When my parents graduated from high school in 1936, a college education was too expensive for the son of a copper miner and the daughter of a plumber.Eighty years ago, our country was in the middle of the Great Depression and teens took odd jobs to help put food on the table and pay the family bills. In those days, no bank would lend money to college students.
In 2001, Boeing announced it would move its corporate headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. Today, you wonder if Boeing is having buyer’s remorse.
It’s that time of year when we count our blessings. In America, they are abundant, especially this year. For starters, the unemployment rate is down from 7 percent last December to 5.8 percent. Washington State mirrors the national average.
Christmas is a difficult time for anyone grieving for a lost loved one. It is especially painful for America’s military families whose son, daughter, spouse or parent was killed in action this year.
Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast in 2005, flooding cities and towns in four states and killing more than 1,800 people. The government response to Katrina, especially by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), became the poster child for an inept and incompetent bureaucracy. But out of this disaster has come a story of success. The hurricane gave New Orleans educators the opportunity to reinvent the city’s failing public schools.
It’s often difficult to “connect the dots,” to show people how the global marketplace affects their daily lives. But plunging gasoline prices are giving Americans a first-hand lesson in the law of supply and demand.
Since 1957, our Canadian friends and neighbors have celebrated Thanksgiving on the second Monday of October. Perhaps, this year we ought to join them.
Entrepreneurs helped make America great. Many of the “big businesses” we know today started in the imaginations of immigrants who came to America, the land of opportunity – a place of boundless possibilities where your station in life didn’t matter, a land where hard work, innovation and perseverance held the key to the American dream.
The good news is we are developing new life-saving medications every day. The bad news is they are very expensive and paying for them could bankrupt our health care system.
Even though water covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, less than two percent is freshwater. Therein lies the problem. As the world’s population grows, demand for water is increasing; in periods of drought it becomes a crisis.
What if we could peer into the future and see the consequences of the decisions we make today? In a way, we can.
Over the Labor Day weekend, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee gave a compelling commentary on the need for employers and employees to set aside their differences and partner.
The good news is Washington is separating itself from the national jobless rate. In July, an average 6.2 percent of Americans were looking for work, while Washington State’s unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent.
