What America Wants – Now!!!

October 28, 2009: Yahoo shows its most popular searches which, of course, provides a clue about what is of interest to the millions of people visiting the site and peforming Internet searches. Of particular interest is that entertainment comes in ahead of politics and that, of course, should be no surprise. People are fed up with lying, backbiting, one-for-all-and-all-for-me politicians.

Gas prices ranked high on the list. I don’t know about your neighborhood but in mine it’s almost laughable to see how the prices are changing several times a day, it seems. Being an information collector, I fired up Quicken and searched for my gas expenditures.

• January 17 – $1.739
• February 20 – $1.639
• March 5 – $1.689
• April 11 – $1.899
• May 15 $2.089
• June 1 – $2.399
• July 6 – $2.409
• August 8 – $2.399
• September 14 – $2.219
• October 15 – $2.299

Forget all the fluctuations. Let’s look at where we were in January ($1.739) and where we were on October 15 ($2.299). Ol’ Jethro ciphered that out to $0.56 cents more for each gallon. Based on the January figure of $1.739, that’s an increase of over 32%. (continued below)

Jobs, Jobs, Where are the Jobs?

Is it any wonder that unemployment benefits rank high on Internet searches? If you’re fortunate enough to still have a job, you have an interest in what the future might hold for you. Trust me on this: it ain’t much. Last year, an acquaintance of mine was nearing her 25th anniversary with her company when she was laid off. Her unemployment benefit was less than half of her salary. It took about 50% of her unemployment benefit to pay for COBRA insurance continuation. The bottom line is that she was trying to live on less than 25% of her previous salary. Could you do that?

And then there are millions of unemployed workers trying to see when their benefits will run out.

The pundits are telling us that jobs are a trailing indicator and that we’re still 12 to 18 months away from seeing job growth. Well, what about the millions of Americans that are waiting for those jobs. Can they hold out 12 to 18 months? Could you?