You Could Do This for a Living!

I just read an article in the New York Times, called YouTube Videos Pull in Real Money. It primarily reports about Michael Buckley who had put clips of himself on YouTube for nearly a year -- mostly just making silly comments about celebrities -- when they offered to make him a Partner.

A Partner is a regular member of YouTube who posts videos like everyone else; the difference is that YouTube gets to put advertisements in his video, and in return Michael Buckley gets paid. A lot. Mr. Buckley makes more than $100,000 per year just from YouTube, and he quit his old job when the videos became more and more profitable.

Stories like this happen all the time. People doing what they love put it on the internet, and a big company offers them money just to keep doing it. (This happens with blogs too! *Nudge*Nudge* to any big companies reading this.)

So, the real question now is: What do you love to do?

Internet Resources on the Housing/Finanacial Crisis

• This American Life (radio show) episodes:
  
  1. 5/9/08: The Giant Pool of Money
     
     • Through that link, you can read a summary of the episode, download a transcript of it as a PDF or stream the audio to your computer -- or pay a dollar to download the audio, but who wants to do that?
  2. 10/3/08: Another Frightening Show About the Economy
     
     • For this episode, there's a summary, but you can only stream the audio or buy it-- no transcript to read available yet
  
  
• New York Times (newspaper) multimedia presentation:
  • The Debt Trap; videos, interactive charts, and newspaper articles about all the different people who are affected by debt and how they fall into it in the first place
  
  
• Washington Post (newspaper) slide show:
  • Anatomy of a Crisis; the slides are narrated, describing how the "Housing" crisis turned into the "Financial" crisis
  • Note: the narrator goes a little too fast if you're not already familiar with the events and the vocabulary he throws around

Every American Should See This Chart

"Obama and McCain's Tax Proposals," from the Washington Post



Read every word on it (even the small ones), and this chart basically stands for itself. Love it or hate it (which all depends on your point of view), this is what your family's income will look like in 2009.

The only extra piece of information that I would use to contextualize the numbers is that Obama's tax increase on the top 1% of earners in the country comes from eliminating the tax cuts that Bush put into place at the beginning of his first term. This means that the top 1%'s taxes go back to the same levels as in the 1990s (and they get to keep that 10% extra from the meantime).