With the launch of The American Wine Consumer Coalition today, U.S. wine consumers now have a place in public policy debates for the first time ever. Brainchild of award-winning wine blogger and wine industry public relations consultant Tom Wark, the new organization will focus on increasing consumer rights to access wine via direct shipping, supermarket sales, privatization, and more! Wark is executive director, and AWCC’s president is David White, who this year won “Best Overall Wine Blog” at the 2013 Wine Blog Awards for Terroirist: A Daily Wine Blog (congratulations, David!). I serve as a member of the AWCC board.
Check out the AWCC website and member benefits. And most importantly, spread the word. Email friends, share on Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Here’s a little more information from AWCC’s press release:
“In 2011 Congress held hearings on a bill (HR 1161) that, if passed, would have fundamentally and negatively impacted consumer access to wine, yet not a single consumer was invited to testify before Congress,” notes AWCC President David White. “While this was not the first nor the last time those most impacted by these kinds of deliberations were shut out of the conversation, this is when it became clear to a number of wine consumers across the country that their voice is ignored, and that something needed to change.”
Today, numerous states block consumer access to wine and the ability of consumers to enjoy a simple bottle as a result of a variety of archaic and protectionist laws that serve special interests, but not the basic interests of wine consumers:
- 11 states still ban their residents from having wine shipped to them from out of state wineries.
- 36 States still ban their residents from having wine shipped to them from out of state retailers
- 17 States still ban its residents from buying wine in grocery stores
- 4 states ban the purchase of wine on Sundays
- 2 States control the sale of wine, rather than allowing its residents to buy their wine in a free and open marketplace
- 15 states ban their residents from bringing a bottle from home into a restaurant.
Among the issues that are high on the AWCC’s agenda are legal consumer access to wine via direct shipment, grocery store wine sales and privatization efforts that take the government out of the business of selling wine and putting it into the hands of the much more responsive free market.
After four years, the Council of the District of Columbia finally passed rules to regulate the burgeoning mobile food industry that seem to please all sides. Restaurant owners were hoping the new dining option would be a flash in the pan, but it seems the new rules and the food trucks are here to stay.
After a marathon hearing on proposed food truck regulations in May, it became clear the would-be rules needed “more time in the oven” as Benjamin Freed of DCist, put it. When the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington approved the original plan, the Food Truck Association of Metropolitan Washington claimed it would put its members out of business. But the revised rules, unanimously approved by the council, seem to be a compromise everyone can live with.
The proposal creates “mobile roadway vending zones” which lets truck operators win access to 180 designated mobile vending spots in a monthly lottery. The trucks must have at least six feet of unobstructed (parking meters do not count as obstructions) sidewalk by their parking space, reduced from 10 feet in the original proposal (which counted parking meters and other non-obstructions as obstructions). The bill also reduces the fine for parking at an expired meter — a change the food truck association pushed hard for — from $2,000 down to $50 for the first infraction and doubling for subsequent offenses. For those trucks not lucky enough to land spots in the lottery, they must be at least 200 feet away from the designated mobile vending zones — which is a reduction from the 500 feet in the original proposal. If an unassigned food truck parks in the spot of a vendor who won it in the lottery, the offending vendor could face a fine of $2,000.
Despite heated rhetoric from both sides, and even outlandish claims that the food trucks could be used in terrorist plots, it appears this bill, which Mayor Vincent Gray is expected to sign before the June 22 deadline, solidifies food trucks’ place in the D.C. dining scene.
President Obama repeated a myth about equal pay and pay discrimination, as the economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes at RealClearMarkets:
Last week in the Rose Garden, at an event celebrating the Equal Pay Act, he once again repeated the myth that women earn 77 cents on a man’s dollar.
“The day that the bill was signed into law, women earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned on average. Today, it’s about 77 cents,” the president said. “Over the course of her career, a working woman with a college degree will earn on average hundreds of thousands of dollars less than a man who does the same work. ”
Nonsense. The 77 percent figure is bogus because it averages all full-time women, no matter what education and profession, with all full-time men. Even with such averaging, the latest Labor Department figures show that women working full-time make 81 percent of full-time men’s wages. For men and women who work 40 hours weekly, the ratio is 88 percent.
One reason women earn less than men on average is that women work fewer hours on average than men even when they work full-time. As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted in February, government data shows women work fewer hours than men, which explains much of the apparent pay gap: “since women in general work fewer hours than men in a year, the statistics [such as this one] used by the White House [to push for passage of the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act, discussed at this link] may be less reliable for examining the key focus of the legislation — wage discrimination.” As Ramesh Ponnuru noted at Bloomberg News, the gap gap between men and women “reflects the fact that women, on average, work fewer hours than men.” Family responsibilities also play a role. Diana Furchtgott-Roth cites a 2005 study which found that “There is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.” In addition to being more likely to seek part-time work, women are also more likely to have gaps in their employment history and to enter lower-paying fields, she notes, and “a 2009 report for the Labor Department, found that these factors account for most of the pay gap.”
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“I’m not a criminal, so there’s really no reason for me to be in a criminal database.” That was James Shepherd, a Kentucky native and a roofer, after he was stopped by police under “suspicion of trespassing” at a Florida hotel. The officer on the scene asked to take his picture and ran it through Florida’s facial recognition database. Finding no matches, he uploaded Shepherd’s photo with the label “suspicious person.”
Florida is one of 26 states that use facial recognition software to verify identities of individuals who possess state ID photos or have their photos added by police, according a new report by The Washington Post. The Post report exposes how quickly systems created for one purpose can be coopted for other purposes. This should make those who support, in order to stop illegal immigration, the E-Verify national ID system contained in the Senate immigration bill consider what other applications authorities could find for the System.
E-Verify violates “a key principle of privacy”
The Senate immigration bill would create a centralized database with photos of every legal U.S. worker or potential worker. It does this by combining the Social Security database – names, addresses and Social Security Numbers – with passport and state ID photos (p. 1317). The bill incentivizes states to provide photos by offering hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for making them accessible to the federal government (p. 1377).
This much alone violates what Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Newsletter, calls a “key principle of privacy.” As Smith explains, “The principle is that information gathered for one purpose ought not be used for an incompatible purpose without consent of the individual.” In this instance, Americans never conceived their Social Security accounts or driver license photos would be used for immigration enforcement, violating the premise under which they handed them over.
Federal law actually recognizes this principle under the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, which strictly limits how states can use photos compiled under the auspices of motor vehicle regulation (18 USC § 2721). But this bill explicitly states the DPA doesn’t apply in this case.
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The so-called rate shock from Obamacare has hit Ohio. The state’s Department of Insurance announced last Thursday that the average individual-market health insurance premium in 2014 will cost approximately $420,” per month, “representing an increase of 88 percent.” “We have warned of these increases,” said Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor. “Consumers will have fewer choices and pay much higher premiums for their health insurance starting in 2014.” Projected costs ranged from $282.51 to $577.40 for individual health plans. “But for many experts who understand the economics of health insurance, the premium increases are not shocking at all. In August of 2011, the actuarial firm Milliman predicted that the Affordable Care Act would increase individual-market premiums in Ohio by 55 to 85 percent.
Most of these cost increases are not only a matter of red tape and compliance burdens, but also related to cost-shifting (what some might view as robbing Peter to pay Paul), and requirements that insurance cover routine minor expenses, rather than performing insurance’s traditional function of protecting against risk by paying unexpected expenses such as medical treatment for injuries and illnesses. Wall Street Cheat Sheet’s commentary “Proof that Obamacare ‘Rate Shock’ Is Real” says that “two main drivers” cause most of this increase: Risk pool composition changes will require the young to subsidize the old and the healthy to subsidize the sick; and Obamacare’s expansion of insurance benefits, particularly its required reductions in deductibles and co-pays.”
Health insurance expenses also will go up because of state court rulings that invalidate common-sense limits on meritless lawsuits, such as the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Wall v. Marouk . In that case, the court struck down a requirement medical malpractice lawsuits not be filed unless they are supported by evidence the physician violated the standard of care (in the form of an expert affidavit), even though such evidence is required for liability. In so doing, it encouraged nuisance lawsuits that drive up the cost of healthcare by encouraging doctors to order unnecessary tests and practice other forms of costly and unnecessary “defensive medicine.” (The activism of the court’s decision is buttressed by the fact that the same day it did that, the Oklahoma Supreme Court also nullified the state’s general tort reform in its entirety. (Here is some coverage: WLF, TortsProf, Tulsa World, Reuters, NewsOK, Beck (“the Oklahoma Supreme Court was plainly out of control in Ysbrand, and unfortunately it remains out of control to this day”), Douglas v. Cox Retirement Properties).)
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This week in the world of regulation:
- Last week, 93 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is up from 72 new final rules the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every hour and 48 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- All in all, 1,592 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
- If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,522 new final rules.
- Last week, 1,536 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 36,027 pages.
- At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,320 pages.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published for the third consecutive week, for a total of 13 so far in 2013.
- The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.58 billion to $10.19 billion.
- So far, 109 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
- So far this year, 291 final rules affect small business; 26 of them are significant rules.
Highlights from final rules published last week:
For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.
A New York Times article yesterday points out some of the potential difficulties already evident in early talks on a trade agreement between the United States and the European Union. The possible trade pact, called the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is touted as a critically important step to getting the sluggish economies on both sides of the Atlantic moving.
Tariffs between the two parties are not likely to be a major issue, as both the United States and the EU have substantially lowered duties on most goods and services. The big bone of contention instead will be non-tariffs barriers, such as some sticky regulatory issues reflecting different approaches to risk as well as attempts to carve out “sensitive products” from the agreement.
Particularly in the agricultural area, the EU’s use of the “precautionary principle” in assessing the risk of genetically modified food products and of certain chemicals and processes is likely to conflict with the U.S. approach, which uses science-based risk assessment and looks at the safety of the product rather than how it was produced. In a prologue to the talks, the European Parliament’s inclusion of the precautionary approach in its list of negotiating objectives has already raised the ire of U.S. farmers.
Another big obstacle to the talks is France’s continued efforts to carve out a “cultural diversity” exception so audiovisual products and services would not be included in the agreement. France, Germany and several other countries supported a European Commission parliamentary amendment to allow films and other audiovisuals to be exempted.
Although an outright exemption would be the French choice, others have come up with so-called “red lines” that would effectively restrict what some French film directors and actors have called “a cultural invasion of Europe.” One would require EU broadcasters to provide the major share of time to domestic works. Another would retain the current film and audiovisual industry subsidies. The last red line would give the EU the right to revise laws to adapt to the digital environment.
Germany has since bowed out of its support, leaving France as the main country that would limit the amount of foreign films that would be allowed in the EU and continue to heavily subsidize the film and other AV industries.
France has said it would veto the agreement if films and AV materials are included. If that country has its way in asserting such a “cultural” exception, that would close out an important U.S. sector that is not likely to accept such a carve-out. It doesn’t seem plausible that the U.S. would accept such an exemption, even if some other sectors might see this as an opportunity for them to get their own “sensitive product” exemptions in return.
Last week at Salon, Michael Lind raised a question he thinks “libertarians can’t answer,” namely, “If your approach is so great, why hasn’t any country anywhere in the world ever tried it?” He elaborates:
Why are there no libertarian countries? If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?
Lind regards the non-existence of a libertarian country as a slam-dunk refutation of libertarianism. “If socialism is discredited by the failure of communist regimes in the real world,” he asks, “why isn’t libertarianism discredited by the absence of any libertarian regimes in the real world?”
Maybe because when political communities adopt libertarian institutions, principles, and policies such as property rights, freedom of speech and association, freedom of contract, free trade, and legislative checks and balances, the results are generally good, and when communities adopt antithetical institutions and policies the results are generally bad.
Reflecting on those big-picture realities, one is led to the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. The ideal is a polestar that helps direct our aim. But that is all. I don’t know a single libertarian who thinks that, if we just keep pushing, some day we will all live in Libertaria.
Why are there no full-blown libertarian regimes in the real world? The answer to this question is so obvious it’s a wonder Lind hasn’t thought of it. Libertarians have actually explicated it in detail. It’s called public choice theory.
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I have an op-ed online in USA Today today entitled “America should learn from Europe on wind power.” In it, I outline how Europe has begun to come to its senses about the unsustainable cost of wind energy:
However, wind power is expensive, and the growing size of the industry has meant that subsidies – and energy bills – have surged. The German subsidy is paid for by a surcharge on household electricity bills. The growth in wind power meant that in January the surcharge increased to over 5 cents (euro) per kilowatt hour, representing 14% of all electricity bills.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, realizing that wind power is economically unsustainable, has proposed capping the subsidy until the end of 2014 and capping further rises to 2.5%, with the probability of further significant reform after the federal elections this year. It’s a similar story in Spain, where subsidies have been cut so much that the chairman of the country´s Association of Renewable-Energy Producers said recently: “Spain’s government is trying to smash the renewable-energy sector through legislative modifications.”
As it happens, President Obama has repeatedly said we should look to Spain and Germany as examples of how to handle renewable power. Indeed, and he should apply this thinking to the loan guarantee application for the Cape Wind project:
The project will cost $2.6 billion, and it has secured funding for $2 billion of that from a Japanese bank. But this is believed to be subject to the project gaining a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. And there is every reason to believe that this would be as bad a bet as its loan guarantee to Solyndra.
The contracted cost of the wind farm’s energy will be 23 cents a kilowatt hour (excluding tax credits, which are unlikely to last the length of the project), which is more than 50 percent higher than current average electricity prices in Massachusetts. The Bay State is already the 4th most expensive state for electricity in the nation. Even if the tax credits are preserved, $940 million of the $1.6 billion contract represents costs above projections for the likely market price of conventional power. Moreover, these costs are just the initial costs, and like in Germany, they are scheduled to rise by 3.5 percent annually for 15 years.
In fact, one major Massachusetts employer estimates that each 1 cent increase in the cost of energy per kilowatt hour will cost the company $4 million, creating a major incentive to relocate, costing the state jobs and revenue.
When you consider that the Cape Wind project would also inflict environmental damage to cause Massachusetts residents and businesses to pay more for their energy, the case becomes a “no-brainer.” This is one case where the President could do with being a little more European in his outlook.
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