Pizza is popular. It hardly needs advertising, much less government subsidy.
And yet the federal government does, indeed, subsidize the promotion of pizza.
Apparently, our government wants us to eat more of the scrumptious (but fattening) stuff.
Has this has been cleared with Michelle Obama?
The program is the business of a much more power group, the USDA. In recent years, according to the U.S. Food Policy Blog,
USDA’s dairy checkoff program has spent many millions of dollars to increase pizza consumption among U.S. children and adults. Using the federal government’s taxation powers, the checkoff program collects a mandatory assessment of 15 cents on every hundredweight of milk that is sold for use as fluid milk or dairy products.
The goal is to promote cheese. (It promotes milk, too, but milk consumption is going down, steadily over the long term.) And, since the pizza industry is the biggest single user of cheese, those checkoff funds wind up in the advertising coffers of Domino’s Pizza, which soaks up about three-quarters of the dough. Ahem.
The federal government seems especially concerned to promote the eating of cheap delivery pizza.
But, good or bad, just talking about pizza makes me hungry for pizza. And yet, to prevent my corporeal presence from ballooning into a behemoth approximating the dimensions of the U.S. national debt, I don’t eat pizza very often.
In view of both of these truths, the USDA could afford to stop promoting the nominally Italian (but actually very American) foodstuff.
Get the government out of food advertising. Particularly (but not limited to) pizza.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
*Pie chart not made from a pizza from Domino’s.
4 replies on “Government Delivers Pizza”
The more I find out about how many pies the government has a finger in, the more discouraging it becomes. Think Levin is right to call it ‘corporatism’.
There are very few things that lobbyists and lawyers cannot accomplish for a compliant and bowing corporation in a fascist state.
Tom Monaghan may have seen his faith becoming a problem when he sold out as he would have been in the same position as the owner’s of Hobby Lobby as the state seeks to even more closely control commercial enterprise with its, as opposed to the owners, sensibilities and morals.
The list of subsidies (aka corporate welfare) is one of the problems I (as a conservative) have with many conservatives.
Cut this; cut that; BUT DON’T CUT MY SUBSIDY. We see that with government subsidized flood insurance–those who don’t live by or near water pay to subsidize flood nsurace for the million dollar homes on the barrier islands and other flood plains. A complaint about reforming it–it would hurt the resale value,, and peopel buying million dollar homes would be (gasp; horrors) be forced to buy less expensive homes.
The same-ethanol; other farm subsidies; (the head of cotton lobbying for years was the son of a former Senate power); and the list goes on the debt goes up, And the middle class gets extinguished
Could THIS be why Domino’s produces such mediocre pizza, hmmnn? (I grew up in the NYC metro area. We take pizza very seriously.)