The biggest bank failure of 2009 happened last week when the FDIC moved to shut down Colonial BancGroup of Alabama, along with four other banks, bringing the total thus far this year to more than 70. A quick deal with BB&T to purchase Colonial caused its shares to rise. FDIC will be shouldering much of the losses, of course, which adds billions to the bailout of the banking system while at the same time working to further bank consolidation for the wealthiest banks still standing.

Such situations are a ‘win-lose’ proposition. Win for BB&T and their stockholders, lose for We the Taxpayers. This scheme where the feds cap the buyer’s losses at taxpayer expense is just another outrage to the hard-pressed public at a time when all the glorious pronouncements of economic recovery have yet to even begin to touch the lives of the general public still losing jobs at a high rate while no new jobs seem to be forthcoming.

And on top of the still-dismal economic situation for average people in this country, now we have the extremely contentious health care reform debate ongoing that looks more and more like bad street theater every day. Between the noisy hoards of idle old folks bused around the country to shut down discussion of provisions during Town Hall meetings held by vacationing congresscritters, and the absurd lies being spewed by the usual suspects at FoxNews and right wing radio, it’s looking more and more like the final result will be a significant new tax on the working poor that will be earmarked directly to the health insurance industry by means of mandatory purchase of junk insurance.

The situation is really health insurance reform, though reform isn’t really a good title either considering how much the Death by Spreadsheet crowd will end up getting from the public directly and from the government as subsidies. Yes, they will have to stop excluding anyone with a pre-existing condition, retroactively canceling policies if the insured person gets sick, and simply not paying for covered health care after the fact. But they will more than make up for however much this costs them by the ~40 million new policies the uninsured will have to purchase, and with government subsidies for many of those as well as losses incurred by having to honor their contracts.

And I am sure readers know that “junk insurance” – insurance that has a high deductible and hefty co-pays – isn’t going to help a person living on a shoestring budget already. Whatever ‘extra’ money those people might have saved over months to pay for a doctor’s visit will be taken by the insurers for that junk insurance. Leaving the working poor even worse off than they were before.

Even the so-called “Public Option” Obama and other Democrats have been touting is just another insurance option. Basic buy-in Medicaid, for which the government plans to auto-deduct from people’s bank accounts to make sure their premiums get paid on time. No word yet on whether they’ll do that for bank accounts that don’t have enough money in them to cover the deduction (like mine, for instance), thus causing families to suffer huge bank overdraft charges and messing up their other payment plans, or if a too-slim bank account qualifies people for automatic subsidy to make those insurance payments. But if I were to guess, I’d guess it’s just going to shaft the barely getting by yet again by throwing their bare budgeting into chaos and costing them more than they can pay.

Isn’t it funny how the wealthy and well-off are somehow able to convince themselves that we at the low end of the spectrum somehow have lots and lots of ‘extra’ money they should be able to take at will?

At any rate, we will not know until Christmas at least what the health care bill looks like or what’s in it. None of us should be holding our breath hoping for real reform or actual access to health care. In the end it’s way more likely that the government will simply be able to claim that they’ve ‘fixed’ the access problem – those ~50 million uninsured and ~100 million underinsured – so the U.S. will no longer rank #37 on the list of 37 industrialized nations on all measures of health care. While We the People will simply be poorer than we were before. I’d like to be pleasantly surprised, but don’t expect to be so long as people like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are spouting lies about killing granny and the Medicare crowd is hollering for the government to keep their hands off their Medicare. Stupid and/or evil people always seem to win in this country.

If you haven’t called or written your representatives and senators yet, please do so. We don’t have much of a voice in what happens in this country, but they at least need to know we’re out here and want real access to health care instead of just another theft of what little we do have. Then when we lose we’ll have earned our own bitching rights!

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports its latest unemployment figures as of January 2009 as 7.6% of the workforce, compared to 7.2% in December of 2008. We all know that jobs are being lost by the hundreds of thousands across the nation. We also know that these statistics account only for those workers who file and are eligible to receive unemployment benefits. Which makes the real unemployment figures at least twice as high, now more than 15%. That’s definitely edging into ‘Depression’ territory, and there will be no let-up any time soon.

Whether or not you qualify for unemployment benefits – which aren’t enough to pay the mortgage for most people – if you are out of work you and your family probably qualify for food stamps, or what is now termed by USDA as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP]. The Social Security Online website also has good information about eligibility for food stamps, and we most certainly hope that readers of this weblog aren’t too proud to make good use of this program if they find themselves in need. You may hope that another good job will soon be offered, but don’t let your family go hungry in the meantime. DO something!

This blog has examined issues of health and nutrition in trying economic times in several post series. 3 Easy Ways to Eat Cheap outlines best strategies for stretching food dollars without sacrificing nutrition. What’s For Dinner? examines fast-rising food prices and ways to get around paying so much. There are some good resources linked in those posts and their follow-ups, but today I discovered a whole new resource that is dedicated specifically to getting the most from minimal food budgets and food stamp allotments.

The website is called Cook for Good and it breaks things down for all to understand. Food stamps in most instances offer a mere $1.50 or so for a single meal per person in a household. It is difficult to figure out how to feed a family on so little as the price of food goes up every single day at the supermarket, and most government subsidies won’t cover fresh foods, farmer’s market purchases, etc. In this website a host of questions and answers can be found on just how to stretch those fake food dollars to not only keep your family fed, but fed well and without the gross extra calories that have turned the “face of poverty” in this country from rail thin to seriously obese in a short 50 years.

Cook for Good even offers a month’s worth of menus to demonstrate exactly how to feed a family for an average of just $1.25 per meal. Including desserts far less fattening than Twinkies! Going with the “green” menu adds just 53¢ to the cost per meal, but includes fresh and organic foods. Between this example of a month’s worth of menus and the shopping hints, recipes and hints on the website, anyone recently out of work (thus with time to spend), on food stamps and concerned about health and nutrition can plan ahead and feel much better about the whole situation.

Who knows? Perhaps if enough people have to go through figuring out how to eat well on much less money, when the economic situation improves we’ll be generally slimmer, healthier and more involved in eating good food than we ever were before. That would be something very good to come of these trying economic times. So go on over to Cook for Good, check out the links here at Shoestring Budget, and if you know of more resources out there please offer them in the comments.

Eat well, be happy!

Links:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Food Stamp Facts
Cook for Good
Month of Menus
3 Easy Ways to Eat Cheap
What’s For Dinner?

Let’s face it. The “Recession of 2008″ is now officially over, because it is January, the first month of the “Depression of 2009.” The last jobless statistics for ’08 showed more than half a million new first-time unemployment filers, which represent only those workers who qualify for unemployment. Final ‘official’ tally for ’08: 2.6 million jobs lost. These are the worst figures in 16 years, while the average hourly workweek for those underneath the supervisory level doing the real work shrank to the lowest number since the government started keeping such statistics in 1964. That, for the quick-math challenged, is 45 years ago.

Most of us who watch the economic comings and goings in this strange era of bail-outs for super-crooks and callous economic eugenics for working families also know that the ‘official’ statistics don’t come anywhere close to matching what is really going on in the real world. Young workers, seasonal workers, minimum wage workers, temp workers and millions who otherwise don’t qualify for unemployment aid or who have exhausted their eligibility are completely off the books – no one bothers to count them, even if their numbers swell the real unemployment picture to more than double the reported statistics. “Unofficial” numbers can range anywhere from 11.1 million jobless Americans to somewhere very close to 20% of our work force. No one much likes to mention that, since anything more than 10% puts us in that ‘depression’ they’d rather slit their wrists than admit to.

Because lengthy layoffs and lack of available new jobs will tend to swell the ranks of both young and unemployed workers going back to school (one way or another) to expand their horizons, I have found a very interesting website tool called Online College that readers may find helpful for themselves or their children suddenly looking at a bleak employment picture for the foreseeable future. There are good and very useful articles posted to the site, and one stands out right now – 15 Ways to Set Yourself Apart in a Recession.

These are hints on how to make yourself stand out on the job so the bosses looking for employees to lay off skip right over you. Some have to do with expanding your useful role to the company, how to make the best impression while looking for new work, and what you can do educationally while ‘between jobs’ to enhance your hireability when the smoke clears. There are even helpful hints about striking out on your own – always risky even in the best of economic times – to find opportunities that will either get you inside a startup or send you in the direction of starting your own business.

And on that starting your own front, a website called brainz offers some great ideas in 33 Ways to Fund Your Startup Business. With the observation that even in the worst of economic times there is always money out there and people looking to invest, these 33 ideas are pure gold for the budding entrepreneur with a good (and potentially lucrative) idea. Some will cost the idea man less than others, and it’s probably not the best idea in this economic climate to risk one’s own property, if one’s real estate is still worth anything (and that’s not very clear right now in many parts of the country).

In future posts we’ll take a look at some of the ideas out there for small business startups, supply and demand and the most “recession-proof” goods and services people will need regardless of economic situation. So stay tuned, don’t get too discouraged, and begin taking a close look at where your family is right now, what its immediate future looks like, what resources you may have to invest and how best to invest them.

Links:

Free Fall: Jobless Rate Worst Since ’94
Mid-Cycle Meltdown: Jobless Claims January 15, 2009
15 Ways to Set Yourself Apart in a Recession
33 Ways to Fund Your Startup Business