1. Over the past few weeks, as a meat crisis has seemed more and more likely, fast food restaurants have begun increasing their prices. McDonald's is reconsidering the items on its dollar menu, Hardee's has changed the options in its 2-for-$3 promotion from burgers to hot dogs, and even upscale Chipotle's is planning a price increase.
"My take? - A good reason to quit buying fatburgers and eat healthy for a change"
2. Oil Prices Sink Despite OPEC Decision, the price for a gallon of gasoline fell below year-ago levels for the first time in 2008, even as OPEC announced a huge production cut in an attempt to halt the declines.
Crude prices have now fallen 56 percent from the highs reached in July, and more than $41 per barrel in just the last 30 days.
OPEC said at an emergency meeting Friday that it will slash oil production by 1.5 million barrels to stem the "dramatic collapse" of oil prices, but crude prices plunged 5 percent anyway as financial markets spiraled downward across the globe.
Crude for December delivery fell $3.24 to $64.60 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices had fallen as low as $62.85 earlier in the day.
The failure of a big production cut by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to stem the slide in crude prices only cemented sentiments on the oil market.
A report released Friday by the U.S. Department of Transportation that showed the largest monthly decline in miles driven in 66 years.
Americans drove 5.6 percent less, or 15 billion fewer miles, in August 2008 compared with August 2007 — the biggest single monthly decline since the data was first collected regularly in 1942.
Americans have drastically altered driving habits, if they are driving at all, amid a severe economic downturn.
From November through August, Americans drove 78.1 billion fewer miles than they did over the same 10-month period a year earlier. The decline is most evident in rural interstate travel where travel is down more than 4 percent compared with a 2 percent decline in urban miles traveled.
"My take? - Cut production and raise prices, that'll help with the cost of transporting products and spiraling prices of consumer goods in these hard economic times,,, yea right!"
3. The Washington Post recently ran a three-part series that calls into question one of the primary tools used in our "War on Terror", the new U.S. Passport. According to the W.P., U.S. passports are printed and assembled overseas in countries with highly questionable security and sold to us at a 600% markup.
The Government Printing Office (GPO), the government agency that handles most government printing needs, decided to outsource insertion of computer chip and radio-frequency i.d. technology into the newly redesigned passports, and fought the suggestion to limit bidders to domestic companies. The winning company, based in the Netherlands, now receives the passport blanks from the GPO, adds the computer chip, then ships them off to Thailand where the RFID antennas are added. Remember Thailand? Land of government instability nestled in the crook between India, Russia and China?
The new technology allows border guards to scan the passport and wirelessly access information encoded in the computer chip. Producing these new passports costs the GPO $7.97, which it marks up to $15 to sell to the State Department. The State Department then marks them up to $100 to sell to us.
How could the GPO think that Americans would stand for such a compromise to their security? Aren't there ANY American companies that can handle these? And why does our government charge us a markup of over 600% for an essential document?
If we care so little about the security of our passports, why not simply let Wal-Mart handle our passport business? I bet they could get the cost down to $9.99, or two for $15.
"My take? - Our smarter than ever government hard at work as usual, screwing us every chance they get, we have to get these money grubbing old school republicans out of office and get someone in there for the people, not overpaid old farts that just care about stuffing their own pockets."
My take on outsourcing? The current government seems to think that outsourcing will bring third-world countries up to our economic level when what it's doing is pulling "us" down to theirs.
