Calley Means: 'The Most Evil Public Policy in America' |
What this video covers
An 84-second clip of Calley Means, posted by a medical-student channel and excerpted from a longer talk, in which he expands on a social-media thread about the food-stamp soda debate. Means recounts Coca-Cola’s effort to keep soda in SNAP, condemns federal grain and soda subsidies as the country’s worst public policy, and draws a line between a company’s right to sell its product and the government’s decision to pay for it.
Key points
- Means says Coca-Cola sat “in the room with civil rights groups, the NAACP, giving millions of dollars” and asking them to “call our opponents racist to shut down debate” over removing soda from food stamps, a program he notes 15% of Americans rely on.
- He says he would call subsidizing soda through SNAP — and the wider subsidy system behind it — “the most evil public policy and the most insane public policy we have as a country.”
- Means argues the US spends “tens of billions of dollars” subsidizing grains and corn that become “just a sugar bomb when it hits the kid’s blood” — “glucose razors for kids” — and amounts to “weaponizing our food.”
- He describes himself as “actually libertarian,” saying most drugs should be legal and that he does not argue with Coke’s ability to exist and sell its product.
- His objection, he says, is to subsidy: using public money to pay for soda is “public policy insanity,” comparable in his framing to subsidizing marijuana with government funds.