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Look out obese America!

You have assumed from smokers the mantle of Public Health Enemy No. 1, this time in the federal fight against fat and the bottom line.

Of course, federal lawmakers are coming after the nation’s overweight to save them — from themselves — and they apparently want to spend a lot of money on this rescue operation.

Just how much isn’t yet clear.

This week, a bipartisan group of U.S. representatives, including Wisconsin western district Congressman Ron Kind, introduced the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act,which would give Medicare beneficiaries and their health-care providers “additional tools” to treat and reduce obesity.

“We know how severe the health risks of obesity are, and the actual costs of care for obesity-related illnesses are just as alarming,” Kind said in a statement. “This bipartisan legislation will help bring health care costs under control, by providing more tools for those trying to overcome obesity and lead longer, healthier lives.”

Among its provisions, the bill would “allow” Medicare to cover additional obesity treatments such as prescription drugs for chronic weight management, which Medicaid already covers in more than 20 states. Weight-loss surgery is the only obesity treatment tool currently covered by Medicare.

The legislation also would require the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to highlight Medicare coverage of intensive behavioral counseling for obesity for seniors and their doctors, and give CMS authority to “enhance Medicare beneficiary access to benefits for intensive behavioral counseling by allowing additional types of providers to offer this service.”

THE BOTTOM LINE: A bipartisan bill making its way through the House would pump more money into America’s growing obesity problem.

There’s no doubt about it: Obesity is a huge health issue in America, with related health-care costs pegged at nearly $200 million.

A 2009 report titled, “The Future Cost of Obesity: National and State Estimates of the Impact of Obesity on Direct Health Care Expenses,” estimates that “if current trends continue, 43 percent of U.S. adults will be obese and obesity spending would quadruple to $344 billion by 2018. The report was based on research by Emory University health-care economist Ken Thorpe, Ph.D., executive director of the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease.

Thorpe this week teamed up with former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who served as Health and Human Services secretary under President George W. Bush, to urge policymakers to act expeditiously in fighting what they and many others define as an obesity epidemic.

Thompson, in the op-ed piece headlined, “Targeting Obesity with Health Care Reform,”warned, “We cannot afford to wait until patients are on Medicare to fight obesity. Rather, we need to encourage weight control over the course of patients’ lives.”

In other words, the government needs to save the increasingly average American from himself.

Thompson had some kind things to say about Obamacare and the potential for its applications, some things he may not have gone on the record to say when he stood by repeal of the contentious health-care act during his unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate in 2012.

“Fortunately, we now have an ideal opportunity to implement reforms. The new health insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act  can establish effective care coordination strategies to identify and treat chronic conditions earlier, addressing not just the immediate conditions but the underlying ones as well,” the op-ed piece asserts.

Thompson and Thorpe argue Medicare can adopt the strategies, and the “benefits for both patients and taxpayers will be substantial.”

Proponents of government intervention into a chronic condition now classified as a disease by the American Medical Association, say federal investments – whatever they may be – will pay off multi-fold over time.

Perhaps these prevention crusaders would be well served to dust off a 2009Congressional Budget Office report which shows preventative medicine – at least the kind the federal government likes to doctor – is rarely cost-effective.

Pound of prevention

How much would the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, or TROA, cost taxpayers? Nobody seems to know. Kind’s office did not have cost projections. An official from the Congressional Budget Office on Thursday told Wisconsin Reporter there won’t be a fiscal estimate until the bill is reported out of committee.

In an August 2009 letter to the House’s Subcommittee on Health, the Congressional Budget Office broke down its analysis titled, “The Budgetary Effects of Expanding Governmental Support for Preventive Care and Wellness Services.”

In short, “expanded governmental support for preventive medical care would probably improve people’s health but would not generally reduce total spending on health care.”

The problem, according to the CBO report, is that even when the unit cost of a particular preventative service is low, costs can accumulate quickly when a large number of patients are treated preventively. Such is the case in Wisconsin, where 28 percent of the population is obese, in a nation with a 26.2 percent obesity rate.

Thorpe argues institutional changes could save the United States $200 billion in obesity-related health-care costs.

The CBO report, however, notes that researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care “generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illnesses.”

A research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, after reviewing hundreds of previous studies on how preventive care affects costs, concludes that less than 20 percent of the services that were examined save money, while the rest add to costs.

A study by researchers from the American Diabetes Association, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society found use of highly recommended preventive measures aimed at cardiovascular disease would substantially reduce the projected number of heart attacks and strokes that occurred but would also increase total spending on medical care because the “ultimate savings would offset only about 10 percent of the costs of the preventive services on average.”

Of course, as the CBO analysis points out, just because a preventive service adds to total spending doesn’t mean it is a bad investment. Saving a life, improving someone’s quality of life, most would agree, are inherently good things. But those who argue they do not come with a cost, or that the cost benefits eventually outweigh the initial taxpayer outlays, are ignoring critical research over time.

The CBO also notes the overlap often associated in services under federally mandated preventive programs.

“Consequently, a new government policy to encourage prevention could end up paying for preventive services that many individuals are already receiving – which would add to federal costs but not reduce total future spending on healthcare,” the report states.

Ted Kyle, a pharmacist and chairman of the Obesity Society’s Advocacy Committee, has a family history of obesity and has struggled with the disease.

He said the current health care system as it relates to overweight Americans is “insane.”

“My health plan would not pay for obesity treatment. I paid for it out-of-pocket, and in doing so I forestalled the need for lipid-lowering medicines,” he said. “When my condition (worsened), they happily would pay for those kinds of medicines but they were not happy to pay for the costs that would keep me healthier across the board.”

Kyle said he understands the criticism of those who see the ineffective results of spending on wellness, preventive and treatment programs not grounded in evidence-based research. But Kyle believes the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act would be well worth the investment.

Freedom to be obese

Curbing obesity, as laid out in the bill, is about encouraging lifestyle changes. The CBO report underscores the challenge in government-funded programs to induce people to live healthier lives.

“Even successful efforts might take many years to bear fruit and could involve significant costs,” the report states.

And, at some level, it does come down to fruit –that is, choosing fruit over fast food, say those in the individual rights camp. It’s a question of choice, they say: The individual’s or the collective’s. Who makes those kinds of health care decisions is a growing matter of debate.

This article originally appeared on Watchdog.org.

When it comes to Third World-style thuggishness, there's nary a gold-bedecked generalissimo or a brigade of sociopathic enforcers haunting any of the jungles of the world who can hold a candle to Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, and his merry gang of loyal psychopaths. Their misdeeds range from jailing journalists who have rubbed him the wrong way to torturing a paraplegic, with numerous others worthy of mention, and litigation (prosecution is too much to hope for). You can add another one to the tally if yet another lawsuit pans out. This time, sheriff's deputies apparently beat an attorney half-to-death for daring to go a-lawyering in proximity to officers of the law.

From Courthouse News Service:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lawyer-hating deputies beat an attorney so badly his brain bled and his shoulder was dislocated as he tried to calm down a client at the scene of an accident, the attorney and client say in separate lawsuits.

Daniel Kloberdanz and his employee and client, Valarie Lingenfelder, sued Arpaio, Maricopa County, its Sheriff's Office and other county employees, in Maricopa County Court. ...

Kloberdanz says he "asked [Officer Joseph] Pellino, very politely, words to the effect, 'Can I please go over and try to calm her down, I'm the only person she knows here.'"

Pellino then asked Lingenfelder "words to the effect, 'Do you know this man?' Lingenfelder then said, 'Yes, he's my friend, [then a slight pause] and he's my attorney.'

Pellino then walked back towards Kloberdanz, and before Kloberdanz could finish a sentence again requesting to approach Lingenfelder, much to Kloberdanz's surprise, Pellino shoved Kloberdanz in his chest so hard it knocked him over," the complaint states. (Brackets in complaint.)

The complaint continues: "Pellino shoved Kloberdanz so hard it left bruises on Kloberdanz's upper chest below his collar bone. From the shove, Kloberdanz slipped on the gravel and rolled on the ground, avoiding hitting his head on the gravel. Once Kloberdanz got his footing back, he stood up.

"Kloberdanz did not do or say anything that might intimidate or aggravate Pellino, knowing he had a gun and short temper.

"Again, Pellino immediately approached Kloberdanz aggressively and began yelling words to the effect that 'I don't need you guys telling me how to do my job,' as he tackled Kloberdanz to the ground.

The injuries inflicted on Kloerdanz were ... mind-boggling. In addition to the brain injuries and dislocated shoulder described above, the deputies so brutally ground his face into the gravel that stones were forced under the skin. He ended up in jail too, of course, and without medical treatment, though charges were later dropped.

That's unbelievable, you say. But as Ray Stern writes at the Phoenix New Times:

One point that runs in Kloberdanz's favor, as far as we're concerned, is that Kloberdanz claims Deputy Steven Carpenter helped hold him down as Pellino beat him. As we've previously reported, Carpenter, in September 2012 -- about three months after the Kloberdanz incident -- went on a road trip to North Dakota to help another deputy ambush and attack a man.

This can't happen in America? Yeah. And the government can't listen to your phone calls, either.

You can read the full text of Daniel Kloberdanz's lawsuit here.

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The growth of federal regulations over the past six decades has cut U.S. economic growth by an average of 2 percentage points per year, according to a new study in the Journal of Economic Growth. As a result, the average American household receives about $277,000 less annually than it would have gotten in the absence of six decades of accumulated regulations—a median household income of $330,000 instead of the $53,000 we get now.

The researchers, economists John Dawson of Appalachian State University and John Seater of North Carolina State, constructed an index of federal regulations by tracking the growth in the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulations since 1949. The number of pages, they note, has increased six-fold from 19,335 in 1949 to 134,261 in 2005. (As of 2011, the number of pages had risen to 169,301.) They devise a pretty standard endogenous growth theory model and then insert their regulatory burden index to calculate how federal regulations have affected economic growth. (Sometimes deregulation extends rather than shortens the number of pages in the register; they adjust their figures to take this into account.)

Annual output in 2005, they conclude, "is 28 percent of what it would have been had regulation remained at its 1949 level." The proliferation of federal regulations especially affects the rate of improvement in total factor productivity, a measure of technological dynamism and increasing efficiency. Regulations also affect the allocation of labor and capital—by, say, raising the costs of new hires or encouraging investment in favored technologies. Overall, they calculate, if regulation had remained at the same level as in 1949, current GDP would have been $53.9 trillion instead of $15.1 in 2011. In other words, current U.S. GDP in 2011 was $38.8 trillion less than it might have been.

Let's use those results as the starting point for some rough calculations. The Bureau of Economic Affairs estimates that real GDP in 1947 was $1.8 trillion in 2005 dollars. The real GDP growth rate between 1949 and 2011 averaged 3.2 percent per year. Compounded over the period, that would yield a total real GDP of about $13.3 trillion in 2011; that's the same figure the bureau gives for that year. If regulation had remained fixed at 1949 levels, GDP growth would have averaged 2 percent higher annually, yielding a rate of about 5.2 percent over the period between 1949 and 2011. Compounded, that yields a total GDP in 2005 dollars of approximately $43 trillion, or $49 trillion in 2011 dollars, which is in the same ballpark as the $53.9 trillion figure calculated by Dawson and Seater.

But let’s say that the two economists have grossly overestimated how fast the economy could have grown in the absence of proliferating regulations. So instead let’s take the real average GDP growth rate between 1870 and 1900, before the Progressives jumpstarted the regulatory state. Economic growth in the last decades of the 19th century averaged 4.5 percent per year. Compounding that growth rate from the real 1949 GDP of $1.8 trillion to now would have yielded a total GDP in 2013 of around $31 trillion. Considerably lower than the $54 trillion estimated by Dawson and Seater, but nevertheless about double the size of our current GDP.

All this means that the opportunity costs of regulation—that is, the benefits that could have been gained if an alternative course of action had been pursued—are much higher than the costs of compliance. For example, the Competitive Enterprise Institute's report Ten Thousand Commandments 2013 estimates that it costs consumers and businesses approximately $1.8 trillion—about 11 percent of current GDP—to comply with current federal regulations. That's bad enough, but it pales in comparison to the loss of tens of trillions in overall wealth calculated by Dawson and Seater.

Defenders of regulation will argue that regulations also provide benefits to Americans: lower levels of air pollution, higher minimum wages, and so forth. But the measure devised by Dawson and Seater accounts for both the aggregate benefits and the costs of the regulations. The two researchers note their results "indicate that whatever positive effects regulation may have on measured output are outweighed by negative effects." There may be some unmeasured positive outputs that result from regulation. But the benefits would have to be hugely substantial to offset the loss of $39 trillion in output in 2011 alone. Is that plausible?

Dawson and Seater explicitly do not attempt to separately measure the benefits of regulation in their study, only its overall effects on output. But the Office of Management and Budget does claim to measure the costs and benefits of federal regulation. In the most recent Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) report, the highest estimates for costs and benefits for regulations adopted from 2002 to 2012 are $84 billion and $800 billion respectively. Let's be extremely generous in calculating regulation's benefits and assume that they provide not just $800 billion in total benefits over 10 years, but that much in just one year. Then, just to be sure that we haven't overlooked any non-monetized benefits unaccounted for the OIRA, and to take into account of the fact that number of pages in the CFR have risen six-fold, let's multiply that by 6, yielding an estimated annual regulatory benefit of $4.8 trillion.

That's just a bit more than a quarter of the current GDP. Recall that Dawson and Seater have calculated that if the regulatory burden had remained the same as it was in 1949, the U.S. economy would be about $38 trillion bigger than it currently is. So the upshot of this wildly optimistic set of assumptions regarding the benefits of regulation is that Americans have foregone $33 trillion in income that we otherwise would have had. Or in the alternative case, where a lower rate of growth results in a GDP of only $31 trillion, that would mean that Americans have foregone about $10 trillion in income due to overregulation.

Whatever the benefits of regulation, an average household income of $330,000 per year would buy a lot in the way of health care, schooling, art, housing, environmental protection, and other amenities.

Since GDP growth rates in other industrialized countries more or less track U.S. growth rates over the period, I asked both Dawson and Seater via email if it would be fair to conclude that those countries had also adopted a similar suite of regulations that also slowed their potential GDP gains. Being careful not to go beyond the data in the study, Dawson replied, "Similarity of growth rates really doesn't tell us anything about the growth effects of regulations in the different countries. However, it would be fair to say that many studies (cited in our paper) examine the effects of regulation in many European countries and find large negative effects on employment, investment, rates of new business start-up, and so on."

For example, a 2004 World Bank study of the effects of regulation in a large sample of industrial and developing countries constructed an index of severity of regulation. It revealed that increasing a country's index of regulation by one standard deviation (34 percent) reduces its per capita GDP growth by 0.4 percent. Dawson and Seater's article, in comparison, finds that "an increase in total regulation of 600 percent reduces growth by just 2 percentage points. Relatively speaking, our effect is smaller." With appropriate caveats about differences in various studies, Seater told me via email, "The uniform message that comes through from all the studies I have seen is that regulation has strong negative effects on economic growth."

So if the effects of regulation are so deleterious to economic growth and the prosperity of citizens, why do countries enact so much of it? Dawson and Seater's paper mentions three theories: Arthur Pigou's notion that governments enact regulations to improve social welfare by correcting market failures, George Stigler's more cynical view that industries capture regulatory agencies in order exclude competitors and increase their profits, and Fred McChesney's argument that regulations are chiefly aimed at benefiting politicians and regulators. I asked if their results fit most closely with McChesney's. Dawson replied: "This could be the conclusion that one reaches based on our empirical results (since they show a net cost of regulation over time), but again we did not set out to prove or disprove any particular theory." Seater added that their research does not address the question of "why society allows excessive regulation....It's an important [issue], but it is one for the public choice people to study, not for macroeconomists like me and my coauthor."

One such public choice theorist, Mancur Olson, argued in The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982) that economic stagnation and even decline set in when powerful special-interest lobbies—crony capitalists if you will—capture a country's regulatory system and use it to block competitors, making the economy ever less efficient. The growing burden of regulation could some day turn economic growth negative, but in a note Dawson and Seater suggest that in the long run that will "not be tolerated by society." Let's hope that they are right.

A gun is a tool of personal self-defense without equal (and a great equalizer). Earlier this week, a 62-year-old California man was reported to have died after being attacked with his own baseball bat while trying to defend his wife. From CBS San Francisco:

Sandy Harlow, 61, was housesitting for a friend in Orangevale. When she came to feed the dogs, she says a former resident of the home was in the garage and wouldn’t leave.

She dialed 911, but the cops didn’t show up right away.

“I called my husband and I said, ‘James, please come. Please come I’m so frightened,’” Sandy said.

James Harlow, 62, did come, with a baseball bat. That’s when Sacramento Sheriff’s Deputies say Brandon Biagioni attacked the husband who was twice his age with his own bat.

Meanwhile, in Southern California a 72-year-old woman was able to defend herself and her wheelchair-bound husband from an intruder, who even apologized after she shot at him. From the AP:

Jan Cooper, of Anaheim, fired one shot from her .357-magnum Smith & Wesson revolver around 12:30 a.m. Sunday as a man attempted to break into her home. During a 911 call of the incident, Cooper can be heard begging with the dispatcher to send deputies and warns that she has a gun at the ready as her Rottweiler barks furiously in the background.

Minutes later, a breathless Cooper says the man has come to the back porch and is trying to get in the house through a sliding door. Through the vertical blinds, Cooper saw his silhouette just inches away through the glass as he began to slide open the door.

"I'm firing!" Cooper shouts to the dispatcher as a loud band goes off…

The stunned intruder apologized to Cooper after she fired, she recalled, telling her, "I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm leaving. Please don't shoot."

The Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that police don’t have a constitutional duty to defend anyone in particular. Americans do, though, theoretically have a constitutional right to self-defense via the Second Amendment, making attempts to curtail it in the wake of sensational violence particularly disturbing.

For years Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have been warning us about secret legal interpretations underlying surveillance activities of a sort that would shock most Americans. Prior to last week, because Wyden and Udall felt constrained not to reveal classified information, all we knew for sure was that the interpretations involved Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which authorizes the government to demand "any tangible things" it deems relevant to "an investigation to protect against international terrorism." Reason Contributing Editor Julian Sanchez, a privacy specialist at the Cato Institute, argued back in May 2011 that the "secret law" troubling Wyden and Udall "is probably about location tracking." After The Guardian broke the story of the Section 215 order that the National Security Agency (NSA) used to obtain telephone records from Verizon, Wyden and Udall said this was the sort of thing they had in mind. But that does not mean the information gathered by the NSA under Section 215 is limited to numbers dialed, date and time of calls, and length of conversations—the details usually mentioned in reports on the program. As Washington Post blogger Timothy B. Lee notes, it looks like the NSA is gathering location data as well:

The order may only pertain to Verizon’s wired telephony business, as Verizon Wireless is technically a separate subsidiary. But the order includes hints that the NSA is also collecting information from cellular customers. In addition to phone numbers and call times, the order seeks information about the specific cell phone tower the customer used to connect to the network during each call.

It wouldn’t make much sense to request that information from a traditional wired telephone company. So its inclusion suggests either that the order includes Verizon Wireless, or that it's boilerplate that is also being sent to wireless companies....

Cellphones make calls using the closest tower. So if the NSA knows you made a call using a specific tower, they can safely assume you were near that tower at the time of the call. The accuracy of this information varies. In urban areas, tower information can pin down your location to a specific city block or even a specific building. In rural areas, it might only identify your location within a mile or two.

The Verizon order covered all calls, domestic and international, since 2006. If wireless carriers have received similar orders that include demands for cellphone tower information, the NSA could have a database tracking the movements of every American with a mobile phone. But remember: The NSA does not "collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans."

For more on cellphone tracking, see my 2012 column "Is That a Spy in Your Pocket?" and Ron Bailey's 2013 feature story "Your Cellphone Is Spying on You."

Verizon, the phone company whose disclosure of customer data to the federal government is at the center of the furor over cooperation by technology companies with top-secret national security programs, has offered a precise, clear, but little-noticed public explanation of why it did what it did.

The Verizon explanation is not in the vague and cryptic memo the company issued last week after the Guardian exposed its program. It came, instead, in the company’s annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, included in Verizon’s annual report to shareholders. It said, “As part of the FCC’s approval of Vodaphone’s ownership interest, Verizon Wireless, Verizon, and Vodaphone entered into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation which imposes national security and law enforcement-related obligations on the ways in which Verizon Wireless stores information and otherwise conducts its business.”

That explanation was offered on February 26, months before the Guardian article. But it gets right to the heart of the matter, which is that there is a connection between Verizon’s status as a highly regulated company and its agreement to cooperate extensively with the government. The New York Times reported Sunday that such cooperation advanced to the point that “Verizon had set up a dedicated fiber-optic line running from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center.”

Verizon needed FCC approval to sell part of its wireless business to a British company, Vodaphone. It needs FCC approval to do lots of other things, too, ranging from acquisitions to building wireless networks on new parts of the spectrum. In addition, the federal government is a big Verizon customer. The company’s Web site says, “We understand the public sector. We've worked with governmental organizations for decades. In fact, we are the leading provider of communications services to the U.S. federal government.”

These federal contracts are worth tens of billions of dollars to Verizon. A single 2009 contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency to Verizon Business Network Services Inc. was worth as much as $2.5 billion over ten years. A Verizon press release in 2008 touted another pair of defense contracts worth as much as $1.12 billion. The online biographies of executives at Verizon Enterprise Solutions include some individual Verizon executives who boast that their efforts have resulted in more than $10 billion in federal sector business for Verizon. A Verizon Web site focused on the “National Intelligence Sector” promises, “we understand technology and have the experts in place to help intelligence missions succeed.”

Verizon was created by the federal government to begin with, first through the government-imposed breakup of Bell system (the 1984 result of a 1974 antitrust lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice), then government approval of the mergers of Bell Atlantic, GTE, and Nynex.

And though details are still emerging, some of the other companies that apparently chose to cooperate with the government data collection programs rather than challenge them also are either highly regulated or do a lot of business with the government. Google, for example, is providing the email for the 7,200 faculty, staff and midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy, for the 5,000 staff at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, and for the 17,000 employees at the General Services Administration. Microsoft had its own antitrust battle with the Department of Justice, from which it emerged more whole than the Bell phone system did but nevertheless somewhat chastened.

Reasonable people may reach differing conclusions over whether these data collection activities are justified by the Islamist terrorist threat. Senators such as Ron Wyden and Rand Paul have raised concerns about the issue. The most durable policy solution may be a market-based one that would easily allow new entrants to arise and raise capital in the telecommunications business without their having to get a lot of permission from the government. If some new phone company or email service provider began with a promise that they’d obey lawful court orders, but that they’d also fight really hard as a rule not to give customer information to the government, the customers would line up — if the government would let them.

In the midst of much extremely justified fuss about the abuse of official power at the federal level, don't forget that state and local officials are at least as likely to wipe certain parts of their anatomy with your civil liberties as are their counterparts in D.C. Today's example comes from Texas, where police are empowered to arrest people and haul them in, even for minor violations that aren't penalized by time behind bars.

From Watchdog.org:

In Texas, people can be arrested for just about anything. In fact, speeding is one of just two crimes that can’t get you arrested; the other is having an open container.

[Don] Elmer was arrested, not for speeding but for failing to wear his seat belt.

When the judge called his case, “he just bust out laughing,” Elmer said. “He was like, ‘He must have really not liked you.’”

Elmer lost his job, and he had to pay to get his car out of the tow yard.

He can thank Gov. Rick Perry and the U.S. Supreme Court for the nearly unlimited power that Texas law enforcement officers have to arrest anyone, even for crimes such as busted tail lights and unsafe lane changes not punishable by jail time.

The expansive arrest powers come, in part, from a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case, Atwater v. Lago Vista, in which America's solons of all things constitutional said it was A-OK to cuff people for such penny-ante offenses as ... well ... not wearing a seatbelt. Texas cops, and police elsewhere, took the decision to heart. As you might expect, such wide-ranging powers are wielded with a great deal of personal discretion. Pissing off a cop during a routine traffic stop — or any other time — can be taken as an invitation to put on the handcuffs, for instance. The threat of arrest can also be used to extract compliance.

Of course, most cops are uninterested in jailing seat-belt violators – they’d be the laughingstock of their departments if they did it often. But Texas police routinely use that arrest authority to coerce people into surrendering their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Since the 2001 ruling, Texas lawmakers have attempted, three times, to rein-in police powers even a little. Governor Rick Perry vetoed the legislation each time. 

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The Australian newspaper The Age, senior writer John Watson reports in an op-ed the results of a couple of analyses that look at the follow on health effects of the triple meltdown of the reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in the wake of the March 2011 monster tsunami. Very good news - despite the scale of the disaster and the amount of radiation that leaked into the environment, the health effects will likely be negligible to undetectable. From the op-ed:

In February, the World Health Organisation reported there would be no noticeable increases in cancer rates for the overall population. A third of emergency workers were at some increased risk.

While infants in two localised hot spots were likely to have a 6 per cent relative increase in female breast cancer and 7 per cent relative increase in male leukaemia, WHO cautioned this was a small change. The lifetime risk of thyroid cancer, which is treatable, is only 0.75 per cent, so even in the worst-affected location it rose to only 1.25 per cent.

Now the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has drawn on 80 scientists from 18 countries to produce a draft report that concludes: "Radiation exposure following the nuclear accident at Fukushima-Daiichi did not cause any immediate health effects. It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers." ...

Nor has the environment been devastated. The report says: "The exposures on both marine and terrestrial non-human biota were too low for observable acute effects."

As The Age further notes:

Let's be clear, Fukushima was hit by a worst-case scenario: the world's fifth-most-powerful earthquake since 1900, a tsunami twice as high as the plant was built to withstand, and follow-up quakes of magnitudes 7.1 and 6.3. A Japanese commission of inquiry described it as a "man-made disaster" because of regulatory failure and lack of a safety culture.

This "perfect storm" hit a nuclear plant built to a 50-year-old design and no one died. Japan moved a few metres east during a three-minute quake and the local coastline subsided half a metre, but the 11 reactors operating in four nuclear power plants in the region all shut down automatically. None suffered significant damage. (The tsunami disabled Fukushima's cooling system.)

Yet such is the imbalance of dread to risk on matters nuclear that this accident was enough to turn public opinion and governments against nuclear power. Never mind that coal mining kills almost 6000 people a year, or that populations of coal-mining areas have death rates about 10 per cent higher than non-mining areas, or that coal emissions drive global warming.

A 2010 National Academy of Sciences study, The Hidden Costs of Energy, calculated that coal fired electricity generation produced $62 billion in non-climate damages annually in the U.S., of which 90 percent were associated with premature mortality. At the standard rate of $6 million per life, that implies about 10,000 excess deaths per year.

There may be a good economic case against pursuing nuclear power, but worries about the industry's health effects (even in a very near worst case scenario) do not provide good reasons to oppose nuclear power generation.

For more background see my column, "The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Nuke Environmentalists," and my post-Fukushima column, "Radiation Non-Alert."