If you want a long term fix, start with the outsourced jobs. We have fewer jobs in this country ever since companies started outsourcing the jobs to China and other countries. This one's easy to fix. "Hey 3M. . .How much money did you save last year by using workers in Taiwan instead of your own country? 700 million? Guess how much your taxes just went up."
Then start actually making shit here again. We have no heavy industry, medium-heavy industry is decimated. . .We don't make anything anymore. We aren't generating wealth, we're just moving theoretical money around in computer systems. That's no way to run an economy.
We've been arguing a lot on whether or not the New Deal brought us out of the depression. The "war saved us" guys do have a point - - we made a bunch of crap for that war. Actually made it. And when the war was over, the factories made other things which were bought by Americans. This one's gonna be different because even if people get money again, a lot of it is gonna go overseas. Want a new TV? Will that be Toshiba, Sony, or Panasonic? Want a new car? Well the only viable choice, especially right now with the US companies in so much trouble, is between Germany or Japan. Maybe Korea if you don't mind burning oil after 50k miles
Hell even our kids toys. . .Even /pencils/ are made in China. We need to get back to making stuff again, as that provides not only things for people to buy, but jobs to give them money to buy it with.
And all this crap about "it's a GLOBAL economy" is bumkus. If it were a true global economy then we wouldn't be able to hire some Chinese guy for 1 cent on the dollar. If it were a true global economy then there wouldn't be any such thing as trade deficits because it would be all one economy. It's not a global economy, that's just the excuse the asshole corporations use to explain why they're employing some 14 year old in Malaysia at slave wages instead of making good jobs available to the people that they want money from.