The calorie label clause, buried deep within the ACA’s 10,000 pages, seems harmless enough at first glance. Each restaurant chain with over 20 locations is required to display the calorie content of each food and drink item it serves on signs and printed menus–with vending machine distributors subjected to the same rules. But the regulation also covers “similar retail food establishments,” a clause vague enough to give FDA regulators sweeping power to determine who does and doesn’t have to comply.
FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg admitted that she “actually thought [calorie labeling] would be one of the more straightforward tasks…but little did I know how complicated it would be.” Hamburg’s concerns are hardly unfounded, but it’s small business owners and franchisees—not FDA bureaucrats—that will feel the most pain under the new law.
What’s particularly stupid is that even if they could make it work without impacting businesses so much, it won’t even do any good, because calories are not what make people obese. All part of the Democrats’ war on science.
The subsidies that enable some Americans to decide “if they will work” mean higher taxes from those who must or want to work.
Republicans immediately jumped on the finding as proof that the law is a jobs killer and cited earlier discoveries about its destructive impact. These include Obama’s lie that “you can keep your plan” and the fact that many new insurance plans come with higher premiums and deductibles and fewer doctors.
Pay more, get less will be the experience for tens of millions by the time the law is fully implemented. And don’t forget its assault on religious freedom.
All true and yet, as Carney’s defense showed, something much, much larger is at play. The impacts are symptoms. The disease is that leading Democrats view fewer workers and more dependency as a good thing. That attitude largely explains slow economic growth, record-low labor rates and the explosion of handouts over the last five years.
This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.
Not all Democrats agree with that approach, but the party is now controlled by those who do. It is the party that celebrates subsidies and rewards states for getting more people on food stamps. It opens the door wider for disability payments and fights for unemployment benefits like it once fought for jobs. It does these things not because of an emergency but because of a warped ideology.
And wherein lies the dysfunction? I’d say that in this case, as in most, it is in our lack of adherence to the Constitution and the intent of the Founders, who would never have imagined such a thing as a federal minimum wage.
…is the American way. Michael Barone reviews Megan McArdle’s new book, which I think has some similar themes to mine.
[Update a couple minutes later]
This bit is interesting:
Her advice is to avoid enterprises that are in long-term decline, such as General Motors starting in the 1970s. In business and public policy, try to learn from well-conducted experiments — but recognize that successful trials can’t always be replicated on a large scale.
I think that also applies to NASA human spaceflight as practiced for the past fifty years.
Marcia Smith has a good description of the highlights, including the discussion on space safety on Tuesday afternoon, at which I felt like the elephant in the room that no one talked about. It was an excellent conference.
Every generation has its foolish adherents to Marxism, ignorant of or unable to learn from history. It is, sadly, a seductive idea to the weak of mind and those incapable of critical thinking.
Traditional capital flows from nonprofits to investment banking are being disintermediated. People, causes and businesses that need capital have access through the internet, social media and crowdfunding platforms to capital that they simply could not access before. As this trend grows, crowds will demonstrate a different sort of wisdom, sometimes funding causes that foundations wouldn’t or entrepreneurs that VCs wouldn’t.
The JOBS bill was one of the few bi-partisan things that Congress had done recently that will actually help the economy and provide more opportunities for true wealth and job creation.
, which I think has some similar themes to mine.