Here's your whip-it-good Wednesday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:

--Google has begun test driving its new online coupon service, dubbed Google Offers. The service will undergo a test run in Portland, Ore., before rolling out nationwide. It remains to be seen whether Google Offers will be able to find a place in a market dominated by Groupon and crowded with other competitors like LivingSocial. There have also been questions as to whether consumers are starting to feel fatigued from so many online daily coupon offers, and whether local businesses truly get enough value from these deals. The concept behind these services is that merchants set a specific number of coupons that must be sold in order for a deal to become available, thus ensuring a certain level of sales and participants.

--Speaking of the Net, California may soon crack down on online shoppers who don't pay their taxes. A bill approved by the state Assembly would require retailers such as Amazon.com to collect sales and use taxes. Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D-Whittier) says his legislation levels the playing field for physical stores that operate in California and have been paying sales taxes all along. "We're not imposing a new tax," he says. "What we are suggesting is a way to collect a tax that goes uncollected." AB 155 extends the statewide sales tax to purchases made from online retailers that have a presence in the state, including those that work with sister companies with offices in California. Physical stores also must charge local sales taxes. The state Board of Equalization estimates that unreported sales and use taxes total more than $1 billion annually.

--Here we go again: Toyota is recalling about 106,000 Prius hybrid cars globally for faulty steering caused by a nut that may come loose. The carmaker says the latest recall affects vehicles manufactured through 2003. Spokesman Paul Nolasco says the recall affects 52,000 Priuses in the U.S., 1,200 in Great Britain and 800 in Germany. The loose nut in the electric-power steering can cause the vehicle, if operated over a long time, to steer with too much force.

-- David Lazarus

Photo: Google wants a piece of the online coupon market. Credit: Clay McLachlan / Reuters

Here's your tickled-pink Tuesday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:

-- Ford has its groove on. The carmaker says its first-quarter profit soared 22% as an expanded portfolio of fuel-efficient vehicles helped it attract buyers. That Ford was able to increase profitability even as gas prices neared $4 a gallon shows how much the company has reinvented itself. In the past, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler made most of their money selling trucks and sport-utility vehicles. Things are different now. With the focus on more fuel-efficient vehicles, Ford posted its highest first-quarter profit since 1998. The company also says it doesn't expect disruptions stemming from last month's earthquake in Japan to significantly affect its North American or European operations.

-- Sweet: Hershey has posted higher first-quarter profit as its sales increased even though the costs of sugar and other materials are rising. The chocolate heavyweight credited its success on the launch of Hershey's Drops and Reese's Minis, as well as its expansion outside the U.S. and a 30% increase in ad spending. Like other companies, Hershey is facing higher costs for raw materials including sugar, fuel and packaging. Last month, it said it would pass those costs along to customers and raise prices by nearly 10% this year. But Hershey is also trying to keep costs down by making cuts elsewhere. Last year, the company rolled out a money-saving program it calls Project Next Century, which included laying off workers and ending production in the old factory that Milton Hershey built.

-- California may follow other states in banning beer-boosted energy drinks. State Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) says caffeinated beer beverages have sent young people to the hospital because of what he calls a dangerous combination that masks the effects of alcohol. He says the products are often marketed to young drinkers. His bill, SB39, passed the Senate on a 24-14 vote Monday. It now goes to the Assembly. The bill would prohibit making, importing or selling the beverages in California. No one spoke against the bill, and, interestingly, there was no opposition from the beverage industry. Padilla says the bill is similar to bans enacted in Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Utah and Washington.

-- David Lazarus

Photo: Ford's vehicles have proven popular with car buyers. Credit: Ben Margot / Associated Press

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a lower court’s ruling to destroy the young plants currently being grown to produce genetically modified sugar beet seeds with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready genes.

In a 21-page opinion -– in which Judge Sidney R. Thomas tapped his inner literati and waxed on with references to author Michael Crichton, William Shakespeare’s “Richard II” and Olivier de Serres, the father of French agriculture -– the court essentially opened the door for the seeds to be grown and available for the coming 2012 sugar beet planting season.

Whether these seeds will ever be planted in the dirt, however, is still unclear.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco dismissed a request for an injunction that would have barred the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s plan to let the beets be cultivated this year. And last summer White revoked the USDA’s deregulation of these genetically modified, or GM, sugar beets, saying the agency had to first complete a more thorough environmental impact study.

White, however, allowed the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to figure out how to regulate the crop until the report was complete. The agency issued out some permits that allowed some growing of the GM sugar beet stecklings, or the rootstock needed to produce seeds.

That prompted the plaintiffs in the case -– including the Center for Food Safety and the Sierra Club -– to file another lawsuit, arguing that the USDA's action violated the National Environmental Policy Act and requesting that the stecklings be destroyed.

White sided with the plaintiffs and, in December, ordered the young plants –- which are poised to produce the majority of the sugar beet seeds needed to fill domestic orders –- be destroyed.

But the 9th Circuit disagreed. On Friday, the court overturned that order, finding that the growing permits issued by the USDA should be given “full force and effect.” The court also found that the plaintiffs had failed to prove that the stecklings would cause irreparable harm.

Citing the book “Jurassic Park,” Thomas wrote, “The alleged irreparable harms are little more than an expression that 'life finds a way' .... However, an invocation to chaos theory is not sufficient to justify a preliminary injunction.”

-- P.J. Huffstutter

A year after tighter credit card regulations took effect, an advocacy group study concludes that they succeeded in making banks come clean about how much consumers actually pay to use cards.

The Center for Responsible Lending study examined the effect of the Credit Card Act of 2009, which the industry had predicted would result in higher card interest rates. It said that, after adjusting for the effect of the troubled economy on card issuers, "actual prices [for credit card use] have remained stable and available credit has not tightened beyond what would be expected."

(Plenty of borrowers, of course, have seen rates on individual credit cards rise. The Center for Responsible Lending relied on a Federal Reserve national average called "accounts assessed interest"; click the link to the study for details.) 

The law stemmed from complaints that consumers had been misled for years into thinking they would pay less for credit card debt than was true. It imposed the greatest changes in three decades on the credit card industry, including tougher restrictions on interest rate hikes and late fees.

From a Los Angeles Times story when regulators first proposed the new rules in December 2008:

The new measures were needed to reverse a trend in which the pricing schemes and terms of credit cards have grown increasingly complicated and obscure, leaving consumers frustrated by mysterious charges, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said.

The banking industry opposed the measures, contending that card issuers would be less likely to take a chance on people with weak credit. Card companies will also be forced to raise interest rates to cover the expense of the new measures, saddling most card users with higher costs, said Edward L. Yingling, chief executive of the American Bankers Assn.

But consumer advocates said the measures, adopted by the Fed, the Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration, were needed to address hidden traps and fees nestled in the fine print of card applications.

A spokesman for the American Bankers Assn. said the group has not yet produced its own studies on the effect of the legislation and that it's too early to gauge the law's effect.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- the federal healthcare reform, to you -- is so long and inclusive that what's hardest to communicate about it is what's in it. When I started asking healthcare reform experts about the provision allowing insurance companies to be exiled from insurance exchanges if they're found to be overcharging, several said it was news to them.

It's not. Starting now, state and federal regulators are supposed to keep an eye on premium hikes. As my Wednesday column reports, companies with a pattern of unreasonable increases can be shut out of the exchanges, meaning they won't be allowed to sell individual or small-group policies after 2014. (The provision is on Page 28 of the act, linked to above.)

But will regulators really impose the nuclear option on a misbehaving insurer, especially a big one? Only if the public holds their feet to the fire. Otherwise insurance companies may escape effective regulation, just as big banks do. And we know how bad things can get when big banks are allowed to do what they want -- just see what happened to the U.S. economy in 2008.

The column starts below.

Big, powerful industries facing tougher government oversight — the health insurance industry, say — know that the legislative battle in Congress or state capitals is just the first skirmish.

The more important fight is over the regulations that implement legislative policies. That's the point where laws with teeth in them are taken to the dentist to get them pulled.

That process is already happening in relation to the new federal healthcare law. Forget the fatuous play-acting over "repeal" by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. The real action is behind the scenes.

Consider what's been happening with a provision in the new law designed to keep health insurers from unreasonably running up premiums before 2014, when they'll come more fully under federal oversight.

Read the whole column.

-- Michael Hiltzik

Politicians in Washington are battling furiously over last year’s healthcare reform law.

But many of those most affected by it -- American workers and employers -- say they still don’t know much about the law, although they expect it will cost them money.

Among consumers, 37% of people say they are not very knowledgeable about the law, and 18% say they know nothing about it, according to survey data from the Society for Human Resource Management and the Employee Benefit Research Institute. A little more than 1 in 3 people say they are somewhat knowledgeable about it.

When asked if they were comfortable in their understanding of the law, 45% of employers agreed that they were. But 41% disagreed and 11% strongly disagreed, according to EBRI.

As for costs, half of consumers think the law will push up their own out-of-pocket costs. And they may have good reason to believe that: Employers say they are more likely to pass along any cost increases they incur than to pass along cost decreases.

About 41% of employers said they'd be likely to pass along insurance-related hikes, and an additional 23% said they'd be very likely to pass them along.

But if healthcare expenses go down -- as supporters of the law say they will -- employees shouldn’t hold their breaths waiting to benefit, according to the data.

In such a situation, only 30% of companies said they'd be likely to lower premiums and co-pays for their workers, and an additional 10% said they'd be very likely to do so.

-– Walter Hamilton

Look out -- the enemies of Social Security are locked and loaded for a renewed attack on the program.

The new volley comes from the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the so-called deficit commission ginned up by the White House as a sop to conservatives. The co-chairs are the profoundly clownish former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, a Democrat with his feet firmly implanted on Wall Street.

Simpson and Bowles today released a draft proposal for cutting the federal deficit, weeks ahead of the Dec. 1 deadline for the full commission to release its report.

The co-chairs propose to gut Social Security under the guise of "saving" it, eliminate federal funding for services and programs that heavily benefit the middle- and working classes, and -- surprise -- steer even more income tax cuts to the wealthy.

The cuts to Social Security are subtle, and for that reason worthy of close scrutiny. The co-chairs' key proposal is to raise the regular retirement age to as high as 69, and raise the minimum retirement age to 64. This imposes disproportionate harm on lower-income workers, whose working lives tend to be shorter than others'. They also want to reduce relative benefits for better-paid workers, and change the formula for cost-of-living increases to one that looks like it would customarily produce lower COLAs.

The chairs' other recommendations include reducing the growth of foreign aid, charging admission fees at government museums and slashing the federal workforce. But their single biggest fiscal recommendation is the tax cut -- yet another giveaway to the wealthiest taxpayers to be funded by cuts in services enjoyed mostly by everyone else.

Will these fundamentally deceptive recommendations subject the agenda of the deficit commission to public view? One can only hope. For more on this subject, see my column this Sunday.

 -- Michael Hiltzik

[UPDATE: An earlier version of this post stated incorrectly that the co-chairs proposed changing the formula to calculate initial Social Security benefits to one that would yield lower benefits.]

New rules for debt relief -- New federal laws will make it more difficult for debt-relief companies to victimize consumers, a Better Business Bureau spokeswoman said. The new laws, which take effect Oct. 27, prohibit these companies from charging consumers until they've helped them reduce or change the terms of at least one debt. Since December 2007, the Better Business Bureau has received more than 6,000 complaints from consumers about debt-relief companies, said Alison Southwick, a BBB spokeswoman. Typical complaints were that the companies charged fees to consumers burdened with debt but failed to reduce or eliminate debts.

Beware of tax scam -- Taxpayers should beware of scammers who are attempting to fraudulently coerce people into paying past-due taxes that they do not know they owe, the California State Board of Equalization said. The Internal Revenue Service and California tax collectors do not send e-mail to notify taxpayers of overdue taxes, the board said in a news release. Taxpayers should discard such e-mails and not follow any of the links, the agency cautioned.

Mortgage fraud -- Federal prosecutors in New York have charged four people with 27 felonies for making false statements to obtain more than $2.8 million in mortgage loans from 2003 to 2005. The four defendants obtained home equity lines of credit on properties that did not exist, the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan alleged.

Debt collector fined -- One of the largest U.S. debt-collection firms has agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle civil charges, brought by the Federal Trade Commission, that it had made repeated telephone calls to collect overdue debts from the wrong person or that it sought to collect the wrong amount. Between 2006 and at least 2008, Allied Interstate Inc. continued collection efforts even after consumers told the company they did not owe the debt, without verifying the accuracy of the disputed information, the FTC alleged. Allied is a Minnesota corporation that works out of offices in the United States, Canada, India and the Philippines.

-- Stuart Pfeifer

The effort to revive a home energy efficiency financing program that stalled this summer has a new recruit: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This week he signed a law that will help route more funding to the Property Assessed Clean Energy program in California, which allows homeowners and businesses to use low-interest government financing to install solar panels, energy-efficient windows and insulation.

Participants of the popular program, known as PACE, use proceeds raised by local governments in bond sales to make energy-efficient improvements, usually with little upfront cost. The funds are paid back through long-term property tax assessments. The liens are attached to the home and roll over to the new owner if the original resident moves.

AB 1873 authorizes state agencies including the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the Pooled Money Investment Board and the State Compensation Insurance Fund to invest in PACE bonds. As a result, interest rates on PACE financing would probably drop.

The bill was co-sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and Sonoma County and authored by Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael). The law, part of a package of job-creation bills, goes into effect Jan. 1.

A bill sent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger would prohibit retailers, including service stations, from charging extra fees when customers use debit cards to make a purchase.

The measure by California state Sen. Jenny Oropeza (D-Long Beach) would close a legal loophole by extending a 1985 prohibition on retail credit card fees to the newer and now-ubiquitous debit cards.

The bill is needed because more people use debit cards than cash, credit cards or checks to pay for goods and services, Oropeza said, and extra fees make those purchases more expensive.

The legislation, SB 933, is supported by consumer advocates and labor organizations. It's opposed by grocers, restaurants, gas station operators and other retailers, who contend they are simply passing along fees that they must pay to bank and credit card administrators.

Gov. Schwarzenegger, who has 12 days to sign or veto the bill, has not taken a public position on the issue.

-- Marc Lifsher

The rise of the publicly traded for-profit university has led quite properly to questions about where the student's welfare ranks among the priorities of these institutions.

Spokespersons for companies such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University maintain that the student comes first and foremost. Not everyone agrees. Margaret Reiter, a former California deputy attorney general, told a Washington hearing convened not long ago by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) of her experience pursuing Corinthian Schools Inc. over what she said was a "persistent pattern of unlawful conduct" that looked awfully like fraud.

"The problem is not just a few bad apples," she told Harkin. What she told me was that in her experience, the abuses of the proprietary school industry "are among the most egregious, widespread and persistent over time."

It wouldn't be fair to tar the entire industry with one brush, and it may be the case that for-profit universities offer students opportunities they can't find elsewhere. But as my Sunday column observes, public college systems should tread very carefully when cutting deals with this industry so they don't look like they're giving the proprietary schools a seal of approval. Does the California Community Colleges' deal with Kaplan cross that line?

The column begins below.

It’s not unusual for government agencies with budget problems to start outsourcing services to private industry.

Computer maintenance, prison management, landscaping — all are among the services that state or local bureaucrats have handed off to private firms over the years.

What about college education? It turns out that California is trying to outsource our public higher education system to the for-profit college industry. What is surprising is that this is happening without any evidence that the affected students would be well served.

The issue has been cast into high relief by a two-year agreement struck last year between Jack Scott, the chancellor of the California Community Colleges, and Kaplan University, an aggressively marketed institution that does most of its pedagogy online.

Read the whole column.

-- Michael Hiltzik