Between 2000 and 2012, the number of people in Penobscot County [Maine] receiving Social Security disability benefits skyrocketed, rising from 4,475 to 7,955 ”” or nearly one in 12 of the county’s adults between the ages of 18 and 64, according to Social Security statistics.

The fast expansion of disability here is part of a national trend that has seen the number of former workers receiving benefits soar from just over 5 million to 8.8 million between 2000 and 2012. An additional 2.1 million dependent children and spouses also receive benefits.

The crush of new recipients is putting unsustainable financial pressure on the program. Federal officials project that the program will exhaust its trust fund by 2016 ”” 20 years before the trust fund that supports Social Security’s old-age benefits is projected to run dry.

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You may remember a little over a week ago on BreakPoint, John Stonestreet gave you his reaction to an outrageous ruling by the New Mexico Supreme Court; a ruling that John said, “eviscerates” religious freedom.

Now “eviscerates” is a strong word. Unfortunately, John was 100 percent right to use it….

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Today’s good-guy award goes to Joey Prusak of Hopkins, Minn.

Prusak, a Dairy Queen manager, back on Sept. 10 saw a woman pick up a $20 bill that a blind customer dropped. When Prusak told her to give it back, she refused. So, the 19-year-old manager refused to serve her. He then took $20 of his own money and gave it to the visually impaired customer.

Prusak’s good deed might have gone unnoticed. But, as KARE-TV reports “Other customers saw what happened….

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Administrators at the Cleveland Clinic announced on Wednesday that the health care giant would be cutting as much as $300 million from its 2014 budget, and that the cuts will likely include layoffs.

“Health care reform has really changed things, and the burden of cost is going to be falling on patients,” spokeswoman Eileen Shiel told The Plain Dealer. “We want to make sure we can keep care affordable.”

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The Federal Reserve lost its chance for a “freebie” by deciding not to begin scaling back its $85-billion-a-month bond-buying program because the markets had already factored in the taper, hedge fund pro Stanley Druckenmiller told CNBC on Thursday….

Druckenmiller argued that the Fed’s lack of action will make it much harder for the next central bank chairman to start tapering.

Read it all (the full video of the interview is highly recommended if you have the time).

Seeing a more uneven economic climate than they expected and the potential for fiscal discord in Washington, Federal Reserve officials got cold feet Wednesday and decided to keep their signature easy-money program in place for the time being.

The move, coming after Fed officials spent months alerting the public that they might begin to pare their $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program at the September policy meeting, marks the latest in a string of striking turnabouts from Washington policy makers that have whipsawed markets in recent days.

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There’s plenty of fodder for deficit hawks in a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. In short, the future looks grim….

First, the good news: The CBO projects the deficit will shrink to $378 billion in 2015, or 2.1 percent of the size of the overall U.S. economy. Compared with just a few years ago when the budget gap ballooned as a result of the recession, this marks a nearly unprecedented improvement in the deficit picture. It’s a rapid decline in budget shortfalls not seen since the end of World War II. The national debt will bottom out in 2018, at 68 percent of GDP.

The bad news: From there, the picture gets decidedly less rosy. Budget deficits gradually rise, “mainly because of increasing interest costs and growing spending for Social Security and the government’s major health care programs (Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies to be provided through the health insurance exchanges),” says the report. By 2038, the national debt will reach 100 percent of GDP….

Read it all and follow the link to the actual report.

More Americans are struggling to afford food — nearly as many as did during the recent recession. The 20.0% who reported in August that they have, at times, lacked enough money to buy the food that they or their families needed during the past year, is up from 17.7% in June, and is the highest percentage recorded since October 2011. The percentage who struggle to afford food now is close to the peak of 20.4% measured in November 2008, as the global economic crisis unfolded.

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The Census Bureau is out with the annual report on incomes and poverty. And while you might think that after years of stagnant incomes and elevated poverty rates, we would be inured to the depressing facts contained therein, it still somehow has the power to shock.

For my money, the most depressing fact about the economy is not the fact that household incomes were basically flat in 2012 (the real median household income was down to $51,017 from $51,100 in 2011, a statistically insignificant change). It wasn’t even the fact that 15 percent of the U.S. population was living in poverty, according to the official, flawed definition of the term.

Nah, the most depressing result comes when you look at the longer view of household incomes in the United States.

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When American University graduate Elyse Barletta, 27, was looking for a full-time nannying position recently in Charlotte, N.C., three families wanted to hire her””all were impressed by her college education.

“They wanted someone who could help with their children’s homework,” said Barletta, a history major who made the dean’s list and is proficient in French.

Experts say young women like Barletta make up a fast-growing segment of the nanny industry: College graduates who could go into law, medicine or other fields but are choosing to become career nannies, sometimes because they struggled to find jobs in their desired professions. These highly credentialed child-minders are being greeted with open arms into middle-class and upper-class families who want to give their kids an edge in an increasingly competitive world.

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Let’s say that your religion considers one day a year to be especially holy. On that day, people complete a 10-day period of self-examination and making amends. Meanwhile, God decides what is in store for the coming year. Members of the community ”” even many who rarely attend services ”” gather to chant special prayers.

ow imagine that, to be there on that day, you have to pay hundreds of dollars.

That is the situation faced by millions of American Jews every Yom Kippur. At most synagogues, to attend services on that holiday, which this year ends Saturday night, one must have paid annual dues or have bought special tickets. The fees also cover tickets for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which was last week.

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Under the Affordable Care Act, more insurance plans are expected to start covering the cost of obesity treatments, including counseling on diet and exercise as well as medications and surgery. These are treatments that most insurance companies don’t cover now.

This move is a response to the increasing number of health advocates and medical groups that say obesity should be classified as a disease.

Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. But this summer, the American Medical Association determined that . They followed in the footsteps of the , a health advocacy group that called obesity a disease back in 2008.

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Only half of all small businesses survive five years, according to the Commerce Department ”” the number is much lower for food establishments. But at his original location, Mr. [Duncan] Goodall said, he’s figured out some rules for indie coffeehouses. These are rules that he has now evangelized to all the mentees, “about 20,” who have found him on the Web.

“You have two types of people” who come for mentorship, Mr. Goodall said. “People who love coffeehouses, and people who love coffee. But there’s no requirement for either of those groups to know anything about business.” So what he offers mentees is like a quickie M.B.A. for people whose background is in ”” to use the Owens’ example ”” preaching or nursing.

Mr. Goodall is emphatic about Rule No. 1: “Figure out your niche.” If you’re attracting the artsy crowd, don’t worry if your employees have crazy tattoos ”” it might be better if they do.

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Earlier today, I spoke with Larry Summers and accepted his decision to withdraw his name from consideration for Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Larry was a critical contributor to the radical deregulation that was one of many causes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It was in no small part because of his lack of expertise, false wisdom, and inept leadership that the economy crashed and burned and even today is still failing to be to back to its full growth potential.

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Ever since the euro crisis broke in late 2009 this newspaper has criticised the world’s most powerful woman. We disagreed with Angela Merkel’s needlessly austere medicine: the continent’s recession has been unnecessarily long and brutal as a result. We wanted the chancellor to shrug off her cautious incrementalism and the mantle of her country’s history””and to lead Europe more forcefully. She is largely to blame for the failure to create a full banking union for the euro zone, the first of many institutional changes it still needs. She has refused to lead public opinion, never spelling out to her voters how much Germany is to blame for the euro mess (nor how much its banks have been rescued by its bail-outs). We also worry that she has not done enough at home: in recent years no country in the European Union has made fewer structural reforms, and her energy policies have landed Germany with high subsidies for renewables and high electricity prices.

And yet we believe Mrs Merkel is the right person to lead her country and thus Europe. That is partly because of what she is: the world’s most politically gifted democrat and a far safer bet than her leftist opponents. It is also partly because of what we believe she could still become””the great leader Germany and Europe so desperately needs.

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Apple has never been shy about claiming its role as artist and shaman. Links between religion and art and the promise of technology are frequently revealed in the company’s advertising campaigns. The 2007 ad that launched the iPhone, for example, shows the glowing device floating against a black background. A solitary finger reaches out to touch the haloed screen, and the tagline reads, “Touching is Believing.”

The copy is a biblical reference (among other things; it also referenced the way the new phone had been kept under wraps), and the visuals refer to a 17th century painting by Caravaggio, “The Incredulity of St. Thomas.” Caravaggio’s painting shows the apostle Thomas placing his finger into the wounded side of the risen Christ to confirm that he has truly risen from the dead. Thomas touches so that he may believe. Apple’s parody of sacred art pairs technology with transcendence.

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The next big movement in Massachusetts health care may come not from the state’s world-famous hospitals or its cutting-edge research labs, but from houses of worship.

Stepping up pressure on the health care industry to control spiraling costs, which are crimping family and government budgets, the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization will host a forum next Tuesday at Temple Israel in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area to grill hospital and insurance leaders about the affordability of medical care.

Top executives of major hospital groups, such as Partners HealthCare System, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Steward Health Care System, and leading insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Tufts Health Plan, have accepted invitations to the event, which is scheduled for 7 to 9 p.m.

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Millennials””people born between 1981 and the early 2000s””are much closer to their parents than previous generations, and they have gained a reputation for being coddled by so-called helicopter parents, say researchers who study Millennials. But when they started joining the workforce in the early 2000s, managers balked at parents getting involved in their kids’ workplace struggles or job searches.

That was then. Now, some firms have begun embracing parental involvement and using it to attract and hold onto talent and boost employee morale.

One of them is Northwestern Mutual. Michael Van Grinsven, field-growth and development director at the Milwaukee-based financial firm, says the company does everything it can to accommodate the parents of college-aged interns, including regularly inviting them to the office for open houses.

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Twitter Inc. said it has confidentially submitted an S-1 form to the Securities and Exchange Commission to begin the process for an initial public offering, a long-awaited move by the microblogging service.

In a tweet on Thursday, the San Francisco-based company said, “We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

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Route 19 north in Cranberry is crowded with three lanes of cars zooming during Tuesday’s lunch hour. A metallic gold 2011 Cadillac SRX with four passengers is on the clogged highway, smoothly traveling at the 45 mph speed limit. Suddenly, danger looms — a black Jeep slowly enters the roadway right in front of the Cadillac. The Cadillac quickly brakes without losing control, slows down and continues moving, avoiding crashing into the rear of the erratically driven Jeep.

Now that was a pretty nifty piece of driving — especially by a computer.

Yes, that’s right, the Cadillac was totally, completely driving itself (with onboard human monitoring, to be sure). It stopped at stop signs and red lights, safely entered traffic on cross streets, made turns (using turn signals, natch), changed lanes to pass cars, and slowed down and accelerated at appropriate times, all the while choosing the most efficient route to a pre-programmed destination.

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A federal judge ruled Monday (Sept. 9) that the Abercrombie and Fitch clothing chain violated federal anti-employment discrimination guidelines when it fired a Muslim employee in 2010 for not removing her religious headscarf, or hijab, for work.

Abercrombie asserted that as part of its business plan, it not only employed sales-floor personnel, but “models,” had a “look policy” that gave employees certain grooming and appearance guidelines, and sought to give customers an “in-store experience.”

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If the drop is mainly driven by demographics — aging baby boomers retiring — then the lower unemployment rate gives a true picture of the amount of slack left in the labor market. If the contraction instead is caused by discouraged job-seekers giving up their search, then the jobless rate doesn’t reflect the true state of the market….

Central bank economists are divided over how much of the fall in the workforce is structural and thus not likely to be reversed.

“There is disagreement within the system,” said Geoffrey Tootell, senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

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There are numerous causes of the less-than-satisfying economic growth in America: the retirement of the baby boomers, the withdrawal of working-age men from the labor force, the relentless rise in the inequality of the income distribution and, as I have written about elsewhere, a slowdown in technological innovation.

Education deserves particular focus because its effects are so long-lasting. Every high school dropout becomes a worker who likely won’t earn much more than minimum wage, at best, for the rest of his or her life. And the problems in our educational system pervade all levels.

The surge in high school graduation rates ”” from less than 10 percent of youth in 1900 to 80 percent by 1970 ”” was a central driver of 20th-century economic growth. But the percentage of 18-year-olds receiving bona fide high school diplomas fell to 74 percent in 2000, according to the University of Chicago economist James J. Heckman.

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The Church of England has invested up to £10m in one of the world’s major arms firms, which supplies systems and technology for unmanned drones and jets to conflicts around the world. The discovery, on the eve of what is set to be the biggest day of protests against DSEi ”“ the UK’s leading arms fair ”“ in Docklands, London, tomorrow, has led worshippers to accuse church leaders of profiting from conflict.

The Church Commissioners and Church of England Pensions Board are both shareholders in General Electric (GE), with shareholdings up to £10m. Yesterday, the Church defended the investment, claiming less than 3 per cent of GE’s business was based in arms sales.

But the firm, along with its key subsidiary General Aviation, is a leading supplier of “integrated systems and technologies” for combat aircraft, military transport, helicopters, land vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles ”“ better known as drones.

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The choice of “Art and Risk” as the theme of a weeklong seminar for Christian writers and artists this June proved sadly ironic when the host, Image journal, lost $65,000 through its online registration process.

Organizers of the Christian literary journal’s 2013 Glen Workshop hired Acteva, a company specializing in events for small nonprofit organizations, to handle its online registrations. The San Francisco-based company boasted a solid 12-year track record, and even gave Image a discount.

“We were looking to try to make it smooth and efficient,” said Gregory Wolfe, publisher and editor of Image. “We felt that it was a reasonable option for us because they were clearly keeping our needs in mind.”

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The chief executive of Lenovo Group Ltd., which recently overtook Hewlett-Packard Co. to become the world’s largest producer of personal computers, is sharing his annual bonus with his staff.

Angela Lee, a spokeswoman in Hong Kong for Lenovo, best known in the U.S. for acquiring IBM Corp.’s ThinkPad laptop brand and the rest of its PC business in 2005, confirmed that Yang Yuanqing, who is also Lenovo’s chairman, will share $3.25 million from his bonus with some 10,000 staff in China and 19 other countries.

Lenovo maintains dual headquarters in Beijing and in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, the base of IBM’s old PC operations, and Yang splits his time between the two. The company has some 30,000 staff worldwide, according to its website.

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Another historic Euclid Avenue church is facing demolition, now that a marketing effort by the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio appears to have netted a big buyer: the Cleveland Clinic.

The diocese recently applied for a demolition permit for the Church of the Transfiguration, a shuttered Gothic Revival building that occupies 0.83 acres on the northwest side of the Clinic’s main campus. The Cleveland Landmarks Commission, which exerts some control over significant buildings and historic districts in the city, expects to consider the demolition request at its Thursday meeting….

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The long, slow recovery in the U.S. job market is leaving ever-more Americans on the sidelines””and complicating the calculus for Federal Reserve policy makers weighing when the economy can get by with less help.

Employers added 169,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said Friday, a bit more than in July, and the unemployment rate fell to 7.3%, the best mark of the recovery.

But beneath such positive numbers lay evidence of a job market stuck in second gear. The government revised down its estimate for June and July hiring by a combined 74,000 jobs, and a disproportionate share of the jobs that are being added are in low-paying sectors such as restaurants and retail.

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Of all her academic heresies, however, none was more upsetting to [Jean Bethke] Elshtain’s colleagues than her support for aggressive military action against terrorist organizations and, a decade ago, her defense of the war in Iraq. Having written about the politics and morality of war since the beginning of her career in the 1970s, Elshtain insisted that America’s conflict with al Qaeda was not a matter of international law enforcement, as some insisted. It was a war.

Terrorists, and states that support them, are not merely engaged in criminal activities; they are our enemies””in the same way that Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were our enemies in World War II. As she wrote in her 2003 book, “Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World”: “With our great power comes an even greater responsibility. One of our ongoing responsibilities is to respond to the cries of the aggrieved. Victims of genocide, for example, have a reasonable expectation that powerful nations devoted to human rights will attempt to stay the hand of the murderers.”

That did not mean that force is always justified or that no rules apply. Elshtain was a believer in, and a leading interpreter of, the tradition known as “just war theory.” This tradition does not propose pacifism””the view that the use of force is inherently unjustifiable. On the contrary, just-war theory says that in the face of unjust aggression, nations sometimes have a duty to use military force. They are also obligated to fight with all legitimate means to win””to defeat the enemy and halt its aggression.

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