What's The Solution?

Stand still in a room with Robert Reich for more than 30 seconds, and he'll tell you the same thing that he's been telling everyone else who will listen. The big challenge with the American, if not the world, economy is that activity that's good for the overall economy is bad for individuals, and what's good for individuals is often bad news for companies.

Whether or not you like Reich's politics, his basic logic is fundamentally sound. And that leads to a simple conclusion - the economy is going to remain broken until we have a simple (but not easy) reform - what's good for the whole economy needs to be good for companies and corporations and needs to be good for individuals at the same time. While it's a common Conservative trope to complain that Liberals like to stoke "Class Warfare," this tends to ignore the fact that the interests of wealthy members of society versus the middle class versus the poor have diverged so greatly that any gains for one group tend to be at the expense of the others. If this isn't a recipe for contention, I don't know what is.

So the $64,000,000,000.00 question (adjusted for inflation) is whether or not the current plans for fixing the economic crisis are going to address this, or if the plan is going to be an attempt to restore the previous status quo?