The Benfit of Federalism - Michelle Obama School Lunch Program Teaches Kids About Central Planning - Granite Grok

The Benfit of Federalism – Michelle Obama School Lunch Program Teaches Kids About Central Planning

school-food-going-to-waste-photo by john davis taken 10/18/2012
Image credit: john Davis

Liberals like to use government to force their worldview on others, from as high up and as far away as they can, preferably with layers of bureaucracy between you–the more people to finger for their own failure the better.  So when Michelle Obama spun her domestic web of progressive meddling across the public school lunch landscape she ‘learned them’ something important about top down, one-size-fits-all central planning.  She also planted a seed; there are benefits to federalism versus top down federal mandates.  No matter whom you blame the latter on, central planning never works as promised.

Progressives blame kid-hating Republicans and greedy businesses for the revolt against Mrs. Obama’s failed policies. But the truth is right around the corner in our students’ cafeterias. Districts are losing money. Discarded food is piling high. Kids are going off-campus to fill their tummies or just going hungry.

According to the School Nutrition Association, almost half of school meal programs reported declines in revenue in the 2012–13 school year, and 90 percent said food costs were up. Local nutrition directors are demanding more flexibility and freedom.

The legislative form of Michelle Obama’s meddling was the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010.  It passed  in the waning days of a Democrat majority House and Senate (Republicans are not responsible for this disaster), and was promoted as necessary to eliminate hunger and improve nutrition.  What it did was institutionalize redistributive forces that changed menus, drove up costs, wasted food, and imparted on unsuspecting students a lesson in the joys of central planning.

There is no shortage of exposition on this topic at GraniteGrok.com.  There are at least a dozen posts on this topic.  From driving up the prices charged by federal mandate, how that forced increase went (LITERALLY) to waste (also here), who from New Hampshire voted for the mandates, the superior benefit of local control, the local revolution against the mandate, and plenty more.

School lunch administrators are livid.  They are paying more, wasting more, and chasing federal subsidies they wouldn’t even need if they were left to run their cafeterias the way they know best.

Kids are hungry, they don’t like the portions or choices, many are going hungry even if they do eat what is offered, but many more are exploring out of network or black market options to feed themselves, while others are simply opting out.  The result is declining revenues at school cafeterias who now have less money to provide reduced or free lunches to the kids who actually need them.

Taxpayers get milked to pay for the higher cost of lunches that are wasted , not to mention the cost of hauling off the waste.  Students end up at school unhappy, and hungry.  Lunch managers are trapped between the bureaucrats, parents, and kids, and the end result will be higher taxes to make up the shortfall created by the policy itself.

Michelle Obama’s healthy hunger free kids act didn’t make kids less hungry nor healthy but it did put a Mao suit on every lunch menu in the nation.

Take note parents and kiddies.  This is a feature of every federal programs that dangles dollars it stole from you in the first place so it could then cram mandates down on state and local governments before they could get any of it back.  And for those keeping score, it is this that most on the right of the Republican establishment want to change.

We’re not anti-government.  We are pro local government.  We are pro local government for all the reasons that the progressive lunch mandates failed.  Local governments are more responsive to local needs, which are as likely to be different in adjacent towns as towns thousands of miles apart.

And yet, progressives insist you believe that it is more efficient and cost-effective for a sliver of the population to manage every school cafeteria in a country with hundreds of millions of people from a tiny district on the eastern seaboard?  You’d be right to question their motives or even their sanity but doing so in the current political culture will get you pilloried as either an anarchist, a racist, a bigot, all of the above, or just some yokel duped by those bastards in the Tea Party.

But let’s face facts.  The founders did know better.  The Constitution protects Federalism and the right and benefit of local control to all but a few and finite things for a reason.  The Michelle Obama School lunch fail is a very real demonstration of why they designed it that way and proof that federalism and local control are superior models of governance.

The founders knew that micro-managed, top down mandates wouldn’t work for school lunch, for education, for energy, for almost anything.  And until the current generation, which has found themselves screwed over daily by the Obama Administration’s lunch tyranny–or the generation or three before them by everything else–realizes this, the Federal government will continue to assume responsibility for things that cost more than school lunch programs and have more dire consequences–like, say…Health Care.

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