steady erosion of our manufacturing base, elimination of millions of skilled industrial jobs, creation of a crushing burden of household ... debt

09/15/07 | Economic Crisis: The U.S. Political Leadership Has Failed | Richard C. Cook
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But he was wrong in thinking that the solution was deregulation of the economy, particularly deregulation of financial and investment institutions which took place during his two terms. The result was enormous growth in the power and influence of Wall Street and the big banks over the rest of the economy. The era of leveraged mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts was the predecessor of the disaster of today with the unfolding fiasco of equity, hedge, and derivative funds in the process of collapse.

After Reagan came President George H.W. Bush. By the end of his term, the loss of manufacturing jobs had produced another recession. Within a couple of years of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, action by Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin to strengthen the dollar attracted enough foreign investment to create the dot.com bubble.
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Our political leadership has let us down in the following critical respects:

... This system, with interest rates much higher, on average, than during previous decades, has been catastrophic for the U.S. economy. It has enriched the financial industry at the expense of everyone else through what can only be called institutionalized usury. Under this system, every period of economic growth since 1983 has been a bank-created bubble, while the general population has become steadily poorer. The Federal Reserve claims that it raises interest rates to reduce inflation, when in fact higher interest rates cause inflation by making every transaction more expensive. Under the reign of monetarism, the U.S. dollar has lost over eighty percent of its value. In fact, government policies are designed to generate inflation, because this makes it cheaper to pay down the national debt and while augmenting tax revenues.

It has been well-documented that since the early 1980s the federal government has acquiesced in every respect to economic policies that have resulted in the steady erosion of our manufacturing base, elimination of millions of skilled industrial jobs, creation of a crushing burden of household and individual debt, crumbling of our physical infrastructure, privatization or elimination of public services, failure to meet such crises as the Katrina disaster, export of jobs to low-cost foreign labor markets, unfair distribution of taxation, and toleration of the influx of millions of illegal aliens who keep wages low within the domestic economy.
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These wars are being paid for by sale of Treasury bonds to possible future adversaries such as China, while the U.S. bubble economy that is backing up our military forces overseas is deflating. Clearly something has to give, either through exhaustion of our military capability abroad, economic collapse at home, or the catastrophe of a world war. The denouement seems to be drawing closer as foreign governments dump their U.S. dollars which are declining in value due to the twin trade and fiscal deficits. What our leaders should now be doing is recognize the fact that we live in a multilateral world where conflicts can only be resolved by nations acting as equals under the umbrella of the U.N. ...