Word: bill
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...filling an otherwise empty room is virtually nothing. Plus, it brings in customers who may return to the hotel in the future - and spend cash. Hill, who trades roughly $100,000 a year through the service, uses his credit to pay the hotel's $650-a-month flower bill, and recently refurnished eight of the hotel's rooms without spending a penny. He's also purchased jewelry through barter and then resold it to hotel guests for a profit. The system works for personal use, too. Hill's wife has spent the hotel's barter credits on cosmetic dental work...
Most of the new sources are letters and journals written by soldiers, and they yield hundreds of shockingly vivid vignettes from the beaches and trenches. You won't soon forget the account of Bill Millin, bagpiper for the 1st Special Service Brigade of the British Army, who had to march out of the surf onto Sword Beach under rifle and mortar fire playing "Highland Laddie." And Beevor focuses on things other writers have neglected. For example, he doesn't gloss over the hideous costs paid by French civilians. The Allies, before liberating them, bombed them relentlessly in an attempt...
Here's the play-by-play from a few days in mid-October. House Republicans wrote (and released to the public) a letter to the President in which they claimed that with the unemployment rate at 9.8%, "it is now evident that the massive 'stimulus' spending bill enacted months ago has been unsuccessful." Obama economic adviser Larry Summers stepped up to play defense. "Thanks largely to the Recovery Act ...," he wrote, "we have walked a substantial distance back from the economic abyss and are on the path toward economic recovery." (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis...
...political back-and-forth on the stimulus bill is the ultimate in bunk, though, because it ignores most of the fiscal stimulus provided by Washington so far. Anytime the Federal Government spends more than it takes in, it creates fiscal stimulus. That stimulus (deficit) was $1.4 trillion for the just-ended fiscal year, up about $1 trillion from the year before. The stimulus bill accounted for just $200 billion of that increase, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Bailing out banks and other financial firms cost $245 billion. A $419 billion drop in tax receipts (due mainly to recession...
...that standard, we're doing O.K. But Bernstein and Christina Romer, the chairwoman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, made the mistake of providing a more optimistic baseline last January - a forecast in which unemployment peaked at 9% without the stimulus bill and stayed below 8% with it. (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House...