by Peter G. Peterson (1996)
According to recent polls, more young Americans believe in UFOs than think they will ever receive a Social Security check. Yet most Baby Boomers, as they approach retirement age, believe they will continue to live their present lifestyle in retirement - without a fraction of the personal savings or pensions necessary to pay for the future they expect. When the 76 million members of the Baby Boom generation - the largest generation in our history - begin to retire in less than fifteen years, one American in five will be 65 years of age or older. This aging population - double today's load - will depend on as few as 1.6 working Americans to support each retired person. Who will support this nation of Floridas? In this short, powerful book, Peter G. Peterson, one of America's top investment bankers and a leading critic of our entitlement policy, spells out in the clearest possible language, with unmistakable numbers and easy-to-read charts, the disaster that lies ahead if we continue to ignore our low savings rate, our ballooning federal deficit, and our enormous unfunded and unsustainable commitments to retirees. Peterson reveals what politicians are afraid to admit: trillions of dollars of promised Social Security and Medicare benefits for which no funds have been provided. Shattering the myths surrounding this subject with hard facts and eye-opening views of the future, Peterson gives the most comprehensive and candid plan for a gradual, humane, fair, and realistic answer to the greatest challenge of the next century: transforming our political, economic, cultural, and social assumptions to adapt to the realities of the graying of America.
Menzie D. Chinn and Jeffry A. Frieden
Examines the role federal borrowing played in the economic collapse of 2008, describing the economic and political causes of the collapse, and discussing what the continuing impact of the debt and foreign borrowing will be on the United States in the twenty-first century.
a novel by Laura Whitcomb
After 350 years as a Fetch, or death escort, Calder breaks his vows and enters the body of Rasputin, whose spirit causes rebellion in the Land of Lost Souls while Calder struggles to convey Ana and Alexis, orphaned in the Russian Revolution, to Heaven.
J. Yellowlees Douglas
"J. Yellowlees Douglas looks at the new light that interactive narratives may shed on theories of reading and interpretation and the possibilities for hypertext novels, World Wide Web-based short stories, and cinematic, interactive narratives on CD-ROM. She confronts questions that are at the center of the current debate: Does an interactive story demand too much from readers? Does the concept of readerly choice destroy the author's vision? Does interactivity turn reading fiction from "play" into "work"--Too much work? Will hypertext fiction overtake the novel as a form of art or entertainment? And what might future interactive books look like?"--Jacket.
Robert Edric
The astonishing new novel from one of the UK's finest literary writersGermany, spring 1946. The Nuremberg Trials are underway. Three hundred miles north, in the Rehstadt Institute, a British "Assessment and Evaluation" centre, Alex Foster interrogates a succession of lesser war criminals, exploring their pasts and their crimes, and deciding their futures in the soon-to-be-reborn Germany.But Rehstadt, a town largely untouched by the war, is a place of old hostilities and burnished hatreds; a place still not entirely at peace; a place where the certainties of the past are still weighed favourably against the deprivations of the present and the vague, uncertain promises of the future.As spring progresses, and as events in the wider world quicken to their own closely observed conclusion, Alex Foster finds himself at the centre of a conflict involving British, American and German interests; and for the first time in his career he also finds himself compromised – forced into subterfuge and deceit as he struggles to weigh personal convictions and loyalties against the greater political and military good...