Payroll Tax Cut Calculator | WhiteHouse.gov

Here's a nifty little interactive tool to figure out how you got screwed by the Super Committee's inaction:

Why Obama Should Pay Attention To Occupy Wall Street’s Critique Of Higher Education | The New Republic

Interesting op-ed in The New Republic:

"...for most college students, debt is a legitimate and growing problem. As recently as the early 1990s, most undergraduates didn’t borrow. Now, two-thirds emerge from college with a loan. Over the last three decades, college tuition has grown far faster than inflation, in good economic times and bad. Even health care costs have grown slower by comparison. Colleges like to blame feckless state legislators who won’t financially support higher learning, and in states like California they certainly have a point. But much of the guilt lies with higher education institutions themselves. They have spent billions on vanity building projects, administrative overhead, and money-losing sports programs in order to compete for status and fame. Students and parents have been left with the bill.

At the same time, the economy has increasingly organized itself so that people require a college degree in order to pursue a decent career. Unemployment rates during the great recession have been catastrophic for the uneducated even as graduates have mostly kept their jobs. So students and parents have little choice: pay what colleges choose to charge you, and if you don’t have the money in the bank, take out a loan."

For what it's worth, the White House is trying to get the message out that it's making an effort to Help Americans Manage Student Loan Debt.

Myths and Facts About the Debt-Ceiling Compromise (according to The White House)

Not sure if this effort on the part of the White House is meant to assuage nervous supporters or convince undecided independents but the White House is in full campaign mode defending and explaining President Obama's actions in the debt ceiling debate with both an FAQ page and an infographic describing the agreement.

VP Biden Op-Ed: Delivering the accountable government that taxpayers deserve | McClatchy

Check out this op-ed today from Vice President Joe Biden.

Where does your tax money go?

Get a receipt for your taxes right here!

American Express Open Forum: 8 Powerful Communication Lessons from the White House

Great article posted on OpenForum.com about how small businesses can utilize some of the tools the White House uses for communication (with examples). These are:

1. Multiple communication streams
2. Be Simple and Creative
3. Solicit Input
4. Use Photos and Video Liberally
5. Produce Lots of (Good) Segmented Content
6. Internal Cross Marketing
7. Nothing Beats Real-Time Information
8. Build Interactivity Into Everything You Do

Definitely worth reading for anyone that needs a communications plan for a business, entertainment career, or any other kind of professional or personal marketing.

The Obudget

The White House announced its 2012 budget today. The New York Times has a great interactive visual representation of it.

Think you can do a better job? Knock yourself out.

Enhanced State of Union Address

Here is the video of President Obama's State of the Union address. If you haven't heard, the did a really cool thing where they had graphs and charts appear alongside the President as he spoke through he speech. It's kind of like watching a lecture with a corresponding PowerPoint presentation. Be sure to check it out!

I know we're trying but we really have a LONG LONG way to go...

A White House blog post this week talked about the Department of Transportation awarding $2.4 Billion as part of its efforts to develop high-speed rail in the United States. Now everyone that’s reading this knows how I feel about high-speed rail. What solidified it much more for me was what a colleague of mine from our Shanghai office told me. He’s working out of the New York office for two weeks and he said his hometown of SuZhou is roughly 74 km (46 miles) from Shanghai. He said the new high-speed line cuts the 45 minute ride of the older trains down to 25 minutes.

Someone show me a new train anywhere in the United States that covers roughly 50 miles between two major cities in under an hour, let alone 45 minutes or 25 minutes?

Is there a reason the red line is so far north of the others?

A Wall Street Journal article today focuses on the White House initiative to boost Latino achievement in colleges. However, the report it cites states that Latino college-completion rates are depressed due to “language barriers and obstacles caused by immigration status”, which would also be the case with Asians too but the graph included in the article does not show that.

Now, in my lifetime I’ve known many people across every race, religion, and ethnic background and realized that intelligence is strictly an individual thing and nothing that can be attributed to a person’s race, background, upbringing, etc. In fact, the biggest factor I’ve seen is work ethic and it’s hard to argue that any particular group is inherently lazy or more likely to work harder and/or smarter than any other group. So what’s really happening here?