Don't Quit Your Day Job…

The Alternative Minimum Tax, a tax enacted in 1969 to set a minimum level of taxation, has had major mission creep – especially in the last 10 years. The Alternative Minimum Tax is a secondary set of tax brackets which disallow certain deductions which are allowed under the normal tax code. The tax was enacted since 155 rich households avoided paying tax altogether back when the tax was started. Today, even with annual ‘patches’ by congress, the alternative tax bracket is hitting more and more people – 4.5 million tax payers last year. Hope you’re having fun doing your taxes this year!

The official U-3 unemployment rate is now 9.6%, up a tick from the 9.5% we saw last report. However, private employers added 67,000 jobs in August, while July’s numbers were revised upwards to 107,000 private sector positions and June numbers were also adjusted to 61,000.

Amid all of the talk about unemployment duration and the unemployment rate is a little known ratio, touched upon in this Wall Street Journal editorial. You’re curious, however – because the unemployment rate calculation has been messed around with quite a bit, how does it line up with the ratio? Lucky for you, I’ve got a graph here.

That treasure trove of data the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a fascinating report that it calls the “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation” report. Last Wednesday it released its report on the compensation costs at various employer types (and locales) for March 2010. One of the interesting things it does, as picked up on Mark Perry’s (great) blog, is to spin out the government’s estimate of overall hourly wages – for private industry, and for state and local government workers. The government workers win in a first round knockout…

For whatever reason, my articles recently keep coming back to charitable giving and volunteering. Here I am again with another post on the BLS’s recent release of volunteering statistics. Reader Patrick of Cash Money Life wondered if the reason that married parents volunteered in such high numbers was because many have children who open up volunteer activities. On the surface, this is a very good theory; younger kids play baseball, soccer and other sports, become Boy and Girl Scouts, and generally do things which occasionally ask people to volunteer to help (like go to school!). Let’s see if we can tease out the effect this has on overall volunteering rates!

Or is it? The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 2.03% yesterday, on the surface a nice gain for the index. Rises such as that give confidence to investors that the worst is over and it’s time to work back into stocks. Let me briefly present the other side of that argument.