The flip answer is just look at history. A lot of rafts and and a lot of waterfalls. But as churchill said, Americans always do the right thing — after they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. (that’s a paraphrase)
On the positive side, the system is working. a lot of hoopla and then a brawl to reach a solution. It’s the American way.
I’m going to reserve judgment whether the system is working until after I see we did not fall into a depression. I like to see managed systems that mitigate severe widespread risk.
In other words, that we have great prenatal care and such a low rate of child mortality, I would say, “the system if working.” If we did nothing and let the weak children would die, someone could make the claim “the strong survive to procreate while the weak die. See, the system is working”. I would call that system “not working” since there is so much we can do to insure the survival of most young children.
Maybe I misunderstand you when you say “the system is working”. I really like the way debt is just being rapidly destroyed. Japan refused to do that and spent 20 years trying to grow their economy. If we fall into a depression then I would not label that “the system is working”, but that “the system already failed years ago by allowing massive credit bubbles, and now we are just paying the logical prices of those long ago failures.”