Now that the home buyer's tax credits are back up and running through May, the next bit of housing-related economic stimulus is focused on homeowners who are willing to spend money to make their homes more energy efficient. More

Personal finance from around the Web Tuesday:

• The Federal Reserve is proposing new rules to protect gift card consumers from exorbitant fees and and expiration dates.  While the exact date these new rules will go into effect remains unknown, it most likely won't be until next summer — after the upcoming gift-card season. [Federal Reserve, Bucks]

• Online microlending has been all the rave in recent years. One of the most popular is Kiva, which allows you to make loans to low-income entrepreneurs in developing countries. But it is no longer practical for it to be true "person-to-person lending." [My Money Blog]

• With the passing of the health care reform bill comes the passing of a 5.4 % surtax aimed at high-income tax returns. The Tax Foundation has created a map that shows the top tax rates in different states under the new plan. [Tax Policy Blog]

• The number of people taking the standardized Law School Admission Test has skyrocketed. In late September, 60,000  people took the test — a worrisome number, since law jobs are shrinking. [Most Strongly Supported]

• Wondering what has happened to the transportation stimulus package? The California Transportation Department reports it has been allocated $2 billion into federal highway funds. But only 2.5 % of that money has been spent yet.  California is not alone, but sometimes slow and steady wins the race. [Freakonomics]

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Personal finance from around the Web to get your week started:

• UnitedHealth Group, the nation's largest health insurance carrier, sent an email to 75,000 employees urging them to protest against government-run health care. The incident is one of many campaigns led by major insurers to recruit company employees as political advocates in the debate over health reform.  [Washington Post]

• A new debit card identity theft scheme is popping up in California, Missouri, Wisconsin, and other states. The thefts are largely tied to Hancock Fabric stores, in which debit card information and pin numbers are stolen and money is withdrawn from the account. Authorities estimate around a $40,000 loss for banks. [The Consumerist]

• Reports from the Commerce Department confirm that retail sales rose 1.4 percent in October because of rebounding auto sales. While sales look favorable for the upcoming holiday season and Black Friday discounts, economists are concerned that the boost is a sign of "double dip" recession. [NPR]

• Digitizing money is an increasingly tangible concept. Programs like ShopSavvy allow shoppers to buy an item on their phone just by taking a picture. PayPal and eBay have taken huge steps in phone sales — users can pay medical bills or pick up coffee with a click of a button. In Japan, wireless carriers are offering a cellphone banking system over a secure network. [The New York Times, BusinessWeek]

• Did your landlord install individual electric meters in your complex? It turns out that individual meters are not only legal, but also encouraged by municipal organizations because it allows the landlord to seek permission to exclude electricity and reduce rent accordingly. [Bucks]

• Most of the Federal Reserve's efforts to relieve the economy have helped Wall Street, but they haven't helped improve the unemployment rate, which now stands at 1t for the 10.2% unemployment rate. Despite the 62% boost in stocks, officials are still wary of the stagnant job growth needed to revive the economy. [Bloomberg]

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A looming shift in Federal Reserve policy could send the 30-year fixed mortgage to 6% or higher, up from Monday’s rock-bottom rate of 5.02%. For all the hullaballoo about the stimulative impact of last week’s decision to extend the $8,000 First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit and create a $6,500 credit for current homeowners, a sharp rise in the bellwether mortgage rate could muck up a housing recovery. More

An unemployment rate in the double digits isn't surprising, but it arrived earlier than most economists were expecting.

I know this because I put the finishing touches on MONEY’s outlook for the 2010 job market less than a week before last Friday's unemployment report came out — the report announcing that the jobless rate had surged from 9.8% to 10.2% in October. Economists I had been talking to only days earlier hadn't forecast a rate that high. And it wasn't just the people I spoke to who had low-balled the number: In mid-October, the Blue Chip Economic Indicators newsletter, which captures the consensus forecast of more than 48 economists, reported that the jobless rate was expected to peak at 10.1% in the first quarter of 2010. More

Insights into personal finance from around the Web:

• Parents worried about the cost of higher education often consider sending their kids to a community college in hopes of a transfer to a better school. But this isn't always the smartest thing to do. [The College Solution Blog]
• A Harvard economist passes judgment on the expanded home buyer's tax credit that President Obama signed into law last week. The professor's verdict? The credit encourages "purely mindless house swapping." [Economix]
• Tough times make us more willing and likely to protect the things we have, but extended warranties probably aren't worth the extra cost. [Wise Bread]
• Watching The Karate Kid can teach you how not to accumulate credit card debt. Use visualization techniques to keep your spending in check. [Free Money Finance]
• The bright side of rising unemployment: With all those people staying home instead of going to work, the burglary rate is dropping! [Marginal Revolution]

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Last week’s stream of economic data points to the emergence of a great divide. On the positive side, annualized third-quarter GDP was up 3.5 percent compared to the prior quarter. (Keep in mind that this is an "advance" estimate from the Dept. of Commerce. Stay tuned for revisions.)  But consumer spending for September fell 0.5 percent. That’s the biggest dip since December 2008 when we were in the midst of the financial crisis. More

The lobbyists for the National Association of Realtors sure earned their fee this go-round. Not only did Congress agree to extend through April, 2010 the existing $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers scheduled to expire at the end of this month, but now we’re going to all pay for existing homeowners to have a similar tax break.  In the new bill President Obama was slated to sign today — the housing credit legislation was  tacked onto legislation extending unemployment benefits — existing homeowners will be able to claim a $6,500 tax credit if they buy a new home they intend to use as their primary residence.

Congress also decided to swing the door wide open for more Americans to get in on both tax breaks More

Five interesting stories from around the web:

• The U.S. unemployment rate cracked double digits this morning. Clusterstock takes a look at the cities where it is hardest to find a job. [The New York Times, Clusterstock]
• Report: Hundreds of credit cards are still using "unfair or deceptive practices." Cards are upping interest rates, penalties and fees ahead of regulatory changes coming in February.  [MarketWatch]
• Why do so many people fail at making a budget? It's because, according to Wise Bread, they omit a crucial task: Tracking what they spend. Here's a step-by-step guide to getting started. [Wise Bread]
• The National Association of Realtors' seasonally-adjusted pending home sales index rose for the eighth consecutive month in September, but Move.com says it didn't see its usual spike in listings last spring. The site says visitors are browsing, but not buying. [Hot Property]
• Princeton professor Daniel Kahneman discusses attitudes toward gains and losses, and why overconfidence hurts individual investors. [Nightly Business Report]

Many workers unfortunate enough to get the ax in this recession at least had one thing working in their favor: subsidized health insurance. This past February Congress threw out a temporary life preserver for workers laid off between September 1, 2008, and December 31, 2009: For up to nine months, Uncle Sam covers 65% of the monthly premium that these newly unemployed people have to pay to stay on their company health care plan. Previously, if you stuck with your company benefits (under the federal program known as COBRA), you had to pay your share of the monthly premium, plus how much your employer covered. For singles, that totaled an average of $400 a month, according to Kaiser Family Foundation; for families, it came to $1,050.

Thanks to this new subsidy, 38% of unemployed workers are opting to remain on the company health plan, double the number that typically stick with it, according to a study from Hewitt Associates, a human resources consulting firm.

But now that lifeline is running out. More

Last month, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) introduced a health-reform-bill amendment that would have prevented the federal government from requiring insurers to offer any particular medical benefits. "I don’t need maternity care," he said. "And so requiring that to be in my insurance policy is something that I don’t need and will make the policy more expensive."

Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow zinged back: "I think your Mom probably did."

The left side of the blogsphere loved this. Democrats used it as fundraising opportunity.

Politicians are probably best advised to stick to a rigorous pro-motherhood line. But Kyl's point was really just an extension of a view about health insurance that a lot of Americans hold. More

The Federal Reserve released on Thursday the latest details of its burgeoning balance sheet. In short, the assets on the Fed's books now amount to $2.2 trillion. That's more than double where it was a little over a year ago (when it stood at a mere $900 billion) — before the central bank bought tons of Treasury debt and mortgage-backed securities from the nation's banks in the midst of last year's credit crisis, putting government cash in the hands of those banks.

Now, when the Fed's balance sheet is big and banks have all that extra money to lend, the usual impact is that the increased number of dollars in the economy are competing for the same amount of merchandise. Prices go up; in other words, we have inflation.

You may have noticed, however, that it's not working that way. For the most part, in fact, prices are actually heading down. How can this be? More

A year ago, if my channel surfing habits had led me to a documentary about the Great Depression, I probably would have kept my finger on the clicker. At that point it seemed no one knew for sure if our country was heading into another depression. I'm not sure I could have forced myself to watch what could have been a glimpse into how miserable life may be over the next year — or even a whole decade. Talk about a downer. (Sure enough, moviegoers flocked to comedies during those months of doom and gloom.)

Yet twelve months later, perhaps armed with a new confidence that our economy is crawling back to safety, viewers have another opportunity to gain a better understanding of the events that unfolded during the Depression. More

Here's part two of my extended interview with renegade supply-side economist Bruce Bartlett, including some thoughts on Medicare that might just scare the pants off you. See here for part one, and here for the less-wonky version that's running in Money's November issue.

David Futrelle: As one of the original supply-siders, you worry that supply side economics had been reduced to little more than a religion of tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts.

Bruce Bartlett: That's right. A lot of what's wrong with conservative economists today is that they still act as if we're living in 1980 — as if we're facing inflation and massively high tax rates — and they're advocating policies that were perfectly appropriate for 1980 in an environment in which they make no sense. More

Bruce Bartlett is a man of strong opinions. A supply-side economist even before the Reagan Revolution, he served in two Republican administrations and then as a policy wonk and gadfly at conservative think tanks. But in recent years he's gotten fed up with Republicans who've turned supply-side economics into a crude and sometimes cynical faith in tax cuts as the solution to whatever ails us. Meanwhile, many conservatives have gotten fed up with him: his highly critical book on George W. Bush got him fired from the conservative think tank he was working at a couple of years ago.

I spoke with him recently about his new book The New American Economy, which among other things suggests that we could learn a thing or two from economist John Maynard Keynes — yep, the guy who thought government spending was the only way to pull economies out of deep depressions. The interview, which appears in the November issue of Money, has just been posted online.

We were only able to fit a portion of our wide-ranging discussion into the tight confines of the print magazine, so I thought I'd share some more of it here on the blog. More