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A report was released last week showing that New York City’s menu labeling law hasn’t been working to get people to reduce their calorie intake. The study involved a number of fast food restaurants in low-income areas of the city. Receipts from before and after the calorie figures were posted were compared to receipts from a comparable low-income area in Newark, NJ, where there was no labeling at all. In the end, the researchers found that despite the fact that people reported seeing the calorie info and saying it influenced their decision-making, the average amount of calories ordered actually went up.

Those who oppose menu labeling laws are claiming victory, and while I’ve tended to agree with them that menu labeling isn’t going to influence most people’s eating habits, I think there’s a bigger picture here. And I think the issue is more than just about getting people to make better choices, it’s also about gravitating towards an end where people’s overall set of choices gradually improve by having the calorie information out in the open.

As for the study itself, I think it was way too narrow to draw any large conclusions. Lower-income people are those least likely to be concerned with calorie intake over price. In fact, the uptick in the amount of calories consumed might be happening because people get higher calorie items in the belief that they’re getting more for their money. It’s very possible that studies of higher-income consumers in different types of restaurants would show declines in caloric intake. On the other hand, the result of this survey requires some reconsideration of the meaning of previous surveys cited by labeling supporters that showed that people notice the calorie information and that it influences their decision-making. The New York study found the same thing – 90% of the people said so – yet it wasn’t leading to lower calorie choices in the end.

Where I tend to agree with supporters of menu labeling is that having the calorie information out in the open often spurs the restaurants themselves to provide healthier choices. As Corby Kummer notes here, Starbucks has already modified some of their higher-calorie items in response to the laws and even some fast food chains have been altering their menus. In the end, I see this as a worthwhile benefit to the labeling laws. While the vast majority of people aren’t going to change their eating habits, if restaurants are motivated to reduce the calorie counts of their offerings in various ways, there will certainly be a positive downstream effect of that.

That said, my concerns about menu labeling haven’t changed much either. Will these requirements be imposed on all food outlets, potentially making it difficult for smaller restaurants to comply – especially ones who rotate their menus a lot (in King County, the requirements only apply to large chains)? Will the calorie measurements themselves be accurate enough to be trusted? Are they simply inaccurate for places like Subway, where you custom make your own sandwich? None of those are serious enough concerns for me, but my main concern is what happens to restaurants with higher calorie items (because there’s legitimate demand for it) who then become targets for overzealous public health officials. When the supporters of menu labeling move from simply trying to inform people’s choices to trying to limit them is when I hop the fence and start yelling with the libertarians.

But unless that point is reached (and maybe I’m somewhat naive for not thinking it’s guaranteed to happen), I’m ok with having restaurants forced to post the calorie totals on menus. It doesn’t influence my decision-making now, but I realize that it might in the future. I think what rubs me the wrong way about the opposition to these laws is how overt the astroturf nature of it is. For instance, here’s a release on last week’s study from the Center for Consumer Freedom. They proudly refer to themselves as the most vocal opponent of New York’s menu labeling law. But why? Posting calorie counts doesn’t threaten consumer freedom in any way. In fact, provided that the counts are relatively accurate, it arguably expands consumer freedom, by giving people better information to make choices. But in the PR world, buzzwords like “consumer freedom” have often been used to make people feel like they’re fighting for their own liberty when in reality they’re fighting to keep corporations from having to do extra work.

From this point, I think there are two directions this can go. Either the public health advocates are right and restaurants will slowly improve the healthiness of their offerings, or the libertarians and the restaurant lobby are right and this is only the beginning of a more aggressive effort to make our choices for us.

Wells Fargo is jacking up its credit card rates.

The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act (CARD), which was passed by Congress earlier this year, will limit how credit card companies can raise interest rates on consumers when the second part of the legislation takes effect next year. But before that can happen at least one bank has chosen to increase consumers’ rates in a step many feel is in response to the new law.

Last week Wells Fargo announced that it would be raising the rates on many of its customers by 3 percent, but the company says the rate change is not a reaction to the legislation.

“This is something we’ve been contemplating for quite a period of time,” Kevin Rhein, head of card services for the bank told Bloomberg, following the announcement.

This at a time when interest rates are at or near near zero.

Rates on three- and six-month bills have been below 1 percent for months, reflecting a campaign by the Federal Reserve to push down short-term borrowing costs in an effort to help the economy emerge from the longest recession since the 1930s.

Fed officials at their meeting last month left the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other, at an all-time low of zero to 0.25 percent. The funds rate has been at that level since December.

Obviously, the best consumer advice anyone can heed is to just not use credit cards, or when you do, pay them off. Easier said than done for a lot of folks during bad economic times.

If you want to understand the populist outrage that exists in this country, the financial sector is a good place to start looking. Whether Wells Fargo is acting ahead of new laws or not, it’s acting directly ahead of the Christmas shopping season. That can’t be good for retailers.

It’s not the responsibility of ordinary consumers who play by the rules to help gigantic banks gain profits to offset the financial calamity caused by the housing bubble or the absorption of failed institutions. I’ve never cut up a credit card and mailed it back to a bank, it’s easier to just not use it. Sure, consumers are sometimes pretty much forced to have a credit card when renting a car or hotel room, but other than that, cash will do.

I still don’t understand why there seems to be little questioning of the right of big banks to pay incredibly crappy interest rates to regular depositors, yet charge consumers multiples of 10 or twenty times that interest rate. Then they tack on fees that more than negate any interest rates they pay to regular folks. But I guess you need an MBA to understand why this is good for business, because it seems to be good for only one set of businesses, and that would be the big banks.

Sure, banks should make some money on the interest rate differential, but wouldn’t logic dictate it be more like five percent or something? Would ten percent be enough? I mean, it’s all gravy, they get the gravy for being big and being a bank and getting to borrow money for free.

Where’s the gravy for the little people? I would please like to borrow eleventy trillion dollars at zero percent, and then I will be a big bank and I will charge people five percent interest, and I will be rich beyond my wildest dreams. I’ll even throw in free toaster ovens, maybe some calendars. The Fed knows where to find me, I’m sure.

Please join us tonight for some politics under the influence at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju5GhNCz_yY[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 340 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to shoot for.

I know there are those in our media and civic establishment who would prefer that politics not get in the way of, um, politics, touting bipartisanship or even nonpartisanship as the cure for most of our governmental ills.

That would be the uncynical motivation behind the relatively broad support for last year’s charter amendment that made all our county offices nonpartisan. The obvious cynical motivation, of course, is that removing the party label makes it easier to elect Republicans to office in overwhelmingly Democratic King County.

Personally, I find our media’s (not to mention the Muni League’s) infatuation with nonpartisanship to be fetishistic and naive, but it’s an issue on which I’m willing to agree to disagree. So my question to the genuinely uncynical anti-partisans is: are you going to stand by and allow partisan gamesmanship to subvert your lofty ideals, or are you going to definitively out Susan Hutchison for who she truly is… a conservative, Republican activist?

And Hutchison is a conservative, Republican activist, or at least, she has been over the past few years, sitting on the board of the Discovery Institute, speaking at numerous conservative and Republican events, contributing to the BIAW and a number of Republican candidates, and funneling $100,000 to the conservative Washington Policy Center while enthusiastically endorsing its anti-tax, anti-transit, anti-labor, anti-environmental agenda. There is a reason why Hutchison is such a close friend of the ultra-conservative David Boze Show, and why she gayly laughs when they enthusiastically exclaim: “Hey Suzie… you are our Sarah Palin!” She is their Sarah Palin.

There’s little doubt that if Hutchison were to be effectively tagged with the “Republican” label, she wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in fundamentalist evangelical Hell of winning in November, and so our media has adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in an apparent effort to remain fair and balanced. But the last time I checked, Republicans are not a protected class, and it is neither unfair nor unbalanced to tell your audience the truth.

I know the Muni League crowd and the editorial boards would have preferred a nonpartisan race, but with Constantine and Hutchison, that’s not what they got. And I just don’t see how voters are served by maintaining the fiction.

When Darcy Burner, who graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Economics, claimed in a debate to have received a degree in Economics, the Seattle Times saw fit to brand her a liar on its front page, possibly costing her the election. So I wonder if they’ll give equal play to Susan Hutchison’s lie at last night’s candidate debate in the King County Executive race?

[Constantine] linked Hutchison to the right wing Building Industry Association of Washington, the state’s chief opponent of conservation and climate change legislation. The BIAW spent millions of dollars promoting Republican Dino Rossi in the 2004 and 2008 gubernatorial races.

Why did you “give $1,000 to the BIAW, the very people who are trying to dismantle our environmental laws,?” asked Constantine.

… “I have never given money to the BIAW: My campaign manager has never worked for the BIAW. So I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hutchison shot back.

Hutchison did, however, donate $1,000 to ChangePAC, the front group and arm of the BIAW that in 2008 filled the airwaves with “hit” TV spots denouncing Gov. Chris Gregoire.

The political consulting firm handling Hutchison’s campaign, the California-based Dresner Wicker, played a central role in ChangePAC’s anti-Gregoire campaign.

Now, I suppose it is true; as far as we know, Hutchison never has written a check out directly to “BIAW.” Likewise, Dresner Wicker is her campaign consultant, not her campaign “manager,” and their association was with ChangePAC too. But that’s just splitting hairs, isn’t it?

In fact, it’s more than splitting hairs; it is a blatant lie.

ChangePAC is BIAW, and not even they deny it. ChangePAC was created by BIAW. It is run by BIAW. They share the same officers, and the same exact mailing address. That’s the way PACs work.

So the question is, will the Times hold Hutchison up to the same high standards they held Burner, and excoriate her, top of the fold, for telling such an obvious and intentional untruth? Or does the newsroom only apply such high standards to candidates the editorial board vehemently hates?

As reported on Publicola, Seattle budget planners have run some numbers to illustrate the potential impact of I-1033 on city revenues, and it’s pretty grim. Indeed, had I-1033 been implemented in 2001, property tax revenues from the city’s regular levy would be reduced to zero by 2015.

That’ right, zero. Zilch. Nada. Bupkis.

I assume the planners started with 2001 because it too was a down year, and would provide an opportunity to neatly illustrate the “ratcheting down” effect of our current recession… that is, every time revenues drop, the baseline from which future revenue lids are calculated is reset even lower. This 2001 starting point also benefits from using real numbers to date, so unless you believe we have finally banished the economic cycle, there’s no reason to expect a 2010 implementation of I-1033 to behave much differently.

Thus whether it takes fifteen years or ten or twenty, I-1033 would eventually and inevitably eliminate Seattle’s regular levy, the portion of the city property tax that does not require the prior approval of voters. I suppose there are some on the right who would argue that this would be a good thing… I just wish they’d do so publicly and honestly instead of attempting to trick voters with deceptive measures like I-1033.

Over at Slog, my foster son Will also takes issue with Andrew Garber’s front page I-1033 piece in the Seattle Times today, picking out this particular passage for ridicule (the emphasis is Will’s):

Tim Eyman was asked recently if he could imagine a time when he wouldn’t feel the need to file another anti-tax initiative.

Eyman, in essence, said no. “It’s a tug of war where the other side is always going to be pulling the rope in favor of higher taxes,” he said. “There needs to be a counterweight to that.”

And so Eyman, who makes his living filing initiatives, has put before voters another measure he argues will stifle any urge by lawmakers to increase taxes at least during the next couple of years, and help rein in government spending.

Will encourages journalists to “connect the dots…”

Memo to news media: Tim Eyman gets paid to file initiatives. That’s what he does. It’s his job!

Memo to Will: it’s not their job to connect the dots. Or at least most reporters appear not to think it is.

And that’s what so often bugs me about traditional journalism.

I guess I could spend some time deconstructing the anti-R71 ad above — you know, its Biblical overtones, the odd image of Adam and Eve in hospital gowns, its lie about equating R71 to same-sex marriage — but mostly I’m just struck by what a total waste of money it appears to be.

Maybe I’m totally out of touch with my fellow Washingtonians, but my sense is that the kinda folks who would be motivated to vote based on Biblical scripture are already pretty motivated to vote in any way that would punish those homosexual deviants. But the persuadable undecideds… I’m guessin’, not so much.

All in all, a pretty crappy ad, especially when compared to the effective emotional pitch of the Yes campaign.

UPDATE:
Oops.  Looks like the anti-R71 folks must know exactly how crappy their ad is in terms of appealing to anything but a fringe audience, as they don’t even allow it to be freely embedded in others’ websites. But you can view it here.

Yeah, see, the thing about today’s front page Seattle Times article on I-1033 — “Tax limit complex; impact unclear” — is that it isn’t, and any fair and balanced effort to impartially explain the initiative to voters only does readers a disservice.

I mean, honestly, on one side you have a broad coalition of labor and business, backed up both by the expertise of the state Office of Financial Management and the real world experience of Colorado’s disastrous TABOR experiment, and on the other side you have, you know, Tim Eyman. Yet in the typical J-School fashion, the Times’ Andrew Garber labors to present both sides equally.

To what end?

The truth is, both the intent and the impact of I-1033 is painfully clear: it will make state and local governments smaller, both as a percentage of the total economy, and in their ability to provide services and build and maintain public infrastructure. I-1033 pegs revenue growth to population plus inflation, yet it is an indisputable fact that the cost of providing government services increases at a substantially higher rate than inflation as a whole. (As I’ve repeatedly explained, it’s all gotta do with the nature of productivity.) Therefore, under I-1033, government revenue would increase slower than its costs. That is a fact. It’s simple math. And there’s nothing unclear about it.

Neither is there anything unclear about Eyman’s intentions. He wants to shrink government… you know… to the size where he can drown it in a bath tub. He’s WA’s Grover Norquist, only taller, and not nearly as smart. (And Norquist, to his credit, is at least manly enough to look me in the eye.)

He’s also an admitted liar, barred by court order from ever serving as campaign treasurer due to his inability to keep his campaign funds separate from his personal accounts. So why the hell is Eyman given equal weight as, and considerably more ink than, say, OFM, in explaining how I-1033 works? For example, in dismissing the argument that I-1033 would hurt schools, Eyman disingenuously claims that, unlike Colorado’s law, his measure doesn’t touch schools at all… rhetorical bullshit that Garber dutifully echoes:

However, there are key differences between the two measures. Colorado’s applied to all governments including school and fire-protection districts. Eyman’s affects only city, county and state government.

Uh-huh. But see, the thing is, about three-quarters of K-12 funding comes from the state, an expense that accounts for the largest chunk of the state budget, so to suggest that limiting state revenues won’t limit education spending is patently ridiculous. Furthermore, local school levies are capped by law at no more than 24% of state and federal funding (up to 33% in a handful of districts), so as state education spending declines (inflation-adjusted or otherwise) so will the amount local school districts are allowed to raise via local levies. Again, it’s simple math: if school levies are capped at a percentage of state funding, and I-1033 limits state revenue, then I-1033 imposes revenue limits on local school districts.

So yeah, Garber is technically accurate in stating that I-1033 excludes local school districts, but by failing to put the very real (and mathematically indisputable) impact of the measure in its broader context, he only ends up misinforming voters. There will be voters who cast their ballot in favor of I-1033, wrongly (if honestly) believing that it will not impact their local schools, and some of these voters will undoubtably believe this thanks to Garber’s impartial reporting.

I’m not implying ill intent on the part of Garber or the Times, or any sort of ethical or professional lapse. But this is clearly one of those times when their devotion to the traditional journalistic paradigm allows the facts to obscure the truth, and ultimately, only serves to mislead the public.

Stefan Sharkansky says he used to do comedy improv. Huh. I guess that explains his coverage of the 2004 gubernatorial election contest.

Two weeks ago’s contest was won by YLB. The correct answer was Amsterdam.

Here’s this week’s, good luck!

Oh man is this refreshing. Just look at what White House Communications Director Anita Dunn had to say about Fox News in an interview on CNN this morning.

Fox News “is more a wing of the Republican Party” than an objective news organization.

“The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”

Fox News is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.”

“They’re widely viewed as part of the Republican Party. Take their talking points, put ’em on the air.”

“If you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election, what you would have seen would have been that the biggest stories and the biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN.”

“Let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

No, let’s not pretend.

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with “opinion journalism” — I guess that’s sorta what I practice. But unlike FOX News, I’m honest about it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va7-nEAkxx0[/youtube]