The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy.

We could, of course, always make the payments, simply by printing more money - we simply promise to pay people by giving them dollar bills - but that could set off inflation.

Now it is unambiguously clear that trickle-down economics does not work. But what does that mean? That means we have to structure our economic policies to make sure that we have shared prosperity. And you don't do that by giving a tax cut to the big winners and raising taxes on those who have not done very well. Your economic policy has to respond to the way our economic system has been working.

Wall Street banks have used the same tactic that Bush used in the war on terror - fear - and they've basically said that if you don't do what we tell you, the sky will fall. If you don't do what we tell you, it will be the end of capitalism as we know it. The failure of Lehman Brothers lent some credence to those fears.

Amherst is a liberal arts college, committed to providing students with a broad education.

If you destroy a firm, you can't pull it out of bankruptcy overnight.

Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.