We recently witnessed Kanye West making an ass of himself at the recent VMA awards by being drunk in public and stealing Taylor Swift’s moment of fame. Reality is that unfortunately Kanye is not the only one of his kind and there are many individuals that simply have too much money for their own good and tend to forget that with money comes responsibility. It really is not rocket science to figure this out but yet it seems that more and more people become millionaires in the US each year and yet the level of social responsibility that comes with this type of money seems to be easily forgotten.

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It is only in recent memories that President’s Bush’s failed attempt at conquering Iraq put us behind 5 years financially, so what will Obama do differently to conquer the Middle East?

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Obama’s first 100 days are up and I thought we would take a moment to actually review his progress and see if the hype over his great speeches were justified.

His first orders of business were focused around cracking down on the corruption and pork that exist within politicians everywhere. He signed in a bill to put a ceiling on the pay of senators, governors and politicians everywhere putting many restrictions on side projects as well as pay. This move was a good one but it came with its shares of drawbacks, most of his elected cabinet was somehow involved in these side businesses and therefore decided to not run for office so they would save him and themselves some embarrassment.

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Consumer confidence has now been up for three consecutive months and that is looking good, despite the lack of job growth, it seems that consumers are starting to realize the recession is nowhere near over and are choosing to start leaving their lives normally again. This is a big surprise.

As many believe this is a simple fluke and will start dipping again, I like to believe it is real and will continue to grow. Most economists will tell you that job growth is directly related to consumer spending and historically this has been found to be true BUT job growth alone is not the only factor that pushes the consumer spending index up. The people’s confidence in their own situations does too, and I think people have just about had it with all the down talk on the news and the negative effects that talk shows and gloomy economists seem to keep playing on. Its not doomsday, its just another recession, not the worst we had and not the smallest but it will go away and the less afraid we are of it, the quicker it will go away.

The only difference is that now you need to spend within your means and thats how it should have been to begin with.

Dont you agree? Leave us a comment

A few days a go, we saw a nice 500 pt jump by the stock market. Many were happy to see such a jump in the right direction and many are afraid as they seem to think the volatility of the market is still continuing.

The market coming up 500 points is great but not by far an indicator that the state of the country is getting better. Continue Reading

President Obama’s plan is the talk of all media everywhere. Many are non believers and are criticizing the president and his treasury secretary for spending too much money and having too vague of a plan. The plan has already promised to create or help put 3.6 million Americans to work by the end of 2010. The plan also speaks to tax cuts for the middle class and tax credits for individuals purchasing a home in 2009 or an American car. Despite what it promises to do and what it will actually deliver, the President stands behind his plan 100% and believes that it will take time but will work.

However, there is one idea that got my attention simply because it seems like it would work.

There has been talks of boosting the market by offering a special incentive called “no capital gains” for securities purchased before 12/31/09. This would create an urgency and reinforce people’s confidence in the market. There would however be some exceptions to the proposed idea, but it could boost small business purchase decisions and help the market to a faster recovery.

Politics is politics and that will never change. In the past few days, more has come from the famous Obama spending bill and as expected, there is a lot of pork in there.

What is Pork?

Pork is a term used in politics that refers to money spent on projects that really have no value to the American people but rather make certain individuals rich, as they own companies that the government gives money to s the lack of need for the product or service. It is often used to gain political ground as those individuals are high centers of influence in the community.

Here are some of the projects referred to as pork in this bill.

Tucked into pages 262 and 263 of the bill, for example, are provisions that will aid the manufacturers of “certain wooden arrows designed for use by children.” The bill will exempt the arrows from an excise tax of 39 cents. There are also tax breaks for race-track owners, for rum imported from Puerto Rico, for worsted wool makers, Hollywood film and television production companies and on and on. Then there is spending $100 million up on blueberry reserves? I am sure if we dissect the bill, there would be close to $10 billion in pork hidden in there.

As we all watched Obama take office, we believed that these pork spending bills would no longer exist. Have we been fooled?

Well, we can look at this two ways:

The first way would be to think that Obama has lied to all of us and that Washington still does not have a leader that cares about the people but rather making sure he gets re-elected. Almost all of our past Presidents have proven this to be true in their presidency, how could we expect Obama to be any different!

The second which is my personal opinion is that perhaps Obama has ran into a bit more resistance from the Republicans as he had planned. He called for bi partisanship and a unified government but reality remains that it will not happen in 2 months and nothing will unify something that has been divided for decades. I believe that this is simply a case of the greater good. Obama strongly believed in passing this bill and it may have required a bit of pork to influence certain people to vote for it.

I remain positive that Obama was the right choice for office and will wait till 2 years go by to truly see if Washington has truly changed.

The Stimulus Program will benefit the poor first and foremost. President Obama signed the $787 billion economic stimulus bill into law on Tuesday, February 17, 2009. This historic rescue package is just one of a raft of recovery measures the new administration is introducing in an attempt to get the economy on its feet again as quickly as possible.

For sure, the stimulus package is the product of much compromise and wrangling in Congress, and it’s far from perfect. A lot of the infrastructure spending provisions will take months or even a year or two to implement, and might not start generating jobs, spending and other economic activity until the recession is already ending.

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I have been receiving many request from folks regarding the new proposed stimulus package and its impact on the economy.

Many are worried about the impact of injecting another trillion dollars in the economy and the impact of inflation in the next 2 to 3 years.

Lets not waste anymore time and lets find out where the money is going…

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