Once a year the professional golf community comes to visit my neck of the woods, in the form of the PGA’s Champion’s Tour.

It’s an event that changes the character of the community in several ways: spectators swell the size of the town, there’s a media focus that usually doesn’t exist...and an actual, no kidding, traffic jam might develop—on a weekend.

It’s a great economic barometer, as well. Despite the efforts of the Professional Golfers Association (the PGA), there is a lot more of an upper-income demographic attending the tournament than there is a Happy Gilmore kind of crowd.

Which brings me to the point of today’s examination: what can we learn about the state of the economy from the perspective of the tricklers, as opposed to how it looks from the point of view of the trickled upon?

I’m a sports fan and a NFL fan, and I enjoy reading Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN.com. Easterbrook brings insight and research to the NFL that is not normally offered by the "jock-ocracy." However, he also finds ways to incorporate science and politics into the mix as well.

This week, during his AFC preview (in which he correctly picks my beloved Colts to return to the Super Bowl,) he takes time to give an honest and infuriating account of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Tuesday Morning Quarterback

It has become fashionable to lament the high cost of health care and college tuition to name but two services provided to the American public. Both were never designed to become cottage industries, and yet both have become sprawling masses of inefficiency. This we know. This is something politicians have latched onto and incorporated in their stump speeches, but hardly anyone ever addresses the reasons for the increased cost.

It’s not what you have, but what you believe you can have that drives the American economy.

We should all understand that Republican fiscal ideology is focused on benefits for the wealthy. It costs the wealthy too much to help out those down on their luck, so we shouldn’t do it is the Republican mantra. However, in marketing this to the common man the Republicans normally drop “the wealthy” modifier and change “down on their luck” to “welfare cheating scum buckets” or some other derogatory adjective.

Beginning July 1st, the first phase of largest college aid expansion in six decades kicks in, according to a release sent out from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office. This was part of the number of bills pushed through Congress in 2006 when the New Direction Congress rolled into town.

In efforts to help middle class families live more affordable, the House passed, among other things, a minimum wage increase as well as the the expansion in college aid which includes an expansion of Pell Grants as well as this reduction in interest rates which will cut in half by 2011 and will begin with a drop from 6.8% to 6.0%.

According to the release

My Last Day of Work
By David Glenn Cox

How could this happen to me? My sector, my department, had always been the best in our employee evaluations. In every category we scored in the highest possible percentile; efficiency, timeliness, loyalty, patriotism, and yes, even in dogma, we were number one. So how could this happen? It must be a mistake, that’s it! A mistake, I’ll send them an Email, requesting an evaluation of pending efficiency and productivity improvement.

Demos is hosting a great conference this week that will address some of the economic concerns that new workers are facing in this unpredictable, unstable, and darn near frighting economy.

A Better Deal: Reclaiming Economic Security for a New Generation will be May 8-9th, 2008, at The Liaison Capitol Hill in Washington DC. While this is a schlep for many folks there are scholarships and stipends available for need based folks interested in this topic. It would be wonderful if I could attend but ... alas... I cannot. The good news is that Mike Connery at Future Majority will be live blogging the conference and I'm sure there will be helpful multimedia available after the fact.

I have often thought to myself... "Rome, at its peak, only lasted for so many years... the U.S. won't be 'on top' forever." And it appears W Bush has taken us to, and now, over the precipice.

The Federal Reserve, having demonstrated our entire unregulated financial system is based on nothing but thin air -- upon which the rich built fortunes on loans backed by loans that were backed by loans -- ‘saved’ the dominant, under-the-regulations paper giant Bear Sterns [International Herald Tribune], while the rest of us appear to be spiraling into something akin to our Great Depression, a fact that only a few seem to understand and our electronic media for the most part ignores. [Robert Reich]

Ahhh tax day. The wonderful day where we all get to hear republicans justify tax breaks to the top 1% of the income bracket.

It has been reported, and disputed here, that the drop in the value of the dollar will provide a stimilus for exports that will offset the decline in the domestic economy. The report above, reporting on the sharp downturns in american manufacturing, indicates that the "stimilus in exports" theory has failed.

This flows from the fact that the weakness of the dollar reflects more concerns than just the imbalance in trade and declining value of the dollar. Dollar weakness also reflects a global lack of confidence in the role of US manufacturing and trade strength vis a vi the emerging manufacturing, technology, and consumption powerhouses of china and india.

OK let's review. Last Spring, Bush said their was no recession. This summer, 'a few bumps in the road' - this fall, "Stormy weather", now, well their might be a depression, but my tax break will fix it.
My opinion of these changes reflect that there is indeed a serious recession and possible depression occurring, but our news media doesn't cover the issues.

    I think anyone who has ever had a political conversation about the essential nature of the Democrat and Republican parties has heard the idea of the “Fiscally Responsible Republican” and the “Tax-and-Spend Democrat.” These titles that are used on a daily basis by people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Rielly seemed to have seeped into the American public’s thinking so thoroughly that most democrats and republicans accept their roles and consider it a moot point to be ignored.
    I’d like to do some research into these little beat-it-into-your-head terms. To start our investigation, I suppose we should lay some ground rules down. What exactly constitutes fiscal responsibility? I think some things that everyone agrees on, for personal and governmental responsibility, are as follows:

So apparently the economy is super awesome for new graduates according to ABC News.

"The entire process was intimidating," Shawn Basak a soon to be Northwestern grad said. "It was nerve-wracking, given the state of the economy, which compounded the fear and pressure."

Watching the Dinosaurs Fall
By David Glenn Cox

The motivation for this comes from an article written by Martin Wolf of the Financial Times and he told the truth, mainly. I won’t dispute a single fact or figure but in his article, “America’s economy risks mother of all meltdowns” he comes to us as a prognosticator, predicting the future of the things that will be.