Finance
Chinese Economy Will Maintain Stable Growth Through 2012
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to become president, next year, announced on Friday that the Chinese economy will maintain stable growth and will avoid a crach this year. “2012 will be a crucial year in driving the 12th five-year plan.China’s economy will maintain stable growth … there will be no so-called hard [...]
Pentagon To Shrink U.S. Ground Forces By 100,000 As Part Of $487 Billion Cuts
Pentagon leaders outlined a plan Thursday for absorbing $487 billion in defense cuts over the coming decade by shrinking U.S. ground forces, slowing the purchase of a next-generation stealth fighter jet and retiring older planes and ships. In a bid to preempt election-year Republican criticism, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the plan shifts the Pentagon’s [...]
Total state budget: How big is it really?
Gov. Martin O’Malley used a 38-page PowerPoint presentation full of numbers, charts and graphs to unveil his fiscal 2013 budget plan last Wednesday. But one key number was missing. What is the total budget? The PowerPoint on page 18 did say that the total funds budget was growing 1.9%, but how much is total spending? Warren Deschenaux, [...]
Disability agency gets more money, plans more programs
After a rocky six months for the Developmental Disabilities Administration, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s fiscal year 2013 budget proposal increases funding by about $31 million and creates a new fund so unspent money will stay in the agency. Health Secretary Joshua Sharfstein and Developmental Disabilities Administration Director Thomas Kirkland sent a letter detailing the agency’s budget [...]
Investing in America What You Need to Know
Social Infrastructure Needs: The U.S. ranks 27th—nearly last—among developed countries when it comes to investments in education, health care and other vital social needs. Most developed nations have recognized that affordable childcare is a necessity for working parents and a key investment in the cognitive and social development of children. In 2005, the U.S. spent only 0.4 percent of [...]
Some Good Resolutions to Take for 2012 Regarding Your Finances
If you want to make some changes to the way you manage your money then now would be the time to start planning. Here are some tips to help you out. If one of your new year’s resolutions for 2012 would be to better manage your finances, then there are some ways that you can [...]
An Analysis Of Pres. Obama’s 2012 Budget: Public Investments
President Obama laid out an ambitious agenda to boost the economy and keep America competitive abroad in his State of the Union address a couple weeks ago. The release of his fiscal year 2012 budget details his approach, and includes sustained public investments in education, energy, transportation, broadband, and basic scientific research. Education: An 11% increase [...]
Armenian banks to conservative in 2012
Samvel Chazmachyan is sure that the level of liquidity of the Armenian banking system will allow it firmly resist the recession. Russian economic Nikolai Kondratiev, known for his analysis and theory of business cycles, predicted the global financial crisis back in 1920s. The current situation, according to Kondratiev, is the “winter of economy”, which can [...]
The Cost of Free Trade
Any renaissance of American manufacturing must begin by fundamentally reversing our trade policies—both in general and in particular toward China. Over the past two decades, leading U.S. manufacturers, both the venerable (like General Electric) and the new (like Apple), have offshored millions of jobs—by one recent estimate, 2.9 million—to China to take advantage of the [...]
Solutions From Your Average Americans
As is the case with most glaring economic issues, the general public tends to turn a blind eye to the increasingly dubious trade deficit. Can you blame them? Average Americans have enough trouble balancing their own checkbooks, let alone finding a solution to an abstract debt that eclipses their own mortgage by trillions. It may [...]
U.S. Signs Agreement on Government Procurement
World Trade Organization (WTO) trade ministers have been convening in Geneva this week for their biennial meeting on the DOHA trade rounds. A major portion of the meeting has been focused on welcoming Russia into the WTO, but this may mask the portion of the talks that could have a bigger impact on the United [...]
Occupy Wall Street – The Issue is Valid but the Actions are Alienating and Counterproductive
The OWS tents in the park are creating an unsanitary environment. The occupiers are carrying signs with no meaningful messages. Here are the basic reasons for Occupy Wall Street’s justifiable unhappiness: • There are no jobs • The middle class is evaporating • There is no light at the end of the tunnel for the [...]
The Unfulfilled Promise of Exports
Increasing exports has long been a campaigning point for the office of U.S. presidency. It is no secret that a sound trade policy must center on American-made goods hitting the shelves overseas. Every president of the last hundred years – Republican or Democrat – has understood this and searched for ways to boost exports. Recently [...]
The Message from U.S. Politicians to American Companies: Either Move Out or Go Bankrupt!
Wake up! Where are our jobs? They are being shipped overseas along with our wealth. Too many of our dollars spent on foreign manufactured products are spent directly on imports, including much of our capital equipment and strategic items like electronics, computers, transportation equipment, and other machinery. How Did This Happen? China has now accumulated [...]
Semantic Propaganda Feeds Stupidity
We would already have had a much needed American revolution in response to the tyranny of the money-fed two-party plutocracy that is destroying the middle class except for one big problem: so much of the American population is just plain stupid. Too stupid to behave like angry Greeks and rise up in the streets to [...]
Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession
The 17th annual executive compensation survey looks at how CEOs laid off thousands while raking in millions. America’s CEOs had a terribly rough 2009. Or so the national and regional executive pay surveys released so far this year would suggest. “CEOs See Pay Fall Again,” blared one headline early this past spring. “CEO pay rankings [...]
The Myth of Privatization in China
As the People’s Republic of China privatizes companies, there is the illusion that the country is transforming from a communist state to a more capitalist society, like the United States. The reality is dangerously different. The “Socialist Market System” (SMS), as the Chinese call it, is very much what the name implies: a socialist system. [...]
Textile Industry Threatened By KORUS
Now that the South Korean government has ratified the U.S.- South Korea free trade agreement (KORUS), it is set to go into effect early next year. This will likely have negative effects on many U.S. industries, and some will be completely devastated. One industry that looks to be hit particularly hard is the American textile [...]
We Must Start Fixing America Now
The United States has morphed from a manufacturing society to a service society, leading to the greatest number of unemployed/underemployed Americans since the Great Depression. With working Americans making less and less, the U.S. is running out of funding for its welfare programs. This is happening at a time when programs like health care and [...]
Wealth Gap Burdens the Entire Economy
The increasing gap between the middle class and the wealthy has garnered a great deal of attention over the last several years. Even before Occupy Wall Street’s rally against the 1 percent was a whisper in the wind, there were significant moral outcries against a growing inequality in income. But beyond the ethical implications, economists [...]
