Party infighting is dooming America to a Great Depression.

Two fresh news items arrive to remind us again how extreme today's Republican Party is in both its policies and its tactics. If on this point I'm getting to sound like a broken record (when will we have to retire that metaphor?), sorry, but I'm not the one who cracked the vinyl. So I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breath it, as the song says, until that fabled hard rain falls and washes these reprobates out to sea.– Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky
Dominant Social Theme: Party infighting is dooming America to a Great Depression.
Free-Market Analysis: Michael Tomasky, a fairly partisan columnist for the Daily Beast, has written a column called "The Party of Predators" (see excerpt above) that supports the idea that America's economic difficulties are aggravated by a lack of cooperation between the Republicans and Democrats.
This is a kind of sub-dominant social theme, that the US's fiscal and monetary situation would be much better if only America was supported by the kind of wise, elder statesmen that the electorate used to send to Washington DC. In fact, such backward-looking reminiscences are specious and confusing.
Once upon a time, America produced 50 percent of the world's finished goods and bestrode the globe like a colossus. But that was after World War II, when almost no other significant industrial force confronted the US.