Three big soda corporations pledge to slash calories in their soft drinks 20 percent by 2025. I think their methods (as outlined in paragraphs four and five) stand a good chance of actually accomplishing that goal, and I'm no fan of soda taxes or serving-size limits either, but 20-percent-by-2025 is still a better slogan than a program, and when are we going after the real problem, which is the massive corn industry subsidy program that keeps high-fructose corn syrup (and soda) cheap?
The Harvard Business Review tells us what folks all over the world think of the CEO-unskilled worker pay gap. Incredibly, Americans think the ratio is around 31:1 (which is around what it was back in the late 1970s), and would prefer that the ratio be more like 7:1 -- and that ratio is apparently the same across the ideological spectrum. The real ratio in America, of course? 354:1. I'd have loved to see the respondents' reactions to that bit of news.
ProPublica checks claims that the long-expired assault weapons ban cut down on gun crime and/or deaths from gun crime -- and finds them wanting. The author suggests that future assault weapons bans might work better, but from here, banning assault weapons looks like another policy prescription that sounds like it should work, but doesn't. (For the record, I still think the return of the 91% tax bracket, and all the infrastructure building/refitting and actual job creation that would accompany it, would do more to decrease gun violence than any gun ban.)
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) says Congress should actually debate the Obama Administration's attacks on ISIS, and that failing to do so would "create() a horrible precedent, or maybe further a horrible precedent." I'd have dropped the word "maybe." Anyway, I sure hope that he doesn't really mean that Congress better authorize these air strikes before ISIS comes and kills us all in our beds. I'd rather he means we should actually debate whether more violence will fix all the violence that came before.
Finally, Daniel Larison at The American Conservative writes that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is "the worst of both worlds" when it comes to foreign policy "in that he wants to intervene in the affairs of other countries while remaining oblivious and indifferent to their political realities." Of course Mr. Larison would have been just as dead-on if he'd substituted the word "Bush" for "Cruz," which he's probably done in his heart if not on paper, but when he talks of a "middle ground" between "McCain and Paul," I hope he means Ron Paul, who is the real deal, and not Rand Paul, who is a fraud of elephantine proportions.
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