Key to climbing out of poverty: Location

And now there is new research, published this week, showing that when it comes to the chances that a poor child born in America can climb up from the lowest rungs on the economic ladder, where that child lives may be more telling than previously thought. The researchers started by looking narrowly at questions of tax policy for poor parents, when they discovered something surprising but unmistakable in their data.

“Location matters, place matters,” says Nathaniel  Hendren, a Harvard professor and one of the authors of the study. When it comes to a low-income child having a chance to climb up the economic ladder, “it matters where you grow up.”

That climb, the study shows, happens most commonly in the Northeast and the West, along with parts of the upper Midwest and much of Texas. New York, Boston, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Houston give a poor child a decent fighting chance. (In the map below, lighter colors indicate higher mobility; darker colors indicate lower mobility).

The odds of children from poor families moving into the middle class are significantly lower in the Southeast and industrial Midwest. Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, and Columbus are some of the metropolitan areas where upward mobility seems to be seriously limited. Read more >>

Stand-alone emergency rooms popping up

When Lisa Boncler gashed the side of her head on the gate to her front yard, she immediately called her neighbor for a ride to the emergency room.

In this fast-growing Houston suburb, six ERs are just a short drive away. She chose Texas Emergency Care Center, a facility that feels like a Western lodge with its earth-toned brick walls, leather chairs and coffee bar. The eight-bed ER that opened last year has almost everything — except, that is, an attached hospital.

"This is so convenient," says a smiling Boncler, 40, as a doctor prepared to close her wound with medical staples less than an hour after her accident. "I've been here before. It's always fast."

The speedier care offered at such facilities, which are springing up in many states, including Texas, Florida and North Carolina, comes at a steep cost, however. Stand-alone ERs, which are often located near high-end shopping centers and target consumers with private insurance, bill like regular emergency rooms. Those prices, which can top $1,000 for a single visit, are spurring worries that the rapid growth of the facilities will lead to higher insurance premiums. Read more >>

10 States That Are Maxxed Out on Credit Cards

Finance.yahoo.com


Here are the top 10 states with the highest bankcard utilization ratios.

10. Louisiana
Average Balance: $3,503
Average Limit: $16,257
Average Utilization: 21.55%

Louisiana comes in last on our list, with a decently low average balance per consumer. The Bayou state could benefit from asking their credit card issuers to up their limits though — a tactic that can lower your utilization without forcing you to cut spending.

9. Texas
Average Balance: $4,072
Average Limit: $18,857
Average Utilization: 21.59%

The saying goes that “everything’s bigger in Texas” and that must be true of the state’s credit cards too, as the Lone Star state has the highest average limit of all of the states on our list. The high credit limit doesn’t mean that Texans aren’t spending though, as they also have the third highest balance.

8. South Carolina
Average Balance: $3,786
Average Limit: $17,351
Average Utilization: 21.82%

7. Oklahoma
Average Balance: $3,579
Average Limit: $16,396
Average Utilization: 21.83%

6. Arkansas
Average Balance: $3,469
Average Limit: $15,751
Average Utilization: 22.02%

Arkansas takes the prize for lowest average balance of any state that made our list. Perhaps residents of the Natural state could use a new credit card, which can add to their overall limit and decrease their utilization ratio.

5. Nevada
Average Balance: $3,999
Average Limit: $18,047
Average Utilization: 22.16%

4. Alabama
Average Balance: $3,618
Average Limit: $16,085
Average Utilization: 22.49%

3. Georgia
Average Balance: $4,246
Average Limit: $18,520
Average Utilization: 22.93%

Though Texas took the highest average limit of all the states on our list, Georgia wasn’t far behind. The state could try to skim more money off their monthly expenses to cut their utilization ratio.

2. Mississippi
Average Balance: $3,384
Average Limit: $14,644
Average Utilization: 23.11%

Though this state comes in second in our rankings, its residents aren’t charging more dollars, on average, than any other state on our list. The high utilization ratio in Mississippi is due primarily to the fact that its average limit per consumer is very low.

1. Alaska
Average Balance: $4,563
Average Limit: $16,453
Average Utilization: 27.73%

While all of the other states in our rankings stayed below a 25% utilization ratio, Alaska broke that barrier. This should come as no surprise to those who pay attention to Alaskans’ personal finances. The 49th state has recently topped lists of the highest credit card balances and highest revolving account debt. Read more >>

Record 47,791,996 on food stamps

On Friday, the United States Department of Agriculture quietly released new statistics related to the food stamps program, officially known as SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). The numbers reveal, in 2012, the food stamps program was the biggest it's ever been, with an average of 46,609,072 people on the program every month of last year. 47,791,996 people were on the program in the month of December 2012.

The federal government also says that in a given month in 2012, the number of households on food stamps was 22,329,713.

The state with the highest average number of participants per month in 2012 was Texas, with an astonishing 4,038,440 folks drawing from the program. The second highest is California, with 3,964,221, and then Florida, at 3,353,064.

Washington, D.C., with an estimated population of 617,996, had an average of 141,147 participants. Meaning, roughly 23 percent of folks living in D.C. are on food stamps, according to the numbers provided by the federal government. The participation rate in Texas, which has an estimated population of 26,059,203, 15.5 percent. Read more >>

Gun stores report brisk business after Conn. massacre

Although national firearms sales and data on FBI background checks are not immediately available for the days before and after the second-largest school shooting in U.S. history, there is evidence that firearms sales are moving at a brisk pace.

Some gun dealers in Oregon, Virginia and Texas said Monday that stocks of handguns and shotguns were selling quickly.

"Our sales are astronomical,'' said Karl Durkheimer, owner of Northwest Armory in Portland, Ore. "We have customers coming in who are very worried for their personal safety. There is no question that sales are related'' to Friday's shooting, which left 28 dead including the 20-year-old shooter and his mother, and last week's deadly shooting at a Portland-area shopping mall. Read more >>

White House website deluged with secession petitions from 20 states

How would Old Glory look with 30 stars instead of 50? As far-fetched as it may sound, the White House might soon be forced by its own rules to examine the question.

On Nov.7, the day after President Barack Obama was re-elected, the White House’s website received a petition asking the administration to allow Louisiana to secede.

If 25,000 people sign the petition by Dec. 7, it will “require a response” from the Obama administration, according to published rules of the White House’s online “We the People” program.

The Louisiana petition has collected more than 12,300 signatures in four days. A separate effort from Texas has 15,400 supporters. Similar petitions from 18 other states began arriving Nov. 9, bringing the total — for the moment — to 20. Read more >>

Thousands of dead fish litter Galveston beaches

Thousands of dead fish are washing ashore along the Texas coast, from the Colorado River to Galveston Island, and Parks and Wildlife biologists suspect low oxygen levels offshore may be to blame.
Visitors to Jamaica Beach were surprised – and a little disturbed – by what the tide brought in.

Biologists with the Parks and Wildlife Department began testing pH, saline and oxygen levels in water samples taken along the coast. ”When something’s affecting one [fish] then usually a lot of them are being affected at the same time because it’s such a big group [swimming in schools] together,” said Steven Mitchell of Texas Parks and Wildlife.

He suspects low oxygen in the water is a problem. However, he won’t know for sure until biologists are able to test water up to 10 miles offshore. That could take several days. Read more >>

Iraq war reconstruction: $6 billion to $8 billion wasted

The official in charge of monitoring America’s $51 billion effort to reconstruct Iraq has estimated that $6 billion to $8 billion of that amount was lost to waste, fraud and abuse.

Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR) for the past eight years, gave that estimate in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity on Monday, shortly after releasing a new summary of his office’s many grim discoveries since it began work in in 2004.

In Friday’s report, Bowen said the exact funds lost to fraud and waste “can never be known,” largely because of poor record-keeping by the U.S. agencies involved in the effort. These include the Departments of State and Defense, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

According to the report, auditors repeatedly found that the State Department and Defense Department failed to properly review invoices from government contractors, often approving billions of dollars in services without checking if costs were accurate or efficient. “I think the consistent theme throughout our eight years of oversight work has been the inconsistent availability of records and information on contracts and costs,” said Bowen, a former Texas lawyer. Read more >>

Majority of US in a Drought

U.S. drought grows to cover widest area since 1956

The drought gripping the United States is the widest since 1956, according to new data released Monday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Fifty-five percent of the continental U.S. was in a moderate to extreme drought by the end of June, NOAA's National Climactic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said in its monthly State of the Climate drought report. That's the largest percentage since December 1956, when 58 percent of the country was covered by drought.

Last week, a government report said 2011's record drought in Texas was made "roughly 20 times more likely" because of man-made climate change, specifically meaning warming that comes from greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide, CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports.

The study, requested by NOAA, looked at 50 years of weather data in Texas and concluded that man-made warming had to be a factor in the drought. Read more>>

FBI Says Mexican Cartel Funneled Money Through Bank Of America

A Mexican cocaine-trafficking cartel used accounts at Bank of America Corp. to hide money and invest illegal drug-trade proceeds in U.S. racehorses, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said. The alleged ties between the violent drug gang known as Los Zetas and the second-largest U.S. bank by assets were described in a 35-page affidavit filed in federal court in Texas last month. According to an FBI agent, a horse-buying and training business created to launder drug money had accounts at the Charlotte, N.C., bank.

According to an FBI agent, a horse-buying and training business created to launder drug money had accounts at the Charlotte, N.C., bank. A U.S. citizen who is the brother of a top Zetas leader and allegedly served as the front man for the drug cartel's horse operation moved money in and out of one of these Bank of America accounts and a separate personal Bank of America account, the FBI said in the court filing.

The FBI agent's sworn statement describes roughly a dozen transactions since December 2009 in which more than $1.5 million was deposited or withdrawn from two accounts at the bank. Read more >>

Texas Schools to Track Students Via RFID Chips

Francisco Vara-Orta
My San Antonio.com 
 Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.

District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.

 Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, [Texas]plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.

Federal Ban Sought on Cell Phone Use While Driving

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called on Thursday for a federal law to ban talking on a cell phone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.

Tough federal legislation is the only way to deal with what he called a "national epidemic," he said at a distracted-driving summit in San Antonio, Texas, that drew doctors, advocates and government officials.

LaHood said it is important for the police to have "the opportunity to write tickets when people are foolishly thinking they can drive safely or use a cell phone and text and drive." More...

Movement to throw all sitting House Reps out of Congress

Opening segment for the show "That's What I Like About the South" with Bea Harrison, filmed in Biloxi, MS and aired on WXXV-TV, the Fox affiliate.