Everything is still working. The people want to work. Their skills, machines, buildings, land, systems, knowledge, networks, etc. haven't gone anywhere. The only thing stopping everyone from working is pieces of fancy paper (or shiny stones, if you are a gold bug). The only thing that will get us all back to work is a stimulus-on-steroids, not the watered down failures the banks, capitalists, and Obusha's controllers have offered.
If you need more, do you work less? While a balanced budget in the long run is sound, cutting back on spending means fewer people working, not more. It will make the budget impossible to balance, not easier.
The Bankers cannot get us out of this. If they lent to failing businesses to stimulate the economy, they would go broke again. It is not in bank's nature to stimulate -- they can only facilitate. Besides, businesses don't borrow to expand or hire people when sales are stagnant or just starting to rise. For instance, Fed-Ex's profit and sales are expanding greatly, but they are still cutting 1600 jobs! The gold standard can't stimulate the economy. Only government funded, paper money stimuli can do that!
Obusha's $50 billion mass transit-infrastructure proposal is laughable, chump change -- less than a month's expenditures on our perpetual oil wars, only about two months worth of automobile sales! Oil gets more than that a year in tax breaks, much more if you count military support to protect its sources and transport. The automobile's economics and convenience are long gone.
In 2002 Argentina defaulted, declared its foreign debts void, froze the banks, and cut off IMF funding. It's been the fastest-growing economy in South America which is booming.
The Republicans and Libertarians kept us in the first great depression when they hindered Roosevelt's stimuli as they are doing now. Yet watered down as the stimuli they let pass were, Roosevelt's infrastructure programs created millions of jobs and middle class businesses that paid big dividends to the country and big tax revenues to the government; not under taxed, billion dollar bonuses to fat cats.
If Roosevelt had been allowed to really ramp up the US economy and therefore lift the world economy out of depression, perhaps WWII could have been avoided. That great depression tag-teamed with the British and French imposed hyperinflation on Germany to create Hitler. Racism always rises during economic depressions.
While we have nothing to gain in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, we are losing everything at home. Both parties heartily support flooding the wars with dollars while cutting domestic spending as our transportation and utility infrastructure crumbles.
We have been betrayed by our bankers and politicians. Our politicians "retire" from public life to work as lobbyists for the companies and countries they "regulated". This is merely delayed bribery. No government official or members of his/her family should be allowed to work for those they regulated, ever.
The FED has failed again and again. If they really did their job, we would have much milder recessions, much milder booms and they would not have created this, the second great depression. Moreover, a house divided must fall: monetary control is divided between the treasury and the FED. One is now blaming the other since neither controls the whole. The FED should be dissolved and, as the constitution commands, the treasury department should control the money supply. Why are we paying the FED interest? They just create the money by printing it. They did not earn or make it anywhere. All they do is set interest rates. Greenspan now claims he was unduly influenced by the Congress?! If so, the FED is useless. If not so, we don't have democracy: we have an oligarchy run by the bankers. As Nathan Rothschild so aptly put it, "I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England ... The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply."
Our debt problem is also the result of predatory practices by China, Japan, Germany, Iran, et. al. These loan sharks, enablers, manipulated the markets to keep the dollar high so their products seem cheap. The debt cannot be repaid. It must be "restructured", i.e., written down and reasonable payments set. A rational compromise is that these market manipulators must use our treasury instruments to buy American goods and services. They must be prevented from using them to buy rights and properties, intellectual or real. They should be paid no interest. This is a small fine compared to their predatory profits.
