You need to know this.

For more signs that we are in a Great Depression and not just a Great Recession - consider this fact - today - over 6 million Americans - more than 45% of all the unemployed in our nation - have been out of work for more than 6 months - a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.

Not to mention an unknown several million other people - the 99ers - who have been jobless so long that they’re not eligible to receive unemployment benefits anymore.

There are two Americas today - one comprised of the working class that’s in the grip of a Second Republican Great Depression - and the other comprised of millionaires and billionaires who are relatively unscathed thanks to the Wall Street bailout.

And the news media - filled mostly with millionaires - don’t want to discuss this reality.

But I do.

You don't have to take my word for it on this tale of two economies - take Alan Greenspan - the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve's word for it when he appeared on Meet the Press last year...

Our problem, basically, is that we have a very distorted economy, in the sense that there has been a significant recovery in our limited area of the economy amongst high-income individuals who have just had $800 billion added to their 401(k)s and are spending it and are carrying what consumption there is. Large banks, who are doing much better and large corporations, whom you point out and everyone is pointing out, are in excellent shape. The rest of the economy, small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labor force, which is in tragic unemployment, long-term unemployment - that is pulling the economy apart. The average of those two is what we are looking at - but they are fundamentally two separate types of economies.

So what's behind this breaking up of the American economy?

Tax cuts for the rich - started by Reagan - carried on by George Herbert Walker Bush then W. Bush and now President Obama.

Between 2001 and 2010 - The Bush tax cuts cost our economy two and a half trillion dollars!

That's two and a half trillion added on to our debt that Republicans today are screaming is way to high.

And that money that SHOULD have been flowing through our government and then through our economy - mostly went into the hands of the very few and the very rich.

In fact - nearly a third of all the Bush tax cuts went to the top 1% of Americans.

The Brookings Institute looked into who got what thanks to the Bush tax cuts and calculated that the lowest 20% of income earners in America saved on average about $20 a year thanks to the Bush tax cuts - about the price of a dinner for one at Outback Steakhouse - not including the tip - courtesy of the federal government.

The middle 20% saved about $740 - about the price of one month’s rent for many Americans.

But get this - the top 1% of income earners in our nation saved an astounding $45,000 - Uncle Sam just bought you a new car.

And for millionaires in America - the Bush tax cuts saved them $120,000 a year - enough to buy the house that the bottom 20% of earners are struggling to pay rent in even with their $20 tax cut.

Basically - the richer got considerably richer - while the poor stayed about the same.

Add on to that the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street - and you can see precisely what Greenspan is talking about when talks of two separate American economies - two economies that he himself is in part to blame for creating...but that's for another day.

So let's go back for a moment back in time - a time when we could have stopped the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 - and reinvested that wasted money elsewhere in the economy.

ThinkProgress did just that - and what they came up with will blow your mind.

(Thom goes to the model village of Democracyville to demonstrate.)

Let's demonstrate it with Democracyville. Here's our little city here, our Democracyville and of course the tax cuts, the Bush tax cuts, $2.5 trillion went t the people living in the pensions and the penthouse apartments. So they got all the tax cuts and all this cash.

And what they do with it? Well, there's an interesting article over at Huffington Post that Patriotic Millionaires, these are folks who actually want their taxes raised. They are people who earn over a million dollars a year, they take in who earn over a million dollars a year, and they want their taxes raised.

And they asked these guys - these people - what did you do with your tax, with the money you made from the Bush tax cuts?

And one, Paul Egerman, he says, he's the founder of a medical transcription company, he says, "I kept it. I haven;t done anything with it." OK, so that money just kinds of stays there.

Another one, let's see, here we go, Frank Patitucci, he says, "probably traveled a little bit more than I otherwise would have".

Another one of the millionaires says, "I got a bigger boat than I used to have," it's a 150 foot boat. He says, but the problem is, it didn't create any jobs, it was built in Italy.

And the fourth one, he says, well, "I just started creating jobs myself. I built a dance floor in my house -- which I really didn't need," he says, Dal LaMagna.

And so, anyhow, here's where the money stayed. But what could we have done? This is what ThinkProgress came up with when they ran the map on this. What could have been done?

We could have given 120 Million children health care. Here's the middle class part of Democracyville. OK, we could have given 120 Million children health care.

We could have given 50 Million People Healthcare with that money, every year for 10 years. Today is the 10th anniversary of George Bush signing his tax cuts. Every year for 10 years we could have given 120 Million children or 50 Million adults full health care every year for 10 years.

We could have hired 4 Million Elementary School Teachers for Democracyville.

We could have provided 31 Million Head Start Slots. We could have provided 30.4 Million Scholarships For University Students. I mean, this is pretty astounding. So we could have built some serious schools. We could have expanded Democracyville considerably. In stead, that money just went to buy a boat made in Italy.

We could have hired 4 Million Firefighters a year for 10 years, year after year after year.

We could have hired 3 Million Police Officers. You think you've got a crime problem or the streets might be safer? We could have hired 4 Million Police Officers with the Bush tax cuts every year for 10 years. But instead we've got CEOs living in their high rises and making even more.

We could have, this is really cool, we could have put 144 million households with alternative energy, with wind power. 144 million households. Now, think about that. There's only 300 plus million of us in this country. How many households? There's about 110 million who are working, so that's probably pretty much every household in America.

Or we could have outfitted 54 Million homes here in Democracyville with solar panels. We could have gotten ourselves off the grid. You know, Germany has this program where they're putting solar panels on people's roofs.

They have now, in the last 10 years, put enough solar panels up that they're generating enough electricity to have eliminated 8 nuclear power plants. They just shut down a bunch of power plants. They are generating more electricity than 8 nuclear power plants in Germany.

We could have done this. But instead, because of the Bush tax cuts, millionaires and billionaires got a little extra and Democracyville just didn't get any of this stuff. Instead, they're just kind of just falling apart.

And this is the big challenge that the Obama administration has now, is how to put the American middle class back together after 10 years of this incredible damage from the Bush tax cuts.

That's The Big Picture.