What a country. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the bankers keep living the high life and swilling that Champagne while at the same time we’re taking books out of the hands of schoolchildren trying to get an education.  I’m no friend of the deficit hawks, but the staggering amounts of money we’ve been spending for the past several years have not benefited the people most in need of help and have not laid the foundation for a more secure economy going forward. We’ve handed over unconscionable tax breaks to the very rich (you can see the Prada paraders high-stepping along Fifth Avenue in their million-dollar flip-flops) and countless billions to the private contractors brazenly feeding off the agony of the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  (Sunday’s paper also had an article about six more American G.I.’s killed in Afghanistan.)  What’s needed is the same sense of urgency about helping struggling families and putting people back to work as the Bush and Obama crowds showed when the banks were about to go bust. That sense of urgency is always missing when it’s ordinary people who are in trouble.  Millions of Americans are stuck in an economic depression. Several million have either lost their homes to foreclosure during the recession or are in imminent danger of losing them. The long-term unemployed are facing painful daily choices on such basic matters as whether to buy food or refill needed prescription medication or pay electric bills to keep the lights on.  Back in February, The Times’s Peter Goodman wrote about the new poor, “people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives — potentially for years to come.”  There can be no real national recovery with so many millions of people in such deep economic distress. We can pretend that we’re locked in some kind of crisis of confidence, that if only people felt better about themselves and the economy then they’d start spending again. This is a variation on the “mental recession” lunacy spouted by Phil Gramm, John McCain’s top economic adviser during the presidential campaign.  People who are out of work and deeply in debt don’t have any money to spend. The only way to get real money back into their wallets and bank accounts (and thus back into the economy) is to get them back to work.  With our help, the banks and Wall Street have done fine. Better than they had any right to expect. It’s the ordinary folks outside the casino, in the real world, who are still in desperate need of help. But in a society of, by and for the rich, that help will be a long time coming.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 13, 2010, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Outside The Casino. Today's Paper|Subscribe
As hiring picks up for Wall Streeters, Main Street and its millions of unemployed are still hurting, and some are in desperate straits.