Attention poor people: Michelle Obama wants your lunch money.
First ladies, out of whatever latent royalist instincts fester in our body politic, are expected to take up warm-and-fuzzy crusades — Laura Bush and her worthy literacy projects, Just Say No, etc. — in order that the plebs do not mistake them for Marie Antoinette. Mrs. Obama’s project has been childhood nutrition: making kids eat their spinach and keeping them off the McNuggets.
While her husband’s signature health-care legislation already is reshaping the way iconic fast-food giant McDonald’s does business — by causing the company to consider revoking health-insurance benefits for some 30,000 hourly burger-slingers and fry-guys — Mrs. Obama’s project would keep nefarious fat-filled hamburgers and the like out of school cafeterias by establishing stricter federal rules about what may be served in schools.
A bill realizing her vision passed the Senate and went to the House, where it currently is foundering in budgetary bickering. The first lady has lobbied hard for the bill, but seems to be losing the fight. Democrats being Democrats, the legislation enabling Mrs. Obama’s crusade was built from the Obamacare blueprint: a host of regulations combined with a slop-pail of taxpayer-funded sweeteners with which to bribe the institutions affected. (The public schools are one of the nation’s largest employers of Democratic voters, and therefore command rich tribute.) So what’s the holdup? The shocking, record-setting deficits already run up by the Obama-Reid-Pelosi axis of fiscal incontinence has been earning the Democrats some richly deserved bad press, and so some $2 billion in spending cuts was needed to offset the nutrition program’s expense. Congress found them in the food-stamp program, which was targeted for $2 billion in cuts from a supplemental fund designed to offset the expense of rising food prices. Since there hasn’t been much inflation of late — two cheers for the Great Recession! — the appropriators figured that Americans receiving food stamps didn’t really need the extra money, which amounts to about $59 a month for a typical family of four.
The food-stamp reductions were Democrat-style “cuts,” meaning that they would take place, if at all, in some hypothetical legislative future. But they were enough to derail the bill in the House. Odds are the money would have been added back in at some point, regardless, but the exercise does offer an insight into the present state of the Democratic mind. If you want an excellent and brief lesson in everything that is wrong with the American welfare state and with Obama-style bobo liberalism, consider this: Money was about to be taken out of the hands of poor Americans thought to be having trouble finding enough to eat in order to fund a program that would subsidize already over-subsidized government schools — including wealthy suburban schools — so that they might eat more of what Michelle Obama wants them to eat and less of what she doesn’t. This is politically of a piece with Obamacare’s “individual mandate,” through which Democrats propose to solve the problems of uninsured Americans by levying fines on them until they not only have bought insurance but have bought insurance of the kind President Obama and his colleagues think they should buy. The metaphorical “Nanny State” grows more literal every year.
It has been a poor showing all around, and Mrs. Obama’s program deserves to fade into legislative oblivion. The federal government almost always does more harm than good when it attempts to insert itself into public-school matters, which are far better handled at the state and local level. The more the federal government involves itself in funding local school activities, including lunches, the more it assumes a license to micromanage local school affairs. The first lady should tend her own garden and allow the local lunch lady (whose professional expertise is not in the law but in lunches) to tend hers.