Where will the jobs come from? Wall Street can produce another bubble, but that won't put the 15 million without jobs to work, one-third of which have been out of work for at least six months.

Recovery requires fundamental reform of America's economic strategy. The old shibboleths of the conservative era—shrink government, cut top-end taxes, free multinationals to move jobs abroad, deregulate finance, wage war on labor unions, declare that trade deficits don't matter —have failed ignominiously. They must be discarded, like yesterday's rotted fruit.

Fundamental changes are needed. Trickle-down should be supplanted by public investment-led growth—large-scale public investments in areas vital to our future such as infrastructure, research and development, education and training. These investments should be deficit-funded until the economy actually starts putting people back to work, and then sustained and paid for through progressive tax reform. Tax speculative security transactions, generating $100 billion a year in revenue to invest in a 21st-century infrastructure that would put people to work and make the economy more productive. Raise top-end taxes, reduce inequality, and invest in making college affordable and exploring the green technologies of the future.

We've pursued tax cuts, promising private investments would flourish. But much of the productive investment and lavish consumption went abroad. In reality, public investment would be far more effective. We have a staggering public investment deficit that must be met for a world-efficient economy. Public investment is more likely to be invested, more likely to be spent here, more likely to create good jobs here, and far more likely to generate new technologies and productive private investments.