This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

With apologies to Count Leo Tolstoy: Every good economy is the same. Every bad economy is bad in its own way.

The last time the American economy looked this awful, it was because corporations and banks were broke. The taxpayers bailed them out, and got the world's longest jobless recovery in return.

Now, to coin a phrase, banks, corporations and individual investors have more money than they know what to do with. They aren't spending it. They aren't investing it. They sure as shootin' aren't hiring anybody with it. And, as long as the Republicans in Congress have anything to say about it, they won't be paying much in taxes with it, either.

The Federal Reserve is running out of arrows. Its radical move this week, promising near-zero interest rates for the next two years, slowed the Wall Street tumble for a day. Its other trick, buying up securities as a way of turning bad paper into good money, is useless when investors are already flush.

In 2008, commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies had bet the house on houses, investing heavily on each other's highly overrated (thanks, Standard & Poor's) exotic mortgage investment schemes. When the bubble burst, everybody owed everybody and nobody could pay up. The resulting clogged flow of capital was nearly the end for the already troubled domestic auto industry.

The solution then, of course, was to force-feed the economy with cash. At the end of the Bush administration, it was TARP, the rescue of the banking system. In the early days of the Obama administration, it was the auto bailout.

The current economic panic, huge fluctuations in the stock market and a downgrade of the federal government's credit rating (thanks, Standard & Poor's) have many causes. A lack of private capital is not among them. Computer maker Apple has, depending on how you tot it up, nearly $80 billion cash and liquid investments in hand. So many companies and individuals are hoarding so much money that The Bank of New York Mellon is actually charging its big customers a fee to stash their cash there.

This time, the solution has got to be bottom up. If the rich won't create jobs, which the Republicans say is what the rich are for, then they had better start paying more in taxes. Then the government could afford to do what the private sector is unwilling or unable to do: put people to work, put money in their pockets, so they will buy things, especially houses, so companies will hire, invest, build and produce.

Every happy economy has a thriving working class. That's where the rebuilding must begin.