I was struck by this quote from President Obama reported in an MSNBC article today on the President’s budget proposal:
“We have more work to do to live up to our promise by repairing the damage this brutal recession has inflicted on our people”
It’s fascinating to me how he chooses language that objectifies the cause of the recession as something or someone other than “our people”.
I find Tyler Cowen’s assessment of the financial crisis in his recent e-book The Great Stagnation far more honest and insightful:
How did we make so many bad mistakes at the same time, all pointing in the same direction?
Here is the eight word answer:
We thought we were richer than we were.
We made mistakes because we thought we were richer than we were. Our people’s problems are because of the things our people did.