Let's take a look at Obamanomics...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-16/obamas-recovery-just-9-charts

and if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you..... but idiot liberals like lard ass okie bill and woodturd think everything is well... GAG

I think the point you wish to make is that when govt gets involved the price of whatever the new govt involvement is in necessarily rises. It's a very democratic idea; use someone else's money to eventually prop your own self up (Yes.  I meant to write it that way.).  One can argue whether as a nation our citizens began backdating personal checks to cut corners and fund their slim margin purchases thereby influencing our representatives to do the same or vice versa.  It doesn't matter.  Excuses never solve problems.

Prior to and during my youth the two American generations ahead of me (I'm a center gen x'er) began accepting debt as a normal financial condition.  Thankfully, I'm also the son of immigrants who had wealth and lost it in their former homeland.  So their attitude toward financial rebirth was close to the heart and their willingness to do whatever it took to recoup their losses meant they would be willing to do just about anything so long as it was ethical and legal.  To the point they left their ancestral homeland to accomplish it.

War disrupts economies.  Even for the winning side but this is hardly ever discussed with any insight.  War disrupts people's thinking.  Their attitudes.  It takes a great deal of introspective contemplation to notice how war changes one's buying habits.  How war changes mindsets.

There's always a sense of, well if they can do it then I can do it too.  Sometimes we substitute the word should for can, but the outcome is the same.  Herd mentality come success or failure.  The idea being, I suppose, that in the case of failure one is not alone.  But failure is failure.  Excuses never solve problems.

We have this rose colored memory of once being a hardy nation of individualists, but stop and think about this; books written about hardy individualists from bygone eras wouldn't sell if everyone had been that type of person.  They would not have been written in the first place, during the times when these things were actually occurring if such attitudes pervaded the populace.  It would have been too commonplace.  Who would bother to read stories about the same things your parents and aunts and uncles did as a matter of course?

The Grapes of Wrath.  Noble souls taking the harder road out of a deep sense of principle, or people abandoning their losses in order to regain the way of life nature's random course had swept from them?

The lesson is hard and uncaring.  Either save to your greatest extent and protect your wealth or suffer loss beyond what you can afford.  Even so, what wealth one saves may still not be enough when the hard times come.  And they always come.

Countries, like families, always go through periods of mismanagement.  Financial and otherwise.  Most importantly, just because others are doing it, whether the nation you live in or the family in whom you are a member, you have an obligation to both the family you represent (whether you like it or not) and the nation under whose laws you live, not to be a burden to anyone else.  Any reason you offer otherwise is merely an excuse.  And excuses don't solve problems.


Harv