Reading Time: 7 minutes

High food prices and the end of extra food-stamp allotments mean hard choices around the country for lower-income people:

“You’re having to make the decision between ‘am I paying my mortgage, or my medical bills or my medication or buying food?’” said Stacey Andernacht with hunger relief organization Feeding South Dakota.

But in her state, there’s yet another factor pushing up costs: South Dakota is one of just three — along with Mississippi and Alabama — that levies its full sales tax rate on groceries without a credit or rebate to offset the costs.

That hits low-income people hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income on groceries than wealthier residents, said Rick Weiland, co-founder of grassroots advocacy organization Dakotans for Health. It’s the reason that most states have eliminated sales taxes on groceries over the past couple of decades.

A bill to do the same has been introduced in the South Dakota Legislature for years to no avail. But in November 2024, South Dakotans may have the opportunity to repeal the grocery tax themselves.

Dakotans for Health began collecting signatures earlier this month on a ballot measure that would eliminate the state portion of the grocery tax. Municipalities would be able to continue taxing groceries, as the state has more resources than localities, Weiland said. Dakotans for Health is forming a coalition of nonprofits and faith-based groups to work together on the campaign.

“This is just something that’s long overdue,” Weiland said. “And so I don’t think the timing could be any better than to do this after 20 years of failed attempts to get it done by the Legislature.”

Grocery taxes falling out of favor

Statewide sales taxes originated in Mississippi during the Great Depression and quickly spread throughout the nation. Groceries were included in the general sales tax in most states at first, said Eric Figueroa, senior manager of strategic projects and initiatives at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

A few decades ago, concerned about the impact on hunger, states began to exempt groceries from that tax. Of the 45 states that impose sales taxes, only 12 still apply it on groceries. And nine of those — Hawaii, Oklahoma, Utah, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Tennessee, Illinois and Missouri — do so at a reduced rate or offer rebates or credits.

A surge in food prices has brought repealing grocery taxes back to the forefront of policy discussions. “It has always been an issue that anti-hunger advocates have rallied around, but I think recently we’ve seen both parties be involved in efforts to try to eliminate it and try to figure out how to pay for the loss of revenue,” Figueroa said.

Earlier this year, Virginia eliminated its 1.5% state sales tax on groceries. (Local jurisdictions there can still levy up to 1%.) Alabama’s Legislature is poised to cut its state grocery tax rate in half. A cut already went into effect in Kansas in January, while Idaho increased its credit on the tax beginning this year. Illinois residents are in a year-long pause on collection and Tennessee instituted a three-month suspension that begins in August.

During South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s re-election campaign last year, she promised to eliminate the grocery tax. But the proposal died in the House earlier in the year. There was also concern that eliminating the tax could reduce $2 million that goes to the nine Native American reservations’ tribal government operations, though Noem later said that the tribes’ contracts would be renegotiated so they would not be economically affected.

However, state leaders did agree to reduce the statewide general sales tax for four years, starting in July, from 4.5% to 4.2%, which will also affect groceries.

Noem originally expressed support for Dakotans for Health’s petition. She backed out due to fear that as written, the ballot measure would jeopardize an annual $20 million that the state receives through a 1998 agreement with major tobacco companies to settle lawsuits for healthcare costs related to smoking.

“She supported it in the past, in the present, and will in the future. But that tax cut needs to be written appropriately,” her chief of communications, Ian Fury, said in an email. He added, “The language proposed by the Governor and legislators during the legislative session did not have these problems and is the right way to go for the state.”

Weiland expressed skepticism about the potential risk to the settlement.

“If the initiated law we are currently circulating passes, and if the courts determine that it exempts tobacco from state sales tax, the Legislature with its one-party supermajority has full authority, before the initiative goes into effect on July 1, 2025, to eliminate any of the Governor’s recent concerns about any potential problem by amending the initiated law to fix any alleged problem,” Weiland said in a press release.

In 2004, over 67% of South Dakotan voters cast ballots against a similar initiative to eliminate the tax on groceries. But Weiland, whose group was among those coordinating a successful 2022 ballot measure to expand Medicaid in the state, believes that the governor’s campaign for eliminating the grocery tax and legislative action in recent years will help garner widespread support for a new citizen-led proposal. He said the organization is working with the tribes to try to ensure that the loss in revenue won’t impact them.

“By letting the people vote on it, we can bypass all the politics that goes on in the Legislature and do what we did with working on the Medicaid expansion campaign — by taking it directly to people and letting them make the decision,” Weiland said.

The organization is going door-to-door, attending events and standing outside public buildings to collect the 17,509 valid signatures needed from registered voters. Those signatures must reach the secretary of state by May 2024 in order for it to appear on the November 2024 ballot.

The state of hunger

Accessing healthy food is already a challenge in the rural state of South Dakota, where grocery stores are sometimes few and far between. One in 12 people in the state, and one in nine children, experience hunger, according to Feeding America.

A 2021 study that looked at grocery taxes between 2006 and 2017 found that areas with the tax experienced some of the greatest food insecurity in the nation.

In South Dakota, food insecurity is particularly pronounced in the state’s nine Native American reservations, where residents face the additional challenge of lack of transportation. On the Rosebud Indian Reservation in St. Francis, Feeding South Dakota’s Andernacht said, residents shop at a convenience store when they can’t reach the closest grocery store 40 miles away. Getting a ride there and back can cost around $100. The nonprofit has increased its food distribution to the reservation from every other month to once a month.

Another client in the central part of the state lives 30 miles from a discount grocery store, so she bought more expensive groceries at a nearby shop where her food stamps didn’t stretch as far. As a result, she used the nonprofit’s mobile distribution food drive to supplement her groceries until she found a better paying job. Now she’s returned to the food drive due to increased food prices, Andernacht said.

Feeding South Dakota provides food for hungry families throughout the state through programs including drive-through sites, school pantries and food boxes for seniors.

Over 11,500 families are served through mobile food distribution per month, which Andernacht says is a 22% increase since last year. She attributes that rise to higher food costs and an end to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s emergency allotments, which resulted in a $90 a month decrease in grocery money for the average SNAP recipient nationwide.

Filling the revenue gap when grocery taxes disappear

Any state repealing its grocery tax must account for the loss of revenue. In South Dakota, the tax brings in about $102 million annually.

The sales tax on groceries has an even greater impact in Alabama, generating about $500 million that goes toward the state’s already strained education coffers.

“It’s been a very hard political problem to eliminate the tax and make up for the revenue in a way that satisfies everybody,” said Figueroa, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

However, a 2020 paper he co-authored suggests that states can raise revenues in ways that don’t hit lower-income people hardest, such as expanding taxes for the wealthy and corporations and cutting special-interest breaks.

Figueroa also referenced a proposal in Alabama he found powerful. Proposed by the organization Alabama Arise, the plan would replace grocery-tax revenue with a cap on the state income tax deduction for federal income taxes, which would bring in an estimated $520 million annually.

“We are in this peculiar position that we have an incredibly regressive tax in the sales tax on groceries and we have a tax cut that is really a tax break that benefits … mainly the top 5% of income earners in the state,” said Carol Gundlach, senior policy analyst at Alabama Arise.

The plan would require a constitutional amendment, so it was not included in a current state bill to cut the sales tax for groceries in half, which Gundlach expects will pass. Eliminating the sales tax on groceries has been a priority for Alabama Arise for three decades. The organization was involved in writing the bill, education, outreach and lobbying.

Gundlach is hopeful that South Dakota will manage to eliminate its grocery sales tax next year.

“We get Alabama and South Dakota, then all we’ve got to do is Mississippi,” she said.

The post Grocery taxes face the chopping block in South Dakota  appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

For the 20th time since 1933, Congress is writing a multiyear farm bill that will shape what kind of food U.S. farmers grow, how they raise it and how it gets to consumers. These measures are large, complex and expensive: The next farm bill is projected to cost taxpayers US$1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Modern farm bills address many things besides food, from rural broadband access to biofuels and even help for small towns to buy police cars. These measures bring out a dizzying range of interest groups with diverse agendas.

Umbrella organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union typically focus on farm subsidies and crop insurance. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition advocates for small farmers and ranchers. Industry-specific groups, such as cattlemen, fruit and vegetable growers and organic producers, all have their own interests.

Environmental and conservation groups seek to influence policies that affect land use and sustainable farming practices. Hunger and nutrition groups target the bill’s sections on food aid. Rural counties, hunters and anglers, bankers and dozens of other organizations have their own wish lists.

As a former Senate aide and senior official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I’ve seen this intricate process from all sides. In my view, with the challenges in this round so complex and with critical 2024 elections looming, it could take Congress until 2025 to craft and enact a bill. Here are four key issues shaping the next farm bill, and through it, the future of the U.S. food system.

The price tag

Farm bills always are controversial because of their high cost, but this year the timing is especially tricky. In the past two years, Congress has enacted major bills to provide economic relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, counter inflation, invest in infrastructure and boost domestic manufacturing.

These measures follow unprecedented spending for farm support during the Trump administration. Now legislators are jockeying over raising the debt ceiling, which limits how much the federal government can borrow to pay its bills.

Agriculture Committee leaders and farm groups argue that more money is necessary to strengthen the food and farm sector. If they have their way, the price tag for the next farm bill would increase significantly from current projections.

On the other side, reformers argue for capping payments to farmers, which The Washington Post recently described as an “expensive agricultural safety net,” and restricting payment eligibility. In their view, too much money goes to very large farms that produce commodity crops like wheat, corn, soybeans and rice, while small and medium-size producers receive far less support.

Food aid is the key fight

Many people are surprised to learn that nutrition assistance – mainly through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps – is where most farm bill money is spent. Back in the 1970s, Congress began including nutrition assistance in the farm bill to secure votes from an increasingly urban nation.

Today, over 42 million Americans depend on SNAP, including nearly 1 in every 4 children. Along with a few smaller programs, SNAP will likely consume 80% of the money in the new farm bill, up from 76% in 2018.

Why have SNAP costs grown? During the pandemic, SNAP benefits were increased on an emergency basis, but that temporary arrangement expired in March 2023. Also, in response to a directive included in the 2018 farm bill, the Department of Agriculture recalculated what it takes to afford a healthy diet, known as the Thrifty Food Plan, and determined that it required an additional $12-$16 per month per recipient, or 40 cents per meal.

Because it’s such a large target, SNAP is where much of the budget battle will play out. Most Republicans typically seek to rein in SNAP; most Democrats usually support expanding it.

Anti-hunger advocates are lobbying to make the increased pandemic benefits permanent and defend the revised Thrifty Food Plan. In contrast, Republicans are calling for SNAP reductions, and are particularly focused on expanding work requirements for recipients.

Debating climate solutions

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act provided $19.5 billion to the Department of Agriculture for programs that address climate change. Environmentalists and farmers alike applauded this investment, which is intended to help the agriculture sector embrace climate-smart farming practices and move toward markets that reward carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services.

This big pot of money has become a prime target for members of Congress who are looking for more farm bill funding. On the other side, conservation advocates, sustainable farmers and progressive businesses oppose diverting climate funds for other purposes.

There also is growing demand for Congress to require USDA to develop better standards for measuring, reporting and verifying actions designed to protect or increase soil carbon. Interest is rising in “carbon farming” – paying farmers for practices such as no-till agriculture and planting cover crops, which some studies indicate can increase carbon storage in soil.

But without more research and standards, observers worry that investments in climate-smart agriculture will support greenwashing – misleading claims about environmental benefits – rather than a fundamentally different system of production. Mixed research results have raised questions as to whether establishing carbon markets based on such practices is premature.

A complex bill and inexperienced legislators

Understanding farm bills requires highly specialized knowledge about issues ranging from crop insurance to nutrition to forestry. Nearly one-third of current members of Congress were first elected after the 2018 farm bill was enacted, so this is their first farm bill cycle.

I expect that, as often occurs in Congress, new members will follow more senior legislators’ cues and go along with traditional decision making. This will make it easier for entrenched interests, like the American Farm Bureau Federation and major commodity groups, to maintain support for Title I programs, which provide revenue support for major commodity crops like corn, wheat and soybeans. These programs are complex, cost billions of dollars and go mainly to large-scale operations.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s current stump speech spotlights the fact that 89% of U.S. farmers failed to make a livable profit in 2022, even though total farm income set a record at $162 billion. Vilsack asserts that less-profitable operations should be the focus of this farm bill – but when pressed, he appears unwilling to concede that support for large-scale operations should be changed in any way.

When I served as deputy secretary of agriculture from 2009 to 2011, I oversaw the department’s budget process and learned that investing in one thing often requires defunding another. My dream farm bill would invest in three priorities: organic agriculture as a climate solution; infrastructure to support vibrant local and regional markets and shift away from an agricultural economy dependent on exporting low-value crops; and agricultural science and technology research aimed at reducing labor and chemical inputs and providing new solutions for sustainable livestock production.

In my view, it is time for tough policy choices, and it won’t be possible to fund everything. Congress’ response will show whether it supports business as usual in agriculture, or a more diverse and sustainable U.S. farm system.

Kathleen Merrigan is a former Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Agriculture

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Many toxic substances harm people slowly, causing serious illnesses years after repeated exposure.

But methylene chloride’s fumes are so dangerous, the chemical can kill you in a matter of minutes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency banned consumer sales of paint strippers with this ingredient in 2019 after an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity into a decades-long string of methylene chloride deaths — and a sustained campaign by relatives of its victims and safety advocates to press the EPA to act.

The coalition pushed for more: Workers weren’t protected by the narrow restrictions, they said. The vast majority of deaths Public Integrity traced to methylene chloride exposure happened on the job. And paint strippers were far from the only product you could find it in.

Now the EPA is proposing to ban most uses of methylene chloride — still with some on-the-job exceptions, but far fewer.

“I’m sort of stunned, you know?” said Brian Wynne, whose 31-year-old brother, Drew, died in 2017 while removing paint from his business’ walk-in freezer. Wynne had thought the EPA’s 2019 action on paint stripper “would be as far as we possibly could get — that we ran into a brick wall of funded lobbyists and councils that are paid to keep people like us away and ensure that their bottom line is prioritized ahead of safety.”

The proposed rule would prohibit methylene chloride in all consumer products and “most industrial and commercial uses,” the agency said in its announcement last week. 

The EPA said it hopes the rule will take effect in August 2024. Federal rules must go through a set process to give the public a chance to influence the final outcome. 

The chemical, also known as dichloromethane, can be found in products on retail shelves such as aerosol degreasers and brush cleaners for paints and coatings. Adhesives and sealants sold for commercial purposes use it. Manufacturers tap it to make other chemicals.

At least 85 people have died from methylene chloride’s quick-acting harms since 1980, including workers who had safety training and protective equipment, the agency said. 

That figure comes from a 2021 study by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the University of California, San Francisco, that quantified the ongoing fatalities, building on Public Integrity’s earlier tally. The number is almost certainly an undercount because one of the ways methylene chloride kills is by triggering a heart attack, which can look to observers like death from natural causes unless someone thinks to do a toxicology test.

The chemical has also caused “severe and long-lasting health impacts” such as cancer in people whose exposure didn’t rise to immediately lethal levels, the EPA said.

“Methylene chloride’s hazards,” the agency wrote in its proposed rule, “are well established.”

So well established, in fact, that experts say the federal government should have acted long before.

Public Integrity’s 2015 investigation turned up multiple missed opportunities for intervention since the 1970s that could have saved lives. Yet more deaths occurred amid delays after the EPA first proposed a rule at the end of the Obama administration in January 2017 — the Trump administration shelved the proposal until pressured to act.

‘Protect as many people as possible’

Liz Hitchcock, director of Safer Chemicals Healthy Families, the federal policy program of Toxic-Free Future, is among the people working for years to stop methylene chloride’s killing spree. She hailed the proposed-ban announcement as “a big day.” 

“Again, people have died using these chemicals,” she said. “People have gotten sick being nearby when people are using these chemicals, people have gotten chronic illnesses from the use of these chemicals. We want to make sure we protect as many people as possible.”

But she wasn’t happy to hear that the EPA believes the rule won’t be finalized for 15 more months. 

And Lauren Atkins, whose 31-year-old son Joshua died in 2018 while using paint stripper to refinish his BMX bike, worries about the impact of the uses that won’t be banned. Seeing those loopholes in the announcement hit her hard.

“I about jumped out of my shoes until I actually read the whole thing, and then I was pretty sad,” said Atkins, whose driving goal since her son’s death has been to get methylene chloride off the market so it can’t kill anyone else. “I lost my son, but my son lost everything.”

The chemical’s use in pharmaceutical manufacturing isn’t covered by the Toxic Substances Control Act, so that isn’t prohibited in the proposed rule, the EPA said. Workers who continue to use methylene chloride in other activities the proposal would allow, the agency said, would be covered by a new “workplace chemical protection program with strict exposure limits.” Methylene chloride kills when its fumes build up in enclosed spaces.

Some higher-volume uses would remain in those exceptions, which include “mission-critical” or “safety-critical” work by the military, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and their contractors; use in laboratories; and companies using it as a reactant or manufacturing it for the allowed purposes, the EPA said. 

But some of those exceptions would end after 10 years.

And most uses would be prohibited. 

There would be no more methylene chloride in paint strippers beyond the federal-agency exceptions. The product was a common cause of reported deaths, frequently among workers refinishing old bathtubs in homes and apartments. 

“I lost my son, but my son lost everything.”

Lauren Atkins, whose son Joshua died in 2018 while using paint stripper on his bike

And methylene chloride would no longer be allowed in commercial and industrial vapor degreasing, adhesive removal, finishing products for textiles, liquid lubricants, hobby glue and a long list of other applications. 

“Currently, an estimated 845,000 individuals are exposed to methylene chloride in the workplace,” the EPA said in a statement. “Under EPA’s proposal, less than 10,000 workers, protected from unreasonable risk via a required workplace chemical protection program, are expected to continue to use methylene chloride.”

Dr. Robert Harrison, a clinical professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has focused on methylene chloride for roughly a decade. He said the EPA is walking a line with the proposal, trying to balance safety with economic and national-security considerations, and he finds the extent of the ban heartening.

“I think that this is a win. It’s a win for workers,” said Harrison, who worked on the 2021 study about fatalities caused by the chemical. “This sets a really great precedent for making decisions based on clear-cut science and establishing the principle … that we should move away from these toxic chemicals to safer substitutes where the harm clearly outweighs the benefits.”

62,000 chemicals

You might think a chemical can’t be sold on the market unless it’s deemed safe. But that’s not how the U.S. system works.

Concerns about chemical safety prompted Congress to pass the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, setting some requirements for chemicals. But those were widely seen as weak, giving the EPA no authority to broadly assess safety. A federal inventory published in 1982 counted roughly 62,000 chemicals, a number that’s continued to grow. 

In 2016, Congress amended TSCA and mandated chemical risk evaluations by the EPA. Methylene chloride was the very first that the agency tackled.

“This is what we worked so hard to reform TSCA to do,” said Hitchcock, who shared the Public Integrity investigation with congressional offices during that period as a potent example of deadly inaction.

The next step for the proposed methylene chloride ban is a 60-day public comment period. People will be able to weigh in on the EPA’s docket — and safety advocates are organizing around that.

“This is a big step forward for public health, but it’s not without its flaws,” Hitchcock said. She’s hoping to see comments that “urge EPA to enact the strongest rule possible.”

Harrison used to say that chemical regulation in the U.S. moved at a glacial speed — until glaciers started outpacing it. But he does see improvement since the 2016 TSCA amendments. The new regulatory action on methylene chloride makes him hopeful.

“There are many other chemicals that can follow the decision that the USA has made about methylene chloride,” he said.

The post The EPA wants to broaden a ban on a deadly chemical on store shelves appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.