Spend less
First there's the long slow fix: Everybody spends less than they earn and either saves or pays off debts. This can be done. In fact, it always is done--it's the way this sort of situation is always fixed. However, it takes a long time. It's painful and disruptive. It's also unfair, in the sense that the pain falls disproportionately hard on different people depending on where they live and where they are in their life.
The slow fix is slow simply because even pretty serious frugality only opens up so much room between income and expense. WIth the amount of debt that's already baked into the system, too many households simply have no daylight between their daily expenses (including debt service) and their income.
At the same time, each household that bites the bullet and puts itself on the the slow path to a sound balance sheet--expenses less than income, debt service a small fraction of their income, an emergency fund, some retirement savings--shrinks the economy a tiny bit. A smaller economy means fewer jobs, less wages, less profits--meaning that it takes even longer to dig ourselves out of the hole we're in.
There are other pieces to the long slow fix. Assets will be sold and the cash used to pay off debt. Sales of productive assets can help everybody--the seller, who gets cash to settle overwhelming debt; the buyer, who gets something valuable for less than it would normally cost; workers associated with the asset, whose jobs now depend on someone who's not so broke; and consumers, who get more stuff because the productive assets can start producing at full capacity. (Of course, it doesn't necessarily help everybody--a productive asset dismantled and shipped overseas might leave local workers less well off. But the exercise can be a positive-sum game, with everybody better off.) Another part of the same process is bankruptcies--some debts are never going to be paid back. (Short of bankruptcy, some debts can be restructured to make them affordable.)But, put it all together and it's still long and slow.The other, quicker fix would be to boost incomes.
