Word: affordability
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...them. After a wide search, she settled on Bobb, who had a reputation for restoring fiscal sanity to city governments - including managing public-school-system budgets. When Bobb arrived last spring, here's what he found: Contracts had been stuffed in office drawers. The district couldn't afford new books. Gas was siphoned between buses. The district had to borrow money to pay its employees. There wasn't even a chief financial officer managing the system's $1.3 billion annual budget. "Detroit is unlike anything I've ever experienced. It's a lot worse than I anticipated," he says...
...lessons taught by the financial crisis, the most personal has been that Americans aren't too slick with money. We take out home loans we can't afford. We run up sky-high credit-card debt. We don't save nearly enough for retirement...
...seen federal benevolence backfire before in this economy. Last February the White House - determined to rescue homeowners from foreclosure as the housing market crashed - launched its $75 billion Making Home Affordable program. The program not only failed to reverse a rise in foreclosures but also caused many homeowners to crash their credit ratings or throw monthly payments into homes they would ultimately lose anyway. Economists, meanwhile, say government efforts to keep people in homes they can't afford are painfully prolonging the nation's housing crisis - which doesn't help anyone...
...Make no mistake" is one of Obama's verbal twitches, and it's as much a prayer as a preface. He can't afford mistakes when the stakes are this high: the economy still wobbly, his agenda embattled and America's enemies snarling loudly. To chalk his troubles up to his personality - he's too cool, too contradictory, the divisive conciliator, the extreme centrist - underestimates the scale of the challenge he faces. It would be nice for Presidents to have magical powers, and Obama convinced many people that he had them, not least by managing to get himself elected...
Soup kitchens and shelters are the traditional ways society has looked after the homeless. But homeless advocates argue that making sure people can continue to afford housing is the central issue. "Services not connected to housing do little good," says Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House, the homeless organization that runs the Santa Ana shelter and an array of other programs in Orange County. "Pancake breakfasts provided by the middle and upper class make people feel better, but where are the pancakes the next day?" he adds. "Haiti is a sad reminder that having a place to live...