NPR: Obama's Remarks On Stimulating The U.S. Economy

[planetkimi]

A couple of observations on Obama's speech:

• Hooray for broadband in the boondocks! :D (No, really - he mentioned it.  Load the page, hit CTRL-F, type "broadband" in the search field - you'll see it.)  
• Mike Rowe is hopefully delighted. :) 

I'm pretty excited.  This is still a new feeling for me - actually being excited about things that politicians say.  I'm generally not into government spending, but we do have infrastructure needs, and there's the whole need for alternative energy sources.  I'm pretty OK with this blood infusion, we just need to make sure that the wounds in the economy get closed as well.  The gov can help with that at a regulatory level (and they should!), but there's also work to be done at an individual level.

If we were to distill the economic crisis down to its essence, I think we'd find greed sitting at the bottom of the pot.  Financiers created financial vehicles that no one seems to understand in order to wring more profit out of the system.  Banks made higher interest loans to subprime borrowers, thus generating more profit on higher risk.  (and then of course they required mortgage insurance to cover it) People borrowed way more money than they were prepared to repay, I guess thinking that it was "magic" that they were suddenly able to afford houses and stuff.  Our economy became an unsubstainable system, and it unsurprisingly crashed.

Well, that's way more preaching than I intended to do today.  :P I just wanted to get that recorded for my own reference years later.  I also need to mention that I have a bunch of foolishly acquired debt myself.  I gotta work on kicking the credit addiction.

So, without further ado, here's the link to the article -
NPR.com: Obama's Remarks on Stimulating the US Economy