Gents,
you all seem to be missing the point here.
The world (with a few notable exceptions - Brazil, India and to a lesser extend Germany) is coming out of an economic crisis that was caused by a financial crisis.
It is not an American problem alone.
History has shown that the type of crisis we find ourselves in is very different from a "normal" economic crisis - see Japan in the 90ies. In the past it has taken much longer to recover. The average is somewhere around 7 years, but this one will probably take longer.
We have become so used to a high-speed world that we do not have the patience anymore to wait until the problems are worked through. Even if our governments do everything right, it will take much more time than the people are willing to tolerate.
The housing crisis in the US makes the recovery even harder as people have become less mobile - if you can't sell your house you can't move to where the jobs are.
Historically the mobility of its workforce has been a great strength which has helped America master recessions better than many other countries - but as mentioned it doesn't work this time around.
So one measure the government could take is helping people get out of mortgages that are greater than the value of their houses, but that will take a lot of time - much longer than an election cycle, because if the measures are too drastic or too fast the write-offs the lenders will have to take would throw us back into a financial crisis and we'd be back at square one (or September 2008).
Being in an election year is definitely not helpful for the US as politicians on both sides of the aisle are focused on getting votes rather than solving problems, and recent primary results have shown that "farming unhappiness" is a good way to get votes in the short term.
No matter what time, no matter what country, in a crisis people tend to vote for the politicians that shout the loudest about the problems, not the ones that offer solutions.
All the topics that seem to dominate the news (immigration, crime, tax cuts, health care, bringing troupes home and so on) are distractions designed to win points in the election.
Politicians have no incentives to fix the fundamental economic problems, because their solution takes so much time that they are likely not to be in office anymore by the time the measures show real results. (again look at Japan in the 90-ies as a case study).
So let's hope that Brazil, India, and a few other countries that did not slip into the crisis (many of them in Latin America, some in Africa, some in Asia) will grow fast enough to bail the rest of the world out.
Don't bank on China though - that could very well be the next bubble to burst. It is a planned economy without democracy and it is gaining complexity at a speed that will soon be too much for the bureaucrats in Beijing to handle. Also the social imbalances in China are too big to not cause some sort of problems, be it a revolution, a civil war or whatever.
