Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 18, 2024 • 03:11 PM

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The High Price of Michelle Obama’s Food Nannying Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, March 13 2014
Schools are being forced to pay more for healthy foods, while actually serving children less.

Stumping for her husband on the campaign trail in 2008, Michelle Obama told a crowd in Puerto Rico, “Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we're going to have to change our traditions, our history; we're going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” Little did we know that she was thinking about our pantries at the time.

It’s a time-honored tradition that First Ladies pick a pet project to champion during their time in the White House. Nancy Reagan had drug abuse. Barbara Bush had literacy. Laura Bush focused on education. It’s been typical of Republican spouses to champion their causes primarily through civil society. They’re not usually pushing sweeping new laws, but rather using their platform as a means of exhorting Americans to voluntary action.

Modern liberals have chosen a more aggressive posture. Hillary Clinton takes the cake on this front, having pushed health care reform during the early days of her husband’s Oval Office tenure, when there was still the pervasive notion of a Clinton “co-presidency.” Mrs. Obama hasn’t gone quite that far, but she’s not bashful about thinking that her pet cause should have the power of the federal government behind it.

The First Lady has chosen childhood obesity as her focus at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s a superficially unobjectionable cause. Children — like Americans generally — tend to eat too much (and too poorly) and exercise too little. There’s nothing wrong with a prominent figure like Mrs. Obama using her elevated visibility to encourage kids to go easy on the sweets and spend a little more time outdoors, even if some of the means she chooses to do so — growing vegetables in the White House garden, for instance — are irredeemably contrived.

That would all be well and good if it were as far as those efforts went. With the Obamas, however, there’s never any limiting principle.

So it was that the (unelected) Mrs. Obama was the one announcing late last month that the FDA will be imposing new mandates on the nutritional labeling that appears on the packaging of most food products. Under the new rules, calorie counts will appear in bigger, bolder print, the definition of serving sizes will be altered, and certain ingredients —such as added sugars—will have to be disclosed on the packaging.

At first blush, this all seems harmless enough. In fact, the changes are so subtle as to be almost indiscernible when you compare the new labels side by side with the old. Yet, to hear the First Lady tell it, this is a form of regulatory salvation for American shoppers. In her White House remarks announcing the changes, she painted a breathless picture of the supermarket hellscape facing anxious parents under the old regime:

So there you stood, alone in some aisle in a store, the clock ticking away at the precious little time remaining to complete your weekly grocery shopping, and all you could do was scratch your head, confused and bewildered, and wonder, is there too much sugar in this product? Is 50 percent of the daily allowance of riboflavin a good thing or a bad thing? And how on Earth could this teeny little package contain five whole servings?

This stream of questions and worries running through your head when all you really wanted to know was, should I be eating this or not? Is this good for my kids or not? And if it is healthy, how much of it should I be eating? But unless you had a thesaurus, a calculator, a microscope, or a degree in nutrition, you were out of luck. So you felt defeated, and you just gave up and went back to buying the same stuff you always buy.

There are only two reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from this histrionic narrative: Either Mrs. Obama does not actually know people who do their own shopping or those she does know are not fully-functioning adults. For most Americans, a trip to the grocery store is a slightly less Kafkaesque experience.

Still, even this could be excused if it was just an example of a political figure trying to inflate a bit of regulatory marginalia for PR purposes. In economic terms, however, the impact is anything but marginal. By the FDA’s own estimates, the cost of the labeling revisions for the food industry will be approximately 2 billion dollars. For that price, the Administration would be better off just hiring a personal trainer for every obese child in America.

The lack of any serious cost-benefit analysis shouldn’t come as a surprise. The First Lady’s previous marquee effort on this front was the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, imposing calorie limits and dietary restrictions on school lunches. Like the FDA labeling requirements, it was also passed into law with nary a thought for the consequences.

An audit released by the Government Accounting Office earlier this month found that 48 out of 50 states are having difficulties abiding by the law’s requirements. Nationwide, more than 1 million students have dropped out of school lunch programs, a phenomenon the GAO attributes largely to the new rules. Around the country, 321 school districts have abandoned the National School Lunch program altogether because of the burdens imposed by the law.

Under the law, some schools have had to jettison such staples as cheeseburgers or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Even white bread is in the crosshairs, with the program emphasizing whole grain items beginning this year. In their place: a bevy of healthy alternatives that one Kentucky school board official famously said students complained, “tastes like vomit.” Schools are being forced to pay more for healthy foods, while actually serving children less.

As a result, students have launched protests, turned to vending machines and increasingly purchased food off-campus. Black markets in junk food are actually turning up in some schools. And much of Mrs. Obama’s artisanal cuisine is ending up at the bottom of trash cans. Could any exercise in social engineering be as inevitably doomed to failure as one attempting to keep adolescents away from calories?

The First Lady’s attempts to serve as the nation’s nutritionist-in-chief have been a failure across the board. Perhaps she ought to stick to exhortation rather than trying to micromanage the contents of children’s meals. Such restrained gestures might actually be palatable to the American people — which is more than can be said of the food that she’s been trying to force down their throats.

Notable Quote   
 
"It's a rematch.President Biden and former President Trump each hit a key marker last week, clinching enough delegates to become the presumptive nominee of their respective party.The outcome of the general election will come down to a handful of states, as usual.The map maintained by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ lists seven contests as toss-ups."Read the entire article here.…[more]
 
 
— Niall Stanage, The Hill
 
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