Story by Avery Mills

Learning from and not repeating the mistakes made yesterday can help to create a better world for everybody tomorrow.

That was the message during Wednesday’s speech entitled, ‘What’s Wrong With the American Economy?’ presented by Floyd Norris, the chief financial correspondent for the “New York Times.” Fisher stated that he believed that the problems within the U.S. economy at the present time could be traced back to what actually caused the Great Depression.

“The fact that we never reached a consensus then, is critical to what happened recently,” he shared, after summing up what exactly has happened recently.

He placed a great amount of the blame on the banks that had been handing out loans left and right without much thought for how or when all of the money was going to be paid back.

When the banks began to fail and the government issued bailouts to help, that money didn’t go to the people who needed it most, it went right back into the banks. This has made it harder to get a loan, refinance homes and has put even more people into an economic crisis.

Norris explained that the banks are “profiting at the expense of people who can’t refinance.”

At this point, most people realize that the government is not going to be able to save the economy on its own, as Floyd referenced the recurring CBS poll featured in the “New York Times.”

It was asked if the reader “trusted the government to do what is right” with 10 percent answering “almost always,” the lowest percentage answering in the affirmative since the 1970s.

Although this number doesn’t reflect a very positive attitude amongst American citizens, Norris seemed confident that something like this would never happen again, as far as the situation with the banks go.

“A cat won’t jump on a cold stove after jumping on a hot one,” he stated.

It’s not all negative though. Norris sees this as an opportunity for Americans to exercise what he calls “joint sacrifice.” This term can be translated to mean that Americans may have to pay a little more in taxes right now, but it will be the most beneficial option in the long run.

The problem is, people don’t want to sacrifice now, they want results now, and as far as Norris is concerned, he doesn’t see an “easy fix” anytime soon.

At the end of his speech, Norris was asked why all of this information should be important to the audience, as a majority of the crowd was made up of college students for some of whom, the current economic crisis, including home loans and refinancing, isn’t really a major concern at this moment in their lives.

Norris answered, “At some point you will need a job, that is assuming there will be one available with the current state of the economy.”

This affected several people in the audience who quickly realized that if the mistakes of the past continue to be repeated over and over, the future of the economy and everybody’s individual future would be defined by errors that should have and could have been fixed a long time ago.