As the Christmas shopping season gathers momentum, a congressional committee last week drew attention to an industry that stands to gain a lot from the annual surge in spending: credit-card lenders.

Some of their profit, argued members of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is unfair and comes at the expense of consumers who play by the rules. "If you shop with a credit card, as most Americans do, dangers lurk that few consumers realize could damage their financial future," said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

With college tuition prices rising at a much faster rate than that of inflation for decades, it stands to reason that somebody is getting rich. A report last week in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates that university presidents are among the first in line at the gravy train.

Social Security and Medicare make up over a third, in dollar terms, of the government that the next president will lead. The two programs together have over $40 trillion in unfunded liabilities, meaning that's how much will be added to the national debt or raised in taxes if the programs remain untouched.

Given these stark realities, a reasonable observer would expect entitlement reform to be a major issue in this year's presidential race, right up there with Iraq and Supreme Court nominations. That reasonable observer would be largely disappointed.

A quiet economic revolution is underway throughout the world. You won't see many headlines about it, but poor people nearly everywhere are escaping poverty in droves.

That's the message of a new book from the UN's Millennium Project titled 2007 State of the Future. While authors Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon argue that some global problems are getting worse-such as corruption and terrorism-they also point to data showing that literacy, life expectancy, and living standards are on the rise.

For the U.S. auto industry, the '70s may finally be over. The Sept. 26 deal between General Motors and the United Auto Workers marked what may become a new era in labor-management relations-one in which workers and their unions recognize that the old ways of doing business no longer work.

On Sept. 18, the Ben Bernanke-led Federal Reserve Board cut the federal funds rate by a half point, an aggressive move that reflected the approach of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan. For some, this was a relief. But for a growing number of critics, it was an ominous sign-a ham-handed attempt to deal with a housing mess that they say Greenspan left for him.

McDonald's reportedly spends more than $1 billion per year on advertising in the United States, and a new study suggests that the company is getting its money's worth.

The study, conducted by Stanford University researchers, found that when children between ages 3 and 5 were offered identical foods in a McDonald's wrapper and a plain wrapper, they consistently said that the food in the McDonald's wrapper tasted better.