ShareThis

There's no telling what kind of a hit, if any, President Obama took in the Wall Street collapse, but his financial-disclosure reports at least let us watch how his investment choices are faring from now on.
According to the report he filed May 15, Obama has divvied his retirement money into Vanguard's FTSE Social Index, Mid-Cap Index and Wellesley Income funds, as well as Goldman Sachs Large Cap and Marshall Mid-Cap Value funds.
He also has IRA money in U.S. Treasury bills and a money-market fund. The disclosure reports show holdings only in imprecise ranges, i.e., between $50,001 to $100,000, so it is not possible to determine the true value of all the accounts. But it can be said that the president has somewhere between $165,000 and $350,000 -- at least -- socked away for his golden years.

Look for immigration reform to heat up again soon, but this time pushed by those who want to grant some sort of amnesty to illegal immigrants living in the United States.
With the number of people caught sneaking across the border with Mexico this year down 27 percent, and the border fence only about 40 miles short of completion, immigrant advocates are gearing up to make the case that now, with the border more secure, attention can turn to legalizing the status of the millions now living in the country's shadows.
Obama, who has already shifted the focus of immigration enforcement from rounding up illegal workers to penalizing employers who hire them, has invited a core group of congressional Democrats and Republicans to the White House next month to get the reform ball rolling.
But don't expect the antipathy of those who see an amnesty as rewarding lawbreakers to evaporate easily, especially if illegal workers are seen to be getting jobs in this grim economy.

The jobless might want to check out Uncle Sam, who is going to be hanging out thousands of "help wanted" signs, if Obama's 2010 budget is approved.
Though it doesn't tally all of them, the budget says the federal government will hire "several hundred thousand new civilian employees during the next four years."
Among them: 33,800 for the Pentagon; 7,000 for the Department of Homeland Security; about 10,000 for the Department of Veterans Affairs; and 3,200 for the Social Security Administration (enough, perhaps, to update their records...).

The U.S. Postal Service, already so financially strapped it wants Congress to allow it to end Saturday mail delivery, is about to take another big revenue hit. The House this past week voted overwhelmingly to prohibit the delivery of tobacco products through the mail, and the Senate is likely to follow suit soon.
The Postal Service estimates such a ban would mean a loss of as much as $40 million in revenue each year, which comes from delivering smokes bought on the Internet, often from Indian reservations, which sell cartons cheap because they don't pay federal taxes.
Anti-smoking advocates already had gotten FedEx and UPS to voluntarily agree not to ship tobacco goods, so the USPS was the only means left.

Firefighting officials are worried that the mounting number of housing foreclosures will translate into a wave of fires in vacant buildings.
The National Fire Protection Association released a study this past week that showed a 2 percent increase in such fires, from 31,900 in 2005 to 32,700 in 2006. Though current stats aren't available, the group said the number of fires in unoccupied structures is climbing.

(E-mail Lisa Hoffman at hoffmanl(at)shns.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Washington Calling