LEAN Act

Even before I read Nudge, I have not just full disclosure in transactions, but obvious slap you in the face disclosure of the most pertinent information that a person should be taking into account (usually the bad side of the deal, since companies' advertisements do a good job of exaggerating the positive). For example, after a short stint as a door-to-door salesman, I wrote a proposal requiring that all contracts, especially those distributed by salesmen, have a prominent box (larger sized text, bolded, different color, etc.) near the place where people sign the agreement stating the fact that the document they were signing was indeed a contract to which they were legally bound for ____ years (maybe even requiring the consumer to fill out the length and initial it) and urging them to read and understand the conditions under which they can cancel.

I thought this was necessary first to prevent lying by salesmen (of which there is plenty), and to make sure that people understand and are reminded of what they are agreeing to, acting as a countervailing force to salesmen's schmoozing aimed at getting people to make decisions that are not in their self-interest. I was mostly concerned with protecting the elderly and the poor and stupid – the prime targets of door-to-door salesmen. The measure seemed inexpensive to implement, and if it turned out that people really were making informed decisions about their purchases then there would be no harm done.

Fast forward to today's NY Times (wow I don't think that makes literal sense at all, but you get the idea) there is an article about prominent calorie disclosure in restaurants. Apparently restaurants in NY are required to post the caloric content of all menu items on the overhead menu and in the menu itself – great idea by my prejudices (or post-judices since I have thought about it a lot and had some experience). But, it is alleged, there is a bill introduced in congress that would allow restaurants to "tuck calorie information at the back of the menu or in a separate brochure".

I'll have to do some more reading on it, but after reading the bill, it doesn't seem to be quite as bad as the author of the article says. The bill requires that calorie information be displayed on the menu board, but the actual menu can just have the information in a separate brochure. I'm interested to see some reasoning behind this distinction, if for no other reason but to confirm or deny my suspicion that my former congressman who introduced the bill , is a lobbyist's whore (like most "moderates" i suspect). [I did support him for Congress back when I lived in his district because Utah needs more Democrats and the man he was running against was . . . well, never mind].