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You don't have to tax corn. Removing subsidies would be more than enough. Oh, and the government should STFU about what it thinks is healthy. The last time i

You don't have to tax corn. Removing subsidies would be more than enough. Oh, and the government should STFU about what it thinks is healthy. The last time it tried to interfere with the market it told generations of kids to eat a pound of bread every day. Don't tax anything you think is "bad" and don't subsidize what you think is "good." If you absolutely must do something bring home-ec back to public schools. Teach kids how to cook. Then let them figure out on their own what they want to eat.

wahern 10y ago
> The last time it tried to interfere with the market OTOH, the first few times it interfered with the market they solved widespread nutritional deficiencies that were killing, crippling, and otherwise substantially harming hundreds of thousands of people every year. I'm speaking of the fortification programs: https://www.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fnic_uploads//45-55.pdf On balance I'd prefer they keep at it. Anyhow, the government was simply echoing the advice of the medical establishment. At worse they've merely been a few years behind those recommendation, which is nothing on the scale of a lifetime. If you have a beef, it's with he medical and nutritional sciences, which invested too much confidence in what should have been recognized as problematic research results.
- Consultant32452 10y ago
  >Anyhow, the government was simply echoing the advice of the medical establishment. No it absolutely wasn't. It was echoing the advice of the agriculture lobby. The medical establishment sent its information in and the FDA altered it. And guess what? The food guidelines from this year were manipulated by the agriculture lobby too. http://time.com/4130043/lobbying-politics-dietary-guidelines/ http://time.com/4130043/lobbying-politics-dietary-guidelines... I only skimmed your article, but it appears those instances were almost entirely labeling guidelines. Example: What constitutes "enriched" flour? I can see the value in that, but I hope it's clear that's very different from marketing enriched flour via the government provided education system.
  - wahern 10y ago
    You said that the gov't "told generations of kids to eat a pound of bread every day." That seemed clearly a reference to the food pyramid and similar guidelines which recommended relative proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Those recommendations were largely reflective of the medical consensus, such as it was--i.e. too much group think and too much reliance on epidemiological methodologies rather than investigatory science. Yes, the USDA is responsive to the agricultural lobby. So what? At the end of the day it doesn't matter how or why they make their recommendations, but the substance and effect of those recommendations. And my point is that in the long-term the general guidance of the USDA has reflected, more than anything else, the medical consensus. Obviously it doesn't only reflect that, but everything is effected by lobbying, even the medical consensus. And my larger argument is that if you examine its long-term track record, on the whole it has been positive, at least in the context of nutritional policy. Yes, the USDA's fortification program was largely voluntary. So were its more modern recommendations. Sometimes their recommendations weren't voluntary, like guidelines for federally funded school lunch programs. But the same applies to their fortification programs--those school lunch guidelines also mandate fortified foodstuffs. Also, the fortification programs involved direct and indirect subsidies, which is why most basic foodstuffs (grains, salt) at retail were fortified, at least until the organic craze. I respond because I'm tired of the narrative that when government does something stupid the answer should just be to remove government from the equation. That's not rational. In every context we should endeavor to make informed and well-reasoned judgments based on a) context, b) facts, and c) some rough assessment of our priorities. Unfortunately we've forgotten how to incorporate those three things into our discourse. We don't understand context because we reframe every issue as some ideological battle about government. We don't understand facts because we're too lazy to root them out, and too lazy to assess their relevance and strength. And we suck at agreeing on priorities because, similar to context, we confuse the means with the end--that is, we seem to think our ultimate goal is to refashion government to fit some conceptual model, rather than to refashion particular laws and agencies to best meet some quantifiable goal, like a lower incidence of diabetes. This retreat and resort to ideology and abstract modeling is not only a political pathology, but arguably it has been the problem with nutritional science. For example, when I mention "epidemiological methodologies" above I'm implying, among other things, that we committed a category error: too much salt might be "causative" of high blood pressure on a population wide scale, but on an individual scale it doesn't cause anything in most people, and the particular issue in the subset of the population responsive to high salt intake wasn't something you'd expect given the large population studies. The population-wide mechanism was empirically sound (lower average salt consumption, improve average outcomes) but not reflective of the underlying pathologies at the micro-scale and ultimately suboptimal. IOW, yes, if _everybody_ reduced salt consumption to some common recommended level then population-wide health could improve. But there's a better equilibrium to be found by understanding the details and taking a more nuanced approach, allowing us to improve health even more. Likewise, maybe we might all be better off on average if the USDA disappeared overnight. But perhaps there's a better equilibrium where the USDA still has a role. We can't know without making a careful assessment, and continually re-making that assessment. Let's stop being lazy. Let's dig into the details. It's difficult and frustrating but there's really no better way. At the end of the day, government will never go away. Somebody will always rebuild the bureaucracy. The only sane long-term strategy is to stay engaged.

wahern 10y ago

> The last time it tried to interfere with the market OTOH, the first few times it interfered with the market they solved widespread nutritional deficiencies that were killing, crippling, and otherwise substantially harming hundreds of thousands of people every year. I'm speaking of the fortification programs: https://www.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fnic_uploads//45-55.pdf On balance I'd prefer they keep at it. Anyhow, the government was simply echoing the advice of the medical establishment. At worse they've merely been a few years behind those recommendation, which is nothing on the scale of a lifetime. If you have a beef, it's with he medical and nutritional sciences, which invested too much confidence in what should have been recognized as problematic research results.

Consultant32452 10y ago
>Anyhow, the government was simply echoing the advice of the medical establishment. No it absolutely wasn't. It was echoing the advice of the agriculture lobby. The medical establishment sent its information in and the FDA altered it. And guess what? The food guidelines from this year were manipulated by the agriculture lobby too. http://time.com/4130043/lobbying-politics-dietary-guidelines/ http://time.com/4130043/lobbying-politics-dietary-guidelines... I only skimmed your article, but it appears those instances were almost entirely labeling guidelines. Example: What constitutes "enriched" flour? I can see the value in that, but I hope it's clear that's very different from marketing enriched flour via the government provided education system.
- wahern 10y ago
  You said that the gov't "told generations of kids to eat a pound of bread every day." That seemed clearly a reference to the food pyramid and similar guidelines which recommended relative proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Those recommendations were largely reflective of the medical consensus, such as it was--i.e. too much group think and too much reliance on epidemiological methodologies rather than investigatory science. Yes, the USDA is responsive to the agricultural lobby. So what? At the end of the day it doesn't matter how or why they make their recommendations, but the substance and effect of those recommendations. And my point is that in the long-term the general guidance of the USDA has reflected, more than anything else, the medical consensus. Obviously it doesn't only reflect that, but everything is effected by lobbying, even the medical consensus. And my larger argument is that if you examine its long-term track record, on the whole it has been positive, at least in the context of nutritional policy. Yes, the USDA's fortification program was largely voluntary. So were its more modern recommendations. Sometimes their recommendations weren't voluntary, like guidelines for federally funded school lunch programs. But the same applies to their fortification programs--those school lunch guidelines also mandate fortified foodstuffs. Also, the fortification programs involved direct and indirect subsidies, which is why most basic foodstuffs (grains, salt) at retail were fortified, at least until the organic craze. I respond because I'm tired of the narrative that when government does something stupid the answer should just be to remove government from the equation. That's not rational. In every context we should endeavor to make informed and well-reasoned judgments based on a) context, b) facts, and c) some rough assessment of our priorities. Unfortunately we've forgotten how to incorporate those three things into our discourse. We don't understand context because we reframe every issue as some ideological battle about government. We don't understand facts because we're too lazy to root them out, and too lazy to assess their relevance and strength. And we suck at agreeing on priorities because, similar to context, we confuse the means with the end--that is, we seem to think our ultimate goal is to refashion government to fit some conceptual model, rather than to refashion particular laws and agencies to best meet some quantifiable goal, like a lower incidence of diabetes. This retreat and resort to ideology and abstract modeling is not only a political pathology, but arguably it has been the problem with nutritional science. For example, when I mention "epidemiological methodologies" above I'm implying, among other things, that we committed a category error: too much salt might be "causative" of high blood pressure on a population wide scale, but on an individual scale it doesn't cause anything in most people, and the particular issue in the subset of the population responsive to high salt intake wasn't something you'd expect given the large population studies. The population-wide mechanism was empirically sound (lower average salt consumption, improve average outcomes) but not reflective of the underlying pathologies at the micro-scale and ultimately suboptimal. IOW, yes, if _everybody_ reduced salt consumption to some common recommended level then population-wide health could improve. But there's a better equilibrium to be found by understanding the details and taking a more nuanced approach, allowing us to improve health even more. Likewise, maybe we might all be better off on average if the USDA disappeared overnight. But perhaps there's a better equilibrium where the USDA still has a role. We can't know without making a careful assessment, and continually re-making that assessment. Let's stop being lazy. Let's dig into the details. It's difficult and frustrating but there's really no better way. At the end of the day, government will never go away. Somebody will always rebuild the bureaucracy. The only sane long-term strategy is to stay engaged.