Millionaires Collecting Unemployment?

by: Daniel Indiviglio

If you were making $1 million per year or more, but lost your job, would you file an unemployment claim? Nearly 3,000 American millionaires would have answered "yes" to this question in 2008, according to an article by Ryan J. Donmoyer at Bloomberg. IRS data shows that a whopping 2,840 households earning at least $1 million in 2008 also filed for government unemployment payments that year. There are two sort of immediate questions that arise from this fact: what were they thinking, and should this be allowed?

What They Were Thinking?

To non-millionaires it might seem absurd that people who had such a staggering income recently would turn to the government for help after losing their jobs. But it shouldn't. First, most wealthy people didn't become that way by accident. They tend to be pretty savvy about money. So if the law entitles them to collect unemployment when laid off, then they aren't the type to turn down free money. Only a fool would do that.
Moreover, for many millionaires, they might see their layoff as the one time they can finally get back some of the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars they've paid in taxes over the years. Many tax credits don't apply to them, if they're phased out for people with income above a certain threshold. They may as well cash in this once, just for principle's sake. After all, once they get back to a high paying job, they will have to revert back to paying the government a lot and getting little in return.

Should This Be Allowed?

Unemployment benefits are actually a type of insurance. And just like other kinds of insurance, it is paid out regardless of how much money you make. In this case, however, it's important to remember that the insurance payments to households that had a high-income are not directly proportional to their previous compensation. Most states have a very low unemployment payment ceiling. In New York State, for example, anyone making more than around $42,000 is paid a maximum of $405 per week — which would add up to an income rate of just $21,060 per year.
So those who enjoyed an ultra-high income can't benefit more from unemployment payments than middle or lower-class Americans. As the Bloomberg article says, these millionaires only took in $5.2 million in unemployment payments in 2008, out of the $43.7 billion total. That's just 0.012%.

In my opinion, the government could certainly pass a law that disqualifies anyone who made more than a certain income during the year from collecting unemployment. And in this case it would have saved the government not more than 7 million dollars. That's something, but this is a pretty tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of government budgets. A handful of millionaires who are enjoying what's likely a short stint of receiving government assistance hardly characterizes a serious problem so vital to the nation that it should be at the top of Congress' priorities.

What do you think?

The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Awards

Every year, The Wall Street Journal gives out awards for technology innovations. This year is their 10th year. With almost 600 innovations from around the world, the judges' pannel faced a difficult task to choose the first three place winners. The judges assessed the applications on three criteria:
—Does the innovation break with conventional ideas or processes in its field?
—Does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists?
—Will it have a wide impact on future technology in its field or in other fields?
The gold prize winner is the Taiwan-based Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). Their innovation was a flexible display screen for everyday use. "ITRI won the top prize in this year's Innovation Awards contest for a manufacturing technique that promises to clear the way for commercial development of high-quality displays on flexible materials.
Flexible displays are attractive for several reasons: They're lighter than glass displays, making it possible to build larger consumer devices, such as e-readers or tablet computers, that aren't too heavy. They can also be used in some novel applications, such as interactive newspapers that can be bent or rolled and be as portable as the paper-based versions."

"With a stable, viable and cost-effective flexible-display technology," says Barry H. Jaruzelski, an Innovation Awards judge and a partner at consulting firm Booz & Co., "the door is opened to a wide range of truly new applications in consumer electronics and device interfaces."
But producing flexible displays in commercial quantities has proved challenging. To understand why, and why ITRI's innovation has promise, requires a brief tutorial.
Making a flexible display as fully functional as the typical flat-panel computer screen requires layering thin-film transistors on a flexible substrate. Because the flexible material can curl or shift during this process, it's bonded temporarily to a rigid piece of glass. The completed flexible display then has to be detached from the glass without being damaged, which is difficult to do efficiently enough to make the displays on a commercial scale.
ITRI's solution—which it calls FlexUPD, for flexible universal panel for displays—is novel yet simple. It places a "debonding" layer of nonadhesive material between the flexible substrate and the glass. The substrate, which has an adhesive backing, is made slightly larger than the final flexible display and the debonding layer, so it stays steady on the glass. Once the transistors are layered on the substrate and enclosed, the display can be cut out from the excess substrate and easily lifted off the glass.

The idea for the debonding layer, says an ITRI spokeswoman, came from watching cooks prepare paper-thin Taiwanese pancakes, which can be easily peeled from a pan at high temperatures. Cheng-Chung Lee and Tzong-Ming Lee, ITRI division directors, are credited with the idea.
The technique, the institute says, can be used with a variety of displays, including current liquid-crystal-display, or LCD, screens and the next-generation displays made with organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs.
ITRI has demonstrated a prototype paper-thin display made with this process, and has licensed the technology to display maker AU Optronics Corp. of Taiwan. The first product using the technology, a flexible display for an e-reader, is planned for release by the end of the year, an ITRI spokeswoman says.

Other companies have demonstrated flexible-screen prototypes and plan to bring them to market using a different manufacturing technology. None, including ITRI's technology, have yet seen commercial success, but ITRI says its improvements make its entry more cost-effective than competing technologies. Also, it says, the technology is compatible with existing factories for fabricating displays, so it can be widely adopted by display makers.
Judges for the Innovation Awards, while noting that ITRI is still in the early stages of commercializing the technology, cited the possible benefits of flexible displays. "This looks like a simple and elegant solution to a manufacturing problem," says William Webb, director of technology resources for Ofcom in the U.K.
ITRI, a nonprofit organization, won an Innovation Award in 2009 for its FleXpeaker, a paper-thin loudspeaker system."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703470904575500342513725972.html

Tornado Charts

I know we've all struggled with constructing a tornado chart to represent our data in the group assignment we did in class. I did a little research and found some helpful websites where the authors explain how to do it in a very easy way. What you basically need to do is make a table of your data, select the whole range, then go to the insert tab and click on charts to choose the stacked bar chart. After that, right click on the Y (vertical) axis, select format and tick categories in reverse order and next to horizontal axis crosses at maximum value. and VOILA your tornado chart is done!! http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/tornadochart.html

There are so many ways to do it; here is another easy process you may like to use:
http://8020world.com/jcmendez/2007/02/business/easy-creation-of-tornado-charts-in-excel-5-steps-no-add-ins/