Over the last few months it’s been difficult to avoid Occupy Wall Street in the news. The antics of some of the more radical “occupiers” have been front page news for months. As in any movement, the radical members of the group often obscure the true intent of the group. One may ask; does this protest actually have a point? The answer to this question is yes.

Societal and income inequality are rampant in the United States. According to the New York Times, the top 1% of earners in this nation take home nearly 25% of wealth annually; this compares to levels similar prior to the Great Depression. In terms that are slightly easier to visualize, this means that 3,688,575 earn 25% of the GDP while nearly 11 million individuals are earning 75% of the wealth. Many U.S. citizens, including the poker 1 percent, immigrants and non-immigrants alike, believe in what is known as “The American Dream.” In short, this dogma states that if you work hard enough you can become well off in the U.S. The current system means that The American Dream is unattainable for most people. The point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is to make The American Dream attainable for everyone.

An additional reason for the Occupy Wall Street movement is to restore some sort of order to the financial sector. There has been a mortgage crisis over the last several years. What does this “crisis” mean for the average citizen? The inner-workings of the financial sector are exceptionally complex and difficult to understand. Luckily, my father is an economist, and a professor, which means that I have a readily available person to explain what I think of as “economic mumbo-jumbo” to me. In layman’s terms (and I certainly include myself in this) banks began to sell packages of investments amongst each other. A variety of risky investments were packaged together with mortgages, which were considered “safe” (although, the French word for death is “mort”, so how safe are they really?) When the risky investments began to fall through, housing prices inflated, people refinanced (giving the financial sector more money) and people began to pay insanely high prices for homes. Once people realized that a three bedroom home with two bathrooms and an unfinished basement wasn’t worth $1 million, the bubble created by this investment practice popped and people were left with homes they couldn’t afford. This was not possible before a “financial reform” act passed in 1999. The point of Occupy Wall Street is to put those regulations back into place so that people aren’t being cheated by the system they invest in.

The point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is to create some financial sanity after years of deregulation and corruption. Individuals participating in this movement are not lazy. They simply want the chance to succeed in a nation where millions of citizens are working in well-paying jobs and have the opportunity to provide for their families. They want to live in a nation where education is available to all. And really, isn’t that what we all want?