It’s no revelation why Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States — People are disgusted, especially with corporate America.

According to trendwatching.com : “The current financial meltdown has led consumers to be more disgusted than ever (if that’s even possible) with greedy corporate execs who just don’t care.”

And here’s four reasons why from reputationgarage.blogspot.com :

• As few as 13 percent of all Americans are placing their trust in big business
• Only 39 percent of employees in a Watson Wyatt survey said they trusted senior leadership
• On primetime TV you are 21 times more likely to be kidnapped or murdered by a businessman than by the mob. Some three-quarters of folks out there feel companies don’t tell the truth in advertising.
• Three quarters of employees in big companies observed violations of the law or company standards in a 12-month period.

From drovers.com: “Dragan Djuric and his wife were eating ice cream New Year’s Eve on the boardwalk in Laguna Beach, Calif., when a flock of birds attacked them. According to a report by a Laguna Beach police officer, one bird hit Djuric’s wife in the head and tried to take the ice cream, and Djuric was defecated on. The couple, from Wichita, Kan., dropped the frozen food and Djuric began hitting the birds with a stick, the police report said.

“One of the birds was a rare Heermann’s gull and it sustained a broken wing and was later euthanized. Djuric was cited by the Laguna Beach police and released on suspicion of animal cruelty.

“Apparently, Heermann’s gulls are on the Audubon Society’s watch list for at-risk birds, with an estimated population of 525,000. The birds are also called “surprisingly aggressive” and steal fish from the pouches of pelicans and chase other birds to take their prey.”

No wonder the bird is on the “at-risk” list.

Gov. Dave Heineman in his State of the State address to the Nebraska Legislature Thursday focused on four priorities: ensuring no tax increases, providing additional funding for K-12 and higher education, preserving services for vulnerable Nebraskans, and maintaining a strong cash reserve fund.

One tax increase Heineman should have called for which would have brought in new revenues and at the same time provide a huge cost benefit to society is raising alcohol taxes.

In a new study published in the February edition of Addiction journal found that the more alcoholic beverages cost, the less likely people are to drink. And when they do drink, they drink less. The study analyzed 112 studies spanning nearly four decades  documenting a concrete association between the amount of alcohol people drink and its cost.

“Results from over 100 separate studies reporting over 1000 distinct statistical estimates are remarkably consistent, and show without doubt that alcohol taxes and prices affect drinking,” said Alexander C. Wagenaar, Ph.D., a professor of epidemiology and health policy research at the University of Florida College of Medicine, and the senior author of the study. “When prices go down, people drink more, and when prices go up, people drink less.”

The consistency of the association between cost and consumption indicates that using taxes to raise prices on alcohol could be among the most effective deterrents to drinking that researchers have discovered, beating things like law enforcement, media campaigns or school programs, said Wagenaar.

The study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, also determined that tax or price increases affect the broad population of drinkers, including heavy drinkers as well as light drinkers, including teens as well as adults.

According to Wagenaar, many studies have analyzed how tax or price increases affect people’s drinking habits, but the new study is the first to examine all of these findings as a whole, using a statistical procedure called meta-analysis.

This technique allows researchers to draw conclusions that are not limited to specific policy changes or a single state or country, said Wagenaar.

To obtain their findings, Wagenaar said  researchers scoured through decades of studies examining links between price and alcohol use. The studies were all reported in English, but not limited to any single country. The data resulting from these reports were compiled and analyzed to glean more precise answers than can be obtained from just one study, Wagenaar noted.

In a commentary in the same issue of Addiction, Frank Chaloupka, PhD, Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, describes the research as a “true tour de force,” and adds, “these findings provide a strong rationale for using increases in alcoholic beverage taxes to promote public health by reducing drinking.”

A new U.S. Census Bureau report said that Medicaid continued to be the largest source of funding for nursing and residential care facilities in 2007 at $59 billion.

According to the report, overall, health care and social assistance revenue increased 6.8 percent
in 2007 to $1.66 trillion, up from $1.56 trillion in 2006.

And that overall health care and social assistance revenue will be dramatically increasing in years to come.

Bill Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonprofit organization formed to campaign for national fiscal responsibility, said entitlement programs now take 42 percent of the $1.3 trillion federal budget.

Bixby, who recently spoke at the national American Farm Bureau Federation meeting, said two socio-economic trends will greatly enlarge this percentage over the course of the next five decades.

First, the percentage of citizens who are 65 years of age or older will become a much larger portion of the national population, according to Bixby.  In 2007 this age group accounted for less than 13 percent of the population, but by 2047, Bixby said  it will constitute more than 20 percent. Second, health care costs continue to increase. In 2007 they absorbed approximately 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Based upon current projections, they will amount to more than 20 percent of the by 2047.