Simplify, Please

By Alissa Scheller

I really just don’t understand anything financial, and my microeconomics professor will probably back me up on that.
This whole housing crisis is also confusing, but I think I get the basics: people took out loans they couldn’t afford to pay back. Americans seem to like living beyond their means and faking prosperity – which is all fun until you have to pay off your debts.

This article from the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-paul/federal-efforts-to-suppor_b_170954.html) explained it all to me pretty well. The writer argues that proposals to “bail out” indebted homeowners (in the same vein as TARP, which bailed out financial institutions) is not a solution. He losses are real, and shifting them around won’t do any good.

Most of the articles and blog posts I found about the lending crisis were complicated. They had all this financial jargon and things that I just didn’t understand. I realize that the economy has a lot to do with economics, and therefore economic language is needed to describe it.

However, I strongly suspect that the average American would not understand most of the articles I read about the lending crisis. It was really hard to find anything that simply explained what was going on – most offered intricate plans to “save” the economy – as if we weren’t already past that.

So, this is what I would say to blog writers if I could: write simply, so that others may simply read. Stop it with the jargon. Some of us are just trying to pass econ so we can graduate.