Having recently read David Kessler’s book The End of Overeating and Michael Pollan’s essay Big Food vs. Big Insurance, I have a proposal for how to address a major health care issue.  Create a “Calorie added tax” that applies to prepared food served in restaurants.  Whether it’s based on the number of calories in the food served or is truly analogous to a Value added tax, it seems like it would be a relatively straightforward way to address the issues that Kessler and Pollan raise.

It appears that the biggest issue with our public health in the United States today is that we are consuming too much unhealthy food – for which calorie count is a useful proxy – and this is leading to a whole series of obesity-related problems.  In addition to Kessler’s observations about the food-production industry’s role in engineering food for maximum palatability, leading to overconsumption, I’ve heard Adam Drewnowski observe that while historically less healthy food had a higher cost per calorie, today the reverse is increasingly true (as Pollan notes about government corn subsidies leading to the increased use of high fructose corn syrup).  Generally speaking, healthier food now costs more per calorie, so people acting in their economic self-interest have a less healthy diet.

If a calorie tax rewards both producers and consumers for fewer calories being served and eaten, or the tax on those increased calories is used to offset the associated health costs of our societal overconsumption, then perhaps we can reverse in some measure the current cost per calorie relationship.

In practice there would be many details to work out:  What’s the definition of “prepared food”?  Is it just restaurants, or does prepared food purchased in a supermarket count?  Does cola purchased in a restaurant get the tax and cola purchased for consumption at home not?  How do you prevent it from being a regressive tax for low-income people who don’t have convenient access to healthier food?  While these may sound hard, states deal with these issues today on a regular basis when assessing sales tax.  It’s not perfect, but it can be made to work.

Is this likely to happen?  I doubt it.  I imagine that Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and many other industrial powerhouses would fight it vigorously.  But if the predictions of the experts are true, we could be on track for a major health-care crisis in the United States and other developed nations.

If you read this and are inclined to be judgmental about people who are overweight or eat too much unhealthy food, I encourage you to read Kessler’s book.  He makes a compelling case that overeating is a by-product of our food industry’s exploitation of humans’ evolutionary history, and that blaming people for this is not much more sensible than blaming people for the color of their hair.

"... and so, my advice to you students is to be born rich, white, and male.  And it doesn't really matter how hard you work in school or how many times you screw up, as long as you can rely on your family connections to keep getting you out of jams."

From Sotomayor Defends Ruling in Firefighters’ Bias Case - NYTimes.com (emphasis mine):

In his opening remarks to the nominee, [Oklahoma Senator Tom] Coburn apologized for the several outbursts by anti-abortion protesters since the hearings began. “Anybody who values life like I do and is pro-life recognizes that the way you change minds is not yell at people,” the senator said. “You love them.”

As has been widely reported, e.g. in On Nixon Tapes, Ambivalence Over Abortion, Not Watergate, recently released Oval Office tapes from January 1973 (after the Roe v. Wade decision was announced) record President Nixon saying the following:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white, or a rape.”

I’m sorry, but even in 1973 those were, shall we say, outdated views.  Or perhaps he was pandering to all those pro-choice racist voters?

Apparently one of the big criticisms of a government-run health insurance plan by its opponents is that it will drive private insurance companies out of business.  But given the presumption that a government-run plan is by nature more bureaucratic and less efficient and that a government-run plan won’t be able to cherry-pick its patients based on criteria like pre-existing conditions, what does this say about the cost structure of a private sector health insurance company if it can’t successfully compete with a government plan?

*RMTB = Riddle me this, Batman

For the past few weeks it has been in the interests of the key players to make the presidential election appear as close as possible:  The Obama campaign to ward off complacency, the McCain campaign to ward off despair, and the media to keep people watching.  That all ends tonight.

I have fond memories of going with my parents to watch them vote.  I loved the mechanical voting machines they had in New York, with the sliding privacy curtain controlled by the same big lever that recorded your votes and the dozens of small switches for individual candidates.  As a child I dreamed of the day that I’d be old enough to vote and pull those levers myself.  Sadly, I only got to do it once (or maybe twice) because when I reached voting age I was out of state at college and voting by absentee ballot. Then I moved to a state with paper ballots, initially the hole-punching kind and now the fill-in-the-oval kind.  Now at least I can appreciate that those mechanical machines were more prone to error and fraud than the ones based on paper ballots.

With my local voting authority moving to all-mail voting next February, I’m faced with the realization that next Tuesday will probably be the last time in my life that I go to a polling place to vote.  I’ve had the option to vote entirely by mail for years (“ongoing absentee voting” in local parlance) and yet I’ve made the choice whenever possible to make the journey to the polling place.  To me, the act of voting is a participatory effort and the ritual involved in making a journey to be with other community members matters.  So while I’ve never been nostalgic about waiting on line at the bank with my parents and I’m happy to be able to shop online whenever possible, I approach the coming election with a measure of regret that has nothing to do with what’s on the ballot.

Last year there was a closely contested city council race where I live.  Back then when I discussed this race with friends, several of them planned to vote for one of the candidates because they felt the candidate was more aligned with them on local issues, even if they had potentially strong disagreements with this candidate on broad, national issues.  “Why does it matter,” the logic went, “what they think about Supreme Court appointments or the like?  It’s not like they’re going to be in a position to exert influence on those issues.”

Now there’s a good chance that the next vice president of the United States will be someone who until two years ago was the mayor of a city less than half the size of the one in which this council race occurred.  This may be an exceptional occurrence, but today’s city councilor is tomorrow's state senator, and tomorrow’s state senator is the next day’s governor.

Continuing the thread of Wikipedia and politics, I recently made my second edit to Wikipedia, a small change to the entry for former U.S. Senator Roman Hruska.  (Here’s my first.)  I am certainly not an expert on Hruska, but his entry cited a noteworthy historical quote attributed to him and used as its source a random blog that itself cites no source.  This is beneath the standards of any reference work.

My little bit of web browsing did not turn up an online archive of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where the quote was supposedly uttered, but relying on Hruska’s New York Times obituary seems like a reasonable fallback and is still a clear improvement.

Now why was I looking up that quote in the first place?

In case you're tempted to believe by this week's events that political discourse in this country has always been in a perpetual downward spiral, it's worth revisiting the presidential election of 1884.

Wikipedia's article on this election perpetuates the apparently incorrect version of the story: "Blaine's supporters condemned Cleveland in the strongest of terms, singing 'Ma, Ma, Where's my Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha.'" In fact, the "Gone to the White House..." refrain was added by Cleveland supporters after he defeated Blaine in the election. This is of course surprising, as Wikipedia is known for the accuracy and impartiality of its articles on U.S. history and politics, as illustrated by the classic Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence.

Finding the repeated Obama-JFK comparisons tiresome, I started thinking about other interesting historical comparisons.  There's the McCain-Obama comparison to the fictional Vinick-Santos election, but comparing a real election to a Hollywood-imagined one is especially silly.

How about comparing John McCain to Bob Dole in 1996?  Consider these facts about Dole:

• He is a war hero who suffered serious, permanent injuries during his military service.
• He lost the nomination to George Bush (41) eight years before winning it.
• He was a long-time Republican senator known for reaching across the aisle to pass legislation.
• He was in his 70's when he won the nomination.
• He had to fend off serious challenges from the right to win the nomination, and his electoral loss was blamed in part by failure to inspire sufficient turnout among Christian conservative voters.
• He divorced his first wife and not long after married a significantly younger and more glamorous woman.

For the first time since 1992, I attended my local Democratic Party presidential caucus on Saturday.  I wasn't planning to attend, due to a conflict with ski lessons, but Snoqualmie Pass cooperated by closing due to heavy snow and my lesson was postponed. 

[That said, I much prefer a primary system as more inclusive, which adds personal irritation to the absurdity that is the February 19th Democratic primary whose results will be ignored.  I may vote anyway simply as a demonstration.]

I went to the caucus torn between the two front-runners, hoping that somebody there would say something that would make something click in one way or the other.  To my mind, either of the two are far superior to the alternatives on the issues that I think are important (foremost, appointments to the federal judiciary), so I'd be happy with either one.  That tends to lead me to focus on crystal ball issues like ability to get elected or to advance one's agenda once elected, but I prefer not to make decisions based on those simply because at this point they're too hard to predict with any accuracy (witness John Kerry in 2004).  On the substantive issues, I was really digging around the margins.  For example, I think Clinton has a better health care plan than Obama.

I'm annoyed by the cult of personality that appears to be surrounding Obama.  All of the comparisons to JFK are perhaps too apt, given that the JFK myth -- most notably, "Camelot" -- did not appear until he was no longer President.  For what it's worth JFK didn't get picked in his first chance to be on a national ticket, as VP in 1956.  I'm more annoyed by the implied threat from Obama supporters that they'll stay home if Clinton wins the nomination, given that the two are so close on the issues; I've not witnessed the same attitude in the opposite direction from Clinton supporters.

But when all was said and done, I thought about the Clintons' association with the DLC, and how I prefer "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party," as Howard Dean famously put it.  And I thought about Clinton's behavior on the Iraq war resolution.  Not so much how she voted on it, but how she has talked about the vote since.  It sounds more like trying to cover her bases than to stand for a principle or even advance an effective pragmatism.  So in the end I voted for Obama.

I know that these Deborah Solomon mini-interviews are edited to be devoid of context and that the title may be intended as a wry joke, but if he really said these things, John Bolton doesn't help his case (Questions for John Bolton, 4-Nov).  To wit:

"I think it’s almost beyond dispute that we were right to overthrow Saddam and the threat his regime posed."

"But even if there is global warming, the notion that you are going to reduce carbon emissions enough to have an impact on it is just — serious people don’t believe that’s true."

Almost without regard to whether you agree with these statements or not, phrases like "it's almost beyond dispute" and "serious people don't believe that's true" suggest a callous disregard for those who disagree with you.  Indeed, it suggests a person who's incapable of practicing... um, I know there's a word for it... wait for it... here it comes... diplomacy.

Jim highlighted in an email message to me a particularly funny recent article in the Onion: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence.  I don't normally use the blog as a link advertisement but this one is worth an exception.

Furthermore, Mr. Bennett said, abortion could be the key to reducing the number of sanctimonious hypocrites in America today: "Let's just abort all of those sanctimonious hypocrites before they start writing pompous books and hosting radio shows."