Yep, Grandmom Is Still Renting Her Old Telephone!
July 6, 2010
By Terry Smiljanich:
It seems that the expensive leasing of inexpensive telephones is still good business for AT&T. A Consumer Warning Network reader reported to us that her elderly mom has been renting her old phone for nearly 30 years.
It doesn’t seem to ring true, but unfortunately it is. Read on.
Who Is BP? Will It Survive?
June 23, 2010
By Terry Smilijanich:
As BP (formerly British Petroleum) continues to struggle with the massive amounts of oil leaking from its Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, many are wondering just how big this company is and whether it can make good on its promise to clean it all up and compensate all its victims. Let’s take a look at a little history of BP and see if we can answer these questions.
Lilly Lays an Egg
May 27, 2010
By John Newcomer:
Last week, I got an excited call from my wife. “You will never guess what just arrived?” she said. What could it be? Gutters for the garden shed? No. My new iPad? No. Our appliance rebate? No. What then?? “Our new chicken coop and four chickens!!” she shared enthusiastically. What??!! And so began our journey into the world of backyard farming.
Minne, Lilly, Ruby, and Abilene
We are now the proud owners of Minne, Lilly, Ruby, and Abilene… clucking and foraging away. Apparently, I am not alone.
The Urban Chicken
The urban chicken is now mainstream America. Cities large (Chicago, IL) and small (Asheville, NC) across America are adopting ordinances that allow residents to raise chickens in their backyards. The national trend is driven not by economics, but by nutritional concerns about the food we eat. However, given the cost of organic eggs it is also very economical to raise chickens.
What does it cost and how hard is it raise chickens?
The Simmons Family & their rooster
Russ and Polly Simmons of Hendersonville, North Carolina have been raising chickens for the last year. They bought their first chicks for only $2.00 a piece. In just 5 months, the chicks were laying eggs. If you are impatient you can buy a full grown egg laying chicken for $10.00. Chicken feed is dirt cheap. Only $10.00 for a 50 pound bag. Chickens also like stale bread, table scraps, pretty much anything that is going into the garbage.
According to Russ Simmons, three chickens will lay two eggs per day. Organic eggs sell for $4.00 for a dozen eggs. Do the math. It only takes a couple of months to cover the cost of your chickens and feed. The wild card in the price equation is the cost of the coop. Russ Simmons built his, and he estimates that it cost him about $500. The good news, chickens are not fussy and any coop will do them just fine. A few pieces of scrap wood and cardboard boxes work just as well as a big fancy one.
Chicken Coop
Chickens are easy keeps. They will not range very far and come back to their coop every night. The really good news is they lay their eggs in the roosting boxes in the coop. Yes, no hunting the eggs. Every few days you need to spread straw on the floor of the coop, and every few months remove the straw, which now makes great compost for the garden.
Health benefits of organic eggs
Eggs have gotten a bad rap on health benefits. Yes, they contain cholesterol, but most of that cholesterol is not absorbed into the blood stream, and they contain a lot of good stuff like protein and choline. According to a study by the Harvard Medical School, an egg a day is just fine for most people.
More important is the recent study of the President’s Cancer Panel. It calls on America to rethink the way we deal with cancer and calls on a more rigorous regulation of chemicals.
This is the reason backyard chickens are becoming so popular. As Polly Simmons points out, she knows for a fact that her eggs have no hormones, chemicals, and are 100% organic. “And they taste better!”
To name or not to name your chickens
Yes, chickens will one day stop laying eggs. Then what do you do? Does Lilly become Sunday dinner? Or remain free to roam around the backyard clucking away. After providing your family with so many delicious breakfast omelets, my vote is to let her cluck to her hearts content into her golden years. And don’t get any silly ideas about finding out whether a chicken can really run around with it’s head cut off!
Fun Facts: The Great Recession’s Impact on Pets
April 20, 2010
Oh how we love our pets. Even the “Great Recession” did not slow down the money we spend on our cats and dogs and parakeets. In 2007, Americans spent $41.2 billion on pet products and services, according to the American Pet Products Association. This was followed by $43.2 billion in 2008; $45.5 billion in 2009; and an estimated $47.7 billion in 2010. We will spend $3.45 billion alone on just grooming and boarding our pets.
Just to put this spending into perspective–this is more than the Gross Domestic Product (the value of all goods and services produced by a country) of Iceland, Afghanistan, Haiti, and Nicaragua combined.
Winners & Losers of Health Care Reform
March 23, 2010
Who wins and who loses with the new health care reform bill just signed into law by President Obama? Low income people who don’t have health insurance are the biggest winners. Young people and couples making more than $200,000 a year are among the losers. CBS MoneyWatch takes a look at five groups that will bear the greatest cost of change. Here’s a sampling:
Loser:
Generation Y
In many ways, the health care legislation – like insurance in general – transfers wealth from the haves to the have-nots. The rich pay more to subsidize the poor, and the young and healthy pay more to offset the costs of the old and sick. On balance, most of the 19 million uninsured Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 will be forced to buy coverage – and those policies will be more expensive than the major-medical coverage they might have chosen otherwise.
For some young people – if you are a struggling playwright, for instance – there could be good news here: Because young people tend to work in entry-level jobs with low wages, many will fall within 400 percent of the poverty line and qualify for some government subsidies. However, the subsidies are unlikely to take the full sting out of the higher premiums: The most generous grants will be reserved for poor families, not single adults, and those who opt not to buy coverage will face penalties of $695 a year under the bill.
Proponents of the bill argue that young people can console themselves by thinking of the lower costs they will pay when they get older. “It is important to keep perspective,” says Volsky. “They will pay less 10, 20, 30 years down the road when they really become sick.”
Winner:
Cancer Patients and Others with Chronic Conditions
A tragedy of our current health care system is that those who need coverage most are denied it most often, says Linda Blumberg, a health economist and senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a policy think tank. Insurance companies can refuse to pay for care related to pre-existing conditions and hike coverage for certain illnesses, so if you have chronic, ongoing conditions or diseases you are forced to either pay out of pocket or shoulder ever-increasing premiums. The new law would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage or raising rates based on illness.
There is hope that helping the sick will eventually have an upside for healthy taxpayers as well, says Igor Volsky, a health care researcher and blogger for the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund. Affordable insurance coverage should encourage the chronically ill to receive treatment earlier, when it is less expensive, rather than wait until high-priced emergency room care is required. A reduction in such emergency care should pay broader dividends, since its cost is typically passed on to the insured, in the form of higher hospital bills, and to taxpayers, in the form of federal subsidies for unreimbursed care.
Click here to read more from CBS MoneyWatch.com
How Long Should Unemployment Benefits Last?
March 11, 2010
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By Angie Moreschi:
Does extending unemployment benefits just end up extending unemployment? It’s a question a lot of people are asking as the Senate passed yet another extension of jobless benefits. The provision to extend unemployment benefits is part of a $138 billion package which also extends dozens of expiring tax benefits, eases corporate pension requirements, and heads-off a cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors. The bill passed in a 62-36 vote.
The unemployment provision in the new bill extends benefits up to 99 weeks, which is almost 2 years. Benefits have generally been limited to 26 weeks or 6 months, but several extensions already enacted have elongated the benefit time period to 78 weeks, which is 18 months. And now, this will extend it again to 99 weeks.
The extensions come in the face of extraordinarily trying economic times which have made finding a job difficult. The jobless rate held steady at 9.7% in February, with 14.9 million Americans reportedly out of work. Those individuals have been unemployed for an average of 29.7 weeks.
Critics say the unemployment benefits program which was created as a temporary bridge for laid off workers is turning into a very expensive entitlement. About 11.4 million out-of-work people now collect unemployment compensation, at a cost of $10 billion a month. Unemployment compensation is funded largely through employer taxes, but occasional extensions by Congress are made on a federally funded basis.
Helping Hand or New Form of Welfare?
At what point does a helping hand turn into a hand-out that people abuse? An increasing number of opponents suggest extending jobless benefits discourages people from trying to find a job.
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told the Senate he questioned why anyone would see unemployment benefits as helpful to the economy, or to the job market. “If anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work,” Kyl said. “I am sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can’t argue it is a job enhancer.”
A labor economist at the Heritage Foundation told the Washington Post that with all the extensions unemployment benefits are turning into a form of welfare. “It is appropriate and natural for Congress to extend the time limit of unemployment insurance with the job market as bad as it is, but by quadrupling it, it is no longer an unemployment insurance program but a welfare program,” said James Sherk.
Necessary in Difficult Times
Others say the extensions are necessary in these difficult economic times. The National Employment Law Project urged Congress to pass the latest extension without to prevent thousands of people from losing their unemployment benefits.
“Congress must swiftly act to maintain the lifeline for millions of jobless Americans caught in the undertow of record long-term unemployment in this ongoing downturn,” said NELP director Christine Owens in a statement.
Is 99 Weeks Too Much?
The centerpiece of the measure passed by the Senate would extend provisions offering the jobless as many as 99 weeks of unemployment assistance averaging $300 per week along with a 65 percent subsidy to help buy health insurance through the federal Cobra program. In general, benefits are based on a percentage of an individual’s earnings over a recent 52-week period – up to a State maximum amount.
Unemployment benefits were created as part of the Social Security Act in 1935, intended to provide the unemployed some portion of their income while helping the economy weather down times. In 1970, federal law was amended to allow for extensions within the unemployment system during periods of high and rising unemployment. Nearly two-thirds of the jobless collect unemployment benefits, which go only to those who have earned a certain amount of money in the previous year, and who lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
Do unemployment checks discourage people from finding work? What if the checks keep rolling in for nearly two years? Is it worth it? Weigh in by voting in the CWN poll above.
Fake Money Rip Off
February 15, 2010
By Chad Soriano:
Small businesses are having a hard enough time these days, and as if the recession wasn’t enough, imagine getting stuck with counterfeit cash after providing a service or product to a consumer. It’s happening more and more. Click here to check out this report on the problem of businesses getting stuck with fake money, by Greensboro NBC affiliate WXII.
Ordering Flowers: How the Different Services Compare
February 11, 2010
By Angie Moreschi:
If you’re sending flowers this Valentine’s Day, it’s time to find out what kind of quality you get for your cash. We put several different vendors to the test, from a local florist, to online services that ship from a warehouse, to well known services that use member florists like FTD and teleflora. Click on the video to watch Angie Moreschi’s report on how they compared and read the story to learn more.
Getting Quality Flowers On Valentine’s Day
February 9, 2010
By Angie Moreschi:
There’s nothing like getting a beautiful bouquet of flowers, especially on Valentine’s Day. But let’s face it. If you’re the one sending the flowers and dishing out the dollars, there’s always a little anxiety involved. How do you know you’re getting quality? What makes one dozen roses last for a week or more, while another lasts for only a few days? We went to a floral expert to find out. Click here to watch Angie Moreschi’s report. Read more
Toyota Puts Brake on Sales to Address Safety Issues
January 27, 2010
By Angie Moreschi:
Drivers who own Toyota vehicles are confused and concerned, as the car company struggles to deal with growing safety concerns over sticking gas pedals. In his first public comment since the latest recalls, Toyota’s President apologized for the situation. Read more
Banding Together and Fighting Back!
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Recalls and Product Safety News- No Specific Cause Found Yet Linking Dry Max Diapers to Diaper Rash
- Toshiba Recalls T Series Notebook Computers Due to Burn Hazard
- Swing Sets Recalled by Kompan Inc. for Repair Due to Fall Hazard
- CPSC Makes Recall Data Available Electronically to Businesses, 3rd Party Developers
- 32-Inch Sharp LCD-TVs Recalled Due to Risk of Injury
- Slow Cookers Recalled by Sensio Due to Fire Hazard; Sold Exclusively at Kohl's Department Stores
