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Nor does your cluelessness about history. Nor does your mad desire for yet more governmental regulation. Allow me to make a few points.
Prior to the Great Depression (GD), there was no unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare/cade, Workman's Comp, Welfare, FHA, etc, etc. Some of these social safety net features we can thank FDR for; some belong to later administrations. They're still in place. Reasonable men may disagree about how robust these safety nets are as compared to earlier times but your claim that we less prepared for a downturn than since the GD is so totally specious as to be bogus.
The housing market today is fundamentally different than it was in 1929. This difference is neatly caught by Adam Smith (pseudonym) in his 1979 book Paper Money where he says "...but your home isn't an investment, it's where you live." How is it that they ceased to be a home and became an investment (which have the habit of increasing and decreasing in value)? Whew! That would take pages and pages. I will point at two things: the death of the Savings and Loan, and the removal of the wall between investment and commercial banks. These two structures were put in place after the GD. The first allowed people to get low interest mortgages for their home (which weren't investments at the time). The second ensured that commercial banks weren't using uninsured, speculative investment bank paper for their reserves. The reason investment banks weren't regulated like commercial banks with reserve requirements etc is because they weren't insured and they couldn't borrow from the Fed. But that was OK because commercial banks couldn't hold their paper so if an investment bank failed, a bunch of fat cats lost their shirt but the banking system would be safe. Thus I agree with you that the proposed changes in regulation are bullshit. This is not a regulation issue. It is a fundamental financial system structure issue (which is not done via regulation). The current system doesn't need more regulation, it needs restructuring.
Your expostulation does an excellent job of ignoring the role of business. Business is the engine that provides jobs that allow people to make money and buy houses, cars, etc, etc. You and your beloved regulations have been choking business for decades (when it takes 20 permits just to be able to raise logs from the bottom of Lake Superior that have been sitting for the last 100 years, you know something is seriously wrong. Even The Economist has poked fun at the over regulation of US society). When that happens, business is going to move (hint: that's called overseas). When the jobs go, your wealth goes.
I do agree with you about the 1%/20%. It's obscene. And the argument that they are more productive is also bullshit. Bill Gates, productive? Puleeze! He's a notorious monopolist who not only got to keep his monopoly but also his money because of Bill Clinton's justice department (BTW, this is being written on a Mac). And how about those poor executives at NW Airlines who became multi-millionaires (again) because they had to work their poor fingers to the bone to get NWA out of bankruptcy? Nobody mentions that they got NWA into bankruptcy in the first place but apparently that's merely a detail. Or the multi-million dollar severance packages for failed CEOs? Productive? I don't think so. In my darker moments I think that executives who make more than some nominal multiple of the average wages that they pay the people who actually do the producing should be taxed at 99.99% for everything over that nominal multiple.
