Word: happeners
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...more expensive? Won't the demise of Wal-Mart kick out of the middle class those who are now clinging to its bottom rung? Only if you define middle class as being able to buy a ton of peripheral stuff for next to nothing. What I think will happen is we'll see the ancillary kinds of junk - like throwaway furniture and gobs of plastic kitchen gadgets - fade out of our lives. The middle class will still have access to what truly makes life good: a comfortable home (but not a huge home), good education, flowing information on the Internet...
...nothing evil about wanting a big house. I think we all harbor that kind of instinct. But it's a desire that will be indulged by fewer of us in the future. The deterioration of the exurbs will be a gradual process - one that takes decades - but it will happen. Housing values in these places will decline and it will certainly affect people. But it won't be any different than, say, the kinds of erasures of equity we saw over decades in places such as Detroit. The difference this time, of course, being that the Detroits of the world...
...look at the paper Romer and Bernstein wrote back in January shows that at least for now, the stimulus plan is at best off to a slow start. The two economists did say in the report that they expect the bulk of the jobs created by the stimulus to happen in 2010 and 2011. Nonetheless, the report says that even by the middle of this year, the stimulus bill would have a positive effect on the unemployment rate. Without the stimulus, the two economists predicted, the unemployment rate would rise to around 8.5% by the middle of this year...
...peace with Israel. "Even the moderates among them do not really want a settlement," Arad said. "At most, they are striving toward a settlement in order to renew the confrontation from a better position." As a result of U.S. pressure, a Palestinian state of "stamps, parades, carnival [...] That could happen," Arad said. "A fragile structure, yes; an arrangement resting wholly on wobbly foundations...
...aggressively marketing his background. In Africa, he spoke about the colonialist mistreatment his Kenyan grandfather faced, and in Cairo he talked about his childhood in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation. He presents himself internationally as he does domestically, as an embodiment of meritocratic achievement that can happen in free and open societies. "I have the blood of Africa within me," he said in Ghana. "And my family's own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story." His message was hard to miss...