That is a very bold assumption on your part.
My yardstick is my family. And I've been poor. We spent myself my wife and our four children spent six months living out of my truck. Now we run a thriving and growing business that will hopefully continue on in my family long after I'm gone. Again I'll say. Most of yall have no clue what it takes to be successful.
Wrong, take your blinders off. We are not ALL so dumb as you paint us. Your problem is that you are in an Economics Forum, and really out of your depth.
You cannot imagine - when the "fit hits the shan" economically - that the nation
must be prepared to restore the economy by tried and true
economic measures.
And yet, consider these historic facts (what actually happened in our economy as of 2008):
*After Dubya had gifted Obama the Great Recession, Obama stopped-dead an exploding unemployment rate at 10% by means of s
timulus-spending (called the
ARRA-bill). See that economic miracle as it happened in this Bureau of Labor Statistics infographic
here!)
*However, to recognize what he had accomplished, the American voters collectively showed our appreciation in the 2010-midterms
by voting the HofR into the hands of the Replicant Party, which steadfastly refused any further spending because they proposed "
Austerity Budgeting" - which could not be more dumb, dumb, dumb.
*The US repeated historically the same error Roosevelt had made at the inception of the Great Depression in the early 1930s,
*Until he was persuaded by John Maynard Keynes (one of the more brilliant economists at the time) that the cure was
Government Spending, which Roosevelt finally embarked upon in the remainder of that decade.
*But the real Spending that stopped cold the Great Recession was that of WW2!
We seem still to not have learned that lesson as a nation.
Because the Replicants refused to vote more Government Spending from 2010 onward in the HofR! Which is why it took four-more-years (from 2010 to 2014) than was necessary for the economy to start creating jobs.
See that fact substantiated
here by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Economic history is a fascinating subject, and it does explain some historical phenomena that the general public finds mysterious. Nonetheless, statistics aside, economic failure is typically a man-made historical event.
Yes, we have nobody else but our selfish-selves to blame ...