It's going to take congress though to cure us. We need to raise the import tariffs back up to historical norms (or higher until unemployment goes down). We need to insulate ourselves from future energy price increases. And we need a loose monetary policy to help rebuild our industries that have been devastated by 0 tariffs.
A loose monetary policy without fixing the structural issues above is like a bandaid on a major wound. It's better than nothing but we are still bleeding to death.
Raise the import tariffs, put our people back to work. And when unemployment drops Bernanke will happily go back to fighting inflation instead of unemployment. He can sell the debt he is buying as quick as he bought it if the market is strong.
His policies are destroying savers, retirement plans and people who have been responsible. How do you feel about that.
We aren't living in the 1950s.
There are many, many industries today that are dependent upon sales abroad. If you enact barriers to free trade, you will reward some people here in the U.S. and punish others.
What is it about free trade that threatens you? The sooner Americans adapt to the competitive pressures from the rest of the world, the sooner we will have an economy worth investing in.
That the standard of living of Americans must be reduced for some is a reality that must be accepted. There is simply no way for the less-productive among us to live much better than more highly productive people in other countries.
If you feel personally generous, then you should give whatever amount of your income you wish to such people. To enforce your standard of who should prosper and who should not isn't fair to those of us who want to encourage greater productivity and the prosperity which it can enable.
The livelihoods of millions of people who once would have worked our farms with manual labor, has been replaced with the livelihoods of thousands making harvesting machines. If you make it impossible to sell harvesting machines world-wide, you force those millions back onto the farms. Who will be available to make luxury items if so many must toil to make food?
Don't buy into the "zero-sum" fallacies of liberalism. There isn't a fixed amount of food which requires that we decide who gets it and who doesn't. We want to encourage the production of food as a general benefit to all.
Similarly, there is no fixed amount of jobs. If you want as many jobs as possible, then you must encourage people to create jobs. It is the profit motive that encourages that creation. Economic barriers simply reward some people at the expense of others. Jobs that only exist because of government barriers are WORTHLESS. Jobs that only exist because of "quantitative easing" are WORTHLESS.