A Healthy Serving of Skepticism in the Obesity Debate

As the rising rate of obesity has cost the nation billions in added health care costs, much needed discussions about healthy eating have become more prevalent. The dominant narrative is that a host of external causes, like "food deserts," "aggressive advertising" and the "high cost of healthy food" are responsible for the widespread and detrimental consumption of junk food. But, unfortunately few Americans, even in the educated classes have approached the official narrative with even a modicum of skepticism and sough to verify its claims. Research have emerged that have cast doubt on many of the claims put forth by government and media figures. For example, in most cases, proximity to a grocery store did not increase consumption of healthy foods and in most consumers can purchase healthy fruits and vegetables at a lower cost than junk food. Anecdotal evidence seems to support the researcher's conclusions, because on every occasion that I visit my neighborhood grocery store, I witness consumers choosing unhealthy, processed foods, over healthy, affordable staples (like lentils, broccoli and tilapia). This is not simply an empty academic debate, because the flawed narrative will lead to flawed policies that will do little to stem the rising tide of obesity.

5 Myths About Healthy Eating

A helping of skepticism about the causes of Americans’ poor eating habits—and the effectiveness of political fixes

Katherine Mangu-Ward | October 21, 2011

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s decision to stay out of the Republican presidential race means that the American people will be spared months of discussion about his ample waistline and the bad example it sets. Nonetheless, with first lady Michelle Obama urging everyone to get moving, obesity remains a political hot potato, or maybe a tater tot. Below, a helping of skepticism about the causes of Americans’ poor eating habits—and the effectiveness of political fixes.


1.  People in poor neighborhoods lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

 Walk into nearly any supermarket in the United States, and you are immediately confronted with abundance—bok choy, mangos, melons and avocados from across the globe—where a couple of varieties of apples and carrots once struggled to fill shelf space.

But not everyone has easy access to this fruity phantasmagoria. If you’re picking up ingredients for dinner at a gas station or a convenience store, you probably live in what eggheads have taken to calling a “food desert”—an ill-defined concept with powerful policy implications. A commonly cited 2009 statistic from the U.S. Department of Agriculture has 23.5 million Americans living in poor urban and rural areas with limited access to fresh food.

Making those food deserts bloom is a centerpiece of Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity agenda. This January found the first lady smiling for the cameras with Wal-Mart executives in Southeast Washington and declaring herself “more hopeful than ever” as she tours the nation’s produce sections.

But the prevalence of food deserts is almost certainly overstated. Not having a supermarket in your Zip code isn’t the last word in access to healthy food. According to the USDA, 93 percent of “desert” dwellers have access to a car. And farmers markets, often overlooked in surveys of rich and poor neighborhoods alike, have tripled since 1994.

Still, it does seem reasonable that making it easier to buy fresh food would improve what people eat. However, a study published this year in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the first to measure the impact of access to fresh food on diet, followed 5,000 people for over 15 years and found something surprising: Proximity to a grocery store or supermarket doesn’t increase consumption of healthy food. That suggests that a lack of convenient leafy greens isn’t the problem. Dinner menus are the product of subtle and pervasive food cultures, which can’t be tweaked from the East Wing.

The primary beneficiaries of tax incentives and other nudges aimed at abolishing food deserts are big grocery chains, not poor shoppers.

2. Advertising forces people to make unhealthy choices.

Television-bound children, their eyes awhirl with images of Tony the Tiger and his high-fructose friends, haunt the debate about junk-food advertising. And any parent who has ever experienced a 2-year-old’s grocery store meltdown would certainly like to have someone to blame. But the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has concluded that “current evidence is not sufficient to arrive at any finding about a causal relationship from television advertising to adiposity [excess weight] among children and youth.” Similar findings hold true for adults.

We don’t need advertisers to tell us that candy is delicious. Humans were big fans of fat and sugar long before the idiot box was invented. We’re programmed to go for the good (bad) stuff. Sure, Kellogg’s and General Mills have big advertising budgets, but they’re nowhere near as powerful as Darwin. Cracking down on advertisers gives politicians a scapegoat, but it doesn’t make kids, or their parents, healthier.

3.  Eating healthy is too expensive.

 A dinner of hot dogs and Devil Dogs is undeniably cheap. But a bowl of beans and rice with a banana on the side is cheaper. A survey by the USDA found that, by weight, bottled watek is cheaper than high-fat, and whole fruit is cheaper than processed sweet snacks. Preparing a big pot of lentils for the week may be not be glamorous, but it’s much cheaper and not much more time-consuming than cooking up frozen pizza or mac and cheese.

The New York Times’ Mark Bittman—no fan of Frito-Lay—writes that the idea that junk food is cheaper than real food is “just plain wrong” and that blaming unhealthy habits on cost is incorrect. People who eat lots of unhealthy food aren’t doing so because they lack cheap, healthy options. Instead, it’s because they like junk food. Making junk food comparatively more pricey by tacking on taxes—a proposal that has been revived many times by Yale’s Kelly Brownell (and recently made into law in Denmark)—mostly means that people will pay more taxes, not eat more kale.

4.  People need more information about what they eat.

It’s hard to argue against rules that give consumers more information. Perhaps for that reason, proposals to require restaurants to jam calorie, fat and other nutrition statistics onto already crowded signs and menus pop up over and over—most recently as part of the health-care reform law—despite the fact that virtually all major fast-food chains already provide such information on handouts and online.

Knowing that a chocolate shake at Shake Shack has 740 calories doesn’t stop me—or the first lady— from ordering one occasionally. We’re not alone: Studies consistently find that menu labeling doesn’t result in healthier choices. A recent study from Ghent University in Belgium found that labels made no difference in the consumption patterns of students there, backing up a 2009 New York University study that found no improvement in poor New Yorkers’ eating habits after the introduction of mandatory menu labeling in the Big Apple.

5.  There are too many fast-food restaurants in low-income neighborhoods.

In many urban neighborhoods, it’s easier to get permission to open a sex shop than a Taco Bell, thanks to aggressive policies by local zoning boards. But zoning out fast-food restaurants in cities is a lost cause—they are probably already too thick on the ground for new restrictions to alter the culinary mix. The same study that found no effect on diet from increased access to fruits and vegetables also found that proximity to fast-food restaurants had only a small effect, and it was limited to young, low-income men.

In a commentary accompanying the study, Jonathan E. Fielding and Paul A. Simon of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health wrote that “policy efforts to reduce access to [junk food], though politically challenging, will likely have a greater impact on reducing the obesity epidemic than efforts focused solely on increasing access to fresh produce and other healthy options.” “Politically challenging” is code for “virtually impossible.”

And for good reason. Eliminating access to fast food and other junk food means taking away choices, something Americans don’t tend to like, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s for their own good.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is the managing editor of Reason. This article originally appeared in The Washington Post on October 14, 2011

Successful Strategies in Debt Reduction

If you are interesting in determining what policies hold the greatest potential for reducing America's dangerous federal debt, I highly reading this article from Reason.com. Two Harvard Economists, Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, studied 107 efforts to lower debt in 21 nations and arrived at a series of fascinating conclusions. They found that “Countries that addressed their budget shortfalls through reduced spending were far more likely to reduce their debt than countries whose budget-balancing strategies depended upon higher taxes" and in most cases the optimal ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases was 85 to 15. We can argue about the exact ratio, but the evidence is clear: nations which based their debt reduction strategies on tax hikes were largely unsuccessful in their efforts . Furthermore, they found that successful debt reduction strategies tended to focus on spending cuts in two areas: social transfers (entitlements) and government wage-bill, or put simply, the size of and compensation received by the public sector work force. Unfortunately I suspect that the majority of voters will continue to be swayed by generic rhetoric such as "the rich are not paying their fair share," rather than look at the hard numbers and experiences of other nations that faced similar challenges. 

Upgrading the U.S.A.

How to fix the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio

Veronique de Rugy from the November 2011 issue

This summer, for the first time in history, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the United States from AAA to AA+. Whether or not we think the country deserved it, whether or not S&P holds any credibility, whether or not the move will have long-term consequences, the rating agency’s rationale for the reduction boils down to a legitimate fear: that America will fail to get its financial act together in time.

But how do we put our house in order? Even if lawmakers allow the Bush tax rates to expire at the end of 2012, the debt-to-GDP ratio is still projected to increase dramatically over the next decade. And then the real problems kick in with the explosion of spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. You could make the deficit situation look better by refusing to soften the blow of the alternative minimum tax through the types of “patches” that are passed each year, but that is both unlikely and unwise. And it would be very helpful if we got all the savings promised by boosters of the recent health care overhaul, but that too is highly doubtful.

The bottom line is that the debt problem in the United States will not go away as long as we don’t reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The coming explosion in entitlement spending will blow apart any possibility  of an equilibrium between revenue (no matter how high marginal tax rates get) and expenditures.

Unfortunately, the debt-limit deal passed this summer failed even to fake a solution. And things can get much worse. S&P has served notice that a further downgrade is likely if more progress is not made at upcoming deficit-reduction meetings to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio within the next few months. Prior to the debt-limit deal, you may recall, S&P had talked about wanting a long-term plan in place by October. And that means doing precisely what our representatives refused to do over the past seven months: moving decisively off this unsustainable path.  

Thankfully, we are not the first nation to struggle with a dangerous debt-to-GDP ratio, and thankfully, the academic world has already produced great insights into what can be done to help the problem without hurting the economy.

Take Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, two Harvard economists. In an October 2009 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the duo look at 107 efforts to reduce debt in 21 OECD nations between 1970 and 2007. Several countries were successful, among them Austria in 2005, Finland in 2005, and Sweden from 1997 to 2004. Spending cuts, the scholars found, are more effective than tax increases in reducing the ratio of debt to GDP. With successful fiscal adjustments, spending as a share of GDP fell by an average of 2 percent while revenue also fell by half a percentage point. Unsuccessful fiscal-adjustment packages involved smaller spending reductions (only about eight-tenths of a percentage point, on average) and large revenue increases.

Following and building on the work of Alesina and Ardagna, American Enterprise Institute economists Andrew Biggs, Kevin Hassett, and Matthew Jensen published a working paper in December 2010 covering more than 100 instances in which countries took steps to address their budget gaps. They identify successful consolidations as those in which the ratio of debt to potential GDP three years following the first year of the consolidation has declined by at least 4.5 percentage points.

Their conclusion: “Countries that addressed their budget shortfalls through reduced spending were far more likely to reduce their debt than countries whose budget-balancing strategies depended upon higher taxes.” What’s more, “the typical unsuccessful fiscal consolidation consisted of 53 percent tax increases and 47 percent spending cuts. By contrast, the typical successful fiscal consolidation consisted of 85 percent spending cuts.”

Alas: Even (or especially) in a time of crisis, lawmakers are driven more by politics than by good public policy. Countries in fiscal trouble generally got there through years of catering to pro-spending constituencies, be they senior citizens or the military-industrial complex, and their fiscal adjustments tend to make too many of these same mistakes. As a result, failed fiscal consolidations are more the rule than the exception. Eighty percent of the adjustments that Biggs, Hassett, and Jensen studied were failures.

The United States cannot afford to follow this pattern. Those who are not ideologically inclined toward austerity measures should remember that all this research is consistent with the work of the Berkeley economists David and Christina Romer—the same Christina Romer who used to chair Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. In a paper published in the June 2010 American Economic Review, the Romers show that increasing taxes by 1 percent of GDP for deficit-reduction purposes leads to a 3 percent reduction in GDP. Alesina and Ardagna discuss Romer and Romer’s paper, noting that while their methodology is different enough to make it hard to compare the two results formally, the studies are consistent in their conclusions. 

Finally, Biggs, Hassett, and Jensen look at how successful different kinds of spending cuts are at reducing the debt ratio. Consistent with other studies, they find that winning fiscal consolidations tend to focus spending cuts in two areas: social transfers, which largely means entitlements in the American context, and the government-wage bill, which means the size and pay of the public-sector workforce.

I can’t stress enough the importance of these findings. At a time when many politicians and pundits are calling for a “balanced” solution that features an equal mix of revenue increases and spending cuts to address our debt crisis, we must remember that this path has systematically failed in the past.

It may not be “balanced,” but what works is a package that mostly cuts spending. In the short term, that could mean means-testing Social Security and Medicare, increasing the programs’ eligibility age, and/or block-granting Medicaid. In the longer term, we must rethink the system on a fundamental level. A system that assumes an entitlement due to the simple fact of being American and over 65 cannot be sustained.  

Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto!

An argument that is often used by opponents of immigration enforcement is that it will lead to labor shortages that  will harm businesses and burden consumers with apocalyptic $10 tomatoes. Those who put forth this argument fail to realize the ability of firms to adjust to changes in labor and commodity markets. When labor or any commodity is cheap and plentiful, they are generally used in an efficient manner. But, when their cost rises and their supply decreases, consumers and firms become more efficient in how they utilize them and seek alternative commodities, in other words they innovate. As the availability of cheap labor diminishes in any given sector of the economy, wages increase and production increasingly relies on the use of capital and mechanization. This may be painful in the short run, but over time it results in economic development and a net increase in living standards. This was seen when a growing number of viticulturalists in California responded to relative labor shortages, brought on by tighter border control, by shifting towards mechanized grape picking. So, opponents of immigration reform would be advised to rely on humanitarian arguments, rather than on facile economic arguments, because a shortage of low skilled labor is one problem that the United States does not face. And to those who decry the lost of low paying agriculture jobs, I respond "Domo Arigato Mr Robot"; mechanization lowers cost, while creating good paying jobs via the individuals needed to: design, build, operate and repair the new machines. And I would encourage those who still believe in the virtue of a limitless supply of cheap labor to visit the workers paradises of China and India

Machines replacing men in the vineyard

Workers with Walsh Vineyards Management harvest chardonnay grapes by machine at a vineyard in the Carneros region early Friday.

CRISTA JEREMIASON/Press Democrat

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Sunday, October 2, 2011 at 4:15 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, September 30, 2011 at 7:08 p.m.

In the dark of night, the Pellenc machine rolled like a giant Transformer-like insect through the vineyard, seemingly swallowing up vines as it gently shook the chardonnay grapes free.

The canopies trembled almost imperceptibly as the mechanical harvester approached at a little more than 2 miles per hour, its lights gleaming like beady eyes staring down the vineyard rows.

As it passed, the valuable fruit fell softly from the vine and was ferried to a mechanical sorter, leaving behind only the empty stems and gently brushed leaves that quivered in the midnight air.

It's a scene that's becoming increasingly common in Sonoma County, as wineries and vineyard managers look for more cost-effective ways to harvest their grapes, and the number of available seasonal farm workers decreases.

In Sonoma and Napa counties, the percentage of vineyards harvested by machine has been growing by 3 to 4 percent every year, said Pete Opatz, vice president and senior viticulturist of Silverado Premium Properties. His company, which farms 3,500 acres in the two counties, harvests about 45 percent of its crop with machines.

“The trend towards mechanization has been a long-standing trend that continues to grow really over the last 10 years,” Opatz said. “Will the labor shortfall push the line more vertical? Of course it will.”

Meanwhile, grape growers are saying there's a shortage of seasonal workers available to help with the harvest this year, a trend caused in part by the faltering U.S. economy and tighter restrictions on the border with Mexico.

“As that labor pool becomes more and more difficult to tap into for agriculture, or any work...I see more and more mechanization of our industry as time goes on,” said Don Wallace, president of Dry Creek Vineyard outside Healdsburg.

The Australian wine industry has long had a smaller labor pool than it needed during harvest, and as a result, mechanical harvesting is far more common there, Wallace said.

In California, many farm workers hail from Mexico and return there after harvest, but stricter immigration policies are making that journey more difficult, said Casimiro Alvarez, regional director with the United Farm Workers.

“It is hard for people to come back to continue working in the fields,” Alvarez said.

Many vineyard managers need about twice as many workers during harvest as they do throughout the rest of the year, meaning harvesters must find other sources of income throughout the year.

“So, what are those workers going to be doing in the non-harvest period?” asked Chris Paige, CEO of California Human Development, which provides training and services to farm workers. “Typically they would be in some kind of non-agriculture job, possibly hospitality or construction. So to the extent that those are down, those workers wouldn't be available during the harvest.”

The Healdsburg Day Labor Center, part of California Human Development, was receiving calls from vineyard managers requesting help with harvest this weekend, Paige said.

At the Graton Day Labor Center, coordinators used to call vineyard managers to say they had people available to work. But now they don't have to, because the vineyard managers call them, said coordinator Carlos Lopez. “It's a different game now,” Lopez said.

Some seasonal laborers have left because of anti-immigration sentiment, and because wineries are becoming more careful about checking identification of pickers, Lopez said.

The lean crop also is making vineyard work less attractive this year for pickers who are paid by the ton, said Jim Murphy, owner of Murphy Vineyards in the Alexander Valley.

“It's difficult to get a hand crew to get motivated to go out there and pick where they're not going to make a whole lot,” Murphy said.

During a plush harvest, pickers could make a couple hundred dollars for a long night of work. But when the crop is thin, the pickers could earn as little as $50 for grueling efforts, he said.

In Lake County, grower Greg Hanson of Hanson Ranch Vineyards was expecting two-dozen pickers for a recent harvest, but at the scheduled time only eight workers showed up. As a result, the crew's harvest fell short of the truckload they had promised to deliver to Geyser Peak Winery that day.

“There's no doubt in my mind the available labor force is just smaller,” said Glenn Alexander, owner of Bacchus Vineyard Management, which manages 600 acres of vineyards mostly in Sonoma County.

Alexander said he felt the crunch during the late spring and early summer, when unseasonable rains meant there was more work to do arranging and managing the canopies. “We had 108 people working in June and July, and it wasn't enough, and we couldn't find anybody.”

Even so, Alexander is sticking to hand picking.

“I'm still one of those people that believes in putting your hands on the grapes,” he said.

For cost efficiency, the numbers are on the side of mechanization. Opatz calculated that it costs about $300 per ton to hand-pick a 5 ton chardonnay crop, when considering the costs of payroll, workers' compensation and social security. Picking the same amount mechanically costs about $150 per ton, even taking into account the cost of the machinery, which can run around $400,000 for a top-quality machine.

Walsh Vineyards Management has been machine harvesting for a decade, and recently invested in more machine harvesters made by Pellenc because the quality of the finished product improved significantly, said Towle Merritt, viticulturist with the Napa company.

“In a situation like this, where we're facing a pretty significant weather event in the middle of next week...you can harvest more grapes in a shorter period of time,” Merritt said. “Sometimes harvesting them at the right time is more important than harvesting them by hand.”

Walsh used a Pellenc harvester to pick chardonnay grapes in the Carneros region early Friday. Sales of the French machines have been steadily increasing over the past few years, said Lance Vande Hoef, sales representative. He attributes that growth to the company's new technology, which separates berries from stems in the vineyard right after it's picked.

Vineyards must be designed for machine harvesting, generally with rows spaced six or more feet apart. Some machines don't work well on hillsides, but do work on flat lands, said Ondine Chattan, director of winemaking at Geyser Peak Winery. The Geyserville winery started replanting vines to be machine-friendly about 20 years ago, under the direction of an Australian winemaker.

“The machines that are used these days are so incredibly gentle it's amazing. They don't break or macerate the berries,” Chattan said. “Australia has always had a labor shortage, so they've always been into mechanization.”

As the appetite for mechanical harvesting in California continues, the end result may be even fewer seasonal workers.

“Some of the wineries, they don't hire them anymore, because they have machines,” Lopez said. “So they need to find another job, or move out of the state.”

California Places Politics About The Rule Of Law And Sound Economics

Governor Brown of California signed into law AB 1236 which bans municipalities from requiring that businesses within their jurisdiction use E-Verify to check the legal status of their employees. This is an example of politics trumping the rule of law and good economic sense. And with an unemployment rate of 12%, massive debt and strained social services, the State of California should encourage its municipalities to take measures to shrink, not increase its supply of low skilled labor. And if the Department of Justice were not equally beholden to politics, it would be equally indignant that California, like Arizona and Alabama is "usurping the federal government's role as the creator of immigration policies."

California Limits E-Verify, Supports Illegal Hiring Practices

By Jon Feere, October 14, 2011

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20 Municipalities Forced to Drop E-Verify Laws

To the applause of illegal immigration advocates and unscrupulous business owners, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law AB 1236, an act that prohibits California municipalities from requiring businesses within their jurisdiction to use E-Verify. Titled, the "Employment Acceleration Act of 2011," the bill is sure to accelerate illegal hiring practices and make it more difficult for legal residents to acquire jobs. Before the bill was signed, at least 20 municipalities in California required use of E-Verify for either city contractors or all businesses within city limits: Mission Viejo, Palmdale, San Clemente, Murrieta, Lake Elsinore, Lancaster, Temecula, Escondido, Menifee, Hemet, Wildomar, San Juan Capistrano, Hesperia, Norco, San Bernardino County, Rancho Santa Margarita, Yorba Linda, Placentia, Orange, and Simi Valley. Many more California cities use E-Verify for government employees; such use is not prohibited by the new state bill.

As written, AB 1236 prohibits:

the state, or a city, county, city and county, or special district, from requiring an employer other than one of those government entities to use an electronic employment verification system except when required by federal law or as a condition of receiving federal funds.

The justifications written into the bill are a smorgasbord of rehashed nonsense spread by open-border groups – e.g. overinflated costs, overstated inaccuracy rates. The bill also cites California's unemployment rate (currently over 12 percent) and explains that the state "must pursue all avenues in facilitating and incubating job development and economic growth." How desperate is California if the legislature thinks the only way to reduce unemployment in the Golden State is to promote violations of federal law, perpetuate ID theft, and strain both natural and taxpayer-subsidized resources via increased illegal immigration? If California wanted to reduce unemployment and income inequality it would mandate E-Verify and eliminate other magnets for illegal immigration, thereby driving out the illegal population and forcing businesses to offer a better wage in order to attract millions of unemployed Californians. But putting legal residents to work, improving their wages, and reducing demand for social services apparently makes too much sense.

The bill also suggests that the state legislature did not read the recent Supreme Court holding on E-Verify,Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting. The bill states: "it is the intent of the Legislature that the state maintain the intent of federal law by ensuring that private employers retain the ability to choose whether to participate in the electronic verification program." The legislature seems to think that Justice Sotomayor's confused dissent was the majority opinion. In actuality, the majority held that a state requirement that all businesses use E-Verify "is entirely consistent with the federal law." Similarly, the municipalities in California that required use of E-Verify were likely acting in accordance with federal law. While a state has the authority to direct its counties and cities, a state legislature should not mischaracterize federal law in advancing its ends.

It remains unclear whether the Obama administration will file a lawsuit against California for moving against the intent of federal law. If the administration does not file a lawsuit, it will be painfully clear that the White House has no interest in the enforcement of immigration law. It will become clear that the Obama administration's main agenda in suing states over their immigration laws is to perpetuate illegal immigration and undermine U.S. sovereignty.

The media has hardly covered the issue, of course. Open-border journalists seem to prefer keeping anti-enforcement bills that might raise the ire of most taxpayers in the dark; only when a bill supports the rule of law do the activist journalists devote gallons of ink to the matter, nearly all of it in an attempt to discredit the effort.

California cities are just beginning to hear of the change and some officials are troubled by the governor's decision. Simi Valley Mayor Bob Huber wrote the following in a letter urging the governor to veto the bill:

We have no evidence of any decline in the number of contractors willing to bid on city projects. All in all, there has been no indication that [Simi Valley's] E-Verify requirement has proved to be a limiting factor in either the public employment or public contracting arena.

This week, the mayor expressed his disappointment with the governor's decision to sign the bill: "It's real disheartening for people out of a job not to be supported by their own government."

Currently 18 states mandate use of E-Verify in at least some circumstances, while two additional states encourage use of the program. California now joins Illinois as one of only two states with legislation banning at least some uses of E-Verify. In contrast, Congress is currently debating a bill that would overcome state-level anti-E-Verify laws by making E-Verify a standard business practice for all hiring in the United States (HR 2164, the "Legal Workforce Act").