i think Obama made his best point right off the bat when he put it simply that this is not the time to be raising prices on education. I couldn’t agree more with that statement and i believe that cheap education is a more bipartisan issue then health care so Obama should focus his efforts there so that he can make some change.

I liked when he said that some republicans are arguing that we need to do everything we can to pay off our national debt so long as it doesn’t mean taxing billionaires. I don’t buy it either and no rational person should.

I really loved Obamas approach on this issue. he kept it lighthearted but made sure to withhold seriousness in his words. The presidents gotta stay cool though to they can’t just be a boring ass politician or else they will lose the undecided voters. I wish all the news was slow jammed.

If i was to give a solution to this problem i would say that college should be free and the rich should be taxed heavily so that everyone truly had an equal opportunity when it came to being successful.

1. The Federal Reserve is the bank of all US banks and of the United States governement. 

2. The Fed was created to regulate the economy and give the banks loans to help the economy flourish. It was created by congress in 1913. The federal reserve act was signed by president Woodrew Wilson

3. The Federal Reserve is located in every state in America. The one in California is located in the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

4.Its job is to create an economic environment with full employment and reasonable prices.

5. many people blame Ben Bernanke for doing a bad job throughout the recession and being corrupt. One critique of the Fed is tthat its should have lower interest rates because that would make for higher employment and then lowere prices on commodities.

6. The Fed is like a really unhealthy heart because it sends blood out in every direction like the fed sends money out in every direction.

the article on the college credit survey was very interesting and unnerving considering the fact that i will probably have a credit card in the near future. I am concerned that i will be in major population of college students who fall into debt. I see this article as very informative and kind of a wakeup call. One of the most alarming facts from the article, in my opinion, is “Only 9.4% of credit-card-carrying college students paid off their debt in full each month, a sharp drop from the 32% found by a survey in 2003.” Thats a ridiculous drop if the studies were accurate. another alarming fact was “This study and previous surveys find that “credit card use has snowballed in the last decade” on campus. In 2004, the average college student had $946 in credit card debt. By 2009, the average stood at more than $4,100.” And also, “The primary takeaways: 70% of American college students have credit cards, five of every six of those students do not know their cards’ interest.” These finding surprise me at first but make sense if you think about it. Financial maturity is just something that people tend to gain later on in life these days it seems.

assignment 16 Images

6 

1. ”Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I’m HardlyRich.

2. It is hard to ask more of households making $250,000 or $300,000 a year. In large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacations or anything else that is associated with wealth.”

3. Come on, we’re all in this together! It’s not like I have infinite money.”

4. Yes we all have to make financial decision and live accordingly to what we make but some people have to decide which luxury car to buy and some people have to figure out how to pay for there public transportation to get to work.

5

1. “Hey i worked hard to get what i have”

2. Why, oh why, does the media bolster President Obama’s rhetoric by using his term: ‘the rich’? Would it not be more appropriate to say ‘the successful,’ or ‘those who work harder?”

3. “I’m not Paris Hilton! I work 70-hour weeks to make this salary!

4. manny professionals work just as hard as ceos but make far less money. It’s just ridiculous to say they work harder then say a janitor or a prostitute or a agricultural laborer.

4

1. “If I can do it, so can you”

2. ”We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots; we must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.”

3. “This is the land of opportunity, where anyone can make it! Instead of complaining, just go out there and get rich!”

4. that works on a personal level but not on a collective level, and its not always necessarily true on a individual level either. If a self made millionaire who came from a middle class home can make it so can a child from east Oakland on food stamps, a broken home, and a learning disability? 

3

1. “You’re Just Jealous Because I Made It and You Didn’t!”

2.“I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus one percent — and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent — [it] is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

3. “It’s wrong to tear down others instead of improving your own life!”

4.  Mitt Romney cracks me up. The occupy movement isn’t trying to divide the nation! it’s trying to bring it closer together! so that a carpenter or a toll booth operator can at least run into a wealthy banker when on a cruise ship or when staying at a hotel, and have the chance to have the same doctor or teacher for their children. I’m not saying that a toll booth operator should get paid the exact same income as a brain surgeon or a lawyer because i do believe in motivating youth to go above and beyond for their dreams of wealth. I just along with most occupyers believe in elevating the minimum quality of life to a level reasonable considering how much wealth the US economy has, so that we can truly be ONE nation under god. Because how it is now, I see 2 nations. A nation where going out to a nice restraunt on a tuesday night doesn’t bring any financial stress to mind where “just throw it on the card” is a solution to almost any situation. A nation where private schools have enough teachers on payroll to concentrate on not only the buerocratic test scores of the students but also the emotional attention that will help them be successfull throughout their schooling years. Then i see a second nation where all of this is reversed and life is hard and children view the world differently. In this world teens have to drop out of school to get jobs to pay their parents cancer treatment because we don’t have free healthcare and the parent is to weak to to keep working for the toxic factory that gave her cancer in the first place. Is that one nation under god? Fuck no.

2

1. “You Shouldn’t Be Punishing the Very People Who Make This Country Work!”

2. “There is a deeply disturbing message coming out of the Occupy Wall Street movement … Simply put, it boils down to this: We must punish success …”

3. “If you punish success, society will collapse into communism!”

4. It’s not punishing success its just rewarding the super successfull a little bit less so that those people they left in the dust don’t starve because there are actually more important things in this world then power, money, and winning.

1

1. Stop Asking for Handouts! I Never Got Help from Anybody!

2. I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Did anybody help me out? No.”

3. “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps!”

4. It’s exactly like the author put it in the article. We have a society that fuels itself and all of our jobs are serving others in someway or another. That is the purpose of society so yes you did get help from others.

1. The overall joblessrate is currently 8.3 percent.

the teen unemployment rate is 23.8 percent ( This seems surprisingly low to me. That 3 in 4 teens are employed)

The national teen unemployment rate has been above 20 percent since mid-2008.

The February unemployment rate for Hispanics age 16 to 19 was 27.5 percent, and for blacks it was more than one-third, at 34.7 percent.

 the impacts of high teen unemployment could last decades. What is unclear is what to do about it.

2. Teen unemployment is usually a reflection of the overall unemployment rate.

Teens who don’t have jobs are less likely to be successfull 6 to 9 years later.

Teens that are unemployed have less money and teens are a huge part of the population that spends money on products that fuel the economy like clothes and electronics.

3. Keep minimum wage low is a suggestion for solving the problem.

pass prices on to customers or figure out how to cut costs.

It doesn’t offer many suggestions.

suspicious ass hoodlum right here

1. whats interesting about Panems economic situation is the clearly visible economic divisions that are set up. People live in districts that are based around the production or extraction of one commodity that each play a role in the worlds overall economy, yet certain districts are very poor even though the workers work just as hard as in the other districts. The story is based around district 12 which is the one that mines coal. Coal mining is the centerpiece to there economy. Those that work for the coal mines are paid low wages even though they are working hard to extract a valuable product based on the fact that it is simple physical labour. Panem is similar to the usa in that way where physical labour is not treated with the same respect as mental labour which creates a division in the spread of wealth.

2. “Economic theory teaches us that over the long term, prosperity is driven by two factors—capital accumulation and the “Solow residual” of technology—and that of the two elements the technology is more important.”

what this means is that the nations that have been most prosperous in the globalized market are the once that have been able to sustain steady capital gain over time but they are vulnerable without the knowledge of how to rebuild themselves which is what Japan and Germany had after the second world war.

3. to say a civilization is rich in knowledge is based on perspective because everyone thinks they are rich in knowledge because they know everything that they know so its like what else is there however i think the reason they are so poor is because they are stuck in a system of the demand not meeting the production when what you want is production and extraction constantly striving to meet the demand. That way everyone wins.

4. A reversal of fortune is when XYZ is bringing fortune and something changes to make XYZ the very thing that brings disfortune. Unfortunately thats what happened to the native south American civilizations when the Europians came. They basically had an army of farmers waiting to become slaves and land that was great for agriculture. That is a negative reversal of fortune.

5. What happens in regions that have beneficial nateral recources is they basically become one big factory for the the world. Most extraction labor is very simple and takes massive amounts of people to do. The workers are therefore paid very poorly so there is no demand for commodities within the country. Businesses fail and people realize the only way to make money is to be the ones countrolling the extraction and selling the recources. These people get greedy and continue to not pay the workers. Its a vicious circle based on the countries lack of experience and knowledge that leaves the economy stuck in the mud.

the articles main points are basically that tensions in iran and around the middle east have caused them to up the gas prices for the oil being exported to the us. Drilling here at home won’t help either because only 2-3 % of the oil in the world is in the united states. If things get worse in Iran, they could cut us off completely which would send prices skyrocketing. 

In my opinion we should ween off gasoline as a society and continue to make progress towards utilizing alternative energies that are healthier for the planet and can be harvested hear at home by the people and not hogged and distributed as a commodity. If we can successfully do that, we could finally cut ties with Iran, Kuwait, and saudi Arabia and be more independent.

Although i recognize that it is still to early to tell, I think Mitt Romney is the frontrunner to win the race. It makes sense that no republican candidate has ever won an election without first winning the ohio primary which Romney won. In the end they are all the same. All the really matters is weather or not Obama can beat them.