Legal Commentary

Katrina vanden Heuvel engages in unconscious self-parody

By Beldar

At the ridiculously named "Post-Partisan" blog on the WaPo, we find the following passage attributed to Katrina vanden Heuvel, who's the editor, part-owner, and publisher of the left-wing magazine The Nation as well as being the most predictably and unintentionally hilarious talking head on ABC News' "This Week" (emphasis mine):

At the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, it takes just under thirty minutes of work for an average burger-flipper to earn enough to buy a Big Mac (average American price, $3.58) on his lunch break.

Startlingly, it would still take that burger-flipper 29 minutes to earn enough to buy a head of organic romaine lettuce ($3.49/head). Add tomato ($4.99/pound), sweet onion ($1.49/pound), and carrots ($2.49/bunch); skim milk ($2.99/half gallon), hardboiled egg ($3.69/dozen), and whole wheat bread ($3.49/loaf), and to purchase his shopping basket, he?d need to clock over three hours of work, not to mention the unpaid labor he?d have to devote to preparing those groceries into a food-pyramid-friendly meal....

As the prices above indicate, [the American obesity] epidemic is not to be blamed on eating habits themselves ? or even on their families. It is simply far less expensive to feed a family from the Dollar Menu at McDonald?s than it is to prepare fresh, healthy choices.

Ms. vanden Heuvel goes on to explain that tax breaks are the reason that McDonald's can feed your family more cheaply than your family can feed itself with store-bought groceries: "In 2006, McDonald?s spent $1 million every day on advertising aimed at American children, legally a tax-deductible business expenditure and, in effect, a subsidy given to the golden arches by the American people."

Her solution: We need to raise taxes! For the good of the children!

(The WaPo webpage from which I've taken those quotes, by the way, rather conspicuously displayed "tax breaks" (i.e., advertisements, the costs of which are considered to be legitimate business expenses of the advertisers) for IBM and the U.S. representative of a trade group promoting French champagnes. I hit the refresh button a few times and saw, in rotation, similar tax breaks for Bank of America, Xerox, Boeing, Sprint, and New York University. Damn, I'll bet Dick Cheney personally designed those web pages! Obviously we need to tax all advertisers more heavily. But why stop there? Let's raise taxes on the WaPo, ABC (or its parent, Disney), and The Nation too, since they're the ones enabling these advertising write-offs!)

(And by the way: I'm very impressed with just how far McDonald's has been able to stretch that million-dollar-a-day tax write-off, especially given that its corporate revenues last year were $22.74 billion, or $62.3 million/day, with an annual profit of $4.55 billion, or $12.47 million/day. If the tax savings from that million-a-day advertising deduction have indeed permitted McDonald's to both sell their food at below grocery-store raw ingredient prices and still generate that magnitude of revenues and profits, then we need to let Ronald McDonald take over Obama's efforts at dealing with the federal budget. If we're going to have a clown in charge, let's pick one who's demonstrated some success!)

Of course, it's only in vanden-Heuvel-World® that McDonald's is cheaper than buying groceries and cooking them yourself. Indeed, Ms. vanden Heuvel's post effectively proves to those of us in the, ahem, Reality Based Community that she's neither fed a family at McDonald's nor fed a family a homemade meal from groceries she's purchased.

Here's a pair of clues, Katrina — no charge:

First, homemade meals from fresh ingredients cost less on a per-person and per-serving basis if, after you've had your healthy lunch, you refrain from throwing away the unused ingredients. Your computations come out quite differently if you'd merely recognize that your specified shopping basket can make more than one meal. Perhaps en route to your summa cum laude degree from Princeton, Katrina, you should have taken a detour to study basic home economics. (Or you could have asked one of your servants. Or even the intern you sent out to an overpriced Upper West Side Manhattan grocery to gather that list of prices, but only if he/she is actually living off the minimum wage you're probably paying, which the more I think about it seems pretty unlikely.)

Second, when you take your whole family to McDonald's, it costs more than one dollar even if you all order from the "Dollar Menu," and almost no one (much less an entire family) only orders a single Big Mac. (The "Dollar Menu," in my own considerable experience and observation at Mickey D's, is mostly used for adding an additional side item by those who would've felt too guilty following their initial instinct to super-size their Value Meal.) Suffice it to say that I've never gotten my four kids and myself out of McDonald's without breaking a second twenty-dollar bill.

When you're completely out of touch with reality, then raising taxes makes marvelous sense as the solution to every problem, real or imagined, doesn't it? Personal responsibility? Individual liberty? How can we possibly afford those things, when groceries are so damned much more expensive than McDonald's food?

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on February 12, 2010 (boomark / email).