gcoll
Legend

http://imgur.com/gallery/YtK27

I thought this was pretty funny actually.

I thought you would appreciate this article:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/01/news....htm?hpt=hp_t3

I would actually argue that private ownership of the public good might solve the failure of the commons aspect, but that's a whole different topic.

I would agree with you on that comment. My intro econ professor loved to say "you are never going to see the chicken go extinct as long as McDonalds is making billions".

I was told my message was too long, here is the rest:

I don't think that my approach takes the responsibility away from the parents, I think it forces them to look at what they buy and think about the longer term needs of the child by pointing out things that experts universally agree children should not be consuming. Parents have refused to tell their children they can't have the foods they want but are bad for them. They have also refused to feed their children the healthy foods that are good for them. These are just truths, as represented by how unhealthy the children today are.

How far do you take that though? Because if you give them too much freedom with it, then you defeat the purpose of it being food stamps. Taken to the extreme, not necessarily where you would take it, they could use the food stamps for alcohol. More to the point I think you were making, since food stamps are suppose to be for those who have no money to buy food it would be counter productive to allow it to be spent on marginal food items such as steak or lobster. The program is more effective and helpful to all the poor if the money is spaced out for staple foods such as chicken, beef, or pork.

Well there are obvious foods that food stamps do not allow, such as lobster or filet mignon. But in most states they also can't be used for really unhealthy foods and foods that are not considered, by health professionals, to not be part of a healthy diet. If they spend money they earn on them, then the food stamp restrictions don't affect them. But since the idea of food stamps is that you don't have money for any food (or not enough) restricting their use to essentials seems logical to me.

The biggest reason that I think it is a governmental issue is because children are a special case because they don't have the same decision making tools. Similar, but to a far less extreme instance, as why children are not allowed to drive or drop out of school.

It does lead to an overreach, but the underreach has led to the fattest generation in our nation's history. There are other reasons for this, but undeniably all the fatty foods we eat are a major contributor.

I would advocate for the approach I outlined below. I certainly don't think that the approach taken was acceptable.

I don't think checking the student's bag is the way to go about it at all. That is both traumatizing to the child and makes them feel like they did something wrong.

The biggest way you can influence the buying decisions is to restrict the use of food stamps and other personal programs. Also we need to drastically change the tax structure for the production of food. The fattier and unhealthy foods are the ones with the higher profit margins, yet they take the money to funnel into lobbying and get better tax credits. Organic farmers, for instant, don't charge higher prices because they think they are fancy, but because their input costs are higher.

Also, to that specific case, the woman who takes the time to make her daughter lunch is certainly not the person or kind of person that I have concern with fattening up their daughter or son.

In the area of the health insurance contracts, I was teaching a class of agents yesterday, asked them how many had read the contracts from cover to cover,and understood the contracts that they had read completely, without any outside guidance, and not one hand went up except mine. This class, as is true of all my classes had experts, with credentials, and neophytes.

Lay people don't have a chance of getting through this maze on any kind of even keel. You cannot choose these things on price alone, and trying to determine value is in fact, a difficult, at best, job for experts.