Cartoonists With Attitude

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Rich people have problems too, you know. No lengthy commentary this week gang. I’ve got things to do.

Next Week: Ineffective Public Service Announcements

More from the Safeway coupon booklet.

Did you know that Campbell's soup is good for the environment? As implied by the accompanying photograph of a happy family running on grass, it makes people healthy (you'd be less likely to run and laugh if you're not well-nourished, or if your soup had toxins in it, wouldn't you?), and good health is of course a function to environmental sustainability, so.... we're left to figure out that connection ourselves.

Presumably the cans don't have that poisonous plastic lining that most cans have? We don't know. The ad doesn't mention this.

What it DOES say is that because the soup is condensed, the cans are smaller than they would be if it wasn't, so 130 million pounds more of metal per year would have been used if the soup already contained the water that customers add at home. But they put it a different way. They say this 130 million pounds of metal was "saved." (Left in the ground? The mining companies said, "let's not mine this last 130 million pounds of metal because Campell's soup doesn't need it"?) Let's not think about how much metal was USED, more metal that would have been "saved" if people made soup from ingredients not purchased in cans. Let's focus instead, as we're supposed to, on all the metal that *wasn't* used, that could have been, if Campbell's was not condensed. Let's focus on the drawing of the Earth with leaves coming out of it behind the image of the soup can, and the words "earth-friendly" at the top of the ad.

$1 off on 4 cans!

... my own personal secret to weight loss? Reading too much current events. I've been eating a lot healthier lately, and I haven't been able to stomach red meat since I researched for this cartoon a few months ago...

OK, I did buy and eat a Dick's Deluxe a couple weeks ago in a drunken fog, but I felt like crap for the next couple days. Definitely because of the burger...

I'm getting ready to head to New York next week for MoCCA Art Fest, so no time to do a full-on Moron post this week (other than to give you a link to Bill Moyers' interview with NYT reporter Melody Peterson)...

I do have an anecdote, though. After I posted the cartoon, I came across a commercial for a drug that should, without a doubt, have been included in this week's 'toon. Apparently, one of the side-effects of the weight-loss drug alli is anal leakage... they have this caveat posted on their website:

You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work

Is shitting yourself at work really a reasonable sacrifice for losing a little bit of weight? How the hell does something like this get approved?

I’ll be attending MoCCA, at the Cartoonists With Attitude table, selling copies of “Hereville.” If you’re there, please come say hi! I attended MoCCA last year and was favorably impressed; it’s a very fun convention, much better (and more alternative-comics-friendly) than most comic book conventions.

MoCCA is in the Puck Building, 295 Lafayette Street in Soho. I’ll be at table A54, on the first floor.

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.

You can also read this cartoon on the Dollars and Sense website, where they have an accompanying short article by Jason Son about how inflation tends to wipe out the gains of the minimum wage, because it’s not indexed to inflation. They also have more good articles on the minimum wage here and here. Please do click through — I think they feel paying me for my cartoons is more worthwhile if they get some traffic. :-)

This Crooked Timber post about the minimum wage by Kathy (who usually blogs at “The G Spot,” which is an excellent blog) pretty much explains the state of research on the effects of the minimum wage:

In response, Krueger and Card did another study that looked at the impact of that same minimum wage increase on employment in fast food establishments in New Jersey. To counter the previous criticisms from economists like Kevin Murphy who said that their data was problematic and that they’d got the timing wrong, this time they used a more reliable data source (employer data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and looked at the data over a longer time period. And guess what? This new analysis confirmed their original findings: the increase in the minimum wage did not lead to a decrease in employment.

There are a number of other reliable scholarly studies on the minimum wage that report similar results—such as this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, for example. There are also quite a few very good studies that show the opposite—that an increase in the minimum wage does indeed bring about a decrease in employment. A fair characterization of the literature is that the minimum wage’s impact on employment is ambiguous. But the fact that the findings are mixed is fairly compelling evidence that there must be something wrong with the standard perfect competition model of employment. […]

Krueger and Card have written a paper that provides strong evidence that “specification searching and publication bias” have led to an overrepresentation of studies that find that the minimum wage has a statistically significant disemployment effect. The ideological character of much of the economics profession in the United States suggests that there are rewards for producing scholarship that confirms the idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment, and punishment for scholarship that finds otherwise.

It’s worth mentioning that even those peer-reviewed studies that find negative effects of the minimum wage, usually find very small effects.