State Retirement Savings Plans Provide Opportunities for Small Businesses and Their Employees Offering retirement plans is a widely practiced benefit offering among U.S. employers. However, the vast majority of those plans are offered by large companies with 500 or...
Resources
Educational Attainment Links to Economic Gain
By Mardee Handler As the U.S. population becomes more educated, it appears that education continues to pay dividends. Latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows an increasing level of educational attainment among the nation’s population age 25 and older. According...
4 Ways to Become a More Informed Voter in Your State’s Gubernatorial Election
By Mardee Handler This November, voters in 36 states will cast their votes for a new (or re-elected) governor. Not unlike during other election seasons, TV screens across the nation are already ablaze with political ads that attack the opponent and distort the facts....
5 Interactive Maps and the Questions They Answer
by Mardee Handler Dating back to the early explorers, maps were tools used to help uncover buried treasures... Now, many maps have become treasures in their own right. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive map can often encapsulate an entire story,...
Five Handy Online Calculators for Municipal Research
by Mardee Handler, managing editor We’ve come a long way from the abacus. The online world is not flat, which continues to increase the power of the Internet. Certainly, we can access vast amounts of information online. We can also, in a growing number of examples,...
Twitter: A Powerful Tool in Your Municipal Research Arsenal
by Mardee Handler, managing editor For those of you who say you don’t have time to add Twitter to your municipal research toolbox, I beg to differ: you’re the ones that can potentially benefit the most from it. For those of you who say you don’t know where to start,...
The Fed Tapers and Munis Waver
And so it begins. Taking a cue from the financial markets’ calmer behavior in recent weeks, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) ended months of speculation by announcing it will start to reduce its bond purchase program to $75 billion from $85 billion a...
Six Reasons to Visit the New GASB Website
Until recently, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) website was rather intimidating to anyone without a degree in finance or accounting. That is no longer the case, thanks to an impressive “new and improved” website that offers greater functionality and...
2013 NFMA Awards Recognize Contributions to Municipal Bond Industry
The National Federation of Municipal Analysts (NFMA) handed out its annual industry awards at its Annual Conference, which was held in San Diego this past week. The awards are given to individuals or entities that “further the goals of the NFMA for the enhancement and...
State and Local Government Policy Organizations React to Fiscal Cliff Bill
How will the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) - or, as some call it, the “Fiscal Cliff” bill - impact state and local governments? The reactions are just beginning to roll in, but the consensus appears to be that the answer remains to be...