From all the mainstream media coverage which portrays the Tea Party Republicans as evil doers (even while they and their ruling class fund them) and thus sidestep the issue of increasing out-of-control government debt, it's clear to me where the core of the ruling class has positioned itself. They are caught in the spiraling debt game to finance their Empire maintenance expenses. While sticking more debt on the shoulders of American taxpayers, they also are intent on cutting all public expenditures such as health and welfare to Americans. So, they have set-up the evil-doers to blame for the cutbacks while portraying the Obama administration as the good-guys. Sooner or later, however, the public austerity measures will increase the pressure on ordinary Americans who are already under considerable stress. Meanwhile, there will be no cutbacks to Empire military adventures, government surveillance, and local police forces.
The directors of the ruling class went down this debt path many years ago due to the huge expenditures for the Vietnam War, particularly the funding of the "guns and butter" policies of the Lyndon Johnson administration. As this war was winding down, Nixon in 1971 was forced to unilaterally and radically disengage from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement which established the gold-based US dollar as a world reserve currency.
Then, compounding the problem was the stampede by US corporations to take advantage of cheap labor in other countries when technological advances made this possible.
The corporate US response to the rising cost of labor in the West plus automated mass production was to transfer practically the whole American industrial base to China, thus multiplying its profits (and in most cases paying for the delocalization through tax breaks).
In the long run, Asia could not but win. Washington tried all sorts of monetary scams to slow the decline. To no avail; productivity kept falling in the West and rising in Asia.
And then the Federal Reserve kept printing paper like there’s no tomorrow, buying bad debts from ‘too big to fail’ banks and US Treasuries, and thus funding Washington’s ballooning spending.