"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."-Thomas Jefferson (attributed)

It is amazing how many people, who believe it will never happen to them, have been laid off in recent weeks. Having been out of work more than once I know better than to think it can't happen to me. When times get tough I try to work a lot harder, and these are a few things that anyone can do. Most of these are common sense, but I decided that you needed a list. You may have already read that I tried to get rich clicking links on Facebook, but this is a lot more likely to work.

10. Cut back on lunches out.
 Lunch in downtown Houston isn't cheap and can cost $10-$12 a day when I eat out. To keep costs down, I try to go out only once a week and the rest of the time I bring a lunch with all of the food I need for a full day at work. Breakfast, snacks and lunch too. Try to mix it up and keep it exciting. Sometimes I have cereal for lunch and bologna sandwich for breakfast, that's right, livin’ on the edge.

9. Lower your cable package.
 You don't want to watch the news and more than likely you could do with less TV anyway. This also could apply to your cell phone package, I am sure you don't really need the unlimited texts package. btw ur shoes iz da hawt. You really only need your internet connection to update facebook and read natechurch.com. If you have to cancel your internet let me know and I can give a list of libraries in your area where this website isn't banned.

8. Floss.
 If you brush and floss you are less likely to need to go to the dentist. Dentists cost money, and you may have to take a day off to go. Plus people with bad breath are more likely to be fired. Well I would fire you. Either way your dentist tells you to floss because he doesn't want to see you more than twice a year. This is likely related to your breath, but it could also be that your copay for your checkup exam is more than enough and he has a blosoming business installing grills for local rappers.

7. Eat more produce.
 Fruits and vegetables are good for you and will keep you healthy and at work. They are also typically cheaper than less healthy foods. If you can grow it yourself, you are even better off. I want to take the time to say I at no point said smoke more produce. I should also take the time to mention that the previous statement was not an attempt to make sure you don't "get high on your own supply". I am seriously talking about tomatoes, potatoes and chili peppers.

6. Drink less.
 Having a few drinks seems pretty harmless, but with the cost of a brew nowadays cutting one premium brew out of your lineup can save a decent amount of money. If you must have another one try brewing your own or wearing skimpy clothes.

5. Save for a rainy day.
 If you use these tips and work at it you can come up with a budget that puts some of your income into savings. Maybe you can only squeeze $100 out of your budget, but every cent will count when there is trouble. If you get laid off, it is easier to pay your bills if you have a few bucks saved up.

4. Create backup plans.
 This is important for everyone, but it is more important if you are married. There are important questions about what costs are considered essential that are much easier to answer before they have to be cut. It is also good to know how long you can go before you have to do something drastic like sell your car. For instance, you may be surprised to find out your spouse thinks Xbox Live isn't essential.

3. Trim waste.
 While you may be very astute at cutting expenses I am willing to be you are wasting a lot of your potential output every day. While some relaxation is helpful when the going gets tough, most people watch TV. I know I do. If you can get some more spare time in your day, you can use it to get ahead. Start with "Dancing with the Stars" and then work up to "American Idol". TV producers don't care about you or else they wouldn't put this crap on.

2. Invest wisely.
 There are very few good investments right now, but the one that will always have big rewards is investment in yourself. Finding new ways to enhance your skills is not always easy when you are on a budget, but reading a book or working on your Spanish could help get a new job or maintain your current one. This equally applies to your family members. Thanks to me, Joanne now knows "Laveme Sucio".

1. Exercise more.
 I am sure my wife, Joanne, is laughing somewhere because this is my answer for everything. Exercise improves your mood, and your physical fitness. A better mood will keep you from getting laid off, plus that extra blood flow helps you think more clearly. Being physically fit keeps you healthy which means less sick days and less trips to the doctor. Try to do it without spending any more money and you are even better off. Running around the block and doing jumping jacks are both free. There is more! Thin people get more promotions, more pay and more jobs than an equally qualified fat person. To put that into financial terms, the cost of getting into shape has a greater return on investment than the cost of a master's degree. So as long as I can't afford to get my master's degree, you'll find me at the gym getting into shape for my appearance on Dancing With the Stars and making sure I look better in this summer's hottest skimpy clothes.

The other day, I had made the joke that President Obama had promised to roll back the President Bush's years but unfortunately he had started with the Dow Jones. In case you were asleep last week, the Dow fell to its lowest point since 1997. A friend of mine commented, "Obama doesn't have any control over the stock market, ". When questioned further he told me that the stock market was like "gambling".

My friend is an educated gentleman who has read books on how to invest and still doesn't get the fundamental links between economic policies and the stock market. If an educated person doesn't get it, I must assume there are many more people who don't get it either. While the intricacies of the market are too much for a single blog entry, I am going to speak to it in a more general sense. Hopefully you and maybe even the President will have a better understanding of his affect on the market and thus the economy.

Literally, President Obama has very little control over the direct value of stock. Although, he does have the ability to control public policies that affect the environment in which a company does business. So while you could say he didn't break the china, he did let the bear into the china shop.

The stock market is a barometer of investors’ opinion about what the economy is going to do. Let's say that you are going to do things that don't favor growth, the market will rise slowly. If you in turn say you are going to do things that hurt growth that will make the market decline. This happens because companies will not make money so there will not be profits paid to shareholders and other benefits of growth.

Before he was in office, President-elect Obama had said that he was going to raise the capital gains tax even though it would decrease the amount of tax revenue generated. This affects the market because those people who have invested in stock pay capital gains when they sell that stock. If is beneficial for someone who was thinking of selling to sell before those tax hikes go into effect, so investors begin selling when they think he is going to get into office before he does. Selling of stock makes the market go down.

Another example is the continuing nationalization of companies. A company's sole objective is to make money. The government is terrible at making money, because the motivations are not there. Government organizations make political decisions instead financial ones, like Freddie and Fannie and Andrew Cuomo's decision to give away high risk home loans. So as the government gets its hands into more and more businesses, and they impose more mandates, those companies become worth less and less to investors. As long as the government owns part of AIG, the likelihood they are going to pay dividends is very slim. If we look at an example to the contrary, Ben Bernanke announced on Tuesday (2/24) that there would not be a further nationalization of banks. That day stocks began to rise. That night President Obama reiterated many of the same threats and the market began to tumble again the next day.

He is also increasing government spending by more than threefold and that is only in extra spending. He hasn't even declared the budget yet. I saw a poll the other day that said 53% of Americans believe the Stimulus package will fail or do nothing. The only slice of the population that believes that it will work is government workers, by a margin of 1%. Each dollar spent by the government is taken from someone else. These are no growth jobs, and therefore do nothing for the economy at large. The government hiring someone to build a road does nothing to help grow our GDP. A company hiring someone to build a car does.

Hopefully you have learned something. If you still disagree you will at least understand why everyone else is selling their stock. I have yet to see an economist debate these issues, but if you look hard enough I am sure you can find one, probably in the cabinet. My observation is that it seems like he is doing it on purpose. If he is as smart as people say he is, then surely he understands what he is doing. So why does he keep doing it? Well the answer to that is beyond this post and range from "he is sinister"(Marx's plan to fleece the bourgeoisie) to "he is an elitist"(Eliminate the middle class from investing) and everything in between. I am not going to debate any of those without a beer in my hand.

Another year has passed and I am supposed to be one year closer to retirement. Not that I look at it that way, but with the market the way it is I feel even further. My future has been spent and now the government is talking about spending my son's.

A recent poll shows that 53% of Americans believe the stimulus package won't help the economy or will make it worse. So how can we bring the other 47% up to speed?

Someone asked me the other day if incresed taxes mean less jobs. While it may seem obvious to the smarty pants out there I figured that if he didn't understand someone else might not as well. The easy answer is because they are inversely proportional, but why they are takes a bit more explanation.

The goverment can tax you in many ways, sin taxes(taxes on items they think you shouldn't buy -- like smokes and booze), sales taxes, property tax and income tax are the obvious ones. All of these taxes have similar effects in that they take away money you can spend and give it to them. How they take away money and how they change your spending behaviours(planned or unplanned) is another discussion. With less money to spend you buy less. If this happens to everyone else too then there are less things and services bought. You may go to one less movie a year, or buy one less pair of shoes. This seems small to you but this is happening to 250 million other Americans too. That means 250 million less movies watched. That hurts the movie industry ability to create decent movies and so we get films like "The Happening" that are total crap. This also means that we need less theaters and less theater workers. Now obviously this is a closed environment, because the movie industry can offer deals to edge out your desire to have pizza. Maybe you order less pizzas and goto the same amount of movies, then the pizza industry is affected too. Of course as less pepople work for the theaters, they aren't spending money either. Maybe since they aren't working they aren't ordering pizza or going to the movies. Therefore the system feeds on itself and becomes circular.

Okay that was a bad idea. Let's just raise taxes on corporations. Okay if you take the money away from the corporations they are going to have less money with which to pay employees. Then they are going to have to cut staff, leading to the same result as before. The difference is that this time it is quicker, ebcause we don't have to wait for the company to loose money from lower sales.

You know the rich have a lot of money, we can take it from them! While it is true they have more net worth than you or I, they don't always have more money.  Rich people and people with investments in general don't have a big pile of money they can jump in and swim. They have investments. Investments can be in the form of stocks, bond, real estate or a Quizno's. If rich people have less money, they are les likely to purchase a Quizno's and the resulting effect on jobs is obvious. No Quiznos = No Jobs. More traditional investments like stocks and bonds are a different story. If your house payment is coming due and you don't have enough cash but you have a lot of stock, you may sell some. You aren't selling because it is a good time you are selling because you need cash., so you aren't going to find the best deal. (Also with a capital gains tax you have to sell more stocks in order to get the amount you need which compounds the issue.) If you sell enough, or there are enough other people doing the same thing the value of the stock is going to go down. Stocks and Bonds are created by companies to get cash so they can do things like buy factories and hire employees. If they get less money per share they sell, then they aren't going to be able to hire as many people. The lower the stock price goes the more people are going to sell and so the price will continue to fall. This will cause more people to loose value in their stocks and so when it comes time to make the next mortgage payment they are going to need to sell more shares. This also hurts the value of the middle class retirement plans whch are heavily invested in stocks, because we aren't allowed to diversify outside of the stock market like the rich can. Another aspect to the paradigm is the rich people also will buy fewer Bentleys when they have less money coming in too. This means that there won't be as many Bentley mechanics and Bentley sales staff. So that means less jobs from them as well.

Many of these results take effect long after the implementer has left. This is because for instance you aren't going to have less of a need for Bentley mechanics the day you cut taxes. It will come over time, as the owners decide on a new car. This is a highly simplified example and dosen't take a lot into account, but it does give you an idea of how the machinery works under the hood. Tax plans are rarely as clear cut as these examples. For instance in 1993, the goverment cut taxes on the poor but raised them on the rich for a cumulative tax increase. This slowed the economy but it took until 1999 for the economic growth to stop. We could have an entire discussion on how these cuts directly benefited and doubled the growth in companies like Walmart but that is a different discussion. Overall when and how to finance our government is a tricky problem, and deciding to cut or raise taxes have long reaching effects.