It's just a question if when, not if.......
There WILL be another economic meltdown and this budget puts taxpayers on the hook for the losses. And to pay for those losses, all the money government takes in will be needed to bail out the banks, bankers, and the capitalist system. Which means that what's left of domestic programs will be cut and probably cut out all together. Except this time it won't be just programs for the poor that are cut too. There's no money left there to cut, so this time the money will come from the so-called "middle class" programs and, of course, social security because that's where the money is.
The actual question is what will we do about it?
= new reply since forum marked as read
not a bug. So that a new downturn is coming is not a prodigious feat of clairvoyance. 
But the banks "...go to Las Vegas" because there's more profit in reinvesting their stockpile of cash in the Wall Street casino than they do even in cars and houses or ANY of the other productive sectors of the economy.
I hope I understood your point. I admit I was a little confused.
Here's the real bitch: It's not going to change, not for a long time. Let me break this down:
FACT 1: 19% of the plebs think the sun orbits the earth. In other words, a fifth of the electorate are dumb as dirt (and yes, the UK population is just as bad, that's missing the point).
FACT 2: Your media is entirely corporate which means conservative and conservative which means corporate.
FACT 3: Humans are instinctively obedient (Milgram), instinctively conformist (Asche) and will believe fucking *anything* if they hear it enough times (too many researchers to list).
Combine 2 & 3 and much, maybe most, of your population have been brainwashed to believe that a wussy moderate like Obama is the reincarnation of Stalin. Media power is EVERYTHING. The Signal is all around us, everywhere and all-pervasive. It is on your tablets, on your cellphones, on your watches and eyeglasses within the next few years; it is time, it is money, it is the air we breathe and the water we drink. The Signal is fucking GOD. That's how powerful it is. Control the media and you can do ANYTHING and I mean that as an absolute term. Cheney could get pulled over tonight with a dead hooker in his trunk (and, straight-up, no exaggeration in the slightest, I am fucking expecting them to find dead kids in his yard when he dies. No word of a lie) and if it doesn't get airtime, it didn't fucking happen. Conversely, Dennis Kucinich said he saw a UFO. Literally. He said he saw something in the sky that he could not readily identify, that's exactly what he said and the definition of a UFO. Within two hours, the story was that Kucinich believed in little green men.
FACT 4: Conservatives have abused the Congressional rules to give them a minority veto over everything which they will abolish teh very second they're in power and reinstate in a lame duck session when they're going out of power.
FACT 5: Conservatives own the SCOTUS. They have a tame group of five judges who make their opinions purely on political grounds and barely even bother hiding it.
FACT 6: Conservatives have gerrymandered the living shit out of the map to give themselves safe seats, enacted voter "fraud" legislation to prevent likely Democrats from voting (so blatant, I'm amazed they don't just say "you cannot vote if you are a Democrat"
and got everyone using unverifiable voting machines (I worked in IT for ten years, it takes more effort to make teh fucking things unverifiable than it does to make them accountable. I'm not saying they used it to steal an election, I'm saying they could).
Add those three facts together and you get plebs who will either vote for conservatives or their vote will simply not count and The Signal will not tell you about it. And even if it did...
FACT 7: (Look at me, preaching a fucking sermon here) There will be no revolt. The revolution will not be televised because the revolution will not fucking happen. Because The Signal feeds you bullshit. It's lulled you to sleep with American Idol and woken you up to Morning Joe. Bread and circuses, man, bread and circuses. Built the Roman Empire, bread and circuses did. Except system's more efficient now. Can't have the state provide you with bread and circuses, that would be too much like *gasp* socialism. You have to work and buy your own bread and circuses.
FACT 8: Don't think I'm being fucking snobby here. I'm a pleb, just like the rest. I use Facebook. Being disabled and crazy, it's my only window on the outside world. I love wrestling almost as much as I love Father Lucifer and for a good deal longer. I have a Kindle, an Amazon account, I shop at Tesco. I'm as much a puppet of The Signal as anyone else. Only difference is that I can see the strings.
FACT 9: The ultimate aim of the corporate PtB is to have a population so desperate, so *broken*, that they will work for pennies, or a meal, or a dosshouse bed for the night. I'm a Ripperologist (someone who studies the crimes of Jack the Ripper) and being in any way serious about that, you have to know quite a lot about Victorian London. Here is my favorite piece of trivia about Victorian London: The price of sex with a prostitute, 4d, was the exact price of a light meal, a shot of gin or a dosshouse bed for the night. I love that piece of trivia because it shows you, in a very real way, the connection between commerce and your very fucking survival (and also patriarchy, these women were not in a good place but that's a whole 'nother sermon). That's their endgame, man. To have you so desperate and with so few options that you'll work for pennies, or a meal, or a bed for the night. And if you can't find a job, they'll send you to the workhouse, rent you out as slave labour in exchange for your dole. When you're too old or broken down to work, fuck you, you're out on the street or Soylent Green. If you protest, they'll ignore you and if enough of you protest, they'll send in the police or the army. And if you don't want it, fuck you, there's millions desperate enough to take it. That's what their ultimate aim is, always has been. And the Republicans (and not all but too many Dems) are their political arm just as the SCOTUS is their legal arm. And too many of the plebs have forgotten or never learned, why you need unions.
FACT 10: Last one, I promise. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. History, economic history anyway, runs in cycles. Times and technology change but it goes the same way every time. The rich exploit teh rules, gobble up too much cash and crash the system. The plebs protest, demand some protections. Government puts in (water down versions of) those protections. And then all the people who remember the last crash start dying off and the corporate PtB start eroding those protections until eventually, they go too far, they crash the system and the whole cycle starts again. It's what happened with the Dutch tulip mania, it's what caused the fucking American Revolution (the original dispute that triggered the whole thing was because the Crown cut taxes on tea imported by the original megacorporation, the East India Trading Company). It's not a coincidence that the idea that the poor are poor because of their own faults; that being rich is a duty and if you aren't, you didn't try hard enough; that you shouldn't tax the rich because they're "job creators". All of these ideas were incredibly popular in the years leading up to the Crash of '29. And then, just as everyone who remembered that started dying off in droves, along come a bunch of rich fucks and brainwashed plebs who think they don't need no fucking rules and they start eroding the protections. All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.
It's not going to change. Not until the end of scarcity (which is possible right fucking *now*), or the end of the class system or patriarchy or The Singularity. It's not going to change. The best you can do, the only thing you can do (save for suggestions that would, rightly, get this post pulled by Facebook) is mitigate the damage, ease the pain just a little. That's all that can be done for now.
Here endeth the lesson. Peace with you.
