100 Calories of Obama per package

[schmevil]

What's up with the 100 calorie trend? Where did it come from - marketers, dieticians? Anyone have a lead?

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Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president.

Truer words. I hate the a-political strategy. Bullshit he's post-partisan. Anyway, I'm halfway through this article, which I totally recommend. A snippet:

How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views On Economy

Among the policy experts and economists who make up the Democratic government-in-waiting, there is now something of a consensus. They agree that deficit reduction did an enormous amount of good. It helped usher in the 1990s boom and the only period of strong, broad-based income growth in a generation. But that boom also depended on a technology bubble and historically low oil prices. In the current decade, the economy has continued to grow at a decent pace, yet most families have seen little benefit. Instead, the benefits have flowed mostly to a small slice of workers at the very top of the income distribution. As Rubin told me, comparing the current moment with 1993, “The distributional issues are obviously more serious now.” From today’s vantage point, inequality looks likes a bigger problem than economic growth; fiscal discipline seems necessary but not sufficient.

In practical terms, the new consensus means that the policies of an Obama administration would differ from those of the Clinton administration, but not primarily because of differences between the two men. “The economy has changed in the last 15 years, and our understanding of economic policy has changed as well,” Furman says. “And that means that what was appropriate in 1993 is no longer appropriate.” Obama’s agenda starts not with raising taxes to reduce the deficit, as Clinton’s ended up doing, but with changing the tax code so that families making more than $250,000 a year pay more taxes and nearly everyone else pays less. That would begin to address inequality. Then there would be Reich-like investments in alternative energy, physical infrastructure and such, meant both to create middle-class jobs and to address long-term problems like global warming.

David LeonHardt
NY Times
August 20, 2008

Comments

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Where did it come from - marketers, dieticians? Anyone have a lead?

I'm thinking the marketers. 100 is a nice, round number and it is easy to calculate things with. When you're counting calories it's far easier to eat a 100 calorie chocolate bar and add it to the tally in your head than a 79 or 123 calorie chocolate bar.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the same thing. It's actually brilliant. My favourite 100 calorie product is popcorn.