It's time to pick on Ron Lieber again; he writes the New York Times business section's "Your Money" column. Nothing against Lieber in particular, I swear—it's just that personal finance tends to reveal the individualistic biases of the bourgeois press.
(The last time I picked on "Your Money" was when Lieber gave a painstaking explanation of how very very hard it is to keep on the right side of tax law when you have servants (not that he used that term). This post criticized Lieber's column in the wake of Tim Geithner's "nanny tax" problems. Well, Lieber must not have the D&S blog on his RSS feed, because on Feb. 4th, he was at it again, in more detail, in the wake of Tom Daschle's tax problems, and the nanny tax problem that Obama attempted-appointee Nancy Killefer had. Since he keeps coming back to the topic, I have another chance to bring up something I'd forgotten to in my last post. In both articles, Leiber recommends some firms that can help people with servants keep on top of things; one of the firms is Breedlove & Associates. Now I don't think "Breedlove" is a common name; in fact, as far as I know, the first time I came across it was in Leiber's first nanny tax column (in the Jan. 23rd issue of the Times). But in the next day's Times, there was that name again, in an article about the besieged openly gay mayor of Portland, Ore., Sam Adams, who has been in hot water for having had a relationship with an 18-year-old intern named Beau Breedlove. Ok—it's not salient, unless we find out that Sam Adams has a nanny tax problem, too.)
Back to the latest "Your Money" of note: this past Friday's column tries to wring personal finance advice out of "diet and nutrition gurus":
Nutritional Insights on Saving Money
Read the rest of the article (not that I'm recommending it, particularly).
For less individualistic and more structural advice (that is, advice that gets beyond finger-wagging about personal discipline), Lieber should have checked with Jackie Ovadia, a nutritionist we mentioned in the editorial note of our May/June 2008 issue, in connection with Thad Williamson's cover article "America Beyond Consumerism":
Dollars & Sense
D&S
A wide array of physical and social stresses arise from the activities that get lumped into the euphemistic term "growth." ... The economy in such cases doesn't solve problems so much as create new problems that require more expenditure to solve. Food is supposed to sustain people, for example. But today the dis-economies of eating sustain the GDP instead. The food industry spends some $21 billion a year on advertising to entice people to eat food they don't need. Not coincidentally there's now a $32 billion diet and weight loss industry to help people take off the pounds that inevitably result. When that doesn't work, which is often, there is always the vacuum pump or knife. There were some 110,000 liposuctions in the United States last year; at five pounds each that's some 275 tons of flab up the tube. ... It is a grueling cycle of indulgence and repentance, binge and purge. Yet each stage of this miserable experience, viewed through the pollyanic lens of economics, becomes growth and therefore good.
We haven't posted Thad Williamson's article (you can order back issues here, or better yet, subscribe), but Jonathan Rowe's article is online—here.