http://www.thedailyanchor.com/2009/01/28/the-benefits-of-a-recession/

So, not much has burned and the green grass is not growing because the old trees have not been burned up yet. This is likely to go on for several years with the new presidency.

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One of the problems we face is that a good forest fire has not gone through our area in quite a while and therefore much of the land is overgrown, making it FAR more dangerous than if fires regularly go through. The solution is to do manually cleaning to go back to how it would look had a fire gone through…we’ve had to thin out trees (cut down over half), ladder remaining trees (cut off dead limbs on the bottom), rake up all of the dead pine needles and remove them, remove dead and fallen trees…all to get it back to a “healthy forest” status.

In fact, by taking care of this maintenance, we are creating a forest in which a fire can go through and do very minimal damage…it will clear the ground, burn the small, unhealthy trees, and underbrush (thereby returning nutrients to the ground) but won’t ever get large enough or out of control to climb the trees and leap from tree to tree, which would eventually wipe out the entire forest.

Your analogy works very well as we need to do a lot of trimming and maintenance to get our personal finances back to a “healthy” perspective, not to mention the economy as a whole.

Andy.