Discussions responses

1) Conrad Loyd

The reason for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act proposal was because the U.S. economy was in recession. In the third quarter of 2008, the GDP was at a minus .3 which was an indication of the economic status (Lazear, 2008). The purpose of the ARRA of 2009 was to help boost the U.S. economy. The ARRA did this by providing funds to state governments to help families that had fallen into poverty (Hyman, 2014). The ARRA also included funding for energy independence, tax cuts, and help states that were suffering from depleting revenues (Boushey, 2011).

2) Simone Veilleux

The intended purpose of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was to stimulate the economy during the recession period. It was to increase government spending into public sectors and decrease spending in the private sector. The United States is a mixed economy meaning that it spends money both in the public and private sectors. This act called for a shift in that economic plan in order to help the economy recover. This act also increased funding to government assistance due to the high unemployment rate and the need for benefits for the unemployed citizens.

1) Regina Fielding

Hi everyone,

I work for a restaurant coporation where I partner with interdepartmental project teams to test new initiatives and changes that impact our operators. It is my role to test the changes in a subset of restaurants where I then gather the feedback from managers and employees and report the results back to the project team. While I am focused heavily on the qualitative side, I have two counterparts who report back the Guest and Financial data. Because I have taken market research courses, I am fairly fluid in the Guest results, but the Financial data has remained somewhat foreign to me at times. I hope this course connects me to the deeper details of message they are delivering.

On a personal level, as my rent continued to steadily increase, I decided that I wanted to pay myself and not someone else. This is when I began paying much closer attention to financials and the return on investment that I was getting from my own money. This led me to paying off interest accounts, opening higher rate savings and money market accounts for better return, and purchasing my own home. I still have a long way to go in terms of understanding investment principles however.

2) Shawn Childers

I do not currently use financial information in my career as a Fire Support NCO in the Army. I do however use financial information in my personal endeavors. This includes balancing my accounts and tracking spending habits, especially when determining whether to execute a large purchase such as a house or car. I also use financial information to buy and trade stocks and mutual funds in both my brokerage account and individual retirement account. For this I use historical data, expectations based on future endeavors by the organization, and their ratings. Some of the information I have learned to understand and use in my decision making. A lot of it is still a mystery to me though. Through the last few years it has become more relevant in my studies to gain the understanding of the determinants that affect certain outcomes in all markets, domestic and global, and the ability to detect some outcomes before they happen.

As I continue to take accounting classes, I am being further drawn to the fascination of collecting and deciphering data in order to make sound decisions. I believe this is something that I would like to further explore as I open my eyes to possible career decisions when I leave my current employment. I would like to continue to not only learn about how to look at data and determine relevance and meaning, but also learn the information systems and tools in order to facilitate this process.