business and economy

In his speech on health care reform last week, President Barack Obama endorsed a plan to charge insurance companies a "fee" on their "most expensive policies."

In other words, Obama likes the idea of taxing what have been termed gold-plated, or Cadillac, health plans.

Before submitting your resume and cover letter, don't forget to proofread them. Better yet, ask a friend to review them for you as well. Just one or two typos can harm your chances of landing an interview. Busy hiring managers who are inundated with resumes from job hopefuls are looking for any reason to narrow the list. Don't let a simple mistake on your resume take you out of the running.

The way things are going, the video game industry might not show any growth this year.

Sales were down 16 percent in August, continuing a string of down months that charts back to March, according to NPD data.

Revenue clocked in at $908.7 million for August, compared with $1.09 billion for the same month last year.

The federal government says it has paid back about 40 percent of the money it owes to car dealers who participated in the Cash for Clunkers program.

But dealers across the nation are disputing that claim, saying that less than 20 percent of the money they put up to make the sales under the program has been reimbursed to them.

For more than a decade, the nation's payday lenders have battled the perception that they operate on the shadowy fringe of the mainstream financial system, outside the reach of government regulators and rules dictating prudent lending.

Now, payday lenders have a powerful new ally in their quest for respectability: big banks.

A few weeks ago we were getting ready to drive my daughter back to college. As we were getting into the car, a neighbor passed by walking his dog.

This neighbor is a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and when he learned that my daughter was returning to college for her second year, he got excited.

Four years after Abercrombie & Fitch refused to let a teenager help her autistic sister try on clothes at its Mall of America store, Minnesota officials have fined the company $115,264 for discriminating against a disabled person.

When it comes to your resume, sometimes what you leave out is more important that what you put in. Hiring managers generally have just a few minutes to review applications they receive. As a result, your qualifications may not catch an employer's eye if they are buried among irrelevant information.

Bea Anderson and her siblings have always made decisions about their shared cabin with a handshake.

With just a brother and a sister and their spouses to consult, that wasn't so hard. But the cabin on Minnesota's Lake Vermillion, which has been in the family for more than 50 years, will pass to seven families in the next generation.

I was having breakfast the other day, and staring me in the face was my wife's Woman's World magazine and the headline: "Get a great job -- even in this economy!"

How could I not pass this information on to you? Here goes ...