How To Fix The Economy

[GPaulus]

Hardly. For one, many symptoms can be traced back to the financial issues.

Second, several nations have taxes on energy/oil that led to an effective market price higher than the one to be paid in the U.S. today. These other countries would have entered the crisis decades ago - but some of them are doing fine even today.

I pay 1.5€ per litre gasoline. That's 5.7 €/gallon which in turn is 7.8 US-$/gallon, for example. U.S. retail price: 3.1 US-$.
My country - Germany - is doing fine, albeit there's still a slight loss of growth to catch up to.

We may have to agree to disagree on this one. I am not saying that higher energy prices will collapse an economy but what I am saying is that Volatile
Energy Prices will collapse an economy. Energy in the economy is "normalized" and products, transportation construction etc can adjust to inflationary (controlled) price increases because energy is in the baseline of their price for the product. But when 20 - 30 % swings occur or the prices climb too fast, the markets cannot react quickly enough. The result is usually double digit inflation. This time things were quite different and extranalities controlled inflation. The result was a deflation in the economy, a collapse.

Given enough time and stable energy pricing, the economy will recover.