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After the mass school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Wayne LaPierre, the NRA's CEO, called on Congress "to put armed police officers in every school."

"If we truly cherish our kids more than our money or our celebrities," he said, "we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained -- armed -- good guy."

But many schools already have "good guys with guns." They're called School Resource Officers.

Brad Pindel is the school resource officer in Westwood, Mass. That's quintessential "small-town New England," about half an hour south of Boston.

"It's 10 square miles, with a population of 14,000 people," Pindel says, noting he grew up here, and he has been a cop in Westwood for 12 years.

SROs -- that's what school resource officers call themselves -- are not security guards. They're police officers.

Pindel is responsible for the high school, the middle school, and all five elementary schools in Westwood. I ask him if he sees himself as the first line of defense, the guy who would stop a school shooter.

"It's difficult to say, because, I mean, being in charge of seven different schools, the chances of me being in that school when something happens are pretty slim," he says.

There are about 10,000 SROs in the U.S. -- that's one for every ten public schools. It would cost the Westwood Police Department a lot of money to put an officer in every school. On average, Massachusetts police make about $60,000 a year. Westwood used to have two resource officers, but there were budget cuts.

We drive by the Deerfield School, an elementary school, and Pindel mentions he has three young kids.

"Actually, one of them goes to that school we just passed," he says. "Certainly one of the things that ran through my head after Newtown..."

Since 2000, the Justice Department has spent almost a billion dollars to fund more than 7,000 SRO positions. President Obama wants to make more government money available so police departments can hire another thousand officers.

Several groups, including the National PTA, say no one should have a gun at school -- even a trained police officer. Other groups argue there is no evidence armed security at schools makes a difference.

So what does an officer like Brad Pindel actually do? He doesn't sit there and guard a school. Like many SROs, he doesn't have an office.

"I try and stay in the high school the most, and make myself visible, because those are the kids that are going to have the most questions or have issues," Pindel explains.

He deals with bullies. He goes to court with kids in trouble. He teaches D.A.R.E. He meets with parents. Pindel also updates the schools' crisis plan -- what teachers and students are trained to do if there is a gunman.

In his six years as an SRO, Pindel has never encountered a gun in a school.

Pindel went through basic police training that lasts more than a month. Every year, there's more training, on everything from firearms to first aid. And he has been certified by the National Association of School Resource Officers.

The association trains SROs across the country. Ernie Whiteman, an SRO from Medford, Ore., is teaching a weeklong course in Leominster, Mass., to about two dozen officers.

He says demand has increased since the Connecticut shooting.

"Last I heard we were scheduled for like 53 of them between now and the first part of August," Whiteman says.

One officer at the training is Steven Creamer. I ask him what he thinks of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre's proposal, to put "a good guy with a gun" in every school.

"You know, it's good to have an armed person in a school," Creamer says. "But they should be properly trained."

Over the last three decades, there have been about 150 shootings in U.S. schools. But the argument for armed security defies cost-benefit analysis. This week, the board of finance in Newtown, Conn., added $400,000 to the town's budget, to put an armed police officer in every school.

Seriously, how am I going to do my job? Every morning I turn on my iPad and open Google Reader. And on one page, I can get stories from dozens of newspapers and blogs and that’s how I find stories, including this one.

And if I want to add another newspapers to my Reader, I just plug in the RSS feed. But when Google takes it away in July?

Joe Hall is an amateur coder and he says: chill out.

“RSS is not dying, RSS is not going anywhere,” Hall said. He says think of Google Reader as a mailbox and RSS as the postal service, or a way to deliver content. So Google takes your mailbox.

“That doesn’t stop the post office, the post office is still going to deliver mail,” Hall said. He adds get another mailbox or another reader, there are plenty of them.

But funny he should mention the post office, which is also trouble. Google says its shutting down its Reader because fewer people are using it, said Whit Andrews, an analyst at Gartner.

“That’s not necessarily a surprise, it’s not something where loads of kids say, boy I can’t wait to get to my RSS feed,” Andrews said. Instead, they’re turning to Twitter and Facebook for news.

Google is a known for experimenting with loads of products from self-driving cars to the world’s biggest digital library. Andrews says since Google’s co-founder Larry Page took over as CEO in 2011, “it’s been pretty clear that he’s trying to streamline the company.”

So far, Page has killed about 70 Google projects. But one man’s cast-off is another man’s gold. Since the news broke of the Reader’s imminent death, competitors like Feedly and Flipboard have been stepping up.

And the tech thinking is that the Reader’s end might be the beginning of something better.

As parents know, the job is never done. But now, a new study from the Pew Research Center says a certain group of parents wants to work even more. The number of moms who say they want to work full-time has gone up significantly, from 20 percent six years ago to just over 30 percent last year.

It seems like that old saying, tied to your mother’s apron strings, is long overdue for a modern day makeover. But what would the update be -- glued to your mom’s laptop? Because more and more of today’s moms want to work.

“Families now feel like they really need two breadwinners,” says Jennifer Sabatini Fraone, associate director of Boston College’s Center for Work and Family. “The recession has caused families to feel like both parents need to be in the workplace and both parents need to be working full time,” she says.

Almost 40 percent of today’s moms who are already working say it would be ideal to work full-time. That’s almost double the number since Pew’s 2007 survey. Myra Strober, emeritus professor at Stanford, says not to put all the blame on the recession.

“When you think about it, part-time seems like it would be just the right answer,” she says. But Strober notes that while part- time work might conjure up a vision of the perfect life/work balance, part-time jobs often comes without benefits or the opportunity for promition, but with expenses like childcare and transportation.

“So instead of turning out to be the best of all possible worlds, for some women, it turns out to be the worst,” she said.

Then there’s society’s opinion. The Pew Center says only 16 percent of parents agree that working full-time is best for kids. And that number hasn’t changed in recent years.

But, according to the Pew survey, working moms say they make better parents. Sabatini Fraone notes that they already feel like superwomen.

“I think there is some level of confidence that comes from the ability to juggle it all,” she says.

So, as mom might say, look on the bright side. Stay-at-home moms -- they say they're happier than moms with jobs.

Americans are paying down their auto loans and home mortgages. But one kind of debt is rising fast -- student loans. And it’s a heavy burden for many young borrowers. Now, a New York City startup called Pave is offering a new funding model for people at the start of their careers.

It’s an unusual deal. Instead of borrowing money, young “prospects” get a pile of cash from a group of “backers,” to pursue some goal -- directing movies, for example.

In exchange, the prospect agrees to fork over about five percent of their income for the following decade.

The backers have no guarantee they’ll make a profit. They could even lose money. But if the young go-getter does become the next Jerry Bruckheimer within a decade, investors could get rich.

“When you’re young you have initiative, you have energy, you have you have ideas, talent, but you don’t have resources,” says Sal Lahoud, co-founder of Pave. “So it’s about connecting those two stages of life. Between an accomplished backer and a young prospect for the mutual benefit of both.”

Terrance Ross is one new prospect. He’s 22, and he graduates college this spring. With a total of $20,000 from eight backers, he plans to travel to Kenya and start his career as a journalist.

“The way I will see Africa is different from someone who is much older than me,” Ross says. “To be able to do this now is exciting.”

But even if he finds a steady job in journalism, Ross could draw a pretty modest salary. So what makes his situation different from indentured servitude?

“I actually think it’s the opposite,” Pave's Sal Lahoud says. “You are giving young people...the financial freedom to basically pursue their passions. I think loans, on the other hand, dictate choices” because borrowers must repay their debt, plus interest, in full, and on a fixed schedule.

In recent years, there have been many attempts to reinvent the way we pay for big projects, through crowdfunding and peer-to-peer loans.

Anya Kamenetz, author of the book "Generation Debt," remembers a lender that connected student-borrowers with wealthy funders back in the early 2000s. It was called MyRichUncle.

“Very quickly the model that they were trying to do -- which is like what Pave is trying to do now -- they found that they couldn’t make it couldn’t work financially,” Kamenetz says. “So they switched over to more conventional private lending.”

A few years later, MyRichUncle folded.

Kamenetz believes Pave may face similar pressures. But there is one thing she likes about the program: you can use the money to just get started on your career. You don’t have to get a degree.

“I remember talking to friends of mine who got MFAs in playwriting, MFAs in novel writing. If only they could have gotten money just to sit down and make the thing that they needed to make, they would have been much better off, they would have saved a lot of money,” Kamenetz says.

So far, eight young people are participating. They’ve each raised between $3,000 and $50,000. And Pave is looking for more prospects.

Samsung’s revealing its new Galaxy S4 phone today in New York. The smartphone is getting a lot of buzz because it’s the first phone set to challenge Apple’s 'cool.'

The producer price index -- prices received by U.S. companies -- rose 0.7 percent last month, its largest uptick in five months. Diane Swonk, chief economist with Mesirow Financial explains what's behind the rise and whether the U.S. should be worried about inflation.

Japan and China have failed to block new restrictions on shark fishing at an international conference in Thailand.

The producer price index -- prices received by U.S. companies -- rose 0.7 percent last month, its largest uptick in five months.

Diane Swonk, chief economist with Mesirow Financial, joins Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to explain what's behind the rise and whether the U.S. should be worried about inflation.

Senate Democrats and House Republicans both introduced federal budget plans this week. Republicans are calling for spending cuts and tax reductions, while Democrats are proposing a "balanced approach" which would increase tax revenues and cut spending.

Differences aside, there is one thing both plans have in common: They are both are friendly to baby boomers. Marketplace economics correspondent Chris Farrell joins Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson to explain how and why older voters are being spared from proposed Medicare and Social Security cut backs.

Almost 100 million sharks are caught every year, mainly for their fins, in trade estimated to be worth up to half a billion dollars a year. Shark fin soup is a delicacy in Asia, but overfishing has decimated several shark species.

In all, five species of shark and two manta rays were given protection at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The BBC’s environment reporter Matt McGrath joins Marketplace Morning Report host to explain why Japan and China are against the measure.

The new pope, Pope Francis I, is a fan of a local soccer club in Buenos Aires that began by pulling at-risk boys off the streets. He considers social outreach a key business of the Catholic Church. To some, its global networks make up the largest charity in the world.

John Katunga of Catholic Relief Services in Kenya cheered the news from the Vatican. He wants the new pope to push for fair lending terms and for development programs in African economies -- starting with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

"These are the big ones," says Katunga, "and have really a direct bearing on how Africa can develop itself and lift out of poverty."

Pope Francis has criticized the IMF in the past for facilitating inequality. In recent decades the Vatican has sought to be a moral voice -- making the case greed was at the center of the financial crisis, and that an increasingly linked world economy should focus squarely on those left behind.

There are certain things that we all have to do that just never seem to get easier. And for Marketplace Morning Report host Jeremy Hobson, one of them is folding a fitted sheet.

Now, one of life's little mysteries has been solved care of LivingonaDime.com. Watch the video below to learn for yourself and happy folding!

J.C. Penney needs something to change its momentum. More than a year ago, the retail giant dropped sales and coupons in exchange for everyday low pricing. Since then, it has lost $1 billion and laid off 20,000 workers.
 
"They've lost 30 percent of their business. It's just gone away," says Ed Fox, a marketing professor at Southern Methodist University who tracks J.C. Penney. "That's an incredible hurdle for a retailer to try to clear."
 
He says Joe Fresh has sold well for Penney online and may work in stores. But by the time Penney fully implements its store-in-a-store plan, it may be too late.

Gabriella Santaniello, a retail analyst at Wedbush Securities, says Penney needs the fashion-conscious customer it's targeting because it has left its middle and lower income core out to dry.
 
"While they're trying to court a younger consumer, a hipper consumer, they're forgetting this moderate customer, Santaniello says. "They've brought in these hip cool brands which, at the end of the day, the consumer who has been shopping J.C. Penney is not really going to identify with."
 
Santaniello and Fox say that leaves the chain in a sort of no man's land, with confused customers who don't know who J.C. Penney is anymore.

J.C. Penney needs something to change its momentum. More than a year ago, the retail giant dropped sales and coupons in exchange for everyday low pricing. Since then, it has lost $1 billion and laid off 20,000 workers.
 
"They've lost 30 percent of their business. It's just gone away," says Ed Fox, a marketing professor at Southern Methodist University who tracks J.C. Penney. "That's an incredible hurdle for a retailer to try to clear."
 
He says Joe Fresh has sold well for Penney online and may work in stores. But by the time Penney fully implements its store-in-a-store plan, it may be too late.

Gabriella Santaniello, a retail analyst at Wedbush Securities, says Penney needs the fashion-conscious customer it's targeting because it has left its middle and lower income core out to dry.
 
"While they're trying to court a younger consumer, a hipper consumer, they're forgetting this moderate customer, Santaniello says. "They've brought in these hip cool brands which, at the end of the day, the consumer who has been shopping J.C. Penney is not really going to identify with."
 
Santaniello and Fox say that leaves the chain in a sort of no man's land, with confused customers who don't know who J.C. Penney is anymore.

Volkswagen reports earnings today at a moment when its business is on the upswing. The company has said its goal is to become the largest carmaker in the world. Volkswagen is the parent company of several brands, including Audi, Lamborghini and Bentley. So, how's it doing in its quest?   

Total world domination would be so much easier if there was no competition. For Volkswagen, third biggest car seller in the world, those rivals are Ford, General Motors, and Toyota according to Richard Hilgert, an equity analyst with Morningstar.  

"It's going to be a dog fight," Hilgert adds.

Volkswagen's profits soared 41 percent last year. The company sold more than 9 million cars for the first time ever. It has had great growth in China, its luxury Audi business is doing well, but car sales in Europe are declining.

Michelle Krebs, an analyst with Edmunds.com, says in order for Volkswagen to be the biggest, it first needs to conquer the U.S. 

"They are very strong, globally, and yet the U.S. market, I tease them. It's an emerging market for them," Krebs says. 

Last year Volkswagen sold more cars in the U.S. than it had since the 1970s. But that number, less than half a million, is only about 3 percent of the U.S. market. Volkswagen says it is focused on growing in the States, but also in two real emerging markets: India and Brazil.

This is a story about the new Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone, set to be unveiled today -- and you can’t do a story about the contender without mentioning the champ. In 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone he said, “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along and changes everything.”

The iPhone did change everything and in the U.S. it still smokes its competitors in terms of sales.

Now, fast-forward to 2013 and this Samsung Galaxy commercial set in front of an Apple store. A line of fans are waiting for the new iPhone.

In the commercial, a man standing in line celebrates the fact that “the headphone jack is going to be on the bottom.”

While a woman gets excited about a new feature, “I heard the connector is going to be all digital!”

“What?” somebody asks.

“What does that even mean? Who knows?” she says cheerily.

The commercial illustrates what may be a tipping point away from Apple brand loyalty.

“You see this flip where apple as a brand has gone from, 'oh, that’s the unique think differently brand' to iPhone user being this mindless person in the herd,” said Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Steve Jobs famously said, “customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” But some Apple fans are wondering if that business model is a little outdated.

“It kind of comes down to old eyes. The more I use my iPhone, I realize I’m squinting," said USC journalism professor Andrew Lih. He has an iPhone, but he’s thinking of making a switch to the Galaxy for the bigger screen.

Apple says it designs its smartphones to fit comfortably in your hand. But Lih says that ignores the way people are using smart phones these days.

He says it’s not so much a phone, but a way to check Twitter, take pics, post to Facebook and if Apple doesn’t get hip to that, Lih and others will start turning to the Samsung Galaxy.

As the Interactive session of South by Southwest in Austin, Texas now gives way to the film and music portions, here's a lesson from the festival on shifting digital media from plain silliness, to some silliness mixed with real journalism care of Buzzfeed.

The popular online media website has aimed to evolve along with the social web, and that now means publishing everything from cat videos to political news.

"The same person is interested in light fare and in serious fare, and we move between different types of content, it's a much better experience," says Buzzfeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti. "I think people who grow up Facebook and Twitter are used to having all of those things mashed together."

And for those readers who don't like cat videos, better have your system checked.

"If people don't like cute animals, they are either a robot or a serial killer," Peretti says. "But humans should love cute animals and love to share them and be connoisseurs of cuteness with their friends."

Dozens of state attorneys general say they are going to closely watch how Google safeguards privacy from now on. The announcement comes just after the search giant agreed to pay $7 million to settle charges it collected personal data from people's wireless networks with its mapping cameras. 

Experts say a new test of privacy will come when the Google's electronic eyeglasses hit the market late this year. Sure, Google Glass is mostly a wearable display screen, but it also acts as a video and audio recorder.

Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain joins Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio to explain Google's privacy problem when it comes to the high-tech spectacles.

This final note today, which speaks volumes about:

1. Health care pricing in this country
2. Why the daily discount site Groupon is in such a bad place.

This offer popped up today in a friend of mine's email inbox. An MRI, including a carotid artery scan, brain aneurysm scan, or both, with 3-D imaging and private consultation -- starting at just $39.

The brain scan package is worth $900; so with the Groupon, your savings are 96 percent.

Or...it's just crazy.

The amazing thing? More than 140 have been purchased.

The Federal Reserve's bond and mortgage purchases have kept long-term interest rates low, but they haven't done what the Fed intended -- which was to help would-be home buyers get affordable mortgages.

Instead, they've fueled a new round of speculation by investors and real estate developers. And that's meant a new generation of Americans has become renters rather than owners.
   
Yes, home sales and prices have been rising, which in turn has created lot of construction jobs and made some home-owners feel a bit wealthier. All good for the economy, at least for now.

But the housing market hasn't turned around because banks are issuing lots of new mortgages. Lending standards are still tight, and banks are reluctant to lend -- especially to younger. Unemployment remains high among millennials -- more than 8 percent even for recent college graduates. And their student debts keep mounting. As a result, the number of first-time home buyers is still shrinking, and young buyers now make up their smallest share of the housing market in more than a decade.

The rise in home prices and construction is being fueled instead by big investors -- many of whom are paying cash and have no intention of living in the homes they buy or build. They're getting a high return on investment by borrowing at rock-bottom rates and then turning the properties into rental units, which young individuals and families are moving into in record numbers.

Last month, a Pew Research Center survey found that the share of millennials who own their homes has fallen from 40 percent to 34 percent since the start of the recession, with a similar decline in residential debt.

Overall, the percent of Americans owning their homes continues to drop, while the percent renting is growing.

The housing market may be bouncing back, but not homeownership. And that's a big change for an economy and society once based on the ideal of owning your own place.

The smartphone wars are fought on a lot of fronts. It starts with creating a great product. And Samsung’s Galaxy is getting real credit for being innovative, said Andrew Lih, an iPhone user and a professor of journalism at University of Southern California.

He’s considering making a switch to the Galaxy.

“So even the Retina display that they’re touting with Apple is going to look a little bit low-res with what Samsung is announcing this week,” Lih said. 

Along with a sharper screen, some analysts say that the new Galaxy will have “eye tracking” technology. A camera on the phone tracks your eyes when you’re reading and when you get to the bottom of the page, it scrolls down automatically.

To be sure, in terms of popularity, Samsung still has a lot of catching up to do in the U.S. where Apple’s got about 40 percent of the smartphone market to Samsung’s 20 percent. But the Galaxy is generating a lot of buzz. For the first time since Apple launched the iPhone, the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant might have a real competitor in the smartphone space.

But with so many smartphones out there, you need an identity.

“Branding has become an absolute must in this market,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner.

Milanesi added that Samsung has positioned Galaxy as a real alternative to the iPhone -- something no other cell phone maker has been able to do. And Samsung is spending plenty on advertising to do it.

“In 2012, Apple’s budget increased to $333 million, but in contrast, Samsung’s budget skyrocketed to $401 million,” said Prashant Malaviya, a marketing professor at Georgetown’s Business School.

Samsung has launched a series of clever ads, gently poking fun of the iPhone as a has-been. So the real question now, is whether it can deliver the “next new thing.”

Celixia Rodriguez used to spend more than 60 percent of her income on rent. She makes about $10 an hour cleaning houses in Boston and picks up any side work she can.

“Even if I had five part time jobs, at $10 an hour it’s hard to come up with $1,500 a month and still support your children and fill your gas tank,” she says.

For three years, Rodriguez and her two kids doubled up, sharing a three-bedroom apartment in Boston with her sister and her two kids. Now she’s moved to the suburbs and her rent is subsidized by the local nonprofit, Neighborhood Housing Services of the South Shore. Her rent is now a much more manageable 30 percent of her income.

Over a quarter of renter households paid over half their income to rent in 2010, says Eric Belsky, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. That’s up from 20 percent in 2000.

“And we know that that’s a risk for homelessness, because you just have so little left over for basic necessitie,s and you are unable to save for emergencies,” says Megan Bolton, the research director at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which released a report looking on rents and wages this week.

The study estimates that workers would need to make $18.79 an hour in order to keep rent from eating up more than 30 pecent of their income. Yet the average renter actually only makes an hourly wage of $14.32.

That often means sacrificing on money for food, health care, travel, and other expenses.

It also means the economic impact can spread from the renter to the communities they live in, says Harvard’s Belsky.

“They’re spending less on things in the local economy,” he says. “There’s no question, from nothing comes nothing.”

Moreover, some renters are forced out of pricey cities because they can’t afford the rents at all.

“Families are deliberately, and in many cases systematically, moving outside of some of the high-cost cities across the country,” says Brett Theodos, a senior research associate in the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. “What we’re losing there is some of the fabric of social life in cities.”

See how many hours a week a minimum wage worker would have to clock just to keep rent around 30 percent of their income. Map from The National Low Income Housing Coalition. (Click to enlarge PDF)