Are you better off than you were last year?

Are people richer or poorer? And are your neighbors more likely to be better off? Or starving to death? Check out the state-by-state statistics, and see how your friend and neighbors are doing. Poverty 2010 and 2011

Additional Library Resources to help you:

• Community Services
• Careers
• Adult Learning Center – Buff up your skills to get a better job – or a job at all. Get a GED, pass the Citizenship Exam, write a resume…
• Nevada Career Information System (NCIS) – Find out where the jobs are in Nevada – what’s hot, and what’s hot hiring. Find a trade school. Find out your skills and where you’d do best!
• Learning Express – Learn A Test – Need to pass a test to get a job? Get practice here! Plus career help, an introduction to using popular software, and more!
• The globalization gap : how the rich get richer and the poor get left further behind
• Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America
• How can the poor be helped?
• The unheard truth : poverty and human rights
• The rich and the rest of us

 

Money Supply

 

Is it possible to have too much money? As individuals, there may be risks to having more money than we are used to spending (a problem few of us have right now), but in reality, the risks of having too much money are much higher for an economy as a whole. 

 

Recently, a friend asked me, “Why can’t the government just print more money to get the economy back on track?”  This is a very complicated question, though the short answer is that just “printing money” could lead to hyperinflation. 

 

The most recent example of hyperinflation comes from Zimbabwe.  Last year inflation peaked in Zimbabwe at 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion percent per year!  Honestly, I didn’t make that number up.  (See source below.) This means prices doubled, on average, every single day.  I won’t give more of an explanation here of why the government can’t just print money.

 

The library does have a number of sources, though, that address these issues. The way I recommend searching this topic is to use the Catalog Plus link on the library homepage. This allows you to search for books and to search the databases at the same time. 

 

Ø     Hint:  Check the boxes for Magazines and Journal Articles and for Business and Investing.  

 

Ø     Keyword search—money supply AND economics.  (This search returns 6 items in the library catalog and literally thousands of articles from our databases.)

 

Ø     Adding hyperinflation as an additional keyword reduces the results to about 100 articles. 

 

Source:  Hanke, S. (2008, December 22). THE PRINTING PRESS. Forbes, p. 106.