Track Your Local Dollars
You know that spending your money locally is good for the Valley’s economy. But do you know just how good?
Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, or CISA, has developed a nifty tool to help measure just how much of your grocery spending benefits the local economy—and how you can do even more. Part I of the online Local Food Calculator computes how much of your grocery budget stays local; as of last week, those who’d already tried out the calculator spent, on average, 35.94 percent of their food budget on local products.
Part II of the calculator nudges consumers to consider how they can increase that number by cutting down on what they spend on things like canned fruit, breakfast cereal and products shipped from far away and committing to buying more on local produce, dairy, eggs and meat.
Want to put your local food spending to the test? Go to www.buylocalfood.org/local-food-calculator.
By the Numbers
The figure cited by inequality.org, comparing the top political contributors in 2012—Dorchester-born casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam—to the top contributor in 1980, tugboat company owner Cecil Haden. The website contrasts the $103.4 million the Adelsons spent to Haden’s much more constrained $1.72 million—a figure already adjusted for inflation. “The Adelsons sit comfortably within the richest 0.01 percent of America’s voting age population. Over 40 percent of the contributions to American political campaigns are now emanating from this super-rich elite strata,” wrote labor journalist Sam Pizzigati in a report at inequality.org.
Worth Quoting
“I said that I was going to take my message around the country of we need
to be a bigger party, we need to be a bigger tent, there has got to be room for me, people like me and Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin.”
—Former U.S. Senator Scott Brown, in an interview with Boston’s WBZ-AM
