228,000 Medicaid records were accessed unlawfully by a state employee.
But, that will never happen when the IRS has access to the information, right?
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Predictions
Almost exactly two years ago, I mentioned the government is getting involved in who may watch children and what they could be fed.
It should scare you, too. How long before the US government is telling you who can watch your kids and how they are allowed to do it, including what the children may be fed?
Two years later comes this story.
The girl’s turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips, and apple juice did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines, according to the interpretation of the person who was inspecting all lunch boxes in the More at Four classroom that day.
The Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs — including in-home day care centers — to meet USDA guidelines. That means lunches must consist of one serving of meat, one serving of milk, one serving of grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables, even if the lunches are brought from home.
When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones.
The girl’s mother — who said she wishes to remain anonymous to protect her daughter from retaliation — said she received a note from the school stating that students who did not bring a “healthy lunch” would be offered the missing portions, which could result in a fee from the cafeteria, in her case $1.25.
“I don’t feel that I should pay for a cafeteria lunch when I provide lunch for her from home,” the mother wrote in a complaint to her state representative, Republican G.L. Pridgen of Robeson County.
The girl’s grandmother, who sometimes helps pack her lunch, told Carolina Journal that she is a petite, picky 4-year-old who eats white whole wheat bread and is not big on vegetables.
Read the entire thing, as there’s some spectacular stuff from the Government Agents In Charge of
Children’s Food. It’s easy to look like you can predict the future when you are predicting the expanded growth of power of the state; it’s easy because people are sheep and continue to allow this to happen. -
More things that should scare the shit out of you
Michigan is going to require doctors report child patient BMIs to the state.
I’m sure nothing could go wrong with that.
Via Karen De Coster
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Plain and Simple
The government should not be able to make this happen. The government has no right to make you sell only products they approve. They have no right to regulate what your product is, only that the states don’t inhibit it’s trade.
Somehow that stopped mattering some time ago.
By the way, y’all do know that rum/whiskey and Coke has caffeine in it, right? HFCS, too. I guess that’s next?
(Kids: when I was younger, we made our own Four Loko: Southern Comfort and Mountain Dew. I believe that is still legal. Don’t forget who is looking out for you.)
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Gosh, I feel so much safer now
The FDA wants to make it as difficult as possible to sell E-cigs.
To that end, the FDA sent a letter to the Electronic Cigarette Association, saying that the agency will regulate electronic cigarette and related products as part of its mission to protect the public health.
“FDA invites electronic cigarette firms to work in cooperation with the agency toward the goal of assuring that electronic cigarettes sold in the United States are lawfully marketed,” the agency wrote to the association.
Under the law, a company cannot say its drug can treat or mitigate a disease, such as nicotine addiction, unless it has proved to the FDA that the drug is safe and effective for its intended use.
The battle over whether e-cigarettes are legal has been heating up over the past year. The FDA contends that e-cigarettes are both a drug and a device, making them subject to U.S. government regulation under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act.
Goodness knows smokers need to be protected from something that might help them quit. Anything that is less dangerous than smoking cigarettes that replaces smoking cigarettes should be celebrated, not banned. That includes snuff, snus, dip, chewing tobacco, and e-cigs.
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The People Making Policy Do Not Know Enough
This great read, “Corny Capitalism” by Matt Purple shows very nicely why the government shouldn’t make energy policy, the market should.
There’s just one problem: Ethanol fuel is wildly inefficient. The amount of corn required to soak the fuel supply is massive. To shift America’s car culture entirely from gasoline to gasohol would require 700,000 square miles of land growing corn exclusively for ethanol production. That would mean converting one-fifth of the United States into a sprawling corn farm.
Then again, the government never found a green boondoggle it didn’t love. For five years now, Congress has been mandating that the fuel supply be diluted with ethanol. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 required 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol in the fuel supply by 2012. A Democratic Congress went a step further in 2007, mandating 9 billion gallons by 2008, 15.2 billion by 2012, and 36 billion by 2022.
Unfortunately, that whole Economics 101, supply-and-demand thing got in the way. The maximum amount of ethanol that can be produced to meet demand, called the “blend wall,” is expected to level out at 15 billion. That will make it impossible to meet the government’s mandates.
The agriculture industry, represented primarily by Archer Daniels Midland and Growth Energy, spied an opportunity. Why not increase the legal gasohol concentration from 10% ethanol to 12% or even 15%? That would immediately ignite ethanol production and allow the government to meet its mandate. More importantly, it would make Big Agriculture some serious money.
The EPA looked ready to raise the limit until science finally intervened. A study surfaced by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from 2008 that found E15 ethanol caused a raft of problems in cars, including a loss of fuel economy and spikes in exhaust temperatures. Meanwhile the higher concentration of ethanol did nothing to reduce tailpipe emissions. The study also found problems when E15 fuel was used in lawn trimmers.
Read the entire thing, it’s enlightening, and highlights the point in yesterday’s post that we really are idiots if we continue to let the government interfere in markets that those who govern can not possibly understand.
Link via Karen De Coster
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What an excellent point
Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek asks a very good question in a letter to the NY Times.
Apart from supplying national defense, policing, and courts of law, there’s no duty that people believe to be more central to the core role of government than building and maintaining infrastructure. So if government can’t or won’t perform one of its core functions, why entrust it with additional functions – such as managing the costs of medical care – that are not at its core?
Yes. Why would anyone think the Government, which can’t do the basic things it’s charged with doing efficiently, can handle more complicated things, like the entire health care industry?
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The Progressive Mindset
If someone can’t use something that has huge benefits for lots of people, then no one can.
Last year, the schools — among them Princeton, Arizona State and Case Western Reserve — wanted to know if e-book readers would be more convenient and less costly than traditional textbooks. The environmentally conscious educators also wanted to reduce the huge amount of paper students use to print files from their laptops.
It seemed like a promising idea until the universities got a letter from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, now under an aggressive new chief, Thomas Perez, telling them they were under investigation for possible violations of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
From its introduction in 2007, the Kindle has drawn criticism from the National Federation of the Blind and other activist groups. While the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature could read a book aloud, its menu functions required sight to operate. “If you could get a sighted person to fire up the device and start reading the book to you, that’s fine,” says Chris Danielsen, a spokesman for the federation. “But other than that, there was really no way to use it.”
So someone complained, and the DOJ is shutting it down. Because that is fairness.
Some officials at the schools were puzzled. Given the speed of technological development and the reality of competition among technology companies — Apple products were already fully text-to-speech capable — wasn’t this a problem the market would solve?
That’s not Perez’s way. To him, keeping the Kindle out of sighted students’ hands underscored “the importance of full and equal educational opportunities for everyone.”
In early 2010, after most of the courses were over, the Justice Department reached agreement with the schools, and the federation settled with Arizona State. The schools denied violating the ADA but agreed that until the Kindle was fully accessible, nobody would use it.
Run through this in your mind. The Kindle is smaller, lighter, and more versatile than paper text books. It costs less to buy books. There is almost no environmental impact of getting a book on the Kindle. Yet the DOJ wants to stop this because a tiny part of the population of private colleges needs help turning it on.
Think of how awesome health care will be when it’s run like this!
Link via The Agitator
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Here it comes
The FDA is going to regulate salt.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration should regulate the amount of salt added to foods to help Americans cut their high sodium intake, which can lead to high blood pressure, kidney failure and strokes, an influential federal panel said on Tuesday.
The Institute of Medicine said the move was needed because Americans get most of their sodium from processed and restaurant foods and merely telling them to eat less salt has not worked.
Yeah. Telling us to stop didn’t work, so now they’ll make us. This is an unbelievable and unconscionable abuse of power. But then, what’s new?
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Told you so…
What? You didn’t think this was coming?
No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption by customers of such restaurant, including food prepared to be consumed on the premises of such restaurant or off of such premises,” the bill, A. 10129 , states in part.
The legislation, which Assemblyman Felix Ortiz , D-Brooklyn, introduced on March 5, would fine restaurants $1,000 for each violation.
Keep giving the government power, it keeps taking it.
Windy Recycling Day 