Democrats did, but when the Democrats were in charge, it was an impeachable offense. Biden should have been removed for all of these illegal things he was doing to the January 6th people, but we’re going to do the same thing back. This is the problem, and this is killing patriotism in America. You know, there’s a verse in the Bible, my brother likes to talk to me about it a lot, and every time I read it, I think this is the fate of America. Think about this. You find this in Ezekiel chapter 7, 14.

It’s around the Easter time, the Easter post in Ezekiel, but anyway, verse 14, the trumpet calls Israel’s army to mobilize, but no one listens, and no one shows up. Yes, there’s going to be a day coming, and I think it’s going to happen, I didn’t think so before, I think it’s going to happen in our lifetime, in my lifetime, and I’m 70, that we’re going to call for a big war, maybe against Russia, maybe against China, maybe against somebody else, and you’re not going to find an American willing to fight, because America has lost not only of its will to work, it’s lost its will to stand up for patriotism, and for this flag, and for this country, because for the most part, the people feel betrayed by this country, and by our leaders, and our leaders have betrayed us. The loss of American identity and patriotism, that was the once great American melting pot, has all melted into gum, it’s melted into a sewer, and we are no longer American first, we are Spanish first, we are Italians first, we are Black first, we are not Americans first, and it’s becoming worse and worse, and there will be a day, there will be another type of Vietnam war, that no one is going to want to go to, and when the leaders of this country call for a war, no one’s going to show up, and the Bible predicts it, and it’s predicting it, I’m sorry, predicting it against America.

Remember, Ezekiel is the prophet for Israel, not for Judah. You read the first chapter of Ezekiel, you see who he’s talking to, he’s being commissioned to talk to the lost tribes of Israel, which were already removed by the time Ezekiel lived. Ezekiel was a Jew, under Babylonian captivity, 150 years earlier, Israel was gone, so how was he a prophet for Israel when they were gone? Because Ezekiel was written for our day and beyond, for the end times, and it’s a warning that Israel would again fall from its mighty weight of power down into the dregs, because we abandoned God and God’s laws and God’s principles. We have become a people who are in rebellion against God. We are in rebellion against God’s laws. Most Christians think the law has been abolished.

Most Christians who want to follow Sunday worship and Easter services and Christmas think that’s Christian, when all anyone has to do is go to any good search engine and type in these holidays and where they came from, and one can readily find out quickly how pagan Americans have become and how God the Father and Jesus Christ are not happy with this country. All you got to do is look at the weather, we’re being destroyed by our weather, we’re being destroyed by our leaders, we’re being destroyed by our lazy people, and we are being destroyed by our economy. And unless we return to God, we beg for God’s forgiveness, and if we as a people to this day pray to God as a people to give this country a second chance, God promises us in his word, if my people who are called by my name turn to me and humble themselves, I will heal their land and forgive their sins.

This is the chance we have, the choice we have. And I’m asking the American people, it’s almost too late, and I think it is too late, but if case enough of us can go to God, maybe it’s not. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today. The one place you go to, theplaintruth.com, to hear what God predicts and what God says. We don’t propagandize what some advertiser is paying us to say. Until tomorrow, Bob Barney saying thank you for listening. Goodbye.