You might wonder what you get in return for your tax dollars. The question isn’t so far-fetched; after all, the government collects those taxes—theoretically, at least—in order to give you back a comparable value in services like police protection, education, infrastructure and a social safety net. Are we getting what we pay for? A recent [...]
In this day and age, it seems like reading is becoming a thing of the past, what with podcasts, TED talks and YouTube videos becoming more popular vectors of information and entertainment. But a growing body of scientific literature suggests that the benefits of reading actual books may be more important than we realize for [...]
Someday, maybe before long, it will become normal again to get on a plane, and the more daring of us might even decide to travel outside the United States. But as we ease back into long-distance vacations, there is going to be an uneasy period where there are greater than normal numbers of cancellations, delays [...]
There may be an inflation driver hidden in one of the most interesting consequences of our year-long global pandemic. Americans stuck in their homes have sent off a surge of orders from factories all over the world, namely in China. These items are carried across the Pacific in intermodal shipping containers (think: the back of [...]
We are definitely living in strange times, with a year of pandemic, microscopically low interest rates, a soaring stock market and everybody walking around looking like bank robbers. And so there were bound to be odd distortions in different sectors of the economy. One of the most interesting is found in the U.S. housing market, [...]
There is no shortage of diet books and online advice about what to eat (avoid sugar, lose weight with the Keto diet, drop gluten from your dinner table) but all of this information is generic, offered to everybody, and you, reading this, are an individual, with your own unique biochemistry. It’s possible that some of [...]
From January through October of last year, there were 900 million fewer international tourists from the same period the year before—due, of course, to the global pandemic travel restrictions. That’s not especially catastrophic for the U.S. economy, since travel and tourism represents only 2.8% of U.S. GDP. But what about the Philippines, where international tourists [...]
There’s a lot to unpack in the newly-passed, newly-signed American Rescue Plan bill, beyond the fact that the government is once again sending checks out to American families. The goal is to help relieve the economic suffering caused by the COVID pandemic in a variety of sectors. The relief bill makes unemployment benefits more generous, [...]
A lot has been written about the advent of online banking, with the ability to deposit checks through an app and earn significantly higher interest on whatever you deposit. But the other side of the trend is that it is becoming increasingly hard to find a convenient local bank branch. A recent report by the [...]
A friend or relative asks you to be their executor of estate. What, exactly, are they asking you to do? An article on the NerdWallet website offers many detailed insights into the scope of the task that you would be taking on, and it is clearly not for the faint of heart. The executor has [...]
