The Sunday 'Report;' 06/19/2011

What The National Pamphleteers Don't Report:
Pawlenty’s 5 Percent Growth Solution Makes Historical Sense

Daniel Gross,
June 14, 2011
Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been getting a lot of grief for his promise that the U.S. economy could grow five percent per year for 10 years if only we follow his program of big tax cuts, spending reductions and deregulation. The claim has raised eyebrows across the spectrum. After all, $15 trillion economies simply don't grow that rapidly over such long periods of time. Pawlenty argues that "we've done it before" and "the same can happen again."Between 1983 and 1987, he pointed out, the economy grew at an average rate of 4.9 percent, and between 1996 and 1999, the economy grew at an average rate of 4.7 percent.  Sticklers will point out that growth in those impressive periods was less than five percent, and that these two golden periods combined didn't last 10 years. Pawlenty's response has been to accuse the doubters of not believing in America. "And this idea that we can't have [....]
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Pawlenty-5-Percent-Growth-dg-4192262000.html?x=0

More Than You?
Have you ever wondered if anyone else had your name; your exact name?  Check this site to find out:
http://www.howmanyofme.com/search/

Talking Down Your House (Appealing Tax Assessments)

Ashlea Ebeling
06.08.11
Forbes Magazine, June 27, 2011
More homeowners are appealing their tax assessments. Here's what to do if you get a tax-bill shock.
After appellate lawyer Patricia Quintilian built a geodesic dome home on 27 acres in Goshen, Mass. in 2002, she was forced to develop a new specialty: property tax law. For five years in a row, she contends, the local assessor valued her home too high and made such basic mistakes as listing the first and second floors as having equal square footage. "It's a dome," she protests. One year she took the dispute up to the state's appellate tax board, which decided her home was worth only $241,600. The next year the local assessor was back with a new $355,600 valuation. "The property tax system is broken," declares Quintilian.  She's right. Local assessors, sometimes part-timers with little training, too often guesstimate a home's assessed value. That number is then multiplied by the tax rate to determine your annual real estate tax bill. "Do not assume an assessor is necessarily an ‘expert.' Assessors are often [....]
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0627/money-guide-11-real-estate-homeowners-taxes-talking-down-house.html

Obama’s Economy Worse than the 1970s

May 27, 2011
by Floyd and Mary Beth Brown
The worst economic conditions in recent memory were during the Jimmy Carter era of stagflation. Stagflation was a term coined in the 1970s to describe high unemployment with high inflation. Stagflation is back. Translation: America’s middle class is getting poorer; a record number of middle class workers are out of work. If you are lucky enough to have a job, your wages aren’t going up, but you are facing higher prices for everything.  “Recent data suggests that the current economic recovery is both sluggish and slowing with unemployment stubbornly high,” this from a page one story in Investor’s Business Daily.
The Obama/Bernanke partnership has been a bust.
The Fed is winding down Ben Bernanke’s experiment in money printing called “QE2.” He trumpets his success saying that QE2 has pointed the U.S. economy “in the right direction.” But did it really? It turns out that QE2 has created maybe 700,000 full-time jobs, but at a cost of about $850,000 for each job.  All QE2 did was create [....]
http://floydreports.com/obamas-economy-worse-than-the-1970s/

Confessions of extreme penny pinchers

I resell vacuums left on curbs 1 of 13
Name: Quentin Lawrence
Hometown: Newport, R.I.
I make an extra $400 a year just from finding vacuum cleaners left on curbs in nearby neighborhoods -- and then selling them on Craigslist.  It started out when I would drive around and see all of these things people leave outside their homes. I guess vacuum cleaners are just really popular to get rid of, because that's mostly what I found.  So I started stopping and looking to see what condition the vacuums were in, and it turns out usually they need nothing more than to be emptied out. Or, they have a belt that's broken, so I can just [....]
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/1106/gallery.penny_pinchers/index.html

10 fastest growing states

North Dakota #1 of 10
State GDP: $31 billion
Growth in 2010: 7.1%
The national economy may be limping ahead at a snail's pace, but in North Dakota, you wouldn't know it.  The state's economy is growing at a rate leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of the country, at 7.1% in 2010. That's compared to an anemic 2.9% for the United States as a whole.
The biggest contributor to North Dakota's growth spurt? Oil.
Even though U.S. energy demand was nearly flat in 2010, North Dakota is expanding its oil production, due to a new controversial practice called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."  That technology is allowing North Dakota to suddenly tap [....]
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/news/economy/1106/gallery.states_by_gdp_fastest_growing_state_economies/?iid=Lead
Until Next Sunday....