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The UK government is preparing to launch an online campaign inviting citizens to submit ideas on how to cut public sector expenditure, and to vote on those ideas they support.

The Spending Challenge campaign comprises a website and a Facebook page where citizens can submit their ideas and describe how they could be implemented. Other visitors can rate these ideas out of five.

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The open enterprise Social and technological change is forcing business to become more transparent

“Our central department ‘champions’ team in Cabinet Office/Treasury will take forward the most promising ideas with departments and Treasury spending teams to be worked up and the results will be reviewed by Ministers, who take the final decisions,” the website says.

The website is based on the same template as the Your Freedom site, which invited citizens to suggest ways in which civil liberties could be enhanced and regulation cut. On

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It is very common for Americans to get their first credit card when they are in their late teens. Unfortunately, it is also all too common for teenagers to run up their bills, getting themselves into serious financial trouble when they are still young. The trick to making sure that this doesn’t happen is to combine two very important things. First, you need to have a commitment to responsible use of the card. And second, you need to choose a good credit card that is specifically designed to help students and teenagers build good credit.

Commitment to Responsible Credit

Before ever getting a credit card, a teen should really commit to responsible use of the card. This involves more than merely saying that you’ll use the card responsibly. Instead, it means taking actions that will help you to be responsible with your credit. Tho

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I’m a city girl, born and raised in Houston. I have spent the past seven years in Austin, a smaller, but lively city where there is always some major event, festival or concert happening. Whenever I drive back home to Houston, I pass by dozens of tiny rural towns, and many homes along the highway clearly not part of any city. Some of the houses are many miles from a gas station or grocery store. To me, this is an absolutely foreign concept.

So I was stunned when I saw an article on CNN this week about an Alaskan couple living 150 miles above the Arctic Circle in an area I would consider inhospitable. In addition to enduring far-below-zero temperatures, the Korth family is utterly isolated — they live 60 miles from their nearest neighbor. They have lived this isolated life for 30 years. Even the reporters expressed shock that people could actually live there. The Korths live off the land: They hunt, fish and trap their food.

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When Jennifer Brady-Brown and Sara Sprague approached The Washington Trust Co. in March with an idea to start a women’s boutique on Block Island, bankers told them securing a loan would be difficult. The business would be a startup during a downtrodden economy and located on an island where the retail season lasts just 10 weeks.

The two friends stayed up until the wee hours of the morning creating a business plan and then, in a critical turning point, the U.S. Small Business Administration agreed to guarantee a portion of the loan in case of default. Washington Trust approved the $40,000 loan and Wild Flowers Boutique opened May 22.

“We did the research, and we knew what we needed to do,” Brady-Brown said.

The SBA has stepped up promoting itself on the island in recent years, seeking people like Brady-Brown and Sprague who need help persuading a bank to approve a loan. In 2009, the SBA guaranteed a portion of one loan totaling $75,000. So fa

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The television commercials promising college degrees or professional certificates fast are hard to miss. The smiling TV actors offer assurances of future economic security and success. But might these programs be compared to subprime mortgages disguised in academic regalia?  

Schools like University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute and a host of others are part of the growing for-profit education sector that may the next industry to crash, burn and drag us all down with it, according to Steven Eisman, the investor famous for predicting the subprime mortgage crisis that set off the recession.

The glaring similarity between the subprime mortgage business and for-profit education is the issuance of loans to people who cannot repay them.

For-profit universities are run like businesses — the main goal being to get as many students, and thus dollars, as possible. But the average attendee doesn’t have easy access to daddy’s credit card or 529 plan, so to speak. Read more…