Occupy Wall Street is right to be angry. Americans are falling farther and farther behind.

The biggest controversy over Occupy Wall Street is about what they stand for. Are they a bunch of dirty hippies with no agenda? Do they really think they can change the entire system? Why won't they just put out a concrete list of demands and policy prescriptions?

While signs at the protests have many, many messages -- from BP to Iran to capital punishment -- the affiliated Tumblr, We Are the 99 Percent, exposes what's motivating people to get on the streets. With over 700 submissions at this point, Americans from all over have been writing down personal stories to explain their frustrations. While those protesting on Wall Street have grievances that are far ranging, those on the Tumblr are almost all sparked by a combination of a few common things: joblessness, debt, and low wages. They are the stories of those who can't make ends meet. These days, that covers a lot of us.

Here's a sampling just from the most recent page (my bold):

My mother (leader in her field of pathology, MA) is upside-down on her house. My father (multiple PhD's) lives in his car so that he can do what he loves for a living rather than be a slave to the system.

I am 45 years old. I was laid off twice in 18 months... I am "unemployable" because of layoffs. I have not worked since November 2008.

I am 27 years old with $100,000 in debt. I was laid off in 2009 and have been struggling ever since then. I have not made more than $10,000 a year since then.

My husband and I have $80k in student loan debt. I am in the process of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a hard enough thing in and of itself. I also have over $30,000 in medical debt because of that... We own cheap cars, live frugally, have a roommate to help, and try hard to keep up... I work when I'm not too sick, and he works full time.We have a combined annual income of less than $40k annually.

I have an MS from a top state university- & $135k in student loans (& growing). I've lost 2 jobs in 3 months.

Lost my job in 2006. Sold my home and moved in with my 87-year-old mother.... Cancer survivor. Need medical care. Can't afford health insurance... TOO YOUNG TO RETIRE. Watching my retirement funds and savings shrink.

As a newer, less established member of the faculty I was out of work when my college cut classes. Over a year later and I still can't find work... Because of deferments my $41,000 loan has become $62,000.

Adjusted for inflation, a smaller American reality than that of my dad -- a civil servant who dropped out of college... My son is learning to speak Mandarin.

I am 29 years old. I have a Master's degree. I am $120,000+ in student loan/medical debt. In the past 18 months I: was diagnosed with cancer, lost 2 jobs, worked 70 hours/wk and unable to keep up. I get more calls from creditors than I do friends... I have $4 in my bank account and no job.

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And I find this one perhaps the most emblematic of the average American's experience:

We live within our means, we own our cars, yet cannot accumulate much savings. We live responsibly, and consider ourselves "citizens" and not "consumers." We find it troubling that living simply can still accrue so much debt... We are one emergency away from financial ruin.

"Living simply can still accrue so much debt." That's been the American experience for years now. As Ezra Klein put it, the Tumblr is full of "small stories of people who played by the rules, did what they were told, and now have nothing to show for it."

For those who are lucky enough to work, the money we take home has been either stagnating or decreasing, and it's getting worse in the aftermath of the recession. As reported by Bloomberg:

Take-home pay, adjusted for prices, fell 0.3 percent in August, the third decrease in five months, and personal income dropped for the first time in two years, the Commerce Department reported last week. The declines followed news from the Census Bureau that median household income in 2010 fell to $49,445, the lowest in more than a decade, and the poverty rate jumped to 15.1 percent, a 17-year high.

That figure, $49,445, isn't going to cut it. A recent report showed that a household with two working parents and two young children needs to earn $67,920 to meet basic needs without relying on public support. It only drops to $57,756 for a single parent with two young kids. Not to mention that rent, food, and health costs are rising. On top of this, 14 million Americans don't even have jobs. When we don't bring in enough money to pay for the basics, the next place we have to turn is debt. Our total revolving debt comes to $796.1 billion, with the average household carrying $14,743 in credit card debt. Household debt is currently 90 percent of GDP, up from 70 ten years ago. It's no wonder, then, that despite making some headway in paying down our debt loads, consumers are still struggling to do so.

And student debt is a whole other story. The total is on track to reach $1 trillion this year, more than our combined credit card debt. Alongside this surge is a rise in delinquencies post-recession. This is partly fueled by the government, schools, and hard-pressed parents pulling back on support. It is also certainly fueled by the dismal job market and graduates' unemployment rate -- which will have ramifications for their earning capacity for years to come.

I'm not surprised that people are at their wit's end over personal finances. I'm not surprised that they're blaming the banks that make money from keeping us in debt. I'm just surprised it took this long for the anger to find its voice.

Bryce Covert is Assistant Editor of New Deal 2.0.

We could redirect fervor and resources to prevent deaths through the health care system.

September 11th marked a political coming-of-age for many young Americans. Where we could once afford to be blissful in our policy ignorance, the realities of terrorism required a far more adult understanding of the issues. It's in the aftermath that I first began to notice the zeal for a particular brand of post-terror policy. It seemed as though every American, and their corresponding representatives in Washington, D.C., would do whatever it took, spend whatever was needed, to prevent the next attack. The commonsense perception dictated eliminating the threat before it could grow into a crisis. I like to imagine applying that standard to the problems I see in health care.

But consider first the extent to which preventing terror dominated the first resulting policy changes. A network of rules and regulations that encroach on civil liberties seek to prevent explosives and weapons from making it onto airplanes. A nation was controversially invaded to prevent its leader from using weapons of mass destruction. A broader war was declared to level Al Qaeda in another country to avenge the attacks and prevent future terror plots. An undisclosed, but certainly astronomical, amount of money was afforded to a top secret government agency to carry out unknown tasks to prevent potential terror threats.

Let's check in on these change: Individuals have found ways to bring weapons and explosives anyway. It is still unclear what threats, precisely, were prevented by invading and then occupying Iraq. Al Qaeda is largely decimated, but the conditions prevailing in Afghanistan can foster a new generation of radicalized anti-American sentiment. And we continue to chase terror plots to this day.

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Now consider a similar zeal for preventative policy, this time applied to health care. A network of rules and regulations could seek to eliminate a growing epidemic of obesity already affecting a third of Americans. We could go into Africa instead of Afghanistan, this time with $3 billion a year in targeted aid (what the Pentagon spends in two days) to end malaria and save those at risk. A disclosed and comparably lesser sum of money could task the federal government with reorienting our health care system around preventative medicine to stop the 900,000 American deaths each year from preventable causes.

A decade later, the results of these initiatives would be a little different. Ending obesity could save $147 billion each year in its associated costs. Our invasion of good will in Africa could save more than a million lives a year, the results of which would be met with a markedly higher level of international admiration, respect, and cooperation. Of course, some will still regrettably fall victim to preventable health problems. But we would know for certain where our dollars are going -- to our health.

There are many legacies and takeaways from 9/11. What I've learned is the power and reach of passionately driven policy. I've also learned that It should not take an attack, or any catastrophe, to ignite zealous action where it is needed.

Rajiv Narayan is a Senior Health Policy Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a student at the University of California, Davis.

When given an ultimatum between children and career, many women go with the latter.

In the debate over work-life balance, there's one argument we can't seem to move past: Women have made a choice to have kids. Now they have to live with their decision and all of its consequences.

But this argument rests on an underlying assumption that, when challenged, just doesn't hold up. If faced with a stark choice between work and family, the Jack Welches of the world seem to think women are going to choose family, while men are going to choose work. Otherwise the idea of a workforce that doesn't need time off for childbearing doesn't make sense. Kids need to come from somewhere. It follows, therefore, that the expectation is that women will "opt out" to raise families rather than pursue a career. (We're not even going to talk about the opt-out debate in this post, as Joan's been over that already.)

But what happens if women don't choose family? What happens if they choose career? The cover story in this week's Economist illustrates what happens when women are given a stark choice between having children and a having a successful career. It turns out -- surprise! -- that a lot of them don't choose children.

The article, titled "The Flight from Marriage," documents a trend among Asian women who marry and have children later in life -- or not at all. The article indicates that non-marriage rates for women in their mid-thirties are pushing 20 percent in the wealthiest countries in Asia, including Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. And unsurprisingly, the non-marriage rate rises with education level. In Thailand, 13 percent of women with a high school education are still single by age 40, compared with 20 percent of university graduates.

The decline in marriage rates has also led to a dramatic dip in the fertility rate, to as low as 1.1 in Hong Kong -- fully half of the replacement rate. (Unlike in, say, Scandinavia, very few Asian births take place out of wedlock.) The overall fertility rate in East Asia has fallen from 5.3 in 1960 to 1.6 today. That's obviously not sustainable, and many of the countries affected are scrambling to offer incentives to persuade women to have children. Among the benefits being offered? Better work-life balance, including subsidized childcare and parental leave for both mothers and fathers. As the Wall Street Journal noted a few months ago, affordable child care has a significant effect on a country's fertility.

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See that, Mr. Welch? That's work-life balance -- as an economic necessity. If it comes down to it, career women in the United States could always pull a Lysistrata and stop having babies until the men come around. But come on. We shouldn't need to get to that point.

Now, the reasons for the low marriage and birthrates in Asia are manifold, as the article describes, and include not only poor work-family polices but also inflexible divorce laws and rigid adherence to traditional social roles. (According to the article, the average Japanese woman does 30 hours of housework to a man's three -- talk about Chore Wars!) Because the tradition is for Asian women to "marry up," it's more difficult for educated and successful women to find a husband whose status matches or exceeds her own.

But the relationship between work-life policy and birthrate holds elsewhere as well. Take a look at Europe. The countries with the worst work-family policies are also, by and large, the countries with the lowest birthrates. Germany, for example, has notoriously bad work-life policies -- and a birthrate around 1.41 children per woman. Those countries with the highest birthrates, including Norway, Sweden, and France, tend to provide parents with the most support.

Business in a capitalist society has one goal and one goal only: to make money. This is often given as a justification for denying the value of policies that help employees achieve (or even attempt) work-life balance. But fertility trends show that this attitude is hugely shortsighted. There's no question that a career is now an option for most women. And the trends show that, when given an all-or-nothing choice between career and family, many women will choose career.

An aging population is a huge financial burden. It makes no sense to disincentivize reproduction. We simply can't afford to.

Joan Williams is the author of Reshaping the Work-Family Debate and Unbending Gender. She and Rachel Dempsey are co-writing an upcoming book about gender bias against professional women.

President Obama's proposed Medicaid cuts won't address the source of rising costs, but they would be a major step backward for public health care.

While the public debate about the Republican budget focused on the sharp reactions against Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization scheme, the other big “M” in health care, Medicaid, hasn’t received the attention it deserves. As a result, the Obama administration has proposed cuts in Medicaid. These will undermine the achievements of its own historic health care law and harm access to health care for tens of millions of women, children and seniors.

Unlike Medicare, our national health insurance program for seniors and the disabled, Medicaid comprises 51 different state programs (including Washington DC) operating under a set of federal rules, financed by both the federal and state governments. As a result, it’s much harder for the feds to control Medicaid costs through policy changes. The Ryan/Republican budget doesn’t even try; it simply limits the amount that the federal government will spend on Medicaid and shifts the rest of the costs to the states, while weakening the rules so that states can dump people out of the program.

Unfortunately, most of the proposals that have been made by President Obama in the debt-ceiling negotiations are a kinder and gentler version of the same wrong-headed policy of shifting costs to states, and through them to American families, rather than dealing with the underlying reasons that Medicaid costs are rising.

It’s true that Medicaid costs are increasing, but that’s not because Medicaid has done a poor job of controlling health care costs, at least compared with the rest of the nation’s health care system. For example, from 2000 to 2009 private health insurance companies spending per person increased by 7.7% each year while Medicaid spending on acute care health services –- doctor, hospital, prescriptions, tests, mental health – increased by 5.6% a year. Medicaid did an even better job controlling spending on long term care, which went up an average of just 3% a year per beneficiary, the same rate at which the economy grew and lower that the overall rate of medical inflation (4.1%).

To really see where Medicaid spends it money, you only need to look at the 5% of Medicaid beneficiaries who are responsible for more than 50% of the costs. These are people with very serious, chronic health conditions and serious disabilities. President Obama knows this –- in fact, he raised the issue at the National Governor’s Association in February.

The other major factor in Medicaid spending is increased enrollment –- particularly when the economy tanks. For example, enrollment of families was flat from 2004-2007 but spiked sharply once the recession began. Enrollment jumped by three million from June 2008 to June 2009 alone, the biggest increase since the early day of the program.

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Rather than dealing with the root causes of high Medicaid spending, the Obama administration proposes to cut $100 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, mostly by changing the way it pays states for the program. The biggest change would be to reimburse states at the same rate for all their Medicaid patients, unlike now, where states get a different rate for different populations, such as children or seniors. The new so-called “blended rate” would be set at a lower amount than current health spending. Like the Ryan plan, the proposal is simply a cut to states, albeit a much smaller one than Ryan proposed and without the loosening of rules on who and what to cover included in the Republican budget. States would still cut back on who and what it covers, if only to the extent allowed within the current rules. States would also cut payments to providers, which in many cases – particularly physicians, dentists and hospitals in some states – would make it harder for patients to get needed medical care.

The “blended rate” proposal also strikes a blow at the Affordable Care Act, which is counting on Medicaid to provide care to more than half of the 33 million uninsured who will be covered under the new law. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government will reimburse states 100% of the cost of these new enrollees for the first three years and gradually reduce that to 90%. Compare that to the average 57% now that the federal government pays as its share of Medicaid. The blended rate would result in states having to pay a lot more for people who become eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. As a result, states will throw up more barriers to enroll these working families and will scream more loudly about how the ACA is hurting their budgets. That later charge has almost no basis in fact now, but will become true under the blended rate proposal.

A second Obama administration proposal would close off one source that states now use to finance Medicaid, taxes on health care providers. Since states would be reluctant to replace these taxes with other taxes, they would also cut their spending on Medicaid, lowering federal spending.

In fact, only 10% to 15% of the cuts in Medicaid spending in the Obama proposal would come from rational savings in the system – increased efficiencies in providing medical equipment and prescription drugs – as opposed to simply giving states less money and making it harder for them to raise money for Medicaid.

The Affordable Care Act was a huge step toward a more rational health system, but the Obama proposals for Medicaid in the budget take us backward. Instead, the President should accelerate reforms that focus on the handful of high cost patients that drive most of the costs, by requiring states to implement care coordination programs which provide systems and incentives for health care providers to improve the care of the chronically.

Early this June, Senator Jay Rockefeller announced that 41 Democrats had pledged to “stand united against any efforts to slash Medicaid." Their action was aimed at the debt-ceiling and budget talks. Unfortunately, their resolve will be tested soon, in the Medicaid proposal made by their Democratic President.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, whose book on the campaign to win reform will be published in 2012. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.