Maine county

39 On the other hand

Given the painful transformation of the U.S. economy, Americans ought to be saving like crazy and buying nothing they don’t need. Some are, but it’s not clear yet if Americans as a whole will save more over the long term or go back to spending nearly everything they have. The savings rate has crept up to about 5 percent, but that’s still lower than the long-term average and far lower than you might expect after a collapse like the one we’ve endured. If savings continue to go up–a prudent move for most households–consumer spending will come down, leaving a hole in the growth of our gross domestic product, with little else to fill it. So hopes for a vigorous rebound rest on spendthrift consumers being as materialistic as ever. Now there’s a strong foundation for success.

38 Stocks crash

You’ve probably heard that the economy is recovering, that consumers are more optimistic, and that companies might soon begin hiring more workers than they’re firing. Hooray. We’ll all be thrilled when the economy stops quivering. The only problem with an upbeat prognosis is that large chunks of the U.S. economy remain addicted to financial painkillers or dependent upon dysfunctional institutions like Fannie and Freddie, and we’ve never gone through the kind of withdrawal that’s set to take place this year. If all goes well, we’ll avoid messy complications, such as these:

37 The total number of PFA accepted taxa

The PLANTS database contains native and naturalized plants of the PLANTS Floristic Area (PFA), which consists of North America and all additional U.S. territories and protectorates. Vascular plant distributions are mapped at the state and province level, and by U.S. county. Our checklists for the non-vascular mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens cover all of North America north of Mexico; no additional distribution data are currently available for these plants. Checklist and plant distribution by island and island group for the U.S. territories and protectorates in the PFA Pacific Basin area are in preparation but are not yet included at PLANTS. The total number of PFA accepted taxa at the rank of binomial and below is about 38,000. PLANTS also has about 5000 vascular plants that do not occur spontaneously (i.e., are not naturalized) in the PFA; these are selected if you choose Not in PLANTS Floristic Area. Most of these are of economic importance, and many of them are cultivated within the PFA.

36 PLANTS Advanced Search

General Instructions

The PLANTS Advanced Search is designed to give our users complete flexibility in displaying and downloading the data. A few general hints follow:

* You can select more than one value within a field by using the Control key.
* “Any” in the search means that any values will be reported in the results; it is equivalent to “all.”
* The general interaction of field values is OR within a field and AND between fields. If you select two States from the State and Province field you will get the plants that occur in either state, and if additionally you select L48 Native in Native Status you will get only plants that occur in either of those two states and are native to L48, the lower 48 U.S. states.
o However, the interaction between State and Province and County—two different fields—is AND so that you can select states as well as counties from surrounding states.
* The interaction between PLANTS Core Data Fields and Characteristics Data Fields is AND, therefore selecting criteria for any Characteristics Data Fields will restrict results to the 2500 or so important conservation plants for which we have these data.
* We have attribute data such as Growth Habits or Characteristics Data only for Accepted names, except for the Legal Status fields. If legal status such as protection or prohibition is attached to a name that we consider a synonym, that status is reported with the synonym, not its Accepted counterpart.
* You must display a field if you want to be able to sort on it.
* Requests for too much information will tax our server, be slow to appear, and may overwhelm your browser.