This is the third of a four-part series describing what went wrong with America’s economy and how to fix it. See Part 4 tomorrow and read Part 1 here and Part 2: "Tell Us What You Think: What’s Wrong With the U.S. Economy? The Long Answer"—and please leave a comment to tell us what you think. (Click the chart to enlarge.) 

If we want to fix what’s wrong with our economy, we can’t just return to the way things were before the Crash of 2008.  We have to fix what was wrong before the Crash.

And what was that?  In short, it was the failure of our low-wage economic strategy of the past 30 years, which crippled the growth engine of the U.S. economy.

On the very day that Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith announced his resignation in revulsion over how the firm is callously “ripping their clients off," Phil Angelides, chair of the nation’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, expressed his continuing disgust with how Wall Street has become “a casino floor as big as New York, New York,” after wiping away $9 trillion of household wealth “like a day trade gone bad.”

Speaking at a Responsible Investment Forum of investors, pension fund managers and union and community leaders, convened in Los Angeles by Heartland Capital Strategies, Angelides assailed the financial system centered on Wall Street for “becoming a conduit for speculation rather than productive investment.”