Not to mention unsustainable levels of debt and a severely reduced (offshored) manufacturing base. And energy costs reaching for the sky. And an inevitable real estate readjustment. The time for a massive, Manhattan Project-sized initiative towards energy independence is long passed. The tragedy is that the funds have been squandered on a whimsical and useless war. We're reaching a point where the only faint hope would come from a Russian Revolution-sized redistribution of wealth, with corporate and exexutive profits seized and redirected. Which would of course bring its own problems. In a word, we're fucked. The credit card funded jamboree that the '80s started is officially over, the bill is due, and this whole country (and by extension, the whole world) is about to wake up with a really really really bad hangover. Colossal, colossal mismanagement. And we're all, to varying extents, complicit.