Here are some of the more interesting facts about gold that we learned from this infographic:

- All the gold in the entire world could fit inside about 3 Olympic sized swimming pools. And unlike paper, it can’t just keep getting printed.

- There are about 5 gold rings worth of gold per person on the earth (~7 billion people = ~35 billion gold rings)

- The vast majority of gold is used as jewelry (as opposed to investments)

- India consumes more than six times as much gold as the US

- China consumes more than three times as much gold as the US

- The US national debt is more than the value of all the gold in the world

From: Number Sleuth

There is nothing more American than spending the money that could support a Congolese family for a year on a bunch of crap that we don’t need.  Like those candy hearts for Valentines Day, you know the ones that taste like a mix of bone meal and shattered dreams?  Nothing says America like spending money on something no one wants, needs or (dear God) consumes all in the name of a holiday almost completely manufactured by corporations.  But it makes us feel good, and especially in these trying economic times, its nice to remind ourselves that the electric bill can go to hell, we’re going to buy some pine-tree branches and expensive electronics!  This is America, dammit!  And when we spend on Holidays, holy hell do we spend big. 
 

Halloween

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Coming in at number five in the list of most spendiferous holidays, Halloween clocks in spending close to $5 billion.  That’s roughly $50-$60 dollars spent for every person that actually celebrates the holiday (people of other cultures and that particularly fun-killing brand of Christians excluded.  While that number is rather large, keep in mind that it does not include the copious amounts of booze, which would likely catapult this holiday to the top of the list.   

So that’s $5 billion on sexy nurse costumes, sexy pirate costumes, and sexy proctologist costumes. Not to mention the candy.  To put it into perspective, that $5 billion number is actually higher than all corporate donations to foreign aid organizations for the entire year.  Halloween should get a pass for being a towering monstrosity of consumerism, owing to its unique status as one of the few holidays everyone enjoys. 

Easter

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Easter was yet another childhood excuse to eat so much candy it made us sick.  The Easter egg hunt is a particularly venerable piece of America, meriting its own section on the White House website.  So when you’re talking about what basically amounts to Halloween minus the costumes, it shouldn’t be any larger than $5 billion, right?  Well, no, try more like $14 billion.  While the majority of this is spent on food and those really disappointing egg-dyeing kits, a huge portion of this spending is on clothing.  And not just clothes for Easter…Mass?  Apparently, a chunk of that big ole $14 billion number comes from the fact that, come Easter, people women take the opportunity to refresh their wardrobes for the spring.  While it’s unclear if this is directly related to Easter or just a general trend, being Americans, I’m going with the “An excuse to shop and spend money!? HOLY CHRIST!” 

Mother’s and Father’s Day

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To prevent a Mothers vs. Fathers debate, let’s just group together the two holidays that have the highest ratio of how often you remember them to how much regret you feel.  Despite their somewhat sullied reputations as holidays invented to sell more Hallmark cards that contain some version of “I’m sorry you’re so disappointed in me”, celebration of mothers and fathers is actually an old tradition dating back to Greek and Roman times.

The modern incarnation started sometime around the turn of the century, with Mother’s day being declared a holiday by congress in 1914, and fathers day in 1966.  Combined, Americans spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $27 billion, with people loving their mothers about $5 billion more than they do their fathers.  This comes out to roughly $240 a person every year, a number that has jumped in recent years due to the slight economic recovery and the speculative rise in the costs of finger paints, construction paper and pipe cleaners. 

Valentine’s Day

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Short of Christmas, Valentine’s day is the biggest spending holiday of year for Americans.  For 2011, the number was expected to come out slightly ahead of Mother’s day, topping $15 billion.  And that’s not even counting the money spent on expensive dates, or the bottles of bourbon you use to drown your crushing, crushing loneliness.  And while a box of chocolates and some flowers might set you back $50, the average per-person expenditure actually comes out to the mid-hundreds.  Where’s that extra money coming from? Ask those of us who can barely afford a disgustingly cute Build-A-Bear (look it’s wearing a sailor’s uniform! It’s not supposed to be doing that, it’s a bear!).
 
Well the numbers for Valentine’s Day are skewed majorly upward by people buying jewelry so expensive if any sensible person received it they’d murder their significant other (guys can get jewelry too, right? How else am I going to finish my pejazzle set?) 

Black Friday

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Contrary to popular belief, Black Friday wasn’t the largest shopping day in America until 2005.  But thanks to relentless media boredom and ruthless retailer price-cutting, it has become the largest, even spawning a bunch of really annoying titles for concurrent days, including “Sofa Sunday” and “Cyber Monday” (despite the fact that no one under 35 has used the word “cyber” since 1994).  This year, Black Friday broke all records, with 226 million shoppers crowding the halls and trampling one another in pursuit of Tickle Me Elmo…or…whatever kids are interested in these days. 

That 226 million is more than three-quarters of every man, woman and child in America.  Meaning that basically anyone who is physically capable of walking and knocking over fellow moms like a linebacker went shopping a few weeks ago.  They spent almost $400 each and collectively spent upward of $50 billion.  That means one day easily dwarfs the expenditures of virtually every other major holiday throughout the year.  And that’s just for Black Friday alone.  The total Christmas season sees that number roughly double.  So next time you hear depressing economic news, remind yourself that—in a sort of modern-day Gift of the Magi — Americans are still finding ways to acquire even more credit card debt in order to buy expensive crap they don’t really need for their loved ones.

Should the real targets of the Occupy Wall Street protests be the fat cats in our institutions of Higher Education?

The fact is that it’s nearly impossible to untangle the causes of the economic mess we’re in. Whether the cause is government (according to the libertarians) or the financial industry (according to the progressives) or an economically ungrounded system of higher education and student loans (according to all of us with a degree, no job and big student debt), there’s a pretty clear message… everyday people are getting tired of getting jerked around.

From: Best Colleges

An ancient piece of common wisdom says the poor get poorer and the rich get richer (in fact it’s as ancient as the Bible).  We’ve all experienced this in small ways in our daily lives in the form of bank fees if our account falls below a certain minimum amount, or in the higher interest rates we pay on a loan given the fact that we don’t have a yacht to put up as collateral.  But lately it seems like this proverb has shifted to “the poor get poorer and holy crap don’t tax the rich — who else is going to generously provide menial minimum-wage jobs to the poor?!”

In case it doesn’t go without saying, being poor is really super awful in ways most people fail to think about.  Well, “most people” might be stretching it, since statistically speaking, the percentage of Americans living in poverty is at its highest point in more than a decade, not to mention that the poverty line is $22,350 for a family of four.  Try supporting just yourself on that and see how not poor you feel. So for the sake of re-affirming the obvious, let’s dive into the actual reasons why the poor stay poor in America.

The Poor Stay Poor (Without Some Sort of Intervention)

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As a starting point, it’s prudent to examine the basic truth behind this proverb: do the poor really stay poor as the rich get richer?  As its known in economics, “per-capita income convergence” is both well-studied and frustratingly inconclusive.  A good way to think about how this question is studied in economics is to ask the why did the per-capita income of Asian countries (speaking generally) converge to the level of first-world Japan in the 80s and 90s while Mexico still struggles to raise its standard of living, despite residing next door to the largest economy on Earth?  Now imagine we’re asking the same question about the North and South sides of Chicago, or Whites and Blacks in America.

The short answer is that the proverb is wrong, per-capita incomes do, in fact, converge given time — which isn’t at all surprising if you were awake for the 20th century.  There are two important caveats to this answer, though.  The first is that while the rate at which incomes converge can be as fast as 25% per year, they can also be as low as 1% (i.e. the poor will stop being poor sometime around the year 3000).  This rate depends primarily on the similarity of conditions in the two groups being observed — the more they have in common, the more easily the poorer group is able to take part in the larger group’s wealth.  The second caveat is that buried in these economic analyses are several assumptions about government policy, the development of human capital and the legal system.  Without these (often very vague) assumptions, per-capita incomes actually do not converge.

So where does this leave us in the question of whether the poor get poorer and the rich get richer?  Absent proper government intervention and legal protections, it looks like the proverb is true.  And, examining the shocking growth in income inequality in the United States, it seems reasonable to infer that America is keeping the poor poor and the rich rich through simple inaction.

No Jobs for the Middle Class

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Before the inevitable debate over what has caused rising income inequality in the US over the preceding decades, it’s important to be aware of the fact that it’s as much of a reflection of the bifurcation in labor growth as any systemic inequalities.  The post-manufacturing economy in America has unfortunately created most of its jobs in either astronomically high-paying positions, or pitiably low-paying positions.

For the past 30 years, you either became a lawyer or a short-order chef.  Without any middle-class manufacturing jobs that paid a livable wage while requiring minimal education, millions of Americans slipped into minimum-wage-or-slightly-above positions.  Not only did this deprive them of the added income, but it also slashed benefits such as health insurance, retirement & pensions, and continued education which indirectly contributed tens of thousands of dollars to households’ bottom line.

The big question that rarely gets asked on either side of the ideological spectrum here is: if the economy is still growing, why aren’t conditions improving for everyone?  Though the high-powered lawyers are capturing a disproportionate slice of that economic growth, it’s not like they aren’t spending that money.  Couldn’t the newly disenfranchised middle class respond by growing into industries that capture all that trickling down?  Well remember the thing where income convergence depends on the proper development of human capital?  What that’s basically saying is that the high-earners may pour their money into yachts and houses in the Hamptons, but the poor machinist trying to change jobs has no way to pay for, much less time to attend, mansion-building classes at the local community college without some sort of aid.  And the government has responded by…uh…

Not Supporting Higher Education

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At a time when America’s work force desperately needs a way to respond quickly and intelligently to a fast-moving high-tech economy, higher education has become more financially inaccessible than ever.  On average, there is no good in the economy growing faster in price than higher education (it’s even beating out healthcare). When wage growth itself is barely keeping pace with inflation when the costs of higher education are consistently outpacing it, you have a recipe for a persistently poor, under-educated and under-employed workforce.

So what could be done to address this?  Well in comparative first world countries (such as Canada), the cost of higher education is growing at a much slower pace, barely beating inflation year-to-year.  The main difference here is Canada heavily subsidizes students seeking higher education, possibly accounting for the vastly different cost structure.  Of course this isn’t an answer to how to fix higher education in the United States, that’s a vastly different and heated debate.  But if you want to know why the wages of almost everyone outside of the top quartile aren’t rising, it’s part of the answer.

The Poor and Uneducated Tend to (Surprise!) Make Bad Decisions

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To preface, let’s keep in mind that being born uneducated and living in an environment where knowledge of the formal economy, and how to prosper financially therein is sparse to non-existent, is not an individual’s fault.  We’re not blaming the victim here, but in understanding the machinations of how poverty persists so virulently, it’s worth nothing that the impoverished do some really stupid things to perpetuate their situation.

The list is long and sounds like Ronald Reagan’s wet dream, but is nonetheless true:

• Only 30% of those making less than $25,000 a year think they can accumulate $500,000 through saving and investing
• As much as 45% think the most likely way to do this is winning the lottery
• On average they say they can’t afford health insurance or investing in a 401k, and yet spend as much as $4,000-$6,000 a year on lottery tickets and cigarettes (which, by the way, would net over a million dollars by retirement in a decent 401k)

What should be done about this is pretty obvious.  Funding a physics Ph.D. is one thing, but basic personal finance education should be an easy and incredibly cost-effective solution.  The problem is, it’s not just poverty and a lack of education that create persistently poor underclasses, it’s also how persistent poverty creates a self-perpetuating cycle within the impoverished classes themselves, and a resistance to education that has little to no relevance in an area that operates primarily outside the bounds of the formal economy.

Lack of Reproductive Care

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When it comes to affordable access to reproductive healthcare, America lags behind many other developed countries.  To be clear, no judgment whatsoever is being passed here on the morality of abortion, birth control, sex education or reproductive care in general.  But if we’re going to talk about what keeps the poor poor, it’s impossible to ignore the facts:

1. Unplanned pregnancies among the impoverished are on the rise, and an 18-year, several hundred thousand dollar commitment is going to be a tremendous financial burden no matter which way you slice it, limiting a parent’s (or parents’) access to higher education, better job prospects, or increased income of any kind
2. The health cost incurred by even a mild STI (not to mention something more serious, like HIV) is likewise a large financial burden
3. People are simply not going to stop fucking

While this somewhat also falls under the category of “things that impoverished, uneducated people do that perpetuates their situation” it is also similar to basic personal finance knowledge in that a little bit of education, as well as affordable access to birth control, reproductive healthcare, sex education and, yes, abortion would seriously diminish this financial burden on the already impoverished, to the tune of at least $11 billion per year in direct medical costs alone.  And before someone talks about women having babies just to collect more welfare, just shut up.  Maybe if the average number of recipient children was above 1.8 per household and falling, there might be a point there, but for now just shut up.

It’s Exceedingly Difficult to Get Decent Credit

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Credit is the lifeblood of any first-world economy, and it’s something that most Americans take even the simplest forms of for granted, be it a credit card, a high credit score, or a credit score at all.  For most Americans living in impoverished neighborhoods, there are three possible options for financing: pawn shops, payday loan stores or banks that are likely to charge rates that even Shylock would consider usurious.  When you’re consistently paying in excess of 20% higher interest rates than the average consumer, it’s incredibly difficult to get ahead, to put it mildly.  And making these outlandish payments makes it difficult, if not impossible to establish good credit — especially because many of those living in poverty rarely have enough money on hand to afford the fees associated with a checking account.  This forces most of those living in poverty to deal strictly in cash, which prevents them from establishing any credit to begin with (which is often worse than having bad credit).

This is especially important because credit is virtually the only way to make those big investments that generally allow people to make a jump in income class.  Even upper-middle-class families need loans to attend college, pay for medical expenses, purchase a house, purchase a car to get to work, or even something as simple as using a credit card to cover a sudden, critical expense.  Not to mention small business loans or similar cash infusions that fuel local economies.  But because it can’t all be doom and gloom, the good news is that since 1977 the government has actually required banks to service low-income neighborhoods, with some success in extending affordable credit.  In fact some of the fastest-growing investment sectors for banks are low-income areas.  However, the act is in bad need of some updating.

Poor Public Infrastructure

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If you’re under the age of 25, it’s likely that the most expensive product you’ve ever purchased is a car.  And by “most expensive”, we’re probably talking an easy 10-15 times the next most expensive thing.  If you didn’t need a car, that’s easily a couple hundred extra dollars in your pocket each week after fuel, insurance, registration, and repairs.  Now imagine you’re at the poverty line with two kids and you make roughly $430 a week before taxes and the bus starts to become a much more appealing option.  Unfortunately in America, unless you live in a small handful of large metropolitan areas, you absolutely need a car to get around.

While some of this isn’t anyone’s fault since America isn’t really as geographically concentrated as, say, Seoul, we have a long history of not giving a shit about properly funding public transit, while throwing billions upon billions at building the public infrastructure necessary to support our $50,000 odes to American independence.  On top of this, mass transit, especially rail, is significantly more cost-effective in the long run than building or maintaining more roads.  As if you needed any more reasons why the poor tend to stay poor, imagine everyone has a “Being an American” tax of at least $1500 annually no matter their income, and if they didn’t pay it the IRS bolts them to the ground, preventing them from going to work.

A Lack of Affordable Healthcare

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Wading into a partisan debate about this issue would be pointless.  Whether the private industry could meet the healthcare needs of Americans or whether the government needs to intervene is irrelevant to the facts at hand, which are:
1. A record more than 50 million Americans don’t have any health insurance; the vast majority of these are, unsurprisingly, low-income.
2. Many of those who have insurance don’t have very good insurance that will cover their bills to the extent that serious illness won’t become incredibly onerous
3. A sudden serious health condition or a chronic health condition can be financially ruinous, in fact more than 60% of bankruptcies in 2009 were the result of sudden healthcare expenses.

Unlike higher education, which is the only service that has outpaced the cost growth in healthcare, people never “choose” to incur sudden large medical expenses.  And even if in the rare event a low-income family can actually pay down their hospital bills, they have no additional skills to show for it.

While the poor are often covered by Medicaid, it’s a common misconception that poverty is the only requirement.  In short, it varies significantly from state-to-state, by age and disability status.  But for your average, reasonably healthy low income person, you basically have to prove that you don’t have assets or savings that could be liquidated to cover your medical costs (to reiterate, this is a national generalization of a program that varies significantly across the country).  An illustrative example can demonstrate why it can be so insanely difficult to emerge from poverty in America:

So say you’re a conscientious impoverished family of four that has diligently paid off your meager house and saved a small amount of money by tightening the belt for decades–fostering a dream of emerging from poverty even though income-wise you’re not even close.  If suddenly you have tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills (or you know, like two nights in the hospital), say goodbye to literally everything you own.

The Informal Economy (And How the Government Deals With It)

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The informal economy refers to all of those things that happen under the economic radar, ranging from drug deals to, yes, the cash you pay your baby sitter.  A more technical definition is it’s all economic activity that isn’t recorded or taxed by the government.  Participation in the informal economy, unsurprisingly, is particularly high in impoverished communities for several reasons.  One is that it’s untaxable, meaning that much more money is able to be squeezed out of it.  Another is that it circumvents the barriers to entry of the formal economy such as credit, education, or a lack of a criminal record, to name a few.  But one of the most salient is that it allows the sale of high-margin goods (read: drugs), something those living in low-income communities would otherwise almost never have the ability to do.

The problem is, the minimum sentencing guidelines instituted during the “War on Drugs”, are pretty much universally viewed as being absolutely insane by everyone but scared housewives and Ronald Reagan’s corpse.  It’s not that everyone is weeping over those poor drug dealers; it’s that sentencing someone to a minimum of 5 years for 5 grams of crack cocaine is completely ineffective in fighting the sale of crack cocaine, and actually increases that person’s likelihood of recidivism.  To get an idea of how big of a problem this is, more than 20% of prisoners in America are non-violent drug offenders, and America currently beats out every other country on Earth for total prison population.  This includes China, you know, that brutally repressive regime with four times our population.

It’s a Race Thing, Okay?

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I know we all just wish we could put this behind us, move on from the sins of the past, and enter a happy, harmonious color-blind society.  But the truth is, it’s insane to talk about poverty in American and not talk about the fact that, oh I don’t know, the average net worth of a White person is 20 goddamn times that of your average Black person.  The painful truth is that when you’re talking about populations that stay poor in America, you’re talking about minorities.

The discussion of why minorities are so systemically impoverished could fill volumes of history, sociology, and economics texts for decades.  To boil it down to its (insanely simplified) essential details: due to extreme historical discrimination and segregation, the majority of minorities were forced into ghettos and then cut off from the formal economy.  In the interim they, by necessity, developed a unique economy, culture, and social norms.  Now remember point number 11 above?  Areas of different per-capita income tend to converge faster depending on how similar they are, which is basically a proxy for how easily they can interact with the larger, wealthier economy.  Now walk to the south side of Chicago, the South Bronx, or pretty much anywhere in Detroit and think about how easily those neighborhoods would integrate with an upper-middle-class suburb.  Now ask yourself how long it would take to integrate these two societies given that they were violently divided for centuries.  Now get depressed.  Now stop worrying because at least you aren’t stupid enough to think that:

Poor People Are Poor Because They Are Lazy

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AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

With revolutions all across the Arab world, riots spreading through Europe, and the continued persistence of the economic downturn, it seems like everyone’s coming to the consensus that perhaps the situation has become so unthinkably bad that previously unthinkable solutions might be necessary.  Government solutions to catastrophic economic collapse have rarely been neat or pretty, but at least in the past they tried to do something bold and mostly succeeded — as opposed to our modern Congress who apparently can’t even agree on the fact that they are responsible enough to spend any money.

So how about we propose a tiny, modest, infinitesimal alteration: just overthrow the whole f’n thing and start from scratch.  After all, it’s the young, well educated millennials that are getting the hardest shaft from the downturn, and it’s the young, educated and unemployed who start revolutions.  There’s not much else that will kick off a revolution faster than grinding poverty and an excess of free time, especially when you add in upward of $100,000 in student loan debt, piled on in pursuit of what ended up being an empty promise given by baby boomers who have their healthcare paid for by the government, but pale with horror when their children demand the same.  So whether we completely re-write the Constitution (which we can totally do by the way), or violently storm the capital, here are 10 ways in which overthrowing the government would help get the economy back on its feet.

(Disclaimer: Many of the options on this list are severe, morally repugnant and hilariously infeasible.  They are presented only as a meditation on how extreme current worldwide economic and political conditions have become.)

Reduce Politically Sensitive Government Spending

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Take a look at this beauty.  That’s the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also known as the most deadly, advanced airplane in existence today.  Along with the F-22, this stealth joint strike fighter will absolutely dominate the skies for the next several decades.  To give you an idea of just how good these planes are, when an F-18 pilot managed to “shoot down” an F-22 in a practice battle, everyone promptly lost their shit.  And that is the only recorded “kill” of these next generation fighters. Ever. The closest competition is an unproven Chinese prototype, which no one is sure even works.  Also they have one, while the US already has hundreds, plans for hundreds more, and the highly advanced infrastructure necessary to pump out even more should the need arise.  Oh also for the cost of the development of the F-35 alone, we could have bought Australia.

As badass as these weapons are, ask yourself briefly: Who the hell are they going to fight?  The US has been involved in two major conflicts ever since the F-22 became operational, and the F-22s have proven themselves capable by…uh…participating in a bunch of training exercises and being repeatedly grounded by mechanical defects.  Even then, canceling the production was a gigantic political fight, and the fact that former Defense Secretary Gates actually succeeded was viewed as “surprising”.  This was due to the fact that the program pumped trillions of dollars into the local economies of politicians who, unsurprisingly, were quite reluctant to see that funding disappear.

As it turns out, military spending (despite most people’s perceptions of the impact of WWII) is actually an incredibly inefficient use of government funds.  According to most models, military spending actually becomes a net drain on the economy, especially when sustained for several years.  Now imagine that the current budget and its long list of politically-motivated decisions were scrapped, and an impartial body was able to re-write the budget map.  The hundreds of billions that go to these badass boondoggles could be put into, oh I don’t know, unemployment insurance, social security, health care, scholarships, or any one of hundreds of programs that actually help out those who need it most and aren’t a net drain on GDP, instead of programs that build useless nightmare machines.

Reconfigure Expensive Budgetary Liabilities

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Despite the perception that most government spending is wasted on unnecessary, politically-motivated earmarks like volcano research and shrimp treadmills, the biggest budgetary problems facing the government, especially state governments, are the promises they made to the previous generation in the form of pensions, job security and generally everything nice about government jobs that people used to talk about.  The problem is, it’s often encoded in law that workers are entitled to certain benefits, which turns every budget-balancing action into a gigantic battle between unions, businesses, governments and the public at large.

This inhibits governments from hiring critically needed workers both because they can’t promise the same benefits and because they can’t offer wages competitive with the private sector.  And these battles ripple out through the economy, most importantly making it next to impossible to responsibly reform education.  I’m not assigning blame to either the unions or the deficit hawks arrayed against them, just saying that what could be a simple problem solved productively turns into a political miasma resulting in imperfect and damaging half-baked solutions.

But if we overthrew the government, all of these agreements could be re-negotiated (since the former United States would no longer exist).  The result would be painful for both sides, but the alternative of “doing nothing except arguing about it in increasingly shrill tones because everyone is too entrenched” is even worse.

Institute Effective, Responsible Regulation

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While there are plenty of fingers to point as to who caused the current financial apocalypse, there’s a clear consensus among many economists that it was seriously exacerbated by ineffective regulation.  Specifically, several depression-era controls were slowly and systematically dismantled through administrations Republican and Democrat alike.  Why were these important and proven safeguards removed?  Well, because of the disturbingly high number of former Goldman Sachs employees in the government telling people they were no longer necessary.  In a revelation economists have deemed “shocking only to the half-stoned and mostly inebriated”, too much private business say in their own regulation led to useless and ineffective regulation.  Even the recent Dodd-Frank reform, supposedly enacted to prevent another financial crisis like the one of the past few years, is generally viewed as being so ineffective even Chris Dodd says he doubts his own bill will prevent another crisis.  And this isn’t just idle worrying about the next theoretical crisis; studies show that effective regulation (i.e. not too burdensome, but not too loose) is critical to economic growth overall.

But imagine that everyone from Goldman Sachs who suggested regulation repeals were lined up and sho– I mean politely asked to leave the room while responsible adults and experts rebuilt an effective regulatory regime.  This wouldn’t be possible under the current regime thanks to Goldman Sachs’ vampire squid hold on America.  But should a revolutionary government (led by the incredibly dashing and charismatic Internet writer who sparked it) take over, regulation could responsibly put in place without special-interest interference.  In a saner and less autocratic scenario, a Constitutional Convention could rewrite the Constitution to include a clause where all financial regulatory reform would be proposed by an outside body of experts and subject to an up-or-down only vote in Congress.  This body would be composed of appointees who would be required to have no entanglements with the financial industry.

Eliminate Harmful Market Distortions

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“If it were economically viable, private companies would already be investing in it and government subsidies wouldn’t be necessary” is the constant refrain used to criticize government subsidies for alternative energy.  As it turns out, pretty much… well… every other form of energy ever receives some pretty healthy subsidies from the government.  In fact, the government spends quite a bit in various sectors such as energy and agriculture in the name of making the end product cheaper for the average consumer and protecting important domestic jobs.  In reality, oil and agricultural subsidies are harmful for pretty much everyone from producer to employees to the final consumer.

Unfortunately, despite repeated efforts to repeal these subsidies based on their general awfulness, ineffectiveness and general economic harm, the lobbying groups behind all these industries take their billions in subsidies and promptly spend that money protecting their subsidies and scaring lawmakers with bogus economics that eliminating the subsidies would spell economic doom.  Much like the previous scenario with regulation, hitting the reset button on the government would (at least briefly) weaken lobbyist control on politics and allow the repeal of these subsidies and other market distortions that are generally loathed by experts.

Reform Education and Fuel Long-Term Growth

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In the current fevered debate as to the extent to which the government should interfere to help correct the economy, it is important to remember that all of the proposed fixes are meant to be short-term.  No economist seriously thinks the government should make a business of bailing out the economy every year.  But this raises the question of how you fundamentally generate stable, long-term economic growth.  And in just about every scenario imaginable the answer is always the same: education is the key to permanent growth.  It’s a truth so fundamental, economists sometimes forget to remind everyone that no fiscal trickery can substitute for a well-educated populous.

And therein lies the problem, because even taking a charitable view, from Kindergarten to a Ph.D., the American education system has some serious problems that need addressing.  Primary education institutions are often poorly funded, under-performing teachers are rarely replaced, and systemic racial and economic ills persist.  Higher education is prohibitively expensive, and students often spend years and tens of thousands of dollars for a degree that will not even begin to pay off their massive student debt.  And again, the problems are (at least partly) structural and inextricably political.  The debate on how to fix American education (or whether it is really broken at all) is long and exhaustive, but addressing the numerous long-standing and entrenched problems surrounding it could only be helped by a fresh start.

Create Less Doubt About the Fiscal Responsibility of Politicians

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As much as it often seems like the value of a dollar is something hard-coded into the economy, the US dollar is a fiat currency.  This means that, to greatly simplify, its value is pegged primarily to the credit worthiness of the United States.  Recently one of the largest credit rating agencies, S&P, downgraded US debt rating for the first time in history, citing, in part, the political instability of the current congress.  Not to mention that the instability surrounding the recent debt ceiling debate will probably cost the United States billions.  Make no mistake, when trillions of outstanding debt hangs in the balance, the trustworthiness of the United States is its greatest currency.

Now imagine that you have a credit card with around a $15 trillion limit, of which you’ve used $14.5 trillion, you’ve lost your job, and you have a couple hundred billion more in outstanding payments.  It may be a radical move, but in this situation it might make sense to throw in the towel and declare bankruptcy, or in America’s case, renegotiate its debt obligations.  To be perfectly clear: This is an insanely extreme measure and would only be rational to implement if the US credit rating continued to drop dramatically and the world financial system was in complete worse-than-the-depression freefall.  But if things (dear god) got any worse, complete overthrow of the government and a bottom-up reform of the financial system and fiscal controls would suddenly move from the realm of “conspiracy theorist chattering in his basement” to “well maybe us normal people should think about this.”  This is how insane the world has become.

Remove the Politics from Bailouts and Stimulus

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Not even the most die-hard Keynesian likes bailouts or stimulus plans.  When a government has to resort to these methods, it means something has gone seriously wrong.  On top of that, bailouts and economic stimuli create a series of moral hazards and perverse incentives, and we know politicians are just the first people we want handling issues that require a dispassionate, even hand.  Hell “Moral Hazard” and “Perverse Incentive” sound like descriptions of Congress on a particularly scrupulous day.

Long economics lecture short: Bailing out companies that have behaved irresponsibly creates incentive for them and their peers to behave irresponsibly in the future, as they suffered few to no negative consequences.  But not bailing them out can mean the economy will lose hundreds of billions of dollars it might never get back. (Lehman Brothers, a firm you never heard about before 2008, was worth around $600 billion.  That’s roughly the annual defense budget of the US.)  Economic stimulus is a recipe for crony politics, earmarks, and billions of dollars spent on things that will have no effect of the short-term health of the economy.  Good luck wrestling these powerful and lucrative tools from the hands of Congress without a total overhaul.

Ideally speaking, these tools would be automated so that no last-minute manipulation would occur.  A perfect example is unemployment insurance, which serves as a natural stimulus when times are tough, then automatically reduces its cost once things improve.  Bailouts could be on the table only when the country is in the midst of a recession, and then would be tied to Constitutionally-mandated reforms of the company that will slowly and responsibly dismantle it — as the company has proven that it cannot be managed dependably enough to justify its size and concomitant threat to the larger economy as a whole.  But unless these measures are taken out of the hands of day-to-day politics, the incentive is too great for politicians to grab the reins and either stimulate and save irresponsibly, or worse, not intervene at all as wealth evaporates by the trillions.

Reconfigure Obligations Abroad

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The US has spent the better part of the past two hundred years getting its hands dirty in just about every international mess imaginable.  Not even mentioning the couple trillion-dollar price tag of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, these interventions have been ridiculously expensive (the recent Libyan intervention cost $600 million — for just the first week).

To a certain extent, these are necessary and justified interventions in the interest of fostering global security and stability.  But as the US sees its larger role and prestige decline, and more and more world powers emerge, perhaps its time to rethink this big brother mindset.  The problem is, trust is currency both economically and in international politics.  The US cannot just abandon its international obligations because it becomes inconvenient, without losing all credibility and standing abroad.  But overthrow the current system, and old obligations and friendships will suddenly become open to reconsideration and renegotiation.  It’s not a morally appealing option (pretty much nothing on this list is), but as a last-ditch option to divert more badly-needed funds back to America, letting the rest of the world shoulder more of the burden for their own local and regional security and stability becomes a more attractive option by the day.

Create Some Serious Old-School Stimulus

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There is a healthy, long-running debate among economists as to what sort of stimulus programs, if any, are effective and to what extent they are effective.  If you’re looking for an afternoon of lively, spirited economic theory, simply type the words “Keynesian + Stimulus + Effective” into Google and prepare to lose any remaining hope.  The truth for millions of unemployed and underemployed workers is that some sort of bold solution was needed about 18 months ago.  After all, the common wisdom is that World War II pulled the world economy out of the gutter, perhaps something of that scale is needed to jar the current economy out of its lethargy.

Obviously a devastating world war is not the ideal solution, but a government program that employs millions at a decent wage, and then pays for their college education after a term of service might just do the trick.  Now think about getting a program like that through the current congress or any congress going back 30 years and enjoy a good laugh.  Bold solutions have become impossible in the “Got Mine, Fuck You” era that’s become horrified that a single person will receive some undeserved compensation, despite any possible benefits.  A government overthrow by the over-educated, unemployed, and disaffected millennials; the hard working middle class that has seen virtually no real wage growth for decades; and all those who are frustrated by a government that seems intent on preserving the status quo instead of pursuing daring and intrepid goals just might be what is needed to snap both the government and the world economy out of its current paralysis.

Because Why the Hell Not?

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Maybe the worst of the Doomsayers are right.  Maybe capitalism is fatally flawed and has reached the end of its usefulness.  Maybe it just needs a free-market libertarian shot in the arm.  Maybe Congress is fundamentally broken and needs a good retooling.  The arguments that something radical needs to be done to address the unprecedented level of this recession and the subsequent inability of Congress to fully address the issues are growing increasingly numerous.  On the other side, arguments for continuing as we have are conspicuously absent and have a somewhat hollow ring and tainted luster to them.

A violent overthrow or even a period of cantankerous civil unrest will almost certainly create more problems than they solve.  Creating a government from scratch is several degrees of magnitude more difficult than tearing one down, but in the face of trillions of dollars in debt, record unemployment, a stagnating recovery, instability in worldwide markets, and a government that seems practically immobile… you know, why the hell not?  Do you have a better answer?  Please?

Figuring out Where Money Goes

The first step to creating a budget that works is to sit down with the past two to three months of bills. Going through each line item and determining where money is spent is crucial in understanding spending habits. There are usually several categories that must be included in any budget:

• Housing expenses, which typically include mortgage or rent payment, homeowner’s association fees, and homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policies
• Personal care, such as clothing, health and beauty items, grooming and maintenance
• Groceries
• Utilities
• Entertainment, such as television, cable, going out, and travel costs
• Transportation, including auto insurance, gasoline, car loan payment, and maintenance
• Gifts
• Savings
• Other loan payments, if applicable
• Pet expenses, if applicable
• Taxes, if applicable

Organization

After determining how much is usually spent in each category, individuals can compare the total of expenditures against the amount of income that is received each month. Those creating a budget can then organize their lists in order of most important to least important. This way, bills are paid on time, and individuals can save their money to put toward expenses such as travel, entertainment, and other more enjoyable ways to spend.

Methods of Tracking

Some people prefer a handwritten budget, while others like to use free websites, which can pull transaction records from credit card and banking websites. Some like to use Microsoft Excel or QuickBooks, which produce logs for tracking each expense and category. Determining how much goes to each necessity is usually the final step in creating a budget that will work. It must be doable; for example, a person who drives 30 miles to work every day cannot budget for one tank of gas per month. All members of the family need to be on the same page about the expenses, so that each will stick to the amounts budgeted in all categories.

Emergency Funds

When an unexpected emergency arises, such as a medical bill or a large home or car repair that must be completed, even the most prepared budgeter can be caught off guard. In such cases, a loan can be obtained from plaingreenloans.com. This allows for a lump sum to be borrowed in order to pay for a sudden expense.

Preparing for the Financial Future

Creating a budget is a great way to keep closer track of monthly expenses. This will allow those using the budget to feel much less financial strain when bills are due each month, and will provide feelings of calm when thinking about the financial future. What are other methods of tracking spending each month?

Check out this infographic that details the top 7 cities to find finance jobs, along with a breakdown for what’s in demand and the skills, profiles of local candidates, and percentage change in salaries. Many thanks to Accounting Principals for conducting this study.

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<br /> <a href="http://www.businesspundit.com/the-top-7-cities-to-find-finance-jobs/"><img src="http://www.businesspundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Finance-citiesB2.3-012.png" width="400" height="1696" title="The Top 7 Cities to Find Finance Careers"></a><br />Source:<a href="http://www.accountingprincipals.com/Pages/default.aspx">Top Cities For Finance Jobs – Accounting Principles</a><br />

The IT sector has bounced back and brought their jobs home. Not only are more well qualified employees finding receiving more callbacks post-interview; the gap is truly closing and those who are qualified are landing gainful employment and careers.

This infographic has pulled in data about the IT bounce-back into graphical form- making it straight forward and visually stunning to review upcoming IT areas, the highest paying careers, and more. Many thanks to Modis, the Information Technology marketplace, for the data and IG below.

Some of the hottest jobs?

• Systems Analyst
• ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
• Systems Administrator
• Network Administrator

Check out more great information on the IG below.

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<br /> <a href="http://www.businesspundit.com/outsourced-it-jobs-return-home-re-employment-in-2011/"><img src="http://www.businesspundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/return-of-outsourced-IT-jobs-2011-modis1.png" width="550" height="3339" title="Outsourced IT Jobs Return Home- Re-Employment in 2011"></a><br />Source:<a href="http://blog.modis.com/job-seekers/return-of-outsourced-it-jobs-in-2011/">The Return of Outsourced IT Jobs in 2011 – Modis</a><br />

As if the current job market and economy didn’t make it hard enough for low income households in America to make ends meet, it turns out that living below the poverty line is actually more costly in many respects as well. It not only takes money to make money, it also takes quite a bit of money to live in poverty. Our friends at Online Sociology Degree put together this graphic to illustrate how expensive it is to be a poor American.

[Source: Onlinesociologydegree.net]

It’s time to face some unfortunate facts: prices for many commodities and goods are going up. The tremulous recovery of the economy after the recession has been shaken in recent months due to shortages, political unrest, and natural catastrophes: events like Japan’s tsunami and nuclear disaster, to the Arab world’s political uprisings, people are beginning to worry about the increasingly cloudy future of the global economy.

Life, nihilists like to say, is cheap. In time, it may be the only thing that is.

Gas

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or driving one around Flintstones-style), you might have noticed that filling your tank has suddenly gotten a lot more expensive. Gas prices, as of the end of March, have reached a 30 month high, with crude oil topping out at $117 a barrel on April 1. Currently, supply is still the same as it was: though Libya has stopped exporting oil, Saudi Arabia has stepped up its own production to cover the shortfall. So why are gas prices so high, having risen $.60 cents in the US since December?

The answer has to do with commodities trading: unrest in oil-producing countries in the Middle East and North Africa have caused investors to panic about the future supplies of oil. People whose job it is to speculate on the future of the economy agree that the current situation in these countries — particularly Libya, which has the largest oil reserves on the African continent — will, at some future date, affect the world’s supply of crude oil. This panic has trickled down to consumers, who are feeling the pinch at the pump.

However, the gas pump isn’t the only place that’s going to be affected by high oil prices. Airlines, already struggling against consumer antipathy, will most likely be passing on their financial suffering to passengers. Consumer goods such as shoes, packaged foods, and electronics are likely to hike their prices too. 


Cotton

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Heavy rains and flooding in Pakistan and China, two of the world’s largest producers of cotton, and rising demands by clothing manufacturers have driven up the price of raw cotton. As of April 1, the cost of cotton was $190 a pound, more than double the prices at this time last year.

Some economists are already forecasting doom for clothing manufacturers like American Apparel and H&M, while other retailers are responding by hiking up prices.

The boom probably won’t last long: American farmers are already planting more crops of cotton in response to the higher demand and prices. A bumper crop in the US could, economists theorize, bring the prices back down. 


Coffee

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Bad news for caffeine addicts: due to a growing shortage of Arabica coffee, dwindling US stockpiles, and hoarding among top exporters, the price of your morning latte is going to rise. The prices of popular brands like Maxwell and Folgers have already risen 25%, while high-end coffee has increased and demand is rising in growing economies like Brazil and China. Coffee specialist Peter Baker is warning of an approaching “peak coffee”, a bleak scenario in which climate change and economic forces push coffee production into an unstoppable decline.

Prescription Drugs

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According to the Government Accountability Office, prescription drug prices have risen about 8% in the past four years. Other agencies, such as Barclay’s Investment bank, put the rate even higher, an increase of 6.8% per year.

Prescription drug prices in America are higher than any other country in the world. Americans spent about $250 million on prescription drugs in 2009, according to the National Journal; about a third of those costs were picked up by the federal government.

With life expectancy of seniors rising, and healthcare costs across the board shooting up, Democratic lawmakers are scrambling to close what some are calling “the prescription drug donut-hole” with healthcare reforms. According to Richard Evans, an economist with Sector and Sovereign Research, drug costs have outpaced rebates offered by insurance and drug companies, which means that Americans are paying more out of pocket to keep themselves healthy. 


Movie Tickets

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Surprisingly enough, when adjusted for inflation, movie tickets have remained pretty steady for the last forty years. An average movie ticket cost about $1.22 in 1967. When you calculate for inflation, that comes to about $7.88. Average ticket prices in the US last year had just hit $8.01.

That doesn’t account for the sudden popularity of Imax or 3-D movies however. Those tickets cost, on average, about $13 a pop, but can cost up to $20 in big cities. And with the popularity of movies like Avatar and the Toy Story franchise, it’s likely to stay that way. 


Movie Concessions

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Movie tickets might not have spiked much, but movie concessions sure have. In 1929, a bag of popcorn cost a nickel a bag. By some estimates, this means that the price of movie concessions have risen over 600% (granted, the portion sizes of movie snacks have also increased. Nobody was eating giant tubs of popcorn back in the day). Still, even adjusted for inflation and larger portions, the price of movie concessions has skyrocketed.

There’s a good reason for that. Or at least, the National Association of Theater Owners believes there is. According to John Fithian, president of the association, concessions account for one-fifth of all theater revenues and nearly half of all profits. The high prices of concessions keep the prices of movie tickets relatively low (‘Relatively’ being the key term here).

Soy

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The prices of agricultural commodities are all heavily intertwined. The connections between a shortage of palm oil, the price of soy, the cost of a cut of beef, and the number of acres of planted corn are weird and twisty and sometimes hard to figure out. Agriculture seems very much like an example of chaos theory at work: the outcome of one crop having far-reaching and unexpected effects on others. Here’s what we’ve been able to tease out:

The price of soy is rising, due in part to bad growing seasons in places like Argentina and Brazil, and growing demand from importers like China and other countries in Southeast Asia. Governments, in an attempt to curb food inflation, are raising their imports and beginning to sell of stockpiles. Food price inflation can contribute to all kinds of bad things, such as food riots, which led to the subsequent revolutions that have ousted dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. In these volatile times, governments are willing to make a few concessions to keep their citizens happy in their homes, rather than rising up against them. 


Corn

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How does this relate to other food commodities? Well, according to the New York Times, it means that farmers are planning on cutting back on corn production in favor of soy. Soy requires less fertilizer, the price of which has also risen in recent years, and is fetching around $400 a tonne in the US. Corn, on the other hand, is only at about $285 a tonne.

There are conflicting reports, however: the USDA has said that US farmers are planning on planting more corn, an increase in acreage by about 4.5%. Corn futures jumped $.30 on March 31, after the USDA revealed that US stockpiles are lower than expected.

So which crop will win out? At this speculative stage, nobody can tell. 
 


Meat

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What we can tell you is this: it might be time to consider going vegetarian. The growing costs of corn and soy (both of which are main ingredients in most livestock feeds), mean that meat is about to get a lot more expensive. Cattle futures reached an all time high last week. 2010 reported the smallest US cattle herd in over 50 years, while demand for meat from the growing middle class in Asia drove up prices.

Some reporters are prophesying doom, as high food prices become the new normal. Some blame it on biofuels and ethanol production, while others are claiming the crisis is rooted in global climate change. Some economists are even predicting that global food riots, even in developed countries, could be right around the corner. 


Chocolate

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Women everywhere, prepare to cry: there may soon be a worldwide shortage of chocolate.
Severe political unrest in the Ivory Coast, a West African nation that produces nearly 40% of the world’s cocoa beans, has prompted a ban on exports by president-elect Allesane Ouattara. Late last week, the UN also imposed sanctions against incumbent president Laurent Gbago, who has held onto power despite losing the 2010 presidential elections.

In addition to what seems like an inevitable civil war in Ivory Coast and the trade embargo on cocoa, cocoa farmers are hurting from a widespread blight on their trees. If that wasn’t bad enough, cocoa farms rarely make their owners enough money to feed and educate their families: there have even been reports of child and slave labor used in production.
Maybe it’s time to switch to fair trade chocolate: the prices won’t rise much, and it’ll leave less of a bitter taste in your mouth.