You’d think the Obama administration would have learned by now how difficult it is to wage two wars at once. Even with many of his resources tied up in wiping Christmas off the face of the earth, Barack Hussein Arugula Obama is now taking the fight to our nation’s other portly little cookie addicts. Fat kids.
On Monday, Obama signed into law the sinister-sounding Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010. Basically, it increases the federal reimbursement for free school lunches by about six cents a meal, and expands the benefits to after-school programs (presently, most schools just provide snacks). Still making the rounds through our current legislative clusterfuck is the Food Safety Bill, aimed at curbing the recent wave of salmonella and other food-born illness. While dems are trumpeting both bills as investments in long-term health care costs, Republicans are wary of intervening in in the profitable business of getting people to put shit in their bodies. Oregon, in particular, is in the trenches of this culture war. The success of the Oregon Trail Card has led to a federal pilot program aimed at providing low-income children in rural areas with healthy food during the summer. In more densely populated areas, food is often provided at schools and parks, but, according to USDA undersecretary Kevin Concannon, that kind of assistance isn’t feasible in rural areas. The debit-card based program will begin next summer and involve 2500 families in Linn and Jefferson counties.
But fear not! As always, thank the Lord (as they certainly do), Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have stepped up to defend our second-amendment right to type-2 diabetes. Palin calls the effort to ban junk food in public-school vending machines a product of “the nanny state run amok.” Beck sees through the niceties and realizes that George Soros probably just wants to drive up beef prices to promote the wide-spread eating disorder known as vegetarianism. And while it’s sad to think of pudgy little boys and girls forced to eat vegetables that they can’t dip french fries in, the real victim here is, of course, the corporations. While McDonalds—though saddled with lawsuits and regulations on the homefront—can at least look forward to doubling its franchises in China, poor Coca-Cola has had to resort to Op-Eds in the Wall Street Journal to defend themselves from paying their fair share of the nations staggering health care costs. This is about freedom of choice, people! Eight-year-olds lacking the cognitive abilities to understand predatory marketing and without the organic-chemistry background to understand the result of increased insulin levels have the right to put their milk money in vending machines whose owners are paying huge contracts to budget-depleted schools in order to be allowed in their cafeterias!
Because the only thing sweeter that high-fructose corn syrup, friends, is Liberty.
It’s our God-given right as Americans to be fat! You Libtards need to realize that the Founding Fathers intended for every American to have life, liberty, and a colon full of undigested beef and fat!
Exactly. Any of the Founding Fathers would have seen one of the beautiful, well adjusted teen in trouble on Maury and let a single tear fall in pride at hearing those sweet words of liberty: “Whatever, I do what I want!”
Whatever happened to ‘keep your laws off my body?’
Oh and ‘predatory marketing’ – is also known as ‘marketing’
Agribusiness in action! Exciting stuff.
Beck is a lunatic, as usual, creating strawmen socialists.
>’predatory marketing’ – is also known as ‘marketing’
Marketing:
“Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales.”
Predatory Marketing:
“The definition of predatory marketing is the practice of targeting potential customers with ads that are geared towards his or her demographic. Often times predatory marketers who are practicing predatory marketing will pray on those who are more susceptible to advertising [children] and play upon fears or concerns.”
not exactly mutually inclusive
If your marketing department is not ‘targeting potential customers with ads that are geared towards his or her demographic’ they’re a tad behind the curve.
If you are such a weak failure as a parent that you can’t control your childrens’ appetites, that’s a shame they must suffer, but stop the fascists from telling the rest of us what to do.
Hey, D, assuming you’re making the above statement… you have children, right? Because, it’s a pretty baseless statement if not.
@D: I wouldn’t support any outright bans on the production or ingestion of junk food (neither do either of these bills), but I fully support taxing the shit out of it. It’s short sighted to think that we’re not paying out the ass in public-health dollars for kids with bad nutrition, especially considering that diabetes is far more common in children from lower-income families.
You’re naive if you don’t think the kind of marketing that goes on during saturday-morning cartoons is predatory… but I’m not naive enough to think it’s going to change. Which, to me, is an argument for why public schools shouldn’t be putting the same harmful products in front of kids. You wouldn’t (I assume) support selling cigarettes in a high school’s senior locker bay to fill a budget gap. What’s the philosophical difference?
@D – Unhealthy fat kids are bad for our nation (health care costs, laziness, etc). Unwanted babies are bad for our nation, too.
Also, isn’t the “true cost” of a crappy cheeseburger something like $200? Our gov is subsidizing bullcrap. Instead, it should be subsidizing things that are good for us.
@Tony Perez – What’s the real difference between banning it and taxing the shit out of it? One of them lets you sleep at night because you don’t feel as guilty?
I don’t see how a child’s lack of cognition comes into play, here – because they ALSO don’t have any money. It’s the parents that make the purchasing decision, and they’ve all been shown the food pyramid.
‘Unhealthy fat kids’ are a symptom, not the root problem. Someone chose to grow them that way – that’s the root problem. So this seems like a familar old question – should the government use taxes in order to influence the public’s behavior?
I think the answer is ‘no.’ Taxes are a way to pay for public services, not a social engineering tool. Using them that way seems unethical.
ROM’s right that there are some ridiculous farm subsidies that probably need to stop.
@Reymont Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of a sin tax, there is a concrete difference between banning a product and taxing/regulating it…and it has nothing to do with the amount of sleep I get (it has to do with markets, distribution channels, and marketing).
I can honestly sympathize with not wanting to use tax policy for social engineering purposes, but what about externalities that are unaccounted for in the free-market (say, the negative impact of pollution)? So long as health care dollars are coming from the public coffers, the government (and their tax policy) should have vested interest in public health. Adam Smith has my back on this.
And yes, ROM’s absolutely right. Continuing to subsidize corn is ridiculous.
Leave the fat kids alone! They’re good for the economy.
Kids today are LITERALLY fatter than your mom.
D, seriously? My parents were pretty damned awesome, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to scarf Ding Dongs whenever I was away from home. Give me one good reason why Hostess needs to sell products in a public school without using libertarian Jedi mind trick bullshit, especially when the kids can walk out the door, down the street, and buy all the Ho-Ho’s they want at Plaid Pantry.
Extending your logic would inevitably lead to the notion that you can sell anything legal in schools, otherwise we’re just being controlling, right? So if you live in a state where you can legally smoke at 16, what’s the problem with a school cigarette dispenser, amirite?
All that said, the crap most schools dish up through their cafeterias isn’t much better than what you’d find in a vending machine. That’s where the real fight needs to be.
Maybe nuts like Glen are just trying to slowly thin the herd. We’re picking off the weak with Double Cheeseburgers.