The Government Subsidizes Junk Food and the Costly Lifestyle Diseases Resulting from Poor Nutrition

If there ever was a defining characteristic of insanity, it's got to be the US government. Only in America are taxpayers forced to subsidized unhealthy bad food that results in expensive to maintain lifestyle diseases that are also publicly funded. The Big Food and Big Pharm lobbies are determined to perpetually guarantee big profits through mandates and subsidies. The marriage of big government and big business has churned Americans into fat pharmaceutical dependent blimps.

Cato has a fascinating piece on this issue.

How Uncle Sam's Making Us Fat

The US Department of Agriculture is Exhibit A for foolish, wasteful federal policymaking: It spends billions subsidizing the same unhealthy foods it tells us to avoid.

This year, the USDA will spend more than $1 billion subsidizing the growth of four common food additives: corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch and soy oils (hydrogenated vegetable oil).

These additives "provide a cheap dose of sweetness and fat to a wide variety of junk food products," warns the US Public Interest Research Group. PIRG found that the USDA spent $18.2 billion from 1995 to 2011 to subsidize junk-food additives.

Yet, while some of your tax dollars pay for these junk-food additives, more pay for public-health education campaigns that strive to convince us to eat less and to eat better.

The USDA lectures and hectors us to avoid anything that's fatty, salty, sugary or filled with processed ingredients — like the ones our tax dollars subsidize.

Clearly, the Agriculture Department puts the D in double standard: The bureacuracy's left hand is at war with its right.

The government doesn't just subsidize nasty things like the manufacture of HFCS and hydrogenated oils, it also subsidizes the retail sale of these nasty products with food stamp subsidies.  Food stamps have been renamed SNAP, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, although there's nothing nutritious about the program.  Even liberal organizations are waking up to the stone cold reality that the government subsidizes junk food that makes folks sick and unhealthy. The farm bill passed by Congress is loaded with all kinds of subsidy horrors

Farm Bill Jackpot – How Much do Corporations Benefit from SNAP?

* Powerful food industry lobbying groups such as the American Beverage Association and the Snack Food Association teamed up to oppose health-oriented improvements to SNAP, at times working with anti-hunger groups

* At least nine states have proposed bills to make health-oriented improvements to SNAP, but none have passed, in part due to opposition from the food industry In one year, nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts together received more than $33 million in SNAP dollars—over four times the SNAP money spent at farmers markets nationwide

*In two years, Walmart received about half of the one billion dollars in SNAP expenditures in Oklahoma

* J.P. Morgan Chase holds contracts in 24 states to administer SNAP benefits, indicating concentrated power and a lack of competition

*In New York, a seven-year deal originally paid J.P. Morgan Chase $112 million for EBT services, and was recently amended to add $14.3 million—an increase of 13 percent States are seeing unexpected increases in administrative costs, while banks and other private contractors are reaping significant windfalls from the economic downturn and increasing SNAP participation.

While food stamps supporting liberals are not exactly recognizing that the government freebies that they so cherish are unhealthy, they are beginning to wake up to the reality and some of them are lobbying for nutritional improvement in the junk food laden food stamp program.

As a Libertarian, I oppose the food stamp program.  That said, I don't believe it will ever vanish.  However, it can be vastly improved by restricting food stamp use to fruits, vegetable, meats and dairy. Food stamp users are notorious for loading up with junk food, sugary cereals for their kids and soda.  They don't have the common sense to eat sensibly which is precisely why junk food needs to be banned from the food stamp program.

But there's a hugely expensive companion problem to the food stamp insanity and junk food subsidies.  Bad food results in lifestyle diseases that are very expensive to treat.  Not only are American taxpayers forced to pay for the junk food that makes folks sick with lifestyle diseases, they are also forced to pay for their healthcare.  In fact, Medicare and Medicaid are costing American taxpayers near $1 trillion a year, here.

With 60% of the American people already on some form of taxpayer subsidized healthcare, America is already a socialist nation and most Americans absolutely do demand government provided healthcare and other entitlements.  Support for Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs remains quite strong. Americans are just like everybody else – they want something for free (translation: at the expense of somebody else) but there is no such thing as a free anything and anything the government does is very costly, inefficient and life threatening.

America spends more on healthcare than any industrialized nation and by a very wide margin.

Also, there is no corresponding increase in American longevity considering the huge amount of money we pour into health care. In fact, we keep going backwards, 3rd world nations are surpassing us and we ranked 42nd in longevity.

U.S. ranks just 42nd in life expectancy

Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries. For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles...

Among the other factors:

•Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

•“The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy,” said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. “We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times.”

Tragically, American is a nation swimming with fat entitlement dependent pigs. Of course, the government itself is responsible for this nightmare by doling out freebies, free junk food and free healthcare to those who simply refuse to eat or live responsibly.

Kids are eating high calorie, low nutrition diets that primarily consist of simple carbohydrates, sugar, corn syrup, fats and sodium. Much of what kids eat in the schools is taxpayer funded garbage. Even more horrifying is that Migration Information reported that schools actually sell advertising to junk food purveyors by signing “"pouring rights" contracts that permit snack and soft drink companies to advertise to children on school vending machines, scoreboards, book covers, t-shirts, and news programs shown on televisions in the classroom., here.

Only in America do we kill our kids for profit and do it with our tax dollars!!

A group called Healthyamericans.org reported in June 2009 that "Today, we spend nearly $800 billion on health problems that are directly linked to lifestyle and poor health habits each year-about one third of our total health care spending…” and that article was quoting a congress critter, here.

America can't begin to solve its immense economic and fiscal problems because we remain a nation of spoiled rotten morons, from the political class and all the way down to the people who vote to hire the police powers of the state to forcibly steal from somebody else to give them what they think they want or deserve.  So long as folks are allowed to vote for politicians who will keep them fat, lazy, sick and entitlement dependent, the soul of a once proud, independent, prosperous and responsible people will continue to die and morph into something so vile that neither America nor Americans will ever be restored to our glorious legacy of being the the strongest, most prosperous and freest people in human history.

The Free Shit Army Rules

The website Government Gone Wild (governmentgonewild.org) has some incredibly enlightening videos including this short but highly instructive 3 minute video:

 Land of The Freebies, Home of the Enslaved

Americans need to acknowledge the bitter truth: America is no longer the land of the free and the economically prosperous. America is very much a fascist/socialist/entitlement hell that is so typical of every bankrupt western nation that is imploding under the weight of unsustainable entitlements.  Even more disturbing is that both Republican and Democrat voters literally voted for this nightmare that is wiping out the once strong and prosperous middle class.

No one describes the situation better than James Quinn, a brilliantly astute economic pundit whose website, theburningplatform.com, is loaded with extraordinary, insightful and well documented data on the true state of the union.  It's not a pretty sight.

Quinn frequently talks about what he dubs "The Free Shit Army", here.

I've come to the conclusion that the middle class of this country has been caught in a pincer movement by two armies. My definition of the Middle Class is households making between $50,000 and $150,000 per year. The Free Shit Army is attacking us on the left. The middle class has been the backbone of the country, doing the heavy lifting in this country. They get up every morning and trudge off to work to support their families. The Free Shit Army sleeps in. They have chosen to not educate themselves in order to advance in our society.

Politicians have enabled them to stay in poverty by providing welfare, disability, food stamps, and tax incentives that make their lives just comfortable enough to not work. If you provide money to people who are classified as disabled, you get more disabled. The Free Shit Army has 50% more disabled than the general population. If you pay people for not working, why should they work? The middle class works and pays their taxes. These taxes are then redistributed to the Free Shit Army.

The second pincer movement on the middle class has been conducted by a stealthier army. This army has experts in propaganda, misinformation, and obfuscation. I call them the Ruling Elite Army. The generals are the ultra-wealthy CEOs of Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. Their armor divisions are manned by the corporate mainstream media. They are excellent at laying down a great smoke screen before blasting away. The infantry is manned by 535 Congressional officers with thousands of corporate lobbyist foot soldiers. This army has been given the mission to capture the supplies of the middle class.

The middle class were not prepared for the assaults they have been fending off. They became soft and satisfied. They stopped training. They became distracted by their gadgets, delusions of home wealth, and fear of phantom terrorist enemies behind every bush. The propaganda machine of their true enemies has convinced the middle class that foreign enemies are massing. The enemy is within. The middle class will need to sacrifice and go to war against two enemies. Are they up to the task? I'm not sure.

Quinn then offers up real solutions for real problems that are outlined under the following categories: Political System, Economic Policy, Education Policy, Energy Policy, National Defense/Foreign Policy, Immigration and Social Issues.

The cures detailed by James Quinn are pretty much identical to the cures that have been advocated by the good doctor Ron Paul for decades.  Both Quinn and Ron Paul have correctly diagnosed the disease and the medicine required to cure the disease.

It's not likely that the America people will listen to what needs to be done or take the life saving medicine to restore their liberty and prosperity because, well, the people are just too far gone and too corrupted. Once the American people made the ballot box decision to hire the police powers of the government to steal from others at the point of a gun to give them what they demand and and think they deserve, the American people signed their own death warrant and voted themselves into totalitarian slavery. The American people now get to chew on a few crumbs and tossed bones that were picked clean by those who promised them the statist cornucopia of plenty.

For a while, The Free Shit Army and their powerful ally, The Ruling Elite Army, were euphoric.  Everything appeared to be working splendidly, until one day it just was no more.  Just ask the Greeks.  

America Really is DEBT MAN WALKING, Fedzilla Spends $114,253 Per Second on Revenues of $73,043 Per Second

Drudge had a big ominous headline today.

Federal Deficit Highest Since 1940s

The federal deficit is higher than it has been since the 1940s, in the years immediately after World War II.

A new visual from the "Face the Facts USA," a non-partisan election project from George Washington University, shows the federal deficit has risen significantly under President Barack Obama, and that the government is increasingly spending money it doesn't have.

In every second of 2011, for example, the government spent $114,253—even though it was only taking in $73,043 in revenue. According to Face the Facts, that means the federal government spent $41,210 every second that it didn't actually have.

For the most part, Americans remain clueless relative to the significance of this incredible fact (America being broke and bankrupt) and that's largely because Americans perceive the government as the perpetual cornucopia of plenty that has an infinite capacity to keep them in a style to which they have become accustomed. The massively unsustainable entitlement state absolutely will burst at the seams and fail, just as it has in Greece, Spain and other European nations.

Just how broke is America? We are currently spending about $3.8 trillion on tax revenues of about 2.3 trillion. The debt is over $15 trillion and climbing. Bush and the Republicans exploded the national debt in 8 years by $5 trillion. Obama has already increased the debt by another $5 trillion and counting in about 3 years. No effort is being made to rein in the spending. The government believes that it can literally spend its way out of national bankruptcy and economic ruin.

Think about the cuts that would be required to live within our means ($2.3 trillion in tax receipts). Well, the federal government doesn’t actually have $2.3 million to spend because Social Security receipts fly right out the window in benefits.

The interest on the national debt in 2011 was a staggering $454 billion, according to the Treasury's own website, here.  Of the $2.3 billion in 2011 federal revenues, $1.3 billion came from income taxes and $800 billion came from Social Security taxes, money that is supposed to be untouchable and not spent by Congress but the Social Security Trust Fund is routinely plundered.

Yes My Fellow Americans, Congress Really Did Steal Your Social Security

The White House budget reported that $780 billion was disbursed to SS recipients in 2011. USA Today reported that Medicare and Medicaid totaled a staggering $992 billion in 2011 ($554 billion for Medicare and $438 billion for Medicaid), here. At least 58% of the American people are dependent on government funded healthcare. There are other big entitlement programs like housing, food stamps and unemployment compensation, to name a few.

With Medicare and Medicaid eating up nearly $1 trillion of the $2.3 trillion in federal tax receipts, it's been reported that all federal entitlements now exceed total federal revenue.

Government Cash Handouts Now Top Tax Revenues

U.S. households are now getting more in cash handouts from the government than they are paying in taxes for the first time since the Great Depression.

Households received $2.3 trillion in some kind of government support in 2010. That includes expanded unemployment benefits, as well as payments for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and stimulus spending, among other things.


But that’s more than the $2.2 trillion households paid in taxes, an amount that has slumped largely due to the recession, according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times.

This cannot end well.  In fact, it will end very, very badly for the American people.  The day will dawn when they wake-up and discover that the government really wasn't the cornucopia of plenty as their fictitious standard of living gets nuked by their own delusions and they are blasted back to an era that few Americans are prepared for, namely, living on what they produce and without mountains of fiat debt and government entitlements.