Mixed Bag

As with the past few months, this week has been a mixed bag. On a positive note, on Monday I attended an orientation for the commencement ceremony for my college. It's where I picked up my cap and gown, shown in the picture. That was kind of cool. But on a negative note, I had to take a mandatory, unpaid week-off from work. It's a corporate thing, an effort to save money. They're also stopping their "matching" contribution to our 401(k)'s, which sucks even worse, as we don't know how long that will continue.

I can pretty much smell a layoff in the air....

Anyway, for my editing course, we had to rewrite the treasury secretary's recent speech, in which he outlined the Financial Stability Plan. For those who don't know, the original speech was widely panned as being uninspiring.

Doing research for the paper, I read something disturbing: to really bail out the banks, to soak up all their toxic mortgages so they can start lending again, would cost about $7 trillion. If I'm doing the math right, that's about $23,000 for every person in the country.

Wow.

To paraphrase Stalin: one dollar is a tragedy. Trillions just statistics.