Cuts to the FDA and USDA, which have been far too long coming, are now being blamed for a recent outbreak of Salmonella in processed food. Specifically lambasting the GOP Congress is Rep. Rose DeLauro of Connecticut, who contends the GOP driven budget cuts will put the nations food safety at risk. The offender in the latest incident is Cargill who produces the ground turkey meat that turned out to be the source of the problem, prompting one of the biggest recalls in the history of processed food. Several people were sickened, and one person died.
DeLauro, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee Health sub-panel, charges that cuts to the Departments were the reasons it took so long to track the source of the outbreak.
A number of points, aside from the fact that the FDA doesn't regulate meat or poultry to begin with. One, no laws have been changed. You still can not legally cut corners and endanger the public health in the pursuit of profit. Two, its not like there was never any outbreaks before the recent budget cuts. There have been several, and it took some time to trace them back to their origins. One fairly recent case that occurred before any cuts went on for weeks. In one or two cases, the origin was never completely verified. There have been problems with tomatoes, with lettuce, with green onions. The latter case almost caused the Mexican restaurant Chi-Chi's to go out of business. That was the problem that was never fully resolved. The problem with the lettuce was blamed, perhaps unfairly, on immigrant labor from Mexico. It too was never fully resolved. But it went away. These things come and go.
And let's face it, the vast majority of cases can probably be traced back to unsanitary conditions in the private home where the cooking occurred, or perhaps the food wasn't cooked thoroughly enough. So what are we going to do about that? Hire a staff of FDA agents in every community to make spot checks of homes in certain neighborhoods to make sure sanitary conditions are being adhered to? Put enough Democrats back in office and that is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Bottom line-we can't afford the shit anymore. Not only do we not have the money, we can't afford to fund the adversarial relationship of big government to business. It causes businesses to not be able to expand or be competitive with larger rivals, for one thing. For another thing, it reduces the prospect of hiring new employees, and even increases the likelihood of further layoffs. Which of course means it becomes even harder to maintain proper conditions. It has caused some businesses to even fold, go out of business, go bankrupt. And, in every case, it causes the cost of these intrusive, combative regulations to be passed on to we, the consumers of America. We pay for it twice. We pay for it out of our taxes. Then we pay for it a second time at the counter.
And for what? One purpose it serves is to create more government workers to pay dues into the coffers of government employees unions, much of which is, of course, funneled back to the coffers of various Democrat politicians like Rose DeLauro.
Another thing it does is actually create a climate more conducive to Big Business than to small and mid-sized business. It is rare when a food giant like Cargill is cited for these kinds of instances. It is usually small operations such as Estrella Family Creamery which bear the brunt of burdensome regulations. Cargill can survive and adapt. If it has to pay a substantial fine, that's a minor annoyance. Smaller businesses have to struggle to survive. And that's just the point.
Democrat politicians, and for that matter many Republicans, hate small business. After all, at their competitive best they are harmful to the profit margins of the big companies that Democrats especially depend on to fill their tax quotas, or to provide make work for their constituents, or their favored unions.
But most importantly, it is small business and their advocates in Congress and the states that hinder their efforts at establishing a regulatory, tax-and-spend regime aimed at putting us all under the thumb of government. A totalitarian government based not on the rule of law, but the law of rules.
