On Thursday, the federal government once again appealed to the food industry to stop marketing junk food to kids. This time, though, government officials provided a specific set of guidelines for food makers:
Citing an epidemic of childhood obesity, regulators are taking aim at a range of tactics used to market foods high in sugar, fat or salt to children, including the use of cartoon characters like Toucan Sam, the brightly colored Froot Loops pitchman, who appears in television commercials and online games as well as on cereal boxes.
The guidelines, released by the Federal Trade Commission, encompass a broad range of marketing efforts, including television and print ads, Web sites, online games that act as camouflaged advertisements, social media, product placements in movies, the use of movie characters in cross-promotions and fast-food children’s meals.[...]
The guidelines are meant to be voluntary, but companies are likely to face heavy pressure to adopt them. Companies that choose to take part would have five to 10 years to bring their products and marketing into compliance.
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Recent National Labor Relations Board actions have revealed some disconcerting truths about the vision of the Obama administration. The litigation against South Dakota and Arizona over union laws prove that the Chief of State and his appointees do not believe in basic constitutional liberties enjoyed by the people of the United States. Americans value their own individual responsibility, and they understand that the state’s ability to intervene in citizens’ affairs must be strictly limited if people are to remain fundamentally free. Though some Americans may argue for increased government intervention, the recent encroachment by the NLRB on the right to a secret ballot election has taken the majority of Americans by surprise.
Big Labor first attempted to do away with the secret ballot election in Congress by proposing the Employee Free Choice Act. Failure of EFCA has not deterred the efforts of Big Labor and the Obama administration from using unelected officials of government agencies to limit worker freedom.
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In Hopewell Township, New Jersey, chickens are only allowed to mate on 10 pre-selected days per year. And that isn’t the only law that poultry must follow. They must be disease-free in order to mate. There are to be no more than six hens per half-acre lot. And roosters must keep their crowing in check — violating Hopewell’s strict crowing regulations means a two-year banishment from the property they disturbed.
Thanks Iain, for your kind comments on my Wall Street Journal op-ed celebrating the Middleton’s entrepreneurship and for the great info on how economic life has improved in Britain — largely due to (now Baroness) Margaret Thatcher’s reforms — since Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981.
In my Journal op-ed, I made the point that Prince William’s wedding to the daughter of entrepreneurs represents an elevation of the status in entrepreneurs in British culture. “For centuries in Britain, commercial activities were looked down upon by many in the aristocracy, whose wealth lay in landownership and who would not deign to dabble in trade,” I noted.
However, a few days ago The Washington Post proved that cultural snobbery against entrepreneurs doesn’t just exist on the other side of the Atlantic. A few weeks ago Christine Hall noted the Post‘s elitist rant against coupon clippers. Now, in its free daily Express, a tabloid that is handed out on weekdays at Washington subway stations, the Posties deigned to dabble in bashing the Middletons’ business.
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CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
April 29, 2011
>>Featured Story
As spectators on both sides of the Atlantic prepare to watch England’s Prince William wed his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton, CEI’s John Berlau draws the attention of the political community to the free-market angle of the Royal Wedding saga. As Berlau explains in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week (“The Entrepreneurs’ Princess“), Kate Middleton’s parents built their own fortune from the bottom-up, creating boundless opportunities for their daughter through their own ingenuity and hard work. Read John Berlau’s op-ed here.
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After two years on the real estate market, Martha Stewart’s beautiful Tribeca penthouse finally sold this week for $8.6 million, a cool two-and-a-half times what Martha paid for the condo in 1999.
Alexis Stewart, the media mogul’s daughter, initially listed Martha’s “Ice House” for $12.95 million in 2009.
This weekend Tribeca begins its film festival, an annual event started in 2002 to bring attention and financial support to areas in lower Manhattan I wrote over at The Washington Examiner:
A lot has happened in Tribeca since 1999 — lower Manhattan suffered after the 2001 9/11 attack, but in 2006 Forbes ranked Tribeca’s 10013 zip code as New York City’s most expensive.
And a lot has happened for Martha Stewart since 1999. After the media magnate was convicted of insider trading in 2004 she spent five months in a West Virginia federal prison camp. Despite speculation that this would be the end of Martha’s “omnimedia” empire, the entrepreneur (and former model) bounced back ahead of projections.
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Have a listen here.
Land-use and Transportation Policy Analyst Marc Scribner looks at China’s experience with high-speed rail, and finds that it may not be a very good deal for the United States. Costs are so high that revenues don’t even cover the interest on the $271 billion of debt that high-speed rail has incurred for China.
While the nation’s attention has focused on government employee unions’ fight to retain their collective bargaining privileges, unions in the private sector are in an even bigger fight for their own survival.
Many major private sector unions’ pension funds are severely underfunded to the the extent that they threaten the unions’ own solvency, as well as their biggest selling point for attracting new members: a stable and secure retirement. At The Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway explains just how bad things could get.
[T]he problem of bankrupt union pension plans is not going away. It’s more than likely a number of big union pension plans will go bankrupt. All of a sudden, union employees who were expecting generous pension plans will be dumped onto the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the government-sponsored enterprise that backstops pension plans. The maximum payout is just under $13,000 a year, or “dog-food money,” notes McMahon.
That’s when things are likely to get really ugly. Multi-employer pension plans are by law governed by boards equally divided between employer and union representatives. There’s already no love lost between rank-and-file union members and the class of political consultants and executives that has come to dominate union leadership. Both of the SEIU’s national pension plans issued “critical status letters” to their members in 2009?—?the Pension Protection Act requires such letters to be issued when funds can cover less than 65 percent of their obligations. The SEIU, however, maintains a separate pension plan for its national officers that was funded at 98.3 percent, according to the latest data.
Expect waves of class action lawsuits over pension mismanagement aimed at recouping money from the employers and unions responsible. This could well bankrupt unions. And when union pension plans begin failing, unions will be deprived of perhaps their biggest selling point — job stability with unrivaled retirement benefits.
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In his 2008 campaign, Obama demagogued about “outsourcing,” but his own policies have outsourced thousands of American jobs, at taxpayer expense, as I explain today at The Washington Examiner.
As ABC News notes, “Nearly $2 billion in money from” the stimulus package has “been spent on wind power,” but “nearly 80 percent of that money” — $1.6 billion — “has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.” Indeed, “a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.” These subsidies effectively outsource American jobs, driving up America’s trade deficit.
Weirdly enough, Obama supports this taxpayer-subsidized outsourcing, which wipes out American jobs, even while opposing non-subsidized (free-market-based) outsourcing, which can actually save American jobs by reducing the cost of finished goods that are produced mostly — but not entirely — in America. (How can firms’ decisions to outsource save American jobs? Here’s how: An American manufacturer of a finished product, facing stiff cost competition from overseas manufacturers, can reduce its overall costs, and thus avoid going out of business, by outsourcing low-skill jobs producing crude components of the finished product to low-wage overseas workers, thus enabling the more valuable finished product designed or assembled by skilled American workers to be cost-competitive with finished goods produced entirely overseas.)
Wintery Knight has an interesting commentary on additional ways that stimulus money and taxpayer money are being wasted on foreign companies and liberal interest groups. I earlier discussed how GE was using “green jobs” welfare to fatten its profits while paying no taxes (unlike most American companies, which pay some of the world’s highest taxes) and getting a special bailout at preferential terms from the taxpayers.
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