Monthly Archives: April 2007

Carrying A Few Extra Around The Gut Area? Blame Congress!

Economics, Government Regulation, Healthcare, The Welfare State

Adam Drewnowski, a researcher at the University of Washington, had a question. Why is it that America works opposite of the rest of the world, where the rich are generally thin, and the poor are generally not so. So he decided to take a look:

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

It’s been widely remarked that you don’t see a lot of poor people on the Atkins Diet. I had used that for a while, and in the span of a couple of months, dropped from 260 lbs to roughly my ideal weight, the low 220’s. But it’s not cheap. You’re eating decent quantities of fish, meat, fresh vegetables, etc. (Thankfully I’m blessed with genetically low cholesterol, so I never had to worry about that aspect). Think about it… You get a salmon filet and some nice broccoli with cheese sauce, a nice bottle of wine, and you’ll probably spend $5-10 per plate (more, depending on the wine). Feed a couple of people, and you’re out $20 or more. Hell, the last time I bought salmon and asparagus for myself I spent close to $20, because I went to the high-end grocer. You serve tortilla chips and a frozen pizza, with Coke to drink, you can feed the same number of people for $8. And who’s going to get a more healthful meal?

Of course, to some extent these things may never change, as there are certain laws of supply and demand, and corn syrup is cheap. But it’s still quite important to ask why, and whether this is something that’s naturally or artificially occurring. Is corn syrup artificially cheap? They say that high-fructose corn syrup is one of the worst things you can usually put into your body. Sugar is bad, but that corn syrup is horrible. Yet it, and a lot of other nasty multi-syllabic chemicals are found in all those foods in the center aisles of the grocery store. Why is that? Well, look no farther than our imperial federal government, and the corporate welfare state, in the guise of farm bills:

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

The author, Michael Pollan, goes on to lament some of the other nasty consequences of the farm bill, such as it creating such low corn prices that we’ve destroyed Mexico’s indigenous corn farming industry, which leads to northward immigration. Not to mention that having them rely on us for corn production has caused the tortilla price increases that I’ve mentioned here, because our new government intervention forces us to use our corn for ethanol, again increasing the price. (Note that I’m not missing the blind spot here. Increased corn prices due to the ethanol mandate will increase corn syrup prices, which will then make the food those poor Americans eat, the stuff that’s high in corn syrup, more expensive).

But go back to the original point. Our farm subsidies are designed such that they make unhealthy food options artificially cheap. Then, we tax sugar imports. Now, sugar isn’t the most healthy thing we can ingest, but it’s much better than corn syrup. But our government’s policies are making the incredibly unhealthy option cheap, artificially inflating the cost of the bad-but-not-horrible imported option, and the non-subsidized healthy options are expensive. It’s so far out of whack that to say it’s nonsensical is doing an injustice to good, honest nonsense.

If you think the government really wants you to be healthier, ask them why they don’t repeal farm subsidies? Maybe you’ll realize that they don’t have your best interests at heart, they’re looking to reward the people who get them elected. Farmers have more lobbying money than the health nuts, so they get their goods and— as usual— poor people get screwed.

Hat Tip: Reason

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

This is supposed to be good news?

Economics

Well…Social Security is set to go bankrupt one year later than estimated:

The trust fund for Social Security will be exhausted in 2041 and the Medicare trust fund in 2019, the trustees of the two programs said Monday. Both dates were one year later than previously estimated.

In their annual report on the financial health of the government’s two biggest benefit programs, the trustees said that slight reductions in projected benefits and slightly higher tax collections had extended the dates that the trust funds are projected to be depleted.

However, the trustees said both programs continue to face serious financial problems with the pending retirement of 78 million baby boomers. The report for the first timed triggered a Medicare funding warning that will require
President Bush to submit to Congress next year proposals for trimming Medicare costs.

And what was the title of the AP article? Social Security, Medicare: Good news. I am not joking. Social Security and Medicare are going to last one year longer than previously estimated and that is some how “good news.” Meanwhile, you are throwing your money down the drain. It’s gone…you’ll never see it again.

H/T: National Taxpayers Union

Jason Pye
http://jasonpye.com/

Who Suggested We Arm Everyone?

Government Regulation, Individual Rights, Keep and Bear Arms, The Nanny State

Well, nobody, really, but that’s the refrain we hear from the left in response to gun advocates who suggest CCW might have helped contain the massacre at Virginia Tech before 32 people were killed. We say “give responsible gun owners the freedom to carry concealed”. They hear “force a gun into every able-bodies citizen’s hand”.

In other words, they have a convenient strawman to argue against. And it’s not just left-wing bloggers, of course, it’s also left-wing Pulitzer Prize-winning pundits:

But it’s more than a little disconcerting to hear that so many adults also believe in superheroes. They must. Why else would they insist that the best way to prevent carnage of the sort that occurred last week at Virginia Tech is to put guns into every available hand? They’re indulging their childhood fantasies, remembering the movies in which the Caped Crusader or John Wayne instantly dispatched the bad guy.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of pro-gun people weigh in on this debate. In fact, I weighed in myself. So far I’ve seen absolutely nobody suggest that “arming everyone” would be a good idea. Nor have most pro-gun people said that it would definitively have improved the situation. In fact, I pointed out that allowing people on campus to carry doesn’t mean that they necessarily would have that day. In fact, I didn’t even claim that it would have stopped Cho, only that it could have.

But all this doesn’t matter. Cynthia Tucker doesn’t want to address the thought that responsible gun owners who went through the trouble of educating themselves about firearms, getting a CCW permit, and take care to leave their house armed might actually have a chance. So she completely dismisses that idea, and jumps into the “well, if everyone was carrying we’d have a firefight and carnage all around!” bandwagon. She’d rather leave everyone defenseless.

Of course, in her own personal life, she knows how to remain safe. As her father taught her:

When I moved to Atlanta just out of college, I told him I was going to buy a handgun. He strongly disapproved, believing I’d be more likely to get injured with my own gun than fend off an attacker with it. “You don’t need a gun,” he said. “You need to stay out of dangerous places.” I took his advice.

I assume by “dangerous places”, she’s talking about college campuses, fast food restaurants, post offices, etc, right? Because every student who woke up to go to class in Norris Hall that day thought they were headed to a safe place. The reason we need CCW is because there are no “safe” places, only those with relatively higher and lower risk. As we can see, even having a place declared a “gun-free zone” doesn’t mean it’s gun-free. This is increasing the need for self defense insurance plans, because in that environment, how do you prove self-defense or otherwise, on your own?

Who’s arguing for CCW? Well, crackpots like the NRA, who have apparently gone beyond the mandate that Tucker believes they should. It’s funny, I thought the NRA was trying to protect Americans’ right to keep and bear arms as described by the second amendment, not just to hunt or sport shoot. Tucker further shows her bias here:

That utterly irrational argument comes straight from the National Rifle Association, which long ago abandoned any pretense of representing the reasonable aims of hunters and sports shooters. The gun lobby now peddles an insane policy of making firearms as ubiquitous as cellphones.

Really? I’ve never seen that NRA poster. Although, a quick Google search showed me that there are about 196 million cellphone users in the USA, and about 200 million guns. Perhaps people carrying the latter would help stop the loud-talkers using the former from interrupting my dinner in a nice restaurant?

The gun control advocates won’t stand up against the argument for freedom. Thus, they argue a different sort of coercion, that we shove a gun into every hand in America. I’m not arguing that we should arm everyone. All I’m arguing is that people should be allowed the freedom to carry, in order to protect themselves. It’s their own choice whether they wish to exercise that freedom. Most of those that I’ve met who exercise their freedom know the level of responsibility they’re taking on, and they don’t need a flippant journalist to treat them like children. Even if that journalist did win a Pulitzer.

Hat Tip: McQ from QandO

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

Sheryl Crow’s Dumb Idea

Environment

The BBC is reporting that singer Sheryl Crow has come up with her own solution to global warming:

Singer Sheryl Crow has said a ban on using too much toilet paper should be introduced to help the environment.

Crow has suggested using “only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required”.\ “I have spent the better part of this tour trying to come up with easy ways for us all to become a part of the solution to global warming,” Crow wrote.

(…)

“Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating.

“I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting.”

Aside from the laughably absurd idea of taking scientific advice from someone who sings songs for a living, there is the equally absurd idea that limiting toilet paper use is going to have a significant impact on the environment.

Do you know where most of the greenhouse gases come from these days Sheryl ?

From coal fired power plants. Given that, if you really want to help the environment you should be lobbying to have the restrictions on construction of nuclear power plants lifted so we can generate electricity with almost no carbon footprint.

But, don’t worry, Sheryl’s got another idea if that toilet paper thing doesn’t work out:

Crow has also commented on her website about how she thinks paper napkins “represent the height of wastefulness”.

She has designed a clothing line with what she calls a “dining sleeve”.

The sleeve is detachable and can be replaced with another “dining sleeve” after the diner has used it to wipe his or her mouth.

So instead of throwing out the napkin, we wash the dining sleeve in the washing machine, thus using more power from those coal fired plants. Bright idea Sheryl.

It’s stuff like this that makes it so hard for me to take the current environmentalist fad seriously. They come up with these ridiculous suggestions designed to make people think they are having an impact on the world and ignore the obvious solutions that are staring them in the face.

Update: It’s been suggested in a comment that Crow wasn’t serious. Well, below the fold is a lengthy quote from the blog entry in question: » Read more

Doug Mataconis
http://www.belowthebeltway.com

Is Google Getting Too Big ?

Economics, Monopolies

In the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein writes about Google’s continued expansion:

Google is the quintessential business success story. Two bright young guys started with an idea, built a company around it and grew it into a $150 billion juggernaut that now dominates the Internet. It nudged aside rival Yahoo, challenged traditional media giants and frustrated the Web strategy of the once-invincible Microsoft. And it did it all fair and square.

First-quarter reports show how much Google has pulled ahead of the pack: a 69 percent increase in profit on a 63 percent increase in sales. The news came just days after Yahoo acknowledged that its profit had fallen 11 percent, sending its already-lagging stock down 12 percent. Reports from big newspaper chains were even more dismal.

Good news for Google, shareholders, and those of us who make daily use of the content that it provides, right ? Not according to Pearlstein:

But now, precisely because of its success, it is fair to ask if Google should be barred from furthering its dominance through acquisitions or collaborations. At issue are the recent purchases of YouTube, the leader in online video sharing, and DoubleClick, the leading broker of online advertising; in both instances Google used its gusher of profits to outbid rivals. There are also new joint ventures with Clear Channel, the giant radio broadcaster, and EchoStar, the satellite television operator.

There is no assertion by Pearlstein that Google has obtained any thing approaching monopoly power, and there is no evidence to support it. So why is it that Pearstein is advocating the idea of putting controls on how big Google can grow ? What is it precisely that Google has done wrong that warrants limiting its growth ? And, more importantly, just how does Pearstein aim to fathom the point at which Google, or any company, becomes “too big” ?

As I have noted before, the only type of monopoly that is harmful to consumers is a legal monopoly, one that is created by the state and whose position is protected by the state. The best example of this today is the United States Postal Service. If if you wanted to use another provider to deliver regular first-class mail, you cannot do it because the law forbids it. Google, on the other hand, is simply providing a product. You do not have to use it if you do not want to, and many people choose not to. However, due to the popularity of Google, it’s no surprise that many businesses use Google as a way to attract new customers. Some companies will even use a website like https://www.yourcompanyformations.co.uk/address/registered-office/ to change their office address in the hope it will attract more customers. Of course, apart from the location, the business website is also an important aspect. And Google has its own algorithm for deciding how to rank a particular website on its search. In order to rank high or get visibility on the first page, many businesses nowadays hire SEO agencies like DigiVisi to keep their website optimized.

As indicated, Google holds significant influence is the emerging field of search engine optimization. By increasing the visibility of a website or webpage, be it through a management service for gmb listings or through SEO boosting, companies are more likely to experience an increase in the quantity and quality of online traffic. Are you looking for ways to help your business rise through the Google search ranks? Reaching out to an SEO Newcastle specialist could help your company to improve its online presence.

Above all, the day that Google becomes a problem is not the day it becomes “too big” it is the day that it uses the power of the state to restrain competition.

Doug Mataconis
http://www.belowthebeltway.com
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