Don’t Quit Your Day Job – Personal Finance, Economics and Investing

How about this title in the Wall Street Journal? “Credit Cards Take From Poor, Give to the Rich” is the name, in reference to a Boston Federal Reserve Bank report on credit card reward programs. The paper says just that: credit card rewards programs and merchant fees for credit card usage are increasing the overall cost of goods for check and cash customers.

Here’s something you can really sink your teeth into – a calculator from the Tax Foundation which will let you input your tax data. What does it output? Well, your tax burden under the ‘Bush’ tax cuts (passed in 2003), your tax burden if the plan expires, and your tax burden if the changes in President Obama’s budget are enacted. Now that you have this data, you can cut through the noise and choose which one you like the best by simply figuring out under which plan you owe the least! Joy!

Here’s another quick, fun entry for you… Bloomberg Business has helpfully aggregated PayScale.com data in order to show you which schools have the highest return on investment. The list is sortable by name, rank, 30 year investment return, and other categories.

You know what’s depressing? A graph of spending versus revenue, which is updated through 2009. The Heritage Foundation recently uploaded one of these graphs, and I’m happy to share it with you today.

Fresh off of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s classic quote to the Brookings Institute, “The rich are not paying their fair share”, it’s nice to see a few publications with proof that thought may be a little wacky. The Congressional Budget Office released a timely report they named “Average Federal Taxes by Income Group”. What does that report show? Strangely, that the share of the burden of taxation for the rich in this country has actually been increasing. Shocking, I know, with all of the quotes you can find to the contrary. Let’s take a look…

…enter grade inflation. This site has recently touched twice on the topic of the spiraling cost of advanced education. Recently the New York Times covered something that the schools are giving back for the increased attendance cost – higher grades. Yes, grade inflation is increasing at a pretty decent clip right along with college costs.

Carnivals and article links for the week!

That treasure trove of data the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a fascinating report that it calls the “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation” report. Last Wednesday it released its report on the compensation costs at various employer types (and locales) for March 2010. One of the interesting things it does, as picked up on Mark Perry’s (great) blog, is to spin out the government’s estimate of overall hourly wages – for private industry, and for state and local government workers. The government workers win in a first round knockout…

As I mentioned in my last article, education is one of the categories where spending has increased the most over the last decades. However, it’s unclear if the product students are receiving is even worth the cost they have been paying. At issue: this article from the New York Times, heavily digested all over the internet. Setting aside the fact that our protagonist majored in Religious and Women’s studies, what is the value (in expected weekly salary) of a graduate or an undergraduate degree?

What’s grown faster than inflation the last 40 years? No, not medical expenses. What’s grown faster than that? You guessed it (from the title of this post) – education costs increased almost 1000% from 1978 to 2008, compared to about 300% in the generally price level as measured by consumer inflation. Yes, inflation is one of the categories of spending which is increasing at an off-the-chart-rate.