The National Bureau of Economic Research is out with a new working paper on what it says is a link between fast-food advertising and youth obesity. The study, by Michael Grossman of the City University of New York, Roy Wada of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Erdal Tekin of Georgia State University, found that "on average, youths view approximately half an hour per week of fast-food advertising." They write:
we conclude that exposure to fast-food restaurant advertising on television causes statistically significant increases in the body mass index of youths and on the probability that they are obese. ...A complete ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of obese youths by 14 percent. Another policy option alternative to banning such advertising on television could be the elimination of the tax deductibility of food advertising costs. While such a policy would still leave a considerable number of youth exposed to fast-food advertising on television, it may still result in non-trivial reductions in obesity
Current polling shows that voters say they will blame Republicans more than Democrats if we go over the fiscal cliff.
But people are not always good predictors of their future opinions. The failure of the grand bargain negotiations in summer 2011 was followed by downturns in opinion toward both Obama and Republicans.
One of the quirks that makes a tax vote harder for House Republicans than it might ordinarily be is the difference, because of the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, between current law and current policy. The "Plan B" to extend the income tax cuts permanently to everyone making less than $1 million a year — the plan Speaker Boehner had proposed but pulled last night for lack of support — is a tax cut of about $4 trillion over ten years compared to current law (under which the rates expire and go up for everyone at year-end), but it's a tax increase of about $1 trillion over ten years compared to current policy (the rates that apply in 2012).
You can look at this as a behavioral economics point — "anchoring" — or as a political point, in respect of, say, Grover Norquist's pledge. But the Republicans could take the same vote on January 2 that they were scheduled to take last night before it was postponed, and the same legislation in January might seem more like a $4 trillion tax cut, while last night it might seem more like a $1 trillion tax increase.
President Clinton says that the burdens of excessive regulation are holding back the American economy. "The compliance costs relative to revenues of a lot of these regulations are just too high for a lot of small businesses, so we need to sequence the implementation of a lot of these new rules and cut the compliance costs," the president said, suggesting that when government adds a new regulation, it should remove an old one at the same time.
The New York Times has a feature on the surge of homelessness among young Americans. Is it just me, or does anyone else out there have the feeling that if it had been a Republican president running for re-election, this is the sort of article that would have run on the front page, before the election, instead of inside the paper, after the election?
The astute Anna Wilde Mathews (a Crimson colleague of mine) has an interview with the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Delos "Toby" Cosgrove. It appears in the Wall Street Journal:
WSJ: Do you think employers will stop providing health insurance, even though they can pay a penalty under the health overhaul law?
Dr. Cosgrove: The first ones will be the small companies…Every CEO I've talked to knows how much he'd save between insuring his people and paying the federal penalty.
WSJ: What does that tell you?
Dr. Cosgrove: The first time some big player does that, it's going to fall like dominoes. What that does is drive everybody to the exchanges.
WSJ: What does that mean to you?
Dr. Cosgrove: It's going to be a faster move towards one payer. Increasingly, people think that in 10 years you're going to have 75% of the health-care costs paid by the federal government.
WSJ: You think we're moving toward a single-payer system?
A lawsuit accusing GE of racial and religious discrimination against two Jewish-American businessmen, Albert and Harris Schwartzberg, whose companies owned and operated nursing homes and assisted living facilities financed with a $44 million term loan and a $22 million operating loan in which GE eventually took a lead role, was the subject of an article here last year.
Earlier this month a federal judge in Louisiana, Ruben Castillo, dismissed the complaint and ordered the complainants to pay Richard Arrowsmith, the GE employee whose behavior was at issue in the suit, $28,518.05 in legal costs.
Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs is someone I rarely agree with, but he may have a point here in this Financial Times article:
the zero interest rate policy has a risk not acknowledged by the Fed: the creation of another bubble. The Fed has failed to appreciate that the 2008 bubble was partly caused by its own easy liquidity policies in the preceding six years. Friedrich Hayek was prescient: a surge of excessive liquidity can misdirect investments that lead to boom followed by bust.
Bloomberg News concludes its six-part series on public employee pay with an article featuring the president of Ohio State University, Gordon Gee:
The Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee lives in a 9,630-square-foot Tudor Revival mansion that was renovated for him, featuring a great hall, pool, elevator and tennis court.
Gee made $1.9 million last year as the highest-paid public university president in the U.S. He also logged $1.7 million in expenses in fiscal 2011, including airfare for trips in private jets, country club dues and fundraising parties at his residence.
"He's overpaid," said CJ Jones, 19, a junior public affairs major at Ohio State, whose tuition has risen 9.7 percent during her 2 1/2 years at the university, based in Columbus, the state capital. "You should want that job for a sense of Buckeye pride. Why do you have to suck so many resources from our budget? I know kids graduating from OSU with $90,000 in debt, and it's a public university."...
The New York Times has a 7,500-word major investigative article that runs under the headline "The Bribery Article: How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs To Get Its Way In Mexico." From the article:
Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam's Club in one of Mexico City's most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit.
My column this week is a version of a William Safire-style year-end "Office Pool" predictions column. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) or Reason (here). When I tried this last year, the article predicted, or at least raised the possibility of, a Romney-Ryan presidential ticket and Senator Kerry's nomination for secretary of State.
The San Diego Union Tribune reports (link via Romensko) on government-employed public relations professionals:
Nationwide, the number of government PR workers more than doubled from 2003 to 2011 while the number of reporters and correspondents fell by a quarter, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There used to be one government PR specialist for every four reporters in America; now the relationship is almost 1-to-1....The statistics also don't account for the government's extensive use of PR contractors.
Rolling back the government public relations staffs to 2003 levels would be one way to help reduce deficits.
Who thought that actor Gerard Depardieu would emerge as a Samuel Adams-style tax rebel of France? Well, not exactly, but give the movie star credit for at least speaking out publicly, as he leaves, against the punish-the-rich tax policy of France (coming soon to America, if President Obama has his way). From Bloomberg:
"I am leaving because you consider success, creativity, talent, anything different are grounds for sanction," the movie star, known for such classic French roles as Cyrano de Bergerac and the musketeer Porthos, wrote in correspondence to Ayrault published today in Le Journal du Dimanche. "I don't expect to be pitied or praised but I reject the word pathetic."
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