The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.
So says Business Insider, and they show 15 graphs to support it. Granted, this is not entirely a balanced view; the two distribution-of-wealth pie charts show that almost the entirety of wealth in the US is held by the upper 50% of the population, and a third of it by the top 1%, with a similar (and unsurprising) imbalance in stocks-and-bonds ownership, but neglects to mention that the same 50% of the population also shoulders essentially the entire Federal tax burden, with the top 1% paying 25% of it.
Also follow the links to this article about how the American middle class is being systematically wiped out, a process which is only being accelerated by US Government policies that are making it an act of foolhardy stupidity for US corporations not to relocate as much as possible of their operations offshore, and this article which asserts that it really makes very little difference whether the Bush-II tax cuts are extended or not because it's already m according to the author — mathematically impossible for even the existing Federal debt to ever be paid off.
If you took every dollar out of every single wallet, out of every single mattress and out of every single U.S. bank and sent it to the government you wouldn't even make that big of a dent in the national debt.
So can't the U.S. government just go out and create more money and solve the problem?
No.
You see, under our system the creation of more money is also the creation of more debt.
You should probably follow on from there to this article about how the US monetary system really works, too.
I see only one way out of this for the United States, and that is for the people of the United States to first fire the entire present government of the United States, and then repudiate the debts of that government. Of course, this would almost certainly precipitate a global financial crisis (yes, another one). But, honestly, so would the other option, which is to continue on this path until the US goes bankrupt. That course would put the crash off for a while, at the cost of it being even worse when it eventually comes.
Frankly, the entire world needs to open its eyes and see that the investment banking industry has spent at least the last thirty years building a house of cards out of imaginary cards, having agreed among themselves to pretend that the cards are real, and laughing all the way to their offshore banks with the profits. They have turned the banking industry into a way to siphon wealth out of the global economy without putting any corresponding value back.