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A visit to the US Treasury website will show you a state by state breakdown of how the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 will affect Americans. The US Treasury estimates that 131.8 million Americans will benefit from this act, with California being the state with the most affected at 14.7 million people. The US Treasury projects that the total reduction in income taxes paid will be $112 billion. This equates to $849 per affected person.

$849 per person seems a bit high, since each parent can get up to $600 with a $300 credit per child up to two. I guess these results suggest that there are quite a few single parents out there with two kids or more. The US Treasury gives a probable reason for this discrepancy on the report. They say that “The proposal extends tax benefits to significant numbers of tax units that did not file during calendar year 2007. The estimates for these units are based on the characteristics of filing units and are therefore subject to greater standard errors and bias.”

You can see the entire two-page pdf report here.

Many people may be wondering how much exactly they will be getting. The US Treasury has a nice five-page pdf file that shows how much money a person will receive under just about any imaginable scenario. You can view the report here.

I just finished up reading a very insightful book called “The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream,” by Christopher B. Leinberger. The main focus of this book was that America will start to fall behind the rest of the world economically if we do not switch to a denser, walkable and transit based society.

In the book Leinberger starts out by saying that before the invention of the car cities were very compact and dense. One could only travel as far as they could walk, so this made it necessary for all things to be close by. Stores, work and home all needed to be located close to one another for the sake of convenience. Even when cars started being produced they weren’t something that was owned by every family.

It wasn’t until the World’s Fair of 1939 and 1940 in New York that the idea of owning a car became something that all Americans wanted. At the fair, General Motors set up a major exhibit called “Futurama.” This exhibit “showed radio-controlled, automated fourteen-lane highways crisscrossig the country with three speed limits (depending on the lane) of fifty, seventy-five, and one hundred miles per hour.” Over the course of the fair it was estimated that 27 million people saw this exhibit, and most were very impressed by it. The exhibit promised that this vision would become a reality by 1960.

According to the book, there were two major contributors to the massive expansion of the suburbs. The first was the end of World War II. Many soldiers came home and immediately started to have children. They started to look for a new kind of lifestyle, and the suburbs seemed to offer just that. The other major contributor was the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This act built the new 46,837 mile freeway system that currently covers the entire country. It was finally completed in 1991. This also helped make commuting from the suburbs to the city that much easier.

In this new society, only the rich could afford the suburbs, and the cities were filled with the poor. Many of the traditional downtown department stores left for the suburbs because business had become so bad in the city. As people moved to the suburbs and found out that they had much more space and privacy, they naturally told their friends about this paradise. After hearing such wonderful things, the friends moved out too.

Leinberger argues that while initially suburbs seemed to offer what was being promoted as the “American Dream,” it actually led to a lower quality of life. With sprawl, people are forced to drive until they qualify for a place to live. For the poor working class this can mean driving hours each way just to get to work. More time in the car means less time with family, and this would lead to a poorer quality of life.

Leinberger has suggested a rational solution to this problem. He essentially echoes what many have been saying for the past few years. We need to be more like the Europeans. He suggests having a central city that is linked to the outside suburbs via some sort of rail/transit line. In the suburbs, the transit center would be what the rest of the town was built around, thus making it convenient for all people to access it. He also suggests that instead of spending billions daily to fund a war that supports our sprawling and congested lifestyle, we should instead be using that money to create better mass transit systems. Until people have better transit options, they will continue to use their cars because that is the only way.

In conclusion, I think that it will take a number of things for the United States to switch into a more transit based society. Once gas prices reach certain heights, people will start to consider transit to be a more viable option and not something that is strictly used by the poor. With increased ridership numbers, the cities should recognize this pent up demand and will infuse more money into the public transit system. All in all I really enjoyed this book. I think that Leinberger made some excellent points on how to fix some of our transit problems. Unlike other books, Leinberger’s solutions actually seem feasible and quite likely to be implemented in the near future. I would highly suggest reading this book if you are at all interested in urban development or environmentalism.

I normally don’t use this blog to rant about a company, but AT&T wireless especially pissed me off today. For the past few months my girlfriend of about 2 1/2 years have been thinking about switching her phone over from her dad’s family plan to a family plan with me. It just seemed to make sense for us, especially since I don’t go through a ton of minutes and she was sharing hers with three other people on her old one. So just last week we went into AT&T to get everything moved over.

It seemed like a pretty painless process. All in all it took about five minutes. They checked all of our IDs and got our numbers and then transferred her number over to my plan and set us up with a new minutes plan. It all sounds good until I took a look at my bill this morning.

Apparently AT&T charges what they refer to as a “Transfer of Service Responsibility Fee” which costs $18.00! $18.00 to move a number on a computer from one account to another. No credit or background checks needed to be done, just a straight transfer! It seems like they should be encouraging you to sign up with the family plan since you will most likely keep your service there longer. Instead they just penalize you! Rediculous! I wonder if they charged her dad as well?

One more thing that made me pretty upset was that they got rid of almost all of my rollover minutes. Over the past 12 months I had accumulated over 3,000 rollover minutes. When I switched over to the family plan they took away all of those minutes except for 700. What happened to keep the minutes that you pay for?

The account summaries that are posted along with this article are taken from my actual bill, so I am not making this stuff up. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences with AT&T and whether or not this is standard practice on the other wireless carriers.

When going into make a deposit or a withdrawal at your financial institution, there is one thing that I ask that you do not do. Please do not come in with a hat pulled down with large sunglasses. There are a few rational reasons that I make this small request.

First of all, I know the large stunner shades are the cool thing to wear, but seriously. I sometimes have a hard time recognizing my own friends who are wearing these oversized sunglasses. If I find this difficult, how easy do you think it will be for me to properly identify a stranger? Probably not very easy. So please, help me make my job a bit easier so that I don’t have to try and imagine what is behind those bug-eyed shades. As an added bonus, it will probably make the line move a bit faster as well. At least most of the girls don’t wear hats along with their stunner shades.

This is a bit of an extreme example, but if you don’t know this person, can you really tell? This picture was taken from the following website.

Guys are actually even worse offenders of these banking no-no’s. Like I said before, when anyone wears sunglasses into a financial institution, it makes it that much harder for us to identify you. It makes it even harder when you come in wearing a baseball hat pulled all the way down to the tops of your glasses. This makes it extremely difficult to identify you. This whole identification complaint is just peanuts compared to the real reason why I don’t like it when guys wear sunglasses and a low hat into the bank.

The bank teller is at the front of the bank and is the only one in the bank with a drawer full of cash. This naturally makes them a prime target for robberies. When someone comes in wearing a low hat and sunglasses into a bank, we automatically assume that you are either a bank robber, or trying to pull some fraudulent transaction past us. Many fraudulent transactions are not caught until days or weeks after the fact and often rely on video evidence to verify the criminal. Hats, glasses and other disguises are often used to hide from the many cameras located inside of a bank. So by you wearing a hat and sunglasses into a bank makes the teller ten times more suspicious of you. This will cause them to examine your transaction much more closely than usual, and will often make them this much more picky and stingy over what you plan on doing.

Ignore the FBI logo on this guy’s coat, and he looks pretty suspicious to me. Heck, even with the FBI logo he looks pretty suspicious. Imagine how you would feel if you had someone dressed like this (criminal or not) standing in front of you while you have tons of cash sitting right in front of you. Not a very good feeling now is it? This picture was taken from the following site.

So please, for the sake of my sanity, take off at least your sunglasses when you come into your financial institution. It will make us feel a lot safer and will make your transaction run a whole lot smoother.

I figured that since I have been living in Seattle long enough it was about time that I got a membership through the Seattle Public Library. Seattle recently built a brand new library for downtown. From the outside it has this totally random shape made out of steel and glass. It really is more of a work of art than an actual building. Inside there are 9-10 different levels. The first 5 levels have a lot of seating and computer areas, as well as a lot of fiction novels. The remaining floors are the non-fiction. These floors spiral on an incline around the northern half of the building. It is a pretty clever idea, but the library can be a bit confusing to navigate. The following picture is what the Seattle Public Library looks like. You can find a nice little review of the library, as well as some other cool pictures here.

Anyway, I set up my account during my lunch break and set out to explore the library. I decided to go check out the books they had in the business/investing section. Those are in the 330’s in the dewey decimal system for those keeping track at home. Originally I wanted to join the library because I didn’t feel like paying $27 + tax for the Turtletrader book at Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately it is already checked out, but I am next in line for it.

It took me awhile to find the right section. I knew that I wanted to be in the 330’s, because it seemed like every other finance book started with 33x as well. I naturally assumed that the 3xx section would be on the third floor. Turns out I was wrong, and the third floor just had fiction books. I found a map that showed that the section that I needed to be in was actually on the 7th floor.

Once I finally found my section, I realized that I needed to find something fairly quickly if I were to be able to check it out and get back to work with enough time to eat some lunch as well. The library actually has a pretty decent selection of finance titles, and after a bit of searching I came along a couple that looked like winners.

The first book is called The EDGAR Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements: Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Becoming a Savvy Investor. The book was written in 2004 by Tom Taulli, an EDGAR Online analyst. The book looks like it shows how to decipher the typical financial statement that is on the EDGAR website and how to make the most of it. For those of you who don’t know, EDGAR Online is a website run by the SEC which lists all of the financial releases of publicly traded companies.

The second book that I checked out is called How Technical Analysis Works by Bruce M. Kamich. After flipping through this book, it looks like it gives a nice overview of many of the different chart reading techniques. This should be an interesting read.

I have to return these books by March 24th, so hopefully that will give me enough time to take a decent look through them and possibly write a little review about each of them.

Generally when you think something is too good to be true it generally is. Today I had a guy come up to me and hand me a check drawn off a Canadian bank (TD Canada) for USD $150,000 made out to him. It seemed a bit fishy from the start, but I figured I would just go along with it and see where it went. So I asked the guy for his account number. I punched it in and the name matched up. After looking into his account I notice that he has less than $10 on deposit with us.

Since we are a credit union, we cannot process checks drawn off of foreign banks. When we get a foreign check, we bring it to Wells Fargo where they process it and then credit our account. So I decided to take the check from him, since there wouldn’t be any way that he would have access to the right away anyways.

Next, I ask the guy how he happened to become the recipient of this large foreign check. He tells me that he had won the Canadian lottery! Wow, seems like a lucky guy to me. I was always under the assumption that you had to be a Canadian citizen to win the Canadian lottery, but maybe I am wrong. He then goes on to tell me that this check is a lump installment that they sent him so that he will have the funds to pay a “luxury tax.” I have never heard of this “luxury tax” scenario ever happening. Typically they take the “luxury tax” straight out of your winnings. I just went along with it and told him to call us up tomorrow to check on the status of the check.

After he left, I took the check over to my manager to see if he felt the same way about it. Turns out the Canadian lottery hoax has been around the block many a time and is nothing new. What happens is that you get mailed a valid looking check in the mail along with an official letter. The letter will tell you that you have won the Canadian lottery. It will then go on to say that the check is to be deposited into your bank account so that you can pay for the luxury taxes and other fees and what not. So you deposit the check in your account, and right after you do this you send the “Canadian lottery” a check for xxx amount of dollars. They get your check and cash it off your account, and you end up with a bounced lottery check and out a bunch of money.

So please, if anyone comes across a letter about winning the Canadian lottery, please don’t fall for it. Remember, if you didn’t enter the lottery there is no way you could have won.

Here is a link to a news release from the District Attorney of Jefferson and Gilpin counties in Colorado that talks a bit more about the Canadian lottery scam.