I'll answer your question, and let Zdreg supply a completely different answer. The U.S. is a nation of crises. Often not much constructive is done until a crisis arrives at our doorstep. The last crisis was the financial industry threatened collapse. The Fed and Treasury stepped in. It will be a minimum of a generation before total, U.S. economic collapse would occur, even in the worst case. I'm not suggesting that things will be great in the meantime, but total economic collapse, no way. The U.S. has the means to extricate itself from the debt and inflation death spiral it is entering. The only question is whether it has the collective will to do what is necessary. Only three things are essential, but other actions would be very helpful. These three things are: 1) Bring military expenditures into line with those of other industrialized nations. 2) Bring medical spending into line with those of other industrialized nations. 3) Rebuild the middle class. At the moment the first two items are absorbing too much of the total U.S. productivity pie. And the third item is needed because a larger, stronger middle class will cause the total productivity pie to grow. Carrying out item (2) will solve the problem with the medical entitlement program, and at the same time automatically result in a more equitable pie distribution. That will be essential in achieving item (3). The other entitlement programs need only minor tweaking. Once item (1) is taken care of by moving from a war based economy to a peacetime economy via phased in conversion of the defense industry to engineering and production of products useful in building infrastructure, the problem of excessive inflation caused by unfunded wars will be eliminated. A long range. ten or twenty year plan, is needed to achieve these goals without undue upheaval. If you are currently in the bottom half of the middle class and over a several year period your wages very gradually increase to the point that you have caught up with inflation you'll wake someday and think, "life is not so bad after all." And if the surgeon's wages over a similar period continue to increase but at a rate slightly less than inflation he'll remain very well rewarded but with imperceptibly less discretionary purchasing power. His wife may decide she prefers the more nimble C-class Mercedes to the lumbering S-class anyway. This is the way to move in a direction that corrects inequities and unsustainable excesses in the economy without creating class warfare and a bunch of extremely disgruntled citizens. It will take an enlightened Congress, but a good crisis can be very enlightening.
Really nice to see a post on this site that instantly you can see has the power of personal thought behind it, instead of the same old worn out statements being repeated by people who heard other people say them and took them as truth above all else.
Funny I keep reading the same rethoric against "lazy parasites", but I never read them complaining about Greece buying billions of weapons from Germany, or the Greek tax evader farmers buying Porsche Cayennes. D'oh!
Berlusconi: complete nutcase, which makes you wonder how he could ever come up with such ironclad logic. Good bit of comic relief for the day, though.
+1 Anyone who mentions entitlement cuts and tax cuts for Billionaires without mentioning need to cut the out of control military spending needs some good sense beaten into his comatose brain.