The salt of the earth

Increased sodium consumption raises blood pressure, and high blood pressure is strongly correlated with (and perhaps causes) heart disease. Thus, a low salt diet reduces the risk of heart disease.

Sounds reasonable.  But apparently wrong.  A committee set up by the National Institute of Medicine (part of the CDC) just released their review of the research: no benefits from low salt consumption.  The leader author on the report says, according to the NY Times:

Although the advice to restrict sodium to 1,500 milligrams a day has been enshrined in dietary guidelines, it never came from research on health outcomes… Instead, it is the lowest sodium consumption can go if a person eats enough food to get sufficient calories and nutrients to live on. As for the 2,300-milligram level, that was the highest sodium levels could go before blood pressure began inching up.

In its 2005 report, the Institute of Medicine’s committee said that sodium consumption between 1,500 and 2,300 milligrams a day would not raise blood pressure.

That range, Dr. Strom said, “was taken by other groups and set in stone.” Those other groups included the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, which formulated dietary guidelines in 2005.

This reveals a lot about how government guidelines are made:

• Lack of a research foundation was not a significant obstacle to creating the guideline.
• The upper end of the “safe” range was dropped in favor of the lower end.
• The lower end that became the guideline is that minimum level necessary to maintain life; thus it is not surprising that some studies have shown that as salt intake approaches that 1500 milligram level that other bad things start happening.
• There are a lot of warnings (for good reason) about the political power of the food industry in setting dietary guidelines.   Manufacturers of high sodium foods make lots of money, yet this low guideline still persisted. Lesson: the political power of those who oppose processed foods should not be ignored.  [Interesting political query:  how did this diffuse interest conquer the concentrated interest?]
• Lots of people think that sodium is bad.  How many of them know that a sodium deficiency will kill you? Really fast.

Before you start adding more salt to your potatoes, however, it is good to remember that this new body of research is not based on the carefully controlled experimental framework that we would like to see.  Indeed, much of what we “know” about nutrition is similarly suspect because it is very, very hard to do those types of studies on human beings.

Dietary guidelines are largely based on pieces of empirical observation connected by theories–not on RCTs of real diets.  The same could be said of a lot of social science work, including economics, so I’m not picking on nutritionists.  And if you think nutrition science is suspect and politicized, just take a little trip through psychology.  Those folks have been fighting about revisions to the DSM for a long time, and the casualty count is very high.

Because people are much harder to study than laboratory mice, we know much, much less than we think we do.  Even about mice, I presume.

Political Bias at the IRS Likely Deep-Seated

The IRS has been taking flak for its treatment of right-leaning groups seeking recognition as tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations under clause 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. As it happens, I have some personal experience with IRS scrutiny of 501(c)(4) applications. I was on the Board of the Free State Project (FSP) when the FSP applied for 501(c)(4) status in 2007-8. Our application was denied. We appealed, and the appeal was denied.

The reasoning the IRS gave us is that the FSP was simply a political action group trying to benefit the Libertarian Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. The FSP has never run or endorsed candidates or given money to any candidates. The FSP has never endorsed specific legislation or lobbied any elected or appointed official. More importantly, the FSP has never had any ties, formal or informal, with the Libertarian Party. Plenty of FSP participants reject electoral politics altogether. To my knowledge, the FSP has never received even a single donation from any foundation, government, party, or any other corporate entity whatsoever.

The FSP clearly qualifies as a social welfare organization, if not a public-benefit, charitable organization (“501(c)(3)”), according to the IRS’s own rules. The point of the FSP is to promote New Hampshire as a destination to people who are philosophically classical-liberal or libertarian. That’s it. The FSP spends money on advertising and promotion, maintaining a website, and holding two annual educational-social events in New Hampshire. The FSP believes that is an organization operated for the public benefit, especially with the educational programs held at its events. However, even if the IRS does not buy that interpretation, it is clearly an organization intended for the social and educational benefit of philosophic libertarians. It is clearly not a political action organization. Indeed, had the FSP applied for section 527 recognition, it probably would have been denied, leading to the absurd likelihood that the IRS would have considered the FSP a nonprofit fitting into no nonprofit category.

Since then, the FSP has operated just fine as a generic nonprofit corporation with no IRS tax status; since the organization’s expenditures always exceed its merchandise sales, it does not have any tax liability. However, 501(c)(4) status would have been a useful designation and signal to donors of the organization’s credibility.

Conservatives would like to find Obama’s fingerprints on the current IRS scandal, but they are unlikely to do so. Career bureaucrats at the federal agency that collects taxes from Americans are unlikely to be friendly to American antitax groups. The IRS’s hostility to antitax groups will manifest itself in a variety of ways, but that hostility is apparently nothing new or even particularly surprising. That doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong, of course.

Hail, small money

Ezra Klein altered my thinking a tad on campaign finance with his recent discussion of the effects of “big money” and “small money.”

On a gut level, I vastly prefer the passionate party activist who sends $200 to her favorite fire-breather to the lobbyist who coolly covers his bets by supplying $2,000 to both candidates in a race. One is acting as an engaged citizen. The other is a glorified bagman. But both have the potential to break our political system.

Just as big money is corrupting, small money is polarizing. And it’s polarization that probably poses the bigger threat to American politics right now. Big money, for example, generally wants to raise the debt ceiling. Small money is one reason Republicans in Congress came close to breaching it. Big money often wants the two parties more or less to get along; no one gets a tax break if legislation dies on the floor. Small money will turn on you if you dare cut a deal with the other side. Big money erodes what little trust Americans still have in their political system. Small money attacks the bipartisanship that, for better and worse, is required for the system to function.

When I said “altered my thinking,” I did not mean, of course, that he led me to where he (and many other MSM types) want election financing to go, namely in the direction of public financing.  I hadn’t really thought of this big money/small money distinction before, and I think the point about small money and partisanship makes a lot of sense.  But I part ways with Klein (who is mostly borrowing the ideas here from Sen. Chris Murphy) regarding the normative implications of this theory.  As is so often the case, Klein jumps from the positive to the normative and assumes that everyone will jump with him without even realizing it.

When Klein says that bipartisanship is “required for the system to function,” what he is really saying is “required for the Congress to pursue a centrist agenda.”  To his ilk, functioning means what we have seen steadily over the past century–an ever increasing scale and scope of the federal government (nicely illustrated in Marc’s recent picture of the uninterrupted trend in per-capita spending).

Klein goes on to say that we “need to change the rules and incentives to keep polarized parties from undermining the well-being of the country.”  Again, to translate, by “well-being of the country” he means “the centrist, statist, country that I value.”

One of my colleagues argued with me awhile back that it is not an unreasonable normative theory to give weight to the preferences of the median voter, which will always be centrist.  But those preferences, facilitated by bi-partisan cooperation over the years, have led to the steady creep, creep, creep of the federal state.  As we inch closer to a debt crisis, it is hard to imagine a centrist, bi-partisan solution to those problems unless someone’s feet are held to the fire through some combination of the many anti-majoritarian safeguards infused into the Constitution.

The problem with turning our Republic over to the median voter is that the median voter really sucks at math.  He is like the accountant that has hidden the cost column on his spreadsheet and cannot understand why the company seems to be unraveling.

Centrists (both those who lean right and those who lean left) have the right to argue their ideology as much as any non-centrist.  I just get really annoyed that their ideology is couched in terms of  ”functioning” or “getting things done.”  Non-centrists want to get things done, too, they just have different visions of what that means.

As for me, nothing could be better describe as “getting things done” than putting the brakes on Leviathan.   Perhaps small money and anti-majoritarian safeguards can accomplish what bi-partisanship probably never will.

The Growth of Government, Updated

The news has been ripe with administration scandals as of late and will likely be for some time (Memo to BHO: There may be no better way to keep scandals in the news than to use the Justice Department to go after the Associated Press). But soon attention will turn to the issue of fiscal sustainability (or at least one hopes).

I have been updating some charts for a second edition of a book I wrote a while back. One of my favorite charts presents inflation-adjusted spending per capita. I focused on domestic spending in this chart not because I discount the importance of defense spending, but because it was in support of an argument I was making. To give you a flavor of the numbers, consider the following (all figures are in 2005 dollars):

• Starting at the New Deal, the peak level of domestic spending before US entry into WWII was $865 per capita (1940).
• Let us leap forward to the 1960s. The highest level of domestic spending per capita under LBJ was $2,265 (1968).
• Peak domestic spending during the Reagan presidency was $4,950 (1987).  That is 218 percent of the Great Society levels (Don’t fight the urge to cheer “LBJ, All the Way”).
• President Clinton assured us that we were witnessing the end of Big Government. While federal spending as a percentage of GDP fell to 18.6 percent (2000), per capita domestic spending stood at $6,206.
• George W. Bush increased that figure to a peak of $7,215 (2007). And Barack Obama made history in 2010, when domestic spending per capita hit $8,631 (it stood at $8,141 in 2012).

A couple of thoughts: First, while many may associate “big government” and FDR,   “that man” (as Grover often calls him) was a piker. In inflation adjusted terms, the Reagan Revolution entailed spending 5.72 times that sum. In 2010, the federal government was spending almost 10 times that amount. Second, these numbers grossly understate overall domestic spending. State and local governments expenditures are 11.3 percent of GDP—a larger share of GDP than the federal government spent in any year during the domestic phase of the New Deal (the peak was 10.3 percent in 1939). If we combine federal domestic, state and local spending for 2012, it stands at $13,034 per capita. Third, the big driver is the combination of demographic trends and mandatory spending on entitlements programs.

Kenneth Waltz, RIP

Sad to just learn that Kenneth Waltz, one of the most influential international relations scholars of the last 50 years (perhaps only rivaled by Sam Huntington), passed away today.  More later once I finish my grading.  But love or hate his work, it is impossible not to agree that he was a giant in the field who had a massive impact on how we think about international politics.  Here is Walt on Waltz.

Rutgers University Hall of Distinguished Alumni

It is not surprising that Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman is in the Rutgers University Hall of Distinguished Alumni.  Indeed, he must be one of the most successful graduates of that New Jersey state school. 

However, it is a bit surprising that another member of the Rutgers Hall of Distinguished Alumni never graduated from Rutgers according to the Rutgers Registrar (as reported by ESPN)!  

Can one be a distinguished alum – or even an undistinguished alum, by definition, without actually graduating?   According to Merriam Webster’s definition, it seems possible: “a person who has attended or has graduated from a particular school, college, or university.”  But is that the common sense understanding of the term?  For those readers of ours who attended college but never graduated, do you consider yourself an alum of that school?  Is my wife an alum of Harvard University since she took a class there once?  When do we get the invites to the alumni reunions (and the awesome networking opportunities)?  And what class are you placed in if you never graduate?

Deserving Poor

I like a great deal of Bryan Caplan’s work, and what I like I like a great deal, but it seems to me he makes a significant inferential error in this recent EconLog post. Caplan notes that “71% of poor families with children are headed by single parents. About 80% of all long-term poverty occurs in single-parent homes. Married high school dropouts have lower poverty rates than single parents with one or two years of college.” He infers from these statistics that there are very few “deserving poor”:

If you combine Rector’s evidence with common-sense moral beliefs about the deserving poor, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that few “poor” Americans qualify. The moral admonition to “help the deserving poor” asks us come to the aid of people who are (a) genuinely destitute, even though (b) they took reasonable measures to avoid destitution. Rector shows that few Americans qualify on either count.

How many of those poor, single-parent families are so because the marriage broke up? How many of those families are so because the father was incarcerated? Fewer than half of children currently in single-parent households were born outside wedlock. You can blame mothers in many of these cases for a poor choice of partner, but living in poverty with your children is a hell of a sentence for that kind of mistake. Some of these households could well be considered “deserving poor.” And yes, their material circumstances are usually not dire, but dignity has to do with a lot more than material circumstances. If you have a refrigerator and a TV but can’t afford to go back to school and get an education to improve your lot in life, are you really well off?

Fatherlessness is important for explaining poverty, but that doesn’t mean fatherless families don’t deserve help.

[Note: "1%" corrected to "71%" above. Copy and paste error - apologies!]