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With the national unemployment rate nearing 7 percent—a figure not seen in the U.S. since 1993—several states have seen their unemployment insurance trust funds shrink to dangerously low levels, with some states already taking out federal loans to pay unemployment benefits. But Massachusetts’ unemployment benefit system remains “strong and solvent” for the foreseeable future, bolstered by over $1 billion in trust fund reserves, according to Robb Smith, director of Policy and Planning for the Mass. Labor and Workforce Development Office. From January through November 2008, the state...
...community forum in Des Moines on Jan. 2, several activists warned that the ranks of middle-class Iowans were shrinking while the number of poor was rising. Iowa?s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in November was 4.3%, compared with 3.8% a year earlier, according to the latest report from Iowa Workforce Development. (By comparison, the U.S. jobless rate was 6.7% in November.) Close to 800 families sought help from a Des Moines emergency food pantry in October, up from 600 to 650 families the same month a year earlier. Sales of Iowa's existing homes for the third quarter fell...
...high prices have prompted some reserves to reject Texas-bred deer. And so deer are smuggled in from northern states like Minnesota, where the stock is bigger and smugglers offer cut-rate prices. This way, smugglers skirt Texas laws that have closed the borders to non-Texas-bred deer. It's not chauvinism at work. There is a danger that smuggled deer can carry diseases like chronic wasting disease - which is similar to mad cow disease - and bovine tuberculosis. The wasting disease has been reported in deer, moose and elk in 11 states and two Canadian provinces. Wisconsin has spent...
...carmaker also plans to suspend production at all 12 of its Japanese factories for 11 days in February because consumers worldwide aren't buying. Masafumi Yamamoto, head of foreign-exchange strategy for Japan at Royal Bank of Scotland, says a 10% appreciation of the yen slashes the GDP growth rate by 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points...
...have made quite as much progress as many hoped. In a time of war, financial crisis, rising health care costs and volatile gas prices, its success in passing actual pieces of legislation has been below average: it enacted only about 3% of legislation introduced into law (the average rate for the past 35 years is about 4.5%). Still, as the 111th convenes on Jan. 6, at least the outgoing class can claim to have excelled at one great congressional tradition: approving a lengthy list of inconsequential, not very discriminating and occasionally downright peculiar Congressional resolutions. In all, the 110th Congress...