In his highly partisan State of the Union address last night, President Biden addressed “shrinkflation”:
Too many corporations raise their prices to pad their profits charging you more and more for less and less. That’s why we’re cracking down on corporations that engage in price gouging or deceptive pricing from food to health care to housing. In fact, snack companies think you won’t notice when they charge you just as much for the same size bag but with fewer chips in it.
My colleague Dominic Pino has already deconstructed Biden’s deceptive rhetoric on this topic. I have a different complaint to make. Earlier this week, Cookie Monster, a character on Sesame Street, also complained about shrinkflation. “Me hate shrinkflation! Me cookies are getting smaller,” Mr. Monster tweeted. The Biden White House quote-tweeted this complaint, adding: “C is for consumers getting ripped off. President Biden is calling on companies to put a stop to shrinkflation.”
It was strange for a character from a children’s TV show to weigh in on this subject in a manner remarkably similar to current White House messaging and preoccupation. Reporting on this, the Washington Free Beacon noted that Sesame Workshop, the organization behind Sesame Street, receives 5 percent of its revenues from the federal government, and that some of its leaders are Democratic donors.
But even if there hasn’t been deliberate coordination between the Biden administration and Sesame Workshop, the unseemliness of Cookie Monster’s apparent politicking ought to renew skepticism of the government funds going to the organization. It may be a small amount, and a small portion of Sesame Workshop’s overall revenue. But the latter fact should make us more willing to end the funding. And amid an only worsening fiscal crisis, the former fact should make us look anywhere we can for items to excise.
Mitt Romney, who is right about Michigan’s trees, was also right about this. In 2012, his campaign promise to end the government subsidy to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization of PBS, was, for some reason, controversial. (At a Romney campaign rally I attended in that strange election, I saw a protester dressed as Big Bird, holding an oversized check.) Romney had a simple test: “Is the program so critical that it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it? And if not, I’ll get rid of it.” The subsidy failed that test. (That goes also for NPR, which also receives CPB funding, whose transcript of a 2012 presidential debate I linked to above.) It still does. Those who want to support such programming have sufficient wherewithal to do so themselves.
Cookie Monster can say whatever he wants. But taxpayer money shouldn’t be supporting it.