Investment Politics - Jobs, The Economy and Social Security

Who wants to be a president; the President of the United States? Social Security reform is the winning ticket.

Research supports the thesis that Social Security reform would provide all the lubrication necessary to get our economic ball bearings rolling in the right direction.

Economies do not grow, or increase employment, when job providers are taxed and regulated unmercifully, throttling their energy, creativity, and profitability.

Consumer spending pushes the economy; we need to do more than hand out a few hundred bucks.

The objective of the exercise, Barack, is to permanently place more disposable income in consumers' wallets while providing incentives for employers to hire more workers.

There are three areas where the impact of reforms would be beneficial to all, irrespective of political sentiment. Social Security reform would benefit the most people, most quickly.

Next on the list, Hillary, would be elimination of income taxes (federal, state, and local) on:

(a) all forms of retirement income, and then,

(b) all forms of investment income.

Third, and particularly important for job creation, John, would be the elimination of all income taxes and nuisance fees on businesses.

Who wants to be President?

Social Security will be the easiest to implement quickly while producing unprecedented increases in disposable income, business cost reductions, and job growth.

Here's a rough outline of a brainstorming plan. Throw out the politics and focus on the program--- phase one deadline, January 1,2010.

Change Social Security funding to a mandatory, private program, for all employed persons, and add a voluntary program for those who are not employed.

All employees would contribute to deferred fixed annuities, purchased from new divisions of qualified financial institutions.

Existing Social Security credits would be the initial deposit to the contracts for all participants under age 60.

This Overlooked Sector is Set to Explode Upwards

Do you know Jim Rogers?

Recently, the bow-tied investing legend has taken to appearing on CNBC and blasting the Federal Reserve for its anti-dollar policies. I respect Jim for speaking his mind. But I respect him even more for his investment insights.

Jim Rogers co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros in 1969. Between 1970 and 1980, the fund returned an incredible 4,200%, outperforming the S&P 500's performance of 47% by an enormous margin.

Rogers, by then a multimillionaire, "retired" at the ripe age of 37.

He has since completed two massive trips around the world: the first via motorcycle, the second in a custom made Mercedes S series. I highly recommend his books chronicling these trips, Investment Biker and Adventure Capitalist. They're entertaining readers. And Rogers' knowledge of international markets is virtually unparalleled.

So when Jim Rogers talks, I listen very closely.

Starting in 1998, Rogers became bullish on commodities. Dissatisfied with the commodity indexes that were available at the time, he didn't just sit back and watch. Instead, he launched his own commodity index.

Since that time, the Rogers International Commodities Index has risen nearly 400%. In contrast, the S&P 500 is only up 18%. However, the vast majority of Rogers' commodity gains have come from hard commodities. Oil, gold, aluminum, copper, and nickel have all tripled in the last five years.

Soft commodities, like wheat, corn, and soybeans on the other hand, remain at historic lows relative to their hard counterparts.

In 1960, one barrel of oil traded for around the same price as one bushel of wheat or a bushel of corn. Today, oil is at $100, wheat is at $10 and corn is at $5.46. It's quite a discrepancy.

And it won't last long. Even if oil prices drop, agricultural commodities could see their prices triple and still not be even close to their historic relationship.

It's a simple matter of supply and demand.

From 1974-2005, the world's population grew by more than 1.1 billion people. However, most of them? and the rest of the world for that matter? weren't eating anything resembling a western diet. For example, in 1980 the average Chinese consumer lived off $1 a day.

However, as emerging markets' economies began to expand, so did the diets of their citizens. In 1985, the average Chinese consumer ate 44 pounds of meat per year. Today, it's more than doubled to 110 pounds.

And it takes 17 pounds of grain to generate one pound of beef.

However, despite their massive growth in population, most countries haven't increased their available farmland. In 1989,worldwide arable land was 1.6 billion acres. It's 1.6 billion acres today.

On top of this, inventories for corn, wheat, and soybean are near 40-year lows. Other soft commodities like cotton, sugar and coffee are at historically low inventories too.

And thanks to a Congress that doesn't understand economics, more and more farmland in the U.S. is being devoted to biofuels. This year one third of all U.S. corn production will go towards ethanol.

Simply put, food prices are not going down anytime soon. The time to buy is now.

Jim Rogers certainly is. In an October 2007 interview he stated, "God knows how high the price of agriculture is going to go, so that's where I'm putting more of my money now... I think I'm going to make more money in agriculture than I make in precious metals."

There are a number of different ways of playing this trend. You could buy an Agriculture ETF, like the Powershares DB Agriculture ETF (DBA) or the iPath Dow Jones Agriculture ETF (JJA). A Swedish Bank has recently launched a fund that tracks the agriculture portion of Roger's International Index too.

Or you could buy a peripheral food play... say a fertilizer company like PotashCorp or Agrium.

But no matter what you do, get some money into agricultural commodities soon. This will be one of the biggest trends of the next two to three years.

Best Regards, Graham Summers

Do You Have Unclaimed Money To Your Name?

Every person in society works hard to earn money so they can live their daily lives.

What is rather amusing is many people have money right under their nose, however they just do not realize it.

But without realizing it, you too could have unclaimed money to your name, and it could be much more than you may imagine.

You have to ask yourself if you have ever moved without getting a security deposit back or have forgotten about a savings account with money in it.

There are state governments all over the country with billions of dollars of unclaimed money.

While the government wants to return this money, people are not coming forward to claim what is rightfully theirs.

It seems rather outlandish that there is all of this money sitting there unclaimed.

If it were a few bucks per person, it may not be as big of a deal. But there are some people with thousands of dollars that have been unclaimed.

In an effort to make things easier on you, the government has begun to make it easier for you to find and recover your money.

Now you can claim your money online with online access to property databases and even online claim forms.

With this information, you can receive information on unclaimed property and links to all available online state property recovery resources.

Then, all you have to do is go to these sites and find out what money is yours and how much of it is yours.

The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators estimates that states are holding back as much as $10 billion in unclaimed property. Not $10 thousand or even $10 million.

But a ridiculous figure of $10 billion. It has been approximated that 26 million Americans have unclaimed property.

So why not take the time to see if you are one of the 26 million Americans missing out on money they already own?

You may wonder what exactly is classified as unclaimed property.

Unclaimed property can be a wide array of things ranging from wages, checking and savings accounts, gift certificates, safe deposit boxes and stocks or bonds.

There are numerous things that you could have to your name and not even realize it.

If you do wish to pursue finding your unclaimed money, you will learn that each state has its own methods and requirements for finding and reclaiming the money.

But searching on the internet has certainly become a popular method because of the ease and convenience.

By Noah Ulrich