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RE: Should Governments Be Able To Institute a “Fat Tax” ?
"In the US, states like New York have already started heavier taxes on drinks like soda, which provides zero nutritional value."
The one in Philly really seems to have backfired. They ran off the Coke and Pepsi jobs right away, and since it also applies to flavored water, some products like Propel Flavored Water saw price increases of around two-thirds after tax.
The only real solution here is politically unpalatable and would involve neither subsidizing nor assisting in the resolution of the "consequences" of individual obesity. I suspect, at least US, politicians will instead take the increasingly regressive route of taxes and prohibition.
You are going to love this. So what does the fat tax really do though? It sounds like it is a way to make people not want to buy these things right?and that normal rational people will stop?
Just like Cigs and Alcohol?
Sugar addiction is a real yhing and many people have it. We are also addicted to caeffeine as it is an actual mild stimulant drug.
So putting a tax on "fat foods" hurts the addicts who can't quit the food. It also hurts a lot of poorer people themost because in general poor people eat low quality(fatty and sugary) unhealthy food because it is cheap.
So what is really happening when a fat tax goes through? It brings in more tax revenue from poorer to middle class people. It is an appearance of solving a problem, but in reality is a way to get gaurnteed money, becuase poor - middle class people can't buy organic cage free eggs (4.99 for a dozen), they can buy the caged and GMO laden eggs for 79 cents for a dozen. Same with vegatables and other healthy things, it costs double triple or more.
The actual problem is the food manufacturers are allowed to load products with junk. They need to go after tem. A fat tax on me buying mdonalds just makes me pay more while mcdonalds still gets their sale and the manufacturers of garbage food still continue on as normal.
It needs to be illegal to serve food that has more than a certain amount of salt or sugar or preservatives per serving. Drinking one 12oz can of soda has enough sugar for an entire day's worth of your daily value, everyone is getting diabeteres and overweight due to too much salt and fat in everything.
We need education, but the government is paid by lobbyists for food corporations to make it so we are un-educated on what we eat.
Will take decades or more to fix this problem and a fat tax just hurts the average person while letting the mega corps do what they want.
I agree with a lot of this, too, but have an even darker view of the systemic deception. The processed food industry is pretty huge, but big pharma is where the real money's at. In the US system, healthy eating will likely never be supported, because feeding the nutritionally under-educated massive quantities of salt and sugar provides rafts of diabetic and heart-diseased customers in need of a lifetime of downward spiral pharmaceutical regimens.
I agree with a lot of what you said. But, I also think people have the right to make unhealthy decisions if they choose, we just need to minimize the negative externalities of that for others.
Very perceptive to note that many people use food as a substitute for other things that are missing in their life, such as relationships, a sense of accomplishment/purpose, etc.
As Fraiser Crane once asked a caller who was struggling with food issues, "What part of you is not being fed?"
However, there is an aspect that was not mentioned - which is high fructose corn syrup, added to many processed food products. The is a direct parallel between the use HFC and obesity rates. Here's a graph from Diabetes Daily :
Right. That stuff is in soooo many products. A little won't kill you, but it's not something that occurs in nature and it's just so hard to avoid.