gratefulness innovator: Self Improvement Month: Get Organized ...

This month is Self Improvement Month. All this month I will do a weekly post to help you improve yourself by getting organized.

Last week we took a home assessment for Self Improvement Month. This week we put that plan into action. This week it is time to get organized!

Look over your home assessment list and let?s get started.

• You want to first gather your supplies. (Trash bags, boxes, sharpies, etc.)
• You want to get started in one area first.
• Sweep through the house organizing according to the plan you wrote out last week.
• Immediately take out the trash and take the donations to where you have already designated them to go.
• Start containerizing what you have decided to keep.
• Put everything in their place. You should already have the designated spots preplanned from your outline last week.

That?s it! You now have completely organized your home. Give yourself a pat on the back and a cup of tea. Now this process can take you several weeks to complete. It?s not like the TV shows you see where everything is tip top in 48 hours. So don?t get discouraged at the length of time it may take to get everything in order. Just keep working your plan and you should have no problem having an organized home in no time.

Next week I will show you how to maintain what you have now put in order. Because maintenance is the key to success.

Until next week?

Series Navigation<< Self Improvement Month: Home Assessment

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Samantha Pointer is the owner of Get It Together! Organizing and Pointer's Vine Web Design. She is a Blissfully Domestic Writer and the Director of Technology for NAPO Nashville. She also manages several websites and blogs. She is the mother to two beautiful girls and enjoys spending time with family and friends. Samantha is a tech geek, foodie, history buff and sports fanatic just to name a few of the hobbies she enjoys. You can find her on her computer late at night sending out emails. She loves cooking,architecture, old homes and decorating. If she was not doing what she is doing now she would have been an economist or historian.

Source: http://organizingguru.com/2012/09/self-improvement-month-get-organized/

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Brazile: Why debates don't always make a difference (CNN)

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In Global Opinion, Kyle Jarrard writes: "Mom played the piano in church Sunday...

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Bank profits rebounded in third quarter - The Term Sheet: Fortune&#39;s ...

FORTUNE -- It's good to be a banker, again. At least for now.

Profits at banks and Wall Street firms likely rebounded in the third quarter. Analysts are expecting that operating profits at nearly all the large banks and Wall Street firms will be up from the prior quarter and a year ago.

That's a change from the second quarter when the profit picture was mixed. Even ignoring JPMorgan's whole London Whale debacle, earnings were held down by a lack of deals, weak trading volume and a stagnant housing market. What's more, loans, the main source of revenue for banks, either because financial firms didn't want to lend or because borrowers were still nervous about the economy, were not increasing. Throw in all the reforms, and that left some worrying banks could no longer grow.? A number of firms announced layoffs.

All those things appear to be changing. While Wall Street remains slow, deal making made a comeback in September. In fact, it's likely that equity underwriting, that is selling shares of stock for public companies like AIG, which did a big offering recently, had its strongest month of the year.

MORE: Does corporate lobbying benefit society?

Commercial and industrial lending appears to be growing much faster than usual - a good sign for the economy. And, at least for now, banks appear to be getting an added boost from Ben Bernanke and QE3. But the best news is that housing prices are rising again. That, along with lower mortgage rates, should translate into fewer foreclosures, which remain one of the biggest drags on bank profits.

Analysts expect operating earnings at Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C) will be up 16% and 20% from the prior three months. Earnings per share at Goldman Sachs (GS) could also be up 20% from the second quarter.

"Banks are not hurting," says Dick Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities. "They are making a shitload of money."

MORE: Still falling off a M&A cliff

Some question how long that will continue. The biggest wild card is the Federal Reserve's recently announced plans to buy mortgage bonds indefinitely. For now, that's been a bonanza. Mortgage bond rates, which is essentially what the banks have to pay to fund, these days from the government, home loans, have dropped much faster than actual mortgage rates, which is what consumers actually have to pay. That's opened up a huge spread between those two rates. It's nearly three times as large as usual, which essentially means banks are making nearly three times as much.

"Mortgage spreads are 80 basis points larger than there were just a few months ago," says Bove. "That's just pure profit."

Eventually, though, some worry that the Fed's relentless efforts to drive down interest rates, particularly if it lasts another year or so, will hurt the banks. Inflated mortgage rates are likely to be only temporary. More long-term is the fact that banks are going to be left with loans that are at substantially lower interest rates than the loans they made a few years ago.

MORE: How to survive a Wall Street meltdown

What's more, while Wall Street firms are technically still allowed to do proprietary trading, that is making risky bets with their own money, at least for another year or so, Brad Hintz, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, says it doesn't appear that many are. Instead, he said the firms are getting ready for a time when the regulations will likely significantly restrict what they can do with their money. That's held down trading profits. What's more, Hintz says the firms still aren't completely sure how much capital they need on hand to meet new requirements. That's made them gun shy with trading and lending as well.

"You are still going to hear plenty about expense controls," says Hintz. "It's not going to be a good story for those of us who rely on bonuses."

Source: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/28/bank-profits/

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Five ways to tax the 47 percent

Gleckman offers five suggestions for reducing the portion of Americans who do not pay federal income tax.

By Howard Gleckman,?Guest blogger / September 28, 2012

A 2011 1040 tax form along with other income tax forms are seen at the entrance of the Illinois Department of Revenue in Springfield, Ill., in this April 2012 file photo. Repealing the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit is one way Gleckman says the government can add more Americans to the tax rolls.

Seth Perlman/AP/File

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Let?s say you are truly offended that 47 percent of Americans?don?t pay income tax.?Just complaining won?t?fix the problem. All those freeloaders are still out there, dodging their responsibilities as red-blooded taxpaying Americans. So, let?s stop fooling around and do something about it.

Skip to next paragraph Howard Gleckman

Howard Gleckman is a resident fellow at The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the author of Caring for Our Parents, and former senior correspondent in the Washington bureau of Business Week. (http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org)

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Here is my modest proposal. Five solutions to make sure everyone pays his or her fair share:

?1. Repeal tax credits,?such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. These subsidies are the major reason?many low-income working families avoid the income tax. About one-third of those who don?t pay are families with kids. Because the credits go mostly to people who earn wages and phase out?slowly as income rises, they are a strong incentive to work.

This seems like a good idea. And it?s why refundable credits were once so popular with conservatives. In fact, they were the brainchild of iconic conservative economist Milton Friedman, who proposed a similar idea (called a negative income tax) 60 years ago.

Still, we could scrap the refundable credits and replace them with a direct cash payment to low-income working families. Of course, this would require a new bureaucracy to administer the program and force working people with kids to stand in a line somewhere to apply. Or, Congress could enact a big increase in the minimum wage. It won?t be easy, but we can make sure these freeloaders pay. Yet, there are still some people who would slip through our net.

2. Eliminate the standard deduction and personal exemption: This would capture another big chunk of non-payers. The only trouble is,?7 of every 10 households, or 107 million tax units, don?t itemize. Sadly for the anti-47 percent crowd, there are millions of people who take the standard deduction but still pay income taxes. For them, wiping it out would only raise their taxes. And it still leaves millions more of those?The?Wall Street Journal?once called ?lucky duckies? who don?t pay income tax.

3. Raise taxes on old people:?That brings us to the roughly one-quarter of those who don?t pay income taxes who are seniors. Those 65 and older get an extra standard deduction as well as a special tax credit. True, in 2009, one-third of those over 65 were living in or near poverty?and nearly 40 percent of elderly women were poor. And it is also true that, for many, their only source of income is their Social Security check, which is tax free for couples making $32,000 or less or singles making $25,000. If we start taxing the first dollar of these benefits, we can substantially reduce the number of these elderly deadbeats. Now, we just need to find a politician willing to sponsor such a plan. Bueller? Bueller??

4. Fix the economy.?Many pay no income tax because they, um, don?t make any money. And many have no income because they are unemployed, victims of what you may have noticed has been a tough economy. The Tax Policy Center estimates?that if the economy gets back on track, the percentage of those who don?t pay income tax would fall by about 10 percentage points. Thus, a bit more than one-third of households would fall into the deadbeat category, instead of nearly half.

5. Keep the No New Tax Pledge.?There is, however, a small problem with the first three ideas: They?d violate the anti-tax hike pledge signed by nearly all Republicans in Congress. How could we get around that? Easy as pie. Just cut taxes on high-income households to offset those tax hikes on the working poor. Just sayin.?

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/zAdwku1NDeg/Five-ways-to-tax-the-47-percent

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Obama flubs line on jobs, says he's 'channeling' Romney

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ACLU Asks Supreme Court to Invalidate Gene Patents ...

By Sam Favate

The American Civil Liberties Union, along with the Public Patent Foundation, again asked the Supreme Court to invalidate patents for two genes that are associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, saying the patents restrict scientific research and access to medical care.

A 2010 ruling from a New York?federal district court invalidated all of the challenged patents, which are held by Myriad Genetics Inc . and the University of Utah Research Foundation. In July 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said companies can obtain patents?on genes, but not the methods for comparing gene sequences.

Earlier this year, in March, the Supreme Court vacated the appeals court?s ruling and instructed that the case be reconsidered in light of its ruling in?Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, which invalidated patents on methods for evaluating a patient?s response to a drug.?In response,?the appeals court ruled last month that companies can obtain patents on the genes.

?In our view, the court of appeals did not fully consider or correctly apply the Supreme Court?s most recent and relevant patent law decisions,? said Chris Hansen, a staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. ?DNA occurs naturally in the human body and cannot be patented by a single company that can then use its patents to limit scientific research and the free exchange of ideas.?

The patents give Myriad the exclusive right to perform tests on the two genes in question. Women with some genetic mutations are believed to have up to an 85% chance of developing breast cancer and a 50% risk for ovarian cancer, according to Sandra Park of the ACLU Women?s Rights Project, in a blog posting. The patents essentially mean that laboratories around the country can?t provide genetic testing of those genes without permission of the patent holders.

The Supreme Court is likely to give Myriad a chance to respond before making a decision on whether to hear the case. Owners of patents have in the past said that research efforts could be hampered without legal protection for the work that went into discovering the genes, the Baltimore Sun noted.

?There?s a real crying need for clarification about patent law and intellectual property related to genomics,? Jeffrey Kahn, professor of bioethics and public policy at Johns Hopkins University, told the Sun.

A spokeswoman for Myriad wasn?t immediately available for comment.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Source: http://justasklegal.com/aclu-asks-supreme-court-to-invalidate-gene-patents/6734/

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