Word: worthing
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...rhetoric of demonstrations in Tehran is worth listening to. Seven years after Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, power is consolidated in the hands of hard-line anti-American conservatives, led by Ahmadinejad and supported by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Together they have used the Bush Administration's opposition as an opportunity to crack down on reformists. Ahmadinejad initially greeted Obama's victory with a rare congratulatory letter, though his ardor then seemed to cool as he called on the U.S. to "halt your support to the uncultivated and rootless, forged, phony, killers-of-women-and-children Zionists...
...designed for coastal warfare. Today's weapons can be radically improved with new electronics, engines and other components without having to build whole new ships, planes or tanks. The F-16's builder says the latest version of that warplane rolling off Lockheed Martin's assembly line in Fort Worth, Texas, yields "the most advanced multirole fighter available today." In fact, the hottest F-16 now in the skies is flown not by the U.S. Air Force but by the oil-rich United Arab Emirates...
Ideas aimed at kick-starting this process include giving everyone who buys a house a tax credit worth 10% of the purchase price and driving down mortgage rates--perhaps to as low as 4%. They're an effort to push fence sitters off their perch and give a head start to folks who are finding that tighter lending standards mean they can't borrow as much as they might once have...
Such programs are great news for real estate agents and builders. But it's not clear how much these ideas would help housing overall. Nearly one-fifth of all borrowers owe more than their house is worth. They couldn't sell their home and pay off their loan even if they wanted to, and that's not a problem that goes away by simply slowing the pace of the fall...
Michael Kinsley hypothesizes that the typical American family will be handing down Social Security entitlements to their children as an inheritance [Feb. 9]. Using the same Federal Reserve data Kinsley cites, the median net worth of couples ages 65 to 74 in 2004 was $190,000, including housing assets. By definition of the term median, this value is far more representative of the typical American family than the average net worth of $691,000 he quotes--which is skewed higher by the wealthiest 10% of families. That recalculation, combined with the large decline in net worth for most Americans...