It’s become conventional to blame fast food for the epidemic of obesity afflicting the poorest Americans.  But, as GOOD reports, a UC Davis study of thousands of adults found that McDonalds, Burger King, et al. are shoveling the fat higher up the income chain…

The relationship between fast-food eating and income looks less like a negative linear relationship—where the lower one’s income, the more fast food they eat—and more like an “inverted U.” Patronage of fast-food restaurants increases as families move out of the low-income bracket, peaks in the lower regions of the middle-income population, then declines after families begin to earn more than $60,000 annually.

From a commercial point of view, it makes perfect sense for the fast food establishment to target the middle class: they tend to operate under a perpetual time-and-money crunch– less free time + more children + shrinking disposable income = more Drive-Thru.  Besides, most fast food restaurants don’t accept food stamps.

America’s poorest are, of course, even more income constrained.  For too many of them, a friend in the grocery business explained, “it’s all about getting as many calories as you can for your dollar.”  That’s a competition that processed foods essentially always win… and so obesity and its evil children (Type Two Diabetes, et al.) are rampant.

At least some of America’s poorest have Medicaid coverage; so treating the expensive chronic ailments that result from horrible diets is possible– albeit a burden on the national treasury.

But for America’s middle class, the situation is the opposite:  the wounds are self-funded– they pay their Arby’s tabs with their own money.  And the consequences– the costs of dealing with chronic illness, or the pain of not being able to afford to– are also (increasingly) borne directly.   A Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report (pdf here) notes that the number of middle-class Americans covered by health insurance has dropped over the last decade far faster than that of any other income cohort; only 66% of middle-class Americans are covered by employer health plans; very few by individual plans.

Indeed, obesity-driven health problems can all too often be a family’s ticket from the middle class down into poverty: A study published in the American Journal of Medicine (pdf here) reports that 62% of all U.S. household bankruptcies were driven by medical debts; most of those in middle class households with inadequate or no insurance.  And, of course, many of those cases were obesity-related.

The obesity epidemic is costing America dearly.  Leaving aside the human costs to focus simply on economics, its drag on Medicaid is unnecessarily expensive at a time when the nation can ill afford it.  But its evisceration of middle class income and savings is even more damaging at a time when the country is struggling to turn itself around in a way that depends on a resurgent middle class.

The debate rages over the appropriate role for government to play in addressing the issue.  But surely one thing is clear: Americans “deserve a break today”– a break from the fast food habit.

Sony’s Howard Stringer Says He’s Ready To Compete Against Steve Jobs

November 11, 2011

Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer told The Wall Street Journal Thursday that he’s finally ready to compete against Steve Jobs.

“I spent the last five years building a platform so I can compete against Steve Jobs. It’s finished, and it’s launching now,” Stringer told the paper, referring to Sony’s strategy of competing on smartphones, PCs, televisions, and tablets.

Jobs, of course, died Wednesday, October 5, of pancreatic cancer. In August, Jobs resigned as Apple’s CEO and was replaced by his longtime Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook.

Last week, Sony projected a 90-billion yen, or $1.2 billion, loss for the fiscal year ending in March after the company reported a surprise loss of 27 billion yen for the quarter ending September 30. Sony had earlier promised a 60 billion-yen profit for the fiscal year ending in March…

As the friend who forwarded this noted, given the headline, one might expect to find the article in The Onion…  But in fact it is (and one can find it in full) at Forbes.

To put this into context, Stringer is certainly right that (as he goes on to confess in the interview cited above), he’s presided over some lean years. especially as compared to his bete noire.  Consider these results, compiled by Dan Frommer at SplatF:

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Indeed, as Business Insider (drawing on Frommer’s further analysis) points out, to the extent that Sony has refrained from completely cratering, it is for reasons that have little to do with what consumers understand Sony to be about– financial services– and the one-time sale of Spiderman merchandising rights:

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Still, Stringer, who joined Sony in 1997, has enjoyed the continued support of his board.  Earlier this year he had to cope with disasters both out-of-his-control (the Fukushima melt-down) and self-inflicted (the multiple breeches of lax online security at Sony’s video game site, which exposed personal data of hundreds of thousands of users)… this, as Motley Fool notes, on the heels of

• Sony’s laptop batteries exploded. A lot. (2006. With a reprise in 2008.)
• Sony repeatedly stood up gamers waiting for PlayStation 3. (2006)
• Sony got “flogged” when Netizens realized it had created a fake blog to push its PSP. (2006) (Incidentally, this kind of marketing fakery wasn’t new — Sony created a fake critic to talk up one of its 2001 films.)
• Music unit Sony BMG took antipiracy efforts so seriously it went anti-customer and sold discs designed to install rootkits (popularly considered spyware) on buyers’ computers. (2005)
• Sony got in hot water for payola — yeah, for real. (2005)

None of these transgressions rise to Olympus-like levels.  And Stringer has taken a 15% cut in comp (to $4.3 million per year, plus benefits), while asking other senior execs to shave 11% from their pay…  But the stock has lost over half it’s value in the last decade, standing near it’s all-time low.  And there’s no end in sight.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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The Economist‘s Free Exchange blog report’s on the Kauffman Foundation‘s most recent quarterly survey:

THE KAUFFMAN FOUNDATION conducts a quarterly survey of economics bloggers (you can see the third quarter results here). It tends to focus on current economic conditions and policy questions, but the fourth-quarter questionnaire contained something a little different: a challenge to capture the state of the economy in haiku. The results are sublime…

Indeed.  Consider the stylings of Reuters’ Felix Salmon:

No one has a job
Except econobloggers
And they’re not paid much

Or the musings of Professor Stephen Karlson:

Intermodal loadings increase
Trade conflict looms without cease
Occupy Wall Street

Or this, from Robert Cringely:

Econ guys, gentle souls
Think policies guide markets
Jail time is better

Or the only-too-culturally-appropriate contribution of Amol Agrawal:

When Japan fell in 1990s
They were lectured by the world economists
Time for Japanese to smile

… more at “The economy in haiku .”

As we think in seventeen syllables, we might recall that it was on this date in 1993 that the Maastricht Treaty came into effect, formally establishing the European Union (EU)… and laying the groundwork for the Eurozone– the European Monetary Union and the creation of the Euro– and thus for the painful pecuniary pageant that is playing out on the Continent today…

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Readers of this blog will know that I am one of those deeply concerned by the consolidation afoot in our economy (e.g., “Beware the Land of the Giants…“), more particularly, in the financial sector (e.g., “Happy 9-15!“)

From Hypervocal, a powerful reminder of just how extreme the dynamic has become, “From 37 to 4: the Consolidation of Banks“…

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In 1990 there were 37 major banks in America. By 1999 there were 21. Just 14 in 2003. Now, present day, there are just four. Four major banks for consumers to choose from — Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JP Morgan Chase — and we’d bet good money that number will be three soon…

As HV points out, the implosion began in the 90s with the erosion of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, legislation designed, after the bank failures of the Great Depression, to assure that there was no repeat of that debacle; it caught fire after the passage of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which finally and fully repealed Glass-Steagall– allowing financial institutions to operate as commercial banks, investment banks and insurance companies under one cross-collateralized roof, on the theory that the banks would be too big to fail.

Well, they’re big all right.  But as the events of 2008 demonstrated, they can fail… indeed, as we do our best to keep from disappearing into the sovereign debt sinkhole in Europe and try to find a road to recovery from the Great Recession, we have to hope that we haven’t created banks that are too big to save.

TechDirt asks “Is Your Senator Using The Distraction Of The Debt Ceiling To Support The Feds Secret Interpretation Of Spying Laws?“…

We were just reporting on how Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was tap dancing around some specific questions about how much warrantless spying on Americans US federal intelligence agencies do. Much of that discussion revolved around the controversial FISA Amendments Act (recursively called the FAA) of 2008, which you may recall as the law that both made warrantless wiretapping officially legal (despite the fact that the federal government had been doing it for years under a very questionable legal theory) and granted telecom companies retroactive immunity for having helped the feds get such wiretaps despite the lack of warrants (and, in some cases, nothing more than a post-it note asking for it).

The FAA is set to expire in 2012, but, as we’ve seen with any law that grants the federal government more power to spy on Americans without oversight, there is no way the folks in power want to give up such things. Now come reports that, while most of Congress is focused on that whole debt ceiling thing, some have decided this is the perfect cover to quickly and secretly re-up the FAA…

[Story continues here]

It’s pretty depressing to realize that– at the urging of an Administration elected in the hope of real change– the *Democratic* Senate is slipping through an extension of one of the most scurrilous pieces of legislation ever.

But in many ways it’s more noteworthy (and disheartening) that the opposition in the Senate isn’t trying to kill the Bill (presumably because it can’t); rather, it’s pushing an amendment that would simply require authorities to provide rationalization of their (now “not illegal”) violations of the Fourth Amendment.  The debate has been so thoroughly re-framed that the opposite of violating citizens’ rights isn’t not violating them, it’s occasionally stating for the record that the eavesdroppers felt they had reason to…

One appreciates that (compared to China, say) government surveillance/intrusion in the U.S. is still relatively low.  But one doesn’t embrace a diminution in standards and coverage at, say, the Washington Post or the LA Times on the grounds that it’s still better than the Lakeland Ledger (or the China Times).  Something real and valuable has been lost, something that’s likely to be hard to recover.

So it is, I fear, with these rights we abnegate.  Shame on the Administration and the Senate– but more shame on us for not saying no.

The Economist reports that participation in the U.S. Food Stamps program– designed to insure that poor Americans have enough to eat– had, by this past April,  reached almost 45 million, or one in seven Americans.

At the same time, Reuters reports that In 11 states, lotteries provided more revenue than the state corporate income tax in 2009… The Rhode Island lottery netted the state more than $3 for each dollar of state corporate income tax in fiscal 2009.

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As we strain to think of even more regressive ways to raise revenue, we might recall that it was on this date in 1932 that General Douglas MacArthur, on the order of President Herbert Hoover,  led two regiments and six tanks against the Bonus Marchers in Washington, D.C.  The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 marchers– 17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups– who gathered to demand cash-payment of the certificates they’d been issued by the government at the end of World War Two as a bonus for their service.  MacArthur’s cavalry charged the protestors’ camp, and his infantry entered with fixed bayonets and adamsite gas, an arsenical vomiting agent, evicting veterans, families, and camp followers.

The Bonus Army incident proved disastrous for Hoover’s chances at re-election; he lost the 1932 election in a landslide to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Shacks that members of the Bonus Army erected on the Anacostia Flats burning after the confrontation with the military (source)

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As political discourse in the U.S. has devolved into the nastiest kind of spitting match– dramatic thesis, passionate antithesis, no synthesis– antagonists on all sides of every issue invoke the Constitution, its Framers, and their intent… which, it seems, can be understood to justify just about any position.

So The Browser‘s recent “Five Books” interview with Jack Rakove on the U.S. Constitution couldn’t be more timely– nor more helpful.  As he explains his selection of the five books he’d most recommend to anyone wanting to understand the context for, the drafting of, the process of ratification of, and the ultimate role of “the oldest written constitution still in use,” the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Stanford historian sheds light in every direction, e.g., on the role of the Judiciary…

Most historians are very skeptical about the way that the Supreme Court is [interpreting the Constitution]. To reason accurately about the past is much trickier than one might think. The current version of originalism is what’s called “public meaning originalism.” It says we don’t really care about the history of how these provisions got adopted, we’re not going to try to reconstruct the debates to figure out what the framers wanted and what the ratifiers thought. We just want to get at the holistic meaning of the language. To historians this is a terribly flawed enterprise, but that’s the current regime… Language is dynamic. As the work of many historians, including my own work, attests, the 18th century was a period of political experimentation. The framers were rethinking the nature of representative government, they were rethinking the nature of executive power, they were coming up with new rules for judges. All this required a terrific amount of creative political thinking. The idea that language was fixed when all these ideas were being stretched and pressed in different directions, the idea that the meaning of a text is frozen at the moment of its adoption, it just strikes most historians as inane.

You’ve said that historians should call the bluff of people who twist the history of the Constitution for instrumental purposes. Please call someone’s bluff.
I submitted a brief in the District of Columbia vs Heller case, from three years ago. That was the case in which the Court struck down a 32-year-old handgun ban as incompatible with the Second Amendment. I think there are intellectual embarrassments of the first order in Justice Scalia’s opinion. He wholly ignores the history of how the Second Amendment got adopted. He makes things up that did not happen the way he hypothesizes. But I’m a historian and he’s a Justice. I’m a private citizen and he’s a public official. I think I have better footnotes, but he has a vote on the Supreme Court.

Read the entire fascinating interview (and order any/all of the books Rakove recommends) here.

As we muse that things could always be– indeed, once were– even worse, we might recall that it was at dawn on this date in 1804 that Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met on a rise in Weehawken (NJ) to resolve their differences with a duel.  The rivals fired essentially simultaneously;  Hamilton’s shot was wide, but Burr’s hit its mark.  Hamilton died the following day.  While there was a good bit of personal animus between the enemies, their feud was fueled by deep political divisions. It’s proximate cause: Republican Burr’s feeling maligned by Federalist Hamilton.  But the bloody encounter was just one symptom of the deep animosity loosed by the first emergence of the nation’s political party system.

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As our mores are manipulated, and our freedoms pre-empted, by the War on Terror (and the related wars on Drugs, Piracy, et al.), the temperature in the pot is rising.  Consider, e.g., Daniel J. Solove’s recent essay “Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (an excerpt from his new book, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, Yale University Press).

The nothing-to-hide argument focuses on just one or two particular kinds of privacy problems—the disclosure of personal information or surveillance—while ignoring the others. It assumes a particular view about what privacy entails, to the exclusion of other perspectives.

It is important to distinguish here between two ways of justifying a national-security program that demands access to personal information. The first way is not to recognize a problem. This is how the nothing-to-hide argument works—it denies even the existence of a problem. The second is to acknowledge the problems but contend that the benefits of the program outweigh the privacy sacrifice. The first justification influences the second, because the low value given to privacy is based upon a narrow view of the problem. And the key misunderstanding is that the nothing-to-hide argument views privacy in this troublingly particular, partial way.

As Solove goes on to demonstrate, there are lots of reasons to fear the disappearance of our privacy, from the erosion of basic freedoms to the encroachment of commercial manipulation. And there are other, less direct but equally insidious results of the cloud of anxiety and fear that is forming– for example, the counterproductive xenophobia that’s blocking immigration reform.

But for the purposes of this post, I want to flag the simplest of the issues one might raise, the one that goes plainly and simply to cost.

Homeland Security is a big enterprise:  In 2010 the Department of Homeland Security had over 200,000 employees and spent over $56 billion; that was larger than the budgets of the Commerce, Labor and Interior Departments, plus the EPA, combined.  And of course, that doesn’t begin to describe the expense fully:  the Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy all have significant Homeland Security responsibilities; the Defense Department has large “coordinated” expenses; corporations pay extra security and incur extra compliance costs, and states and municipalities are also on the hook.  All in, HSRC estimates, 2010 expense was close to $175 Billion.

And Homeland Security is a growth industry.  As the Economics Blog at Lawrence University observes (citing a George Washington University study, pdf here), in real terms (2005$), the Homeland Security budget has more than doubled since the 2000 “pre-9/11 base year,” accounting for more than 40% of U.S. regulatory spending and more than half the personnel as well.  By 2014, total Homeland Security expense is expected to top $200 Billion… over a quarter the (2010) size of Social Security or Defense spending; two-thirds the cost of Medicaid.

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But while these mammoth numbers raise all kinds of immediate questions, both about how they’re being spent and about what other programs they’re preempting, the deeper concern is their longer-term implications.

Not surprisingly, educators and guidance counselors have taken note of the Security trend.  By 2005, over 80% of the community colleges in the U.S. offered preparatory curricula for Homeland Security work, as do the for-profits (Phoenix, Capella, et al.)– and the course offerings continue to grow…  even as, overall, reduced funding means fewer classes available in more traditional areas that prepare students for careers in health care, business, education or whatever else.  Indeed, high schools are beginning to institutionalize Homeland Security prep (e.g., here).  In a domestic economic environment in which unemployment has rocketed and stayed stubbornly high, Homeland Security has become a rare bright spot, a promising path to a job, a job with a future…

There’s a cautionary tale told in the Southwest: the story of a rancher so concerned with protecting his cattle from rustlers that he invested more and more in fencing… until he’d so diverted his resources that his powerfully-protected herd starved to death.  We in the U.S. are beginning to look all too much like that imprudent rancher, burning more and more of our resources in the overhead of protection… at the risk of starving the very things that we mean to protect.

Original here; Part One here.