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jobs are the by-product of business, not the goal of business.
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This is the thinking that will assure an extended period of poverty for the US.
Forget all of the convoluted economic theories that we have developed and propagated to justify unethical behaviour. Keynes, Maynard, Say, Marx, Mao, Greenspan et al. have served up various essays on how, why and therefores.
In the end we all want the same thing - male, female, black, white, religious, pagan, straight, gay, able-bodied, disabled, whatever....
We want to live in a secure society with enough food to eat, a roof over our head and opportunity for our children to do the same.
In this, we are no different from plants and animals. They exist to propagate.
The thing that does differentiate us is that we have the potential to recognise these desires in others, and to accomodate them while concurrently achieving the goals ourselves.
Where plants will strangle each other without thought in order to assure their own survival, and where animals - although they may work in herds and packs to achieve their own goals - will do the same, we have the opportunity through the capacity of conscious thought to survive ourselves without destroying others.
It is entirely possible have enough for ourselves while allowing the same dignity to others. It is not possible to acquire an obscene excess of wealth without engendering an immoral degree of poverty in others whose work went to generate that wealth.
I have watched quite a few businesses expire over the last 18 months. One thing that they all had in common was a lack of respect for the employees and the customers who actually made the businesses work, and an idiotic belief that "efficient" management would obviate the need for those employees. So the workers went, the customers followed quickly and the "efficient" managers are unemployable.
I also see a lot of other companies like the ones that we have tried to be - where employees and the knowledge they have are recognised as the most valuable resource a business has. Not a lot of us going under right now. Things are tighter to be sure and there's not a lot of cash to go around but we'll survive and pick up some extra business as others go by the wayside.
At this point, it makes no difference what President Obama does, the US economy is no longer the most important one on the globe. You are facing a very difficult couple of decades, followed by another five or ten decades of evolution.
In the end, if things go well for you, you will end up like the Portugal an earlier poster disparaged above, or any one of hundreds of other politically stable, somewhat socialist yet productive economies where the incredibly wealthy and the incredibly poor are statistical anomalies rather than identifiable sectors of the society.
Unfortunately, you've been indoctrinated over the last sixty years to believe that "socialism" is an evil thing - interchangeable with "communism" and an anti-American credo. The folks who made sure you were spoon-fed this crap are the ones who stood to benefit most from your continued unenlightenment. The rise of the "conservative values" movement follows the same timeline as the rise in the average compensation of a corporate CEO in your country, and the rise in the number of medically uninsured citizens.
There will be an inordinate amount of ranting and wailing on your parts I am sure, and the recovery is not really going to get going until there has been actual generational change, but if you work hard, save your money and keeep smiling you'll wind up in a better place.
In the meantime...your debt is just getting too big. You are no longer producing enough to pay it off and your credit is going to get cut off soon (the late fall). The continued erection of trade barriers is going to guarantee it.
Your dollar is going to fall pretty substantially. You don't want to be in the stock market or even in cash at that point. Land is good as "they aren't making any more of it". Gold should be good. Oil is dying an acccelerating death but will still be valuable for another 15 years or so...
Probably best just to hunker down and hope - may be a good time to sell and go cruising.
As a matter of fact, the conditions that could start World War III seem to be boiling up but let's hope that doesn't happen huh ??