Larry Beinhart on how we got into this economic mess and how we’re stuck there:

The real estate bubble is now routinely described as the root of our current economic problems.

That’s not true. It’s merely a symptom.

The problem is that the government, the nation, and the individuals in our country have all taken on massive amounts of new debt. Without investing it anything productive. Even our conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq are not profitable (except for specific war profiteers), they are drains, endlessly creating more debts. Debts which are, bizarrely, kept off the books the way Enron used to do it, or more pertinently, the way George Bush used to do it when he was at Harken Energy.

This is quite accurately reflected in the fall of the dollar against such currencies as the Euro. The dollar is now worth one third less than it was in 2001, pretty much the size of the bubble, one third of the economy.

It is also the primary cause of half of the increase in the price of oil. Since oil is priced in dollars, oil producers have had to raise their prices by fifty percent just to keep even. As our energy policy has been to just keep using oil, that makes the problem self-perpetuating, sending more and more money out of the country.

Here’s another statistic to make things scarier still: Amount more Americans earned than spent in 2001: +2.3 percent Amount less Americans are earning than spending in 2008: -0.5 percent (State of the Union 2008: By the Numbers, Reuters, 1/28/2008 the source of many of the statistics included here.) The beat goes on.

The solutions that have been proposed so far are more of what has created the problem.