Yeah, I know, I've been too lazy to fix my php on the Feedburner subscribers to the right - so it fluctuates 20 or more readers a day. I'll get to it... maybe even today!

Before the primaries move on to Kansas and various territories (the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Marianas), it's time to take a quick look back at how far the four remaining candidates have come - in both votes and delegates!

We recently talked about paradoxes with insurance and the lottery, but I'm not ready to give up on this topic just yet! I present to you this article which uses IRS data to try to answer: "What is the relationship between gambling and income?".

Most of those comments I've seen on this blog and others seem to imply that the lottery (and most other forms of gambling...) is a game only for the poor - even sometimes referred to as a 'poor tax'. Lucky for the naysayers, the IRS has compiled data which shows that Americans in all income classes (even the 1%!) love to gamble. Yes, in 2009, 284 of the taxable returns with over $10,000,000 in adjusted income had gambling winnings reported! So, dear readers, let's take a look at gambling in the United States...

Does anyone actually recognize that we just had a leap day? February 29 anyone? Whatever, call it March 0.

(... over his first term in office ... if you don't count inflation and population growth ... if you don't consider the whole ten year estimates ... if you count the extended 'Bush Tax Cuts' and AMT Relief in Obama's totals.)

Today we're going to follow up an article which I first delved into last year. Using BLS data, I detailed the pay gap between workers in the public sector and workers in the private sector. Public and private sector wages has become an increasingly politicized issue, so when the Congressional Budget Office tackled the topic, I had to read the report with great interest.

Man, that script I wrote with the subscriber count has been broken like all week (it likes to take the […]

Do all web sites have personalities?

Your favorite personality lacking personal finance site, Don't Quit Your Day Job, has been tagged in a Personal Finance blogosphere (don't like the term? Come up with a better one...) game of PF tag. Our tag is from our friends Him and Her over at the site Make Love Not Debt. Please ensure that after you're done reading this article you visit and subscribe!

I apologize in advance: this post is going to be a bit heavy on theory and math. We try to digest our statistics are much as possible here at DQYDJ, but this topic requires a bit more explanation than the average article on this site.

You see, a combination of Federal Reserve Policy and United States taxation law is literally eroding the value of your short terms funds. Thanks to Robert Higgs at The Independent Institute for prompting this article on the expropriation of private wealth by the government. Feel free to skip the two introduction sections below and get right to my point, or check out this WSJ article of a less wonky slant.

8.3%.

The significance of that number? In this instance, I'm talking about the most recent BLS unemployment report for January 2012. The top-line number, U3 (total unemployed as a percentage of the labor force), is the rate most often quoted in news stories and reports. Let's continue the trend and say that the top-line number improvement is an encouraging sign. As recently as September of 2011 the unemployment rate was 9.0%. Of course, drawing a trend line from a few months of data isn't the most honest graph you can make, but you can't call this drop anything except what it is: an encouraging sign.