There's no way to finesse it or sugar coat it. What we are witnessing is a massive moral failure on the part of the leadership classes, both here and around the globe. Evil is not too strong a word. And the blame cannot be compartmentalized on a partisan basis; the villains are working from both sides of the aisle. If you think defeating Romney and the Republicans will stop it, you are living in a fantasy. All electing Democrats seems likely to do is slow the descent into the hell of greed fueled, depraved madness. Democrats are willingly putting Draconian cuts to desperately needed social programs on the table, defunding Social Security and putting it into jeopardy while multinationals and billionaires dodge paying their share and even collect huge subsidies while doing so. Yet the trillion plus dollar defense/security state which protects little besides oil companies and billionaires' cynical geopolitical chess games by killing anyone who stands in their path gets whatever the hell it wants. And often much more.
This is bluntly not good enough. It's not even close to good enough.
I'm not even opposed in theory to protecting the value of a currency by bringing public finances into a closer balance but for fuck's sake don't do it at the expense of the poor, the retired, children, the sick, disabled and infirm, education and such. For the bankers, wealthy political and executive classes to propose cutting those while they as a class look for any way possible to weasel out of personally contributing to solving the problem simply because they can and the powerless have by calculated design no means to oppose them is untenable. That's just evil, suggesting there isn't enough wealth in our economies to protect the weakest and most exposed while wealth disparities explode and the richest among us prosper as never before. It's bad economic policy and it's immoral at the same time. If balancing budgets is so damn important let's see those who can afford to lead by way of example through personal sacrifice. Capitalism will fail if this isn't dealt with in a humane and reasonable fashion and I'm not sure we'll like what replaces it.