Last 21 months? Did you forget about the 96 months prior to that during which our budget surplus was squandered and more of our nation's wealth was transferred into the hands of our wealthiest 5%?
-- Paul Krugman (2008 Nobel Prize, Economics) 12/22/06
Don't be fooled into thinking that the millionaires and billionaires (including corporations which, thanks to our current Supreme Court, are legally treated as people more than ever before) who are financing the "conservative" propaganda campaign have your best interests at heart.
The Democratic Party helped the Republican Party to create the mess we're in--all of their candidates take campaign money from wealthy donors just like the Republican candidates do--and that's probably why this crisis has been addressed with only half-measures; our "representatives" don't want to bite the hands that feed them. Even the millionaires and billionaires will suffer if our economy completely tanks so Washington has put it on a kind of life-support that perpetuates, if not accelerates, the long-standing wealth transfer instead of actually fixing the underlying problems.
Where I live, a lot of people have lost their homes to foreclosure and when I try to buy one with a mortgage loan it gets sold to someone who can afford to make an all-cash offer instead. This has happened to me twice already and it will probably happen again. If HUD had repossessed those properties, families wishing to live in them would've been given the first crack but our government has placed no such restriction on the banks that our tax money has bailed out. The housing meltdown could have been a situation where homes were transferred from families who couldn't afford them to families who could but instead it has turned into a transfer of real estate wealth from the middle class to the rich. Middle-class families who rent have no home equity with which to finance training or education for their children so their children will either be strapped with school loans before their careers have even started or they'll have low-paying, unskilled jobs.
The Tea Party has it all wrong; the next revolution in this country isn't going to look like the American Revolution, it's going to look like the French Revolution.