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There are many personal-finance software packages that help people track their money, including the industry mastodon, Intuit's Quicken, which dwarfs Mint with 15 million users. But consumers have taken a liking to online money management, mostly because it's free. Microsoft stopped developing its Money program in June, and Intuit started offering Quicken Online for free in October 2008. Banks, too, have started to offer a similar service to their customers, but somehow, having an outside party monitor your bank seems like a better idea. Mint makes some money - it's unclear how much - by recommending credit cards...
...cost was a bailout that placed trillions of taxpayer dollars at risk. It was expensive, it was messy, it was unfair. It struck many people as downright un-American. But it worked. "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," is how President George W. Bush described it last December...
Patzer, along with his key engineers Matt Snider and Poornima Vijayashanker, built Mint using open-source technology, meaning it was pretty much free. They bartered legal advice for a little bit of ownership in the company. After Patzer's apartment got too small, the company moved into shared office space, renting cube by cube. They had a blog and e-mail campaign instead of advertising - and Patzer did a lot of press. For a young guy, he's very mediagenic: "Observe the world around you - everything you do, and especially everything you hate to do - solve a real problem...
...systems developed to aid the needy and unload surplus wheat and other products bought by the government to support farm prices. Food stamps originally came in two colors: recipients bought orange stamps, which could be used for any kind of food, and they were given half that amount in free blue stamps, which could be used to buy designated surplus foods (all but the most destitute had to make some payment to receive food stamps until 1977). About 20 million people made use of the original food-stamp program, but its popularity dwindled as prosperity returned, and the program...
...major change to the program came in 1977, when Congress stopped requiring payment for food stamps and distributed them to all recipients for free (the price had steadily decreased over time, until it represented just a fraction of the face value). The move dismayed a number of observers, who had supported the program as a means to help the poor help themselves, not as a direct government handout (the Agriculture Department had insisted on selling food stamps for fear of undermining the dignity of recipients). The policy created a backlash - some middle-class shoppers indignantly complained that food-stamp users...