The Irony of "Public Health"

Obesity researchers then were eying sugary drinks with great suspicion. For decades, dietary guidelines had told Americans to cut back on fat. When it came to weight gain, most experts thought, a calorie is a calorie, no matter the source. Because fat has more than twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein, people should avoid fat. Then in the 1990s, some nutrition experts—watching obesity rates surge despite that advice—started rethinking carbohydrates.

Some scientists argued that eating carbs floods the bloodstream with sugar, which triggers a sharp release in the hormone insulin. Insulin brings blood sugar down and also tells the body’s cells to store fat rather than burning it. After a carb-led surge in blood sugar, the scientists argued, the outpouring of insulin is so great that within about two hours the blood sugar level crashes down to below normal. That low blood sugar makes people feel hungry, prompting them to eat more. By this line of thinking, a calorie wasn’t just a calorie.

At around the same time, Dr. Robert Lustig was arguing that sugar is not just another carbohydrate but is uniquely bad—he called it toxic. When the fructose in sugar hits the liver, he said, it sets off a hormonal chain reaction causing chronically high insulin levels that, over years, lead to obesity and diabetes.

Yet another group of researchers was showing that calories in beverages are not nearly as filling as calories in food. In one study, when people ate calories in food they compensated by eating less later in the day, but when they drank their calories they actually ate more food later.

In the end, it didn’t matter much to the health department whether soda leads to weight gain because it delivers unnecessary calories, or because those calories come from carbohydrates, or because those carbohydrates are sugar, or because the sugar is in liquid form. Sugary drinks make people fat.

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/17/coca_colas_sneaky_evil_politics_how_big_soda_twisted_race_and_used_the_koch_brothers_to_fight_a_tax/

The irony here - a public health advocate, cheering for the latest round of government manipulation, who won't tell the rest of the story:  government manipulation pushed the population towards sugar, and was the cause of the obesity epidemic and the resulting costs to the national health care coffers.  All those "life saving medications" we are paying for are largely those that treat hypertension, vascular diseases and the diabetes that causes them (and probably causes many cancers too).

The Koch brothers work to their own self interest by opposing government over reach, and make enemies in the process because so many love government over-reach.  Coke exists to sell a toxic product and probably cannot face up to that fact and survive.  Coke and the sugar industry did a fabulous job using the idiots in federal government to manipulate the public's perception of the risks of sugar ingestion whilst those same federal government idiots were telling the public to avoid fat. Neither Coke or any other citizen or business entity on their own did even a fraction of the damage in human health and suffering that our government has.

Will the government lovers ever acknowledge the shortened lives and suffering on their hands?  

What Is Competitiveness?

The third way business can and should improve U.S. competitiveness is by stopping self-interested actions that weaken the commons. Many such actions involve government relations and corporate lobbying. When firms seek special permits, tax breaks, or regulatory exceptions, they distort
competition and raise regulatory complexity. Each plea seems profitable to the company or industry involved. But taken together, such pleas have created an exception-riddled corporate tax code, a rat's nest of earmarks and subsidies in the federal budget, and delays in crucial legislation. Self-interested efforts by one company make others feel they must do the same. The overall cost and complexity of doing business rises. More important, in the long run, the resulting public cynicism erodes society's support for business. Business should advocate policies that improve the U.S. business environment rather than pursue narrow self-interest, which often backfires.

To understand why that's critical to America's future, we need to be clear on what competitiveness means. The U.S. is competitive to the extent that firms operating here can compete successfully in the global economy while supporting high and rising living standards for the average American. Doing one without the other means we aren't really competitive. A high-wage economy like the U.S. can achieve both only by being a highly productive location, one where firms can create innovative, distinctive products and produce them efficiently.

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/10/15/porter-rivlin-economy-fix/

Will - Too Damned Big

Too big to fail is too large to allow to remain un-broken up.
http://www.humanevents.com/2012/10/13/george-will-too-big-to-maintain/

Volts n Dolts

Each Chevy Volt sold thus far may have as much as $250,000 in state and federal dollars in incentives behind it – a total of $3 billion altogether, according to an analysis by James Hohman, assistant director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2011/12/are_volts_for_dolts_its_starti.html
Whatever your opinion, the facts show that Volts aren't exactly selling like hotcakes. It's not hard to see why. As Audi’s president of North America Johan de Nysschen said, "No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a Corolla.”

De Nysschen prefers diesels, and I'm with him. If our silly environmental regulations didn't discriminate against diesels, you'd be able to buy a VW Polo diesel for a little over $20,000 and get more than 70 miles per gallon. That would mean real savings from the first day, not theoretical savings over the life of the car.

And you don't have to plug it in - or subsidize its production.

But even further into the range only a dolt could love:
Meanwhile Chevy's still being encouraged by the feds to crank out giant gas-guzzling SUVs thanks to the federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, which discriminate against cars and in favor of so-called "light trucks."

Power Corrupts, Episode One Million

During the Clinton administration, when the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House became a favorite place for campaign contributors to rest their weary wallets, the infamous Johnny Chung made the observation that the White House was like a subway turnstile. You put your token in and you got inside.
Getting inside the White House was easy for billionaire investor George Kaiser, who made multiple visits to the White House and appeared at White House events next to administration officials. One of the prime investors in the green energy company Solyndra, Kaiser put quite a few tokens in the White House turnstile.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/583962/201109061842/SolarGate.htm

Give The Devil His Due

This is a perfect example of the phenomenon that once government has a particular power, it must be fought over.  Boeing would not be smart to stay out of the political arena; it must try to exert influence because to do so is 'easy money.'  But when you make a deal with the devil, you know the payment's coming due sooner or later ...

Boeing is not free to make its jets at the factory of its choosing, according to the National Labor Relations Board -- it must make them in Washington state, using union labor.
This extraordinary abridgement of economic freedom might suggest an anti-Boeing vendetta from President Obama, except that this administration's Export-Import Bank has subsidized Boeing with nearly $15 billion in loan guarantees in the past two years -- roughly three-quarters of all of Ex-Im's guarantees during that time.
This puts Boeing in an awkward position. The NLRB is surely overreaching in trying to block Boeing from making some of its 787s in South Carolina, a right-to-work state (NLRB calls this illegal retaliation against the machinists and aerospace workers union for its 2005 and 2008 strikes). In its effort to fight back, Boeing could be defanged by its reliance on big government. It's a cautionary tale for Obama's other corporate allies -- from the drug industry that benefits so much from Obamacare to the tech, agrichem, coal, and other industries that have benefitted from the president's corporatism.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/04/boeing-lives-big-government-dies-big-government#ixzz1KYv3NL00