I would add a quote from Philip K. Dick;
"Reality is what doesn't go away, when you stop believing in it."
Life is a process of trial and error, but we are sitting on the top of a billion years of trial and error.
Our current system has managed to survive by borrowing from a future that has arrived.
It is not due to the politicians, who are little more than puppets on strings, but the system of value circulation, ie, banking.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nervous system. While money and banking, as the value circulation system, is analogous to blood and the circulation system.
There was a time when government was private, but as monarchs lost sight of their larger function to society, they were usurped. Banking is now having its, "Let them eat cake." moment.
We think of money as a commodity, because it originated as a reciept for some tangible asset, like gold, but what is overlooked is that reciept is a contract, where the asset value is backed by an obligation, a debt. Over time it has become convenient to replace the original, asset backed obligation with other forms of obligations, ie, debts.
Consequently, in order to create the amounts of money this system views as the meaning and goal of life, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.
For example, the government doesn't actually budget, which is to order one's priorities and spend according to what is prudent, but simply puts together enormous bills that can only be passed or vetoed in whole.
Once upon a time, the premise of the line item veto was put forth, but it had an ice cube's shot in hell of passing congress, as it would have gutting their control over the bills, in favor of the executive.
Yet if they actually wanted it to work, they simply could have broken these bills into their many items, have every legislator assign a percentage value to each one, put them back in order of preference and then the president draws the line. "The buck stops here."
Though ask yourself a minute, could Wall St. function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus money every year and backing it with the public guarrantee? Where would it go, otherwise? Derivatives? Apple stock? Ferarris?
The secret sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The functionality of money is its fungilibilty. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.
We presume to store it by investing it, but there is a far more limited amount of viable invesments, than the amounts of money we feel are necessary. Yet we do have many of the same needs, like stable communites and healthy environments, that if these could be invested in directly, as stores of value and not just resources to be mined, in order to create the fat bank accounts, life would be in much better shape. Redeveloping the public commons.
Which is not socialism, as society needs both public and private sectors, like a house has family and personal spaces. It's just a matter of sorting out which is which.
