It seems to me that fatty foods are more of a health hazard than smoking, so why shouldn’t we put huge preventative luxury taxes on the most unhealthy foods like we did to tobacco?
I’m not as concerned with the financial implications of this. We might make a ton of money for the government this way, or it might cost a ton of money to enforce it, and I’m not sure which it would be. I’m more concerned with the moral implications of it. What do you think?
What’s moral about trying to control what somebody else eats?
Would you tax cooking oil? Butter? It’s easy enough to create fatty foods if you take normal, healthy foods and prepare them in ways that use a lot of oil and butter.
For example, fried chicken.
At the same time, fat is an important ingredient in normal, healthy foods too. Particularly for children, it’s important to eat a decent amount of fat.
It seems to me the difference between food and tobacco is that with tobacco, it’s very easy to categorize tobacco products as 100% bad from a health perspective. So from a moral perspective, it’s not too hard to justify imposing a “sin tax” on tobacco.
If you’re completely ignoring the financial aspects then this is a non-starter. You’re imposing your morality on others. If I decide that I would rather enjoy eating and not live to be 100, who are you to decide that I can’t do that?
If you factor in financial aspects my mind might be changed, but I don’t know.
:dubious: Let me guess - you are a skinny smoker, right?
I don’t think there’s any feasible way to tax food, since fast food and whatnot isn’t high fat/high cholesterol at all. What it is is fast to make and cheap. So really the issue is that you can by pre-made food cheaply. But if you were to put a minimum price on such food (like minimum wage), that has a very high potential to impact the children of low income families, who might not be getting enough food at all if it isn’t cheap and easy enough. And it would definitely have a negative impact on the economy. It could very easily put a substantial percentage of fast food restaurants, and even supermarkets and small delis, out of business.
I think you would do much better to simply use advertising with kids teaching them that you don’t need to clean your plate and that large portions for cheap is still wasted money.
If I smoked, I probaby would be skinny. 
I’m just a regular slightly-pudgy non-smoker, actually.
Say your advertising idea works, and people stop eating unhealthy food. Doesn’t that have the exact same negative economic impact as taxing the crap out of it would?
Your analogy is a good one, if you’re looking only at the moral angle. It makes just as much sense* to lump unhealthy food into the sin tax category as it does to do so with tobacco. It’s a little harder to isolate the bad food from the good (there isn’t any “good tobacco”), but it’s not impossible. Processed food that is eaten as is can be easily evaluated for it’s healthiness, and then taxed accordingly.
*either way: good sense or bad sense.
The government already controls, or at least strongly influences, what people eat. It spends billions of dollars on subsidies for wheat, rice and especially corn farmers (and meanwhile places tariffs on sugar imports). As a result, lots of food we eat either contains corn directly or indirectly in the form of cattle feed and high-fructose corn syrup. One might think it better to encourage people to eat more fruits and vegetables but that’s not what they’re doing. (Note that much of this is shamefully cribbed from the writings of Michael Pollan and other writers.)
Granted but all that is sort of an amoral pursuit of money for special interest thing. The OP seems to be motivated by a desire to control others for their own good. Not saying either is a good thing.
It’s just as moral as trying to control whether someone drinks and smokes…
Maybe, maybe not, but the OP didn’t ask about alcohol or tobacco tax.
Certainly possible. But a) it’s not got any loopholes and b) it would be a gradual change rather than a sudden one, giving the market time to compensate with other industries. If nothing else, once the government starts taxing food, they’ve no incentive to stop even when the populace stops putting on the pounds.
But the point is that the OP is assuming that, since alcohol and tobacco taxes are accepted by society, a tax on fattening foods would be no less “moral.” So if you wish to assert that the concept is amoral, you have to be willing to take on the whole class of taxes. And, since many, if not most, taxing schemes involve moral decisions on various behaviors in society (e.g.: tax credits for “green” energy efforts), you’d be making a pretty novel argument. 
The last thing we need is yet another regressive tax.
(What’s more expensive, healthier food or ‘junk food’?)
The analogy between controlling tobacco use and food consumption doesnt work well, because tobacco is strongly addictive. Trying to coerce people into stopping smoking, and coercing them into not eating fatty foods aren’t the same thing, because in the case of tobacco the issue of choice is largely moot.
Back in the early 1990s, IIRC, California had an experiment with a “snack tax.” The idea was that foods that people prepare at home would not be subject to sales tax, but foods that people would grab and eat would be. Not surprisingly, it hit junk food the most.
It was a disaster. Nobody knew what to tax and what not to: I think there were silly stories going around like a 2 liter Coke wouldn’t be taxed, but a 64 oz Big Gulp would be taxed.
I think once people saw what confusion it caused business owners and what disgruntlement it caused consumers, even the supporters of the concept of a snack tax had to agree that the whole thing was botched. The life of the snack tax was maybe a year or two if my memory isn’t deluded by all the Twinkies I have eaten in my lifetime.
Based on that experience, although I don’t have a problem with the concept of taxing junk food and using the money for something good – children’s health insurance, maybe – I’m firmly convinced there’s no way to make clear assessments of what foods are bad and should be subject to tax, because there’s just too much gray area. Cigarettes aren’t really like anything else (except cigars) and liquor is pretty distinguishable from other beverages. But having the tax man draw a line between a Rice Krispie treat (probably junk) and one of those ridiculously large ten thousand calorie blueberry muffins you find at Costco… the ease of implementation of any tax scheme has to be considered.
I disagree. Tobacco is one of the few legal products that, used as directed, has an alarming tendency to kill the user. Alcohol and fast food, not nearly so much.
There’s a pretty strong correlation between obesity and the number 1 cause of death in America, heart disease. My bet is that junk food kills people much faster, and much more commonly than tobacco does, or ever did.
How many obese people die of something NOT caused by their obesity? Diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, all caused by junk food. Obese people don’t even get to live long enough to get cancer.
Also, in response to Der Trihs, there actually is plenty of evidence that “compulsive overeating” is a real psychological disorder. It might not be chemically addictive like tobbacco, but I can certainly see how cheap and easy access to junk food can help cause this disorder. At the very least it’s something the FDA should be investigating.