Daily Score Blog

Tonight is the kickoff of America's two-month festival of gluttony:   first Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then the extended food coma that has become the Hannukah-Christmas-New Year season.

As is now my holiday custom, I plan on packing on about 5-7 pounds over the next 2 months, then fretting about my growing girth, then vowing to eat better and get more exercise in the New Year, with mixed results. 

I know, I know, it's a vicious cycle -- I should just eat more healthfully to begin with.  But that's hard:  sugars and fats have become so cheap and abundant that they're virtually impossible to avoid.  Treats aren't a novelty any more -- they're the norm.  And even if I can steel my will to resist 9 out of 10 temptations, there's still way too many opportunities to fall off the wagon.

Growing girth is just one symptom of a food system that's fundamentally out of whack.  We've created a web of subsidies -- everything from agricultural research to tax breaks to direct payments to farmers --  that favor empty calories (e.g., corn syrup, vegetable oils, animal fats) over healthier foods, like fruits and vegetables.

A month or so ago, I got to wondering how just how many food calories the nation produces, compared with how many we need to keep our bodies fueled.  As it turns out, we produce vastly more food calories than we could ever use ourselves. Vastly.

On average, a person can survive quite well on a diet of 2,000 calories per day -- maybe a smidge more or less, depending on your weight and level of activity.  But the US corn harvest alone produces the equivalent of 13,500 calories per US resident per day -- almost 7 times more calories than we need.  And soybeans add an additional 2,600 calories per person per day. 

Add in wheat, rice, fruits, veggies, and a few minor crops, and we're talking about an agricultural system that produces at least nine times as many calories from plants as our bodies can healthfully use. (And that doesn't even count seafood, grass-fed beef, milk from pasture cattle, etc. -- just food crops.)

That's a lot of calories. 

Obviously, very little of that food is actually intended for direct human consumption.  Most goes to feed animals, a lot of it goes to ethanol, some gets sent overseas or used in industry.

Still, given how much we produce, it's no wonder that we're surrounded by sugars and fats. Spurred on by misguided subsidies, our agricultural system has become so phenomenally productive that it's actually a hazard to our health.

What could the guy next door do if I-933--or other western property initiatives--pass on November 7? Sightline has just launched a No on 933 issue ad that shows how these initiatives could pave the way for irresponsible development and an end to many commonsense protections.

Watch the ad! 

Forward it!

If you have an extra second, go to the YouTube version and rate it!

Please comment below or send feedback to elisa@sightline.org.

Seems like more and more people -- even conservative economists -- are going on record in support of higher gas taxes.

From an economists' point of view, it's a bit of a no brainer. Like just about any addiction, our gasoline habit carries lots of "externalities" -- ie., costs that fall on everyone, rather than just the person who uses the gas. (Think climate change, oil spills, air pollution, security vulnerabilities, international military entanglements, economic risk from oil price shocks, etc.)

If we consumers had to pay those costs every time we filled our tanks, then we'd tend to use gas a little more sparingly -- and we'd create fewer externalities as a result. Plus, the taxes could provide a source of revenue to deal with the problems created by energy consumption -- say, a source of revenue for energy efficiency, to ramp down our contribution to climate change

But that begs the question -- just how high should the taxes be?

There's no easy answer to that question, since there are so many uncertainties involved. Estimates of various military costs of petroleum vary by as much as a factor of six, for example (see this pdf for a summary). But taking a limited look at just the climate impacts of gasoline consumption, I'd say that a tax of, oh, about 25 cents (US) per gallon is a reasonable place to start.

That works out to roughly a penny per mile. 

Applied to both gas and diesel, that tax would raise about $2 billion per year to fight climate change in the Pacific Northwest alone.

Editor's note: Guest contributor David Kershner is a land conservation consultant who did research for Sightline's book Tax Shift.

In case you haven't noticed, environmental tax shifting is receiving national attention, thanks in part to Al Gore. Last month Gore gave a speech at New York University in which he proposed replacing the payroll tax with a carbon tax .

Last week Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that he asked Barack Obama "why [Obama] didn't support an energy-tax married to tax relief for working Americans" in a recent speech to members of MoveOn.org. Klein refers to it as Gore's "tax swap idea." Obama responded later in the interview that, "It's a neat idea. I'm going to call Gore and have a conversation about it. It might be something I would want to embrace."

Meanwhile, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz has been promoting tax shifting as part of his current book tour. In an interview on KUOW's The Conversation about two weeks ago, Stiglitz lent his support to the idea and said that leaders of the Conservative Party in Britain are now talking about the benefits of lower taxes on labor and higher taxes on pollution.

From the October 25 issue of The Guardian:

On Conservative plans for ensuring how yet-to-be-defined [carbon reduction] targets were met, Mr Cameron reiterated that his own party was committed to rebalancing the system through a system of "taxes on things that are bad," such as pollution, and ["]tax reductions on things that are good," such as free parking for battery-operated cars.

Maybe tax shifting's time has almost come?