In Defense of Obama

This week, President Obama announced that he was ending NASA's Constellation program to return a man to the moon in the current budget and turning manned space flight over to commercial companies. The project was chronically underfunded by the Bush Administration (who was the administration who developed the plan). Although it is not something that I know a whole lot about, having gone to school in Houston with a lot of friends whose parents worked at Johnson Space Center (as in, "Houston, we have a problem"), the Facebooks were atwitter today...or something like that.

On one good friend's wall, I wrote the following. Although this happens to be about manned space flight, it could just as easily describe the situation that Obama finds himself in when trying to decide how to spend government money these days:

I don't know how I feel about Obama's decision about manned space flight. To be honest, I only think about space flight when something goes horribly wrong -- a situation in which I am probably like most Americans. But, what I do know is that space flight, like all government programs (if we want them to continue to be run by the government), requires money. And, since Obama was put in the position of cleaning up the messes of the previous two administrations, we don't have a lot of that right now.

When money is tight, we need to figure out where we are going to spend it and, unfortunately, where it is not going to be spent. Maybe it's because NASA hasn't sold itself well enough or maybe it's because I didn't grow up in the Houston area and didn't know many people involved in the space program until I got to college. But the fact is, compared to other things that I care about in this country -- health care, education, national defense, transportation -- it is difficult to see what value comes from space flight other than a sense of national pride that we beat the Russians to the moon forty years ago.

But, what is more important is to figure out why we don't have any money to be able to spend. The obvious place to start is the bailouts of the banks -- caused by the Bush and Clinton administrations' penchant for eliminating nearly all regulations in the financial market and the ongoing trend since Reagan to starve the few regulators left of any money to do their job ($700 billion). Next, let's look at the war in Iraq which has cost us $700 billion to date and, as the Shoe and Christmas Day Bombers have shown, have failed to substantially increase our safety. The repeal of the inheritance tax -- the tax on money that you literally get for being born to the right family -- has cost us $1.7 trillion^[1] from 2001-2008 (including interest on deferred debt obligations) and will cost us another $1.277 trillion (again, including deferred interest payments) over the next ten years.

The whimsies of the past eight to sixteen years were financed by the future and that future is now. I totally agree that taking away space flight might destroy "kids' interest in math and science," but they won't have the resources to be interested if their school buildings -- mostly built in the 1950s and 1960s in this country -- are falling down around them. Without changes in energy technology, fuel will become so expensive that it will be impossible to launch a rocket, commercial or otherwise.

I am not sure that Obama's policies are the best policies for moving things forward (particularly the 3% reduction in government spending for everything except programs for defense and the elderly). But, I certainly do know that he is being forced to make the difficult decisions that every administration before him (except for possibly George H.W.) abdicated. They threw a party, over-ran the budget by $3.1 trillion dollars, have another $1.277 trillion in clean-up costs to come (if the inheritance tax is not repealed), and he's being blamed for not cleaning it up quickly enough.

I sure as hell know that I could figure out a way to save manned flight, get students excited about math and science, and build them new schools if I had and extra $3.1 trillion dollars to work with.

^[1] I realized that the $1.7 trillion figure is actually the cost for the entire Bush 2001/2003 tax cut, not only the inheritance tax. Although there were some provisions of that tax cut that helped the non-wealthy class, it disproportionately helped those with the highest salaries.

No Really, Coke is Good For You, Trust Me

I just read this commentary from Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent that is so incredibly duplicitous, I really cannot believe that even the Wall Street Journal would publish it without significant editing. Let me tell you the punchline upfront: shockingly the CEO of Coca-Cola Corp. does not believe that a tax on sugary drinks will help curb obesity (now you'll understand why the Wall Street Journal published it). Basically his argument boils down to...well it doesn't quite boil down to anything, so let me summarize: Coke has lots of calories, but so do lots of other things. People need to exercise more. And, oh yeah, I employ lots of people.

To support this rambling, Mr. Kent has a great deal of evidence and insight into why Coke is not responsible for Americans becoming obese. For instance, he first pulls out the favorite claim of the American Beverage Association and the National Restaurant Association, Coke doesn't make people fat — people make people fat:

If we're genuinely interested in curbing obesity, we need to take a hard look in the mirror and acknowledge that it's not just about calories in. It's also about calories out.

Let's see, calories in > calories out = weight gain. True fact. Now, there are two ways that one could mess with that statement: 1) increase calories out, or 2) decrease calories in. But why drop your calories in when you could have it all just by exercising more! In case that didn't persuade you, Mr. Kent moves on to playing the victim:

Our industry has become an easy target in this debate. Sugar-sweetened beverages have been singled out for demonization in spite of the fact that soft drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks and sweetened bottled water combined contribute 5.5% of the calories in the average American diet, according to the National Cancer Institute. It's difficult to understand why the beverages we and others provide are being targeted as the primary cause of weight gain when 94.5% of caloric intake comes from other foods and beverages.

Hmmm... Can't imagine why you would be singled out. Americans get one in twenty of our calories from soft drinks, which — as it clearly states on Coke products — are "Not a significant source of calories from fat, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, dietary fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium and iron." Which leads Mr. Kent to his next argument (confused yet):

Research from the United States Department of Agriculture shows that added sugars, as a percentage of total daily available calories, have declined 11% since 1970. Yet the percent of calories from added fats and flour/cereal products has increased 35% and 13%, respectively, during that same time period.

That's right — the 5.5% of absolutely empty calories that you get from his products are MUCH better than the fat and carb calories you get from eating other foods. I wonder what the Snack Food Association and International Foodservice Manufacturer's Assocation thought when reading this and whether they are going to start a round-robin blame game. "It's cereals making kids fat!" "No, it's Twinkies!" No, it's soft drinks." Finally, Mr. Kent pulls out the trump card:

Policy makers should stop spending their valuable time demonizing an industry that directly employs more than 220,000 people in the U.S., and through supporting industries, an additional three million.

That's right — don't tax us or you'll lose your job (I'm sure Dave will especially love that one).

There's more I could pillory in the commentary. It is actually quite a feat to put so much unrelated garbage in a mere 724 words that he should be awarded some prize just for that. I'm not sure that a soda tax will work to curb obesity and I think that it is actually a pretty crappy policy. Sodas are not cigarettes; no one is going to be upset if you are drinking caramel coloring, carbonated water, and sugar next to them the same way that there was social pressure to stop smoking. If we are going to invest in obesity prevention, it would be a lot smarter to make physical activity a priority by ensuring access to safe neighborhoods with amenities for kids to be able to play. It would mean reducing the work week so that parents can have time to spend with their kids supervising them and being able to go to grocery store and prepare dinner rather than buy it pre-made. But, of course, that would require investment of government dollars and increasing taxes, which you know Mr. Kent would be opposed to no matter what.