BUSINESS
April 29, 2012 | Reid Kanaley
Inflation erodes the purchasing power of money over time. Its effects on your life depend on how well your income and investments do keeping up. Take a look at these sites to see how you're doing. Digging the data. InflationData.com is a personal-finance site edited by Tim McMahon. It posts a current inflation rate, based on the government's Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, of 2.65 percent. The site is rich in articles, charts and links on housing, employment, other economic matters that go into the cost of living, and calculators for doing some figuring on your own. www.inflationdata.com Grim calculation.
BUSINESS
February 7, 2012 | By Erin E. Arvedlund, Inquirer Columnist
With the government pumping money into the economy and the Federal Reserve pledging to keep short-term interest rates low until late 2014, inflation could soar. What's an investor to do? Pure savers will lose. Low interest rates mean that your deposits aren't going to earn much of anything for the next three years. You're going to lose money on holding cash - after inflation. JPMorgan's Chris Millard explains that with a 2.0-2.5 percent inflation rate, "that means if you leave your money in cash for the next three years, you lose 2.5 percent of that every year.
NEWS
July 2, 2011 | By Dan Hardy, Inquirer Staff Writer
A law enacted as part of the budget deal reached late Thursday night makes it much more likely that school boards will have to put tax increases up for voter approval. The legislation goes into effect for the 2012-13 school year, so has no impact on district budgets just passed by school boards. But going forward, the legislation "puts taxing and funding decisions where they belong - in the hands of the voters who are footing the bill," Gov. Corbett said at a bill-signing ceremony Thursday night.
NEWS
June 30, 2011 | By Angela Couloumbis,Dan Hardy, and Amy Worden, INQUIRER HARRISBURG BUREAU
HARRISBURG - With only hours left before the end of the fiscal year, the fate of the state's new $27.15 billion budget - once seemingly secure - appeared to be in a holding pattern Thursday night. A last-minute dispute over a school tax bill threatened to derail what appeared to be the smooth passage of the deal negotiated between Gov. Corbett and the Republican-controlled legislature. The bill would make changes to a 2006 law called Act 1 that requires school districts to get voter approval if they want to raise taxes above a state-set inflation rate, with certain exceptions.
BUSINESS
June 16, 2011 | By Christopher S. Rugaber, Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Reports Wednesday on inflation and manufacturing appeared to offer contradictory snapshots of the economy and helped prompt another selloff on Wall Street. In a report on consumer prices, the Labor Department said declining costs for energy cooled inflation in May. Overall consumer prices rose 0.2 percent, the smallest increase in six months. May marked the first drop in energy costs in nearly a year. But so-called core consumer prices, which exclude volatile food and energy, rose last month by the most in nearly three years.
NEWS
June 13, 2011 | By Richard Burnett, ORLANDO SENTINEL
ORLANDO, Fla. - When it comes to investing his money, Dave Epstein sees no easy answers out there at the moment. Inflation is eroding any returns he would get from relatively safe bank-savings deposits. But the stock market, while offering potentially higher returns, still makes him jittery with its volatility. For now, Epstein has chosen the riskier of the two roads. "Most of my investments are in stock mutual funds. Certificates of deposit were never even a consideration," said the 81-year-old retired lawyer, who lives in Orlando.
NEWS
May 9, 2011 | By Dan Hardy, Inquirer Staff Writer
Since 2006, Pennsylvanians have been able to vote on proposed school-tax increases that exceed a state-set education inflation rate. That might surprise those who have watched their taxes go up well beyond that rate year after year but who have never been asked to vote on them. That's because the law also allows tax hikes for certain spending categories without voter approval. Now, with the support of the Corbett administration, Republicans in the state House and Senate have introduced bills that would remove those exceptions and require all proposed tax increases above the education inflation rate to be placed on the ballot.
NEWS
April 10, 2011 | By Dick Polman, For The Inquirer
Hey, President Obama has formally announced his reelection bid! I've added the exclamation mark to help ratchet up the excitement. It has been a long and difficult slog since Inauguration Day, so I'm going to assume that the looming inevitability of another presidential campaign is about as welcome as the prospect of trace radioactive elements in your milk. Still, attention must be paid. If you're not up for pondering Obama's current victory odds, no problem, I'll do it for you. Here are the seven easy-to-read factors: Incumbency.
NEWS
July 15, 2010
Dear Harry: I have always invested in stocks, but not always to my advantage. Recently, I've been worried too often about the market, so I decided to stick to U.S. securities for any new money that I invest. I have a few EE bonds, but they offer no inflation protection. I am considering I bonds. I'd like to know about how to buy them, how the interest is calculated, how long they last, how the interest is reported for taxes, etc. Thanks. What Harry says: You can buy I bonds at most banks, or you can buy them directly from the Treasury.
NEWS
July 11, 2010 | By Dan Hardy, Inquirer Staff Writer
They cut staff, dipped into their savings, and came up with new ways to lower expenses, but even so, almost all school districts in the Philadelphia suburbs are raising their property taxes for the coming school year. More than half of those districts are increasing taxes at a rate above Pennsylvania's budgeting benchmark "education inflation" index, which is a combination of the statewide average weekly wage and the wage-based federal education inflation index. That rate is 2.9 percent for the 2010-11 school year.