{"id":71,"date":"2010-02-03T11:06:39","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T15:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/?p=71"},"modified":"2010-04-05T11:55:06","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T15:55:06","slug":"its-all-about-the-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/2010\/02\/its-all-about-the-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s all about the economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Obama gave an excellent State of the Union address last week.\u00a0 But in covering so much ground – as Presidents invariably do – he missed an opportunity to drive home a fundamental message – his highest priority policy initiatives are all about building a stronger, more prosperous economy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Education<\/strong> – a well-prepared, agile workforce and world leadership in research and innovation are what made the American economy what it was for so\u00a0 many years\u00a0 –\u00a0 the engine of prosperity.\u00a0 Look around the world and you’ll find economic growth and increased living standards in countries where education is a national priority (and you’ll find the worst economic records where, through corruption or ideology, education is neglected or suppressed).<\/p>\n

Health Care<\/strong> – Major US corporations finally figured out that global competitiveness is hard to achieve when your competitors all have robust and universal health care systems that aren’t dependent on an accident of history – employer-paid health care that is far from universal.\u00a0 Healthy people are more productive, and productive people drive a healthy and growing economy.<\/p>\n

Energy and Climate<\/strong> – in investing, creating wealth comes through reducing the risk of loss and identifying profitable growth.\u00a0 Avoiding the potentially ruinous costs of climate change is all about reducing risk on a national and global scale.\u00a0 The clean energy economy has the potential to lead the US economy in much the same way that transportation, electronics, aviation, computing and communications did over the last 60 years.\u00a0 And reducing our dependence on unfriendly sources of energy saves money directly through lower outflows to those countries and indirectly through increased national security and decreased dependence on unfriendly countries.<\/p>\n

None of this will happen overnight – and that’s not easy for us to hear when there’s so much economic pain.\u00a0 But it won’t happen at all unless we get started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Obama gave an excellent State of the Union address last week.\u00a0 But in covering so much ground – as Presidents invariably do – he missed an opportunity to drive home a fundamental message – his highest priority policy initiatives<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-behavioral-change","category-policy-federal","","tg-column-two"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.riverbendadvisors.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}