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JerseySmarts.com

President Bush’s Farewell Speech

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After listening to President Bush’s farewell speech last night, I hope the fanatics who destroy every word that this man says will let up a bit. His speech was genuine and from the heart. Many of the fanatics who hate Bush (not dislike, but hate the man) are pessimistic anyway, so I doubt that they’ll give this man his moment to say goodbye. President Bush’s speech was very classy and to the point – you couldn’t ask much more for a now-controversial President who is leaving the White House after eight years.

I have to say, though, I got a kick out of the audience shots looking at Vice President Dick Cheney. Again, I think that history and scholars will show that Cheney didn’t overstep the bounds of his office, but rather scared a nation who became used to an impotent Vice President. Frankly, I hope that Vice President-Elect Joe Biden takes as active as a role in that position as Cheney did because Biden has some good thoughts in his head if he just lets them out.

Anyway, Cheney amused me because he has that perpetual angry old man look on his face. About halfway through the speech they spanned to Cheney and he had a look on his face like, “Let’s go, George. I gotta get to sleep!” I loved it – hilarious. And then when the speech was over you KNOW Cheney wanted to turn to the crowd and say, “Alright, assholes. Get out!”

He’s the best.

Whether you love or hate the man, you have to admit that President Bush’s message last night about freedom in the Middle East and a strengthened security system at home was mildly inspiring. Whenever we, as a country, step back and look at the results of our good work around the world you can’t help but be in awe. Sure, most of the world doesn’t understand us and we’ve been too aggressive in foreign policy lately, but that doesn’t negate the positive results worldwide thanks to American involvement.

Foreign and domestic policy will change drastically with the new administration. I’m looking forward to these changes for a variety of reasons, but I thank President Bush and his administration for their contributions over the last eight years.

What’s Worse? Getting Laid Off or Cut Back?

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What’s worse? Getting laid off from your job or being forced to take a pay cut as well as unpaid time off? This is the predicament that some employees are facing around the country as the economic crisis continues to waffle its way through the American workforce. The New York Times ran an article on this issue last week – below is an interesting piece from that article:

A growing number of employers, hoping to avoid or limit layoffs, are introducing four-day workweeks, unpaid vacations and voluntary or enforced furloughs, along with wage freezes, pension cuts and flexible work schedules. These employers are still cutting labor costs, but hanging onto the labor.

And in some cases, workers are even buying in. Witness the unusual suggestion made in early December by the chairman of the faculty senate at Brandeis University, who proposed that the school’s 300 professors and instructors give up 1 percent of their pay.

How about that, huh? You have professors willingly giving up 1% of their pay so that their colleagues at the university will not be fired. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me. The article goes on to talk about how about 30% of the professors have opted into this program and it will generate some $100,000 in savings – enough to save the jobs of “several” university employees.

What is interesting here is that unlike in previous economic downturns and recessions, there are some companies that do not want to cut their existing staff because they know that cutting staff will lose talent. You have to believe that at this point in history, if companies were employing people who were inefficient at their jobs then they would have already been fired. So what’s an employer to do when they need to save money but don’t want to fire anyone?

Send their employees home.

This puts the employee in an awkward predicament. Do you stay with a job that is finding ways to literally nickel and dime you out of a few percentage points on your annual salary or do you look for greener pastures? My stance would be to do both. If your job is sending you home once a week and forcing you in to extended, unpaid furloughs, then you should use that time to find a new place to work, if possible. Look, your job is already telling you that they value you as an employee and that they don’t want to lose you by virtue of your continued employment. If, however, you feel that the reduction in pay is not going to work for your financial needs, then you may as well use the new free time to play the field a bit.

The Big Three Automakers Make Unreliable Cars

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Over the course of the last weekend, I read a bunch of articles online that talked about some of the different views on the current automaker crisis in America. Tom Baldwin from The Times of London wrote an op-ed entitled, “For too long the Big Three have produced the type of cars Americans do not want.” Baldwin concisely talks about some of the main points regarding the auto industry crisis, mainly that the “big three automakers” are making cars that nobody wants to buy! Or in his words:

This indicates that if the Big Three go bust it is their bosses, insular and stuck in their ways, who should be held most responsible. Put simply, for too long they had built bad cars, which were inefficient, unreliable and unattractive and Americans did not want to buy them.

The man makes a point. Everyone knows that foreign cars are much more fuel efficient, definitely more reliable, and usually more stylish than their American counterparts. Let’s put it this way, Ford didn’t earn the nickname of “Found On Road Dead” out of nowhere.

A few years ago (2002) I purchased a 1999 Chevy Blazer. The price was around $15,000 – give or take a few hundred bucks. First of all, the price was way too high for a three year old automobile. Second, since I purchased this machine, I’ve probably put an additional $15,000 into it in repairs. And of those repairs, about half of that expense was to pay for labor!

But the thing is, I’m one of many drivers who have had a financially negative experience with the American automakers. On the flip side, though, I’ve been borrowing my Mother’s spare 2000 Honda Civic for a few months now and not only does it get 31 – 33 miles to the gallon where the Blazer got 18 miles to the gallon, but I’ve not had one problem with it. I drive a lot for my job and since I borrowed the Civic I’ve put about 5,000 miles on it – no problems. With the Blazer, though, traveling that much almost certainly meant that I needed to stop at the shop one weekend for minor repairs.

American made cars are poor quality, energy inefficient, and cost way too much to manufacture. Unless these core problems change, they’ll never reclaim their former dominance in the market.

Defining America’s Poor People in Real Terms

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Last week I was reading an article posted from RealClearPolitics.com entitled, “Slumdog Millionaire.” The title was intriguing so I had to read the article. You can go read it for yourself, but the author talks about a movie which details poverty in Mumbai, India. This is the part of the article that made me want to blog about it:

“Overall,” writes Heritage, “the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.”

“Nearly three-quarters of poor U.S. households own a car,” says the study, “31 percent own two or more cars. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions. Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.”

In these times of economic hardship, it makes you wonder how desperate some of our fellow Americans really are… Hey, if someone can afford a microwave, stereo, car, color television, and some type of DVD or VCR player, then they can certainly afford to pay the rent or mortgage each month, right?

When read statistics like these, it just makes you wonder how “bad off” we really are during this recession.

Economic Downturn or Not – Americans Still Donating to Charity

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We all have many reasons to be proud to be an American, but one of the top reasons why I’m proud is our proclivity to give to charitable causes even in the worst economic times. CBS News ran a story on their website the other day talking about how Americans are still donating money to nonprofit organizations even as their 401k accounts and discretionary income dollars are dwindling. From the article:

The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University says that historically, charitable giving has been recession-proof.

Contributions to American charities have increased during 39 of the past 40 years in today’s dollars, and a change in the tax laws – not the stock market crash – can be blamed for the drop in 1987, said Melissa Brown, associate director of research for the center. Between 69 and 72 percent of people give routinely, she said.

The article goes on to talk about how some nonprofit organizations are cautiously optimistic about the potential donations for this year’s Christmas season. Believe it or not – we may be hearing about all of the horrible things going on in the auto industry and the banking sector, but Americans are prepared to give to charitable causes nonetheless. This will be an interesting phenomenon to watch – will Americans continue to give their scarce dollars to charitable causes even as the biased media runs around talking about the “horrendous” market conditions? I guess we’ll see.

There are only a few places that I donate my scarce dollars. The first place is my national fraternity’s foundation, which is (of course) helped by the fact that I am a Board member for the foundation. I began donating to some other causes like child cancer research and feeding the homeless, but I felt like my meager dollars were lost in a mess of bigger donations from bigger donors.

I’d like to find a small, locally-based nonprofit organization which is really helping to make a change in society – even if the geographic boundary of that “society” is defined as a single township or a single county in New Jersey, etc. I really think that a small nonprofit like that would be the perfect “project” for a donor to take on in terms of giving away money to help a specific cause. Unfortunately, those types of organizations really don’t exist in Monmouth County or my hometown up in Morris County, so there isn’t any opportunity like that – for now.

As we go out and purchase gifts for our loved ones this year, please remember to give a few dollars to a charitable cause if you can.