Starting in December 2011, by city ordinance, there will be no more toy giveaways in Happy Meals in San Francisco. Talk about meddlesome government.
“This will be a sign to the fast-food industry that it’s time to phase out its predatory marketing to children at large,” according to Deborah Lapidus of Corporate Accountability International, a Boston-based advocacy group.
What’s the next sign?
Prohibiting sales of Hasbro’s Easy Bake Oven? A toy that bakes only sugary foods?
Or how about outlawing the dancing M&M characters? Or banning Saturday morning cartoons sandwiched between all kinds of non-nutritious advertising?
The San Fran ordinance doesn’t target McDonald’s specifically, but prohibits fast-food restaurants in general from including toys with meals if the meals have more than 640 milligrams of sodium, 600 calories or more than 35 percent of calories in fat.
So, will children will be prohibited from using restaurant-provided crayons to draw on place mats while consuming 1,190 mg of sodium in a serving of fried, breaded clam strips at Long John Silver’s? Under this ordinance, yes.
We understand and support the idea that children should be healthy eaters, but isn’t that a parent’s responsibility?
Despite the separation of toys and Happy Meals in San Francisco, we doubt very much that children will stop consuming burgers and fries — or fried clam strips.
At what point, if government insists on continually assuming parents’ responsibility to educate their children, will parents simply give up?
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For years upon years, hunters paid $2 to tag their deer — $1 went to the agent tagging the deer and $1 went to the state.
Last year, the fee went up to $5, with $1 staying with the agent and $4 going to Inland Fisheries & Wildlife to help with “funding woes,” a move that successfully shifted some woe to the tagging stations.
For some agents — typically small shop owners in small towns — it’s just not worth the time and effort now. When they shared the fee equally with the state, working for $1 seemed more palatable than working for the same $1 and sending four times that to Augusta to help balance its budget. Which is just plain weird since the real work is done by the agent, but the state gets the bigger share of the fee.
At some point, the work of these agents was twisted from providing basic service for hunters to becoming just another revenue stream for state government.
Worse, with fewer tagging stations hunters now have fewer options to tag their deer, forcing them to drive great distances to adhere to state law to tag their take.
Since IF&W relies on tagging agents to help accurately track harvest rates and locales, doesn’t it make sense to make it as easy as possible instead of alienating these agents? Or, worse, making it so difficult for hunters to locate a tagging station that they simply stop making the effort?
We suggest the incoming Legislature reverse this inequitable fee structure, and get back to ensuring accurate hunt counts in the best interest of Maine’s wildlife management. Or, is the $72,180 worth of state tagging revenue realized from last year’s deer harvest really worth disaffecting agents and endangering accurate harvest data?
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