Welcome to the Weekender, the highlight of everyone’s week! (And isn’t that what really disappoints you during the week- the fact that DQYDJ is so far away from posting another Weekender?)

The late William F. Buckley, founder of the conservative-leaning political magazine National Review had a very famous quote when it came to the Republican primaries: vote for the most conservative candidate who can win. Add to that little piece of advice this oft-repeated maxim: “Democrats fall in love. Republicans fall in line.” (popularized by Bill Clinton). Toss those two together and what do you get? New Hampshire Primary results… at least according to the exit polls! Let’s dig in…

The issue of the declining savings rate in America has been mentioned as one of the ways in which the younger generations are falling behind economically. The credit crisis caused massive deleveraging in America which increased the savings rate, but most of it was due to consumers reducing debts and liabilities as opposed to building assets. There could be many causes of this, but to name one: in times of uncertainty, consumer tend to brace themselves for a more hazy future by building net worth as quickly as possible. A decrease in stock prices and home prices eliminated much of the buildup of household assets which needed to be counteracted by an increase in savings. Also, credit standards have tightened, which has further compounded the problem and increased the deleveraging among American households.

We apologize in advance if this discussion is too concentrated on minutiae and definitions, but we’d like to clarify an issue (with the help of our readers!).

Let’s just throw it out here: “How do you define savings?”. It’s a serious question, and you’re going to get two articles with serious answers… one from yours truly and another from Cameron, our resident Economist. Let me lead with my definition: ‘savings’ , in my mind, is any money set aside from current earnings that is easily accessible, liquid, fungible, and have a reasonable chance for maintenance of principal and appreciation.

Okay folks, let’s hit the links under the watchful eye of the squirrel…

If I were to ask you Tuesday morning which candidate would attract the most Tea Party support during the Iowa Caucuses, how many of you would have responded with Rick Santorum (who, incidentally lost the Caucus to Mitt Romney by only 8 votes)? I can see arguments for Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul (who strangely got a fair amount of coverage implying he had the most Tea Party support), or Rick Perry… but I didn’t see this one coming. And that’s just one of the great things we can find out about the actual behavior of voters thanks to the exit polls for the Iowa caucus. Let me lay out three of the most interesting results I found from the night… and you tell me if they’re surprising or you saw them coming…

Our tax visualization last time was interesting, but this one might convey more data. Once again, or source for tax data is the IRS’s publication 2010 Data Book. Just like last time, note these are tax collections, and the IRS annual year ends in September. True revenue is after all refunds and credits are finalized, but this data is interesting to see the amount of tax collected – and how it makes it’s way to Uncle Sam.

Ahh, New Year, new resolutions, and new stocks for stock-picking competitions. We are a web site ostensibly about Personal Finance and investing, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t enter a few contest this year. I already discussed my picks for the Money Pros Stock Picking Competition, but this time I’m entering a 4-stock contest run by Nelson at Financial Uproar. As always, just because I picked stocks here doesn’t mean I’m telling you to buy them – so do your own due diligence!

I know it says the 26th, but this thing will be posted on the last day of the year. You know what that means? Just like all the other web sites you read, we’re going to recap our best articles from the year (in addition to our normal roundup)! Lucky you!

Much to the chagrin of our regular readers who try to keep up with DQYDJ in a feed reader, we must once again anger you by asking you to click through to an article. It became tedious for us to calculate the ‘amount of the world economy’ of each country which was next in line to ‘possibly default’. Instead of quitting the subject entirely in disgust, we decided to just visualize the GDP of the entire world. To that we have added the share each country contributes to World GDP. Because sharing is caring, our data is posted at IBM’s Many Eyes for you to edit and play with. Fascinating stuff, and a great visualization if we do say so ourselves.