All is not well with the economy. The same ones that ran up the debt and drove the financial system into the ditch, causing the recession, are the ones who tell me they are sadly forced to cut services to save money, and hand the nation over to the tender mercies of the efficient and benevolent corporations and financiers to make things right. None of the major talking heads depend on those services and few of them saw much real down side when the financial system went down in flames because their money protected them. Even legal restrictions are little barrier when you can hop into the tax deductible corporate jet and go to Guatemala to do what you can't do here.

When I see discussion on TV it is always bankers and financiers and corporate leaders who are doing the talking. Where are the union representatives and people looking out for labor. I'm tired of some guy making millions claiming to be talking for the middle class. The median income in the US is roughly $45,000 but everyone claiming to be looking out for people who make $45K all make twenty or more times that much. And most of them work very hard at hanging out with people making many times that. Other than the gardener and doorman they may never interact with anyone making median wage.

You don't need to be destitute to empathize with and seek to look out for poor people. But you ought to spend time around those you claim to represent. You ought to know and understand how they feel and what their lives are like.

The popular myth is that poor people just want to be handed huge amounts of money and sit around eating bon-bons. Which tells me the people who came up with that didn't know much about poor people. I've lived and worked around poor people and it is hard to find any that don't just want a decent job, dignity, a fair chance at living a modest life, and some chance their children might move up a little. Failing that, yes, they will take what money gets tossed to them. Just getting by, and hating every minute of it, is better than not getting by. The poor are always in survival mode.

You want to learn urban survival skills? Find out where the homeless people stay and hang out. Average Americans often feel fear going into depressed urban areas. Imagine being homeless and living there. You have no resources. No reserve. Even the police don't take you seriously. Just staying alive is a trick. Staying relatively healthy and sane is remarkable.

The simple fact is that there has never been a settled and quiet time when all was well in this nation. But, you ask, what about the good old days, when we were united and happy working together? Say ... during WW2. We all set aside our differences and pulled together. Really ...

"During the forty-four months from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, there were 14,471 strikes involving 6,774,000 strikers: more than during any period of comparable length in United States history.29 In 1944 alone, 369,000 steel and iron workers, 389,000 auto workers, 363,000 other transportation equipment workers, and 278,000 miners were involved in strikes."

From: http://libcom.org/history/world-war-ii-post-war-strike-wave

Look up the 'Zoot-suit' riots, and, of course, there was that unpleasantness with the Japanese-Americans during WW2. Land and property abandoned, confiscated, most of it systematically stolen.

Point here is that the US hasn't had settled times and the 'good old days' are largely an illusion. Going back to 'better times' assumes there were better times. It all has been, and looks to always be, a rattle and roll existence.

The best anyone can do is to set up systems that take the worse of the rough edges off, moderate the system to avoid the worse of the extremes, and prepare as a society and individually as time and resources allow. There aren't any easy answers but we got this far, through some very rough times with less to work with, and that should give us hope that we will get through the troubles of our times.

The Japanese are rebuilding after a huge disaster. But they rebuilt after WW2. That was many times worse.