American families have endured nearly two years of stress and punishment under almost unprecedented financial turmoil, but the economy is beginning to turn around. Sort of.
“Things are getting worse more slowly,” former Clinton Administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich told a packed audience Tuesday at Eisenhower Medical Center's Annenberg Center for Health Sciences, part of the 2010 Rancho Mirage Speakers Series.
The economy “will turn up. I promise you, it will turn up. … You can bank on that.”
Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, served in three presidential administrations — including late president and Rancho Mirage resident Gerald Ford's. Reich also helped lead President Obama's economic transition amid a downturn that eventually became the nation's worst since the Great Depression.
In an interview prior to his speech, Reich said he supported the Obama Administration's nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package, which he said helped save an estimated 1 million American jobs — but it didn't go far enough.
Billions more in federal funding should have been pumped to the state and local levels to help keep school districts, police and fire departments, and homeowners across the country afloat, Reich said.
Banks that took even more billions in taxpayer money to avoid collapse, since they were dubbed “too big to