TresSugar

Million Dollar Sweet Sixteen Partay

GiggleSugar — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 02:00:00 -0700

What is the world coming to these days? This kid turns sixteen and his dad drops over a million bucks to throw the blingest bash in town: red carpet, Diddy, Kanye West, a new set of wheels, a personal chauffeur--the works. Wait until the end of the clip when the kid opens his mouth to say ~~thank you~~ how great he is. Sheesh!

Front Page: Carrie Prejean Is Offered Millions For Sex Tapes

TresSugar — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:50 -0800

Porn distributor Vivid Entertainment is offering Carrie Prejean millions of dollars to distribute her sex tapes. - Gawker
Speaking to students in Shanghai, President Obama said it's better for society when everyone can use Twitter freely. - CNN
The UK version of the marketing poster for Couples Retreat doesn't include the movie's black couple. - Huffington Post
Courteney Cox has signed on for Scream 4. - AP
2012 came in number one at the box office this weekend. - BuzzSugar

Cleveland: Future Host of the 2014 Gay Games

TresSugar — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:42:00 -0700

While America's first family arrives in Denmark with hopes of bringing the 2016 Olympic Games home to Chicago, Cleveland, OH, has just been awarded the 2014 Gay Games! The sports and cultural event should attract more than 10,000 athletes, along with spectators ready to spend millions of dollars. In fact, the games can generate up to $80 million in economic impact.

The Gay Games were started in 1982 by US Olympic decathlon competitor Tom Waddell, who has since lost his battle with AIDS. The event's philosophy is that "doing one's personal best should be the paramount goal in any athletic endeavor." Anyone can participate, regardless of his or her sexual orientation or skill level, and competitors represent their cities, not their countries.

Cities like New York and San Francisco have hosted the Gay Games, but it's fun to see a less predictable location choice like Cleveland. Would you check it out?

College Football Ranking System Might Violate Antitrust Laws

CitizenSugar — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:00:00 -0700

Attention college football fans. Your lawmakers are listening to you!

The Senate will soon review how college football picks the country's number one team each year.

In case you've been living under a rock, the NCAA doesn't support a playoff system. Instead polls and computer models rank teams. The top two play each other for the BCS championship. The other ranked teams play in bowl games. Certain conferences get automatic bids to the bowl games, which prove to be major money making events for the schools.

In a statement, the subcommittee on antitrust said that the current BCS system "leaves nearly half of all the teams in college football at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to qualifying for the millions of dollars paid out every year."

Do you think overlooked teams are being sore losers, or should lawmakers rightly step in?

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Should Unemployment Rates Impact Immigration Policy?

CitizenSugar — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:30:59 -0800

As the unemployment rate rises, so does the call for stricter immigration rules. Many Americans resent that they have lost their income while visaed foreigners bring home dollars, or even worse, while corporations illegally hire undocumented workers.

The issue showed up last week on CNN's Cafferty File. Jack asked whether a 7.6 percent unemployment rate meant it was time to change the immigration policy in America to keep jobs from going to millions of legal, and illegal, immigrants. One viewer said:

Halt all immigration until the unemployment rate is below 3 percent. Plus impose a 50 percent tax on all money sent back to home countries by noncitizens.

Columnist Thomas Friedman has a different take on it. He was wants an "open-door bailout." To see what that means, read more.

Friedman summed up the message immigrant business people want to send America:

Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart, and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.

Last year Bill Gates argued to Congress that allowing more foreigners to work in the US would not steal jobs away from Americans, but rather create more jobs for them. He said for each H-1B visa hire, four support employees are hired.

Do you think open immigration will help solve the economic crisis, or is it just part of the problem?

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Country on Sale: Foreclosed Home Tours For China's Wealthy

LibertySugar — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:30:20 -0800

I've heard stories of savvy English people hopping across the pond for a shopping holiday in New York City thanks to the strong pound; but believe it or not, the Chinese are taking shopping trips with the mission of buying million-dollar homes.

These aren't rogue bargain hunters. Rather they're part of organized tours targeted at Chinese investors looking to take advantage of deflated American real estate prices.

The AP reports that growing incomes and isolation from the global crisis have created a rising Chinese upper class, looking for smart investments internationally. Companies, eager to steer the investors toward their dream homes, are organizing tours. From Feb. 24 to March 6, a group from China will visit foreclosed properties in New York, California, Boston, and Las Vegas. Such trips go for $2,000, plus the cost of airfare.

The buyers plan to rent out their new homes, or use them on business trips. One dad hopes his son can live there if he goes to university in the US. Since there are fewer investment options at home, the American dream is becoming China's, too.

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What You Could Buy For $1 Trillion - Besides the Iraq War

CitizenSugar — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:00:04 -0700

Citizen Rob Simpson set out on a mission: to find out what else the US could have purchased for the $1 trillion dollars the war will probably cost. As with superhumanly large numbers, most recently and famously, the $700 billion bailout, it's helpful to put the number in concrete terms. That's what Simpson did with his new book What We Could Have Done With the Money.

The book's corresponding website has a ticker on it, calculating how much money has been spent since you've been looking at the site. I had it up for a bit this morning and presto, $25 million gone. Here's the entertaining (like a haunted house is entertaining) part of the website: you can "shop" with a $1 trillion dollar credit card. Anything from sports teams to Air Force One is up for sale - and if you choose the plane, the site asks you, "quantity"? The cost of the plane is only $325 million. I tried and bought every NFL franchise, Dracula's castle, and a theme park and didn't even come close.

To see what else $1 trillion buys, read more.

For $1 trillion, the US could the double the 663,000 cops on the beat for 32 years.
1.9 million additional teachers for America's classrooms.
Forget fixing roads, for that amount the US could pave the entire interstate highway system with gold - 23.5-karat gold leaf.
Every person on the planet could have an iPod.
Every American's credit card could be paid off.

See something on the list you'd rather have? Test yourself and see if you know where spending on Iraq stacks up against other wars.

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Nancy Pelosi: Birth Control Will Stimulate the Economy

LibertySugar — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:00:57 -0800

Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the inclusion of hundreds of millions of dollars for family planning services in the stimulus bill yesterday, by arguing that birth control will help the economy. On ABC's This Week Pelosi said:

The family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education, and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
While Pelosi's comments could come off as characterizing children born to poor families as nothing more than a burden on the government, there could be some logic to her argument. Unplanned pregnancies can level significant financial burdens on parents, who may turn to the government for assistance if they do not have the means. By increasing access to contraception, lower-income families would have the freedom to plan their families just like those with access to contraception. Still, others point out that population growth typically helps economic growth, and in places like Japan, the government actually encourages citizens to have more kid-producing sex.

Do you think Nancy Pelosi's argument that birth control can help the economy is far-fetched?

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Should Congress Bail Out the Automakers?

CitizenSugar — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:30:32 -0800

If Michigan-bred Mitt Romney doesn't think Congress should bailout the auto industry, then the plan to save Detroit might need a set of jumper cables. Mitt wrote today:

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor, and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority, and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

But not everyone agrees with Mitt's persuasive case. In an attempt to persuade Congress that it must act, the big-three automakers may have given themselves a flat tire. Yesterday, the CEOs of GM, Ford, and Chrysler flew into Washington on private jets (which cost about $36 million each) so they could make in-person appeals for $25 billion of taxpayer money. Looks like first-class wouldn't suit the first-class beggars.

For more on how much the companies spend on private jets, and for some arguments in support of a bailout, read more.

ABC News reports that a private jet trip from Detroit to Washington, DC costs about $20,000. Ford's CEO takes the company's private jet back from Detroit to Seattle each weekend, while making $28 million as his annual salary. Meanwhile, thousands of employees get laid off, and the companies are asking the public for billions.

Still, if the car companies fail average Americans, not just jet-setting CEOs, have much to lose. The automakers and their affiliates make up 2 percent of the American workforce, and nearly one million Americans participate in GM's pension program, which would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars if it collapsed.

What do you think the US government should do?

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Agency Asleep at Tractor Wheel? Rich Collect Farm Subsidies

CitizenSugar — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:30:30 -0800

Between 2003 and 2006 thousands of ineligible multi-millionaires cultivated farm subsidies from the US Agriculture Department. A congressional report shows that a financial firm executive, a professional sports team owner, a former executive of a technology company, and residents of Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom received thousands of dollars of taxpayer money via farm subsidies.

Officials at the Agriculture Department say they're innocent, since the congressional investigators could access IRS records off limits to them. Instead the Agriculture Department relies on a one-time self certification by those collecting that they don't make more than $2.5 million. The Agriculture Department also noted a relatively small margin of error, considering investigators found only that 2,702 (out of a total of 1.8 million) wrongly received payments during the period.

While government waste doesn't shock me, I'm curious how non-farming millionaires justified taking farm subsidies. Wait a second, considering CEOs flew to Washington in private jets to beg for taxpayer money last week, I guess none of this surprises me.

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