Child Nutrition Bill - One More Failure

Yesterday the president signed a new child school nutrition bill.   The president said the bill was needed because poor children don't have enough access to nutritional lunches, and the school lunches provided are nutritious enough.   The bill will mandate more fruits and vegetables and give the federal government control over what is sold in school vending machines.

According to the president, the school lunches and vending machine sales are the reason America's children are overweight.   He thinks this bill will cure that.   However, that is utter nonsense.   This is a feel-good bill that looks good on the surface, but will not accomplish its goal and takes money away from a program that is even more important in this recession.

First of all, poor children are already given reduced-price or free meals in school lunchrooms.   This is a good program that has been working for many years.   And while these lunches might be made better with more fruits and vegetables, they are far from non-nutritious.

Second, it is not the school lunches (or even the foods bought from school vending machines) that are giving us a generation of overweight kids.   If we're going to help the obesity problem by doing something at school, it would be far more effective to mandate more rigorous physical education.   But even that would not solve the obesity problem.   That's because it's not what kids are doing or not doing at school that's the problem.

The real problem is what the kids are doing after school.   When they get home, they overeat and sit on their butts in front of a TV or a computer.   As long as this is true, it simply does not matter how perfect or nutritious school lunches are (or what is sold or not sold in school vending machines).

But that is not the worst part of this new law.   Congress passes a lot of silly and ineffective laws.   The worst part is that they funded this doomed-to-fail program with $4.5 billion taken from the Food Stamp Program -- a program that needed every penny it had.   Because of the recession taking millions of jobs and other jobs being outsourced, millions of Americans are having to receive food stamps just to feed themselves and their families -- over 42 million people in September (14% of the population) and the number is growing each month as the recession drags on.

In plain English, they took money from a program that badly needed it to feed hungry Americans to fund a program that has no chance of succeeding in meeting the goal of reducing obesity among children.   That makes this new law a double failure.

I know the president and the Congress are busy patting themselves on the back for passing this feel-good law, but someone needs to clue them in on the reality of what they have done.   They did not help, but they probably hurt a lot of families (because the new Republican House is certainly not going to give the Food Stamp Program any more money, since they only help the rich -- not the poor).