Here’s the always brilliant George Carlin detailing and poking fun at the way politicians use words and describe certain circumstances “in such a way.” Hopefully you’ll enjoy the video as well as on the oncoming weekend. Stay safe!

Best Regards,

The Daily Middle Team

“The Dow Jones is now up 70% from it’s low in March 2009. Oil is up 86% from it’s low in February 2009. Copper is up 172% from it’s low in December of 2008. Prices for almost all stocks and commodities have been going through the roof. Having analysts on Wall Street proclaiming the recession is over and economic recovery is here. But how can an economic recovery be here if U-6 unemployment is still at a multi-decade high of 16.9%? The truth is our economy is not recovering. Prices are only rising due to inflation. Our economy is currently experiencing a ‘Meltup.’ The Federal Reserve has held interest rates at 0% for 17 months. Our financial system has been flooded with trillions of dollars in newly printed money. Those with access to the Fed’s cheap money have done well in the past year.”

Each day, nearly 3 million American workers head to work at temporary jobs. They range from clerks to construction workers, attorneys to medical aides, engineers to accountants.

Once the realm of people who preferred part-time, flexible work schedules or newbies needing a foot in the door, agency-placed temporary jobs are a growing haven for laid-off professionals and those in skilled trades. And with companies cutting millions of full-time jobs this year, staffing industry experts say they’re fielding more and more applications from seasoned workers.

“Staffing firms have been flooded with candidates,” says Steve Berchem, vice president of the American Staffing Association, a staffing industry group based in Alexandria, Va. After a slump in 2008, hiring has stabilized this year, with professional and managerial posts making up about 50 percent of temporary jobs.

The weekly paycheck may not be as fat as at your previous job, but it definitely pays to work at temporary jobs. The average worker in the temporary sector earned $14.77 per hour in March, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Depending on your abilities and background, the rate can range from minimum wage for day laborers to more than $120 per hour for doctors and senior executives.

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Rumor has it that we tend to spend less in retirement, but it sure seems as though we come up to the buying intersection more frequently as we grow older. Worst of all, it’s as if the intersection gets wider with more traffic so our decision gets more complicated as we age too. Will buying that HDTV affect our savings goal? Do I have enough for my kids’ college if I change my car now? Luckily, for the most part, buying is rarely our only option. Here are 7 alternatives to buying.

1. Make It Instead
One of the great products of the information superhighway is the abundance of how-to guides and access to people with unique expertise. If you are willing to put in some effort, a vast majority of stuff can actually be made. Note: DIY isn’t always cheaper though. There are situations in which DIY is more expensive.

2. Fix What’s Broken
Repairing is really becoming a lost art. In our modern society, replacing is often a cheaper solution but fixing is not solely about cost. Fixing is sometimes about convenience and self sufficiency too. Just the other day, a fluorescent light fixture in my home stopped functioning. Despite my efforts, no electrician wanted to come replace it because the job was too small. I ended up taking it apart myself and changing out the ballast, which took all of 15 minutes to do. Could I have eventually found someone that I can pay enough to come by? Of course, but how long will that take?

3. Refurbish What You Already Own
Whether it’s giving your car a fresh coat of paint of refinishing your furniture, many of what you already have can be made fresh again. If you’ve never done this, you might be surprised at how simple updates can completely change the perception of whether something needs to be replaced or not. Note that quality of work matters a good deal. If you are going to repaint your car for instance, it’s crucial to find a reputable body shop that can do a good job. Going with the lowest cost is rarely a good idea, so think carefully before you decide!

4. Rent It or Borrow It
Renting often seems expensive, but you may end up spending less money since most people don’t use anything to its maximum lifespan. You won’t get the initial rush of buying something brand new, but chasing desires is a dangerous road my friend.

5. Barter or Swap for It
Actually, we already do this on a daily basis. We exchange our labor for pieces of paper we call cash in our jobs, then we exchange those pieces of paper into products. Bartering is just skipping the middle step, exchanging labor directly into what we want. Another great way to stretch your dollars is to arrange for a swap. Could your friend use a printer you no longer want who could give you that car seat his daughter grew out of? Caution if you agree to this arrangement: retailers don’t like this.

6. Maintain It Before It Breaks
Quite often, we need to replace something because we never took care of it in the first place. Do you regularly clean up the junk on your computer before it slows to a crawl? Do you service your vehicle regularly? Maintenance sometimes seem cumbersome and expensive, but replacing is often much more costly and time consuming.

7. Make Do Without It
Quite often, all that stuff we accumulate becomes just a big pile of junk. And worst, it’s hidden in the attic until we move, costing time and money. What’s the point? You know the drill. Just make do! [Want to save money on moving? Here are some tips.] Buying is at times necessary but it’s not always the only choice. Be creative and you might be able to save even more money than you do now!

Buying food in bulk can save you a lot of money — unless the food goes to waste. After all, how many families are going to eat five pounds of strawberries in one week?

To cut waste and take advantage of the deals at warehouse retailers, households across the country are starting informal food buying clubs. While the clubs aren’t super structured, they do require organizing, planning and a level of flexibility to make them a success.

Get the Word Out

To state the obvious, your food buying club won’t be much of a success without club members. The question is, how many?

In traditional food co-ops, the larger that number, the more money the group will save. But if you are simply looking at shopping in bulk at a warehouse retailer or local supermarket (rather than work with a local farmer as is the case with most food coops), having too many members may make things too complicated. Keeping the group at between five to ten families makes more sense, says Patricia Seaman, director of marketing at National Foundation for Financial Education.

“If it’s a really large group it will probably get unwieldy,” she says. “If you have five families you might buy two or three 60-roll packs of toilet paper, but with ten families you’ll buy six and you’re not realizing additional costs savings.” Seaman says it’s more logical to start out with a small group and then add more members where it makes sense.

Where do you find members? The obvious route is to ask family, friends and neighbors if they would be interested in pooling resources. Another option is to post flyers at your local church or use websites like Facebook, Craig’s List and Meetup to get the word out, says Kate Forgach, content editor at Coupon Sherpa, who started a food buying club years ago.

Once you’ve recruited the number of members you need, have the first meeting within two weeks, says Forgach. Otherwise, you risk that interest will wane.

Compare Shopping Lists

Once you have your members, it’s time to sit down and compare shopping lists. Since everyone has their preferred brands and items, you’ll have to figure out where there are discrepancies — or duplication. Everyone drinks milk, for example, but you can’t assume everyone drinks whole milk or 1% milk. The same goes with brands. Some people in the group may only use Bounty paper towels.

Equally important is knowing how much the items on your list typically sell for, so you can quickly identify sales. “A good idea is to assign everybody to track the costs of these products in other locations,” says Seaman.

Be sure to compare items’ cost at the warehouse club and the cost when they go on sale at the local supermarket or grocery store. Don’t assume that shopping at a warehouse club means automatic savings: in some cases, you may be able to get a better deal if you couple coupons with a sale at the supermarket. “The whole idea is trying to get the best value for you dollars and there are more ways to do that than just going to one location,” says Seaman.

Delegate Club Duties

A key to a successful buying club is appointing the right “chief executive officer.” The person heading it up should have good management skills and the ability to delegate, says Forgach. Often, the person starting the club ends up doing all the work, which is unfair and can leave other members feeling left out. Instead, the food club’s CEO will help assign tasks to the rest of the members, including shopping, delivery and distribution of the food, as well as clean up.

Since buying clubs are by nature small, the shopping can fall on one or two people that have big enough vehicles to bring the food back from the store.

One exception: it may make sense for everyone to tag along on the first shopping trip. That way, brand decisions can be made on the spot and the group can learn the prices for certain items. “Bulk buying tends to be a repetitive activity. Once the group knows what the common brands are and what the typical price is, the shopping can go down to one or two people,” says Seaman.

Once the food is purchased, the group will have to decide where it will be stored, when it will be split up and how it will be delivered. If there are perishable items like fruit or meat, the group may decide pick up has to be right after the shopping spree. If its non perishable items like toilet paper or toothpaste, there may be more leeway as to when you can get your share. If you’re buying food that can go bad like fruits and vegetates, Forgach says it may be worth it to hit the store once a week. If its things that can be frozen like meat, the buying group may only have to shop once a month.

The group will also have to figure out how many containers, tin foil or saran wrap and other items they will need to split up the food. Not to mention who will handle the money and take the orders. Being flexible will add to the success of the club. If the group starts out with rigid rules it will be hard to change something that it isn’t working.

Make It Fun

Food shopping is a chore for most people, even if it’s in a group setting. Keeping it interesting could ensure the food club isn’t a flash in the pan.
Sharing recipes, having pot lucks or showing each other how to use the food are ways to spice it up. “If it’s a little more social than just a business operation, people are less likely to dump work on one another,” Forgach says .

Vice President Joe Biden has declared that the heavy lifting is over for the year, and it’s time to begin campaigning and talking about the White House’s accomplishments. The heavy lifting might be over, but it sounds like the heavy shoveling is just beginning.

“The artificial life support is low interest rates. If the Fed pulls the plug, this phony economy is going to die. Now, it needs to die unfortunately because we need to replace it with a viable economy, not the phony one that is living off the low interest rates. But that’s reality. Just look at the housing market; I’ve been watching a lot of analysts talk about the fact that, ‘we need to help refinance, we need to get homeowners to take advantage of these low interest rates to refinance their mortgages.’ Everybody focuses on the borrowers side of this exchange. Yes, the borrower gets to refinance, he gets to save money. But there are two sides to this equation. There’s the borrower and there’s the lender…”

From running your dog at a city dog park and parking your car, to visiting the local community center, the use of government services can be like feeding a vending machine as residents find themselves nickel and dimed for services that once cost little or nothing. Here are 10 places where you will now have to pay up. Call it a symptom of the Great Recession, as governments struggle to reconcile budget shortfalls in creative if unpopular ways.

1. Public Parks
Be sure to have cash in hand when heading out for a Sunday picnic. Starting Aug. 1 in Phoenix, Ariz., city mountain parks and reserves will charge $5 per day or $75 a year to park a car. The city’s parks board had considered a $10 daily parking fee, but compromised.

2. Property and Tax information
If you’re cruising the Information Highway, the city of East Lansing, Mich., charges a $2 fee to access property and tax information online. Property owners will still be able to get their property records and tax data for free online, but a detailed search of their property or search of other properties will cost $2.

3. Loo Tax
In Newark, N.J., city workers will soon have to start bringing their own toilet paper to work because the city isn’t buying it anymore.

4. Parking on other people’s lawns
Gainesville, Fla. now requires a $52 business tax to homeowners who allow University of Florida football fans to park on their lawns on game days. It’s a unique (and some would say insidious) tax on a once-free service that isn’t provided by the government, said Ed Braddy, a member of the Gainesville City Commission from 2002-08. The city manager dusted off an ordinance that wasn’t enforced as a way to make $10,000 to $25,000 in city taxes, Braddy told WalletPop in a telephone interview. The city manager told the Gainesville Sun that he was enforcing the ordinance after getting complaints about off-street parking. Either way, Braddy says its taking money out of the hands of people who count on the tailgaters, and cuts down on parking lots.

“It’s a time-honored tradition — people drive in,” he said. “Where are we going to tailgate?”

5. Community Center parties
“If you’re going to use it, you’re going to pay to use it,” says Dave Hatter, a city council member in Fort Wright, Ken., since 1998, where they recently eliminated free use of a community center for parties. They now charge $100 per rental. The price was set with an expected 10-20% dropoff in usage due to the fee. But Hatter says he hasn’t heard any complaints about the new policy.

Fort Wright has stable finances and a $7 million annual budget for its 6,000 residents, but the recession has caused it to look at other areas to charge users.

6. Parking at Parks
Hamilton County in Cincinnati requires a motor vehicle permit of $2 daily or $5 a year to park at its parks, and a parking fee at Fort Wright’s parks is being discussed, Hatter said.

After this year the city will stop subsidizing a Civil War museum at one of its parks, telling the museum board that it will have to figure out how to come up with the money to keep the museum open, he said.

One problem with instituting more fees is that they can require police or other officials to enforce, said Fort Wright’s Hatter, whose city has 20 employees, most of them police officers. It’s not feasible, for example, to have police enforce parking fees at a city park.

7. Privatizing for Profit
In late December 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley ramrodded through City Council a controversial lease of the city’s parking meters to a LAZ Parking, a company run by Morgan Stanley, for $1.15 billion. Following the sale, rates more than quadrupled, free Sunday parking vanished, and enforcement of meter violations skyrocketed.

Today, less than 20% of that money is left, according to a Chicago Sun-Times story. The funds were supposed to last 75 years. Nor did it help Daley’s popularity when news reports after the deal revealed that his nephew, William Daley Jr., is a Morgan Stanley executive — or that the city, by rushing the deal through, potentially lost out on at least another $1 billion.

8. Didn’t this used to be called bribery?
In Gainesville, Fla., where creativity seems to be common in adding fees to city services, paying an extra fee can get a building permit expedited, said Tony Domenech, a city commissioner for three years up until 2005. “I was stunned to find that out,” Domenech said.

9. Pay for Poop
In Montgomery County, Md., park police will enforce new rules that turn a once-free dog park into a fee zone. Residents there will pay a $40 annual fee to use the county’s dog parks, plus $45 for each additional dog. Dog owners caught not paying face a $50 fine.

Permit holders will be given colored tags to put on their dogs while in the dog parks so park police can easily see which dogs are legally there.

10. No insurance? Extra fee
Some individual fees are masked to cover people who use the service but don’t pay. Tom, a resident of Norwich, N.Y., who didn’t want his full name used, said his local hospital charged him $90 for an uninsured service fee after he got blood work done there. The hospital incorrectly assumed he was uninsured and told him that the medically uninsured pay the fee to help pay for other uninsured people. The people who can afford insurance the least have to pay more to help others like them. His fee was dropped when the hospital obtained his correct insurance information.

So where does the money go?
Turning a trip to a city park or public beach into a trip to a vending machine leaves residents wondering where their tax money goes, said Karen Kraut, director of the Tax Fairness Organizing Collaborative, a network of state level advocacy groups at United for a Fair Economy. It turns citizens into consumers, and creates resentment to use a public service where everything is a commodity, Kraut said in a telephone interview with WalletPop.

“In general nickel and diming is less courageous than raising taxes” such as the income tax, she said. The federal government should help states financially, and state legislators should be brave enough to pass progressive tax reform where the highest earners pay more, she said. Paying a $5 fee to go to a park hurts a lot less for a millionaire than it does the average person, Kraut said.

“It’s a cheap out by politicians who can’t support a broad-based tax increase,” she said. “It’s really a disincentive.”

And don’t expect any of these fees to go away when things get better. Just as any parent who gives their child an allowance knows, once you give them the money, it’s difficult to take an allowance away. Illinois Tollway users know this first hand; when the roads were built decades ago, politicians promised to turn them into freeways once they were paid for. It never happened–though the tollway employs lots of high-priced attorneys and staff today as a patronage haven.

So take it to the bank, if you will: Even when the economy improves, the new fees for city services are unlikely to go away, said Hatter, the Kentucky councilman.

“At this point,” he declared, “I would never go back on this.”

Aaron Crowe is a freelance journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

By: John Browne

At long last, a good portion of mainstream economists now concede that a ‘double dip’ recession is in the cards for the United States. To head off the pain, sixteen top economists addressed an open letter to the President urging him to “stimulate” the economy with a massive new round of government spending. We feel this is a recipe for driving a recession into a depression. However, there can be few doubts that such a move is being considered in the highest policy circles. Flush from victories in financial regulation and healthcare, the Administration may feel the conditions are ripe to push through another bold initiative.

If so, the United States may find itself in a very diminishing bloc of nations who fail to appreciate the magnitude of the global debt crisis. Its policies will become increasingly at odds with the drift of other world powers. Given American dependence on economic support from abroad, the risks of such isolation are significant.

On July 20th, UK Prime Minister David Cameron made his first official visit to the US. At a joint press conference that followed the private meeting, President Obama and Mr. Cameron papered over the fundamental economic disagreements that separate both governments.

At his core, Mr. Obama is in favor of spending his way out of the current recession. Most of the post-World War II occupants of the White House have followed the same course. Although the policy is short-sighted, it serves nevertheless to protect the competitive advantage of keeping the US dollar at the heart of the international monetary system. Spending expands global credit and creates the illusion of an invincible dollar, increasing the system’s popularity at home and abroad. In a self-perpetuating feedback mechanism, the dollar’s unique international position allows it to get away with even more spending.

Many international economists, bankers, and politicians now believe the US has overplayed its hand. At the recent G-20 meetings, America was at odds with the other major powers, who favored major cuts in government spending even if the result was a deeper short-term recession.

Part of this can be explained by currency movements. The Greek debt crisis threw doubt on even financially sound nations like Germany and ravaged the European common currency. Wishing to save the euro from the dustbin of history, the Germans and their allies within the EU have dug in. The sentiment even had an effect on the UK elections, which put the Conservatives into power with a mandate to strengthen the government’s balance sheet and buck up the pound sterling.

On the other hand, Washington’s profligacy has yet done little to dent confidence in the greenback. As a result, the Obama Administration senses no need for caution. This hubris will prove costly.

On paper, the United States appears to be the world’s richest economy. However, she is also the largest debtor. If unfunded obligations are added to the $14.1 trillion official Treasury debt, the total would exceed $60 trillion, or 430% of 2009 GDP. If deficits and the disguised costs of Obamacare are included, the bill gets even larger. Despite this, the US government retains its treasured ‘AAA’ credit rating, at least in the eyes of disgraced Western ratings agencies. Meanwhile, according to the seemingly less-biased Dagong International Credit Rating (DICR) agency of China, the US has been downgraded to ‘AA-’. Given its debt levels, even that rating may be overly generous.

According to the DICR, only Australia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, New Zealand, and Switzerland retain their prized ‘AAA’ rating. Canada, China, Germany, and the Netherlands have been downgraded to ‘AA+’. France, Japan, South Korea, and the UK join the US at the disturbing ‘AA-’ level. However, if Prime Minister Cameron delivers on his promised 25 per cent cut in government spending by 2015, the UK may regain a higher rating.

On the other hand, President Obama has bragged that Americans should “make no mistake, we are headed in the right direction.” More disturbingly, his Administration has put forward the absurd notion that government spending achieves a 3:1 multiplier versus private spending (meaning every dollar of government spending will “pay for itself” by generating three dollars of private economic activity). Sensible economists suspect that the reverse is true: every dollar of government spending sucks between one and three dollars from the wealth-creating private sector.

It appears that America is now set on the sanguine ‘progressive’ path of stimulus and inflation. Our rejection of the other great powers’ newfound maturity will push our recession into a depression, reduce our credit rating, and raise our already vast borrowing costs. Meanwhile, the rest of the world may not even notice we’ve fallen. Cool heads should plan accordingly.

By: Dan Weil

Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson has an explanation for why unemployment remains stubbornly high at 9.5 percent. It’s the threat of tax increases as the Bush tax cuts end this year.

“Why is it that small- and medium-sized businesses in the United States today are not hiring? Why is it that they’re not expanding?” he said on CNN.

“It’s because they see the tax hikes coming that are implied by this fiscal policy.”

The United States is running a budget deficit estimated by the White House at $1.47 trillion for this year. And the government debt burden totals around 10 percent of GDP.

The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are set to expire Dec. 31. And some experts say the scheduled hikes will severely hurt small businessmen.

“The key issue here is can you get back to fiscal equilibrium in the same way that encourages business confidence, encourages the private sector?” Ferguson said.

“Or are you going to do it in a crazy way, like the Greeks currently are, by punishing business with higher taxation?”

Ferguson thinks the United States should refrain from slashing spending or raising taxes now, while the economic recovery is tenuous. But we need a workable plan for long-term fiscal stability, which the White House hasn’t provided, he said.

Centrist Democrats are coming around to Ferguson’s view.