Two other examples show how deregulation can harm health. In 1994, as a result of intense lobbying by vitamin and food supplement makers, the U.S. Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), which limited the Food and Drug Administration’s authority to regulate supplements. Under the new Act, as long as manufacturers made no claims about their products’ treating, preventing, or curing diseases, the FDA had to prove they were harmful rather than the industry having the prior obligation to prove they were safe. Consumer Reports judged that “the law has left consumers without the protections surrounding the manufacture and marketing of over-the-counter or prescription medication.” Supplement manufacturers were now able to launch products without any testing at all, just by sending the FDA a copy of the language on the label. In 2010, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on FDA oversight of dietary supplements found that nearly all of the herbal dietary supplements that the GAO tested contained trace amounts of lead and other contaminants, and 16 of the 40 supplements tested contained pesticide residues that appeared to exceed legal limits. Among the illegal claims that supplementary makers made were that a product containing ginkgo biloba was a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and a product containing ginseng could prevent diabetes and cancer. The deregulation instituted by DSHEA endangered the health of consumers and provided misleading and deceptive health education. This further complicated the task of nutrition educators accountable to the public rather than corporations. These educators now needed, not only to give people the facts they needed to make informed food choices, but also to counteract the better funded misinformation campaigns that industry sponsored.
A study of alcohol regulation in the United Kingdom concluded that the deregulation of alcohol marketing that began in the 1960s and continues to the present has significantly increased the health-related harms caused by alcohol. Repealing laws that limited the hours and places of sales, and the pricing and marketing of beer, wine, and liquor contributed to increases in deaths from cirrhosis of the liver, hospital admissions for alcoholic liver disease and acute intoxication, and binge drinking among teenage girls. Compared to the United States, which still has more robust state and local alcohol regulations in place, the United Kingdom has higher rates of alcohol consumption, fewer alcohol abstainers, and a youth and childhood drinking rate more than twice the American rate. In 2013, bowing to pressure from the alcohol industry, the United Kingdom again missed an opportunity to remedy these problems by rejecting a proposal to institute regulations that would have used alcohol pricing to discourage excess use, a decision decried by public health advocates.
Tax relief: Another plank of the business plan for restoring profitability is tax relief. Although U.S. businesses paid lower corporate taxes than in Europe and Japan, American businesses insisted that high taxes were a deterrent to economic growth and a drag on the U.S. economy. Beginning in 1980 with the Reagan tax cuts and continuing for the next three decades, U.S. corporations saw their tax rates fall. Between 1955 and 2010, the percentage of federal revenues generated by corporate taxes fell from 27.3 percent to 8.9 percent. In the same period, the percentage of the gross domestic product that came from corporate taxes fell from 4.3 percent to 1.3 percent. By 2010, compared to other nations, U.S. corporate taxes constituted a smaller percentage of the GDP (1.8 percent) than those in Australia (5.9 percent), Japan (3.9 percent), or Great Britain (3.6 percent). In 1978, Congress passed and President Carter signed a tax bill that cut the top rate of capital gains taxes from 48 percent to 28 percent, thus also reducing the taxes on the private investors who supplied corporations with the capital needed for expansion, including expansion of the industries that promoted hyperconsumption. By 2012, the effective corporate tax rate in the United States had dropped to 17.8 percent, about 40 percent of the 1960 rate.