Ground Turkey Recall: Why Did It Take So Long? … Tracking down the source of an illness is a difficult, complicated business, and federal officials defended the months-long process Thursday by saying they wanted to be absolutely sure before they asked Cargill to initiate the third-largest meat recall in history. …
Pentagon Chief Warns Won’t Accept Extra Spending Cuts … Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Thursday he would not accept large military cutbacks under a debt deal, charging the move would weaken the United States faced with rising powers. …
New York Unveils $127 Million Bid to Help Minorities … New York mayor Michael Bloomberg Thursday unveiled a $127.5 million campaign to help black and Hispanic youths who suffer from staggeringly high unemployment, crime and poverty rates. …
BLITZER’S BLOG: Hunger in America Growing at Staggering Pace … It’s hard to believe, but one in seven Americans – 15% of the country – now need government-provided food stamps simply to survive. … Nearly 46 million Americans receive food stamps out of a population of some 311 million people. That’s the highest number on record. …
Ground Turkey Recall: Why Did It Take So Long?
Tracking down the source of an illness is a difficult, complicated business, and federal officials defended the months-long process Thursday by saying they wanted to be absolutely sure before they asked Cargill to initiate the third-largest meat recall in history. … Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest believes the government should have told the company – and the public – about the possible outbreak much sooner. … “Clearly this kind of delay in an outbreak situation is one that puts the public health at risk,” DeWaal said. – AP
Dominant Social Theme: Unregulated food providers will make you sick.
Free-Market Analysis: This theme is an oldie; it’s been running since Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906. Tales of profit-hungry food companies feeding tainted food to the public have rhetorical power because everyone eats, everyone can feel disgust and everyone has had at least a brush with food poisoning. But it’s not government inspectors and government punishers that keep your food safe. It’s the desire of food companies to protect their reputations and to keep their customers. Sometimes that means defending a brand name (e.g. Kraft) from any taint. In Cargill’s case, it means protecting its relationships with food distributors and retailers. In every case it means that a food provider either is vigilant about quality or it goes out of business.
Pentagon Chief Warns Won’t Accept Extra Spending Cuts
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Thursday he would not accept large military cutbacks under a debt deal, charging the move would weaken the United States faced with rising powers. … Such cuts “I believe would do real damage to our security, our troops and their families and our military’s ability to protect the nation,” Panetta said. “It is an outcome that would be completely unacceptable to me as secretary of defense, to the president and, I believe, to our nation’s leaders,” he said. – AFP
Dominant Social Theme: Don’t touch military spending. We’re in danger and our only safety lies in supporting the troops.
Free-Market Analysis: There’s no limit to the threats you can find if you keep looking. Every unneighborly remark by any public figure in any foreign country can be pumped up into a menace. And there is no limit to how much you can spend to ward off any threat. “More” can always seem like better until you fail to weigh the cost. In fact there are other things to spend money on – just ask any unhappy taxpayer. But Secretary Panetta never will. Instead, he offers a stark choice: give me every penny I ask for or live in fear.
New York Unveils $127 Million Bid to Help Minorities
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg Thursday unveiled a $127.5 million campaign to help black and Hispanic youths who suffer from staggeringly high unemployment, crime and poverty rates. … “Far too many are trapped in circumstances that are difficult to escape,” Bloomberg said. “Even though skin color in America no longer determines a child’s fate, sadly, it tells us more about a child’s future than it should.”… “New York City is going to send a signal that the situation facing young black and Latino men requires the same kind of aggressive, cross-agency response that a natural disaster would demand, because fixing these outcomes is critical to the City’s health and future.” – AFP
Dominant Social Theme: Unless the government does something about it, anyone who isn’t white will get the short end of the stick.
Free-Market Analysis: Whatever the reasons for high unemployment, crime and poverty rates among blacks and Hispanics, not being white isn’t one of them. Unemployment, crime and poverty rates among Americans whose families originated in China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, India and Pakistan are markedly lower than among white Americans.
Color isn’t the problem. Government is. As measured by income, the history of black people from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War II was a history of progress. Black income levels were gradually converging with those of whites. During that same period, illegitimacy rates among the black population were lower than among the white population. That changed after World War II with the advent of a government program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, that offered generous benefits to fatherless families – so generous that many black families found they would be better off if Dad would walk away. The social result has been what most would expect when millions of children grow up without fathers.
Minimum wage laws seal the fate of black children who grow up in fatherless families. Low educational achievement means skills with a low economic value – in many cases below the minimum wage mandated by government. The practical result: disadvantaged black youth are forbidden to earn and are forbidden to develop work skills by actually working. For them, government makes sure that the first rung on the economic ladder is unreachable.
Government is not the agency that protects the poor and weak. It is the agency that uses them as human shields for protecting the power of the state.
BLITZER’S BLOG: Hunger in America Growing at Staggering Pace
It’s hard to believe, but one in seven Americans – 15% of the country – now need government-provided food stamps simply to survive. … Nearly 46 million Americans receive food stamps out of a population of some 311 million people. That’s the highest number on record. … The continued high unemployment and the weak U.S. economy have contributed to the explosive growth of the food stamp program – with no end in sight to the monthly increases. – CNN
Dominant Social Theme: Without government assistance, millions would starve.
Free-Market Analysis: Don’t believe us, believe your senses.
Test #1. Walk down the street in any U.S. city. Note the people who are especially slender. Are many of them are well dressed? Do many of them appear prosperous? Of those who appear financially strapped, how many look to you as though drugs, alcohol or poor mental health are the heart of the problem?
Test # 2. Walk down the street in any U.S. city. Note the people who are undeniably overfed. Do you find that many of them are shabbily dressed or bear other signs of poverty?
In other places and at other times, poverty and lack of food went hand in hand. Today in the U.S. they are only occasional companions.
Millions accept food stamps because under the government’s rules they are eligible, and food stamps are tantamount to free money. The government’s cheerleaders then uses the high number of recipients to “prove” that there is an enormous need for food stamps, which “proves” that hunger is an enormous problem.
