Word: california
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...California is the poster child for dysfunctional state finance. A week past the legal deadline for passing a budget, the state has yet to close a $26 billion hole. State workers are - yet again - being told to stay home. The National Park Service is threatening to take back parks it gave to California should the state try to save money by closing them. Taxpayers are getting IOUs in the mail instead of refund checks since there's no cash to pay them what they're owed. You can now buy the IOUs on eBay...
...California's crazy budget laws make it an extreme case, but that doesn't mean it's alone in financial duress - there are plenty of other states in serious hot water. (See how Americans are spending...
...costs that, much as society may value them, eventually weigh on states' financial health. In New York, unfunded state pension liabilities average $2,633 per person. Massachusetts' tab is even larger, at $3,372 per capita, although that's nothing compared to New Jersey's $9,833. By comparison, California seems in something of a sweet spot, at $1,325. Still, that's hefty compared to Florida...
...have passed budgets for this year," says John Miller, chief investment officer of Nuveen Asset Management, which runs, among other things, municipal-bond funds. "Those are areas where obligations are probably growing faster than their revenues." That spend-now-pay-later attitude eventually catches up with a state. Ask California. (Read "Can the U.S. Afford to Let California Fail...
...happiness-boosting exercises, for example: keeping a gratitude journal, jotting down three good things or "blessings" that occur each day, making a practice of doing "acts of kindness" for others, writing a letter of gratitude to a mentor. But more recent research, particularly by Sonja Lyubomirsky at University of California, Riverside, indicates that some of these exercises can lose their power with too much repetition: "They become stale and stagnant," says Lyubomirsky...