Pet Food Recall

Several well-known brands of dog and cat food have been recalled because they are causing vomiting and kidney failure. Menu Foods, the Ontario, Canada-based company that produced the pet food, said Saturday it was recalling dog food sold throughout North America under 48 brands and cat food sold under 40 brands including Iams, Nutro and Eukanuba. The food was distributed by ...

Bulb Wars: Fluorescent versus Incandescent

If a California assemblyman gets his way, the Golden State would be the first jurisdiction in the world to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs in favor of replacement technologies, primarily compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs)--although LED light bulbs, which are more energy efficient than fluorescents and lack their color-emission drawbacks, may be similarly priced in the coming years as ...

More on Marcotte

K.C. Johnson has more on Amanda Marcotte. One possible defense for Edwards in hiring Marcotte is that Edwards was not aware of it and had little input in the decision (e.g., go get us a blogger for our campaign blog). Johnson points out that this is hard to believe because it was fairly widely known that Marcotte was ...

Minimum Wage and Commodity Pricing

George Will has a rather standard column, with which I basically agree, on why increasing the federal minimum wage is both politically expedient and economically silly. He gets into trouble, though, toward the end of the piece: But the minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices. As Kevin ...

Wal-Mart Pushing Flexibile Worker Shifts

Ezra Klein has an interesting discussion of a subscriber-only WSJ piece on a growing trend of major retailers including Wal-Mart, Payless ShoeSource, RadioShack, and possibly Target (which is mentioned in the WSJ subhead but not in Klein's post, so I'm not sure if they are following or bucking the trend) toward flexible scheduling in retail. Klein's summary: [S]oftware tracks customer habits ...

Flourescent Light Bulbs Get Push From Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is trying to coax consumers into buying light bulbs that they don't actually want. It's an interesting study in the power of zealots, especially if they sit atop a mega-billion dollar retail behemoth. As a way to cut energy use, it could not be simpler. Unscrew a light bulb that uses a lot of electricity and replace it with ...

John McCain Taps Terry Nelson as Campaign Chief

ABC reports that John McCain will announce "veteran GOP campaign operative Terry Nelson as his pick to be his national campaign manager, should the Senator choose to turn his exploring into a full-blown run for the White House." Nelson served as national political director for Bush-Cheney '04. He has served in senior roles in both the political and ...

John Edwards Tries to Cut in Line at Wal-Mart for PlayStation3

Wal-Mart is outing former Senator John Edwards for trying to cut in line to get a PlayStation3 while continuing to campaign against the retail giant. Yesterday, a staff person for former Sen. Edwards contacted a Wal-Mart electronics manager in Raleigh, North Carolina to obtain a Sony PlayStation3 on behalf of the Senator's family. Later that night, Sen. Edwards reportedly re-told ...

Amazingly Bad Reporting

Like Michael Cannon, this article in the Washington Post strikes me as a particularly bad case of reporting on economic policy. The article is on tariff suspensions and is caste in a typical fashion of domestic businesses being beaten by foreign competitors, Wal-Mart bashing and how it is bad for tax payers. Lets take the last one first. The ...

National Health Care and Firm Competitiveness

In the comments to this post, commenter Tano made the following claim regarding national health care. But they is plenty of room for compromise here. To take just one issue: I think it would be great if we had a national health insurance. That would relieve WalMart, and other companies, of their responsibilites toward their worker’s health, and thus make them ...