What Passes For Economic Policy In New York

In New York we have the highest taxes in the country.  Local progressives get to feel good about themselves because they think that the money goes to help the poor and downtrodden.  Yet somehow if you just look around you find out that despite the spending we have higher rates of poverty and homelessness than most anywhere else in the country, together with the very highest income inequality.  What gives?

It's a couple of things.  One that I have discussed on multiple occasions is that somehow we spend about double the national average per student on K-12 education to achieve bottom-of-the-barrel education results; and about double the national average per beneficiary on Medicaid to achieve no-better-than-average health results.  Another reason for high taxes in New York is what passes for economic policy in this state.

What passes for economic policy in New York consists of shooting ourselves in the foot with a gigantic shotgun.  Let's consider a couple of examples that have been in the news in the past few days.

The lead article in the business section of today's New York Times has the headline "Looking for Silver Linings: Losses Pile Up for Solar Companies, and Future May Be Stormy."   It seems that in recent days and weeks various companies in the solar business have reported big and growing losses, and their stocks have tanked.  Many may go out of business.  Essentially, reports the Times, all the companies have business models driven by some combination of government subsidies and high prices of competitive fossil-fuel-based energy.  But of course, recent months have seen plunging fossil fuel prices, and government subsidies for solar have seen some cutbacks as well (although not the principal federal tax credit, which has recently been renewed):

Many of the assumptions that underpin the financial models [of companies in the solar power business] are far from certain, analysts and experts say, and as market conditions, public policies and technologies evolve, the risks are becoming more evident. Cheap natural gas doesn’t help, making it harder for rooftop solar energy to compete in markets with low electric rates.

But, you ask, didn't the big government-backed solar panel makers like Solyndra go bust several years ago?  You'll remember Solyndra as the company that got a $500+ million federal handout as part of the "stimulus" in 2009, and then a big visit from President Obama in 2010 (Solyndra "is leading the way to a brighter and more prosperous future" said our President).  In 2011 Solyndra went bankrupt and the government took a total loss on its investment.  Other solar manufacturers that got their start with the 2009 stimulus also very publicly went bust around the same time.  How could this be an issue again now?

Easy.  While you weren't looking, a new round of government handouts launched a new crop of would-be solar power handout farmers in the past couple of years.  The pols learned exactly nothing from the Solyndra debacle.  The focus of the Times article is a company called SolarCity, chaired by the charismatic Elon Musk.  How's it going with them?

SolarCity’s revenue last year grew nearly 60 percent to $400 million from the year before. But its costs grew at much faster rate, leaving the company with an operating loss of $648 million for the year. . . .  But even more troubling, SolarCity’s debt levels are soaring as cash levels shrink. Last year, the company’s interest payments on its debt totaled nearly a quarter of its revenue.     

I guess that would put SolarCity's one-year GAAP loss around three-quarters of a bil.  What genius handout granter got this one off the ground?  You guessed it -- the State of New York!  It's actually Governor Cuomo's baby.  Just about a year and a half ago, in 2014, New York agreed to build these guys a gigantic factory in South Buffalo.  Motley Fool here has a description of the terms of the deal, which border on the unbelievable:

The state will actually both build the building SolarCity will be housed in as well as buy the equipment SolarCity designs for manufacturing. Construction costs allot for $350 million for the building and $400 million in equipment. . . .   Most notable in the agreement is that SolarCity's cost for using the $750 million capital expenditure New York is making is a whopping $1 per year for 10 years with an option to renew for another 10 years. Yes, you can read it here: Rent on the $750 million investment could total $20 over the next 20 years.  To put this subsidy into context, with no direct benefit for the state for its $750 million investment, the subsidy amounts to $153,061 per job outlined in the agreement.     

Oh, by the way, today's Times article nowhere even mentions the $750 million New York State handout in its long treatment of the finances of SolarCity.  Meanwhile, as this company struggles near the brink of bankruptcy, the gigantic factory isn't even open yet!  It's scheduled to open later in the year.  For the other side of the story, here is Governor Cuomo's website touting this fiasco as a good idea.   Thousands of jobs will be created!!!!!  I wonder if they'll actually ever hire a single person to work in the factory before the company goes out of business?

Can we top that one as brain-dead economic policy in New York?  Yes, there is a contender from here in the City -- the ongoing development of "affordable housing."  The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday has a big article on the opening of a new development in Brooklyn called 250 Ashland Place.  It's a big new high-rise with 568 apartments out near the new Barclay's Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  

This being New York, some 200 of the apartments don't go to the highest bidder as with a normal market, but rather are designated as "affordable."  Those apartments get much lower rents and are allocated by a lottery.  The Journal gives some information on the amounts of the discounts that go to the lottery winners: market rents start at $2800/month for a studio and $6500/month for a three-bedroom; "affordable" rents start at $801 for a studio, with the most expensive "affordable" three-bedroom at $3649.  In round numbers, it's about 70% off for the lottery winners.

So these lucky lottery winners must be poor, right?  Not at all.  Thirty-three of the two- and three-bedroom "affordable" apartments are to be available to "a family of four with incomes up to $172,600 per year."  The $172,600 would be more than triple the U.S. median income, and in the top 6% in Brooklyn.  And if you have a family of six or more, you can still qualify for this lottery with income over $200,000!  But don't worry.  These income criteria were set back during the Bloomberg term, and our new progressive Mayor de Blasio is just as outraged about them as you are.  So, in the never-ending quest to achieve perfect fairness and justice among all people, de Blasio has lowered the income criteria for "affordable" units in new projects created during his tenure.  From now on, you can't get in with a family of four if your income is above $142,400.  Take that, plutocrats!

I really think that these people just can't add.  How anyone could think that the government can make its citizens better off by giving free three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar factories to Elon Musk, or providing subsidized apartments to people in the top 6% of the income distribution, is just beyond me.  Somehow, whatever calculations they are doing treat the expenditure of public funds as something completely free.  So, a couple of years from now, when you find yourself driving past a vast, almost-new-but-completely-abandoned factory south of Buffalo, and wondering what it is, now you'll know.  And you'll understand a little more why taxes are so high in New York.  

Is Donald Trump Actually An "Anti-Establishment" Candidate?

The New Hampshire primary is now behind us, and the news sources are filled even more than before with the narrative that the voters are favoring the "anti-establishment" candidates.  On the Republican side, supposedly that means New Hampshire winner Donald Trump.  But is Trump really "anti-establishment" in any meaningful sense?

Certainly one could take the position that Trump is not part of the establishment in the sense that he has not previously held elective office.  But he has attended lots of big fund-raisers, written lots of big checks to office-holders, and hobnobbed with all the big insiders of both parties.  That sounds rather "establishment" to me, even for someone who has not held office.  And even if we accept that not having held office means being "outside" the establishment, being outside the establishment is not the same as being anti-establishment.  For me, to be anti-establishment, a candidate should be demonstrably against many of the bad things that the establishment is for.  What makes the establishment the establishment is its support for the continuation of the corrupt status quo of overspending, subsidies, handouts and favors of which its members are beneficiaries.  An anti-establishment candidate would be one who is willing to stand up and oppose the interests that are bleeding the public dry with these subsidies, handouts, and favors.  Where is Trump on that?

I can't find any reason to think that Trump is anti-establishment in this sense.  Has he said anything about how he would push back against ongoing growth of the government, seek to rein in spending, or cut any program?  Nothing meaningful that I can find.  The Iowa caucuses were the perfect opportunity to draw a line in the sand against one of the most wasteful and corrupt of all federal programs, the ethanol mandate.  Cruz actually did it, and still won the caucuses.  Trump?  He seems to have avoided saying anything specific, but gave plenty of signals to indicate that he would not rock the ethanol boat.  Here's Breitbart News quoting Trump on November 13:

“I went out to see some of the folks on the ethanol. Good stuff and great people, put a lot of people to work out here. I just want to thank them, they’re doing an amazing job.”

Go to the "Issues" section of Trump's web site, and you find almost nothing specific in the way of policy proposals.  In the one and only proposal that I would actually say is on net somewhat to his credit, he has a fairly detailed proposal to simplify the tax code and lower rates.  But even that one is marginally dishonest in that it likely doesn't remotely add up without eliminating big deductions like the ones for home mortgage interest and charitable contributions.  There's no specific mention of that. 

Out of the hundreds of issues in which the federal government is involved, Trump's web site only sets forth positions on five: tax policy (already discussed), U.S./China trade (he somehow thinks that government-to-government "deals" are what makes trade beneficial), reform of the VA (socialized medicine will work if only we have better management!), immigration, and Second Amendment rights (he's for them!! -- as is every other Republican candidate).   How about a few of the dozens of other areas where the federal government has a vast footprint and needs to be reined in: overspending, ridiculous over-regulation, out-of-control EPA, Fannie and Freddie back to re-inflating the housing market, a trillion dollars of annual anti-poverty spending without ever reducing poverty by a single soul, public housing designed to trap recipients in a lifetime of poverty, education handouts used to entrench unions and keep kids trapped in failing schools, a budget that ratcheted up a trillion per year with the "stimulus" and then somehow never went back down, entitlements and Obamacare heading into socialist Ponzi-scheme-style death spirals, etc., etc., etc.  Sorry, nothing about any of these issues. 

I don't know about you, but if somebody is running for President and doesn't at least specifically say that he is going to push back against the federal beast, I'm going to believe that he's not going to push back and he's just going to allow the cancerous growth to continue.  

When Trump does address (in speeches) the vast remainder of the government beyond his few specific proposals, it's to say that he knows how to make deals and can manage the bureaucracy better than the next guy.  Well, here's some news on the fundamental difference between running a business and running the government.  When you're running a business, you set up business units, and you can measure them by whether they are showing a profit or a loss.  If a unit shows continual losses, you get rid of it and fire the people -- perhaps the thing Trump is best known for.  In government, the whole idea is to lose more and more and more money.  It's called growing your budget.  In government, that's the goal for every single person who is in it.  Hey, it's for the public good!  There is no specific line that can tell you when you have gone over from public benefit to waste, and every single voice you will hear is advocating for more spending on every program.

Sure, there are a few things in Trump's proposals on trade and immigration that will discomfit a few Republican insiders.  In the overall picture, these things are nibbling around the edges.  The signal I take from Trump is that the vast corpus of the federal beast is safe with him against major attack.  I'd call that "establishment."

More On The Epidemic Of Orthodoxy Enforcement In The World Of "Science"

Back in December I wrote a post highlighting a rather extraordinary email by the head of the National Association of Scholars, Peter Wood, opposing the election of Martha McNutt to head the National Academy of Sciences.  McNutt has most recently been Editor in Chief of Science magazine, one of the premier peer-reviewed journals that give voice to budding scientists by publishing their work.   But, as Wood documented in his email, McNutt has repeatedly used her perch at the helm of Science, not to advance scientific knowledge through the scientific method as generally understood, but rather repeatedly to squelch challenges to entrenched orthodoxy in multiple areas, all in the service of careers, funding, and regulatory regimes that had come under threat from evidence adverse to the prevailing favored scientific hypotheses.  Wood gave three examples of areas where McNutt has made it her business to be sure that adverse evidence and counter-hypotheses cannot get a hearing: (1) the so-called linear no-threshhold dose-response model, which is the basis for much of the regulation of radiation and nuclear energy, and which is subject to substantial research that would appear to invalidate it; (2) the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution, which is the basis of many costly EPA regulations (including the so-called Clean Power Plan, currently in the works), and where there have been credible allegations of misconduct by researchers on whom EPA relies; and, of course, (3) the so-called consensus model of climate change, where McNutt assures that Science will not publish anything questioning it in any way.

To get an idea just how far McNutt has moved from science to policy advocacy, take a look at the op-ed she published in Science back in July 2015.  Hey, if you're Editor in Chief, you have no problem getting your stuff published -- even if it is completely out of your own field, and even if the subject is explicitly political rather than scientific.  Excerpt:

The time for debate has ended. Action is urgently needed. The Paris-based International Energy Agency recently announced that current commitments to cut CO2 emissions [known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)] from the world’s nations are insufficient to avoid warming the entire planet by an average of more than 2°C above the preindustrial level. To set more aggressive targets, developed nations need to reduce their per-capita fossil fuel emissions even further, and by doing so, create roadmaps for developing nations to leapfrog technologies by installing low-CO2–emitting energy infrastructure rather than coal-fired power plants as they expand their energy capacity.

There is no other candidate challenging McNutt to head the NAS.  So come July, barring some huge unforeseen events, she'll have the position.

But there's another premier science journal, called Nature.  How about them?  The answer is that they have sunk just as low.  The most recent issue has an article by Stephan Lewandowsky and Dorothy Bishop, titled "Research Integrity: Don't Let Transparency Damage Science."  L&B explicitly advocate that it's OK for people calling themselves scientists to refuse to share data and methods with people they don't like or trust.  Indeed, according to L&B, lots of people seeking access to scientists' data and methods are not acting in good faith, but rather are engaged in "harassment."  And by the way, of course the people that "scientists" don't like or trust are inevitably the ones who challenge the orthodox hypotheses.  A few excerpts from L&B:

Many organized attacks call for more data, often with the aim of finding an analysis method that makes undesirable results go away. . . .      Even when data availability is described in papers, tension may still arise if researchers do not trust the good faith of those requesting data, and if they suspect that requestors will cherry-pick data to discredit reasonable conclusions. . . .  [S]ocial media and online comments also offer an easy way to inject biased, incorrect or misleading information.

There's plenty more.  The basic idea is to give cover to any researcher to restrict the sharing of data and methods to only friends who can be trusted not to undermine favored policy prescriptions and the ongoing flow of government money.  In case it's not obvious, by the way, Lewandowsky is principally known as an orthodoxy-enforcer in the climate change area.

The blogosphere over the past several days has plenty of appropriate reaction to this drivel from Lewandowsky and Nature.  Judith Curry has a long post at her Climate, Etc. blog, titled "Violating the norms and ethos of science."    Her thoughts on how so-called scientists could go so far astray as to think it's OK to refuse to share data and methods:

Careerism leads a scientist not to want to have their research be challenged or audited, for fear of damage to their reputation that is shallowly based on such things as publication numbers, funding, memberships on prestigious boards, press releases and citation numbers (rather than an interest in learning and making meaningful contributions that advance science).  Policy advocates/activists do not want to see their science challenged (or the science of their political allies), for fear that the challenge will diminish their policy and political objectives.  Challenges from someone on the ‘other side’ of the policy/political debate are regarded as especially objectionable, since their motives are ‘different’.  As a result, we are seeing an epidemic of ‘activism that abuses science as a weapon.’       

Perhaps the most interesting part of Curry's post is a link she provides to another guy named Paul Mathews, who has managed to make a record of a number of comments that appeared on the Nature site and then were deleted, supposedly for violating Nature's policies in some respect.  For example, there was this comment from a guy named Brad Keyes:

The above article is a heinously antiscientific attempt to make excuses
for obscurantism, deletionism and Phil Jonesism (“Why should I make my
data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong
with it?”) Dear Lewandowsky and collaborator (whose name I’ve forgotten),
do yourselves a favor and wake up to the fact that THE MIDDLE AGES ARE
OVER. You can either be priests or scientists. Not both.

Plenty more such deleted comments can be found at Curry's post, or by following her links.

The unbelievably sad truth is that the leading science journals and government science agencies (like NAS) today are far more in the business of orthodoxy enforcement than science.  The journals have literally no excuse why they do not require on-line archiving of all data as a condition to publication.  But they don't.  We are left to rely on the internet and interested volunteers to continue the lonely search for truth.  Surprisingly, they're doing a remarkably good job.

Is The Mass Hysteria About Climate Starting To Dissipate?

Immerse yourself in the Democratic Party/Mainstream Media/Manhattan bubble, and you almost certainly have the impression that all is going swimmingly in the ongoing battle to "save the planet" by forcing others to use less energy (while you fly around on your private jet).  Hey, everybody agrees that "climate change" is the hugest, most existential problem the world has ever faced!  And also everybody in the world just agreed to the big Paris non-treaty!  Here is Obama in the State of the Union last month:

“Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it,” Obama said. “You’ll be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.”       

And any mainstream media outlet worth its salt publishes multiple articles every month on why it's the "hottest [something] ever" and shaming anyone who dares to disagree.  So, is anything changing, particularly on the political front?

I would say that the first fissures on the political front had appeared as early as 2009, when the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus was quoted as saying that "Global warming is a politician's myth."  But, you say, the Czech Republic is a tiny country.  Well, next came India.  Nobody could call them tiny.  The new Prime Minister Narendra Modi, elected in 2014, started talking about India's "right to growth" -- unsubtle code for a plan to use a lot more energy from the cheapest sources available (otherwise known as coal).  In May 2015 the Guardian quoted Prakash Javadekar, Indian Minister of Environment and Forests, as follows:

Our emissions will grow because we are not developed and we have a right, every person on this Earth has a right, to develop. If today the world is 0.8C warmer [than it was in pre-industrial times], it is not my fault.    

Now we're not talking fissures, but big cracks.  An article just yesterday in the increasingly appalling Scientific American asserts that "India is becoming increasingly anti-science."   Well, guys, since when is saying "we have a right to develop" "anti-science"?  Do you really think that you can shame India into keeping a billion or so people in abject poverty in order to stroke your precious Western environmental sensibilities (while you yourself continue to fly around on your private jet)?  I for one would not see India backing down any time soon.

And now how about the latest news out of Australia?  Today's Sydney Morning Herald reports that the organization known as CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) has announced some 350 upcoming layoffs due to government budget cuts, with the layoffs apparently including most or all of those dedicated to researching issues of the climate.  The Herald quotes what it calls "one senior research scientist" as saying "Climate will be all gone, basically."  OK, I'm sure he's exaggerating, but it's still the first sign anywhere of a serious cutback on the government-funded climate parasites.  Well, boys, you said the science was "settled," so what's the need to spend billions on further research?

And meanwhile, has anything changed in the United States?  Consider this:  four years ago I went to a fundraiser for Romney, and was appalled to hear him blathering on about how seriously he took climate change and how he was somehow going to save the planet as President.  And before him, McCain in 2008 had equally drunk the Kool-Aid.  Today?  It's becoming increasingly likely that the Republican candidate is going to be one of the three of Trump, Cruz and Rubio -- and all three of them have said, at the least, that they are not going to allow the American economy to be damaged by the futile crusade to restrict carbon emissions.  For example, here is Marco Rubio in response to a question from Jake Tapper of CNN at the September 16 debate:

We're not going to make America a harder place to create jobs in order to pursue policies that will do absolutely nothing, nothing to change our climate.

Cruz went so far as to organize a big hearing in the Senate back in December at which a number of dissenters from the climate orthodoxy got to present some real evidence.  And Trump?  He has famously tweeted that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to put American manufacturers out of business.

So here in the bubble, it may seem to the New York Times and the rest of the Manhattanites that not much has changed.  But then, we have long known that they are not very good at getting outside and observing what is going on.

Third-Party Pay Health "Coverage" Meets The Real World

One of the accepted propositions of modern progressivism, on which it is difficult to find dissent in the precincts that I inhabit, is that in any "decent" society, everybody "should" have healthcare "coverage."  I put the word "coverage" in quotes because that word is often intentionally used by advocates to create confusion with the very different idea of insurance.  The word "coverage" gives the impression that somehow magically somebody else will take care of all of your expenses in the medical area, and you can consume as much medical care as you feel like while paying nothing.  And we come to a world where some large majority of people have healthcare "coverage" that takes care of not just major and unexpected expenses like a hospital stay or a heart attack, but also all kinds of routine and ongoing expenses like routine checkups, doctor visits, and prescription drugs.  Nobody in their right mind would buy insurance for such things absent massive government arm-twisting (in the form of tax-deductibility for employer-provided "coverage" as well as Obamacare mandates).  Would you buy insurance for the cost of your daily lunch?  As I wrote in that linked article (from 2013), in a world of third-party pay for routine expenditures, "you can be sure that [people] will buy the most expensive options and that the cost will zoom out of control."

In the medical arena, people have been pointing out the problematic incentives of third-party pay for a long while.  But it seems only in the last few years that medical providers like hospitals and pharmaceutical companies have perfected their pricing strategies to get the absolute last dollar out of the third-party payers like government and insurance companies.  Two examples recently came to my attention in my personal life, that I thought I should share with readers.

The first involves the former Official Manhattan Contrarian Summer Intern, who was my research assistant for this blog in the summer of 2014.  Today she is off attending the University of Chicago.  A few months ago, she fainted briefly while at school.  It turns out that she had also fainted a couple of times previously, in circumstances where she had let herself become a little dehydrated.  On those occasions she had thought little of it, and hadn't gone to a doctor or hospital.  But this time the U of C packed her off to their affiliate University of Chicago Medical Center.  With a well-insured (or "covered") warm body in their clutches, the hospital staff took the opportunity to run up every expense that their creative minds could think of, and then a few more.   The bill was $6000.  And the diagnosis?  "Nothing wrong that we can find."  

In this instance, the insurance company negotiated the bill down to about half that.  The parents got a bill for a co-pay of $75, which they gladly paid.  But do you get an idea of why health "coverage" may be getting so pricey?

The second example involves one of my own daughters.  Several months ago she jumped out of a tree (don't ask what she was doing in the tree) and landed the wrong way on one of her feet.  By the next morning, the foot was swollen and painful to walk on.  She hobbled over to the very fancy new "urgent care" center in our neighborhood in Manhattan, run by a hospital system known as North Shore/LIJ (currently in the process of changing their name to Northwell), and made the mistakes of first telling them that she had insurance and then allowing them to examine her without agreeing to a price in advance.  They took an x-ray, and, after a wait of a couple of hours she spent about 5 minutes with a physician, who evaluated the x-ray.  He said that it was not clear whether the bone needed to be set, and he did not treat her; but he recommended that she see an orthopedist promptly.  A couple of days later she got an appointment with an orthopedist, who also recommended that no treatment was necessary.  However, he advised her to keep weight off the foot and it would heel within a few weeks.  Sure enough, it did.

The bill from the orthopedist was about $400.  Expensive, but hey, this is Manhattan.  The bill from the urgent care center was $4700.  My daughter has insurance through her job, and again, the insurance company negotiated the bill down, in this case to about $2600, of which they paid about $1300.  That left a remainder of about $1300 that consists of various deductibles and co-pays applicable to various parts of the bill. 

I don't know about you, but I live in Manhattan and pay outrageous Manhattan prices for everything, and still $4700 -- or even $2600 -- struck me as rather wildly out of line for a visit that involved five minutes of doctor time evaluating an x-ray and no actual treatment of any kind.  

Meanwhile, I have recently become aware of a new kind of walk-in medical clinic springing up around our area, catering to an uninsured clientele that pays cash on the spot.  So in recent weeks I walked into a couple of those, described the circumstances of my daughter's visit to the urgent care center, and asked what their price would be for the same service to an uninsured patient walking in and paying cash.  The two were Union Square Urgent Care, on 14th Street, and CityMD, on 23rd Street.  In both cases their answer was the same:  $185.

I would be 100% sure that no individual paying out of his or her own pocket has ever paid North Shore/LIJ the $4700 -- or even the $2600 -- for a visit of this type.  Very few people would have that kind of money for an unexpected expense of this type, and the few who did would rightly refuse to pay it.  These numbers are purely picked out of the air by the hospital to see what they can game out of the insurance company, and in circumstances where if the insurance company refuses to pay the hospital knows that the insured will first blame the insurance company rather than the hospital.

The $185 price of the walk-in clinics is a clear demonstration that a functioning market of people paying with their own money has no trouble finding a reasonable price.  Sure, some people can't pay even that.  That's why there's charity in the world.  Or do you think that replacing "third-party pay" with "single payer" can suddenly magically do away with the phenomenon that everybody games whatever system there is to their own advantage?  Good luck with that! 

How To Fix The Problem Of Government Consensus Science

It's just eleven days ago on January 20 that I posted my first book review on this blog, of "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz; and now just nine days after that on January 29 the Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed on the subject of the book.  Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic co-authored the op-ed, which is titled "The Food Pyramid Scheme."

Like Nina's book, the op-ed describes how our government in 1980 issued dietary guidelines promoting a low-fat diet to then 220 million Americans, even though the science supporting such guidelines was known to be weak at best and plenty of evidence was available even at that time to suggest that the recommendations were unsound.

Scientists should have known in 1980 that the recommendation to cut fat was unsound.  Large clinical trials at the time did not support the theory, according to a systematic review published last year in the cardiology journal Open Heart.  "It seem incomprehensible that dietary advice was introduced for 220 million Americans," the authors wrote, "given the contrary results."   

So how did a counter-productive diet get foisted on the American people in the face of such adverse evidence?  Easy.  A small group of avid promoters of the high-fat-diet/heart disease hypothesis had managed to get control of the principal government funding institutes, and of the peer review process at the key journals.  Dissenters got cut off from funding and from publication.

Meanwhile, the bad consensus science has proceeded to do untold damage to the health of the American people.  Teicholz and Nissen describe how even as new evidence has continued to come forth showing that low fat diets do not improve heart disease outcomes (and may well have much responsibility for the increase in obesity and diabetes), little has been done to change the government's guidelines:

What's disturbing is how little this new evidence has been heeded.  The guidelines continue to insist that Americans choose reduced-fat dairy products like skim milk.  But even epidemiological evidence now contradicts this advice, and a randomized trial published last month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people eating full-fat dairy, including whole milk, showed a number of better heart-disease outcomes.

So what is to be done?  Teicholz and Nissen favorably endorse, with some recommended modifications, an upcoming "independent" government review, just funded by Congress, and to be conducted by a somewhat but not very different crowd from the people who got us into this mess.  While generally supporting the independent review concept, Teicholz and Nissen do suggest that a "disinterested referee" be appointed to lead the review, "from outside the field of nutrition."

Well, maybe that will make some difference.  But how about this idea:  the government should entirely get out of the business of meddling in the diet of the American people.  Any next round of recommendations to come out of the government is very likely to be just as wrong as the last round.  It's in the nature of giving some people government authority to lord it over others that the ones given the powers will lose all humility and be overtaken by the thrill of ordering other people around based on what they believe to be their own superior knowledge and expertise.  It's just one more example of why socialism doesn't work.  See also, climate science.