Tag: USDA

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Government Delivers Pizza

Pizza is popular. It hardly needs advertising, much less government subsidy.

And yet the federal government does, indeed, subsidize the promotion of pizza.

Apparently, our government wants us to eat more of the scrumptious (but fattening) stuff.

Has this has been cleared with Michelle Obama?Pie Chart

The program is the business of a much more power group, the USDA. In recent years, according to the U.S. Food Policy Blog,

USDA’s dairy checkoff program has spent many millions of dollars to increase pizza consumption among U.S. children and adults. Using the federal government’s taxation powers, the checkoff program collects a mandatory assessment of 15 cents on every hundredweight of milk that is sold for use as fluid milk or dairy products.

The goal is to promote cheese. (It promotes milk, too, but milk consumption is going down, steadily over the long term.) And, since the pizza industry is the biggest single user of cheese, those checkoff funds wind up in the advertising coffers of Domino’s Pizza, which soaks up about three-​quarters of the dough. Ahem.

The federal government seems especially concerned to promote the eating of cheap delivery pizza.

But, good or bad, just talking about pizza makes me hungry for pizza. And yet, to prevent my corporeal presence from ballooning into a behemoth approximating the dimensions of the U.S. national debt, I don’t eat pizza very often.

In view of both of these truths, the USDA could afford to stop promoting the nominally Italian (but actually very American) foodstuff.

Get the government out of food advertising. Particularly (but not limited to) pizza.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

*Pie chart not made from a pizza from Domino’s.

Categories
folly

Taxing Christmas and Common Sense

Joke writers received an early Christmas present this week when the Obama Administration announced plans to levy a tax on Christmas. Actually, the tax was not on Christmas, precisely, but on Christmas trees. 

And not on all Christmas trees, just on real, “cut” Christmas trees as opposed to the artificial variety. Seems people prefer artificial trees. Sales of “fresh” trees have fallen significantly in recent years, while artificial tree sales nearly doubled from 2003 to 2007. 

So, the folks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a 15-​cent-​per-​tree tax on “producers and importers” of 500 trees or more. The money would go into an advertising campaign to promote freshly-​cut real trees over artificial ones.

But is it even a tax? 

“I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama administration is not taxing Christmas trees,” declared White House spokesman Matt Lehrich. “What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign …”

But Jim Harper of the Cato Institute asked and answered the essential question: “Do Christmas tree farmers go to jail if they refuse to pay? Yes. It’s a tax.”

Once joke writers and commentators and real people (as opposed to the artificial variety) got wind of it, the tax/​non-​tax was scuttled with an announcement that “USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action.”

Don’t bother. As Robert Childress of the Texas Christmas Tree Growers Association posits, “I feel that marketing for my products is my responsibility …”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
nannyism too much government

The Propaganda Diet

When the federal government gave up its goofy “food pyramid,” I thought it might be a sign that the USDA had given up. We’re not so lucky. The USDA just announced its new diet propaganda campaign, trading in the pyramid for a pie chart.

But, as noticed on Reason magazine’s Hit and Run, there’s no pie.

Actually, the graphic’s in the shape of a plate, with four categories broken down in pie-​chart fashion: Fruits, grains, vegetables, and proteins. In a separate element to the side, a “cup” labeled “dairy” serves as a fifth food group.

The “eat your vegetables” mantra we’ve been hearing all our lives is now reinforced by the command to make half our “plate” (the graphic is available at ChooseMyPlate​.gov) fresh fruits and vegetables, take half our grains as whole grains, avoid salt, and switch our milk to skim or 1 percent. Oh, and avoid sugary drinks; drink water instead. And eat less overall.

Good advice, I suppose, but at this point if the government tells me that the unclouded sky is blue, I’d check to verify, first.

And regarding our diets, “check to verify” is probably a good idea. We can hardly trust even the so-​called experts without applying our own critical intelligence. Our eating habits are ours. And much of what the government’s said in the past has been nonsense.

As for me, I’d like to cut down on government itself. This campaign seems the place to start. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment too much government

A Cool $90,000

Is American life now best described by the plot of a Nathanael West novel?

Maybe. In West’s A Cool Million, the young hero meets calamity after calamity, often at the hands of America’s authorities. I stopped after a prison official had all the hero’s teeth ripped out to “prevent infection.”

Most American punitive “overkill” is not as gruesomely funny. If you ask John Dollarhite, it’s not funny at all.

Dollarhite, who runs a computer store in Nixa, Missouri, inherited his son’s rabbit-​breeding business, which Dollarhite describes as being on the order of a lemonade stand. When his son reached 18, Dollarhite took over Dollarvalue Rabbitry, and sold over 600 little furry creatures in the space of a year and a half. 

He closed the business after the USDA got involved.

You see, the USDA licenses the selling of animals in this country. And neither Dollarhite nor his son were licensed to breed and sell rodents. Dollarhite says he wasn’t aware of such a requirement.

So, of course, the USDA came down. Hard. Like a starved puma on a vole.

The USDA demands he pay over $90,000 in penalties. Dollarhite says the government might as well demand a cool million — or, as he put it, a “$1000 or $100 million. I don’t have it.”

The blogosphere is up in arms about this, and rightly so.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking this isn’t American justice. More like that Nathanael West novel I never finished.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.