After narrowly averting economic Armageddon just a few months ago, the United States is now well on the road to recovery, influential voices are saying. “The Recession Is Over,” Newsweektrumpeted on one of its recent covers. The recovery may still feel like a recession, the article qualifies—but we can at least be heartened by the fact that we’ve reached bottom.

Commenting on the “turnaround” at a town hall meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, last week, President Obama added (emphasis mine throughout),

We have stopped the free fall. The market is up and the financial system is no longer on the verge of collapse. … We’re losing jobs at half the rate we were when I took office six months ago. We just saw home prices rise for the first time in three years. So there’s no doubt that things have gotten better. We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recession.

Stratfor’s take, also from last week, painted an even rosier picture, saying we are now “well past the worst of the current recession.”

This week, however, we were again smacked in the face by cold, hard reality. According to the Associated Press, even as President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress spend their way to stratospheric levels of debt, tax receipts are estimated to fall by 18 percent this year—the largest one-year drop since the Great Depression.

“Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago,” ap continued. “Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.”

Think about what these statistics mean. We’re already spending way beyond our means—have been for decades. It’s taken just 200 days for the new president to double last year’s deficit. We are on pace for tacking on another $1.8 trillion in debt this year (not counting the additional debt accumulation disguised as “intragovernmental holdings”). We already owe trillions and trillions of dollars to creditors overseas. Add to that the tens of trillions more we’ve robbed from “trust” funds, like Social Security and Medicare.

Now federal tax revenues are plummeting. No wonder it’s taken just six months for President Obama to backpedal from his campaign guarantee that 95 percent of Americans would “not see their taxes increase by a single dime.”

Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the president’s chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, both hinted at tax hikes for the middle class.

Not surprisingly, critics of the new administration howled in protest, which prompted White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to rise in defense of Mr. Obama: “I am reiterating the president’s clear commitment in the clearest terms possible that he’s not raising taxes on those who make less than $250,000 a year.”

What once was a campaign guarantee is now a commitment that will soon become a broken promise. And a broken promise like that, as President Bush the elder learned in 1992, can derail an incumbent’s bid for reelection.

But with America’s economy still perilously close to the edge of disaster, raising taxes across the board is now being considered as a last resort.

“There is no way we can pay for health care and the rest of the Obama agenda, plus get our long-term deficits under control, simply by raising taxes on the wealthy,” a former Clinton administration official told the New York Times. “The middle class is going to have to contribute as well.”

If only it were that easy! In actual fact, heavier tax burdens on the wealthy, the poor—and everyone in between—will not bail us out of the bottomless pit we are in. Sure—we may still muddle our way through a few momentary “upturns”—prompting pundits who were blindsided by last year’s downturn to then boldly proclaim that we’ve reached the bottom—we’ve survived the worst of it!

Sadly, as volumes of history books confirm, the worst is yet to come. Our addiction to credit, our skyrocketing deficits, out-of-control and horribly wasteful spending, mass-printing of paper money, runaway inflation, crushing taxation, ever expanding, strength-sapping welfare programs—these are all curses that will result in economic ruin.

Never mind what some “experts” say. Bankruptcy is inevitable. The handwriting is all over the wall.

It’s also prophesied!

Nearly a half century ago, in his mass-distribution classic The United States and Britain in Prophecy (request your free copy), Herbert W. Armstrong described the skyrocketing rise to power of our people, which resulted in the accumulation of stupendous wealth, as being one of the most amazing facts of all history. And all of it was recorded well in advance of its actual occurrence—right there in the pages of your own Bible!

“More amazing still,” he wrote, “are the unbelievably shocking facts of the present—of how—and why—we are losing it faster than it came!”

He wrote that during the 1960s. The sobering and shocking facts of today make that prescient forecast more amazing still!