The suburban teenager who works at a burger joint has something in common with the single mother who buses tables to provide for her children. It's the same thing they have in common with the middle-class wife who works part-time to help balance the family budget.

They all earn the minimum wage (or at least many of them did when they started their jobs), and they were the focus of congressional debate in recent weeks over a proposal to raise the national minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.25 per hour.

Sometime next year, customers who head to a Ford dealership to look for a new minivan will have to be ushered by salesmen to the used cars.

By the end of 2007, Ford Motor Company, an icon of the automotive industry and one of the world's strongest brands, won't have a minivan to sell.

From oil tycoon J.R. Ewing in Dallas to corporate raider Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, businessmen have been Hollywood's stock villains for decades. An occasional doctor, lawyer, mechanic, or teacher will be the bad guy in a TV drama or movie, but studies show that Hollywood holds a particular hostility toward the corporate world.

When Warren Buffet last month pledged $37 billion to charity-$31 billion going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and $6 billion to the foundations of his wife and children-many business leaders, philanthropists, and journalists lauded the insurance tycoon's gift, which constitutes 85 percent of his total fortune. The Los Angeles Times called it "an astonishingly selfless act" and the Houston Chronicle extolled Buffett for setting "a beautiful example."

A hundred years ago, a book like Free and Clear would not have raised many eyebrows. Lenders were much more responsible in extending credit and the principles in Free and Clear, written by Crown Financial Ministries CEO Howard Dayton and published this year by Moody, were common wisdom.

When it comes to gambling, Americans are a conflicted people. They participate in large numbers, but many say they don't enjoy it. They recognize gambling's negative social consequences, but they don't think it's morally wrong or should be illegal. By a large majority, they believe that legalized gambling leads to bad stewardship of money, and then they prove the point by losing more than they win.

It's difficult to know whether, or how much, to applaud a pension-reform plan unveiled late last month by British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

On the one hand, it contains the single most important element of any serious reform effort, an element missing in President Bush's Social Security proposal last year: namely, it raises the retirement age. On the other hand, the Blair plan dilutes the impact of that reform by increasing the benefits paid out to pensioners.