A recent story on CNN Money mentioned that states could face a $12 billion shortfall if Congress doesn’t pass a bill to help them out. Four states in particular will see shortfalls in money of more than $1 billion each.

While this is a scary figure, especially with the way the economy is working, it seems no one has attempted to explain why there’s such problems with Medicaid. I’m going to answer that question for you, or at least give you an idea of what states are up against, and I’m going to base it on New York, the state where I live.

First off, the problem certainly isn’t how medical entities are paid. To use the easiest term most people will understand, Medicaid pays on a fee schedule. This means they pay a certain amount for procedures and services. That’s pretty much how most insurance companies pay claims, just so you know. In Medicaid’s case, many payment amounts haven’t changed in more than 30 years. However, if you’re a hospital in New York, you must accept both Medicare and Medicaid patients, so hospitals end up losing a lot of money because of Medicaid.

About 15 years ago or more the state added a new feature where they threw in co-pay amounts that patients “had” to pay. That money was taken from the payments medical facilities received, since now they were supposed to get it from the patients. However, that came with a caveat; if a patient told you they couldn’t pay, you had to write it off and you couldn’t bill the patient for the balance. And you were supposed to ask them while they were in the hospital, or any other medical facility. The co-pay amount for the most part is only $3, but multiply that times a couple of million people who probably go for services more than once a year and it all adds up. Anyway, this part is just to show that states aren’t losing money because they’re paying out too much to hospitals or physicians.

What’s the problem then? The problem is in administering the program. It’s unwieldy and unmanageable, both because of the way the state runs it and because of the people who are on Medicaid, though for the second, probably not for the reasons you might expect.

In New York, every county has its own Medicaid program. The way Medicare is run is that the federal government contracts with different companies throughout the country to administer the program in certain states. Medicare is considered a federal program, whereas Medicaid is considered a state program. So, every county has to have people to staff those offices. And sometimes, there are multiple offices handling different aspects of each program. So, there’s a lot of duplication of bodies, which means money gets eaten up fairly quickly.

What the state has allowed are Medicaid HMOs, which seems like a good idea except for a problem I’m going to mention now, and a problem I’ll mention later. The “now” issue is that those insurance companies running Medicaid HMOs must have at least one competing insurance company in the state. Otherwise, subscribers don’t have to select a HMO at all, which almost renders them useless in some counties. The reason there aren’t many HMOs is because the money they’re given to try to handle claims is pretty low, and the best a HMO can hope for is that there’s a significant number of people they’re paid for that decide not to use any services. That doesn’t happen often, however.

Medicaid also funds programs through the Department of Social Services whenever they see a need for something extra special. For instance, in Wayne County, there’s a special program for migrant workers that travel into the area to help pick crops, yet don’t speak English. In Westchester County, there are special programs that pay for specific types of things such as psych services or chemotherapy, especially if you’re an undocumented worker. Payments still aren’t great, but it all takes a drain on the money available.

Now, let’s talk briefly about the subscribers. Something not generally known is that probably half of Medicaid subscribers are fairly transient; they move around all the time for whatever reason. And they don’t tell the DSS that they’ve moved, which is problematic in the first place, and then gets worse when they move to another county, because there’s no true state system where someone can just go in and update one system and have everything working great. Subscribers are told they need to go to the local office and do it all over again; that’s an ugly way to do things.

Subscribers are encouraged to sign up for Medicaid HMOs in those counties that have multiples, but they’re also told that they can drop it at any time and sign up with another one. That’s an ugly process as well, as it takes a lot of manpower hours switching people all the time. And when it comes to authorizing services, it can get uglier still.

There’s more detail I could get into, but I’ll stop here. This should be enough information to have a basic understanding of why Medicaid programs might be in trouble. What could states do? I’ll offer only this one bit of advice; standardize the process and have fewer outside offices, which will reduce the number of people needed to do everything, and potentially reduce the amount of paperwork. States have to be willing to move Medicaid services into the 21st century.

Last December I wrote on Intel being sued by the Federal Trade Commission based on the sweetheart deal Dell was getting for using their chips in Dell computers. The suit against Intel is about to commence, but it seems Dell did a proactive move and decided to settle with the Securities and Exchange Commission to the tune of $100 million in fines. The reason for this is because they reported all that extra money coming from Intel as revenue, which of course helped improve their bottom line for investors, and that’s a major no-no. How any of this affects Intel long term no one can say, but this is the kind of corporate ugliness that makes us not trust large companies.

In April, I wrote about black farmers finally getting a deal with the government to pay them for long standing abuses that pretty much wrecked their lives. The last remaining piece of legislation was to pass the bill to pay for it. In May, I wrote a follow up to that, saying that they still hadn’t been paid, and that if Congress didn’t get a move on that the deal would expire and open the government back up to multiple individual lawsuits.

It seems that the government missed another opportunity to provide funding for this lawsuit when the house passed a war supplemental bill last week. The provision was in there, but it was scrapped to get the bill passed. I hate calling anyone out, but it seems one party in particular, in the Senate, is really against paying any money to black farmers; they sometimes go by the moniker “party of no”. The Senate minority leader is saying all the right things, yet it remains locked up and the bill will probably die without ever being voted on. I thank Tim for bringing me up to speed on the issue, since it didn’t make the headlines.

Many states are trying to work their way out of what’s been deemed a housing industry crisis. To say that things have been bad across the country would be an understatement. In 2009, the top housing markets were those that weren’t in a freefall, including my home area of Syracuse, which was flat yet considered as the 2nd best in the country.

Whether or not you believe unemployment has improved (it hasn’t), things have definitely stabilized in a fashion. And in some states there are plenty of houses that are available for purchase. And yet, not including places like Chicago, which has rebounded fairly well, those homes aren’t being purchased, and home ownership isn’t growing, or at least not growing enough to overcome the bad times.

What’s the problem? In my opinion, it’s all in the hands of the banking industry. True, I blame the banking industry for causing the problem in the first place, and now I’m blaming them for keeping it down. There are many reasons I’m blaming them; let’s take a look.

1. Not giving up the loans. I understand that banks have had a hard go of it, but many of them have gone too far in the other direction and are looking to loan people money who don’t really need it. When rich people with credit scores over 800 can’t get home loans, you know that banks have become skittish on who they want to loan money to.

2. Bank closings. So far, 102 banks have been closed in 2010; this is about 45 more banks than were closed at this point last year. Many more banks are projected to be closed this year. Many of the banks that have been closed are in states that are still having major problems with housing. As other banks are taking over, they’re being a lot more judgmental in who they’re going to give loans to.

3. Banks holding on to foreclosed homes. In some states that have had high foreclosure rates, banks are artificially trying to keep home prices up by keeping some homes off the market. Picking and choosing which homes they want to put on the market means there are many homes that someone might want that they can’t buy. Florida has many homes at low prices, and many of those homes are starting to be snapped up. It’s better for everyone if they can buy whatever home they want, even if the prices are lower, because it helps stimulate the entire industry. Banks, let up on the foreclosed properties.

4. Not processing loans quicker. The reason the federal government had to extend the time for people to finish qualifying for loan modifications is because banks could care less whether people qualify for it or not. They got called out for not processing more of these loans in a timely matter, but the truth is that it didn’t work in their favor, or at least they didn’t perceive that it did, so they didn’t have any reason to try.

That’s enough for the moment. To be somewhat fair, banks do have to change up their criteria a little bit. Some people who purchased homes before weren’t really qualified to buy those homes at the prices they got them for. Low interest rates don’t protect banks from people with risky credit, and that’s understood as well. However, as long as banks in areas with depressed housing markets won’t work with brokers and consumers to try to get them into homes, those markets will continue to suffer, which means the entire country will suffer along with them.

There was an interesting news story on CNN last week. Actually, it wasn’t quite news, more of a feature. It was called Confessions of Former Debt Collectors, and at least half of them stated that they knew that they were breaking the law with some of their collection practices. Yet they knew that they had to break those laws to keep up with the quotas set by the company’s they worked for to not only keep their jobs, but to earn monthly bonuses.

I had two takes on the story. One was “duh”, because I know how collection agencies work. I used to hire collection agencies for some of the hospitals I worked for in the past, and all of them would say that they would follow all the rules and never put the hospital in a bad light. Then we would have someone calling the CEO complaining about something someone said to them on the phone, and of course the CEO would call me and I’d have to figure out a way to deal with it.

Over the years, here and there I’ve had to deal with a collection call as well. Lucky for me, I know the rules of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and would always make sure they knew I knew the rules up front so that they wouldn’t dare try any of that stuff on me. Of course, it also helps to ask them to hold, wait for about a minute, then tell them that you’re recording the conversation you’re having with them, whether you are or not. One, it’s a great tactic, and two, in some states if you were recording someone you have to tell them that (who remembers Linda Tripp?).

The other side of some of what these people had to say are the threats that they ended up getting from people who said they’d track them down and kill them. While I don’t ever condone that type of thing, it seems like these people wanted to violate what I call the rule of consequence; don’t do it if you’re not ready to deal with the consequences of your action.

Here’s the thing. Collection agencies are needed to help companies recover money from debtors who have refused to pay. However, most companies will write off that debt and collect insurance on it, so don’t feel totally sorry for them. Not only that, but they then sell the debt to someone else, which means they’re not getting any more money from it. Now, you can be sued, and it’s always best to try to set up some kind of payment arrangement because it looks better on your credit report. But no one has the right to be intimidated, lied to, or threatened to collect money that the original owner has already written off the books.

If you’re ever threatened, call your state’s attorney general and complain. You might even end up getting money from the collection agencies, but better yet, you help change the culture of the industry and force them to follow the rules set by the federal government… just like everyone else.

I haven’t kept up on this blog recently because I’ve been working on a live workshop I’m doing on July 22nd and August 19th. It will contain around 5 hours of material on social media marketing, and that takes a lot of time to put together and rehearse. If you’d like more information about it and live in the central New York area, check out this link. That guy to the right is me.

The reality in today’s world is that social media has made it important to be doing something online. Standard business practices such as putting a business in a brick and mortar location and waiting for people to come just isn’t going to continue getting it done unless your name is Starbucks. Small businesses that are thriving have learned that hooking into social media in some fashion is helping them to grow in ways they couldn’t have imagined even 5 years ago.

Don’t believe me? Think of it this way. Blogs have been around for a long time and they help get one’s message out. Facebook has been around about 4 years now for the masses, and it’s worth between $3 and $5 billion at least. They generate all sorts of cash from advertisers who want to reach people they believe are interested in what they have to sell. Facebook facilitates that by dipping into people’s profiles, breaking privacy or not, and using that information to help advertisers reach their core audience.

There’s a company called Four Square which allows people to say where they are at a given moment to let their friends, and pretty much everyone else, know where to hook up with them. Some small businesses will give patrons discounts for helping to spread the word about them, which works wonders with the younger set, and these businesses find that they don’t have to buy print advertising to get the word out because social media is doing it for them. By adding incentives to get the word out, they’re exhibiting a bit of ingenuity into their social media marketing efforts.

Look at Twitter. It started out as a communications medium for people to connect with others all around the world as long as they stayed under 140 characters. Now it’s a business empire in its own right, as businesses have learned how to monitor Twitter for customer service, get the word out on specials they’re running, and actually will communicate with their customers who might have something either negative or positive to say and just want to vent. I can honestly say that I’ve made money from Twitter via conversations and blog posts.

As more of these companies continue to pop up, I would expect that savvy investors will be scanning these companies for opportunities to get in on the ground floor, whether these companies go public or not.

Actually, it’s just a bit longer than a month. By August 15th, consumers are supposed to make a decision with their bank accounts as to whether they want overdraft protection or not. It’s something I originally wrote about in February, but since we’re close to the date I felt it was a good time to look at it again.

In that previous post, I laid out the two main scenarios for help in making a decision on whether to opt in or not. At that time, I wasn’t sure if it was inclusive of credit cards as well or just banks. Based on knowing that, at least for now, that it seems to only concern banks (unless I’ve just missed the inserts in my credit card bill), I’m thinking I’d like to clarify my stance just a little bit.

If this included all credit cards, I’d probably say that it’s not worth the cost to have it added to your credit card account. In my opinion, it’s better to not be able to buy something using your credit card than going over the limit. However, the rules have changed on that front, such that credit cards can’t hit you with extra fees for going over your balance in that particular pay period. They can stop you from going too far over the limit, but if you’re over by less than $50, you’re okay.

When it comes to your bank account, that’s another matter entirely. All of us have had a time in our lives when we’ve written checks without knowing that older checks have never cleared. Some people you pay won’t cash your check for six months. Sure, we should all be balancing our checkbooks monthly, but we don’t. So, it might not be such a bad idea to have that extra layer of protection.

It depends on how much your bank is going to hit you for each transaction, though. For instance, my bank is going to charge $22 per overdraft, while my wife’s bank will be charging $25 per. The upper limit per day for everyone is $100, which is a good thing, but in essence, if I have 4 checks hit that puts me over I only pay $88, whereas my wife will be at the max. That’s not much difference, and it’s making me think about leaning towards the protection. My wife decided she was going that route, and it’s already been set.

Everyone needs to know their buying habits, but knowing that it’s not always in your control could lead you to decide for the bank protection, instead of bouncing checks all over the place. I think it’s a wiser move than I believed it was in February.

Man, I hate being right. It seems that there’s a prediction that around 1.2 million people are about to fall off the extended unemployment benefit rolls, and with that goes the benefit they were getting on their COBRA insurance coverage.

I’ve talked about the fact that unemployment figures are usually skewed by the number of people who have made it through the entire system without finding a job, and thus suddenly don’t count against those very same unemployment numbers. If this many people suddenly drop off the rolls, the unemployment figure is going to start looking pretty good, but once again it won’t be telling the whole story.

Once again, it makes me and many others continue to ask the question where will jobs come from, and I just don’t see an answer in sight. Well, I do, but no one is listening to me on ideas on spurring the economy.

There was a story by U.S. News in December that talked about the best careers in 2010. These are areas where jobs or careers are either growing or have the potential to grow. The thing is, all of them require certain educational skill sets that some people aren’t qualified to obtain. Those who are or possibly might be able to attain those skills can look to these 5 main categories:

* Science & Technology

* Healthcare

* Education & Civic Work

* Business & Finance

* Creative & Service

In other words, people need to start thinking about what else they can do to replace what it is they’ve been doing. However, let’s be realistic. Science and technology will take some serious education if you don’t already have it. Same for business and finance. Most communities seem to be laying off teachers, and some states are laying off state employees as well. There are areas in healthcare where there are shortages, but some careers, such as being a certified nurse assistant, are physically grueling, so if you’re not young I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s also a long training curve for some of those positions.

To me, the most viable area are creative and service. Truthfully, there never seem to be enough electricians or plumbers, and both pay well. There’s certainly not enough people who know how to fix general items, and computer service, while kind of technical, is easier to learn than many other technical areas. If you’ve got an eye for design you might find pretty good paying jobs as an independent.

Still, it’s a scary world for those people about to lose governmental support. Those folks will have a long way to go before being ready to think about doing something on their own.

At the Group of 20 Summit in Toronto days ago, the countries participating left with one common goal; to reduce the deficits in each country while not promoting that people hold onto their money and to spend it instead.

It’s an interesting prospect, one that needs to be examined because of its unique scope. The economy has been jittery since 2008. Pretty much every country has suffered in some fashion. What many countries have done is throw money at the problem, which I don’t totally disagree with, but without a specific strategy for what they wanted to do, it hasn’t worked all that well.

At the same time, unemployment has been a big problem in many countries. Even though the United States would love to blame its problems all on companies that have taken jobs to other places and illegal immigration, the fact is that this was probably a long time in coming and that almost everyone had to know it was on its way. I had figured it was on its way back in 2001, and felt that many people had their heads in the sand instead of looking ahead and trying to brace for the future in some way.

Governments did what governments do; they created more money to try to help out. That often ends up destabilizing someone because it makes some currency worthless, or at least reduces what it’s worth in other countries. Who remembers that for awhile last year Canadian and American currency was worth the same thing? I remember when you used to get the equivalent of $1.64 for an American dollar; now you get $1.27.

Meanwhile, unemployment hasn’t snapped back, but the government is trying to encourage people to spend their money. For at least 10% of the population in the United States eligible for a job, it’s not happening. For at least 40% of the working population, it’s not wise because they’ve taken jobs that are paying them less than jobs they had previously. That doesn’t leave a lot of people with extra money to spend unwisely. Even when the government was giving us money ala President Bush, most people used that money to pay bills rather than to spend frivolously.

My previous post about New York is basically true for the rest of the country. There’s less money to spend, less credit to use, fewer companies to spend the money on. Many specialty shops have closed and prices haven’t exactly dropped to encourage people to go out and find deals. Even Walmart struggled a little bit for awhile (heck, did they close all Sam’s Club’s?). And both state and federal governments are balking at spending money on programs that are needed because they say they’re worried about the deficits, everywhere except in their own regions.

The question stands; can these governments actually do what they hope to do? I tend to believe absolutely not; at least not right now. There are just too many negatives that everyone has to deal with, including unstable governments. It’s going to take a hero to step forward somewhere and be able to gain a true consensus. Unfortunately, there are too many people who think it’s all about them and not about the people, so it’s not going to get done.

The New York state budget is almost 3 months late. The state has financial issues, pretty much like all the other states, but it’s budget it tied into the stock market, and that’s not doing so well. Congress is split between both parties, and the majorities are slim. Nothing’s getting done; it’s politics as usual.

The governor of the state, David Patterson, is recommending some very interesting things that he’s determined are going to go through if there’s no budget, and some of them he’s hoping will go through anyway. Things like slashing Medicaid, which is the worst payer to begin with, adding things like a soda tax. The state has already increased the price of cigarettes to where it’s going to cost about $10 a pack, almost $11 a pack in NYC.

Now there are plenty of commercials attacking the governor and some of his plans. Every commercial makes him out to be a buffoon, and says people should write their congress-folks to complain about cutting this or adding that, saying it’s wrong.

You know what’s missing in every one of these commercials? What do any of them suggest the governor do instead? None of them have any inkling, which is why I ignore all of them. It’s not that all of them are wrong, just that all of them are misleading and childish.

Years ago I was working someplace and we had a consultant in. The guy was there for 3 days asking all sorts of questions. In the end, he came up with a 30 page report of all these problems. He found 64 issues; I knew about 63 of them. For each issue his recommendation was “put more people on this”. How’s that a recommendation? If I had all the people he recommended I wouldn’t have had the problem to begin with. Even the CFO looked at it and dismissed it as useless.

The problem with many folks who hate something is that they don’t have, or can’t think of, anything better to do. That was the problem with the health care debate earlier this year; whether you liked what the President and the democrats came up with, at least they came up with something, while the republicans just kept saying no. They said they had a health care plan; not only did they not have one, but they never intended to present one.

And that’s the problem in New York. I don’t like knowing that schools are going to have to fire teachers. I don’t like that our produce farmers are having difficulties because the budget isn’t passed. I don’t like that our government is on the verge of shutting down because we don’t have the money to pay all the workers. I certainly don’t like hearing that Medicaid is going to be slashed when it already only pays hospitals and providers $9 for a chest x-ray and things go down from there.

But what else can be done? There are things I don’t care about that someone else does. Neither one of us really wants only half of what we used to have, but if it’s me I’d compromise so that we’d both at least have something. In this case, everyone wants everything and doesn’t want to compromise, and some parties want more.

I’ve said elsewhere that California has basically condemned itself to poverty; New York isn’t far behind.

Very little surprises me anymore when it comes to seeing that minorities suffer the most on many financial levels. First it was hearing that blacks and Latinos are taking the worst hit on unemployment than anybody else. Then it was hearing that black farmers still haven’t gotten money from the government that the Justice Department says they deserve. Next on the list was hearing that Wells Fargo, along with many other banks, we’re giving minorities higher mortgage rates to purchase homes than anybody else.

So it comes as no surprise hearing that black and Latino homeowners have suffered more than non-minorities as it pertains to foreclosures. At least as its related to home loans between 2005 and 2008. For that group, it seems that 8% of the foreclosures were from minority homeowners, whereas none minority homeowners had their homes foreclosed upon at 4.5%. The reason this is an important figure is because it shows that even now, lenders are treating minority home owners differently than anybody else, hitting them with interest rates so much more above the norm that they are at the greatest risk of having their homes foreclosed upon. The study by the Center for Responsible Lending also stated that black and Latino communities will suffer the most in declining property values between 2009 and 2012, to the estimated tune of $373 billion.

Of course foreclosures hit everybody across the board, and the overwhelming number of foreclosures came from bad deals that occurred back in the 90s. However, knowing that this is still a common problem, and in listening to some pundits say that they believe all of this is the fault of Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who helped pass a law to equalize lending for minority applicants, it seems to indicate that lenders pretty much ignored the law in the first place, thus abdicating Rep. Frank of any responsibility for the present crisis.

What happens now? Who knows, since it seems foreclosures are still occurring, even at a lesser rate since so many homes have already been foreclosed upon, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.

Finally a few more protections from the people who issued credit cards have gone into place. As of last Tuesday, laws were enacted that state if you make a late payment credit card companies can only hit you up for $25 late fee if it happens only once, and then no more than $35 if you happen to do it often within certain time limits. They also can’t hit you with a fee higher than the amount of any financial violations. In other words, if you happen to go over your limit by $18 accidentally, they can’t hit you with a 50 or $75 fee.

Something that many banks and said they were going to start doing was charging people who didn’t use their credit cards. The new regulations say that they can’t do that; that’s a good thing. It’s one of things I griped about what I talk about this concept of credit scores and outstanding credit. If you don’t have to spend credit you have available to you, you shouldn’t be penalized because you’re not buying things you don’t need. It was inherently unfair, I’m glad the federal government me that correction.

For once, the American Bankers Association is going along quietly with the new regulations as opposed to saying that it’s not fair to banks. Supposedly a representative was quoted as saying that the industry would work quickly and diligently in addressing these new regulations.

Here’s one more good thing. The new regulations state that banks cannot raise the interest rate on outstanding balances, with some banks had already put into place. At the same time, the new regulations are encouraging those banks that took advantage of the gap in time last year between when other credit card legislation was passed and then implemented to go back and rethink the interest rates that they raise during that time period. I’m not exactly sure how strong that encouragement is, but anything that works to the benefit of consumers is a good thing.

These rules will go into effect on August 22, which gives banks about 2 1/2 months to put everything into practice. Let’s hope they come down some of those interest rates as a sign of good faith.

A news story by CNN Money came out and asked this question: Is A Housing Shortage Coming? Their premise is that, because of the housing industry issues that have plagued the country for a few years, that there aren’t enough homes for those people who are ready to buy either existing or new homes.

Frankly, when I read stories like this, it makes me wonder about the intellect of these people who supposedly have some kind of finance background, or at least some investigative skills. Are there enough houses? Please!

For most of the country, there are plenty of houses. Well, that’s kind of a misnomer, so let me clarify this. In those states that have suffered the most, there are so many homes available that it’s amazing banks aren’t working more with potential home owners in getting those loan applications through and those homes purchased. In California, there were so many homes available that banks which had foreclosed on many of those homes took some of them off the market because they were driving prices too low. In that case, the homes are there, but the banks might not be making them available.

However, as bad as the housing industry has had it, there were still places where homes were still being built. In places like my home area, Syracuse NY, new homes are being built as fast as ever in the suburbs, while the city is starting to convert more downtown property to condominiums to entice 20 and 30-somethings to move back and help the city grow again. In many parts of Texas, home building has never slacked off either, as they have weathered the housing crisis fairly well for their size.

In the story, cities that were highlighted were New York City, San Francisco and Seattle. New York City has had a problem with space for years, which means that has nothing to do with home builders not trying to build homes. And NYC has been losing population, so if present condominium owners, since there really aren’t lots of houses throughout parts of the city, decided to drop prices a little bit, there are plenty of spaces available for occupation. I don’t know San Francisco or Seattle as well, but the reports are that both cities will have housing prices dropping possibly through 2012. If housing prices are dropping, it means there’s plenty of available space for new home owners or tenants. After all, prices don’t drop if there’s too few homes.

True, there might be some communities where there aren’t enough homes available. I just don’t feel it’s as pervasive as CNN Money believes it is.

Should have seen this coming. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which has been run pretty much by the government since 2008, have been “asked” by the New York Stock Exchange to delist themselves and to stop trading stock. That’s because the prices have fallen very low, with Fannie Mae around $1 and Freddie Mac under $2. The minimum dollar amount allowed by the NYSE is $1 a share.

This is a blow both to the conservatorship and how the government has run them and the housing industry overall. Both of these entities loan and guarantee money to consumers and other lenders, and without the ability to raise capital on their own, it’s questionable how much support the federal government is going to be able to give them; they seem to have their own issues right now with unemployment, health care, and of course BP.

By the way, shares of both fell below $1 once the announcement was made, which means the NYSE pretty much sealed the fate of each company with the public request. Standard & Poor’s believes it’s going to get worse for both corporations before it gets better, believing that the earliest a turnaround might occur is in 2012. That’s bad news for both companies and the housing industry.

The worst secret in the world at this point is the large oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, courtesy of British Petroleum (BP). Actually, it’s a misnomer to call it a “spill”; it’s more like a “gusher”, because it continues coming out; the Exxon Valdez was a spill.

One of the big questions that keeps coming up is who should pay for all of this stuff. In my mind, it’s a ridiculous question, because of course BP should be paying for it. They should pay to clean it up, and they should pay for the industries that have shut down because of it. All of us can look forward to higher seafood costs this year because of them; I guess I won’t be eating much shrimp soon.

However, there are many who believe the United States should pony up a share of the costs. That’s right, we, the taxpayers, are under some kind of consideration in helping to pay for something that someone else did. Where is this coming from? I mean, these are the same people who make people pay for forest fires if they accidentally leave a cinder burning and it sparks and spreads all over the place. What’s the difference here?

Check this quote out from the CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce Tom Donohue, who believes “we” should be helping out: “It is generally not the practice of this country to change the laws after the game. Everybody is going to contribute to this clean up. We are all going to have to do it. We are going to have to get the money from the government and from the companies and we will figure out a way to do that.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) at first seemed to agree with this, but has backed off his initial comments, although it’s left us not quite knowing what his position on this is. What’s our position? According to Gallup, 59% of Americans believe BP should be paying for the whole thing; who are these 41% who believe we should be paying anything at all for this? And, for that matter, how is it that only 49% of Americans believe BP is doing a bad job in taking care of this matter? Did the word get out that it’s still coming out?

By the way, this issue won’t easily be taken care of. More than 20 years later, the area around Prince William Sound in Alaska still has oil all over the place, and has still impacted the fishing industry there, and it was a lot smaller than this. This one is affecting travel and vacation plans, and there’s still the possibility that it could reach beaches if not contained in some fashion. This one could really end up hurting our economy worse than we know. Should we pay for someone else hurting us that badly, something that may take decades to recover? No!

Yes, I know unemployment is basically holding steady, and that it’s been pretty high. And I know we all want people to go back to work if they so choose, and that it’s been a travesty that so many people have lost factory jobs that we all know are never coming back, and that we’ve lost them to those countries that have cheaper labor.

Where I live, the Syracuse NY area, used to have Allied Chemicals residing along Onondaga Lake. These days it’s known as the most polluted lake in the United States, possibly the world. The village it resided in, called Solvay, used to have pink skies all the time, soot everywhere, and the air smelled like bad perfume. The plant is gone now, the skies are no longer pink, the people can actually clean the outside of their homes and know it’s going to stay that way… and the lake is still polluted. Hey, three out of four isn’t bad.

There have been a couple of lists that have come out about cities around the world. They are both the dirtiest and the most polluted cities in the world. And these days, the United States doesn’t have any cities on those lists. At least not in the top 20 or 10 of the two lists mentioned.

Which two countries are at the top of the list? China and India. Where have most of the American manufacturing jobs gone? China and India. Sure, there are other countries that have pollution problems that are on the list, but not in the numbers as the first two, although Russia easily surpasses any other country for the third spot.

China’s problems have definitely come as a result of more manufacturing and fewer standards as far as making sure factories are safe for its employees. India has always had problems because it’s never been considered an overly rich country, and now that they have some industry there, it’s not helping to contribute to making anything cleaner. In some cases, the poor are even poorer than they were before they started getting more industries there.

How does the United States compare? Strangely enough, even our most factory-laden cities don’t rank high on pollution lists. The most polluted city in the country is, strangely enough, Pittsburgh PA, at least on one list. Los Angeles is at the top of another list, and Bakersfield swaps places with Los Angeles on another list. Their problem is too many cars in such a concentrated area; the ozone isn’t their friend. Detroit, which many people have believed was one of the dirtiest cities in the country because of its factories, comes in at #9 on only one list, so much for its reputation.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t lament the jobs that have been lost, especially since not all the jobs that have been lost were manufacturing jobs. But the United States overall seems to be a cleaner place, and that does say a lot.

The latest jobs report shows that unemployment dropped from 9.9% to 9.7%. Normally looking at a figure like that would be a good thing, but this time around, there’s proof that figures sometimes don’t tell the whole truth.

It seems that the reason unemployment dropped is because the federal government hired more than 400,000 employees for the census, temporary jobs that will end in a couple of months. The private sector only created 41,000 jobs, way below what the government was hoping for, and there are more people unemployed than ever in recorded history, which began in the 1940′s.

If there’s anything positive to try to latch onto, it’s that the number of new people who have applied for unemployment benefits has dropped by 10,000 over the previous week, but the overall numbers are still higher than usual. Of course, there has to be an acknowledgment that at a certain point there won’t be many new claims because, just like foreclosures, most of the jobs that were cut en masse have been taken care of, which means the rate has to slow down at some point.

As we wrote last year, the biggest question is where new jobs will come from. Factory work in big numbers aren’t coming back, the government isn’t paying enough for new training, and there hasn’t been a big rush of people going back to college or trade schools, mainly because it’s hard to afford when people aren’t employed. We hate being the bearer of bad news, but technology and education are the only things we have left that are going to create newer and better paying jobs. And, until the two wars are over, the government won’t have the money to help fund any of it.

There is a post on a blog called New Homes Section, Illinois, titled 5 Things To Know About Buying A House. It’s a pretty good article if I say so myself, but I think there are more things to add to this list, which I’m going to do now.

1. Don’t get pushed into buying a house if you’re not feeling it. Realtors are taught that many people will suffer from what’s known as “buyer’s remorse”, so they’ll work hard to encourage you on a house that you might have some hesitations on. Stick with your feelings because a home investment is not only costly, but it’s a long deal, the longest arrangement you’ll ever enter into other than marriage.

2. Make sure you send in your own inspector and make sure you understand what they’re telling you about a property. Realtors will recommend inspectors for you, and I’m not saying that they’ve got a cozy relationship with each other, for the most part, but you’ll do better finding your own. Once you do that, when they give you a report make sure you ask them what they mean by some of the things they say. Often they won’t give a red mark to something, but they’ll indicate something that’s less than being totally positive. Those types of things could end up costing you a lot of money later on, so it’s best to know up front what’s going on.

3. Even with disclosure laws, you might not hear about every problem a house has. A homeowner might not tell you that the roof leaked during one major rain storm, especially if it doesn’t leak every time it rains. The same goes for flooding in the basement. If you ask the question and get a false answer, which you’d know later on, if you documented it you’ve earned some rights of protection. If you don’t ask questions, it’s all on you.

4. Know your own credit report. Here’s the thing. Even if you’ve been approved for a loan by a realtor, the mortgage rate you get might not be up to snuff because of your credit rating. Of course, those of you who read this blog know how I feel about credit scores in general, but lenders still use these things, and you might not get that wonderful 5% mortgage rate you’ve been hearing about if they’re worried about your credit viability.

5. Even if you’re having a house built, make sure you have it all down on paper. I learned this lesson from my mother, who dealt with a salesperson that ended up having a bad reputation. He promised my mother a lot of things and she made him write them all down. When the company fired him and came to her saying she couldn’t get all those things, she produced the paper that he’d signed promising those things, and she got them, to their dismay.

This is the 300th post of Top Finance Blog. It comes just beyond 18 months of ownership after taking it over from someone else who decided after a month that he didn’t have the time for it.

I’ve been giving some consideration as to just where I believe this blog should go. I’ve written many posts on the current news stories of the day, and I’ve written some instructional posts as well. I’m not really sure which types of articles most people really enjoy. For instance, here are the top 5 most visited stories in the past month:

These are the top visited posts in the last 100, mainly duplicates:

And finally, the most visited posts ever on this blog; once again, mainly duplicates:

Finally, the top categories I wrote about:

Overall, it seems that when I write more personal financial things that people respond. Then again, the budgeting posts didn’t seem to go anywhere, which tells me that most people really don’t want to think about budgeting their money, even though, in my opinion, it’s one of the most important things anyone can do for their financial health.

No matter; I believe there’s no real consensus on what this blog should specifically be writing about other than commentary and news, and since those are the goals of this blog anyway, I promise to continue giving a lot more of that, as well as an occasional educational post here and there to break things up. Onward and upward towards post #400; I hope you stick around, and invite friends. The more the merrier.

The Dow Jones Industrials took it on the chin for most of May, finishing with the worst performance in 70 years. Even though it came up from its fall under 10,000, closing at 10,136.63 on Friday, the final figure was a 7.9% loss for the month. It’s the percentage that makes May 1940 worse, as back then shares dropped 22%, making it the worst May in history.

Last week I talked a little bit about how the global economy takes its toll on the Dow, and last week’s overall performance illustrates that point again. There are great worries about Spain’s credit downgrade and an announcement from France that they might be in trouble soon as well. There’s also uneasiness after tensions started to grow once more between North and South Korea, as they’ve suspended some of the considerations they’ve had between each other for nearly 40 years, although in my mind I don’t see war breaking out any time soon, if ever. However, it does mean that the United States will start taking a more active role again, and any time that happens the Dow gets nervous.

All of this is happening during the same time period when the housing market overall is starting to show signs of recovery and consumer confidence is on the rise. It will be interesting to see what the unemployment numbers are next month as we move into summer, and of course the first month of housing purchases since the federal tax credit ended in April. People also still aren’t spending as much as the government would hope, but it’s face it, until more people are back to work, that’s the way it’s going to be.

Be thankful for the extra day of time off to let minds rejuvenate, and please take time to think of those who have given their lives so that this country can be what it is.

We all knew it was coming, and today it finally came.

The Dow Jones Industrials has been up and down, riding an interesting roller coaster over the past couple of weeks that saw it drop below 10,000 a couple of times, only to rally back above the mark by the close of the day. Last Friday was the last time the market dropped, only to recover later. Today that didn’t happen, and the Dow ended the day at 9,974.45, dropping about 70 points or .7% on the day. This time, things started out well, then slowly declined.

Once again, world events have impacted the Dow, as the euro continues its slide. Last week I mentioned Germany, but now it seems there are worries coming from Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain, and even the United Kingdom seems to be somewhat shaky. Not to mention Microsoft’s message today saying they’re going to reduce marketing and potentially stay away from China because the country won’t enforce their copyright laws & protect Microsoft’s licenses. And China might be the catalyst for the market’s decline because they’re heavily invested in European bonds, and with the market so shaky there they’ve started making overtures that look like they might try to get out from under some of them, hence a little bit of panic.

With all this uncertainty, is it the right time to put your money into the stock market? I asked a broker friend of mine about it and he said yes, but it depends on what it is you’re putting your money into. Putting one’s money into a money market account, where your funds are spread out among a bunch of different types of stocks, is always a good bet because, on average, they end up growing over the course of 5 to 10 years as opposed to suffering drastic losses. However, one still has to be predisposed to be ready to ride it out for the long haul, as one’s money could always potentially stagnate or even decline if there are more losers than growth stocks, as what happened to my portfolio last year.

Prediction for the next two days? Nope, I’m out of the predicting business, because it turns out the only real way one can hope to do it with any real chance of making money or losing very little is to keep watch on it every hour to see what’s going on. By the way, the NASDAQ and S&P were also down, .68% and .57% respectively.