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VP Joe Biden Unveils Home Energy Efficiency Program
November 09, 2010 3:45 PM
ABC News' Mary Bruce reports:
The White House announced a new federal program today designed to help Americans make their homes more energy-efficient, which Vice President Joe Biden said it would save consumers money and create jobs.
“We believe that retrofitting homes has the potential to save us billions of dollars. And we believe that these projects that we are announcing today will go a long way toward growing an industry and in the process create good jobs for a very good public purpose,” Biden said at a Middle Class Task Force event at the White House this afternoon, noting that the new initiative could create tens of thousands of jobs.
The Recovery Through Retrofit program will enable homeowners to get low-cost energy audits of their homes and federally insured loans to pay for improvements.
“Look, folks, investing in this stuff is the only way to build an economy capable of not just competing in the 21st century, but actually leading, as we have in the past,” Biden explained. “Making our homes more energy efficient, a major part of this, is a no-brainer. It saves consumers money on their electricity, reduces our dependence on foreign oil, it creates jobs. It's all part of efforts to fundamentally reimagine the American economy by fundamentally changing our approach to energy consumption.”
Biden also said that retrofitting homes is “one of the quickest jolts” to move the country toward energy independence. “It is the low-hanging fruit out there. It doesn't require many significant technological breakthroughs to have gigantic impact on our consumption patterns,” Biden said.
Under the new program, homeowners will receive a “Home Energy Score” that ranks their home’s efficiency on a scale of one to ten and shows how it compares to others in the neighborhood. Trained and certified contractors will then estimate how much money a homeowner could potentially save through upgrades and will recommend improvements.
To pay for retrofitting, consumers will be eligible for up to $25,000 in low-interest, federally insured “PowerSaver” loans. The program also sets new guidelines for contractors that identify the skills needed for workers in the retrofit industry.
Several communities across the country are testing the new energy scoring system this fall before it's rolled out nationally next summer.
“I don't want to oversell this, but this is a significant start,” Biden concluded
The White House announced a new federal program today designed to help Americans make their homes more energy efficient, which Vice President Joe Biden said will save consumers money and create jobs.
“We believe that retrofitting homes has the potential to save us billions of dollars. And we believe that these projects that we are announcing today will go a long way toward growing an industry and in the process creating good jobs for a very good public purpose,” Biden said at a Middle Class Task Force event at the White House this afternoon, noting that the new initiative could create tens of thousands of jobs.
The “Recovery Through Retrofit” program will enable homeowners to get low-cost energy audits of their homes and federally insured loans to pay for improvements.
“Look, folks, investing in this stuff is the only way to build an economy capable of not just competing in the 21st century, but actually leading, as we have in the past,” Biden explained. “Making our homes more energy efficient, a major part of this, is a no-brainer. It saves consumers money on their electricity, reduces our dependence on foreign oil, it creates jobs. It's all part of efforts to fundamentally re-imagine the American economy by fundamentally changing our approach to energy consumption.”
Biden also said that retrofitting homes is “one of the quickest jolts” to move the country toward energy independence. “It is the low-hanging fruit out there. It doesn't require many significant technological breakthroughs to have gigantic impact on our consumption patterns,” Biden said.
Under the new program, homeowners will receive a “Home Energy Score” that ranks their home’s efficiency on a scale of one to 10 and shows how it compares with others in the neighborhood. Trained and certified contractors will then estimate how much money a homeowner could potentially save through upgrades and recommends improvements.
To pay for retrofitting, consumers will be eligible for up to $25,000 in low-interest, federally insured PowerSaver loans. The program also sets new guidelines for contractors that identify the skills needed for workers in the retrofit industry.
Several communities across the country are testing the new energy scoring system this fall before it's rolled out nationally next summer.
“I don't want to oversell this, but this is a significant start,” Biden said.
-Mary Bruce
November 9, 2010
in Joe Biden, Mary Bruce, White House
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Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative easing trying yet again to spark an economic recovery against the odds of a main street economy still mired in the collateral damage of central government's past grand visions.
Don't get me wrong. I actually agree that Fed needs to be doing what it is. We need to find a sustainable balance for our economy and it's a data intensive compass that can only be seen with clarity from the offices occupied by people like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair. What I do worry about though is that these central solutions too often take from the small and give to the big because the simplifying assumptions used by the economists and statisticians that support the process aren't capable of seeing the one-by-one trench warfare fights being fought by small businesses and individuals. It's an inherent policy formulation weakness of the academic brain trust behind our system that may be costing ordinary people more pain than necessary. But these ordinary Americans are there. We know this because they voted on Tuesday.
Fortunately, the United States is a big country and Washington D.C. isn't the only place exploring ways to find economic recovery formulae. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to chart independent paths to creating their own "islands of recovery". The City of Los Angeles' proposed Responsible Banking Ordinance continues to move through the committee process improving bit-by-bit into what I believe is an important emerging economic policy counterweight to ensure that the "small to big" tendencies of central solutions do not take us astray yet again.
The tale of the tape is something I believe worth sharing with the readers of the Huffington Post.
On October 26th, there was a public hearing by the L.A. City Jobs Committee chaired by Councilman Richard Alarcon on item CF 09-0234, Responsible Banking. The measure was approved with a number of questions to be investigated and reported to a hearing of the L.A. City Budget and Finance Committee to take place on Monday, November 8th. The questions aired by Councilman Bernard Parks focused on two areas. He asked for more information to determine if the cost and design of the process for implementation by the City was indeed workable. He also asked for clarification about how the differences between community banks, large complex banks and the city's debt underwriters would be recognized within the final ordinance.
Mr. Park's questions tell me that the L.A. process is indeed making progress because these are no longer questions about whether this a good thing for the economic interests of the City but rather how well is the plan risk managed. The interests behind the initiative become more positive as banks, large and small, begin to recognize that there is opportunity to be had here. The carrot being offered by the City of L.A is preference to win lucrative contracts that the City will be issuing anyway if evidence can be presented by the bidders that they are placing the interests of the region higher up the business priority list than their competition. It's subtle and far reaching in its potential to encourage money to circulate locally longer.
So now to ponder details,
As I reviewed the current version of the ordinance draft, it was clear the that City of Los Angeles had specified a data collection and reporting request that seeks to get banks to translate the nature of their business activities into measurement language that city governments can understand. The policy question is actually spot on but I'm also pretty sure that asking a bank to deliver the answer on a silver platter to the city first time out is a bit of a stretch. I think there's a better way to make it work for everyone and bring the cost/risk of the process well into good comfort.
The path to success here is to recognize two things. The first is that banks know how to report data to their regulators. They actually track all the information the city wants to know. Once a year they even have to report data to the granularity of branch-by-branch information to the FDIC. The other thing that's clear from the city draft is that municipal governments analyze their quality of service based on census tracts because that's how voters are bucketed. The trick in getting one system to talk to the other is to leverage by translating between the two universes via the zip codes of the U.S. postal service.
Asking the banks to do all the work is a lot of work. But if the City of Los Angeles were to re-design the ordinance implementation process to be a two step process where the banks report data in branches with identification of which zip codes are affected by that branch and there was a post- process by the City to morph the submittals into census tract visibility I think this would actually work reasonably well. City employees and/or other specialty vendors are more knowledgeable about the second step of the transformation than any bank will ever be. And there's a reason for that. Bankers, being lenders, have been discouraged from doing the second step for a long time because the technology that does so equates to gathering the data to do "red lining". So it's actually a better plan for the City of L.A. to deliberately separate these two steps from each other in its ordinance design.
My point here is that by taking a step back and recognizing where natural divisions of skill can be used to complement each other what seems onerous as an all-in-one data request can quickly become very doable.
This gets us to Mr. Park's second inquiry about larger out of area institutions and debt underwriters seeking to do business with the City. To that my observation is that the City of Los Angeles needs to set up a fair playing field for everyone. It's my read that by combining the suggestion above for banks with local branches with the tenets of the current ordinance draft language requesting distilled data into zip codes there's plenty of wiggle room for presentation of evidence of local involvement by these larger institutions, even those that do not have physical branches in the region. Complex transforms of data to support reporting requests are well within the capabilities of the IT departments of these larger businesses. Bearing in mind that these are also the banks that will go after the largest contracts with the City there's plenty of incentive for them to get their systems to produce the reports that will give them an advantage over competing bidders.
And in the long run I'm not just talking about competing just for L.A.'s business. There's a far larger universe of municipal and state government opportunities out there and I'll remind the readers of the Huffington post to look back at the history of my blogs for the one reporting on Bill Lockyer's inquiry earlier this year to the largest municipal bond underwriters.
I mean does anyone really think that the rest of America's League of Cities isn't watching how this plays out? Or that incoming California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Mayor of Oakland, doesn't already know that Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities in California are actively exploring how to affect the future of the State's economy using local strategies? Or that Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and Barack Obama won't read about this?
Keep going L.A. La-La Land may yet become the next shining star of economic recovery innovation.
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
« Previous |
Main
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VP Joe Biden Unveils Home Energy Efficiency Program
November 09, 2010 3:45 PM
ABC News' Mary Bruce reports:
The White House announced a new federal program today designed to help Americans make their homes more energy-efficient, which Vice President Joe Biden said it would save consumers money and create jobs.
“We believe that retrofitting homes has the potential to save us billions of dollars. And we believe that these projects that we are announcing today will go a long way toward growing an industry and in the process create good jobs for a very good public purpose,” Biden said at a Middle Class Task Force event at the White House this afternoon, noting that the new initiative could create tens of thousands of jobs.
The Recovery Through Retrofit program will enable homeowners to get low-cost energy audits of their homes and federally insured loans to pay for improvements.
“Look, folks, investing in this stuff is the only way to build an economy capable of not just competing in the 21st century, but actually leading, as we have in the past,” Biden explained. “Making our homes more energy efficient, a major part of this, is a no-brainer. It saves consumers money on their electricity, reduces our dependence on foreign oil, it creates jobs. It's all part of efforts to fundamentally reimagine the American economy by fundamentally changing our approach to energy consumption.”
Biden also said that retrofitting homes is “one of the quickest jolts” to move the country toward energy independence. “It is the low-hanging fruit out there. It doesn't require many significant technological breakthroughs to have gigantic impact on our consumption patterns,” Biden said.
Under the new program, homeowners will receive a “Home Energy Score” that ranks their home’s efficiency on a scale of one to ten and shows how it compares to others in the neighborhood. Trained and certified contractors will then estimate how much money a homeowner could potentially save through upgrades and will recommend improvements.
To pay for retrofitting, consumers will be eligible for up to $25,000 in low-interest, federally insured “PowerSaver” loans. The program also sets new guidelines for contractors that identify the skills needed for workers in the retrofit industry.
Several communities across the country are testing the new energy scoring system this fall before it's rolled out nationally next summer.
“I don't want to oversell this, but this is a significant start,” Biden concluded
The White House announced a new federal program today designed to help Americans make their homes more energy efficient, which Vice President Joe Biden said will save consumers money and create jobs.
“We believe that retrofitting homes has the potential to save us billions of dollars. And we believe that these projects that we are announcing today will go a long way toward growing an industry and in the process creating good jobs for a very good public purpose,” Biden said at a Middle Class Task Force event at the White House this afternoon, noting that the new initiative could create tens of thousands of jobs.
The “Recovery Through Retrofit” program will enable homeowners to get low-cost energy audits of their homes and federally insured loans to pay for improvements.
“Look, folks, investing in this stuff is the only way to build an economy capable of not just competing in the 21st century, but actually leading, as we have in the past,” Biden explained. “Making our homes more energy efficient, a major part of this, is a no-brainer. It saves consumers money on their electricity, reduces our dependence on foreign oil, it creates jobs. It's all part of efforts to fundamentally re-imagine the American economy by fundamentally changing our approach to energy consumption.”
Biden also said that retrofitting homes is “one of the quickest jolts” to move the country toward energy independence. “It is the low-hanging fruit out there. It doesn't require many significant technological breakthroughs to have gigantic impact on our consumption patterns,” Biden said.
Under the new program, homeowners will receive a “Home Energy Score” that ranks their home’s efficiency on a scale of one to 10 and shows how it compares with others in the neighborhood. Trained and certified contractors will then estimate how much money a homeowner could potentially save through upgrades and recommends improvements.
To pay for retrofitting, consumers will be eligible for up to $25,000 in low-interest, federally insured PowerSaver loans. The program also sets new guidelines for contractors that identify the skills needed for workers in the retrofit industry.
Several communities across the country are testing the new energy scoring system this fall before it's rolled out nationally next summer.
“I don't want to oversell this, but this is a significant start,” Biden said.
-Mary Bruce
November 9, 2010
in Joe Biden, Mary Bruce, White House
| Permalink
| Share
| User Comments (31)
Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative easing trying yet again to spark an economic recovery against the odds of a main street economy still mired in the collateral damage of central government's past grand visions.
Don't get me wrong. I actually agree that Fed needs to be doing what it is. We need to find a sustainable balance for our economy and it's a data intensive compass that can only be seen with clarity from the offices occupied by people like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair. What I do worry about though is that these central solutions too often take from the small and give to the big because the simplifying assumptions used by the economists and statisticians that support the process aren't capable of seeing the one-by-one trench warfare fights being fought by small businesses and individuals. It's an inherent policy formulation weakness of the academic brain trust behind our system that may be costing ordinary people more pain than necessary. But these ordinary Americans are there. We know this because they voted on Tuesday.
Fortunately, the United States is a big country and Washington D.C. isn't the only place exploring ways to find economic recovery formulae. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to chart independent paths to creating their own "islands of recovery". The City of Los Angeles' proposed Responsible Banking Ordinance continues to move through the committee process improving bit-by-bit into what I believe is an important emerging economic policy counterweight to ensure that the "small to big" tendencies of central solutions do not take us astray yet again.
The tale of the tape is something I believe worth sharing with the readers of the Huffington Post.
On October 26th, there was a public hearing by the L.A. City Jobs Committee chaired by Councilman Richard Alarcon on item CF 09-0234, Responsible Banking. The measure was approved with a number of questions to be investigated and reported to a hearing of the L.A. City Budget and Finance Committee to take place on Monday, November 8th. The questions aired by Councilman Bernard Parks focused on two areas. He asked for more information to determine if the cost and design of the process for implementation by the City was indeed workable. He also asked for clarification about how the differences between community banks, large complex banks and the city's debt underwriters would be recognized within the final ordinance.
Mr. Park's questions tell me that the L.A. process is indeed making progress because these are no longer questions about whether this a good thing for the economic interests of the City but rather how well is the plan risk managed. The interests behind the initiative become more positive as banks, large and small, begin to recognize that there is opportunity to be had here. The carrot being offered by the City of L.A is preference to win lucrative contracts that the City will be issuing anyway if evidence can be presented by the bidders that they are placing the interests of the region higher up the business priority list than their competition. It's subtle and far reaching in its potential to encourage money to circulate locally longer.
So now to ponder details,
As I reviewed the current version of the ordinance draft, it was clear the that City of Los Angeles had specified a data collection and reporting request that seeks to get banks to translate the nature of their business activities into measurement language that city governments can understand. The policy question is actually spot on but I'm also pretty sure that asking a bank to deliver the answer on a silver platter to the city first time out is a bit of a stretch. I think there's a better way to make it work for everyone and bring the cost/risk of the process well into good comfort.
The path to success here is to recognize two things. The first is that banks know how to report data to their regulators. They actually track all the information the city wants to know. Once a year they even have to report data to the granularity of branch-by-branch information to the FDIC. The other thing that's clear from the city draft is that municipal governments analyze their quality of service based on census tracts because that's how voters are bucketed. The trick in getting one system to talk to the other is to leverage by translating between the two universes via the zip codes of the U.S. postal service.
Asking the banks to do all the work is a lot of work. But if the City of Los Angeles were to re-design the ordinance implementation process to be a two step process where the banks report data in branches with identification of which zip codes are affected by that branch and there was a post- process by the City to morph the submittals into census tract visibility I think this would actually work reasonably well. City employees and/or other specialty vendors are more knowledgeable about the second step of the transformation than any bank will ever be. And there's a reason for that. Bankers, being lenders, have been discouraged from doing the second step for a long time because the technology that does so equates to gathering the data to do "red lining". So it's actually a better plan for the City of L.A. to deliberately separate these two steps from each other in its ordinance design.
My point here is that by taking a step back and recognizing where natural divisions of skill can be used to complement each other what seems onerous as an all-in-one data request can quickly become very doable.
This gets us to Mr. Park's second inquiry about larger out of area institutions and debt underwriters seeking to do business with the City. To that my observation is that the City of Los Angeles needs to set up a fair playing field for everyone. It's my read that by combining the suggestion above for banks with local branches with the tenets of the current ordinance draft language requesting distilled data into zip codes there's plenty of wiggle room for presentation of evidence of local involvement by these larger institutions, even those that do not have physical branches in the region. Complex transforms of data to support reporting requests are well within the capabilities of the IT departments of these larger businesses. Bearing in mind that these are also the banks that will go after the largest contracts with the City there's plenty of incentive for them to get their systems to produce the reports that will give them an advantage over competing bidders.
And in the long run I'm not just talking about competing just for L.A.'s business. There's a far larger universe of municipal and state government opportunities out there and I'll remind the readers of the Huffington post to look back at the history of my blogs for the one reporting on Bill Lockyer's inquiry earlier this year to the largest municipal bond underwriters.
I mean does anyone really think that the rest of America's League of Cities isn't watching how this plays out? Or that incoming California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Mayor of Oakland, doesn't already know that Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities in California are actively exploring how to affect the future of the State's economy using local strategies? Or that Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and Barack Obama won't read about this?
Keep going L.A. La-La Land may yet become the next shining star of economic recovery innovation.
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
« Previous |
Main
| Next »
VP Joe Biden Unveils Home Energy Efficiency Program
November 09, 2010 3:45 PM
ABC News' Mary Bruce reports:
The White House announced a new federal program today designed to help Americans make their homes more energy-efficient, which Vice President Joe Biden said it would save consumers money and create jobs.
“We believe that retrofitting homes has the potential to save us billions of dollars. And we believe that these projects that we are announcing today will go a long way toward growing an industry and in the process create good jobs for a very good public purpose,” Biden said at a Middle Class Task Force event at the White House this afternoon, noting that the new initiative could create tens of thousands of jobs.
The Recovery Through Retrofit program will enable homeowners to get low-cost energy audits of their homes and federally insured loans to pay for improvements.
“Look, folks, investing in this stuff is the only way to build an economy capable of not just competing in the 21st century, but actually leading, as we have in the past,” Biden explained. “Making our homes more energy efficient, a major part of this, is a no-brainer. It saves consumers money on their electricity, reduces our dependence on foreign oil, it creates jobs. It's all part of efforts to fundamentally reimagine the American economy by fundamentally changing our approach to energy consumption.”
Biden also said that retrofitting homes is “one of the quickest jolts” to move the country toward energy independence. “It is the low-hanging fruit out there. It doesn't require many significant technological breakthroughs to have gigantic impact on our consumption patterns,” Biden said.
Under the new program, homeowners will receive a “Home Energy Score” that ranks their home’s efficiency on a scale of one to ten and shows how it compares to others in the neighborhood. Trained and certified contractors will then estimate how much money a homeowner could potentially save through upgrades and will recommend improvements.
To pay for retrofitting, consumers will be eligible for up to $25,000 in low-interest, federally insured “PowerSaver” loans. The program also sets new guidelines for contractors that identify the skills needed for workers in the retrofit industry.
Several communities across the country are testing the new energy scoring system this fall before it's rolled out nationally next summer.
“I don't want to oversell this, but this is a significant start,” Biden concluded
The White House announced a new federal program today designed to help Americans make their homes more energy efficient, which Vice President Joe Biden said will save consumers money and create jobs.
“We believe that retrofitting homes has the potential to save us billions of dollars. And we believe that these projects that we are announcing today will go a long way toward growing an industry and in the process creating good jobs for a very good public purpose,” Biden said at a Middle Class Task Force event at the White House this afternoon, noting that the new initiative could create tens of thousands of jobs.
The “Recovery Through Retrofit” program will enable homeowners to get low-cost energy audits of their homes and federally insured loans to pay for improvements.
“Look, folks, investing in this stuff is the only way to build an economy capable of not just competing in the 21st century, but actually leading, as we have in the past,” Biden explained. “Making our homes more energy efficient, a major part of this, is a no-brainer. It saves consumers money on their electricity, reduces our dependence on foreign oil, it creates jobs. It's all part of efforts to fundamentally re-imagine the American economy by fundamentally changing our approach to energy consumption.”
Biden also said that retrofitting homes is “one of the quickest jolts” to move the country toward energy independence. “It is the low-hanging fruit out there. It doesn't require many significant technological breakthroughs to have gigantic impact on our consumption patterns,” Biden said.
Under the new program, homeowners will receive a “Home Energy Score” that ranks their home’s efficiency on a scale of one to 10 and shows how it compares with others in the neighborhood. Trained and certified contractors will then estimate how much money a homeowner could potentially save through upgrades and recommends improvements.
To pay for retrofitting, consumers will be eligible for up to $25,000 in low-interest, federally insured PowerSaver loans. The program also sets new guidelines for contractors that identify the skills needed for workers in the retrofit industry.
Several communities across the country are testing the new energy scoring system this fall before it's rolled out nationally next summer.
“I don't want to oversell this, but this is a significant start,” Biden said.
-Mary Bruce
November 9, 2010
in Joe Biden, Mary Bruce, White House
| Permalink
| Share
| User Comments (31)
Election week is done. It's time to get back to the business of finding real solutions for our nation's economic recovery. As this week ends it is clear that the appetite for federal stimuli is beginning its ebb tide. We see the Federal Reserve playing the risky cards of quantitative easing trying yet again to spark an economic recovery against the odds of a main street economy still mired in the collateral damage of central government's past grand visions.
Don't get me wrong. I actually agree that Fed needs to be doing what it is. We need to find a sustainable balance for our economy and it's a data intensive compass that can only be seen with clarity from the offices occupied by people like Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair. What I do worry about though is that these central solutions too often take from the small and give to the big because the simplifying assumptions used by the economists and statisticians that support the process aren't capable of seeing the one-by-one trench warfare fights being fought by small businesses and individuals. It's an inherent policy formulation weakness of the academic brain trust behind our system that may be costing ordinary people more pain than necessary. But these ordinary Americans are there. We know this because they voted on Tuesday.
Fortunately, the United States is a big country and Washington D.C. isn't the only place exploring ways to find economic recovery formulae. Across the country, cities and states are beginning to chart independent paths to creating their own "islands of recovery". The City of Los Angeles' proposed Responsible Banking Ordinance continues to move through the committee process improving bit-by-bit into what I believe is an important emerging economic policy counterweight to ensure that the "small to big" tendencies of central solutions do not take us astray yet again.
The tale of the tape is something I believe worth sharing with the readers of the Huffington Post.
On October 26th, there was a public hearing by the L.A. City Jobs Committee chaired by Councilman Richard Alarcon on item CF 09-0234, Responsible Banking. The measure was approved with a number of questions to be investigated and reported to a hearing of the L.A. City Budget and Finance Committee to take place on Monday, November 8th. The questions aired by Councilman Bernard Parks focused on two areas. He asked for more information to determine if the cost and design of the process for implementation by the City was indeed workable. He also asked for clarification about how the differences between community banks, large complex banks and the city's debt underwriters would be recognized within the final ordinance.
Mr. Park's questions tell me that the L.A. process is indeed making progress because these are no longer questions about whether this a good thing for the economic interests of the City but rather how well is the plan risk managed. The interests behind the initiative become more positive as banks, large and small, begin to recognize that there is opportunity to be had here. The carrot being offered by the City of L.A is preference to win lucrative contracts that the City will be issuing anyway if evidence can be presented by the bidders that they are placing the interests of the region higher up the business priority list than their competition. It's subtle and far reaching in its potential to encourage money to circulate locally longer.
So now to ponder details,
As I reviewed the current version of the ordinance draft, it was clear the that City of Los Angeles had specified a data collection and reporting request that seeks to get banks to translate the nature of their business activities into measurement language that city governments can understand. The policy question is actually spot on but I'm also pretty sure that asking a bank to deliver the answer on a silver platter to the city first time out is a bit of a stretch. I think there's a better way to make it work for everyone and bring the cost/risk of the process well into good comfort.
The path to success here is to recognize two things. The first is that banks know how to report data to their regulators. They actually track all the information the city wants to know. Once a year they even have to report data to the granularity of branch-by-branch information to the FDIC. The other thing that's clear from the city draft is that municipal governments analyze their quality of service based on census tracts because that's how voters are bucketed. The trick in getting one system to talk to the other is to leverage by translating between the two universes via the zip codes of the U.S. postal service.
Asking the banks to do all the work is a lot of work. But if the City of Los Angeles were to re-design the ordinance implementation process to be a two step process where the banks report data in branches with identification of which zip codes are affected by that branch and there was a post- process by the City to morph the submittals into census tract visibility I think this would actually work reasonably well. City employees and/or other specialty vendors are more knowledgeable about the second step of the transformation than any bank will ever be. And there's a reason for that. Bankers, being lenders, have been discouraged from doing the second step for a long time because the technology that does so equates to gathering the data to do "red lining". So it's actually a better plan for the City of L.A. to deliberately separate these two steps from each other in its ordinance design.
My point here is that by taking a step back and recognizing where natural divisions of skill can be used to complement each other what seems onerous as an all-in-one data request can quickly become very doable.
This gets us to Mr. Park's second inquiry about larger out of area institutions and debt underwriters seeking to do business with the City. To that my observation is that the City of Los Angeles needs to set up a fair playing field for everyone. It's my read that by combining the suggestion above for banks with local branches with the tenets of the current ordinance draft language requesting distilled data into zip codes there's plenty of wiggle room for presentation of evidence of local involvement by these larger institutions, even those that do not have physical branches in the region. Complex transforms of data to support reporting requests are well within the capabilities of the IT departments of these larger businesses. Bearing in mind that these are also the banks that will go after the largest contracts with the City there's plenty of incentive for them to get their systems to produce the reports that will give them an advantage over competing bidders.
And in the long run I'm not just talking about competing just for L.A.'s business. There's a far larger universe of municipal and state government opportunities out there and I'll remind the readers of the Huffington post to look back at the history of my blogs for the one reporting on Bill Lockyer's inquiry earlier this year to the largest municipal bond underwriters.
I mean does anyone really think that the rest of America's League of Cities isn't watching how this plays out? Or that incoming California Governor Jerry Brown, the former Mayor of Oakland, doesn't already know that Los Angeles, San Jose and other cities in California are actively exploring how to affect the future of the State's economy using local strategies? Or that Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair and Barack Obama won't read about this?
Keep going L.A. La-La Land may yet become the next shining star of economic recovery innovation.
eric seiger
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
Here is a guide for all those money chasers who wants learn how to make money with adsense. The people at Google came up with the thought back in 2003, if they could build out a way to present ads on any website, according to the subject material of the website, they could trade more ads.
Hence they came up with "Adsense". Through Adsense, a webmaster can display the identical ads that displays on Google's search results with familiar subject as the search results. When a visitor clicks on the ad, Google gets rewarded for the activity. So Google gives a part of the ad fees to the webmaster, the advertiser gets more publicity to targeted viewers, Google gets more places to show ads, and everyone is pleased .
Sounds uncomplicated and it can be. But there are a few other facets that you need to know. Google has a very stringent set of rules you must follow. So the first thing you should do if you want to gain knowledge about Adsense and how it works is to go to Google's web page and click on advertising programs at the bottom. Once you click there, you will see all the Adsense information and details on the right side.
I hope after getting hard on the rules of Google, you would like to know about its money making idea. Let's get to the money making branch of Google Adsense. There are a few compulsory components of making money with Adsense. Due to the nature of the business mould you have to have traffic (people who visit your website). You need to have information that has some plus point for the visitor. And you require to make it as easy as possible for that visitor to see something of importance in the ads that are displayed, so they will click on the ads.
The first two go together, if you have excellent information of importance to a visitor, the search engines will facilitate you out by sending traffic to your website. The third part, the clicking on the ads gets a little more tricky. Here's where some of those stringent Google rules come into picture. You can't force visitors into clicking, you can't display the ads in such a way that is not up to standard with the terms and conditions of Google.
You must provide a regular flow of new information, specific to your website subject matter and update regularly. You also require to be able to do this updating in an planned and easy manner. You will need a lot of visitors and the best way to get those visitors is more fresh and updated information. The more the search engines sees you update with eminence content, the more they will provide your website up in search engine results.
The amount of money or revenue you can create is totally dependent on the cost of the ads displayed, and the number of clicks. Prices or fees for the ads can run from as little as .10 to $20 per click based on the going competition in the Adwords fees. So the more cut-throat the subject area, the more the website owner gets for a click.
There is a lot of assumption what percentage of the fee that Google pays. Most consent that it's probably around 35%, so if Google gets a $1.00 from ads on your website, then the webmaster would get $0.35, so the higher the ad cost, the more the webmaster creates per click. As you can see, if you get 20 clicks a day at $0.35 that's about $7.00 per day.
The first step in getting into the Adsense big business is to choose your subject theme. The subject should be a unique and popular one, and a competitive subject so that the cost of the ad is high enough to afford a good return on your hard work.
Once you have resolute your subject matter, the next part is designing your website. There are many belief on what the best layout may be in regards to updating, getting the maximum clicks per visitor in regards to position of the ads, and magneting the more traffic. Some time extremely small changes in the design can have remarkable impact on the number clicks per visitor.
Everything about the layout and design should be regularly tested to conclude if you can get better on the click rate of your visitors. Testing is the solution to find out how to get the highest yield out of your visitors despite of your traffic volume.
There are two most important consideration on how to run an Adsense business. One is to build as many websites as possible, use up limited time in development and shift on to the next. The other is to build one very huge and detailed website and persist to develop the content.
There are positives and negatives on both the above consideration. Some say having 100 websites that create $20 per month and do not need extra work is the way to go. Others want one website that produces $1000 per day and you regularly update to amplify the visitors and clicks.
There are software do exist to do the many website method that help you create multiple websites a day. That is why we have so many websites these days, as with most money making prospects people have ill-treated the system and created a lot of useless websites.
Both techniques can be successful if the websites are well designed, researched, and content is of worth to the visitor. Hosting up a lots of websites of no significance will not make you any money. Secondly, spending time on a subject matter that produces a low click fee most aptly will not give a good return on your time devoted.
There is lot of information available on the net which will misguide you. Many experts will tell you to find a low rivalry subject since it would be easier to pull visitors. Lookout for an vicinity where there are only a few hundred searches per month. Three to four hundred visitors a month won't create much money since your market is so narrow. Since the area has no competition, the ad fees are possibly low too and so the return.
We also see the opposite end of the gamut where they recommend you go for the highest competitive terms and ad fees. There are topics that Google gets up to $40 per click, therefore you as a webmaster can get $16 per click. This is certainly a good news. But the bad news is you will be competing with number of the best in the business and it's very tricky to build any traffic to your website.
The finest idea I can make is to find some tip between these two edges. Find a subject matter that gets a sufficient enough ad fee to offer a good return on your efforts, and low enough competition that you can attain the required level of traffic.
So if you want to learn how to make money with Google Adsense, follow a few fundamental rules. No matter what technique or mould you use for your Adsense business, be confident that your content is fresh , meaningful and updated to the visitor. Do the appropriate study to determine the worth of the ad fees and popularity of the subject area. Also keep testing different layouts to make sure you are monetizing your click rate.
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
Joel Klein to <b>News</b> Corp; Cathie Black to Head NYC Schools
Joel Klein, who's been the head of the New York City school system since 2002, is stepping down—to take a job at News Corp. One insane job to another! His replacement: Hearst chairman Cathie Black.
<b>News</b> Poll FAIL - Epic Fail Funny Videos and Funny Pictures
epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. ... News Poll FAIL. epic fail photos - News Poll FAIL. Submitted by: Unknown. Incorrect source or offensive? G-rated, math is too hard, news, News Poll, opinions, poll, television ...
Michael Jackson's 'Breaking <b>News</b>' Saga Continues With Tweets <b>...</b>
"Regarding the song 'Breaking News' I am so sorry you have to deal with this. My uncle loved you so much and would not want it this way," Jackson's nephew Taryll tweeted. There are songs that are my uncle singing on the upcoming album ...
eric seiger
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