Yes, at some level, it is. I agree with that. By the way, my background is in political economy and economic development, so I tend to look at these things from a macro view, with a mind towards "what yields a stable and increasingly wealthy society?" One of my best friends in grad school was an economics grad student, and we used to argue a lot: I thought he was far too concerned with efficiency and tidy outcomes (in theoretical arguments), and he thought I was muddying economic discussions with political ones. *shrug*
I see some seriously bad things in the U.S. that have gone on for quite some time; capture of government by private interests, capture of one of the two political parties by extremism, economic illiteracy, dissolving of social welfare programs and refusal to get with the times on implementing new and better ones, the rise of a completely unhindered right-wing media machine...these things are horribly destabilizing.