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Deep recessions and depressions do NOT lend themselves to laissez faire "free market" recovery because they are subject to a feedback loop process whereby businesses fire workers who happen to also be consumers who in turn cut back purchases from businesses.
Increased government spending and tax cuts for poor and middle class taxpayers are a necessary but only a TEMPORARY band-aid for our hemorrhaging economy.
The REAL solutions to our economic problems are:
1) True transparency and accountability in the financial markets with active audting by the IRS and SEC of corporations and banks on a regular basis to insure an end to gaming the system which has made lending institutions so paranoid that they won't even loan amongst themselves much less to consumers.
2) A living wage - no American who works 40 hours a week should make less than poverty level income. The claims of laissez faire economists that this will result in increased unemployment are simply lies. The result will be that average workers will have more to spend and will drive up demand.
3)FAIR trade, not free trade. We should not allow any product or service to be sold in this country that was not produced under the same or better health, safety, environmental, and labor laws as our own. Corporations are making an end run around the progressive era and returning us to the age of slave labor, robber barons and exploitation of people and the environment by shipping our jobs overseas. The only way to stop this is to tax them punitively when they send an American job to a place where someone is being paid 50 cents a day to do the job in slave labor conditions.
The greedy free marketeers who exploit these foreign workers are actually killing the goose that lays the golden egg because the unemployed American worker can no longer afford to buy their product nor will the exploited underpaid foreign worker be able to afford it either.
4) Investment in basic research and in national infrastructure. The only true way to make productivity gains that improve our standard of living is to have the government do the kind of research and development and infrastructure investment that corporate America simply refuses to do because it takes too long to show a profit from it.
All the other industrialized nations have done this for their own industries for decades while we have done very little to help our own.
5) Investment in universal free lifelong education for all Americans. The biggest factor in improving an individual's standard of living is NOT investment in the stock markets but RATHER acquisition of marketable job skills to allow them to remain employed or to switch careers or to advance in their career.
Education has become commercialized to the point where it is becoming out of reach for middle class Americans to a degree not seen since before World War II.
In an America devoid of manufacturing jobs, a college degree is the difference between a middle class job and working at a fast food restaurant for minimum wage.
It is the least we owe our citizens and it is an investment in them and in our national welfare and national defense not merely some unnecessary social program.
6) Universal free health care - we are the only industrialized nation in the world with a privatized corporate healthcare system which consumes one out of every seven dollars of the economy.
Our health care system is NOT the best in the world by any number of standards and despite the claims of the free marketeers is actually LESS efficient than government run systems in other countries.
Most importantly, our existing healthcare system serves to make a few people very rich while bankrupting companies, individuals and denying healthcare services to one out of five Americans.
The only solution is to adopt a system similar to that in Canada or England.
7) Investment in energy independence - much of what drove our economy into the current recession was a dramatic spike in energy costs that could not be absorbed by consumers who in turn borrowed to make ends meet until they could borrow no more and lost everything.
Although energy prices are currently dramatically lower we cannot count on them to remain this way and our energy supply needs to be diversified and shifted away from mid-East oil as a matter of sound economic policy, human rights policy and national security.
We have been sending as much as 700 billion dollars a year overseas on foreign oil that simply leaves our economy that could better be spent here on domestic alternative energy.
8) We need to get out of unaffordable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and focus on our own country. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas every year fighting these wars sending money abroad which no longer circulates through our own economy.
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