Tomorrow’s USA Today has competing food safety editorials and they both get it wrong.

The editorial board of USA Today says regulators lack enough authority to do what’s needed to protect the public, and they need recall authority.

No, regulators have lots of authority and continually mess up.

Tom Coburn, a medical doctor and a Republican senator from Oklahoma, says in this political nosestretcher that “America has the safest food supply in the world, and it has never been safer” and that “the so-called FDA Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010, which the Senate will vote on after Thanksgiving, only expands a disjointed, duplicative and ineffective food safety bureaucracy. “

Coburn says that “for the past 100 years, the free market, not the government, has been the primary driver of innovation and improved safety. Consumer choice is a far more effective accountability mechanism than government bureaucracies.”

Except consumers can’t choose safer food because no one will promote such food at retail. Coburn is having some wet dreams about Reagan trickle-down economics.

Market food safety at retail and consumers could actually choose. Otherwise, it just tastes like urine, trickling down …