Monday’s top personal finance stories
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Andrea Coombes’ Ways and Means: Four reasons to consider a reverse mortgage when you retire
Microsoft, not Apple, hosted must-see tech event
A funny thing happened last week when Microsoft and Apple held dueling product events — Microsoft hosted the grabber.
Older adults more likely to be imprisoned, data show
Keith Humphreys is a psychiatry professor at Stanford University.
The U.S. imprisonment rate has been shrinking for six years, but the change has been uneven across generations. Despite criminal behavior typically peaking in young adulthood, the young rather than the old are driving the nation’s ongoing de-incarceration.
(Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics)
Over the most recent decade of state prison data analyzed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the inmate population aged even faster than the graying U.S. general population. The imprisonment rate for people ages 55 and older bucked the broader de-incarceration trend by jumping a startling 71 percent.
Adults younger than 30 in contrast were far less likely to be imprisoned in 2013 than was the case a decade ago. If the entire population had experienced the same change, states would be shuttering empty prisons coast to coast. This good news about young American adults is paralleled in other studies showing that they are far less likely to get arrested than were young adults of prior generations.
Multiple factors account for the rising proportion of older Americans in prison. First, ever the trendsetters, baby boomers are somewhat more criminally active in late life than were previous generations. Second, the many state-level reforms designed to reduce incarceration were implemented long after the “tough on crime” era in which many older inmates were given protracted sentences. Third, older convicted criminals by definition have had more time than younger ones to accrue long criminal records, which often leads judges to mete out longer sentences for a particular offense.
Because prisons are legally responsible for providing health care to inmates, the aging of the prison population could strain their budgets despite the decline in the imprisonment rate. On the other hand, elderly, severely ill inmates pose minimal risk to public safety and thus …read more
Asian shares mostly lower as FBI probe raises U.S. uncertainty
Asian stocks wobbled Monday as a revived FBI inquiry into U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s private email server sharpened uncertainty over the election.
Why US inmates launched a nationwide strike
Last month, on the 45th anniversary of the infamous Attica Prison uprising, tens of thousands of US inmates launched a nationwide protest that continues today, according to advocates who helped organize the effort.
Source:: CNN US News
3 ways Halloween can frighten your finances
Where Americans need the most help carving pumpkins
Pumpkin carvings of presidential nominees Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are on display at Chelsea Market in New York. (Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)
A little more than one-third of Americans told Gallup in 2006 that they “usually” celebrate Halloween by carving a pumpkin. And, if Google search data is to be believed, some of us have a more natural knack for making faces out of orange gourds than others.
Consider the map below. It plots the relative volume of searches for the phrase “how to carve a pumpkin” between 2004 and 2016.
That phrase is a pretty useful proxy for pumpkin-carving ineptitude: search it yourself, and you can see the top results include how-to’s from the likes of Martha Stewart (“Tip: Prevent exposed areas of the pumpkin’s flesh from turning brown by applying a film of Vaseline”), extremepumpkins.com (“I personally use power tools and extreme techniques, but many of the methods that I use to carve pumpkins apply to anyone”), and the New York Times (“An annual tradition like carving a jack-o’-lantern can become a mindful moment by cultivating what is known as beginner’s mind”).
In other words, people Googling “how to carve a pumpkin” need help with the basic mechanics of the task, like stabbing, cutting and the scooping-out of guts.
[How to maximize your sugar high this Halloween]
According to Google, the states most lacking in this fundamental knowledge are clustered mostly in the South — Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi all lead the nation in how-to pumpkin carving searches. North Dakota and Hawaii also stand out as places with a relatively high interest in pumpkin tutorials.
On the flip …read more
Did GM downplay debut of SUV to avoid Trump’s wrath?
If you’re wondering why you haven’t read a review of the Buick Envision SUV yet, blame Donald Trump.
Deep Dive: AT&T, even without Time Warner, beats Verizon as a dividend stock
AT&T is being more aggressive than its rival by pushing harder into content creation, says Phil van Doorn.