Wrapping our minds around the changes

I'm mostly going to speak here about world financial changes and the U.S. and how it relates to it in layman's terms. I'm not an economist, just a logical commonsensical person trying to make sense of it all

First let's go back a ways to try to get a full grasp of it:

We were a creditor nation(people owed us a lot of money) from World War II until the middle of the Viet Nam War. At which point we became a debtor nation and have been a debtor nation ever since. However, politicians in the U.S. never stopped acting like it was the 1950s to about 1969 when we started to really become a debtor nation(owing lots of money to other nations nationally).

So, as a result of the Viet Nam War we went into a pretty bad recesssion starting with the Arab Oil Embargo and people were in long lines all across the United STates and fighting each other for gas and diesel nationwide. This led into a recession and high unemployment. To my way of thinking looking back at it, it was pretty rough from 1973 off and on until Clinton was elected in 1992 for most people in the United STates except for the very rich and very well educated which tended in many cases to become the rich eventually.

So then we had fairly good prosperity from the fall of the Berlin Wall until 9-11 where it all went to hell and we have been experiencing those various states of economic hell ever since then. This led to our present chaotic financial state when into the mix globalization, subprime failures and lots and lots of private money that came into the United States into the real estate loan market starting in the late 1990s from China, India and Europe mostly.

Also, China has loaned the United States Government 500 billion dollars on top of all the private capital that was put into the subprime market in the U.S. that tanked. If China asked for the 500 billion dollars back one day it would likely start a war between the U.S. and China because we couldn't pay it back even if we wanted to now. This could become a problem now that the people of the United States can't afford to buy the quantity of Chinese goods that they once did. This is causing hundreds of Chinese factories to shut their doors and millions of Chinese are losing their good jobs because of this. There are multiple global negative chain reactions going on. The problem is that most of the world blames the United States for their problems now(at least the financial ones).

Though I don't think this is fair I don't live in these countries. It is just the way they see it there.

If one wanted to set the blame one could easily say it was the FED and the SEC that didn't do their jobs properly and reign in the culprits making subprime loans and being overly greedy. There is definitely blame to go all around the world in this. The greedy all over the world are all to blame for what happened and for what is happening now. This is a much more realistic way to look at it than to just blame America.

However, here we are. How do we survive it all now? The first problem is the concentration of wealth in the United States. If you look at the demographics of wealth in the United States and much of the world right now, too much of the wealth is in the upper 1% of mankind. This causes great imbalances for all mankind. In fact, the ratio of wealth just in the United States is about the same ratio as when the Great Depression began in 1929 in the U.S. One way to spread the wealth then was the Labor Unions. However, organized crime became involved more and more in the labor unions worldwide and has given unions a black eye if not a bad name these days. However, some kind of equalizer must be created now for things to get better again.

In the 1930s FDR created the Civilian Conservation Core that built bridges, Highways, and other public infrastructure that put thousands of people to work so they wouldn't starve to death. It kept people alive and it built our national infrastructure. This might be something we need again, especially as unemployment compensation runs out and there aren't any new jobs for thousands and millions 6 months or so from now. Also, our infrastructure (bridges, highways etc.) are in dire need of repair all over the U.S. so maybe it is time again for this.