October 2008

Found 4 blog entries for October 2008.


In addition to offering its residents an increasing number of job opportunities as well as one of the most stable housing markets in the country, Texas has also been ranked as one of the least-burdensome states in terms of taxing its citizens.

The Austin Business Journal reported that the Tax Foundation recently released its annual report and listed Texas in the 43rd position, with 1st being the worst, for its tax environment.  The list was compiled by evaluating the state and local taxes that each of the state's residents had to pay.  This amount was then divided by the total amount of income in the state.  According to the Tax Foundation, the average burden was 9.7% of a state resident's income.  Residents of Texas, however, only paid 8.4% of their…
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Although many western states are struggling to maintain jobs and to grow within the country's current economy, Texas is going against the grain and increasing its number of job offerings.

According to the Austin Business Journal, the Western Blue Chip Economic Forecasts indicated that the state of Texas had the second highest percent of change in terms of job growth over the past year.  In fact, when comparing this July to July of last year, the state saw a 2.4% increase in jobs created.  While the state's percentage increase was second in the nation, with Wyoming having a higher percentage increase at 2.5%, Texas actually had the largest number of new jobs added.  In fact, a total of 250,900 jobs were added in the state during that one year period of…
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One of Austin's biggest companies, Dell, has pledged to increase the amount of money it gives to local, national and international causes.  In all, the company plans to give 1% more of its pre-tax profits to global charitable causes by February 2010.

According to the Austin Business Journal, the company wants to provide more support in the areas of education and digital inclusion efforts.  The company has determined that funding in these two areas is greatly needed in order to create a successful new tech era, which also means focusing on emerging countries where there is a greater need of providing educational opportunities focused around technology.

"The next billion Internet users coming online will largely live in emerging countries, such as Brazil,…
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Austin takes pride in it focus on going green and its efforts have been paying off.  In fact, the Austin Business Journal reports that the city has been ranked as the 14th greenest city in the United States by the website SustainLane.com.  Not only did the city manage to land a high spot on the list, it also moved up one spot from the list put out by SustaineLane in 2006.

In order to rank the cities throughout the country, SustaineLane considered a number of different factors.  These included ranking the city's ability to maintain healthy drinking water and air as well as its public transit systems and parks.  The site also considered each city's sustainable local economy with green building, its renewable energy sources, its use of alternative…
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