Half of the United States are on government assistance. How do we fix this?

Okina 

Speaking of government assistance is speaking of the the least interesting/meaningful part of the problem. It is just a consequence not a cause. This problem is not a US problem but a problem shared by all developed countries today. It looks quite familiar in some aspects to what happened during the 30's.

Totally agree.Most important part is :

Over the last three months, in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone, we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars on all the wealth-producing goods -- things like industrial plants, machinery, office blocks, schools, roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth. $3.4 trillion sounds like a lot of money until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion that has been slushing around in the same countries, in our financial institutions, doing absolutely nothing during the same period except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices.

The result is stagnant wages, more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe out of work. And consequently, low aggregate demand, which in a never-ending cycle, reinforces the pessimism of the investors, who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing