American Dollar Decreasing

Obama not safe on gas prices yet

A few months back, the specter of $5-per-gallon gasoline this summer spread panic through the country.

Record prices at the pump would rip into already tight household budgets. A fragile economy appeared teetering as hiring slowed in May. Approval ratings tumbled for President Barack Obama, who pledged to investigate price manipulation.

Well, the country can relax a bit. Summer arrived Tuesday with gas averaging $3.64 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association.

And fuel prices are now expected to drop further, with several analysts predicting crude oil will fall to $85 per barrel. Based on recent history, that might cut another 50 cents off a gallon of gas.

It’s essentially a stimulus package at the height of vacation season, when families are more likely to splurge.

How did we avert the nightmare scenario? Certainly, there’s lower demand coupled with higher supplies. But Phil Flynn, an analyst for the Chicago brokerage PFGBEST, said it’s also because a Federal Reserve program to buy $600 billion of U.S. Treasury bonds is about to end.

The program — known as the second round of quantitative easing, or QE2 — was an attempt to spur growth by adding cash to the economy. But, Flynn said, it was basically the government printing more money, which lessened the value of the dollar. And since oil trades in dollars, petroleum costs more when our currency gets weaker.

The expiration of the program lets the dollar strengthen, causing oil to return to levels last seen around the start of the year.

But cheaper gas through the summer won’t ease the pressure on the president, according to Democratic strategists. A year ago, a gallon of gas was almost a dollar less.

“Gas prices are where the rubber meets the road at the intersection of foreign and domestic policy,” said pollster Brad Bannon. “Prices have gone down, but voters are still steamed.”

More important, the president is still battling a swarm of economic troubles.

“If gas prices are still on a downward glide path next November, they alone pose no problem for the president,” said Democratic consultant Steve Murphy. “There are a bucket of economic concerns driving the wrong track poll numbers, led by unemployment and followed by the deficit and the debt, slow growth, gas and food prices, home equity loss and so on. The president needs this bucket to start emptying, in whatever order.

Abugida Ethiopian American Information Center » The shocking truth ...

Farmers, civil servants, businessmen and citizens as a whole will benefit from the much needed rain of development.

The Ethiopian government has trumpeted rapid development since it has been in power. It claims to have achieved “double digit” growth over the last seven years even in the face of a worldwide recession. The inundation of double digit growth however happens in rare cases over the globe. The failure of Ethiopian development is uncovered when we follow the path of “double digit” growth onto the dinner table of civil servants. Civil servants as citizens must reap the benefits of economic growth to say that growth is real. Development is not something that can be defined as existing apart from the day to day lives of citizens, rather, they should be able to grab it, use it, taste and enjoy it.

The true experience of nowadays Ethiopian civil servants is revealed by observing their relative income. Given a more successful economy it would have been fair to compare the current Ethiopian development with that of South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan or Singapore. ጽድቁ ቀርቶብኝ በቅጡ በኮነነኝ However, as a result of the failure of the Ethiopian economy to compete with the growth of the world’s economies, we can only instead compare the relative income of today’s civil servants to the relative income of civil servants during the years of the former Derg dictatorial military regime.

When we see from their income, Birr income shows an upward growth of 300 per cent when we compare the starting salary of today’s Ethiopian civil servants to that of civil servants in the years of 1990/1.When we compare the same salary in the hard dollar value, however, the income shows a continual decrease over the last 20 years. In 1990/1 a recent graduate was hired with a starting salary of 500 birr which equaled 247.5 US dollars. After 20 years “rapid growth” the same degree holder was hired with a starting salary of 88.2 US dollars. This means that 159.3 dollars of civil servant salary was steadily lost over 20 years at an average salary reduction rate of 14 per cent per year and at a total reduction rate of 280.6 per cent from 20 years ago.

We can predict from this continuing decrease that in 2020/1 one degree holder might get paid one dollar per month as an average starting salary, or that civil servants themselves will entirely lose their grasp of the economic ladder even sooner than 2020. We are examining the Ethiopian civil servants incomes in terms of dollars because the Ethiopian trade deficit (importing more than exporting) is very high and the value of the decrease of Ethiopian Birr against the dollar affects citizens negatively.

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