Let's analyze some of the news coming out from Philadelphia regarding its poorly performing tax that the city's leaders imposed upon naturally and artificially sweetened beverages distributed to be sold by retailers in the city.
The Current Challenge to the Soda Tax in Court
The City of Philadelphia is facing lawsuits from beverage manufacturers and distributors regarding the constitutionality of its Sweetened Beverage Tax (SBT), one of which has already reached the state of Pennsylvania's highest court. The plaintiff in the case, the American Beverage Association (ABA), has argued that the tax isn't legal under the state's constitution, which prohibits municipalities from applying local taxes on top of items that have already been taxed at the state level.
Two lower courts have ruled in favor of the City of Philadelphia already, finding that since the tax is assessed against beverage distributors rather than beverage consumers, the tax is not duplicative, which would be directly prohibited by Pennsylvania's state constitution.
The judicial findings in these two lower court decisions are largely based on the letter of the law, by which we mean that that they have not considered the real world issue of tax incidence, where the people and businesses who might be mandated by legal statutes to pay a tax are not necessarily the ones whose money is being collected by the government. Most often, they will pass as much of the cost of the tax as they can onto their customers through increasing the prices of the goods and services they might sell to them, so that in effect, their customers become the ones who are really paying the cost of the tax.
For the Philadelphia Beverage Tax (PBT), we've found examples where the city's beverage consumers are paying anywhere from two-thirds to nearly all of the the city's new soda tax, where much of the difference from one store to the next might really be attributable to the extent that the retailers or beverage manufacturers are willing to subsidize the cost of the tax to consumers through their advertising and marketing budgets to generate discounted sale prices.
Some retailers have made it clear on their receipts how much of the cost of the beverages they sell is being passed through to their customers (Image Credit: ZeroHedge). As we're about to see, the higher costs being passed on to them are, particularly for small retailers, having a negative effect on their businesses.
A Family-Owned Bakery Goes Under
In Philadelphia, the Orlando family has owned and operated a bakery since 1948 in the Overbrook neighborhood at the intersection of Lebanon Ave. and Kenmore Rd. Sunday, 6 August 2017 was its last day in business, and the last day of work for its five employees.
Over the years, it survived every economic challenge that came its way, but one.
"The soda tax was the kill shot," said Anthony Voci Jr., a grandson of Christopher Columbus "Chick" Orlando and now a lawyer in Philadelphia.
Chick Orlando started in the baking business with his father in the 1930s with a shop in West Philadelphia, and ran several shops in the city and Delaware County until he was killed by a drunken driver while making a delivery shortly before Christmas 1971. His sons David and Robert took over Orlando's.
The business' last owner, Tyler Orlando, 32, also a grandson, said business was off 60 percent since the soda tax went into effect Jan. 1 – a difficult situation for a low-margin business. Orlando said his customers simply crossed the nearby city line to avoid the higher prices for juices, milk and other sweetened drinks typically purchased with doughnuts and pastries. "I'd see my customers in there," he said. "I don't blame them."
The actions of consumers to avoid the burden imposed by the true tax incidence of Philadelphia's soda tax is not surprising. It is human nature to want to get the most for one's money, so we should expect that people will change their long-established shopping patterns to avoid having to pay an outlandish increase in prices, when they can easily buy exactly the same product just a little way down the road for a lot less.
Nor is it surprising that Philadelphia is experiencing the rise of an organized black market that is thriving on exploiting the differences in the prices for soft drinks in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs.
A Boom in Bootlegging
When we've talked about bootlegging in the past, it has typically been in the context of cigarette and other kinds of so-called "sin taxes" that are supposed to produce positive benefits by reducing consumption. But that only matters to the extent that consumption is actually reduced, where the business of bootlegging both allows the "undesired" consumption to remain higher than it might otherwise be while it also damages the expected tax collections that would be realized if the sin tax was achieving its desired results.
On 23 June 2017, Danny Grace, the Secretary-Treasurer of the Teamsters Local 830 union, testified before a Pennsylvania Senate committee on the direct negative impact of Philadelphia's soda tax on the members of the union, where he counts 155 lost jobs (10 more than we tallied back in May 2017). In doing so, he also shown a light on a negative externality being experienced by members of the union because of the increased profits for bootleggers whose profits are made possible because of the tax and their ability to avoid paying it, and also the impact to the city's poorest residents because of the soda tax' highly regressive nature (emphasis ours).
The definition of a regressive tax is one that disproportionately affects the very people who can least afford to pay it. The city's poor don't have the financial means to absorb a tax that has more than doubled the costs of their favorite sodas, juices, iced teas, sports drinks, flavored milks and countless other beverages. The tax has been applied to virtually every beverage sold in the city. The working poor also don’t have the ability to drive to the nearby suburbs or South Jersey to buy their beverages and avoid the outrageous tax, like many other city residents are doing. This situation – which the Teamsters predicted – has forced many low income Philadelphians to forego sweetened drinks altogether or purchase them through the many illegal black market operations that have sprung up across the city. We have seen evidence of people purchasing hundreds of cases of sweetened drinks in nearby suburban areas such as Upper Darby in Delaware County, loading them in unmarked vans, and driving them into Philadelphia to be sold out of nondescript warehouses or right out of the vans.
The Kenney administration's stated assumption that lost sweetened beverage sales would simply be filled in with increased sales of water and other non-sweetened drinks has been proven false. Consumers don't behave that way. Consumers can make the choice today to abandon sweetened beverages for water and other non-sweetened drinks, but they haven't done so nor will they.
As a direct result of the beverage tax, there has been a huge drop-off in sales of sweetened beverages in the city, just as we predicted. The damage the tax has already done to our union has been significant. As of this moment, 155 of our union brothers and sisters have been laid-off - 80 members at Pepsi, 40 at Coke and 35 at Canada Dry. And these are family-sustaining jobs we’re talking about.
The beverage tax has caused a disastrous domino effect within Teamsters Local 830. The tax has resulted in drastically fewer products being sold in the city, which means less trucks needed for deliveries, which means less Teamsters drivers needed. Fewer delivery trucks on the roads means less need for Teamsters' mechanics to maintain and repair the trucks. Less products being sold also means less need for Teamsters' production and warehouse personnel. And decreased sales of beverages means less need for Teamsters' merchandisers in corner convenience stores and supermarkets.
That's more practical insight into the nature of externalities than one may ever find in the lecture halls of today's universities. We will point out that when Grace refers to a "huge drop-off in sales of sweetened beverages in the city", he's referring to the sales of sweetened beverages to which Philadelphia's beverage tax has been applied, where bootlegging operations and the actions of Philadelphia's consumers to shift their purchases of these products outside of the city's limits to legally avoid having to pay for the highly taxed products are sustaining a far higher level of consumption within the city than the amount of taxed sales would suggest.
Additional Notes
- There are several acronyms that we've used in this post that apply to Philadelphia's soda tax, which are really all referring to the same thing, but which appear in different reports. These acronyms include PBT (Philadelphia Beverage Tax), SBT (Sweetened Beverage Tax, Sugary Beverage Tax).
- There's an as-yet little noticed legal argument that might severely dent the administration of Philadelphia's soda tax, which could effectively crash both its revenues and the city's plans for what it would do with that money if it proves to have any traction. We'll explore that idea sometime next week, but will be drawing on the information presented here!
Previously on Political Calculations
Presented in chronological order....
- Examples of Junk Science: Taxing Treats
- Philadelphia Soda Tax Crushes Soft Drink Sales
- Philadelphia's Soda Tax Collections Are Falling Short
- Philly's Soda Tax Collections Continue to Fall Short of Goals
- Jobs Gained and Lost from Philadelphia's Soda Tax
- Philadelphia Soda Sales Volume Down 34% Since Tax
- Philadelphia's Soda Tax to Shrink City's Economy by $20 million (updates an earlier analysis in the series based on new information)
- Big Miss for Philadelphia's Beverage Tax
Labels: food, random thoughts, taxes
Today, is the first day of the U.S. federal government's fiscal year, which begins with a little under one-fifth of all of the U.S. federal government's 4.4 million employees being told to not report to work today as part of the government's "shutdown". By any chance, did you notice the sheer amount of money they spent last week? Way more than any other week in the rest of the entire fiscal year! And since what they spent last week would have been enough to keep the entire Department of Veterans Affairs running for an entire year, including its emergency acquisitions of artwork, we think they can probably afford to go a few weeks without spending anything more.
But then, if Washington D.C.'s bureaucrats really cared about the interests of the American people, they might have used a good portion of that money to pay down the national debt enough so they could instead keep the government running without hitting the national debt ceiling later this month. Somehow, we don't think that idea even occurred to them.
Today is also the first day that the Obamacare health insurance "marketplaces" are supposed to be open for business. If you want to get a sense of how much health insurance for an individual will cost in 2014, as compared to what it costs today, check out the four maps below. The two on the left are for 27-year olds, the two on the right are for 40-year olds. Individuals living in states shown in shades of red will be paying more than today and the more red the state, the more money you'll be forced to bleed to pay for your health insurance coverage.
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Now that you've seen the maps and have a good general idea of what you can expect pay for health insurance your state in 2014 compared to what you may have been paying today, find out now if it makes more sense for you to not buy health insurance through the Obamacare exchanges and pay the "penalty" tax instead. (Don't let the word "penalty" throw you - you may decide it's the right way to go for you, especially if you're young and healthy, and especially after you see just how small in comparison it may be with respect to your actual out-of-pocket costs for health insurance in the new age of Obamacare!)
You might think that in the run up to the launch of the Obamacare state exchanges, the bureaucrats of the Department of Health and Human Services would be tightly focused on doing whatever it took to make sure their opening and operation went off without a hitch, fully meeting all promises made by President Obama and the Democratic Party members of the U.S. Congress over three years ago. You would be wrong.
Instead, they would appear to care more about how household net worth is distributed within the U.S., at least if the following one-day sample of visits to our site that we snipped during the last two weeks is any indication (this is the same period of time in which we were rolling out our tools and commentary related to some of the more perverse incentives of Obamacare, which didn't seem to interest them as much).
For fun, why don't you return the favor and see how your income ranks within the distribution of income earned by federal government bureaucrats (we're afraid that we don't have the data to find out the distribution of federal employee net worth!) Although the data for our tool of comparison is for 2011, the results will still very closely line up with today's data, even if you don't account for the effect of inflation (but it would be better if you do by converting your income today to be in terms of 2011 U.S. dollars first!)
On a final note, is anybody else amused that neither Ezra Klein, nor his like-minded team of pro-Obama administration sycophants at the Washington Post's Wonkblog, could muster up the energy to do any real analysis of the information they directly solicited from Trader Joe's, leaving it wide open for us to do it instead? You would expect that kind of absence of critical thinking from the similarly-biased writers and editors at Time magazine, but the Wonkbloggers actually put some effort into getting a statement from Trader Joe's, so their not doing any serious analysis of Trader Joe's claims really stands out.
Perhaps that's just us expecting something from them that's simply beyond their cognitive capabilties. Or their journ-o-listic integrity....
Labels: random thoughts
We think we finally have enough non-outlier event data to map out the current trend for new jobless claims in the U.S. through the week ending 5 January 2013:
The last time the U.S. had a flat trend for new jobless claims was right before the onset of the so-called "Great Recession" at the end of 2007. The only problem is that it's gone flat at a level some 48,000 layoffs per week higher than was typical during the low-unemployment years of the Bush administration.
As for what brought on the new trend, we believe it was falling gasoline prices in the U.S. beginning in early September 2012, where prices plummetted after spiking at the end of summer in most states other than California, whose refinery problems with their boutique blends caused gas prices there to continue skyrocketing into October 2012.
We have a crazy idea. You know how some people make their own candles at home? What if we put together some kits with the components and equipment needed for people to make their own incandescent light bulbs, similar to the kinds whose manufacture is currently in the process of being progressively phased out, and tapped into the market being defined by those people who are hoarding 100-watt light bulbs? Shark Tank, here we come!
It seems that after eight years of blogging anonymously, we may finally have been outted, complete with a very handsome photo. Or perhaps it's all a horrible error and our Seeking Alpha profile still offers the only real glimpse of our true nature. Either way, it explains a lot!
Labels: random thoughts
How do we know that the Fed pays attention to the things we write? Previously, commenting on the apparent lack of effect that the Fed's latest round of quantitative easing has had on stock prices, we observed:
- The Fed is doing it wrong. In the two previous rounds of QE, the Fed purchased large quantities of U.S. Treasuries. So far in this round, the Fed is only purchasing Mortgage Backed Securities. The stock market just doesn't get the same bang for the buck as when the Fed buys up Treasuries, which acts to reduce long-term interest rates across a wider swath of the economy, which is really what helped boost stock prices in earlier rounds.
- QE, as an effective policy, is running out of gas. The interest rates that the Fed might hope to lower in its QE programs started off at a much lower level, and a lot closer to their minimum zero level, than in its previous incarnations. With less room to maneuver, the Fed's actions just don't have the same oomph they once did.
And now, the Fed has announced that they've gotten the message and are going to start "doing it right" and also buy Treasury securities, which will give this latest generation of QE more "oomph". Interestingly, they've also announced the economic targets that must be satisfied before they will discontinue the plan. All together, that suggests to us that they're thinking the future for the economy in much of 2013 will be somewhat worse than other official sources are letting on....
It looks like that as far as the pace of layoffs in the U.S. is concerned, the impact of Hurricane Sandy lasted for just three weeks.
Assuming that the volatility we've previously noted dies down, we should have enough data to begin projecting the new trend in initial unemployment benefit claim filings within a few weeks.
Suppose we converted a house to run entirely off the grid on green, renewable energy sources like solar or wind, so that we would never again have to pay an electric bill or generate any carbon emissions for the power it consumes, as President Obama would seem to desire all Americans do. What possible environmental harm would we cause by lighting it with the soon-to-be-banned 100-watt incandescent bulbs, which we might note are far more friendly for the environment and are much less costly than their CFL replacements? And if the answer is "none", why must we have the government progressively ban all incandescent light bulbs from production?
On a development note, we can't help but notice that if we combined the site traffic our tools for determining individual, family and household income distribution percentile rankings, they would collectively represent the most popular tool ever on Political Calculations. So guess what will be coming soon!...
And speaking of coming soon, here's our Christmas countdown clock!
Labels: random thoughts
Phil Miller is happy that Mizzou ranks low in a new poll based on the likelihood of the school's athletic programs being sanctioned for NCAA rule violations, which is based on odds set by online gambling site BetUS.com. We wonder if the NCAA itself is behind the poll, given that it would provide an financial incentive for members of a cheating athletic department to bet that their schools would get caught cheating, which they could then ensure happens. Phil thinks they'll just continue pursuing the traditional approach of jumping ship to another ethically-challenged athletic program before their old school officially gets caught....
Having run the numbers, there's nothing really out there to either drive U.S. stock prices significantly higher or lower during the month of July. Without investors shifting their forward-looking focus past the end of the year (where it's at now), and absent any significant changes to the level of what companies are planning to pay out in dividends at that time, we would expect that the S&P 500 in July 2009 will mainly fall in the same average range between 925 and 945 as it did in June.
One of the main arguments made supporting "Obamacare" is that too much money is wasted trying to keep people alive longer in the last six months of their lives. The same people also point to, in our view, poorly constructed statistical studies that would seem to indicate that people live longer in countries that spend less on health care than the U.S. (In reality, people in the United States have the highest natural life expectancy of all countries.) We wonder though: if the U.S government starts "rationalizing" health spending at the expense of these life-extending efforts, what might we reasonably expect to happen to the U.S.' ranking within those poorly constructed international life expectancy comparisons? And tell us again why that's a good idea?
Of all the recent deaths of well-known people, Billy Mays' passing is the one that will truly affect the greatest number of people. He was the very rare man who could see the American dream happening all around him, who came into his own success because he discovered his place within it, and who could really appreciate it all. The future will be different because he's no longer with us.
Labels: random thoughts
Did anyone else notice an odd convergence last week? Namely, that both Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen and Env-Econ's Tim Haab were both in Arizona. At the same time. Yet no-one has ever seen them together. Hmmm..... Could "Tim Haab" just be another one of Tyler's multiple personalities? One that he uses to exploit his extraordinarily high levels of productivity by collecting an extra paycheck and superior student surveys from OSU? Perhaps someone could check Tyler's digital camera to see if he has recently photographed a restroom door at the Grand Canyon to see if they really are, in fact, the same person....
We've been turning this next puzzle over in our heads for a while. Mike Moffatt has enlisted Ian Ayres' stickK.com to incent himself to lose weight (details here). Now, by publicly stating his goals and by attaching a substantial monetary penalty to failing to achieve them, Mike has created a powerful incentive to do what it takes to reach his goals. The puzzle is: "how can we erase the effects of this incentive?" or rather, "how can we incent Mike to fail instead?"
These are tricky questions to answer, and not being game theorists, we were out of our element. So, we went to the Secret Economists Club for assistance. That turned out to be a mistake - first, the Secret Economists Club is made up of economists who are using their knowledge to become filthy rich and take over the world. So they had no time for us. Plus, all they would talk about is TANFs and TSLFs like they know what they mean. Oh, and did we mention that they're a really boring group on top of that too?
So we ended up at the Secret Economists Other Club. This is a much more interesting group of people. Unlike the stuffy Secret Economists Club, where Robert's Rules of Order apply, this group operates under Hayek's Rules of Spontaneously Emerging Order, which are pretty similar to the rules of Fight Club.
As it happens, an ad-hoc group had already been formed to tackle the problem, calling themselves the Anti Mike Moffatt Organization, or AMMO for short. They had picked up on an idea by Aaron Schiff that the way to break the stickK.com incentive was to provide a counter-incentive in the form of insurance that would cover the cost of Mike failing to achieve one of his stated goals.
Now here's where it gets interesting. The way to incent Mike to fail is to get people to bet that he will successful. Here's how this would work - since Mike has such an apparently strong motivation to achieve his goals, betting on his success in a prediction market would seem to be an easy way for a lot of people to win a little bit of easy money, albeit at pretty low odds.
But, Mike has asymmetric knowledge - he knows more about his status than do the people who would bet on his success in the prediction market. He can determine, at any time, either how close or how far he is from achieving one of his benchmark goals. If the odds revealed by the prediction market distinctly favor his achieving a benchmark goal, he could stand to collect a substantial amount by betting against himself using his superior knowledge, and potentially win enough to fully cover his stickK.com commitment and any other costs he might need to cover, as well as maybe picking up a little extra cash as profit.
So the question now is: which one of these potential beneficiaries of Mike's failure to achieve his stated goals will be the first to set up the prediction market?
Labels: none really, random thoughts
All hail President Mankiw!
Just because it's classy and classic at the same time, and because Russ Roberts believes it should be shared widely, here's Milton Friedman vs Naomi Klein:
When Senator John Kerry recently endorsed Senator Barack Obama's presidential bid, our very first thought was that he was delivering his patented "Kiss of Death." Turns out that we weren't alone - here's a sampling of the reaction from various quarters of the web:
- Captain's Quarters
- One comment at the Huffington Post
- Two comments at ABC News' Political Radar blog.
- No fewer than seven comments at Chris Cillizza's Washington Post blog The Fix
- Riehl World View
- Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever
- An amazing 24 comments at the New York Times' The Caucus blog
That's what we call a wide spectrum of public agreement... Our advice: You politicians should stay away from other politicians. Nothing good can come from your continuing to associate with these people. Stop now before somebody gets hurt.
Did you ever wonder how Shakespeare would insult you? And you know he would.... (HT: Let's Play Math)
It's old news at this point, but we couldn't resist the headline: Playboy Centerfold Busted
New Trunk Monkey!
Labels: random thoughts
We were surprised to find out this morning that our S&P 500 At Your Fingertips tool is now included among the stock data resources maintained by London-based JF Holdings in their Equity Warehouse. You'll find us at the bottom, just below the links to the various text files incorporating annual UK stock market data going back as far as 1800.
Meanwhile, Jay Solo recently said the following about a recent post:
Political Calculations intrigued me with a post I expected to be boring: The Sun, in the Center. It's about a method of measuring appropriate stock values without relying on the traditional earnings per share. The correlation over time, using dividends as a leading indicator, is remarkable.
The part about expecting to be bored and turning out to be intrigued sounds about par for the course for our readers. If nothing else, it suggests to us that it may be time for a new motto to replace "Interactive Tools for Interactive Politics": "Unexpectedly Intriguing!"
Hey, it beats "Mostly Harmless," and is light-years ahead of "The Boring Made Dull, " and then some lawyer snapped up InstaPundit, so what else can we do?...
Labels: random thoughts
The Modern Media Motto?
Sometimes you have to lie to tell the "truth."
Honestly
Why can't political candidates named Clinton raise money honestly?
From the "More Than We Wanted to Know" Department
A close up view of the PowerRecycling Bin.....
Economic Freedom Top 10
The Economic Freedom of the World: 2007 Annual Report is out! Here's a quick look at this year's top ten and their index score (in parentheses):
1. Hong Kong (8.9)
2. Singapore (8.8)
3. New Zealand (8.5)
4. Switzerland (8.3)
5. United States (8.1)
5. United Kingdom (8.1)
5. Canada (8.1)
8. Estonia (8.0)
9. Ireland (7.9)
9. Australia (7.9)
And here are the basement dwellers:
131. Chad (5.1)
131. Niger (5.1)
131. Togo (5.1)
134. Burundi (5.0)
135. Venezuela (4.9) - Same as previous year, dropping from 5.5 in 2000.
136. Central African Republic (4.6)
137. Republic of the Congo (4.3)
138. Angola (4.2)
139. Democratic Republic of the Congo (4.0)
140. Myanmar (3.8)
141. Zimbabwe (2.9) - Dropping from 3.4 last year and from a high of 5.4 in 1995.
Under the Traffic Radar
Political Calculations' stealth strategy is a success as we continue to pass unnoticed. Soon, WORLD DOMINATION!
Labels: random thoughts
Peter Gordon recently said this about us:
Newmark's Door points us to this very cool blog. Talk about public goods!
We won't dispute the "very cool blog" part, but is Political Calculations really a public good? And if so, where are the buckets of tax money that we ought to be getting from the government for providing you with our particular brand of public good?
On second thought, just have someone tell Congressman Jack Murtha (D-PA) that we're based somewhere in his district and we'll make it up through earmarks....
Speaking of Peter Gordon, he proposed that instead of building Los Angeles' "Subway to the Sea," that the money that would be used to build it might better be spent by giving low-income riders a "lifetime pension of $5,000 per year," which King Banaian argues would provide the riders with the option of buying a used car or paying for other bills (or a new car too - let's not rule that out if that's their choice!)
The problem with this proposal is that the money from the government will instead likely result in driving up the cost of all cars and whatever else the low-income individuals might spend the money upon, spurring higher inflation in the economy. Much like how increasing financial aid for students almost invariably results in even higher tuitions at the nation's colleges and universities.
Could there be a way to achieve the goals of light rail (less gas consumption, cleaner air, less road congestion), the taxpayer (less wasteful government spending), and low-income earners without sparking higher inflation?
We see a way to achieve a lot of different goals here using the money that might otherwise be used to build light rail systems. All hinging upon when the low-income recipients of money redirected away from light rail projects might choose to retire.
Compared to their high-income counterparts, those with low incomes will work much longer before becoming able to retire from the workforce. So, if you directed the money from light rail to instead go into Individual Retirement Accounts owned by the low-income recipients (our former light-rail riders), you would accelerate the build-up of their retirement savings to the point where they can choose to retire from work (and their daily commute) much sooner than they otherwise could have.
As an added bonus, since their annual incomes would not be inflated by the funds from light rail, the prices of the things they buy won't be driven up by the inflationary forces unleashed whenever the government floods the economy with money.
Getting out of the rat race dramatically reduces the amount of gas an individual uses, not to mention removing them from the road at the times when most people are trying to use them. So, with our proposal, we have, in one stroke, increased individual savings, made it possible for low-income people to retire earlier, kept inflation under control and reduced the amount of gas used in the future while simultaneously removing congestion from our roads and carbon emissions from the planet.
Then again, instead of obsessing over how to get a pretty low percentage of people to be able to afford earlier retirement by giving them other people's money and controlling what they do with it, we could just reduce taxes across the board and achieve all these things by making it possible for all income-earners to be able to afford to retire just a little bit earlier.
Holy cow! Political Calculations is a public good! Send those tax dollars to....
Labels: random thoughts
What wisdom can we learn from the past titans of industry? Better yet, what could we learn from the not-so-great among the CEOs of the past? To find out, we've drawn a random sampling of almost-great business knowledge from Simpson's quotations*. Why you ask? We don't know - it just seemed like a good idea at the time.
Market research can establish beyond the shadow of a doubt that the egg is a sad and sorry product and that it obviously will not continue to sell. Because after all, eggs won’t stand up by themselves, they roll too easily, are too easily broken, require special packaging, look alike, are difficult to open, won’t stack on the shelf.
- Robert Pliskin
Vice President, Benton & Bowles
In fact, the only good thing about eggs is that the producers work for chicken feed....
It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have.
- B. Earl Puckett
President, Allied Stores
Because, as men already know, they're not unhappy enough with what they have already.
We hope this car will be less labor intensive, less material intensive, less everything intensive than anything we have done before.
- Roger B. Smith
Chairman, General Motors, on GM's new Saturn in 1985
As it happened, GM's Saturn proved to also be less sales intensive and less profit intensive than just about anything GM did before, so it appears to have wildly surpassed Roger Smith's grandest ambitions....
Smell that! That’s gasoline you smell in there. You can’t buy any perfume in the world that smells as sweet.
- William K. Whiteford
Chairman, Gulf Corporation
And at today's price of roughly $3.00 per U.S. gallon, it's a bargain compared to other perfumes! Let's get Earl Puckett working on this one right away!
People want economy and they will pay any price to get it.
- Lee Iacocca
Ford VP and future CEO of Chrysler, in 1974
Now, if only they could buy it from a U.S. automaker....
* That's James B. Simpson's Contemporary Quotations. Homer J. Simpson's contemporary quotations are quite, quite different....
Labels: random thoughts
We weren't going to offer our random musings today, but since we just confirmed that we'll be hosting the March 26, 2007 edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists, we thought we'd take the opportunity to point to the official submission form for the CotC! If you're a blogger with on-topic insight into the worlds of business, careers, economics, entrepreneurship, investing, management, or other closely related matters, we look forward to your contribution.
In light of our recent experiment, in which we determined that there is still some benefit to posting to some blog carnivals (although not as great as in the past), we're looking forward to seeing how our blog traffic might change from officially hosting a carnival. Is it still worth the effort to host a carnival? We'll show you!
In the meantime, this week's edition is up at Dispatches from Blogblivion!
And now, on to the randomness of it all....
How long will it take Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, well known enthusiast of futuristic technology *and* the second amendment, to notice this fun convergence....
Maybe it's 1984 all over again!
Speaking of technology, we've had more than our fair share of fun lately with Google's Patent Search. Some of our favorites include Patent #1,183,492, which provides the figure featured in the upper right corner at the top of this post, Patent #325,316 (aka, "the beer faucet") and if you've never noticed how the lids to every coffee travel mug ever produced have unique patent numbers stamped on them, see them all!
Labels: carnival, random thoughts
China. Subprime lenders. Trade deficits. Low orders for durable goods. Oil prices. All have been suggested as reasons why the stock market dropped so sharply on Tuesday, February 27, 2007. Feh. If you really want to point a finger at the culprit personally responsible for shaving so many billions off the value of assets held in equities in just one day, point it here....
Hey look! Gasoline rationing is coming to oil-rich Iran! Sure they call it a rationing system, complete with coupons allowing the purchase of a certain amount of gasoline at a specified "market" price with additional amounts able to be purchased at a much higher level than the defined "market" price, but isn't this proposed rationing method, given the reasons behind it, really just a kind of progressive Pigovian tax? Does this mean that Ahmadinejad has joined the Pigou Club?
And because we mentioned Iran, for the sake of historical balance, we must now consider Greece....
Being fans of the ancient history surrounding the early survival of Western Civilization against outside forces, the more we hear about it, the more we want to see 300. It's now only a matter of choosing between a regular movie screen and IMAX.
On a related note, why is it that writers with experience in writing for comics seem to produce much higher quality work and more compelling stories for the movies and television than their peers with resumes exclusively dominated by screenwriting credits? Frank Miller, Joe Straczynski, Neil Gaiman, Joss Whedon and Alan Moore, to name just a handful off the top of our head, are among those whose work on the big and small screen stands out from the pack - so much so that we'll seek out their next projects in the theaters more than we care about who's directing or starring in their scripts or scripts based on their work in the comics (although to be honest, the names involved are very interesting!) Just a thought, Hollywood: More, please.
Why do we have this nagging feeling that Hollywood's response to our request might be cribbed from Dickens?
Question of the Day: How comfortable would you be with the idea of having members of the Teamsters Union, or for that matter, any politically-active labor union, "duplicate" 1 out of every 7 ballots in your county's elections? Better Question of the Day: If that prospect doesn't bother you, what does that say about your honesty and integrity as a citizen in a representative democracy?
Labels: random thoughts
It's official - Political Calculations has become surprisingly popular in Iran! And of all the tools we've created, we would never have guessed that our tool asking the question "What are the chances your marriage will last?" would be the first to stimulate commentary in Farsi!
We always knew it was unlikely that there were two people going by the name "Craig Newmark" (see here), but now we know that one of the two might prefer the name "David M. Newmark," despite all protests to the contrary!
"Fatherland, socialism or death" declared Venezuela's Hugo Chávez when being sworn into office. At least we don't have to wonder about what kind of 21st-century socialist he may be. He's clearly the national socialist kind. We wonder only if Cuba will prove to be the new Austria....
Calling Greg Mankiw: A New York state senator calls for a new law that would impose a $100 fine on people who cross a street while listening to their iPods or talking on their cell phones, citing the danger to personal safety of being distracted by modern electronic devices. We anxiously await the good professor's call for a Pigovian tax on personal electronic products to "correct" these negative externalities.
Late breaking: A balanced federal budget sooner?
Labels: random thoughts
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
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Closing values for previous trading day.
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