http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html
Just a link to an article written on taxing fattening foods. Some of my favorite comments:
Excellent article. I would support any politician of any party who ran with these ideas. This is not about the nanny state taking away people’s rights (by the way, when we talk about rights, why do so few remember to mention responsibilities?) It seems to me that people who develop illnesses or injuries from risky lifestyle choices, are free riders on our health care system. It is statistically possible to calculate dollar amounts spent on health care for illnesses and injuries that result from voluntary life choices that come with serious health risks attached. The retail prices of those items should include assessments, which go directly into a fund to pay for the health care that is going to result from them. That’s not restricting anyone’s right to anything, but it is asking people to be responsible enough to pay their own way. [I have a responsibility to my society to manage my body in a way that society approves of?]
I love this idea! Why should only the affluent get to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, while the poor get more and more unhealthy? Plus, this would help pay the health costs that are caused by such an unhealthy diet.
Those corporations who produce and profit from these products will complain, which, as wealthy and healthy individuals, they can’t see any problem from their viewpoint; after all, they mostly know other wealthy and healthy people and couldn’t imagine a breakfast of cola and chips.
Talk to the poor, and they want to eat healthy, but simply can’t afford it. There is either no healthy option nearby, or it’s a choice between eating something and rent/transportation/health care.
If Michelle Obama wishes to battle childhood obesity with her, “Let’s Move” campaign, how about using this idea to fix up the choice of fuel for their bodies? [Poor people can afford vegetables and fruit, although it is a difference of degree to be sure.]
Mr. Bittman’s concise, and well thought out arguments are yet another blow to the notion that free markets can do no wrong. Adherence to this ideology, which was revived after the Great Depression by Milton Friedman and irrevocably instilled into our political culture by Ronald Reagan, has crippled our government for at least the past 30 years.
As Mr. Bittman simply illustrates, the free market has created a environment in which the pursuit of maximum profit for a limited number of individuals in the short run (through the production and marketing of cheap yet incredibly unhealthy food) saddles our nation as a whole with hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs in the long run. And as we are all currently witnessing, our country simply cannot afford to continue to spend a continually-increasing percentage of our GDP on health care costs. [Ignoring government interference in the food market and ignoring the fact that health care costs managed by the government is not free market]
I like this idea. Clearly, given the current system of incentives, we as a culture lack the ability to make healthier lifestyle choices. Yet we somehow expect someone else to foot the bill for our resulting disease. If we are fine with offloading a significant portion of the responsibility for our healthcare costs to the public at large, the public at large should have a say in the incentives underlying what drives those costs - and junk food stands at the top of the list. We’re already doling out incentives. Unfortunately we’re funneling them in a direction that’s killing us. We shouldn’t have to settle for that. [Here’s a better idea: Don’t offload your portion of your health care cost to the public at-large and maybe it won’t cost so much and people won’t make awful decisions.]
I’m sure that there will be howls of protest from so-called freedom lovers but we have for decades subsidized agri-business with nary a peep from most Americans. [So-called? Approving of choice in food consumption is pro-freedom. There is nothing “so-called” about that.]
A brilliant idea that, unfortunately, would probably never fly. Considering how the Tea Party reactionaries got themselves into a froth over the ban on wasteful light bulbs, they’d probably become even more apoplectic about a junk food tax. Look at how they laid into poor Michelle Obama when she promoted healthy eating as a way to curb childhood obesity. A soda tax was recently proposed in Philadelphia and the beverage industry spent a fortune to defeat it with deceptive ads about “the government telling us what to eat.” One could expect a much more vociferous reaction if a national junk food tax was proposed. [So would a national junk food tax not amount to "the government telling us what to eat?]
Ok, I’m done for the time being.