Economic hardships and how it affects me

Since the economy has been rapidly moving towards a global economy and also rapidly going into a tailspin, more or less, simultaneously, it affects everyone. I work at a school called Germantown Friends which is located in the heart of Germantown in Philadlphia, Pennsylvania. The school will have to make some major cutbacks and is researching many ways on how to save money, still maintain a high level of education, as well as allow for scholarships and things of that nature.

In various ways this affects what I do because I am a member of the maintenance crew and because the budgets are being readjusted there are many things that normally I could do that I now cannot. It is probably similar for many businesses. There will not be as much money for major rehabilitation projects and things of similar nature. In addition to doing maintenance work though, I've also been assigned the task of entering data for different utilities in order to research what could save some money as far as lowering energy usage since going green is the "in" thing to do now.

However, donations to scholarship programs can still be a good thing for the shareholders of businesses who are in the S-Corp category. Here are two websites that have a bunch of information on tax deductions and who giving to scholarship programs will benefit:

http://www.edreform.com/index.cfm?fuseAction=document&documentID=59
http://www.paschoolchoice.org/reach/site/default.asp

And here is a relatively recent article regarding PA state tax deductions and donations to REACH or Road to Education through CHoice:
http://www.paschoolchoice.org/reach/cwp/view.asp?A=11&Q=572113

All in all it is pretty interesting to be able to do work for a school that is striving to save money and be less strenuous on the earth.

The economy has not had much impact on what I like to do for fun as of recently. If I was still in a band or had been for the past couple of years, it would certainly deter me from wanting to play too many shows or do any type of physical release at all of recordings. Materials and gas were too expensive for many bands, and I know for a fact a lot of artists not signed to major labels had to get jobs when they were home from tour in order to be able to continue to do even small, month long stints in relatively close range to their homes. The Bled would be a good example of this and they actually just had to completely shake up their lineup as most of the members are either getting "real" jobs or have moved on to playing a different type of music that is more profitable for major label recording artists.

The movie industry will be affected to because the actors will probably strike sometime in the next year or so. Films will more than likely be on more stringent budgets following negotiations and I would think that we'll either see a lot of these big budget productions try to do more with less, which could be either really cool or really horrible. There might be more grit and realism such as seen in the new James Bond series and the new Batman series, but they'll have to find a way to lower the budgets on films like that if they want to keep doing them.