Tag: regulation

Children are refusing to eat the Obama administration’s lower calorie school lunches.

3:22 pm

Losing the youth vote: In a boycott that began in Pennsylvania and has now spread to Minnesota, children are refusing to eat the Obama administration’s lower calorie school lunches.

Starting this year, there are strict limits on calories, sodium and meat portions. Whole milk is off the menu altogether, and kids are required to take a fruit or vegetable. As parents with fussy eaters might guess, some student’s aren’t salivating over those options.

In the halls of Rockford High School, a food fight over some simple things — cookies, condiments and milk — has started taking off after seniors Adam Anderson and Zach Guthrie set up a Facebook group encouraging a brown bag boycott. Bags were prepared in advance, bearing messages like, “Where’s the ranch?” and “We want our cookies.” By Thursday, the school served about 150 fewer lunches than it had the day before, and students promise the movement will only continue to grow even though there may be no resolution.

I think it a travesty that modern parents think the federal government should provide their kids lunch. This is the parent’s responsibility, not the government’s.

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“[Medical] services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.”

9:31 am

“[Medical] services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.”

Words written by one of the writers of Obamacare, who is expected to be appointed to Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel of fifteen unelected officials whose job it will be to decide what treatment is affordable and what treatment is not and should therefore be denied. The problem with the above quote however is that this person is advocating denying treatment not because of cost but because in his opinion some individuals are simply not worth very much to society.

We have got to repeal this monstrosity.

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After mandating the sale of 15% ethanol gasoline — that can damage engines and lower fuel efficiency — the EPA is now going to require that you buy at least 4 gallons in order to reduce the damage.

5:35 pm

How nice of them: After mandating the sale of 15% ethanol gasoline — which can damage engines and lower fuel efficiency — the EPA is now going to require that you buy at least 4 gallons when you fill your tank in order to reduce the damage.

The entire auto industry has made it very clear its opposition to 15% ethanol because that mixture is harmful to vehicle engines. So, does the EPA back off? No, it instead doubles down, increasing its regulatory control in a manner that is complex, unenforceable, and impractical.

And when this new regulation doesn’t work and vehicles begin to fail, don’t expect the EPA to pay for the repair. Instead, I expect we will soon have EPA regulators standing at every gas station, checking to make sure we use the right gasoline in the right amounts, ready to fine or arrest us if we dare to do something different.

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Despite a 3x increase in the use of gasoline and diesel fuel since the 1960s, the amount of vehicle-related pollution in the Los Angeles area has declined by 98 percent during that same time.

9:50 am

Good news: Despite a 3x increase in the use of gasoline and diesel fuel since the 1960s, the amount of vehicle-related pollution in the Los Angeles area has declined by 98 percent during that same time.

While many on the left will argue that this proves the validity of government regulation, I only see it as evidence that the initial regulations imposed in the 1970s did their job, and that there is no reason for stricter regulation now, something that the EPA, the Obama administration, and the left continue to demand.

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The price of pizza is set to rise because of Obamacare.

11:32 pm

Now we have to repeal it: The price of pizza is going to rise because of Obamacare.

Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter says that Obamacare will result in a $0.11 to $0.14 price increase per pizza, or $0.15 to $0.20 cents per order.

The fact is that these kinds of price increases are going to occur across the board in almost all service industries, since higher regulation always leads to higher prices.

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Gibson Guitars has struck a deal with the federal government to avoid prosecution for the use of banned wood.

9:48 am

Extortion does work! Gibson Guitars has struck a deal with the federal government to avoid prosecution for the use of banned wood.

The company will pay a $300,000 fine under a criminal enforcement agreement that defers prosecution for criminal violations of the Lacey Act. Another $50,000 fine will go to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation “to be used to promote the conservation, identification and propagation of protected tree species used in the musical instrument industry and the forests where those species are found.”

Notice the political payoff to an outside environmental group. How nice. I wish my cause could get funding this way, by having the U.S. government threaten companies I don’t like and force them to give me money.

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The disappearance of the old-fashioned chemistry set.

9:52 am

The disappearance of the old-fashioned chemistry set.

Here’s what it used to be like, when we lived in a free society:

By the 1920s and 30s children had access to substances which would raise eyebrows in today’s more safety-conscious times. There were toxic ingredients in pesticides, as well as chemicals now used in bombs or considered likely to increase the risk of cancer. And most parents will not need to be told of the dangers of the sodium cyanide found in the interwar kits or the uranium dust present in the “nuclear” kits of the 1950s.

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Because of a new federal regulation, passengers who use US Airways for only part of their flight will have to check their bags and go through security again when they switch airlines.

10:27 am

Thank you DOT and US Airways: Because of a new federal regulation, passengers who use US Airways for only part of their flight will have to check their bags and go through security again when they switch airlines.

It appears that US Airways is at much at fault here as the DOT. Read the article.

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The lawsuits fighting the Obama administration mandate that religious organizations fund contraceptives against their religious beliefs has now risen to more than 20 separate cases and nearly 60 individual plaintiffs,

2:00 pm

We’ve only just begun: The lawsuits fighting the Obama administration requirement that religious organizations fund contraceptives against their religious beliefs has now risen to more than 20 separate cases and nearly 60 individual plaintiffs.

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The EPA is attempting to enforce a regulation requiring ships to use low-sulfur fuel, despite the fact that the regulation has not yet been voted on by Congress.

10:27 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: The EPA is attempting to enforce a regulation requiring ships to use low-sulfur fuel, despite the fact that the regulation has not yet been voted on by the Senate.

The treaty amendment at issue is a 2010 agreement under the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, or MARPOL. The United States has signed onto MARPOL, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has accepted the 2010 amendment. Domestic enforcement of the amendment is not permitted without ratification by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate.

And the Senate has not voted on this yet.

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Against the advice of almost every farm organization the USDA is proceeding with regulations that will require farmers to individually tag every chicken and cow.

4:11 pm

Racists! Against the advice of almost every farm organization the USDA is proceeding with regulations that will require farmers to individually tag every chicken and cow.

Fidelis Hegngi, a senior staff veterinarian at USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, also has his doubts. “To really truly have something like tagging work on poultry you would need to have something absolute because birds move a lot, if you don’t have something absolute, it’s not going to work. … I don’t think the technology is there yet to really implement the bird ID to be fully, fully functional,” Mr. Hegngi said. Government officials have not said whether they would check animals for identification at traffic stops.

Ms. Bergener has a simple solution to the poultry police: “I’m going to do selective passive resistance,” she said. “I’m not tagging.” …

According to the letter to OMB, the USDA’s disconnect with farmers does not stop at rules for poultry. The USDA estimates a rancher’s cost to identify cattle at 18 cents a head, but the letter cites a study from North Dakota State University that places the actual cost of cow citizenship at $20 a head.

Nowhere is it explained why the USDA is demanding such stringent ID requirements of farmers, other than to make their lives difficult and to increase the petty power of the Washington bureaucracy.

In other words, for the Obama administration it all can be summarized like this: “Voter ID bad! Chicken ID good!”

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At least 80 House Republicans have signed a letter demanding that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) block any further funding of Obamacare.

7:24 pm

At least 80 House Republicans have signed a letter demanding that Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) block any further funding of Obamacare.

This story illustrates two things. First, the House Republican leadership has been timid about using its power to block the implementation of Obamacare, even though the public clearly wants it blocked. Second, that about a third of the House Republican membership has already signed the letter, with more signatures expected, suggests that the bulk of the Republican Party is not as timid as their leadership. Moreover, I expect the November election to significantly strengthen this fiscally conservative trend.

Thus, it will not surprise me if we see some very radical budget cuts in the next Congress.

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The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limited the agency’s regulatory powers.

1:57 pm

The House Appropriations Committee has approved a $1.4 billion cut in the budget of EPA, also including 31 additional riders limiting the agency’s regulatory powers.

That would make the 2013 EPA budget equivalent to its budget in the early 2000s, numbers that would hardly be crippling.

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Another dismal jobs report.

9:47 am

Another dismal jobs report.

Job growth amounted to a disappointing 80,000, below analyst expectations of 90-100K, while the jobless rate remained the same at 8.2%:

Read the whole article. There’s a lot more, all of its depressing and trending downward.

While no President should be blamed entirely for the unemployment numbers, the policies of any President do have a direct influence on those numbers, and should bear some responsibility, especially in this era where we have ceded so much power to the federal government. Consider this graph (below the fold), which shows the “total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” The steep upward swing, beginning in 2008, sadly corresponds too closely with the beginnings of the Obama administration. And it is with this administration that we have seen the worst deficits, the most regulation, and the biggest increase in the power of government in our lifetimes. It is thus no surprise the economy has crumbled.
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A Modest Proposal

9:48 am

“A Modest Proposal.”

Now that the Roberts Court has affirmed that the government has the power to mandate purchases of private goods and services as long as it’s structured as a tax, I propose that we put this new-found authority in the service of an explicit Constitutional right. For far too long, too many Americans have suffered from an inequal distribution of firearms, despite the Second Amendment’s express exhortation to “keep and bear arms,” in large part because income inequality in this nation has kept the poor and working classes from having the proper protection for themselves and their loved ones. We need to end this disparity now by applying the ObamaCare model immediately.

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