So, on NPR this morning, they had a long story about new USDA standards for student lunches:
Less salt and fat. More whole grains, fruit, veggies and low-fat dairy. This is what kids can expect in the school lunchroom soon, according to new nutrition standards for school meals announced today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and first lady Michelle Obama.
….
The price tag on the changes? $3.2 billion over the next five years, the agency says. But schools will get some help with those costs from the government — included in the package announced today is an increase of 6 cents per meal in reimbursement funds for schools. This is the first increase in reimbursement funds in 30 years.
Look, this sort of thing does more to promote right-wing, anti-government rhetoric than anything else. Does school lunch menus really need to be controlled from Washington? I’d say no. Sure, mandate educational standards so that local school boards controlled by loons can’t just teach their idiosyncratic beliefs, but come on, let the parents and local boards figure out what to serve in cafetarias. Instead, this sort of thing just feeds into the rhetoric that Washington wants to control everything.
Other examples are low-flow toilets and light-bulbs. If there are negative externalities to the use of those things just tax ‘em. Then people who really want powerful toilets and energy inefficient lights can still have them, while the rest of us respond to market incentives and become greener as a matter of choice rather than mandate. The enforcement costs on that, btw, would be dramatically less, and the surtax on inefficient items would actually increase government revenue.
The problem is that when the government does too much, it ends up delegitimizing those things that it actually ought to be doing. And, in general, I really don’t think liberals are sensitive enough to this dynamic. Pick your fights. Focus on the big issues. Let stuff like school menus remain a local concern. Frankly, better to have school boards spending their time debating chocolate milk rather than mucking around in textbook content.
this sort of thing does more to promote right-wing, anti-government rhetoric than anything else
Well, no. What underlies that rhetoric is the right wing’s anger that the federal government made them desegregate their schools.
I think Matt Yglesias had this right:
I personally wouldn’t mind living in a world where the USDA had zero role in school lunches. But I also think that it’s a mistake to believe that the right wing– which didn’t have any problem with George Bush Jr.’s approach to federalism in Raich v. Gonzales– cares that much about this sort of thing except as a rhetorical device.
I agree with you. I am not referring so much to hard-right activists, but rather to the appeal of the sort of “government out of control” sentiment that is widely shared even among the general population. I think that focusing on the big issues and leaving toilets and light bulbs out of it would be a useful step toward sustaining a reasonable perspective on the role of the federal government.
Note, I am not saying that local school boards would do a better job. They wouldn’t, or at least most wouldn’t. But in the end, who cares if kids gets pizza and chocolate milk at lunch? Why should the USDA be mandating this?
Well, how frustrating, I was hoping for a nice rollicking disagreement. So we’re agreed on the big picture here– the fundamental problem with American politics is the Republican Party’s complete irrationality and disdain for policy.
We have a narrow, empirical disagreement. You think that this kind of thing is reasonably perceived as overreach, so why not knock it off and maybe diminish the vague, inchoate sense that “the government is too big”. I’m of the view that as long as there’s a GOP & a right-wing paramedia that feels the need to foment suspicion and hatred of America whenever they’re out of power, it doesn’t much matter what happens around the edges. In a world where Bob Dole & Jesse Helms’ health insurance reform plan can suddenly be decried by everyone in the GOP as unconstitutional fascist tyranny– thereby driving down the plan’s support in public opinion polls– there’s no sense trying to meet in the middle. The point, for Republicans, is the tantrum itself, not the ostensible policy reason for it. And they are great at getting their message out. So now we have greater public concern over the deficit than we did when the Republican Party was busy creating the deficit.
When NPR fired that guy because James O’Keefe released a clip of him saying something that made it sound like he was being mean to the Tea Party, it didn’t result in the right ceasing its highly effective PR campaign against the “liberal media”. They’re gonna keep on saying it no matter what the media does, because it works for them, and it seeps into the public consciousness.
As to “who cares”, this admittedly too-high-sounding number from last year is part of why I’m a little less receptive to this particular local-rights argument than I might be:
New to the blog, and I’m no intellectual, but what about the cost of 3.2 billion over the five years. Is that not a concern or is that peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah, I agree, $600m per year is not going to make a difference in the overall budget picture… but again, this is the sort of thing that just makes people shake their heads.
[...] USDA school lunch guidelines, I got into a bit of a debate with commenter reflectionephemeral who counters my argument about making reasonable accommodation to anti-Washington sentiment. He writes: You think that this [...]
I think you are wrong about federal involvement in school lunches for a number of reasons. First, kids don’t spring from the womb with innate knowledge of what healthy eating is, they have to be taught and school seems like a pretty good place for that. Second, the kind of externalities associated with a bad diet are ones that can only partially be covered by taxation; you can recover the cost of treating kids for Type II Diabetes and obesity, but you can’t recover the kid’s health. Third, school is the only place kids are likely to learn these lessons since mom and dad are likely engorging themselves with Big Macs and stuffing their kids with Happy Meals.