If you are complaining about the bailouts, you are ignorant. They weren't free money. They were loans, and the government has already recovered most of it, ahead of schedule.

Bernie Madoff had nothing to do with the crash of 2009. The crash was due to banks giving out loans to people who were fundamentally not worthy of credit, making bad assumptions about their credit worthiness, and taking on debt in foreign markets, under the assumption that the domestic debt they own would pay off their foreign debt.

If the government had not loaned the banks money, the banks would have defaulted on trillions of dollars of debt, which would have set off a massive economic catastrophe of unparalleled proportions.

Don't mistake the causes of the crash with the cause of our economic decline. They are completely different things. Most importantly, America is in an economic decline because of demographics: middle aged and old people are about to retire in massive numbers. That would have caused inflation, since they would have all pulled their savings out of the capital markets at roughly the same time. An economic "crisis", like the crash of 2009 merely accelerates the process of demographic withdrawal of funds. Don't believe me? Consider that 60% of Americans were in the labor force in 2008, and that a third of them were due to retire in the next 10 years. That means that 40% of America would have to perform the labor that 60% of America used to -- that means that every American in the labor pool would have to do the work of 1.33 people so that we could all maintain our standard of living. A 33% increase in necessary effort, just to stand still!

If you want to blame anybody, blame your grandparents for having too many kids, and your parents for not having enough to support them.