In a recent column op-ed columnist Paul Krugman's dealt with what he refers to as a "Crises of Confidence.
" Citing a study from The Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, Krugman declares that "Americans are more pessimistic about their situation than they have been for more than a quarter century.
" And while by traditional measures, the economy doesn't look that bad, Americans haven't been this pessimistic since the early nineties,

What's striking about this bleak mood is that by the usual measures the economy isn't doing that badly - at least not yet.
In particular, the official unemployment rate of 5.
1 percent, though rising, is still fairly low by historical standards.
Yet economic attitudes are worse now than they were in 1992, when the average unemployment rate was 7.
5 percent.

But as Krugman points out, you need to look a little closer to understand what's behind the unfavorable mood of the country,

Our bleakness partly reflects the fact that most Americans are doing considerably worse than the usual economic measures let on.
The official unemployment rate may be relatively low - but the percentage of prime-working-age Americans without jobs, which isn't the same thing, is historically high.
Gross domestic product is up, but the inflation-adjusted income of the median family is probably lower than it was in 2000.
(emphasis added)

This is the real problem, working Americans are producing the wealth but are getting an ever smaller piece of the pie.
Problems like the sub-prime crises, the credit crises, as well as corruption in corporate America as evidenced by the Enron and World Com collapses are merely symptoms of a much greater problem, and that problem is the corporate takeover of America.
For about the last three or four decades we've been hammered with the notion that the answer to our problems is to maximize free enterprise.
Fewer regulations and lower taxes would bring prosperity to everyone.
But the reality is; that prosperity has been mostly enjoyed by a select few while most Americans have found their real income has stagnated at best or even declined.
The fifties and early sixties are often referred to as "the good old days" by those who lived through them (providing you weren't black or some other minority), and many consider that period--before the hippies came on the scene--as a very conservative period in America.
But as Stephanie Coontz reveals in her essay, "What We Really Miss About the 1950s", from an economic stand-point, this was probably the most socialistic era in our history.
While as Coontz points out, there's more to the nostalgia than just the economics, still, there's no question that economics has a lot to do with it,

For one thing, it's easy to see why people might look back fondly to a decade when real wages grew more in any single year than in the entire ten years of the 1980s combined, a time when the average 30-year-old man could buy a median-priced home on only 15-18 percent of his salary.

And though the people who remember the fifties fondly like to think that factors such as morals and values are what defined that generation, when pressed these illusions melt away,

Nostalgia for the 1950s is real and deserves to be taken seriously, but it usually shouldn't be taken literally.
Even people who do pick the 1950s as the best decade generally end up saying, once they start discussing their feelings in depth, that it's not the family arrangements in and of themselves that they want to retrieve.
They don't miss the way women used to be treated, they sure wouldn't want to live with most of the fathers they knew in their neighborhoods, and "come to think of it" - I don't know how many times I've recorded these exact words - "I communicate with my kids much better than my parents or grandparents did.
" When Judith Wallerstein recently interviewed 100 spouses in "happy" marriages, she found that only five "wanted a marriage like their parents.
" The husbands "consciously rejected the role models provided by their fathers.
The women said they could never be happy living as their mothers did.
" (emphasis original)

When it comes right down to it, it's the prosperity that people are actually nostalgic for.
But unlike today, and that includes the nineties where we enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, working Americans enjoyed a significantly greater share of the wealth they helped produce,

Contrary to widespread belief, the 1950s was not an age of laissez-faire government and free market competition.
A major cause of the social mobility of young families in the 1950s was that federal assistance programs were much more generous and widespread than they are today.
In the most ambitious and successful affirmative action program ever adopted in America, 40 percent of young men were eligible for veterans' benefits, and these benefits were far more extensive than those available to Vietnam-era vets.
Financed in part by a federal income tax on the rich that went up to 87 percent and a corporate tax rate of 52 percent, such benefits provided quite a jump start for a generation of young families.
The GI bill paid most tuition costs for vets who attended college, doubling the percentage of college students from prewar levels.
At the other end of the life span, Social Security began to build up a significant safety net for the elderly, formerly the poorest segment of the population.
Starting in 1950, the federal government regularly mandated raises in the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation.
The minimum wage may have been only $1.
40 as late as 1968, but a person who worked for that amount full-time, year-round, earned 118 percent of the poverty figure for a family of three.
By 1995, a full-time minimum-wage worker could earn only 72 percent of the poverty level.
An important source of the economic expansion of the 1950s was that public works spending at all levels of government comprised nearly 20 percent of total expenditures in 1950, as compared to less than 7 percent in 1984.
Between 1950 and 1960, nonmilitary, nonresidential public construction rose by 58 percent.
Construction expenditures for new schools (in dollar amounts adjusted for inflation) rose by 72 percent; funding on sewers and waterworks rose by 46 percent.
Government paid 90 percent of the costs of building the new Interstate Highway System.
These programs opened up suburbia to growing numbers of middle-class Americans and created secure, well-paying jobs for blue-collar workers.

Higher taxes, greater redistribution of wealth, increased government spending, these all marked the period dubbed "the good old days.
" We'll never return to the fifties, globalization and free trade are here to stay but the point is this; we need to stop buying into the mantra endlessly repeated by the greedy capitalists who brought us Enron, the sub-prime crises and the general decline of the middle class, that fewer regulations, lower taxes and smaller government are good for us all, it just isn't true.
However we move forward, we need to understand that this country doesn't belong to the Exxons and Enrons, it doesn't belong to the Bushes and the Cheneys, it belongs to us.
The fifties were all about expanding the middle-class, about sharing the prosperity and while we'll never recreate the fifties, we need at least to understand that we don't have to take the crumbs they offer us and be happy about it.
By learning from the lessons of the past we can make this country work for all of us.