The Federal Open Market Committee will meet on November 3-4, 2009, to discuss U.S. monetary policy. The main course on the table will be whether or not to recommend that the Federal Reserve raise the Federal Funds Rate or keep interest rates at their current low levels. It is expected that monetary policy will remain largely unchanged after this meeting.

I vote that they raise rates a little even though this is supposedly a recipe for slowing the economy. Why? Because the Federal Funds Rate is at odds with reality where interest rates are concerned. Anyone who has a credit card knows that interest rates have gone up despite Fed policy. This policy has chipped away at the value of the dollar and steadily made life more expensive for consumers, despite official inflation figures that show low inflation.

Speaking of suspect official figures: Supposedly, the U.S. posted GDP growth of 3.9 percent in the third quarter of 2009. In light of massive job losses during the same period, skepticism about this claim is warranted. American workers must be massively more productive during this recession because the only way fewer workers can produce such impressive growth would be through productivity gains.

Exports are up slightly, thanks to the weaker dollar. Is that enough to account for the growth? Every other economic indicator is down: Companies continue to shed workers (the current unemployment rate of 9.8 percent is the highest since 1983); household consumption (70 percent of U.S. GDP) remains weak; the commercial real estate bust continues (though sales of existing homes seem to have recovered somewhat -- at lower prices); and the weakening of the dollar is going to make it very difficult to hide inflation in the coming months.

The back of my envelope says that slightly higher exports of around $128 billion in August are not enough to cause the GDP to grow by 3.9 percent. The stock market was up in the third quarter, and financial firms did well. That performance accounts for the growth in GDP -- speculative growth in the financial sector.

Haven't we been down this road before? The Wall Street casino rises enough to pay the financial folks their massive bonuses, and we get glowing reports about the GDP. If that accounts for the growth, this figure is calculated in a flawed way. Speculative frenzies do not create any new value -- they just raise prices on existing value. This Wall Street casino concept of wealth is what got us into this mess in the first place. It is not going to get us out of it.

I hope the FOMC considers that. It is not growth if people are not working. Real wealth is not created without work. This is not about numbers. It is about people. If we want to get out of this recession/depression thing we're in, somebody needs to figure out a way to get people back to work. Bigger Wall Street bonuses do not a healthy economy make.

In a capitalistic system like ours, the only way to get people back to work is to invest in the enterprises that create jobs. The government can't do this directly, but rules and regulations could be crafted to kick the investing class's butt a bit. The only thing we have going for us right now is the weaker dollar, and the dollar is going to get much weaker no matter what happens to interest rates. Why not take advantage of this opportunity? Why not tilt the playing field through legislation that rewards investment in real, productive enterprise and taxes idle speculative gains? In other words, if you make money in the carry trade or through a derivatives contract, it's taxed at 90 percent. If you make money on dividends earned by a producer of products or services, it's taxed at a much lower rate.

This seems like a way of discouraging those practices that harm the economy and people and encouraging those practices that help the real economy and real people. We need more investment in our inventors and our producers NOW so that we can take advantage of the weaker dollar in coming years and put people to work.

Meanwhile, raise the Fed Funds Rate a tad to get it more in line with reality and to stanch the bleeding of the value of the dollar. If unemployment continues to rise and the dollar continues to fall, things are going to get much worse in the real world, no matter what the GDP figures say.

That probably didn't help any ordinary people survive unemployment today, but it helped me. I hope somebody with some semblance of clout reads and comprehends it.