Michael Ettlinger on Economic Recovery

How quickly will we begin seeing the effects of the economic recovery and reinvestment package?

We have a long road back to get our economy back on track. It's going to take quite a while before we see our economy back to where it should be. But the effects of the economy reinvestment and recovery measures that are being taken, we'll see those relatively quickly. We'll start seeing the rate of job loss becoming less; we'll start seeing things starting to stabilize in the economy; and in about a year we should really start seeing the corner turn to a stronger economy.

How much does the stimulus invest in long-term, rather than short-term, growth?

Most of the recovery and reinvestment measures that are being taken help us both in the short term and the long term. It's one of the features of the package is that most of these provisions are two-fors. We get something that helps stop the downward spiral we're in, and we get investments in some of the things that we have been failing to invest in for way to long and that we absolutely need for strong, long-term growth. For example, measures such as investments in infrastructure, energy independence, health care technologies; these are things that we absolutely need for our long-term growth, but they'll also help us create jobs in the short term and get our economy back on track.

How can we prevent a similar economic downturn in the future?

What got our economy into such deep trouble was basically two things. First of all, we had eight years where we didn't really have strong economic growth. We didn't have rising incomes; we didn't have the fundamental things that strengthen the middle class, that really build a strong underpinning to a really genuinely strong economy. The other thing is that we let our regulatory structure fail to oversee the financial markets. So, to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future, we really need to focus on the basics in the economy to make sure that incomes are rising and to also make sure that we have a regulatory structure in place and regulators who believe in regulating the financial markets to make sure that they don't run the economy into a ditch the way they did this time.