I'm going to say flat out: the fault for the current economic mess lies squarely with the Republicans. But not the ones in Washington.

Fault lies with the business owners -- who are predominantly Republicans.

For 30 years, American businesses have been shipping jobs overseas. Good jobs. Until about 10 years ago, the shifted jobs were almost entirely in manufacturing. About 10 years ago, offshoring became the big buzz word in IT and other intellectual properties industries.

And American businesses -- along with the rest of us -- are now paying for it. When you shift a job to China, you pay less for the labor, but you give up the buying power the laid off employee provided you. Every shifted job was a dent in our gross domestic product, and in the end, those little dents have added up to one huge hole.

Of course, we can't blame American businesses entirely. American consumers love to buy cheap goods. Those cheap goods are rarely made here.

And American workers are also at fault, especially unions. By driving up salaries as high as we have, we basically challenged our employers to send our jobs elsewhere. The problem is even worse when you couple in factors such as bad work attitude and workers who don't realize how lucky they are to have good jobs.

Everything that happened was inevitable.

There is only one solution, one very simple solution: we as a country need to reverse the trade deficit.

How we do that, well, that's not so simple.