My parents and I were all afraid of being poor - really poor.

We don't win what we don't fight for.

People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.

Big banks churn out page after page of incomprehensible fine print to obscure the cost and risks of checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and other financial products. The result is that consumers can't make direct product comparisons, markets aren't competitive, and costs are higher. If the playing field is leveled and the broken market fixed, a lot more money will stay in the pockets of millions of hard-working families. That's real stimulus - money to families, without increasing our national debt.

The poor pay more, and that's one of the reasons people get trapped at the bottom of the economic ladder.

This country isn't working for working people. It's working only for people at the top. That's not the American dream. That's the American nightmare.

It's pretty much how we get anything added to the curriculum. When parents said children needed to be computer literate, the schools started responding. The same thing is true of basic financial literacy.