Tax Junk Food

[Airbrush]

This seems like such a no brainer, why don't we hear about it? The problem is America is grossly overweight, and sickly, due for the most part in unhealthy living habits. Why not put a big tax on junk food, and use it to subsidize fruits, veges, and other quality nutritional food? Then poor people will better afford healthier food, and can't afford junk food.

 

Also there should be a tax break for being very healthy, and not needing expensive health care.

Edited February 2, 2012 by Airbrush

[iNow]

It's not that there's a rational argument against it. It's an ideological position.

 

 

Ken Rogoff wrote a good article on this just yesterday: http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/01/rogoff-coronary-capitalism/

[John Cuthber]

" Why not put a big tax on junk food, and use it to subsidize fruits, veges, and other quality nutritional food? Then poor people will better afford healthier food, and can't afford junk food."

Given the people who eat on burger bars and the people who eat in vegetarian restaurants, I take it that your plan is to tax poor people to subsidize food for rich people.

 

And, since the biggest predictor of being unhealthy is being poor, you plan to do it again.

 

"Also there should be a tax break for being very healthy, and not needing expensive health care. "

A classic case of blaming the victim if ever I saw one.

[swansont]

" Why not put a big tax on junk food, and use it to subsidize fruits, veges, and other quality nutritional food? Then poor people will better afford healthier food, and can't afford junk food."

Given the people who eat on burger bars and the people who eat in vegetarian restaurants, I take it that your plan is to tax poor people to subsidize food for rich people.

 

But would that be the case if such a plan were implemented?

[John Cuthber]

But would that be the case if such a plan were implemented?

Quite possibly. It's difficult to change people's behaviour. Also, where are the burger joints and where are the vegie cafes? Where do the people live?

Are you going to set up a bus service?

[Santalum]

" Why not put a big tax on junk food, and use it to subsidize fruits, veges, and other quality nutritional food? Then poor people will better afford healthier food, and can't afford junk food."

Given the people who eat on burger bars and the people who eat in vegetarian restaurants, I take it that your plan is to tax poor people to subsidize food for rich people.

 

And, since the biggest predictor of being unhealthy is being poor, you plan to do it again.

 

"Also there should be a tax break for being very healthy, and not needing expensive health care. "

A classic case of blaming the victim if ever I saw one.

 

An apple from the green grocer is often less expensive than a Mars bar these days.

 

And a simple meal of fresh veges and a small amount of meat is easily less expensive than a family meal at McDonalds etc......at least in Australia.

 

So this argument about the unhealthy being poor victims is deeply flawed and those who get fat on a diet of junk food are making a life style choice as is the case with smokers.

And if that lifestyle choice imposes a substantial financial burdon on society then they ought be discouraged from making that choice.

 

Therefore there is a reasonable case for taxing junk food even though I enjoy the accasional chocolate and packet of chips as much as the next person.

[Phi for All]

The very first Tea Party protest was on a measure NY state wanted to implement, imposing an extra tax on any soda sold in the state that wasn't diet. Count on a huge portion of the country to object, with the inevitable dogpile from the corporate super PACs.

 

It's funny, when cigarettes were connected with health problems, it seemed like a no-brainer to add tax to them to offset the costs of care. But now it's food that's the culprit, food that probably the majority eat, and suddenly people want to gripe about unfair taxation, and how it's just not right to try and legislate what people eat. Never mind that we already legislate what you drink, smoke, pop or chew, now they're after your DORITOS!!!

 

I'm intrigued by the idea of using a tax on junk food (who determines THAT classification?) to subsidize the distribution of lower-cost fresh fruits and vegetables as an encouragement to lower income citizens to eat healthier. Definitely something to think on.

[Moontanman]

Just let everyone see the pink slime fast food restaurants use as meat, pink chicken slime and pink beef slime....

 

[D H]

And a simple meal of fresh veges and a small amount of meat is easily less expensive than a family meal at McDonalds etc......at least in Australia.

That is a false comparison.

 

A fair comparison is a meal at McDonalds versus a meal at some other restaurant, or a meal prepared at home using cheap, but admittedly not so healthy, ingredients versus your expensive fresh vegies and a small amount of meat (presumably not hamburger). The poor eat poorly because eating well is expensive. A meal at McDonalds is a luxury they can sometimes afford, just as is eating at a fancy restaurant is a sometimes affordable luxury to those of us who are better off.

 

 

Get out bedroom, get out of my kitchen, get out of my house!

Edited February 3, 2012 by D H

[swansont]

get out of my kitchen

 

Completely? To the point that government doesn't regulate amount of e.g. arsenic or lead that's in your food, food containers or paint on the walls?

[CaptainPanic]

A fair comparison is a meal at McDonalds versus a meal at some other restaurant,[...]

Just look at university restaurants, or company canteens.

 

Restaurants are expensive if you get a menu, and it's freshly cooked... but if they can prepare hundreds of similar meals all at once, it becomes much cheaper.

 

[...] or a meal prepared at home using cheap, but admittedly not so healthy, ingredients versus your expensive fresh vegies and a small amount of meat (presumably not hamburger).

I guess this point is true in the USA (and Canada too?), but certainly not in the rest of the world. Generally, seasonal fresh vegetables and fruit, from your own country (not the ones imported from other continents!) are CHEAP. We're talking 1 to 2 euro per kg, where you typically eat about 200 grams per meal. In other words: fresh veggies cost 20 to 40 cents per person per meal over here.

[Arete]

And a simple meal of fresh veges and a small amount of meat is easily less expensive than a family meal at McDonalds etc......at least in Australia.

 

I grew up in Aus and now live in the US. It is not the case here. You can't make food as cheap as you can buy prepared fast food. It's anecdotal - but I put it down to Australia's much higher minimum wage.

 

While in theory a user pays health system is a fantastic idea: calculate the estimated financial burden say, cigarettes and alcohol consumption creates for the public health system, add that cost to the products in the form of a tax, channel it back into the health system. That way - smokers and drinkers (and fattys and whoever else) aren't left in the cold when they need medical treatment - people who don't indulge in whatever the product in question aren't being fleeced to pay for preventable lifestyle disease in others.

 

There's a number of problems, however: 1) most places already tax liquor and tobacco products. The money doesn't directly find its way to the health sector. Just try to snatch a lucrative teat like that from your average government.

2) A user pays system of health care needs a functioning health care system. I came from Australia, where we have a big, "evil" government controlled healthcare system i paid for as an income tax levy. Now I live in the US and have my private health insurance garnished from my salary. My personal health coverage here is better than Australia, however it costs 10x as much as the Medicare levy used to cost me and the average person's cover is both probably lower and the flow-on effects of litigation in place of adequate coverage affects all sorts of aspects of my life.

Given the way the US healthcare system works, user pays isn't going to be effective without substantial restructuring. You could be McDonalds biggest customer (and thus contribute vastly to the user pays health tax scheme), but with no insurance it comes to naught in the current system. So you'd need whole system restructuring before it would function.

Edited February 3, 2012 by Arete

[Airbrush]

Have public mess halls that anyone can eat at for free, but the food is all very nutritious, healthy food, prepared by expert chefs to make the food delicious. Maybe you are required to do exercise before eating before you are allowed this public benefit. These are financed by a progressive tax on foods generally accepted to be less healthy. Develop a food index. The higher the index, the higher the tax.

[Phi for All]

Have public mess halls that anyone can eat at for free, but the food is all very nutritious, healthy food, prepared by expert chefs to make the food delicious. Maybe you are required to do exercise before eating before you are allowed this public benefit. These are financed by a progressive tax on foods generally accepted to be less healthy. Develop a food index. The higher the index, the higher the tax.

If you're going to that extent, it would be easier to tie in food purchases with your healthcare program. Not all foods have the same benefits for all people. Everyone should have a physician-approved menu, and food purchased from that menu would be at the lowest cost possible (subsidized the most by foods that are bad for you, and taxed the least). You could still have anything you wanted, but some foods are going to have a stiff tax (for you) based on how healthy they are (for you). This way the best choices will always be the most affordable, or at least the best deal.

 

You could make a system like this work in either a publicly-funded medical insurance program or a private one. The private insurance would probably want to track the purchases and charge higher rates to people who deviate from their diet menu a lot, but as long as there is a publicly-funded alternative, competition would keep them in line.

[CharonY]

I grew up in Aus and now live in the US. It is not the case here. You can't make food as cheap as you can buy prepared fast food.

 

It is kind of possible, if you cook yourself. However, in the US it appears that less and less people actually have time (or bother) to learn to cook. Especially in worker families (with both parents working full-time) it is more common to grab food from somewhere. And considering the dominance of food chains (Panda express, Burger King etc,) that all cater to a taste (i.e. greasy and sweet), I am not even sure where one could get healthy food, much less to a competitive price.

I think an important part would not only be to subsidize healthy food, but also to get people reacquainted to unprocessed food.

[Vent]

Are you guys kidding that fast food is cheaper than getting shopping from supermarkets?

[Arete]

Are you guys kidding that fast food is cheaper than getting shopping from supermarkets?

 

I could get a burger, fries and coke for lunch at work for $3.99 (5x4= $12).

 

What I actually do is my lovely wife bakes our bread (about $1 per loaf. Say we were buying rye sourdough it would be around $5), we spend around $5 on lunchmeat a week, around $3-4 on salad items, around $3-4 on a block of lite cheese. (total: $12-18).

 

Even when you bake your own bread from scratch, it's hard to beat fast food in terms of dollars per meal. Dollars per nutritional unit is a different kettle of fish of course.

[Phi for All]

Are you guys kidding that fast food is cheaper than getting shopping from supermarkets?

Packaged perishables can cost more than fast food if you don't cook very often because a lot goes bad before you can use it. For people who want to eat less processed food, I recommend investing in a big pot, a casserole pan and some plastic containers for freezing, so you can take advantage of sales, and pick a day each week to cook a couple of stews or soups or casseroles for the rest of the week.

 

The key here is to do as little actual cooking/cleaning as possible, while being able to buy thrifty bunches of fresh food, and use them all up at once so nothing goes bad. If you do it all on one day and make one mess, it'll be less hassle.

 

I don't know about anyone else, but I think working people spend too much money on lunch, and end up eating too much at a time when being really full is counterproductive to their work. Unless your job is super physical, having a big processed lunch from a restaurant might make you feel more like napping than finishing that project. Eating a decent portion of one of your homemade casseroles or a mug of your soup might be a better, more economical choice most days.

[Airbrush]

I don't know about anyone else, but I think working people spend too much money on lunch, and end up eating too much at a time when being really full is counterproductive to their work. Unless your job is super physical, having a big processed lunch from a restaurant might make you feel more like napping than finishing that project. .

 

People have been brain-washed by the food industry that food is something to worship as much and often as possible, and that eating should be an orgiastic experience 3 times a day (if not more). Fancy food makes people eat too much. Plain simple unprocessed foods are very delicious IF you restrict yourself until you are very hungry. Restaurant food is bad medicine, simply because it is too much fun. I'm 57 and I love to munch on raw cauliflower, celery hearts, etc, before my evening meal, because I don't eat anything solid all day. In the morning just coffee then I make my 2 daily protein smoothies (banana, frozen peaches, fruit juice, soy milk, protein powder, milled flaxseed, yogourt, and a tablespoon of liquid minerals), along with my vitamins. I pour them into two 20 fl.oz. bottles, one of which I drink slowly on my way driving to work. At mid day I have hot water with vege broth, later during my lunch hour I retreat to my car for my second smoothy with vitamins and I totally relax, space out listening to the radio, or meditate, and I don't feel hungry at all. When I get home from work I relax for a while to recover from my stressful job as a bookkeeper. Then I jog around my neighborhood for about a mile a few times a week. Then I might do some pushups and situps while watching TV and yoga stretching. By 8:00pm I am very hungry so I have my raw vege snack, all I want. And my dog loves cauliflower too! We eat it together. My religion is WAHWE (we are HOW we eat). I also have junk food occasionally, but if it costed much more, I would cut back more. I rarely get sick, not even a cold in many years. In 20 years I may have called in to work sick about a half dozen times, and most of those were so I could go surfing instead.

 

I like the comment above about how different people should avoid different kinds of foods. Some are alergic to certain foods which are good for others. But some things like excess sugar, salt, and unhealthy fats, (and an excess of just about anything) are probably not very helpful for most people. In the future, when there are so many people and resources are being stretched to the limits, it might be necessary for government to get more involved in the life habits of people, that can be good and healthy which will result in a person who is not a charge upon society, and does not need much tax assistance for their never-ending supply of expensive drugs and other escalating health care costs.

Edited February 3, 2012 by Airbrush

[JustinW]

Am I the only one on this forum that looks at this as a blight on personal freedom and liberty? Why not tax the air we breathe and give the money to combat co2 emmisions? Lets start taxing people's flatulance like they do livestock in Ireland. Is there some line that could be considered uncrossable when it comes to regulating and taxing for the greater good of society? If so what is it, and why is that the line? People say that the world is getting fatter, but has anyone considered that the ratio of people starving or going hungry might have dropped at a rate that corrolates with this gain in weight? Has anyone considered that most of the people that are unhealthily overweight have more reasons than just what they eat? Hey here's an idea that we can add to the food tax... Let's add a tax to people who DON'T excersize. THEY are obviously exponentially more unhealthy than people who do excersize, at least at probably close to the same ratio as fat:skinny. Why not go that route? Where do you want to draw the line on the control that a government can have on what people do with themselves? If everyone is so pissed off to have to pay into a system because of people's behavioral eticate then, by god, change the damn system. Don't keep choking people's wallets to prevent bad choices. It's beginning to look like people think of the government as a hypothetical parent.

[Moontanman]

My problem isn't lack of healthy food, i eat vegetables all the time, fish, shrimp and other seafood makes up quite a bit of my diet, the problem is .... potato chips.. I tried to eat just one but there was the whole bag... so I thought, you know, just maybe one more and soon I was waiting out side the store for it to open in the morning, a glazed look on my face, hollow eyes, body shaking as the DT's took over.... Just say no to potato chips kids, trust me...

[Santalum]

That is a false comparison.

 

A fair comparison is a meal at McDonalds versus a meal at some other restaurant, or a meal prepared at home using cheap, but admittedly not so healthy, ingredients versus your expensive fresh vegies and a small amount of meat (presumably not hamburger). The poor eat poorly because eating well is expensive. A meal at McDonalds is a luxury they can sometimes afford, just as is eating at a fancy restaurant is a sometimes affordable luxury to those of us who are better off.

 

 

Get out bedroom, get out of my kitchen, get out of my house!

 

 

No it is not a false comparison!

 

We are discussing whether or not junk food is always cheaper than healthy food. And in my scenario it is clear that this is not universally the case!

 

Healthy restaurant food is not a fair comparison with McDonalds anyway because it is high status food the cost of which is primarily the labour of trained cheffs, as opposed to the labour of teenagers in McDonalds.

 

A comparison between your own labour in cooking a healthy meal, as opposed to that of a teenager cooking poor quality processed foods, is far more realistic than comparing the latter to the meals offered by higher status cheffs.

 

Am I the only one on this forum that looks at this as a blight on personal freedom and liberty? Why not tax the air we breathe and give the money to combat co2 emmisions? Lets start taxing people's flatulance like they do livestock in Ireland. Is there some line that could be considered uncrossable when it comes to regulating and taxing for the greater good of society? If so what is it, and why is that the line? People say that the world is getting fatter, but has anyone considered that the ratio of people starving or going hungry might have dropped at a rate that corrolates with this gain in weight? Has anyone considered that most of the people that are unhealthily overweight have more reasons than just what they eat? Hey here's an idea that we can add to the food tax... Let's add a tax to people who DON'T excersize. THEY are obviously exponentially more unhealthy than people who do excersize, at least at probably close to the same ratio as fat:skinny. Why not go that route? Where do you want to draw the line on the control that a government can have on what people do with themselves? If everyone is so pissed off to have to pay into a system because of people's behavioral eticate then, by god, change the damn system. Don't keep choking people's wallets to prevent bad choices. It's beginning to look like people think of the government as a hypothetical parent.

 

Boo hoo!

 

A proportion of people in society require their behaviour to be heavily regulated to prevent them doing harm to themselves, others and scoiety at large.

[iNow]

Am I the only one on this forum that looks at this as a blight on personal freedom and liberty?

No, not necessarily, but you do seem to prize personal "freedom" and liberty as the ultimate priority over absolutely everything else... And that I think is naive and short sighted. Liberty is important. So are many other things. Let's find balance instead of looking for one-dimensional answers to complex problems.

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/libertarian-illusions_b_1207878.html

 

libertarianism itself is beguiling. Like many extreme ideologies, libertarianism gives a single answer to a complicated world. It seems to cut through the fog and get to the heart of solutions; illusions, alas, but powerful ones nonetheless.

 

Libertarianism is the single-minded defense of liberty. Many young people flock to libertarianism out of the thrill of defending such a valiant cause. They also like the moral freedom that libertarianism seems to offer: it's okay to follow one's one desires, even to embrace selfishness and self-interest, as long as it doesn't directly harm someone else.

 

Yet the error of libertarianism lies not in championing liberty, but in championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values. Libertarians hold that individual liberty should never be sacrificed in the pursuit of other values or causes. Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable -- all are to take a back seat.

 

When libertarians translate the idea of liberty into the political and economic spheres, they argue that government should operate only to protect personal liberty and not for any other cause. According to libertarians, the sole role of government is to enforce private contracts and to keep the peace so that no one can use force to deprive the liberty of another. In English political theory, this is called the "night watchman state."

 

By taking an extreme view -- that liberty alone is to be defended among all of society's values -- libertarians reach extreme conclusions.

 

<...>

 

America has achieved it greatness not through a single-minded ideology but through pragmatism and the wisdom to embrace several important values. A vast majority of Americans today embrace liberty, civic responsibility, and compassion, and seek a government built upon all three. We are the better individuals and a much stronger society for it.

[Santalum]

No, not necessarily, but you do seem to prize personal "freedom" and liberty as the ultimate priority over absolutely everything else... And that I think is naive and short sighted. Liberty is important. So are many other things. Let's find balance instead of looking for one-dimensional answers to complex problems.

 

 

http://www.huffingto..._b_1207878.html

 

 

 

 

AGREED!

[swansont]

No it is not a false comparison!

 

We are discussing whether or not junk food is always cheaper than healthy food. And in my scenario it is clear that this is not universally the case!

 

Healthy restaurant food is not a fair comparison with McDonalds anyway because it is high status food the cost of which is primarily the labour of trained cheffs, as opposed to the labour of teenagers in McDonalds.

 

A comparison between your own labour in cooking a healthy meal, as opposed to that of a teenager cooking poor quality processed foods, is far more realistic than comparing the latter to the meals offered by higher status cheffs.

 

It doesn't matter if there is a high status chef or not. If you compare any restaurant to eating food you prepare yourself, you are still ignoring the cost (and time) of someone else preparing the food. Even if it is a bunch of teenagers making minimum wage.