An impossibly ridiculous program that has wasted millions of your tax dollars funding nanny state campaigns to pester you about health might finally be at death's door. The "Prevention and Public Health Fund" (which I warned about more than a year and a half ago when it had a different name and piles of cash from the "stimulus" bill) looks to finally face the ax at the hands of the House of Representatives when it votes tomorrow on the massive $1 trillion "megabus" appropriations bill.
H.R. 3671, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, takes aim at the PPHF and its funding of state- and local-level campaigns for higher taxes and stricter regulation on everything from soda to tobacco products. Though they are of course justified in the name of "public health," the PPHF-funded efforts have spent millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars in support of a host of policies that raise costs and restrict availability for perfectly legal products while nagging people to exercise more and eat their Brussels sprouts. Kudos to House appropriators (you won't hear me saying that very often) for seeing fit to include language in the megabus to put an end to this insanity.
The "slippery slope" argument that is so frequently deployed in Washington isn't always accurate, but the PPHF is perhaps the best example that it not only exists but is even steeper and more slippery than we could have imagined. Decades ago when the anti-tobacco crusade really began in earnest, many limited-government advocates warned that it would only be a matter of time before government began trying to tax into extinction and restrict other products with which they were displeased. Those warnings are proving prescient now that many states and localities are fighting battles not just against so-called "sin" products like tobacco or alcohol, but on fatty foods, sugar-sweetened drinks, even SALT for God's sake! But the PPHF really takes the cake (as long as cake is still legal, that is) because in many cases, those dollars are handed out to lobbyists and PR firms to run glitzy ad campaigns to snuff out whatever products or behaviors Big Brother doesn't like. Tax dollars funding lobbyists who fight to raise your taxes! It's a spiral of stupidity.
Thankfully, House Leadership has seen that insanity for what it is and targeted it in the appropriations bill. Here's hoping that, whatever happens with the end-of-the-year appropriations fight, common sense prevails and the PPHF gets what it deserves: elimination. After all, if Congress can't cut a program this egregious, what can they cut?