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WHATEVER HAPPENED to the American dream, and the Californian dream? That dream of good jobs, of a large and prosperous middle class and of critical public goods like education provided broadly to all? That dream has severely eroded in recent decades, with a precipitous drop during the current recession.

Inequality is higher than ever, unemployment is higher than any time since the Great Depression, and public goods like parks, transportation, and education are cut repeatedly.

Have we as Americans become less productive? No, we are more productive than ever — twice as productive as we were in the 1960s.

Are we overtaxed? No, we pay lower taxes than virtually any other developed nation, and the same —27 percent of income as was paid in the 1950s. The problem is inequality — virtually all extra productivity has been captured by the top end of town in the last three decades, while taxes have been pushed downwards. The tax system taken as a whole is no longer progressive, while the growing inequality has smothered overall economic vitality.

Are we over-regulated? It was precisely the lack of proper regulation that let the banking industry engage in fraudulent lending — the kind of liar loans that were pushed to unwary or speculating borrowers, and sold on to other investors under false promises for short-term gain. This fundamentally fraudulent activity was the immediate cause

of the current crisis and has not been sufficiently prosecuted.

Aren't free markets the best way forward? As we have seen in the financial meltdown, markets left to their own devices have extremely serious defects that can only be remedied by conscientious government oversight. The Occupy movement seeks a universal financial transaction tax, to slow down the gambling on Wall Street and refocus finance on long-term rather than short-term investment, among other reforms.

Didn't the "stimulus" fail? Isn't the government broke? Here we get to the most serious misunderstandings of all. The original stimulus package worked well, if inefficiently, adding a couple of pecent to GDP and lowering unemployment by at least 1 percent, according to unbiased sources like the Congressional Budget Office. Clearly, it was not enough, and we need more, especially spending targeted directly at hiring workers and creating public goods.

The last three decades featured not only a class war of the rich versus everyone else. It also featured the triumph of fundamentally flawed economic theories whose ideological nature and empirical poverty are now exposed. Uncontrolled laissez-faire leads to increased inequality, and threatens to turn us into a banana republic. The Occupy movement supports restoring progressivity to the overall tax system through reforms like taxing capital gains as regular income and raising top rates.

The "Leave it to Beaver" era was brought to us by Keynesian economics — by progressive taxation and by federal policy that put full employment front and center. In the current crisis, only federal spending can quickly employ the millions who are out of work and resolve our truly catastrophic conditions. There is the equivalent worth of 62 Apollo programs in Americans unemployed — even as our roads crumble and other public needs go unmet. Putting those two together is our path back to prosperity, as it has been in the past.

Nor is the federal government "broke." It prints the money and has infinite fiscal capacity.

Indeed, investors keep clamoring for more bonds, rightly unconcerned about inflation, which will only present a risk once employment is back to normal, or better. http://www.marinij.com/opinion/ci_19259981 agree. Okay, I've found what I can that might be of interest for people to discuss, now I'm off to do what little I can for OWS...