U.S. Marine Courage On 9/11...

For years, authorities wondered about the identity of a U.S. Marine who appeared at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, helped find a pair of police officers buried in the rubble, then vanished.

Even the producers of the new film chronicling the rescue, “World Trade Center,” couldn’t locate the mystery serviceman, who had given his name only as Sgt. Thomas. The puzzle was finally solved when one Jason Thomas, of Columbus, Ohio, saw a TV commercial for the new movie a few weeks ago as he relaxed on his couch.

His eyes widened as he saw two Marines with flashlights, hunting for survivors atop the smoldering ruins. “That’s us. That’s me!” thought Thomas, who lived in Long Island during the attacks and now works as an officer in Ohio’s Supreme Court.

Thomas, 32, hesitantly re-emerged last week to recount the role he played in the rescue of Port Authority police officers Will Jimeno and Sgt. John McLoughlin, who were entombed beneath 20 feet of debris when the twin towers collapsed.

Back in New York to speak of his experience and visit family, Thomas provided the AP with photographs of himself at ground zero. As further proof of his identity, the movie’s producer, Michael Shamberg, said Thomas and Jimeno have spoken by phone and shared details only the two of them would know.

Thomas, who had been out of the Marine Corps about a year, was dropping his daughter off at his mother’s Long Island home when she told him planes had struck the towers. He retrieved his Marine uniform from his truck, sped to Manhattan and had just parked his car when one of the towers collapsed. Thomas ran toward the center of the ash cloud.

“Someone needed help. It didn’t matter who,” he said. “I didn’t even have a plan. But I have all this training as a Marine, and all I could think was, ‘My city is in need.”’

Thomas bumped into another ex-Marine, Staff Sgt. David Karnes, and the pair decided to search for survivors. Carrying little more than flashlights and an infantryman’s shovel, they climbed the mountain of debris, skirting dangerous crevasses and shards of red-hot metal, calling out “Is anyone down there? United States Marines!”

It was dark before they heard a response. The two crawled into a deep pit to find McLoughlin and Jimeno, injured but alive. Jimeno would spend 13 hours in the pit before he was pulled free. Thomas stayed long enough to see him come up, but left due to exhaustion before McLoughlin, who remained pinned for another nine hours, was retrieved.

Thomas said he returned to ground zero every day for another 2 1/2 weeks to pitch in, then walked away and tried to forget. “I didn’t want to relive what took place that day,” he said.

Shamberg said he apologized to Thomas for an inaccuracy in the film: Thomas is black, but the actor cast to portray him, William Mapother, is white. Filmmakers realized the mistake only after production had begun, Shamberg said.

Thomas laughed and gently chided the filmmakers, then politely declined to discuss it further. “I don’t want to shed any negativity on what they were trying to show,” he said. As for his story, Thomas said he is gradually becoming more comfortable telling it. “It’s been like therapy,” he said.

Non-U.S. Revenue Percentages...

One of the most important aspects of investing your hard-earned dollars is to ensure that you are diversified to guard against fluctuations in sectors of your portfolio that may be overweighted, such as what happened to a lot of people in 1999 when they were overweighted in tech and what happened to people at Enron who were way overweighted in their own company stock.

It pays to do a little digging because things may not always be as they seem.

For instance, you may be invested in a U.S.-based company thinking that you have covered the U.S. portion of your portfolio, when in fact, most of that company’s revenue is coming from more unstable foreign sources.

Below, find the 15 largest U.S. firms and the percentage of their non-U.S. revenue...

Intel - 80%
ExxonMobil - 75%
Coca-Cola - 70%
Chevron - 63%
IBM - 63%
Altria Group - 62%
Proctor & Gamble - 53%
Cisco Systems - 50%
AIG - 44%
Pfizer - 43%
General Electric - 41%
Johnson & Johnson - 41%
PepsiCo - 36%
Dell - 33%
Microsoft - 32%

A Little History Of Actual "Monopolies"...

In 1911, at the Justice Department’s request, the U.S. Supreme Court broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, which began in 1870. It was split into 33 companies, including Jersey Standard (Exxon), Socony (Mobil), and Socal (Chevron).

In 1945, a federal appeals court found that Alcoa had illegally maintained its monopoly over aluminum ingot production, which began in 1888. The company was not broken up, but the government strengthened competition by selling its own wartime plants to Kaiser and Reynolds.

On January 8, 1981, after 13 years of litigation, the Justice Department dropped its effort to break up IBM for allegedly monopolizing the computer industry.

Also on January 8, 1981, AT&T signed a consent decree with the Justice Department ending Ma-Bell’s century-long telephone monopoly. It agreed to divest its 22 local operating companies, which were then recognized as the seven Baby Bells.

In June 2000, a federal judge found that Microsoft had illegally maintained its monopoly on PC operating systems and ordered the company split in two. A year later, however, portions of the ruling were overturned, and Microsoft then settled, avoiding a breakup.

Your Tax Dollars At Work...

With such a big debate constantly raging about who tax cuts benefit and how much things like the War on Terror or Katrina Relief cost, I think we as Americans fail to look at, analyze, and complain about how much of our tax money is wasted on the smaller, day to day projects that add up to far more money than any of these single-ticket large budget items.

The Department of the Interior spent $63,000,000 to consolidate 16 financial systems into one, but the project has failed and will be restarted from square one.

The Department of Homeland Security spent $104,000,000 on an infrastructure upgrade that did not meet federal law requirements.

The Department of Defense has spent $264,000,000 on their online travel booking system, a project that is currently four years behind schedule.

The FBI spent $170,000,000 on a web-based case management system that has failed to work properly and is also being restarted from square one.

The Transportation Security Administration spent $834,000,000 on their infrastructure modernization, but the project has never yielded the results they were looking for, and they, too, are starting over.

And lastly, our friends at the Federal Aviation Administration have spent $11,400,000,000 (yes, $11.4 billion) on 16 separate improvement projects, 12 of which are behind schedule, and one of which is currently 13 years behind schedule.

What A Real Bender Might Look Like

Life With The Clintons...

Bill Clinton will clear all future public-policy statements with his wife.

Senator Hillary Clinton was embarrassed last month by reports that her husband was advising the United Arab Emirates at the same time she was denouncing a ports deal involving a Dubai-owned company.

Now the couple has agreed that Hillary will get "the final say" over what Bill says and does, sources told the New York Daily News.

"He knows it’s Hillary’s time now," said an advisor close to both politicians.

A spokesman for Bill Clinton said that with Hillary preparing for a 2008 presidential run, the former president is willing to do "anything he can" to help - including, presumably, keeping quiet.

A Health Warning About Food & Plastics...

I have long been very concerned about the mixture of food and plastics. Just the other night I saw a commercial for plastic crock-pot liners that keep the pot clean while you simmer food for hours on end that made me think about how dangerous a combination hot plastics and food can be.

I find it very hard to believe that a plastic bag next to a heat source will not release chemicals into the food that it is holding. Then, this week, I received an email that addressed that very issue.

I must admit I was not surprised about heat and plastics, but I was surprised about cold and plastics. The email talks about the dangers of warming and freezing food and drinks in plastic containers.

Studies at Johns Hopkins are now showing that cancer-causing dioxins in the plastic containers that we use each and every day are seeping into food when it is being heated.

Dioxins are absorbed, eaten and then begin poisoning your body’s cells, leading to the development of cancer.

Johns Hopkins recommends the following:
1. DO NOT put plastic containers, even so-called "microwaveable" containers, in the microwave. Dioxins can seep into your food while it and the plastic container are being heated.
2. DO NOT put plastic water bottles in the freezer. Dioxins seep into the water as the water freezes.
3. DO NOT use plastic wrap in the microwave. Dioxins seep into your food when the plastic wrap is heated.

The Leap Days

Today, we worry about millisecond and nanosecond inaccuracies in times, but in the past, there have been discrepancies the length of days.

When Julius Caesar invented the Julian calendar, it was off by 11.5 minutes each year. Over the centuries, that small error added up so that by 1582, the Julian calendar being used by the Western Roman World was 10 days behind.

To fix the discrepancy in the Julian calendar, Pope Gregory XIII gave us leap days. However, before the Gregorian calendar could be put into place, the extra 10 days given to mankind by the Julian calendar had to be done away with.

Pope Gregory XIII then declared that the day after October 4, 1582 would be October 15, 1582. In Rome, all the days in-between never existed. There was wide-spread rioting in Rome because many Christians alive at the time felt that if their date of birth and date of death had been pre-ordained, the Pope had just shortened their lives by 10 days.

In defiance of Rome, England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar, so for nearly two hundred years it was always ten days later in Rome that it was in London.

Finally, in 1752 when England adopted the Gregorian calendar to sync itself up with the rest of the Western World, the day after September 2, 1752 was September 14, 1752, 11 days having never existed in London.

The problem this time, however, was not that people felt their lives were being shortened, but people actually were incensed to riot because they paid rent by the month and only got 19 days for their monthly rent that September. Naturally, landlords refused to make exceptions and expected October’s rent right on the first of the month.

The Leap Second

It received some news coverage, but nothing really major. At the end of 2005, there was a leap second that was added to analog clocks to get them caught up with atomic clocks.

To understand this, you must first know that there are currently two time-keeping systems in place for the civilized world.

Analog clocks are kept and maintained by measuring the Earth’s cycle around the sun and the Earth’s rotation on it axis, just as has been done for thousands of years.

The problem with analog, however, is that each time the Earth revolves around the sun, there is an average discrepancy of a half-second each year. In addition, each day is actually not exactly as long as each other due to the pulling of the tides on the Earth’s rotation which cause fluctuations of milliseconds.

Realizing that there was a problem with this analog time keeping, scientists developed a new method called the atomic method some 40 years ago. The atomic method uses the measurement of the extremely accurate and precise cycle of an atom of the isotope cesium-133.

In one second, the atom cycles 9,192,631,770 times. This cycle is constant, never varying and means that a half-second variance like the one that occurs in analog time each year, occurs only once every 10 million years in atomic time.

Since 1967, because of the variance in the two time-keeping methods, mankind has had to add a leap-second to analog time 23 times to ensure that the analog clocks and the atomic clocks are in sync to the tune of no more than a 0.9 second variance.

Why is it important to keep the clocks in sync? Well, if we stopped adding the leap seconds today, in the year 5000, the sun would be right overhead at noon, but your atomic clock would say it was getting close to midnight.

So, what’s the problem with leap seconds? Well, remember Y2K? There are some folks that believe if we keep stopping our atomic clocks for one second intervals every couple years, it will cause wide-spread system failures in the flight control, traffic control, power grids, mobile phone networks and defense systems that are all tied to atomic clocks.

For example, if a GPS satellite sends a signal a millisecond early or late, it can provide a reading that is inaccurate by 100 miles. You do not want a ballistic missile being 100 miles off its target.

So, for now, while scientists debate the best method, atomic clocks continue and the old-time Earth-monitoring analog time continues, both being continually checked against the other.

What Can Congress Do?

A senator can have a corporate jet make a special flight just for them and reimburse the company for one seat's worth of first-class airfare, not the actual cost of the flight. See how a company can donate to their senator through this airfare reimbursement?

A representative cannot take travel expenses directly from a lobbyist, but can take expenses from a charity or other organization with a lobbyist on its board. This means that the lobbyist cannot give travel expenses to the representative, but the lobbyist's charity can.

Corporations cannot contribute to a politician’s campaign fund, but the corporation can contribute to a charity that a politician is associated with. These charitable donations do net even need to be reported by the politician.

Senators, representatives, and their staffers cannot take a single gift, including food and entertainment, worth $50 or a collective of gifts worth $100 from a single person. If that person, however, is a "personal friend" of the representative, that $100 increases to $250. Because of these limits, the owner of the NBA Wizards and the NHL Capitals has set the price of club tickets at $49.50.

A lobbyist can provide up to $49.99 worth of food per person for a representative and staff for late-night sessions, provided the lobbyist has no "direct interest" in the legislation they are working on that particular night.

Senators and representatives are allowed to use campaign funds to defend themselves in bribery investigations that are related to their office.

The $10 Bill....

In 1861, the first $10 bill was issued near the outset of the Civil War.

It featured a portrait of Lincoln and is the only time a sitting president appeared on U.S. currency.

In 1861, a $10 bill could have bought you an entire barrel of flour, a month’s stay in a New York City tenement, or a ride on the Great Eastern steamship from Manhattan to Cape May, New Jersey.

In 1901, the $10 bill depicted explorers Lewis & Clark on the edges with a large American bison in the middle, and bought you ten private ballroom-dancing classes, a housepainter’s labor for eight days or a full eye exam and 10 pairs of glasses.

In 1929, all U.S. currency was changed to its standard size of today. Despite the popular belief, the car on your 1929 standardized $10 bill is not a Model T Ford, but a composite of cars from the day. In 1929, your $10 bill got you a year’s worth of accident and sickness insurance, a waffle iron, or a one-minute phone call from New York City to London.

In 1942, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, special $10 bills were printed for Hawaii with the state’s name printed on the front and back and the serial numbers printed in brown ink instead of red. This was done so that if the Japanese invaded Hawaii, the U.S. Treasury would declare these $10 bills worthless.

Keep an eye out for the new $10 bill coming early in 2006. Its design is still mostly green, but now features shades of orange, yellow and red and has renderings of the Statue of Liberty torch and the words, "We The People..."

Bibendum, The Michelin Man...

We all know him and just about all of us love him, whether or not we’ve ever purchased his tires, but how much do we really know about the Michelin Man?

I hadn’t given him much thought until my wife pointed out that the Michelin tires I bought a few months back had the Michelin Man right on the sidewall. Then, just a few weeks ago, there was an article about him in Fortune Magazine, so I just had to read it.

His name his Bibendum, which is a Latin gerundive which means, "Drinking to be done." To understand why they gave him a name synonymous with drinking, you must remember that 107 years ago, only wealthy well-to-do’s could afford cars and drinking and driving wasn’t really frowned upon yet.

Though he has become such a lasting icon, Bibendum came from pretty simple beginnings. Bibendum first came to the mind of Edouard Michelin when he and his brother Andres were at an auto expo in Lyon in 1894 and Edouard commented that some stacks of tires in a row looked like a line-up of tire men...all you had to do was add the arms.

It was just four years later in 1898 that Bibendum appeared in his first Michelin ad, a poster that depicted him as being so tough that he was eating broken glass.

Later in 1898, Bibendum was depicted as having just triumphed over two other tire men in a fight who looked notably like John Boyd Dunlop and the then-chief of Continental Tire.

Bibendum as a mascot made his debut in Paris in 1898 as well when an actor was paid to stand behind a cardboard cut-out of Bibendum at a cycle show to entertain the show’s patrons.

Bibendum was so popular an attraction at the show that Michelin’s rivals started shoving patrons, trying to get them away from the Michelin exhibit, and police had to be called in to restrain them.

It might seem a little much, but early tire manufacturing was a very competitive business that in those days catered only to the folks who were affluent enough to be able to afford motorized, wheeled transportation.

The industry's competitiveness even sparked a series of Bibendum ads in the early 1900s that had him standing in triumph, sword-in-hand, over fields of battered and bloodied tire men, crying out for mercy.

Then, in 1914, we finally saw the makings of the Bibendum of today when he appeared in an ad as a middle-aged good samaritan driver, cigar-in-mouth, lending a fellow motorist his best tire from his mid-section.

Today, you can catch the Michelin Man at auto expos and trade shows. Due to the risk of liability in today’s world, the actor inside Bibendum is under strict instructions not to say anything. Bibendum will take a picture with you, but he won’t put his arm around you, and keep his hands visible in front of him at all times. They’ve kept his name, but you won’t see today’s Bibendum bibending anymore...

Some Snacking Milestones

Doughnuts without holes existed in medieval Europe, but it is said that in 1847 a Maine sea captain by the name of Hanson Crockett poked out the pastry’s center to fit over the handles of a ship’s wheel, thus giving us the doughnut as it is today.

In 1896, Louis Rueckheim gives his popcorn snack to a salesman, who tries it and says, "That’s crackerjack!" It is a real word...look it up. Rueckheim trademarks the word.

In 1916, Antonio Gentille, a 14 year-old from Virginia, wins the Planter’s peanut logo contest by creating Mr. Peanut. He receives $5 as his prize. The hat, monocle, cane and gloves are then added by a professional artist.

In 1930, the Mars company creates a candy bar and names it after the family’s horse, Snickers.

In 1930, Jimmy Dewar, manager of the Hostess bakery in Chicago, creates the first Twinkie, filled with banana cream. He gives the cakes their name after seeing a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes. The banana filling remains until World War II when America has a banana shortage, forcing the switch to vanilla.

In 1932, after tasting Fritos in a San Antonio cafe, struggling ice cream maker Elmer Doolin purchases the recipe for $100. He makes the chips in his mom’s kitchen and distributes them in his car.

In 1941, M&M’s are first sold, primarily to the American military. The coating that prevents the candies from melting in your hand makes them a popular snack for soldiers in any climate, say even Northern Africa.

In 1965, Lay’s potato chips, which already have the "Betcha can’t eat just one" slogan, become the first chips to be sold nationally.

Know We're Paying For That?

When you depsoit your money in the bank, you feel comfortable because of those FDIC plates that tell you that your money is insured.

Well, it is true that your money is insured, but here is something that you may not have known...if the U.S. Government had to pay out on that FDIC insurance on a mass scale, it could total up to $3.4 trillion based on current deposit rates.

Where do you think the U.S. Government will get that $3.4 trillion dollars when it needs it? Why from the citizens, of course, through a tax hike, where else?

Here are some other things that you might not know.

The U.S. Government insures American farmers - we all know that - but did you know that the potential for loss could be as high as $41 billion in a single farm season?

When you buy flood insurance, chances are that you are buying that flood insurance from the U.S. Government because almost all private insurance companies will not take on the risk. An unheard-of catastrophic flood season could potentially carry a bill for the tax-payers of $643 billion.

How about nuclear power plants? Did you know that once an accident bill at a nuclear power plant exceeds $9.4 billion, there are laws in place that say every penny over that amount will be paid for by the U.S. Government, again, meaning the tax-payers?

Now, here is the real kicker. You might work a job where you have no pension, or no retirement plan, but when the U.S. Government steps in to bail out failed pension plans through The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., it uses your income tax dollars to bail out the pension. It doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you are on...that’s gotta upset you.

Ukraine's Samyilo Adamovich

Since being let out from underneath the Iron Fist of the Soviet Union, Ukranian historians have been digging deep into their history, an endeavor that was virtually impossible under communist Soviet rule.

According to the Ukranian press, Ukranian historians have uncovered evidence that a man by the name of Samyilo Adamovich moved to London shortly after the Russian-Swedish war in 1708.

Once in London, Samyilo changed his name to Sam Adams, and eventually moved from London to the American colonies, where is son, Sam Adams, was born and later became the Sam Adams that we know today.

Ukranian historians also claim to have found a 1712 draft of a constitution strikingly similar to ours.

No Protection For Owners

When a reserve soldier is called up to active duty, there are laws and regulations that protect that soldier’s job while he or she is away on active duty.

What most people are not aware of, however, is that there are little to no regulations, laws, or protections for the small business owner who is also a reservist.

I recently read an article about small business owners and how their newly activated reserve status is affecting them and their businesses and felt compelled to share with my readers the facts.

As an employer, you can fill the job of a reservist, but it must be waiting for that reservist when they return from active duty, but, what about the employer him- or herself? There are no safeguards to assist the small business owner when his or her unit is called up to active duty.

There are no government subsidies that provide for lost income, provide for lost revenue, or damage to the business while the business’s owner is overseas on deployment.

I, for one, would like to see this change, but I think we all know how likely it is that this will change any time soon. For now, we need to be aware of this pitfall in our nation’s reserve policy and demand changes from our elected officials.

Keep Your Plutonium...

You’ve heard of the police stings where they send notices to people with arrest warrants that say they have won a car or a boat, then when the unsuspecting criminal shows up to claim their prize, they get handcuffed instead...You’ve also heard of programs where law enforcement officials buy back weapons, right?

Well, frighteningly enough, there is enough unaccounted-for nuclear material in Russia that they are combining the sting and the buyback and have offered to buy nuclear material at $8.25 per milligram, then are arresting the people that bring in large quantities of material.

The program has yielded an arrest of a former government enrichment plant worker. The man, Leonid Grigorow, received word from the Russian government that they were closing his plant in 1992, but when Leonid’s requests for disposal of the plant’s weapons-grade plutonium went completely unanswered by the Russian government, he simply put all 400 grams of the plant’s plutonium in a lead case, took it home, and put it in his garage, where it has been since 1992.

Upon hearing about the buyback program, Leonid did the math and realized that 400 grams at $8.25 per milligram would yield him $3.3 million, but when he went to turn in the plutonium, Leonid was arrested.

Let’s all thank the Russian government for teaching everyone that turning in plutonium to the proper officials will result in an arrest, while selling it to terrorists will actually probably get you the $3.3 million.

The Most Beautiful Benz Is The One That Saves Your Life...

Imagine that you are loyal to a car company with every purchase you have made for the past decade...then imagine that one of those cars saves the life of one of your loved ones.

There is not a single year of my life that has not been spent as a resident of Orange County, and as such, when I say that this winter’s rainy season was the worst I’d ever seen, even beating out 1993, which seemed impossible, I know what I’m talking about.

The worst day this winter for us came on December 28, 2004 when I was awoken by a call from my wonderful girlfriend of 7 years, Teresa, while on her way to work, telling me that she had been involved in a car accident.

If you’ve ever received one of those "accident" calls, you know the feelings I was experiencing at the time.

That morning, as I was driving down the 73 to get to where Teresa was, I was driving through, literally, one of the worst rain storms I have ever seen in my life.

Now, I figured that if Teresa had been able to call me to tell me she’d been in an accident, that was the most promising sign that she was, in fact, all right. The fact that she had been able to tell me that she had not hit any other cars and describe what had happened as she slid off the road was also reassuring, but I must admit that as I arrived to where the car had slid off the road, literally bent the guard rail into a "U" and was sitting in six-inch deep mud, I became very worried.

Then, when I saw the car, I became even more worried...but, as I got to Teresa, she looked a little shaken up, but seemed totally fine. The OC Fire Authority was there and I can’t thank them enough for the job they did caring for Teresa that morning.

Teresa was taken by ambulance to Hoag and was given a clean bill of health. Though she had a bit of soreness in her neck for a couple days, otherwise, Teresa came out of the accident completely unharmed.

That morning, Teresa’s 1998 Mercedes-Benz C230 did exactly what we had bought it to do...save her life.

When something in the road blew out the car’s right front tire and the mass of water in the road from the downpour sent the car veering off the road uncontrollably, it wasn’t the "luxury" part of the car that saved Teresa that morning, it was the century of unparalleled safety engineering.

Later in the morning, when we went to the towing yard to get Teresa’s things out of the car, the workers there commented about how they hoped whoever was driving the car, described by them as in the worst condition of any car they’d seen in a long while, was making it through okay, and I amazed them by telling them that she was right there, walking next to me.

A Mercedes-Benz looks beautiful sitting, shiny and new on the car lot and looks and feels beautiful as it performs out on the road, but you’ll come to find that the most beautiful Mercedes-Benz that you will ever see is the one that saves your life.

A U.S. Tax Timeline...

1913 - The 16th Amendment authorizes income taxes. Congress taxes income over $3,000.

1918 - During World War I, Congress institutes progressive tax rates with a top bracket of 77%.

1919 - Prohibition begins. The commissioner of Internal Revenue must enforce it.

1931 - Gangster and bootlegger Al Capone is convicted of tax evasion.

1933 - Prohibition is repealed.

1942 - The Revenue Act raises tax rates but allows deductions for medical and investment expenses. President Franklin D. Roosevelt says, "In time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid his taxes, of more than $25,000 a year."

1943 - Payroll withholding is introduced.

1944 - Congress creates the standard deduction.

1954 - April 15 replaces March 15 as the deadline for filing income taxes.

1974 - The Employee Retirement and Income Security Act gives the IRS regulatory responsibility for employee benefit plans.

1981 - Congress enacts a $750 billion tax cut, the largest in U.S. history. 401(k)s are introduced. IRAs become widely available to Americans.

1982 - Deficits soar and tax cuts are repealed.

1984 - Deficits still soar and more tax cuts are repealed.

1988 - George H.W. Bush says, "Read my lips; no new taxes."

1990 - Taxes rise for the wealthy. Observers later suggest that this hike will cost George H.W. Bush the 1992 election.

1993 - President Bill Clinton signs into law a $496 billion tax hike.

1997 - President Bill Clinton cuts capital-gains rates and introduces the $500 child credit.

2001 - President George W. Bush cuts taxes and the IRS mails outs "advance refunds."

2003 - A 10-year $350 billion tax cut temporarily reduces dividend, gain and estate taxes.

When It's 2010, 2015, & 2050...

When it’s 2010, the average life expectancy of men turning 65 will be 81.4 years, while women turning 65 in 2010 will live to 84.1 years.

Mean household income, which is $92,553 today, will get up to $113,361 in 2010 and $133,831 in 2015.

Americans’ taxable payroll which is at $4.7 trillion today will go up to $5.4 trillion in 2010 and $6.1 trillion in 2015.

The U.S. GDP which is at $12.1 trillion today will shoot up to $13.9 trillion in 2010 and $15.7 trillion in 2015.

Today, Social Security revenue is 12.73 cents per $1 of taxable payroll with 11.05 cents of revenue being paid out and 1.68 cents of revenue being put into the surplus fund. In 2010, Social Security revenue will go up to 12.83 cents per $1 of taxable payroll with 11.34 cents being paid out and only 1.49 cents being put away. By 2015, Social Security revenue will reach 12.95 cents per $1 of taxable income with 12.26 being paid out and only 0.69 cents being put away.

Today, U.S. unemployment is at 5.25% and is expected to go down to 5.21% in 2010 and 5.20% in 2015.

The U.S. population, at 288 million people today, will go up to 309 million in 2010, 323 million in 2015, and reach 421 million in 2050.

Within the U.S. population, people over the age of 65 make up 12.4% today, will make up 13.0% in 2010, make up 14.5% in 2015 and make up 20.7% in 2050.

So what else is in store for 2050?

According to Elizabeth Gardner from Financial Planning Magazine:

• There will be "solar" paint with embedded semiconductor particles that can power the electronic devices that are painted with it
• Wearable electronic devices will run on power generated by the wearer’s skin (a process patented by Microsoft in 2004 that will help the company reach $1.4 trillion in market value by 2050)
• People of two or more races will be so common in the U.S. that the Census Bureau will consider dropping the "race" question from the census (the CB will actually drop the question sometime after 2100)
• Printable transistors will be woven into clothing so that people can sell commercial time on their clothing to advertisers
• Distance learning will replace institutions of learning like Harvard for the most part (where annual tuition will be $320,000 in 2050) and individual instructors who teach students all over the world remotely will become the new icons of learning
• California will be forced to institute once again an English-only policy for official city and state signage as ethnically-centered populations have resulted in entire cities having official signs in only that city’s most popular language
• Human tissue, bones and organs will be custom-made using devices that build three-dimensional structures of living cells, revolutionizing prosthetics and the plastic and restorative surgery industries
• The penny will finally be officially eliminated by congress, but other cash and coin in the U.S. will still be around for private, in-person transactions, while a new form of currency that is worldly universal for use over the Internet and electronic shopping methods will have been popularized and replace the U.S. dollar as the defacto standard for the world’s currency
• Land-fill mining companies will be becoming popular, mining old landfills for metals, minerals and other materials whose natural resources have been exhausted
• The youngest baby boomer will be 86, the oldest 104
• Books will be a retro luxury much like vinyl records are today with some pretty common books by today’s standards being displayed in museums while book-binding will become a well-to-do hobby like home wine-making or beer-brewing is today
• To deal with seething social unrest caused by an excess of single men, China will offer attractive financial packages to Chinese girls adopted buy U.S. families to get them to come back to China
• There are 800 million cars on the world’s roads today, but there will be 3.25 billion by 2050