There is new evidence that the economic recovery has been a recovery for only a few at the top.

From 2009 to 2011, the top 7 percent of households grew in wealth while the bottom 93 percent of households declined in their net worth. A study released earlier this week by the Pew Research Center shows that this disparate recovery comes from those with Wall Street investments reaping the rewards of the recovery while housing prices and the yield of U.S. Treasury securities continued to decline.

According to the Pew study, from 2009 to 2011 the top 7 percent of households saw their wealth increase by 28 percent. Their mean income grew from just under $2.5 million to almost $3.2 million over those two years. In that same period, the bottom 93 percent of households saw a four percent decline in their net worth, from $139,896 to $133,817. That decline is the equivalent of two months of wages earned by workers in this group.

Households earning more than $500,000 annually were found to be far more likely to have investments in 401(k)s; thrift savings plans; stocks or mutual funds; or direct business investments, more than twice as likely as households earning less than $500,000). Households earning over $500,000 annually are also three times more likely to own shares in stocks and/or mutual funds than are households earning $499,999 or less annually.

What these different types of assets had in common over the first two years of the recovery were strong growth. According to the Pew study, 401(k)s and thrift savings plans grew by 57 percent, stocks and mutual funds by 55 percent and equity in business by 14 percent. High-income households invest disproportionately more in these assets, so they benefited the most from the growth. Put another way, the recovery helped most those with the most economic ties to Wall Street and big business.

This means to have done well in the economic recovery you had to have a large amount of disposable income. But with stagnant wages many members of the middle class have not seen an increase in disposable income and don’t have a whole lot of it. The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened Thursday morning at 14676.30, more than 3.5 percent higher than the Dow’s pre-recession peak in 2007. Meanwhile, median income in inflation-adjusted dollars dropped from $54,489 to $50,054 in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and as The Atlantic’s Matt Phillips wrote in March, “if consumer expectations are any reflection on income levels, it doesn’t look like the pay has gotten anywhere back to normal pre-crisis levels.”

Households earning less than $500,000 have most of their wealth invested in just about everything that experienced less growth than Wall Street during the first two years of the recovery. According to Pew, that included regular checking accounts, at 29 percent, and equity in their own home, at 61 percent. From 2009 to 2011 the mean value of equity in houses fell by 16 percent and home prices fell by 31 percent; the mean values of checking accounts only grew by 9 percent from 2009 to 2011.

These trends reflect an unsettling reality; the recovery was only a recovery for those who benefit directly from Wall Street investments. The study also shows that there was no trickle-down from Wall Street; there were only gains made for people who directly benefit from Wall Street institutions. The growth in stocks and mutual funds was not accompanied by growth in the mean value of home equity or any of the other assets that the middle class is most likely to be invested in and rely on.

The takeaway from this study is the need for a plan to create jobs that will increase wages for the middle class and work towards full employment. To have a sustainable economic future, the recovery needs to be shared by, not come at the expense of, the middle class.

An estimated 60,000 converged on the Capitol on Wednesday to tell Congress to take legislative action to enact comprehensive and fair immigration reform. To borrow a line from so many of yesterday’s speakers and protesters, “the time is now.”

But one group that deserved more time at the rally was undocumented youth, who need measures such as the Dream Act, which would enable these youths who were brought into the country with their parents to come out of the shadows and eventually become citizens.

These undocumented youth, who will play an important part in America’s future, make this as much a youth movement as it is an immigration movement.

Nadia, a student and organizer with the mid-Atlantic United We Dream, talked about the importance of immigration reform to youth. Speaking from her own experience, she said that she and her parents came to the United States 13 years ago as a way to provide a better future for her. However, due to being undocumented and the barriers that come with it for higher education, she said, “our American dream was shattered.” She said she overcame many of these barriers upon attaining citizenship, but her friends and family with undocumented or immigrant status still face them.

There are 2.4 million undocumented youth in the United States like Nadia, who could benefit from policies like the Dream Act. While there weren’t many of the Dreamers on Wednesday’s stage, you didn’t have to go far to find a group of college-age students sporting t-shirts and signs saying “united we dream,” “immigration reform, dreamer’s moms” or similar slogans. The strong presence of youth at the rally highlights the importance of youth to the immigration reform movement.

This isn’t just something that would solely benefit undocumented youth and their supporters. Reforming immigration policies to remove barriers to upward mobility for undocumented immigrants, youth especially, will benefit the nation as a whole. Nadia said one of the barriers faced by immigrant millennials is receiving a work visa after college. She said that this means many remain undocumented and then cannot fully contribute to innovation to drive the United States and its millennial generation forward.

Expanding green card availability is one of the important parts of of the proposed immigration reform bill. Currently just above 10 percent of migrants on student visas are able to obtain a green card after completing their studies, which means the United States is losing the talents of untold numbers of innovators and professionals who are U.S.-trained foreign students. This means the fact that China long ago surpassed the U.S. in patent production should come as no surprise.

Nadia and the Dreamers at the April 10 rally show that immigration is not only a human rights issue. The U.S. cannot compete globally and offer a productive future for millennial America unless it allows Nadia and 11 million other immigrants to become full participants in our economic system. “Young people need to be involved [in immigration reform] because it is our future,” Nadia said.

When you’re a student taking out a loan, should the amount of protection you get from fraud differ based on the size of the lender?

That is the question the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is about to decide as it draws up new regulations for student loan servicers. If your instinctive answer is “no, it shouldn’t matter,” tell the CFPB your point of view before the May 28 comment deadline.

The CFPB’s current proposal involves extending its current supervisory policies to nonbank servicers with over 1 million customers and will allow the CFPB to audit loan servicers. This means their oversight would be extended to companies such as Sallie Mae that are contracted to service federal loans.

This isn’t enough. While lenders with over a million customers make up a large portion of the market, they only account for seven of the 23 servicers contracted by the federal government. People with student debt should have equal protection under the law. That means the CFPB must have the same rules for all student loan servicers and providers, whether they have one customer or one million.

The CFPB has argued that expansions of its supervisory powers are necessary because they have received reports of loan recipients getting the run-around from lenders on such issues as how much they owe or when a payment is credited to their account. Similar practices were uncovered in an investigation into lending practices last year by the Senate Committee on Education when investigating lending practices in the for-profit college industry.

This poses a real problem for students and begs the question: Why is the CFPB only going to regulate the seven largest loan servicers and not the entire industry? Frankly, there’s no suitable answer. As the recent case of a small business lender, Joon Park and Jade Capital & Investments LLC, shows, smaller loan servicers are just as likely to engage in fraudulent practices as their larger counterparts like Sallie Mae.

Further, all companies that use taxpayer dollars to service federal loans should be subject to the same oversight and regulation from the federal government. Why would we not want to regulate how taxpayer money is being spent – especially when it has such a massive impact on millions of Americans?

With the average student debt at $27,000, a national student debt of over $1 trillion and 60 percent of students borrowing annually, strong action is needed. The first step is encouraging the CFPB to regulate all loan servicers regardless of size. All consumers should be equally protected by the CFPB’s regulatory actions. What people with student loans need is real relief, not political maneuvering.

You can tell the CFPB what you think they need to do by clicking here and making sure they know that no student loan servicer is too small to regulate.

The next time your Republican representative says they support the troops, laugh and call them a liar because they obviously don’t care enough to make sure the men and women in the military will be able to afford college.

Due to the sequester many branches of the military have cut the tuition assistance program that helps thousands of troops pay for higher education. As I’ve said before, there need to be serious cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, but they should never come from programs that help our troops better support themselves and their families.

A friend of mine in the U.S. Marine Corps recently texted me a meme that said, “Congress gets a raise and sequestration hits our tuition assistance, F*** us right?” This sentiment is understandable, as this will be far-reaching and could affect as many as 300,000 enlisted members while only saving $600 million. This will put the squeeze on a lot of military personnel who are attending college, especially when the average in-state cost for public school is nearing $20,000 per year. With a large number of troops making under $30,000 a year a sudden loss of tuition assistance will put a greater burden on students.

This is not a good thing for enlisted members of the military or our country. Weighing troops and veterans down with extra debt further disadvantages a group that is already at increased risk for homelessness and unemployment. Increasing the financial strain on soldiers and their families shows what the right’s sequester and cuts not growth agenda is all about: forcing austerity on vulnerable groups and public servants, while protecting the payouts to corporations and the 1% — who in this case happen to be military contractors.

The best way to fix the issue is to repeal the sequester. If you want to support our troops against harmful cuts, tell your member of Congress to vote for H.R.900 to repeal the sequester.

If the sequester is not repealed, there are much better places to make cuts, without harming military employees who are most vulnerable to austerity, while still cutting down on wasteful spending that supports the military-industrial complex. Those cuts could start with programs like the parasitic F-35 program. Cutting the F-35 could save $46 billion this fiscal year. This cut alone could spare troops from major cuts to their tuition assistance.

If you’re a big fan of the Air Force there’s still plenty of other places to cut. For example, the Stimson Center has shown that upkeep of our military arsenal costs $31 billion per year. There is also a $10 billion dollar project to modernize the B61 gravity bombs. Cutting the tactical submarine fleet down to 40 (it would still be the one of largest in the world) by 2020 would save $32 billion over 10 years. Cutting any of these projects would ensure corporations that profit from this wasteful spending bear the brunt of the cuts, and not the troops.

So why hasn’t the right agreed to cuts that would allow us to really support the troops? Because that would mean that Lockheed Martin and others would lose some profitable corporate handouts and the right would lose some political donations.So why actually support the troops when you can support the multi-billion dollar corporations that donate to your campaign? The cuts hitting the troops the hardest and mainstream GOP refusal to reevaluate the sequester shows that the Republicans don’t care who the cuts hurt as long as it’s not their corporate friends.

You wouldn’t know it from the shopping list drawn up for the Pentagon by defense hawks in Congress, but we’re long past the days of contending with a global superpower developing weapons that rival our own and flaunting its military might in menacing, destabilizing ways. The Cold War is over, and our Pentagon budget no longer reflects the country’s defense needs. Which is why Campaign for America’s Future has joined 21 other groups in signing a letter to urge Congress to include fundamental reforms to the Pentagon budget in the any alternative to the sequester.

These groups have put forward over $800 billion in Pentagon cuts that can reduce the deficit and prevent cuts to other important areas of government spending.

As 350 economists will tell you, the sequester is a terrible idea to begin with. But if any government spending is to be cut, it is important that those cuts happen where they have the least impact on job creation and economic growth.

These 22 groups believe military spending should given priority in cuts because there is a large amount of waste.

We are united in the belief that there are plenty of ways to strategically target pork-barrel projects and programs designed to fight the Cold War instead of 21st century threats. What seems lacking is the political will to have a meaningful discussion over the structure of our armed forces—a structure that is sensible as well as sustainable.

These programs include things like limiting the number of Virginia-class submarines the government which the CATO Institute predicts could save $2 billion in fiscal year 2013 alone. Such savings can provide long-term deficit reduction without harming the economic recovery in the manner that drastic cuts to social programs would.

Besides, Pentagon spending yields one of the lowest rate of jobs created per billion dollars of spending. The Political Economy Research Institute found for every billion dollars spent on the Pentagon there are around 11,000 jobs created. That is less than half of the 26,000 in jobs that are created for every billion dollars spent on education.

Campaign for America’s Future has been joined in signing this letter by Americans for Tax Reform, Center for Freedom and Prosperity, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, Cost of Government Center, CREDO, Freedom Action, Friends Committee on National Legislation, National Priorities Project, National Taxpayers Union, Peace Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Project On Government Oversight, Republican Liberty Caucus, R Street, Take Back Washington, Taxpayers for Common Sense, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, USAction, U.S. PIRG, Women’s Action for New Direction, and Win Without War.

President Obama’s State of the Union address highlighted the importance of keeping medical and scientific research fully funded by the federal government. “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the space race,” President Obama said.

While the space race has ended for now, the need for strong investment in scientific research, especially medical research, continues. Federal funding for research spurs innovation, supports well-paying jobs and reduces medical costs. The federal budget sequester now going into effect would slash 11.3 percent of the Nation Institute for Health’s budget. These cuts to medical research would have profound economic consequences and set back important research.

Federal funding for medical research stimulates a lot of economic activity. As Obama stated in his speech, for every dollar spent on the human genome project, $140 is returned to the economy. Investing federal funds in medical research stimulates large amounts of growth. Every public dollar spent on medical science helps stimulate $3.50 in the pharmaceutical industry alone. This is the type of spending that is necessary in an economic recession to encourage continued economic growth.

Not only is federal funding for medical research a good investment in the economy, it is also plays an important role in supporting jobs, especially well-paying jobs. A study by the Association of American Medical colleges found that “federal and state research funding received by medical schools and teaching hospitals directly supports nearly 300,000 full-time, mostly high-skilled, jobs.” That amounts to about one of every 500 jobs.

It is important to note that jobs created through medical research are high-skilled and well paid. CNN Money’s “Best Jobs in America” list for 2012 ranked clinical research associate at number four. The median pay of a clinical research associate is $90,700 per year and the field is expected to grow by 36.4 percent over the next 10 years. Another set of jobs supported by medical research funding are research scientists; they have a median income of $81,800 per year and a projected 10-year job growth of 15.5 percent. These types of jobs are what the economy needs, in growth areas where workers can earn greater disposable income. Drastic cuts to federal spending will lead to job losses and will harm job growth in fields that are vital to continued economic recovery.

Aside from the negative economic impact, the sequester cuts would also cause significant setbacks for medical research. One devastating setback would be the predicted slowdown of research on new cancer treatments. Cuts to medical research will hurt cancer research, which only receives $5 billion dollars a year, and would stall new research on cancer treatment. Advocates have also said that the sequester will negatively affect the wait time for Food and Drug Administration reviews of oncology drugs. These setbacks will hurt millions of Americans.

With 55 percent of Americans saying we’re not making enough progress in medical research, it is unacceptable to even imagine cutting federal funding in this area. Medical research is essential to getting America going again and providing important services to Americans. The damage the sequester cuts to medical research funding could do to jobs and growth in America is just one more example that austerity is not the way forward for the country.

Republicans and deficit hawks are out of touch with unmarried women voters, and that is particularly true when it comes to the across-the-board spending cuts known as the sequester that are due to go into effect Friday.

A study released today by Democracy Corps, Women’s Voice, Women Vote Action Fund and the Roosevelt Institute found that unmarried women are strongly opposed to the social services cuts that would be imposed by the sequester. These voters in particular “struggle to comprehend how Washington could allow a series of cuts to take effect when the economy is fragile and they are struggling to make ends meet. To them, Washington’s dysfunction comes at a steep price,” the study said.

This focus group study found that unmarried women reacted strongly against the cuts when they were discussed in President Obama’s recent State of the Union address. When Obama said, “Now, some in this Congress have proposed preventing only the defense cuts by making even bigger cuts to things like education and job training; Medicare and Social Security benefits,” approval among unmarried women fell to just above 30 percent. However, when the president declared, “That idea is even worse,” approval rating among unmarried women shot up to around 65 percent.

It is not out of ideology that unmarried women are opposed to the conservative cuts- not-growth agenda, but because they would be one of the groups most harmed by the sequester. Page Gardner, founder and president of the Voter Participation Center, explain that unmarried women make up two-thirds of all unemployed women, as well as two-thirds of women who are uninsured. Unmarried women also account for 80 percent of women in poverty. This should leave no one wondering why unmarried women are opposed to cuts that will disproportionately affect the unemployed and uninsured.

With unmarried women making up 23 percent of voters, this means Republicans are ignoring the policy needs of a very large proportion of American voters. Making groups such as unmarried women bear the brunt of the sequester cuts shows that Republican deficit hawks are sadly out of touch with what the American people want and need.

The Democracy Corps study also found that unmarried women reacted positively to progressive policies like pay equity and affordable higher education. Stan Greenberg, from Democracy Corps, said that their study found unmarried women had a very strong response to policies that are intended to spur economic growth. Greenberg said that unmarried women showed very strong approval for broad-based investment and infrastructure.

Unmarried women showed the strongest support  for the Paycheck Fairness Act, at 93 percent, and for raising the minimum wage, with support around 85 percent. This shows that unmarried women, an important part of the voting population, support progressive policies that work for economic justice rather than policies that would force them and other middle-class voters to make further sacrifices.

It’s been 13 days since the Campaign for a Fair Settlement challenged President Obama to use the first 100 days of his term to “fix what Wall Street broke.”  Though Obama said his policies will, “speed relief to the hardest-hit homeowners,” he has yet to act on many of these demands.

The Campaign for a Fair Settlement is dedicated to making sure President Obama follows through on his promises, and prioritizes financial and housing reform in the first 100 days of his term.

Since the campaign was launched, the U.S. has filed a 119-page, $5 billion lawsuit against the rating agency Standard & Poor’s. The Justice Department has accused Standard & Poor’s of inflating its ratings.  This is a good, but not the best one possible.  Dan Petegorsky from Campaign for a Fair Settlement said, ” This is just one case against the abettors, rather than the main perpetrators. It’s still just civil, not criminal. So, there is tremendous work to be done before the DOJ is anywhere close to fulfilling its obligation to taxpayers and homeowners.”

In addition to making sure that bankers and Wall Street face criminal prosecution, Campaign for a Fair Settlement is demanding that the banks pay back the American people.  American taxpayers spent $245 billion of TARP funds on banks, but have only received $26 billion in settlements.  As Campaign for a Fair Settlement puts it, this amounts to a small parking ticket.  Banks have not contributed enough to stabilizing the housing market and providing homeowner relief funds. Numbers aside, there is no way to assure that this money will reach the communities most harmed by the foreclosure crisis.

Communities of color were hit the hardest by foreclosures; black wealth has declined by well over 50 percent, and Latino wealth by over 60 percent, since 2005.  This is because of discriminatory lending practices that targeted communities of color with bad loans.  Campaign for a Fair Settlement’s biggest obstacle in getting Wall Street to pay America back t is reversing this trend of discrimination, which has continued in the relief program created by the settlement. Reversing this trend will require including an anti-discrimination clause in homeowner relief plans.  President Obama has done little about this situation so far, and lawmakers in general have danced around the issue of racial discrimination inherent in the foreclosure crisis.

While these are good plans for the future, the First 100 Days campaign is also focused on providing immediate relief to struggling homeowners.   To this end,  campaigns organizers are calling on Obama to allow Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to start resetting mortgages and begin principal reduction. Obama has failed consistently to deliver on this policy.  This problem persists in large part because of Federal Housing Finance Agency chairman Edward Demarco’s refusal to engage in principal reduction. Obama has failed to remove Demarco, despite rumors last year that he might do so.

The First 100 Days campaign is also working to expand affordable housing and stabilize communities.  The campaign is pressuring Obama to allow previous homeowners to buy back their old homes at market rate, or rent them from Fannie and Freddie.   This is another policy that is running into trouble because of Demarco’s firmly anti-middle-class policies.  This problem will persist until Obama fires Demarco and replaces him with a director who is responsive to the needs of struggling homeowners.

Campaign for a Fair Settlement faces an uphill battle for housing justice and Wall Street reform.  Their biggest challenge is to get Obama to stop talking and start acting.  While the Obama Administration uses progressive rhetoric about reform, it has yet to take serious actions like firing Demarco, providing a relief program that deals with the racial discrimination of foreclosure, or pursuing a sizable settlement from banks that received $245 billion in TARP funds.

The president still has 87 days to “fix what Wall Street broke,” give Wall street the bill for the damage it caused, and get millions of struggling homeowners the help they need and the justice they deserve.