You're saying that about a decade ago, a bubble started to grow.
A housing bubble caused by rich people getting richer by selling crap mortgages, crap mortgages they knew were crap mortgages, and other stinky financial instruments, correct?
Housing prices skyrocketed, doubled in many cases, and you could smell a problem. You especially, but other analysts too. Meanwhile the people with the power and responsibility to do something about it, like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, did nothing. Millionaires looked the other way while millionaires made more millions.
And the bubble grew. It got big, real big, like 8-trillion-clams big.
And it did what bubbles do: it burst, and sent the economy into the crapper. Or a ditch.
If I'm reading you correctly, it's not quite true that the GOP drove the economy into a ditch; financiers did. Sure, the economy has longstanding deep problems -- inequality and declining wages chief among them -- but the direct cause of our current clusterfuck is the greedcorruptioncriminalitynegligence of the rich people who crashed the economy.
And along with the Bush tax cuts (which both parties just extended), the depression is the biggest cause of of the deficit. When the economy sucks, the government loses tax dollars and spends extra billions on unemployment benefits. Contrary to the claim of the serious set, we don't have a spending problem. We have a crappy economy problem.
But pols are pushing the lie that we have an out-of-control spending problem to advance their agenda. Which is to cut government programs, including Medicare and Social Security. Social Security, which has nothing do with the deficits.
As for our long-term debt, that's driven by exploding health care costs. We don't have a debt problem; we have a health care problem. A health care problem that could best be addressed by creating a cost-effective, un-corporate, and humane health care system. Like Medicare for All. But that's not on the table. It's not even in the house.
Something else not in the house: any measure that might nick those who enriched themselves as they crashed the economy. A measure like a tax on financial speculation, which exists in England. Even a modest tax on financial speculation could help protect the economy from Wall Street and raise, oh, $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But we can't even talk about that.
No, no, no, no, the people who must feel the pain in these United Banks of America are those who are already suffering because of the dirty deeds of millionaires and billionaires, Millionaires and billionaires who've built an all-but-indestructible heads-they-win-tails-we-lose system.
To recap, rich people got richer as they crashed the economy and, in some cases, their own companies -- they failed. And the millionaires in DC, who'd looked the other way while their once-and-future colleagues crashed the economy, opened up the United States Treasury to them. Take what you need, friends! As for the rest you, well, sorry, the money's just not there. Because we have a out-of-control spending problem!
Did I get that about right, sir? Now maybe you, or someone else, could explain to me why we're not all marching nonstop in the streets.
