Robert Haggar and Reid Grode

The North Dakota Oil Spill and it’s Economic Significance

On October 17th Tesoro announced that it had found “anomalies” along it’s High Plains Pipeline in Western North Dakota.  This was preceded by reports from a local farmer discovered a oil leak in his fields on September 29th.  On October 10th and 11th, Tesoro used a robot to discover that there was a leak in the 20 year old pipeline running in part from Tioga to Black Slough in North Dakota.  Experts have reported that corrosion on the pipe may have caused the spill.  The pipeline, part of the "High Plains" pipeline system, gathers oil from the Bakken shale and delivers it to another pipeline and to Tesoro's 68,000 barrels-per-day Mandan refinery.  All in all, a total of 20,000 barrels of oil were spilled.

When it comes to economic significance, the results are clear.  Due to the fact that most of the oil harvested from North Dakota is utilized using fracking, people are going to be wary of future oil drilling, especially for the more difficult to obtain oil.  In addition to oil spills, fracking has also been attributed to natural gas in tap water and increased health risks for people living near the fracking.  Because of these factors and the fact that oil is becoming more scarce, we can expect gas prices to rise steadily and quickly.

Question:

Why would an event like this have an impact on the economic market?

Visser, Nick. "North Dakota Oil Spill: Tesoro Detected Anomalies Before 20,000 Barrels Burst From Pipeline." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 18 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/tesoro-detected-anomalies_n_4117259.html

Mollie Drexler and Stephanie Podhradsky

Our article is about how people are going to soon have to deal with retiring later and an universal pension age. The age will soon be going to 67 instead of 65. Rich people are living longer and don’t have to work so much and this is going to cause lower income people to have to work longer. People in a higher class have an age gap of 5 more years than people in lower classes. This will be causing most people to not be able to enjoy their retirement for as long. Some reasons people believe that rich people live longer is because less stress, less bad habits, and better health care. People that have money are working less time and this causes less stress. Along with that, they don’t have to the stressful jobs that run down the body. They normally work inside and within companies. Poorer people are forced to find jobs such as working in mines and in dirtier places. This definitely has more of an effect on their health. Bad habits such as smoking a lot, drinking a lot, and not eating well are other causes for an earlier mortality rate in the poor people. After a stressful or long day it is easy to want to go smoke and to drink. And health doesn't seem like a big deal and easily gets ignored. Health care is getting better but rich people don’t have to worry about the price of health care ,whereas, it does matter to people with less money.

Making an universal pension age will affect the economy because people are seeing that it is getting harder and harder to move up the scale and if they are born poor they are starting to get stuck as a poor person. The rich can still buy but the poor people can’t. They have to try to save money and get by. And in a world of scarcity the poor people save their money for bad habits and barely get by. In the United States we use to make it available to move up the classes but now it is getting more difficult.

Question:

Overall, how do you feel about them wanting to increase the age of retirement and what do you see as a  negative result of this choice? Will a universal pension age affect everybody in all social classes and how would it affect each class?

Works Cited:

"The Rich Are Different." The Economist 22 Dec. 2012: 116. Web.

Online access:

www.economist.com/longevity12

Colton Wehking & Logan Hawkins ☺

According to American official figures, 15 percent of Americans live in poverty. Others say that the actual percentage is over double that. They say this because in the 1960’s the government created a way to measure poverty by taking the number of people on a very low-cost food plan and multiplying it by three, that was what would account for what a family would need just to be at a poverty-level standard of living. This measure has been used for about 50 years now. But now, in 2011 the U.S. Census Bureau came up with a new measure called the supplemental poverty measure. This new measure only measures about 16% of Americans in poverty, which isn’t much different from the previous measure. They described poverty as not being able to meet the costs of a person’s basic needs, such as food, shelter, and medical care. If you actually tally these costs up and see what the person’s income is, it says about one in three Americans are in poverty, according to Jeannette Wicks-Lim, Assistant Research Professor.

Question: Do you believe that these numbers are actually accurate?

Relevance to economics: Involves money

Wicks-Lim, Jeannette. "Actual US Poverty Twice Official Figure." The Real News. N.p., 31 May 2013. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. <http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10244>.

Can Employee-Owned Companies Reboot the Economy?

We need employee owned companies to fix our broken economy. Employee owned companies typically pay better, have better benefits, and treat their employees better in general. It also tends to improve interaction between the employees, as they are working together rather than doing what their boss tells them to without having any say. The companies then reflect the viewpoint of the company as a whole, not a multimillionaire owner. Scheels and Hy-Vee are both examples of employee owned companies.

This ties into how the economy is deeply rooted in everyday life. The effects of having a employee owned companies will drive the economy up. Without greedy owners, there will be cheaper prices and/or higher pay rates for the employees. This in turn will cause more money flowing in the general public rather than select individuals.

Question: What are some other advantages of employee owned companies?


By: Dylan Kipp, Mark Magelky, Kenny Cooperrider

Works Cited

Matthews, Christopher. "Business & Money." Business Money Can Employee Owned Companies Reboot the Economy. Time, 19 Nov. 2013. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.
http://business.time.com/2013/11/19/can-employee-owned-companies-reboot-the-economy/

     Two thirds of all Americans in the United States are Overweight or Obese. These overweight Americans take in more calories than they burn during exercise if they even exercise. The majority of food the overweight people eat include salted, sweetened, or fatty items. Now a days, the jobs that people take part in involve less physical activity.Cars reduce the need to walk or bike to or from place to place. As more people in the world continue to be obese, the possibility of heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, joint troubles, and cancers increases. There are a couple responses that can be taken: You can do nothing at all. Another response is to punish fat people. In Japan they have started the process of setting a specific limit of waist line size in Japan; if workers don't slim down they will have to pay fines. A third response is to make it easier to choose healthier food over junk food. They can help this by making healthier food like gluten free food cheaper. They can insure that in schools students are eating healthy foods and are taking part in recess. Clear standards can be set on nutrition labels, so it will help people make a clear choice. They could start taxing soda, which would raise the cost, and cause less people to buy it. The relevance to economics is the fact that when people are fat, they cost a lot of money to themselves and others.Due to people being obese, they can experience many problems which could potentially be paid for with American taxpayers if the obese person is under federal health care. Fat people could make our economy different because if the government decides to raise taxes on soda because of the fat people, normal sized people will have to pay more for soda, even though they only drink it in a moderate amount.

www.whealthysolutions.com

Question for Classmates:

How would you fix the world’s obesity problem?

Source:

Howard, Charlotte. "The World Is Fat." The Economist: The World in 2013 31 Mar. 2013: 32. Web.

By Maddy Klamm and Emily Anderson

Ashley Schobert, Becca Goth, Cassidy Wethor

The article we chose talked about how president Obama tried to make amends with Iran. His first attempts however, were met with hostility from iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. His second attempt, on September 24th was taken differently however, he wasn’t showing that he wanted friendship, but he was accusing them of producing nuclear weapons, which they promised not to do.’ This article is relevant to economics because it is dealing with the president and the other countries.  You could say this would fall into a globalization category.  Iran has oil  which is a big part of our economy.  

1) Do you believe we should be trying to intervene with Iran?

2) What could happen is we upset the Iranian leaders?

“Jaw-jaw for now.”  The Economist.  28 Sept. 2013: 44-45.  Print.

U.S. to become world's top oil producer in 2015 - IEA

Katie Erickson, Bethany Headrick, Peter Choudek

United States is expected to pass Saudi Arabia and Russia for the top oil producing country by 2015.  Our oil reserves in North Dakota and Texas will propel us to the top;  we are expecting.  With the increase in oil production, the IEA predicts that we will produce around 101 million barrels a day.  This is expected to go down by 2020.  By 2020 the middle eastern countries will once again be at the top of the oil producing world. The oil prices will rise with the developments of different resources like a light, tight oil that has fueled the oil boom in the U.S. This is relevant to economics because oil prices fluctuate with supply and demand.  Oil prices also determine what airline companies charge for tickets and service.  If the United States becomes self sufficient with oil, our economy will improve greatly if even for a few years.

Do you think that it is probable for the U.S. to become the top oil producer?  What kind of effect will it have on our economy?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-become-worlds-top-oil-134055417.html

Hudson, Dale. "U.S. to Become World's Top Oil Producer in 2015 - IEA." Yahoo Finance. Reuters.com, 12 Nov. 2013. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. <http://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-become-worlds-top-oil-134055417.html>.