The idiocy of New York's new gun law

I'll keep this one quick, because it's essentially an update to a couple of recent posts. As could have been expected, some states are already moving toward stricter gun control laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook incident last month. The first state to enact a policy response is nearby New York, as CNBC notes.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislative leaders tentatively agreed on Monday on a broad package of changes to gun laws that would expand the state's ban on assault weapons and would include new measures to keep guns away from the mentally ill. 

Approval of the legislation would make New York the first state to act in response to the mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., last month. Monday was the first full day of this year's legislative session in Albany; the State Assembly opened its session with a moment of silence for those killed in Newtown, and lawmakers from both parties said they expected to vote on the gun package late Monday or early Tuesday. 

"We don't need another tragedy to point out the problems in the system," Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said at a news conference just before 9 p.m., during which he detailed elements of the proposed legislation. "Enough people have lost their lives," he added. "Let's act."

That's basically okay so far, I don't have any major gripes with those first paragraphs, even if it does reek a bit of the "DO SOMETHING" dynamic that I loathe so much. Let's keep going.

In an acknowledgment that many people have suggested that part of the solution to gun violence is a better government response to mental illness, the legislation includes not only new restrictions on gun ownership, but also efforts to limit access to guns by the mentally ill.

The most significant new proposal would require mental health professionals to report to local mental health officials when they believe that a patient is likely to harm themselves or others. Law enforcement would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by the patient. 

"People who have mental health issues should not have guns," Mr. Cuomo said. "They could hurt themselves, they could hurt other people." 

But such a requirement "represents a major change in the presumption of confidentiality that has been inherent in mental health treatment," said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, the director of the Division of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, who said the Legislature should hold hearings on possible consequences of the proposal. 

"The prospect of being reported to the local authorities, even if they do not have weapons, may be enough to discourage patients with suicidal or homicidal thoughts from seeking treatment or from being honest about their impulses," he said.

Okay, now we've got problems. "Addressing mental health issues" in our society does not mean "treating those with mental health issues like convicted felons and second-class citizens". The proposal, as stated, would strongly discourage those who are struggling with mental illness from ever disclosing their problems, lest they be forced to give up their rights as Americans as a result. That would make the societal issues we now face much worse, not better.

The goal of these policies should be to minimize the number of mentally ill people in the country, and to pro-actively treat the symptoms of those who become viciously disillusioned or inclined toward violence, not to further isolate those people and make them even more bitter and pissed off at society. This is not a step in the right direction; on the contrary, it's a huge step backward for New York and the country as a whole.

Unfortunately, this type of response is exactly what I warned about in my previous missives on gun control, only worse. Instead of ignoring mental health issues (as I had feared), New York politicians are seemingly trying to actively antagonize the very people they should be seeking to help. That's a dereliction of duty of the highest order, and a complete failure by those politicians to protect the rights and well-being of all citizens equally.

I see no reason to be diplomatic or civil when policy proposals that are so boldly idiotic are put forth. Citizens and politicians of New York, what in the fuck are you thinking?

[CNBC]

The credentialization of America

Last week, I wrote a post about government policies gone bad in Chicago, and how those policies are getting in the way of innovation and economic growth. I wrote:

The fact of the matter is that most politicians don't have a clue about what it actually takes to promote economic growth, even while they recognize that it's the absolute only way out of our current budgetary morass, given those same politicians' utter unwillingness to do anything meaningful to address it. 

As I've written here before, if we really want sustainable economic growth, then we need to be incentivizing innovation and entrepreneurship, not stifling it with overly onerous regulations that turn a simple task like starting a food truck business into a Sisyphean struggle. But, of course, we seem to be consistently doing the opposite, just about everywhere we look. 

We pass regulations on top of regulations from coast to coast, and we issue overly broad patents that protect the large companies at the expense of the small and innovative start-ups. We pass bizarre "taxpayer relief" bills without reading them, rubber-stamping a plethora of corporate kickbacks and subsidies in the process when nobody's looking. And we require that ever more trivial jobs require credentials and continuing education, increasing the cost of pursuing just about any career path we may choose (I'll have more on that topic next week).

Well, here it is, next week, and I am a man of my word. I happen to follow the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Twitter, largely because it's amusing to do so. Last week, they posted a status talking all about certificates, and how they were the "fast track" to careers. They linked to this strange little marketing pamphlet, which talks all about how awesome these certificates are. In it, they wrote:

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has identified 33 occupations as typically requiring a certificate or other postsecondary nondegree award for people entering those occupations. In 2010–11, according to NCES, the most popular disciplines for certificate programs were healthcare, personal and culinary services, and mechanic and repair technologies and technicians. But people also earned certificates in a wide range of other occupational areas, such as computer and information sciences and protective services.

This includes jobs like hairdressers, nannies, fitness trainers, all the way down to computer programmers and web administrators. Strangely enough, most accountants, preschool teachers, and paralegals reported that they didn't need any special sort of certificate, which is honestly a little bit bizarre.

Now, in many of these cases, the tendency toward requiring certificates provides a very valuable protection for consumers—they can be assured that they're getting at least a minimum level of competence from the people they hire, and that's usually a good thing. But as these credentials and certificates creep their way down into even the most "unskilled" of occupations, I have to wonder what the point of it all is.

Is all of this just making it harder for everyone to meet basic job requirements? And is that a good thing for the economy at large? Or are these requirements just destined to get in the way of economic growth, like the licensing requirements for food trucks in Chicago in my earlier post? I'm all for safeguarding certain professions and making sure that the people who are in high-risk or high-impact positions don't blow up the world, but I think we've gotten way beyond that now.

I've been through a few of these types of training courses on my own over the years (TIPS training was a personal favorite), and I can tell you first-hand: they're not all exactly academically rigorous. Generally speaking, I'm not any more or less likely to do the right thing as a bartender or a financial advisor or a manicurist or whatever else just because I forked over a few hundred bucks and took a couple of classes with some common-sense tests attached to the back of them. Ultimately, there's a big difference between knowing the right thing to do, and then actually doing the right thing. Shocking, I know.

As consumers, we can't be so willing to outsource our due diligence to these certificate-granting institutions, whichever they may be. Many times, we in fact allow ourselves to become more vulnerable as a result, because it's incredibly easy for a scam artist to get himself a license or certificate and then hide behind his "credentials". And in the process, we may actually have made it more difficult for an honest and hard-working man to get that same job. That's bad.

Maybe none of this matters, and I'm just howling at the moon a bit, but I don't think this world needs any more licenses and certificates and credentials than it already has. What it does need is more common sense, more personal accountability, and more innovation and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, again, we seem to be headed in the wrong direction.

[Bureau of Labor Statistics]

On government policies gone bad

In a post earlier today, I talked about unintended consequences and provided a link to this post from last year, in which I discussed the ramifications of "when regulatory bodies go wild". Unfortunately, John Cochrane (the self-dubbed "Grumpy Economist") shared a few similar examples from his own backyard of Chicago, showing that this regulatory madness is spreading, not abating. He writes,

If you travel from California or New York to Chicago, especially the beautiful but food-deserted campus of the University of Chicago, you will notice a striking absence: food trucks, which serve a bewlidering variety of tasty treats in other cities. 

Finally, last summer, our City council passed an ordinance allowing food trucks to cook food, along with a bewildering variety of restaurant-protecting restrictions, such as that they may not operate within 200 feet of a restaurant, they can't park for more than two hours, they must carry an on board GPS to verify position, and so on.   

Today, the Chicago Tribune reports on the success of this program:   

Of the 109 entrepreneurs who have applied for the Mobile Food Preparer licenses that allow onboard cooking, none has met the city's requirements... 

The process of getting a license is just too daunting, according to Rodriguez and Fuentes, who cite bad experiences with city bureaucracy, steep additional costs and the need to retrofit equipment among the reasons. 

"I think many food truck owners are hesitant to even pursue cooking onboard because of their haunting experience with working with the city," Rodriguez wrote in an email.  

(Kudos to Rodriguez for having the courage to write on the record, and good luck with her next application.)

....Chicago's code includes rules on ventilation and gas line equipment that "are meetable but extremely cumbersome and can raise the price of outfitting a truck by $10,000 to $20,000."...

...the additional ventilation equipment (with intake and exhaust fans similar to those in brick-and-mortar kitchens) also raises the height of trucks to 13 feet, making certain Chicago underpasses impassable. 

Aaron Crumbaugh, who operates the Wagyu Wagon ... said he is outfitting several trucks for franchisees in other cities whose processes for licensing are clear-cut.  "But here they don't know exactly what they want," he said. "Every time a truck comes in (health officials) say 'You need this' but then when you come back they say 'No you need that' and then the next time they find something else."

The Tribune did a much more balanced job of including quotes from city employees defending themselves. I'm a blog so I don't have to be balanced. The numbers speak for themselves. Zero. 

Yeah. Cochrane also shares a story from the Hyde Park Herald that discusses the ridiculous red tape that is currently preventing a South Side movie theater from opening on time. As Cochrane concludes, "Chicago, like the US, is broke. It says it wants more businesses. Until actual businesses try to open. Really, if we can't get food trucks and movie theater regulations to work, how do Dodd Frank and the EPA have a hope?"

Well said, John. The fact of the matter is that most politicians don't have a clue about what it actually takes to promote economic growth, even while they recognize that it's the absolute only way out of our current budgetary morass, given those same politicians' utter unwillingness to do anything meaningful to address it.

As I've written here before, if we really want sustainable economic growth, then we need to be incentivizing innovation and entrepreneurship, not stifling it with overly onerous regulations that turn a simple task like starting a food truck business into a Sisyphean struggle. But, of course, we seem to be consistently doing the opposite, just about everywhere we look.

We pass regulations on top of regulations from coast to coast, and we issue overly broad patents that protect the large companies at the expense of the small and innovative start-ups. We pass bizarre "taxpayer relief" bills without reading them, rubber-stamping a plethora of corporate kickbacks and subsidies in the process when nobody's looking. And we require that ever more trivial jobs require credentials and continuing education, increasing the cost of pursuing just about any career path we may choose (I'll have more on that topic next week).

Absolutely none of these government policies does anything but slow economic growth and the pace of innovation, and they must all therefore be considered counter-productive with respect to American prosperity. As Mr. Cochrane so eloquently wrote, if we can't get a food truck to start up in Chicago without violating some arcane city code, how can anybody ever do anything of any value in this country without breaking the law? I wonder.

[Grumpy Economist]

The NCAA and unintended consequences

Earlier today, my attention was drawn to a tweet from John Infante, a former NCAA compliance officer who writes the Bylaw Blog for Athnet. I've written a fair amount about the NCAA and its relationship with "student-athletes" before, so I thought this latest tidbit was worth sharing. In an article teased in his own tweet, Infante writes:

In the wake of last summer’s highly publicized transfer battles (Ed. Note: like these), the news that the NCAA was looking at changing the transfer rules was refreshing. What appeared to be an inconsistent standard for waivers along with student-athletes needed permission to contact other schools lead to a popular backlash against the NCAA’s transfer regulations, a sentiment that was echoed by NCAA President Mark Emmert... 

There is no formal proposal yet, but the Leadership Council published a set of principles for updated transfer rules that make it easy to see what those specific rules might be.

One of those principles is the topic of this post (and of Infante's tweet), the principle regarding a GPA contingency:

AM RT: NCAA considering transfer model that would allow all athletes with a 2.6 GPA to play immediately: athleticscholarships.net/2013/01/03/new…
— John Infante (@John_Infante) January 4, 2013

In general, I think this principle is a clear step in the right direction, as it restores some rights to student-athletes who, through no fault of their own, are left in a situation that is dramatically different from the one they entered (like a coach leaving for the NFL, or dying, or a program being put on probation for violations that occurred before the player arrived, etc.). It also hypothetically provides these student-athletes with an incentive to actually go to class, which is definitely a positive for everyone involved.

However, as usual, it wouldn't be a policy if there weren't some unintended consequences to consider. In this case, I see a great problem with setting a GPA threshold that doesn't (and can't) vary based on the quality of the institution. Are we to pretend that a 2.6 GPA is as easily attainable at Stanford or Notre Dame as it is at San Jose State or Arizona? Since we know that it isn't, doesn't this proposal effectively penalize those students who choose to go to schools with rigorous academics? And by extension, isn't it also penalizing those schools for not watering down their academic programs to benefit the student-athletes? If so, is that really what we want our NCAA policies to be doing?

As I wrote in a Twitter response to this news, encouraging schools to downgrade the rigor of their academic programs is a poor long-term strategy. Unfortunately, that's arguably what this policy would do, simply because of the incentives that it creates for student-athletes when they are considering schools. If an athlete with a 2.6 GPA has more rights than an athlete without one, then every kid should do everything in his power to make sure that he can attain a 2.6 GPA.

In an ideal world, that would mean that the athletes in question would all buckle down and work harder in school, and we'd end up with a world full of student-athletes with sparkling collegiate transcripts. But over here in the real world, all it does is encourage the kids to go to schools where they can get a 2.6 just by showing up, thereby immediately receiving more rights as an athlete.

Is that really what we want? Do we actually want to steer athletes away from the top academic schools, simply because they're likely to have more rights at the lower-tier ones? I don't think so, and I hardly think that's the idea at the core of this proposal. But unintended consequences are consequences nonetheless, and they require careful consideration by policy-makers at all levels of governance.

This winter, we have seen several top-rated schools play in meaningful football games—from Northwestern gaining its first bowl win since 1949 to Stanford winning the Rose Bowl for the first time in 40 years to Notre Dame playing for the national title for the first time in what seems like forever. Hell, even Vanderbilt won itself a bowl game, in a bowl season where most SEC teams can't seem to get out of their own way.

Against all odds, teams are finding a way to excel both in athletics and in academics, and yet the NCAA wants to pass a rule that would take us in the opposite direction, even if unintentionally. That would be a terrible shame, and I encourage the NCAA to reconsider this proposal, which has good intentions but potentially dire consequences.

[Athnet]

Quote of the Week (Fiscal Cliff edition)

I don't have a lot to say about the recent "resolution" to the fiscal cliff, largely because it resolved nothing and is, once again, merely a prelude to the next "fiscal crisis" that is mere weeks away. However, I thought that Tyler Cowen of the Marginal Revolution blog shared the most succinct (and sobering) summary of the entire fiscal cliff experience. From New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it's your Quote of the Week.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"If a newly re-elected Democratic president can’t muster the political will and capital required to do something as straightforward and relatively popular as raising taxes on the tiny fraction Americans making over $250,000 when those same taxes are scheduled to go up already, then how can Democrats ever expect to push taxes upward to levels that would make our existing public progams sustainable for the long run?"
                                                     - Ross Douthat, New York Times

Indeed. Which of course just shows us that there is, ultimately, zero political will to address the problems about which I've spilled so much ink (okay, pixels) on this blog. If we can't raise revenue, then we can't fund programs, period, end of story. It's just a matter of when we choose to recognize this fact (or when the markets decide to recognize it for us, as is usually the reality when it happens elsewhere, and is almost assured given that politicians are already setting up to capitulate on the next crisis).

All of this means that charts like this one aren't likely to change any time soon, regardless of what some people might want to tell you:

Source: Bianco Research via Barry Ritholtz

But hey, at least the markets liked the deal, that must be good news, right? Uh, maybe. Or maybe this thing was just like every other piece of legislation out of Washington lately—hastily thrown together, not well-understood even by those who voted on it because they didn't bother to read it, and loaded up with all sorts of kickbacks and favors to the corporate elite that don't belong in there to begin with.

Business as usual in Washington, right? Good grief.

[New York Times]
(h/t Marginal Revolution)

More adventures with USPS

I was actually quite pleased this morning when a Christmas present that I ordered early this week—shipped via USPS—arrived ahead of schedule. From San Jose, CA to my door here in Charlottesville, VA in just two days. Hooray for Priority Mail!

Of course, as we all know by now, USPS customers aren't always so lucky. And when I shared my excellent news with a very dear friend of mine, he was more than a bit nonplussed by my package's miraculous two-day cross-country journey. Because, you see, earlier this week he had sent a package from his home in Santa Monica, CA to nearby Brentwood—about 3 miles, door to door. And his package took... 3 days to arrive. Here are the grisly details:

Now, for those unfamiliar with California geography (like me, for example), you might not think much of the little stopover there in Richmond, CA. No big deal, just had to go to the local sort facility to be processed and then sent back out to Brentwood. Standard operating procedure, right? Wait, what in the what?

Holy crap... this thing went all the way to Oakland and back! That's 380 miles away! Put another way, that's the rough equivalent of sending something from Boston, MA to Cambridge, MA... BY WAY OF BALTIMORE!!! In what world does any of this make sense?

USPS, you continue to baffle me. But hey, thanks for the package. You guys are awesome, keep up the good work.

On housing and the low cost of money

I'm often writing about the perils of the Fed's monetary policy, but there are obviously some bright spots to be found out there. I'm sure by now that you've read at least one glowing article this year about the "housing recovery", and for the most part it's legitimate (even if there are some strange dynamics under the surface).

The question, of course, is whether this recovery is sustainable, and what will happen to housing prices if interest rates begin to rise from their freakishly low levels. That's a topic that Tim Iacono took on in a recent blog post, and I thought his findings were absolutely worth sharing (emphasis mine).

I’ve about had it with how giddy a large portion of the U.S. population has become about rising home prices. 

Don’t get me wrong, when first thinking about this, I was about as happy as anyone else to learn that property values are now rising sharply again since, after renting for six years, my wife and I finally bought a house about two years ago. So, we stand to benefit as much as anyone else. 

But, when you look at what’s driving home prices higher and how unnatural and unsustainable those factors are, suddenly the headlines sound more ominous than optimistic...  

Yes, low inventory is a big factor behind the home price surge as the flood of foreclosures has slowed to a trickle while strong investor demand and growing confidence amongst American consumers have surely tipped the scales in favor of higher prices. But, it is today’s freakishly low interest rates – engineered by the Federal Reserve – that have clearly played the biggest role in pushing home prices higher, simply because most people buy a house based on the monthly mortgage payment, not the purchase price. 

And when you see the impact record low rates have on purchase prices, you might be as concerned as I am... 

Based on a constant mortgage payment of $1,100 per month (what seemed to be a good national average based on this story and others like it), today’s 3.31 percent 30-year mortgage rate will finance a house at almost double the price that the 40-year average mortgage rate would!

While there are clearly other factors involved, it is the Federal Reserve’s asset purchase program that is largely responsible for these freakishly low rates (it is one of their stated policy objectives) and, while the central bank has promised to keep rates low for a long time and to continue buying mortgage-backed securities indefinitely, those actions are by no means guaranteed. 

This is a dynamic that I've been well aware of for a long time now, but it's still striking to see it laid out graphically like in Tim's piece. In just the last 12 months, 30-year mortgage rates have come down from 4.2% to 3.4%. Using Tim's $1,100 monthly payment, that means that a buyer who waited a year can now afford to buy a $276,000 home, as opposed to a $250,000 home last year.

That's an increase of 10.4% year-over-year because of the low cost of money, and yet home prices are only reported to have increased by 5 or 6% over the last year, even according to the rosiest estimates. Therefore, in any realistic terms, the price of housing has continued to decline this year, rather than rebound sharply as the headlines would have you believe.

If interest rates are really going to stay this low forever, then you shouldn't have much to worry about, and you can go ahead and buy real estate to your heart's content (just don't read these three posts before you do so). But as Wells Fargo is always reminding me in their constant mailings, "Interest rates rarely stay put for long!"

And if Wells Fargo is indeed correct, well then... Tim's chart tells us that housing's got another pretty significant leg down (like, 30 or 40%) to get back to those historical average rates. And that likely won't be pretty for anybody hoping to sell property at any point in the next few decades. Good luck!

[Iacono Research]

More stadium financing follies

I've written about the lunacy of publicly-funded sports arenas and stadia here before, and I think the issue deserves to be revisited given recent developments. On the one front, there is the city of Miami, which was taken to the cleaners by the disgrace that is the Miami Marlins franchise. Unfortunately for that city, their woes may just be beginning, as the Dolphins are also reportedly looking for public funding to fix their dilapidated home.

It would be easy to write this all off as Miami's loss, and theirs alone, except that it's not the case. When municipalities like these go into debt to fund stadium boondoggles, the whole country pays, as a recent Bloomberg article points out.

New York Giants fans will cheer on their team against the Dallas Cowboys at tonight’s National Football League opener in New Jersey. At tax time, they’ll help pay for the opponents’ $1.2 billion home field in Texas. 

That’s because the 80,000-seat Cowboys Stadium was built partly using tax-free borrowing by the City of Arlington. The resulting subsidy comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer, including Giants fans. The money doesn’t go directly to the Cowboys’ billionaire owner Jerry Jones. Rather, it lowers the cost of financing, giving his team the highest revenue in the NFL and making it the league’s most-valuable franchise. 

“It’s part of the corruption of the federal tax system,” said James Runzheimer, 67, an Arlington lawyer who led opponents of public borrowing for the structure known locally as “Jerry’s World.” “It’s use of government funds to subsidize activity that the private sector can finance on its own.”...

Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg on 2,700 securities. Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data show. 

Those estimates are based on what the Treasury could have collected on interest from the same amount of taxable bonds sold at the same time to investors in the 25 percent income-tax bracket, the rate many government agencies assume. In fact, more than half the owners of tax-exempt bonds pay top rates of at least 30 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So they save even more on their income taxes, a system that U.S. lawmakers of both parties and President Barack Obama have described as inefficient and unfair.

Yes, that's right, when tax-exempt municipal bonds are used to pay for these stadiums, that means that the FEDERAL government is effectively subsidizing these projects. So when the Cowboys build a stadium with "public" funds, that "public" isn't limited to the Dallas area—it includes the entire nation. This amounts to taxation without representation for those of us who don't get to enjoy the Cowboys' new monstrosity, and that used to be something that mattered in this country (but of course, doesn't any more).

Sure, we could try to argue that some of this comes out in the wash, because it's just a transfer from taxpayers to bondholders, and there is significant overlap between those two populations—it's just taxpayers stealing from themselves. But unless every taxpayer is also a municipal bondholder (and I'm at least one taxpayer who owns no munis), then this becomes a very serious constitutional issue, and yet one that is perpetually ignored by nearly everyone in the nation. I, for one, have no interest in paying more in taxes so that Jerry Jones can build a playground for the super-rich in Texas, but I was never afforded a say in the matter.

Ultimately, this trend of public financing of private enterprise must end in all its forms. There's no reason for taxpayers to be funding private business, in Miami, Dallas, or anywhere else. This is a long-running scam that has been run on Americans who love their sports (and teams) too much to say no to this extortion. We all must stand up and say that we are unwilling to pay for stadiums that we then must pay to enter—if it's a public facility, then we should have the right to do with it what we please. Otherwise, the Jerry Joneses of the world can figure out their own ways to build the things. I'm getting out of the stadium-building business... who's coming with me?

[Bloomberg]

Maryland, Under Armour, and the Big 10

This is turning into a sports-heavy week, which is ironic given that in my first post yesterday I said that we probably ascribe way too much importance to sports, since they're just a form of entertainment. But given some of the things I've written about in the past, I felt that it was necessary to chime in on yesterday's decision by Maryland to leave the ACC for the Big Ten Conference (which will soon have 14 teams, because of course it will—the Big 12 has 10 teams... awesome).

The University of Maryland's Board of Regents voted Monday to accept an invitation to join the Big Ten and begin competition in the conference in the 2014-15 academic year. 

"Today is a watershed moment for the University of Maryland," said university president Wallace D. Loh in a release. "Membership in the Big Ten Conference is in the strategic interest of the University of Maryland." 

Loh added it would "ensure the financial vitality of Maryland Athletics for decades to come," and offer opportunities to boost the "education, research, and innovation" of the university... 

Sources at Maryland believe the Terps will be able to negotiate the current $50 million exit fee from the ACC to a lower amount. The additions of Maryland and Rutgers would spur the Big Ten, then, toward negotiations on a new media-rights deal when its first-tier rights expire in 2017.

There are any number of angles I could attack on this topic, and most of those angles have already been explored in my previous missives about collegiate athletics. But what I find most troubling (and unique) about this particular move is the rumored role that Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank has had in these negotiations.

Welcome to the new landscape of college sports, where billionaire boosters and eight-figure payouts cause universities to abandon rivalries decades in the making. 

On Monday, the University of Maryland Board of Regents unanimously approved leaving the ACC and joining the Big Ten conference, a decision that may trigger the next wave of college sports realignment. The move is potentially quite profitable for Maryland, which could double the TV revenue it gets by hitching its wagon to the Big Ten Network. 

However, despite the foreseeable long-term gains, breaking with the ACC comes with a high upfront cost: $50 million, an exit fee that was recently raised from only $10 million. That kind of fine could cripple the University, especially at a time of cutbacks and budget shortfalls. 

Luckily for Maryland, it has a billionaire backer who may be willing to foot the bill: Under Armour founder and Maryland alumnus Kevin Plank. At the release of the Forbes 400 in September, Plank was the 345th richest person in America, with an estimated $1.35 billion net worth. A $50 million donation would barely dent his bank account... 

According to an ESPN report, an anonymous university regent said Plank is “100 percent” behind the move to the Big Ten and added that the billionaire is “heavily involved behind the scenes with board members.” 

The final piece of the puzzle may have fallen into place last week, when Under Armour announced in a SEC filing that Plank would be selling 1.3 million shares of the company “for asset diversification, tax and estate planning and charitable giving purposes.” What would 1.3 million shares of Under Armour net Plank on the open market? Try a cool $56 million after taxes—just the amount Maryland needs to pay if it leaves the ACC for greener pastures. 

Is it a smoking gun? No. And Plank did not immediately return requests for comment. But such generosity wouldn’t be unique.

Right. "Generosity". That's what we're calling it now. The simple fact is, if Plank does indeed foot the bill for Maryland's move to the Big Ten, then the expenditure amounts to little more than a marketing expense on the part of Under Armour. The company spends a few million bucks, they put their ugly-ass Maryland uniforms on a few more cable TV screens, and they immediately get increased exposure to a whole new midwest market.

We may think we're watching student-athletes play ball out there, but what we're really watching is cleverly designed product placement, brought to you in (large) part by unpaid student labor. The setup is eerily familiar to those of us who have studied 19th century plantation economics, especially when you consider that a not-insignificant portion of the players on these teams are blacks from low-income backgrounds. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'...

Increasingly these days, when we talk about collegiate athletics, what we're really talking about are Nike, Under Armour, and ESPN, because those are the companies that really call the shots around here. The conferences and the schools have become little more than pawns, transformed into the marketing departments for these huge multinational corporations. Maybe that's a cynical way of looking at things, but I'm finding it increasingly difficult to view NCAA sports through anything but a cynical light, especially given how cynical the decision-makers at these schools have seemingly become.

The NCAA needs to step in immediately and put a stop to this ridiculous conference-raiding free-for-all, before the whole thing loses all credibility. If we want to master plan this thing and create four or five huge jumbo-conferences, then fine. Let's get everyone together under one big NCAA umbrella and do this thing. But doing it piecemeal, with every conference raiding every other and then forcing the schools to pay exorbitant exit fees on the way out of town is just insanity, and worse yet, it's monstrously inefficient.

The conferences (and the apparel and TV companies) have become significantly more powerful and profitable than the NCAA itself, and that's clearly becoming a problem. As for me, the more days that go by, the more I think I should just quit on football altogether and start watching the sports that don't make any money, because at least there's something real left there.

As a remaining fan of the ACC (until further notice), all I can say to Maryland is "good riddance". A school that would sell out so brutally to one corporation and its CEO is not a school that I want anything to do with. God speed, Terps. Enjoy being the new Indiana.

[ESPN]
[Forbes]

Quote of (Last) Week

It's time to do a little catch-up around here, as it seems to be a lot recently. We'll start with last week's Quote of the Week, which never got posted because I'm a delinquent. It comes from NBC Sports' Mike Florio, whose "Pro Football Talk" is a staple of NFL news reporting. It's also batshit nuts. I'll give you the full context, so that you can appreciate the (lack of) development of Florio's argument.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"More than a few NFL players have made known this year their intention to miss a game in lieu of missing the birth of a child.

If push comes to shove, however, should they choose to be present for the pushing and not the shoving?

It’s a thorny issue.  My position was and is that the players have made a lifestyle choice that entails being available 16 days per year, no matter what.  If they choose not to plan their nine-month family expansion activities to coincide with the eight months per year when their work activities don’t entail playing games that count, why should their teams suffer the consequences?"
                                                        - Mike Florio, NBC Sports

Wow. "Family expansion activities," first of all, is an epic turn of phrase that deserves to be commemorated for all time in the Mike Florio Hall of Fame. The rest of the Florio piece basically speaks for itself, in a tone-deaf "football isn't everything, it's the only thing" sort of way.

Insinuating that a football player can and should have full control over when his wife gets pregnant is only a couple of small steps removed from declaring that pregnancy cannot result from a "legitimate rape". Remember that what Florio is really trying to suggest here is to say that players should only have sex with their wives during the season, so that they can reasonably be expected to go into labor in the offseason (when we include the playoffs and training camp, the offseason is a whole lot closer to 4 or 5 months than the 8 months that he suggests).

That's right, during the season, when the players are constantly on the road, or recuperating from injuries, or spending late nights at the stadium watching film because WINNING IS EVERYTHING. And if you can't get the job done this season, too bad, my friend, you better wait till next season to try again. Hopefully your wife's biological clock is kind enough to stop ticking for our benefit.

Now... to Florio's credit, he backed off of his initial statements and actually subsequently penned a much more reasonable and well-articulated piece on the topic. This incident, therefore, seems to have been a case of publishing-before-editing, which is increasingly common in the internet/blogging era of journalism.

Nevertheless, the mentality that Florio initially articulated persists among fans and journalists throughout the country, and it's an ugly and dangerous mentality. Whatever your job may be, nobody should ever suggest that performing it at the highest level should take precedence over family and good parenting. That's particularly true in an entertainment industry like professional sports, which many people take way too seriously at the end of the day.

Missing one or two games over the course of a career in order to attend to major family events should never be something that fans take issue with, especially when fans (and TV networks) already expect teams full of players to miss holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years simply to add incrementally to our enjoyment of those same holidays. These players sacrifice large portions of their lives (and their personal health) for our entertainment, and some people would request that they sacrifice even more. That's a terrible attitude to have, no matter how much these guys get paid (some of them, a ton, others, not so much). I'd rather we just said "thank you," and went on our way.

[Pro Football Talk]

Pay for Congressional performance?

Sheila Bair baffles me. Every time she starts making a ton of sense, the former FDIC head says or writes something else that comes across like low-grade satire, except I don't think it is. Her most recent piece for Fortune falls into the latter camp.

Will the elections bring about improvements in our increasingly dysfunctional government? I fear not. Successfully running for office these days is more about political fundraising and negative campaigning than about the art of governing. Only one in 10 Americans thinks Congress is doing a good job, and no wonder. Our economy is stuck in low gear, and our fiscal situation is precarious. How do we motivate our national leaders to deal with these problems? As with most organizations, it comes down to economic incentives. If our elected officials can keep their paychecks by being adept at fundraising and negative campaigning, then that is what they'll do. But if at least part of their pay is based on performance, maybe we could get them to focus on doing their jobs. Pay for performance has improved management in the private sector. Why not try it with the folks in D.C.? 

For instance, one-half of compensation for corporate directors is frequently paid in stock, which they must hold for several years. The idea is to align their economic incentives with the long-term profitability of the corporation. There is no stock ownership in the federal government, obviously, but we do issue a lot of debt (boy, do we ever). So here is an idea: Let's start paying members of Congress and the President half of their compensation in 10-year Treasury debt, which they must hold until maturity. Members of Congress make roughly $180,000, so under this proposal, they would get $90,000 in cash and $90,000 in 10-year Treasuries. (We would add a housing allowance, too, given the high cost of living in Washington.) For the President, it would be $200,000 cash and $200,000 in T-bonds. If the economy does well and if they get our fiscal house in order and institute pro-growth tax and spending policies, those 10-year bonds should hold their value. But if we continue our profligate ways, inflation spikes, and interest rates skyrocket, those bonds may end up being worth as much as the stuff Czar Nicholas issued shortly before the Bolshevik revolution (some of which I bought at a flea market and now use as wallpaper in the bathroom).

She keeps going with her proposal, but I refuse to further indulge her ramblings here. Realistically, the very premise of Bair's argument is fundamentally flawed.

"Pay for performance has improved management in the private sector," she writes. No, Sheila, it hasn't. Reams and reams of research have been produced which prove your argument wrong. What pay for performance tends to do, instead, is encourage leaders and executives to make company-betting moves which promise huge potential payoffs but equally large risks. If those risks pan out, the executive in question makes millions and retires happy, but if they don't, the whole company blows up and the manager walks away scot-free, moving on to the next gullible company to rinse and repeat (see: John Thain).

These schemes have led to an epidemic of short-termism on Wall Street in particular, where traders and executives have little interest in the firm's profitability beyond the next quarter or year. Making those stocks or options or bonds vest at a later date does little to change the underlying risk/reward dynamic from the standpoint of the executive. While things may be slightly different for Congressmen than for Fortune 500 CEOs, those differences aren't nearly as great as we would like them to be. The folks in Washington have already shown themselves to be experts at trading long-term security for short-term gain, and the last thing they need is another scheme from us that encourages them to do more of the same.

You see, even if our Congressmen (and women) were to blow up the whole country under Bair's proposal, they'd still be pulling in $90k a year (oh, and a housing allowance, of course), well above the national average. That's not exactly giving them the "skin in the game" that they might need in order to ensure that they don't screw things up terribly for the rest of us.

Worse still, the plan suffers from a serious flaw in design by tying compensation to a bond price rather than some other more tangible measure of actual long-term American prosperity. If our Congressmen suddenly own millions of dollars worth of U.S. government debt, then all that does is give them a huge incentive to encourage the clowns over at the Fed to keep on keeping on with their ridiculous quantitative easing, which sends bond prices skyrocketing (and yields plummeting) even while the fiscal state of the union deteriorates by the day.

The real flaw in Bair's argument, ultimately, lies in its presumption that Congressmen and Senators control bond prices and economic outcomes with their policies—they don't. The Fed controls these things, they have for decades, and that won't be changing any time soon, regardless of any "pay for performance" scheme that you want to put into place. Not until the voters force it to be so, that is.

The truth is, the only kind of "pay for performance" scheme that will ever work in a democracy is to vote the bums out when they screw over their constituents. That requires real, actual responsibility on the part of the voters, more than some lazy "autopilot" compensation scheme that won't work and represents a further abdication of the voters' responsibility to hold their elected officials accountable.

Now as ever, we as voters get the government that we deserve. If we refuse to hold our Congressmen accountable with our votes on Election Day, then we can't expect the mess to sort itself out just because they own a few more government bonds then they used to. Bair should know better than this, and yet somehow she doesn't. Unless, of course, this is satire, in which case the joke is, once again, on me.

D.C. politicians have in large part ascended to their lofty positions by being experts at gaming whatever system has been placed before them. Unless a pay-for-performance scheme is meticulously designed to avoid any unintended consequences, you can bet that they'll find the loopholes and design ways to maximize their compensation, regardless of the externalities that may result from their actions. What a joke of an idea. Our politicians need fewer systems and schemes to try to game, not more. Go back to the drawing board, Sheila.

[Fortune]

Quote of the Week (Election Edition)

I'll make this one quick and just throw out some interesting words to ponder, on this Presidential Election Day. I don't agree with everything written in Douglas French's epic rant, but I do think there is some serious food for thought in there.

No matter how things break tonight, there will be a lot of very happy people, a lot of very angry people, and a lot of people like me, wishing that it didn't have to be like that. When a nation is so bitterly divided that it forgets that we're all in this together, I think that's unequivocally a negative thing. But so be it.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"There are thousands of elections every year. Political positions from constable to governor are elected constantly. So with all of these layers of democracy — this great thing that America spends so many lives and so much money exporting — is America freer? With this constant turnover of political blood, is business allowed to operate unfettered? After all, we are led to believe democracy is synonymous with freedom. No democracy, no freedom.

America was attacked on Sept. 11 because they hate us for our freedoms, we’re told. America is so free it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 750 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. More than 2.3 million people are locked up, and many more millions are on probation. Is this the upside of this great thing — democracy?"
                                                - Douglas French, The Daily Reckoning

Interesting stuff to think about, either way, and similar to this bit from Stephen Fry, which will be this post's parting shot.


Get out there and vote today, regardless—apathy may feel good, but it does nothing to help any of our issues.

[Daily Reckoning]

Quote of the Week (French teachers' edition)

After a slow start to the week, I've got a whole bunch of posts coming your way today and tomorrow (many of them quick hitters). As for this week's Quote of the Week, this week's contest was in fact no contest at all. French President Francois Hollande won this thing going away, making him (I think) our first ever two-time Quote of the Week champion...

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"French President François Hollande has said he will end homework as part of a series of reforms to overhaul the country’s education system. And the reason he wants to ban homework? He doesn’t think it is fair that some kids get help from their parents at home while children who come from disadvantaged families don’t."
                                       - Valerie Strauss, Washington Post

Ban homework!! That's a brilliant idea... what we really need in order to reform education is for our kids to be studying less, not more. That's the ticket!

Ironically, countries that are rapidly going broke—which France most certainly is—should probably be encouraging homework, rather than discouraging it. The more learning that can be outsourced to the home, the fewer government-subsidized teacher hours need to be purchased in order to educate the populace. But, of course, that just isn't fair.

Furthermore, this is just an instance of mind-numbing ignorance on the part of Hollande. To assume that simply eliminating homework means that affluent children will learn nothing from their parents when they are home is idiotic. The parents will still have the opportunity to hire private tutors, pay for music lessons for their children, buy their children books that the poorer children cannot afford, and generally provide a well-rounded life full of education and learning, regardless of what's happening (or being assigned) at their schools.

If you want to ban homework, you really shouldn't stop there. The real key is to ban non-affluent parents, because their kids shouldn't have to bear the costs of their inevitable poor parenting. Therefore, from here on out, all French children will be removed from their birth parents and raised only in affluent households by considerate parents. Great success!

[Washington Post]

The cult of the smartphone

Tim Iacono tipped me off to an interesting Wall Street Journal article about cell phones that I hadn't yet seen. It raised some points that I've been thinking about for quite some time, and I thought they were worth sharing here.

Heidi Steffen and her husband used to treat themselves most weeks to steak at Sodak Shores, a restaurant overlooking a lake near their hometown of Milbank, S.D. Then they each got an iPhone, and the rib-eyes started making fewer appearances. 

"Every weekend, we'd do something," said Ms. Steffen, a registered nurse whose husband works at a tire shop. "Now maybe once every month or two, we get out." 

More than half of all U.S. cellphone owners carry a device like the iPhone, a shift that has unsettled household budgets across the country. Government data show people have spent more on phone bills over the past four years, even as they have dialed back on dining out, clothes and entertainment—cutbacks that have been keenly felt in the restaurant, apparel and film industries... 

Labor Department data released Tuesday show spending on phone services rose more than 4% last year, the fastest rate since 2005. During and after the recession, consumers cut back broadly on their spending. 

But as more people paid up for $200 smartphones and bills that run around $100 a month, the average household's annual spending on telephone services rose to $1,226 in 2011 from $1,110 in 2007, when Apple Inc.'s iPhone first appeared. 

Families with more than one smartphone are already paying much more than the average—sometimes more than $4,000 a year—easily eclipsing what they pay for cable TV and home Internet... But the question for the industry is how much bigger bills can get before the cuts in other parts of the family budget grow too painful. 

The article goes on to discuss an interesting developing battle with respect to smartphone data plans—with data usage now skyrocketing, cell phone carriers like Verizon are now eliminating unlimited data plans for customers who wish to buy smartphones at the subsidized rate. This means that many customers will have to either choose to actually pay full price for their iPhones (which very few can afford to do), or else pay even more in their bills each month.

I've always found it amazing how much people will be willing to pay on a per-month basis in order to avoid actually paying full price for their phones—in many cases, over the course of two years with an iPhone, people will pay 4 to 5 times the actual retail cost of the device just on monthly bills, without even thinking about what they're doing.

It's a topic that blogger Karl Denninger has tackled at length on multiple occasions, especially when Sprint announced that they would be allowing iPhones on their prepaid network without a contract. Citing a Fox Business article, Denninger wrote:

Virgin Mobile USA, a prepaid brand of Sprint, on Thursday announced it will offer the Apple iPhone on a no-contract basis to customers starting on  June 29, but you may want to think twice before jumping ship from your current  carrier if you're already an iPhone owner. 

The "garf" is that you're going to have to pay cash for the phone -- in this case, $549 or $649, depending on the model you want.  No subsidy. 

But.... the plan is $35/month for 300 minutes of voice and unlimited text and data. 

Now consider that over two years if you buy the phone from AT&T it breaks down like this: 

$199 up front for the iPhone 4S 

$39.99/mo for base 450 minute service 

$30.00/mo for 3gb of data 

$20.00/mo for unlimited text messages 

====== 

$89.99/mo * 24 months = $2,159.76 + $199 = $2,358.76 over two years 

Now on Virgin, it's $649 up front and then $35/month * 24 months, or $1,489.00 over two years. 

Want to pay an extra $869 plus additional taxes and fees on the AT&T service that are billed separately but not on Virgin, which simply charges sales tax (this can easily be $200 or more over those two years.) 

Go right ahead. 

For everyone else just tell AT&T and Verizon to***** off.

Interesting analysis. For what it's worth, the cost of using an iPhone on Virgin is still pretty damned expensive, but at least you're not locked into a two-year contract at exorbitant rates just to pay off the effective "loan" that you took out to buy your overpriced phone.

Either way, even though I personally continue to do it (not with an iPhone, with an Android, but that's a story for a different day), I really can't figure out how so much of America can justify spending so much on phone service even as they're cutting back on just about everything else.

Sometimes I wonder, in our desperate attempts to stay "connected" to the world with our phones, are we risking becoming completely disconnected instead? Once we choose to stay home and play with our phones rather than going out and having meals with friends, I think that choice has already been made. It's a weird choice, but we are where we are.

[Wall Street Journal]
[Market Ticker]

Quote of the Week

As usual, I've got some catching up to do here on the blog. We'll start things off today with your belated Quote of the Week, then your Clip of the Week will be right behind it. I may throw in an extra post just for kicks, but I'll probably hold off on it until tomorrow—you all know how much I love writing on Fridays.

The leader in the clubhouse for this week's Quote was this post over on the Marginal Revolution blog, which shared some seriously bizarre tidbits about people's intense love for K-Pop (what's K-Pop? This is K-Pop; so is this). Fanaticism knows few bounds, apparently.

But then I came across this post at The Motley Fool, which was frankly so terrifying that I couldn't help but write about it on the blog. So here's your Quote of the Week... go America.

This week's QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"As part of the Dodd-Frank Act, lawmakers directed the [Securities & Exchange Commission] to figure out how much average investors knew about the stocks and mutual funds that they held. Here's what they found: You are an idiot... Statistically, the SEC found that American investors—regardless of age, race, or gender—'lack basic financial literacy,' and that they generally do not understand even 'the most elementary financial concepts such as compound interest and inflation.' The surveys suggest that certain sub-groups, including the elderly... 'have an even greater lack of investment knowledge' of concepts like the difference between stocks and bonds, and are unaware of investment costs and their impact on investment returns.
                                                  - Bill Mann, Motley Fool Funds

What's perhaps most concerning about this post is what Mann later points out—this study didn't consider ALL Americans, it ONLY CONSIDERED THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY DEEMED TO BE ACTIVE INVESTORS. If active investors can't adequately answer a question like "what's a stock", then I admit that I have seriously overestimated the intelligence level of my nation. Unfortunately, it appears that's the case.

Now, granted, my inner tin-foil-hat man does look at this survey data with a fair bit of skepticism, recognizing that the SEC has a vested interest in reporting that investors are gullible fools who need to be saved from themselves (by the SEC, of course). That said, I have a very hard time contradicting the study's results—frankly, it all sounds just about right.

If you watch the Presidential (and Vice Presidential) debates this fall, and you start to notice that the candidates are speaking about the economy and the markets in a way that seems designed to confuse, please know that it's absolutely on purpose—they assume that you don't understand this stuff, so it's in their interest to speak in circles so as to confuse you.

You won't know the difference either way, and you'll therefore be forced to choose the guy who "looked the best" doing it. That is, unless you choose to educate yourself. And if you read this blog, I'd like to think that you're already doing so. Otherwise, I've probably been confusing the hell out of you for a long time now. My bad, guys.

[Motley Fool]

Our food supply issues grow

I hadn't blogged about our food supply here in a long time, but then I came across two articles in one day that gently reminded me that I was overdue for an update. I've previously blogged here (and here) about the dangerous (and creepy) nature of genetically modified (GMO) foods, and the evidence continues to pile up in favor of my argument.

From Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog, citing a study from the Committee for Research & Independent Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN):

For the first time, the health impact of a GMO and a widely used pesticide have been comprehensively assessed in a long term animal feeding trial of greater duration and with more detailed analyses than any previous studies, by environmental and food agencies, governments, industries or researchers institutes. 

The two tested products are in very common use : (i) a transgenic maize made tolerant to Roundup, the characteristic shared by over 80% of food and animal feed GMOs, and (ii) Roundup itself, the most widely used herbicide on the planet. The regulatory approval process requires these products to be tested on rats as a surrogate for humans. 

The new research took the form of a two year feeding trial on 200 rats, monitored for outcomes against more than 100 parameters. The doses were consistent with typical dietary/ environmental exposure... 

The results... included increased and more rapid mortality, coupled with hormonal non linear and sex related effects. Females developed significant and numerous mammary tumours, pituitary and kidney problems. Males died mostly from severe hepatorenal chronic deficiencies...

The implications are extremely serious. They demonstrate the toxicity, both of a GMO with the most widely spread transgenic character and of the most widely used herbicide, even when ingested at extremely low levels, (corresponding to those found in surface or tap water). In addition, these results call into question the adequacy of the current regulatory process, used throughout the world by agencies involved in the assessment of health, food and chemicals, and industries seeking commercialisation of products.

As Yves and the study's authors point out, what sets this research apart from previous studies is the duration of the testing. While regulatory analyses of these products last only 3 months, this particular study lasted two years, a significant portion of the rats' lives. This study therefore sheds more light on the long-term effects of these products, which is frankly significantly more relevant from a public health standpoint.

At issue here is Monsanto's GMO corn, an herbicide-resistant product (Monsanto also sells the herbicide in question, Roundup) that is in a distressing number of the products that we buy regularly—one estimate pegs the percentage at 70%, largely because GMO corn is the primary ingredient in high-fructose corn syrup, which is in basically everything in the supermarket these days. Think you're doing your best to avoid GMO corn in the supermarket? So did I, until I read this blog post, which scared the crap out of me.

Finally, since I promised that I'd read two articles that made me want to revisit this topic, here's the second.

If it were a novel, people would criticize the plot for being too far-fetched – thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. Only in this case, it’s not fiction: It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die. 

Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program. 

Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids. 

In the U.S. alone, these pesticides, produced primarily by the German chemical giant Bayer and known as “neonics” for short, coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products. 

Research published last month in the prestigious journal Science shows that neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. They are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.

Perfect. Am I the only one creeped out by the fact that we regularly eat chemicals that disorient and kill bees? If it's toxic to bees, then it's toxic to us as well, even if it doesn't immediately kill us or send us wandering aimlessly off the grid in search of our homes. No, we just die decades later from mysterious cancers that we can't seem to cure, never knowing what the hell happened to us or why.

Just because there isn't a short-term problem doesn't mean there it isn't a long-term problem (hey, sounds a lot like our debt situation, doesn't it?), and I'm increasingly convinced that's what's going on with our nation's food supply.

Yes, in the short term it seems like these foods are just the same as the foods that we grew 20 years ago—they look the same, nobody's dropping dead from them, we don't show any visible ill effects in the first few years, so we all assume that everything is hunky-dory. But is that really the case? Increasingly, science is answering "no" to that question, and I think we all need to stand up and take notice. Our food supply is inexorably deteriorating in quality, and it may already be too late to reverse the damage.

[Naked Capitalism]
[Reuters]