The only source of real wealth is having your people making stuff and having them buy it with the money they earned doing it. If you can sell your surplus production overseas that's even better. The present decline we're seeing in the American economy is due entrirely to business's failure to appreciate this (or its deliberate attempt to avoid it).

The new business model is retooling itself to rack up short term gains by transforming the economy into a mechanism to get other people to make stuff and having our people buy it with borrowed money. Businesses are now more concerned with selling paper, or the digital equivalent of paper, to each other than with the actual production of goods and services.

This is not something we can blame on the Reds, Clinton, liberals or even conservatives. This is simply how business has evolved in a post-industrial world. Like all self-regulating systems, it occasionally has the tendency to become destructively unstable.