Counterpunch Today’s deepening financial and economic crisis cannot be alleviated without addressing a number of problems that the public does not really want to hear about. Even to cite them raises a wall of cognitive dissonance. For starters, today’s debt problem is not marginal, but has become structural – and structural problems cannot be solved with merely marginal palliatives. What Alan Greenspan called “wealth creation” turned out to be asset-price inflation – bidding up property values and the stock market on credit. The Bubble Economy loaded down households, real estate and entire companies with debt, while the Bush tax cuts for the higher tax brackets forced federal, state and local budgets much more deeply into debt. This policy could continue as long as debt inflated property prices at a faster rate than the ...