While You Were Sleeping: October 2011

The gist of what you may have missed.

by Juliann Castelbuono, September 28, 2011

The mass layoffs and home foreclosures in late 2008 and early 2009, at the peak of the recession, spiked food stamp use by 70 percent, a trend that is expected to continue. The Food Stamp Program cost taxpayers $68 billion last year. Although some economists advocate that the program helps the economy by allowing for people to spend money on gasoline and retail in general, many taxpayers are currently not keen to put food on other people’s tables at their own tables’ expense.
Source: NPR

According to Christopher Shays and Michael Thibault, who headed the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the last decade over $30 billion of spending for contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan has been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct. Forty million was spent on an unwanted and unfinished Iraqi prison and $300 million on an unstable and underfunded Kabul power plant. Shays and Thibault offer 15 strategic recommendations for improved government contract spending at www.wartimecontracting.gov.
Source: Washington Post

A new scientific study provides an explanation for why getting home always seems to take less time than getting to an initial destination. Niels van de Ven, a psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, has discovered the psychological phenomenon known as the “return trip effect,” or the positive feeling that people have upon returning home that gives the illusion of speeding up their travel time. His theory is that the trip back seems shorter because it’s more familiar, but van de Ven acknowledges that this is only one of many causes for the effect. Some psychologists, like Richard A. Block of Montana State University, think that the trip home seems shorter because there’s less pressure to reach the intended target on time.
Source: NPR

Local and state governments cut 203,321 more full-time equivalent employees in 2010 than in 2009 and 27,567 more part-time employees, according to the Census Bureau. Rhode Island severed the most city, town, and county full-time jobs, where the municipal workforce shrank 7.7 percent. California municipalities shed the most part-time employees at 47,620 jobs lost. Idaho and Connecticut lost 5 percent of their state workforces. Although states like Wisconsin increased their state government part-time workforces by 5,063 jobs, Florida shed the most state government part-time positions—a 7.5 percent decrease—which translates to cutting 3,555 jobs. “We are looking at the worst contraction of state and local government employment since 1981,” said John Lonski, chief economist for Moody’s Capital Markets Research.
Source: Reuters

A recent study published in the Lancet indicates that Weight Watchers is more effective than advice from doctors. After tracking 772 overweight and moderately obese people, researchers found that dieters following Weight Watchers were likelier to stick to their diet and shed more than twice as many pounds as those following weight-loss guidance from their primary care doctors. The motivation and accountability that Weight Watchers provides fuels its effectiveness, according to a study funded by Weight Watchers as well as an independent research team. As opposed to a one-on-one compliant interaction with a physician, Weight Watchers offers a networking component—it connects dieters via weekly meetings. According to registered dietitian Dawn Jackson Blatner, author of The Flexitarian Diet, “It’s important to have people who will pick you up when times are tough and cheer you on when you have successes.”
Source: US News & World Report