Big Brother in the Supermarket

Safeway announced a new plan to cut employee healthcare costs. For those employees who sign up, their food and in-store purchasing habits will be analyzed on a month-to-month basis, with employees who engage in 'healthy buying patterns' receiving discounts in their health insurance rates. Sounds great, right? It encourages healthy lifestyles and rewards societally-beneficial behavior.

Wrong. This is (Yet another) version of Big Brother, being played out in a supermarket near you. If the end goal is to reduce the healthcare expense for Safeway and its employees, base the rates upon semi-annual physicals with rebates and discounts for healthy choices (gym memberships, etc). By monitoring eating patterns, as opposed to physical results (and no-one'd cheat the system and drive down the street to munch on a pack of Ho-Ho's or Twinkies).

But this way's easier. They can use their existing customer management systems at little additional cost. They can take a P.R. 'Praise Bath' in public acclaim. They can lower their healthcare costs.

And their employees can lost another bit of privacy in their lives.

-Shawn

Political Blogging in an Amendment #1 World

And it's a hot topic in the Sunshine State. What to do with Amendment 1 on this January 29th ballot. Vote 'Yea' and save up to a $250 per year (maybe, if, barring qualifying requirements, etc.). or Vote 'Nay' and screw over the blighted home-owners. Or maybe it's much, much worse than that.

The under-appreciated issue with Amendment 1 is portability. Coming from a mid-state county, we see a significant number of 'immigrants' coming from other Florida areas--large home families moving into our more rural, less expensive district. Great for them, but if they bring their exemptions, it's horrible for us. Maybe. Or maybe not. We don't have any real gauge as to how much future tax revenue will be 'lost' to our cities as a result of in-state immigration. Ask any city finance manager and the heads will spin. They can't honestly calculate with any degree of accuracy what type of hit portability will cause to local millage revenues.

And that's a problem. Cities bond against future tax revenues. Their credit ratings are based upon their expected ability to generate future payments. If a city can't reasonably or realistically calculate future revenue streams, then by definition, the risk for creditors to loan to that city has increased. In short--it is likely to cost our cities more to borrow (which they all do) to do the critical things that our citizens ask of us, than it does right now (assuming nothing else changes).

So, while Amendment 1 will enshrine a small tax savings into our state constitution (and cutting taxes is nearly ALWAYS a good thing), it will create significant uncertainty in future revenue projections whilch is likely to result in increased future interest costs to our municipalities. (Not to mention the fact that this amendment doesn't in any match revenue cuts with expenditure cuts--and we've already seen a number of cities raise replacement revenue streams through 'fire service' fees, etc., resulting in little to no true savings to our residents.)


Food for thought. I love cutting taxes, but this is a poor, expensive way to do it.

-Shawn

Environmental Marketing and Awareness

Here's a link to a great site demonstrating the power of data and 'authoritative evidence' in environmental marketing. Is the data real? Is it 'fudged?' It looks good and looks verifiable, which is enough for 90% of the viewers.

Environmental marketing is all about comparisons--are we better or worse than some other benchmark. Set the right benchmark and your opponents can look downright evil.

-Shawn

History's whims

History's what you make of it.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/books/01/13/1421/index.html?imw=Y.
Click on this link for an interesting tale of the first Chinese explorers to 'discover' North America -- nearly 80 years before Columbus.

Happy New Year!

-Shawn