Jamie Oliver is a shit spewing blowhard

The BBQ Pit
21

I can. Because in order to have any hope of being effective the tax would have to be truly enormous, at which point it becomes just a cash grab with potential unintended consequences and still may not achieve its intended purpose.

I think a better answer is public education, and since governments are always more anxious to find new ways to take money in than to spend it on things like public information programs, this is what we should be pushing for instead of encouraging the easy route to more taxation. I know this is the typical conservative anti-government attitude, but in this case for once I agree with it. The tax approach was tried with liquor, and we still have alcoholics and alcoholism. The only thing it’s done is made decent wine even more outrageously expensive and given the government an ongoing tax windfall.

What people need to understand is that sugar is unhealthy in ways that go far beyond its mere calorie content. It contributes to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, insulin resistance, heart disease, and promotes fat out of proportion to its already high calorie count. This is one piece of information that forever changed my attitude to soft drinks, the other piece is just how much sugar there is in a typical soft drink – it’s basically water saturated with sugar, with some flavor and carbonation added.

So, while it’s probably wise to avoid soft drinks altogether, I still enjoy something like Coke Zero once in a while, but I wouldn’t touch the regular stuff. If more people had this perspective, they’d likely do the same. Mission accomplished, and no tax required.

22

Except that, most people aren’t going to be as smart or as disciplined as you.

Let’s make a parallel example. Motorcycle accidents are dangerous and costly. Some people who ride motorcycles have good health insurance, some don’t. Of those who do not, some wind up on life support in the state/city hospital and the bills are paid by the taxpayers. Life support can last for years and be very costly.

Honestly, I’m not even sure that is true, my parents used to ride motorcycles and that is the type of thing they used to gossip about, poor, underclass people who rode motorcycles and gave the “good” riders a bad name.

If, however, those stories are true, I would support an extra tax on motorcycles to make up for the costly hospital bills. You could educate people forever about how dangerous it is to ride motorcycles, but, people will still ride them… so tax it if it winds up being a burden on society.

23

So do I. And I occasionally have to remind people talking about the health costs of obesity or tobacco that they are on a path fraught with peril when they try to mix the subject of UHC with public policy on those issues, because they fall right into the right-wing trap that says that if you let government cover your health care costs, eventually they’ll try to run the rest of your life, too.

Universal health care must be absolute and unconditional and unconnected to anything else, period, end of story. Don’t drag it into other conversations about healthy living. It’s a basic human right to which everyone is entitled, rich or poor, fat or thin, smoker or not. Government should be encouraging us in every reasonable way to live healthy lifestyles and giving us information about health and nutrition while recognizing that ultimately we live in a free society and are free to do as we wish.

24

What would you consider to be truly enormous?

25

Right, which is why the US government shouldn’t be subsidizing Big Sugar. If it’s so wrong for the government to “nanny-state” us with a tax, then it is equally wrong for them to be playing Sugar Daddy. Something’s gotta give.

26

He tried to make it illegal to sell a soda over 20 oz. The court found he acted in excess of his mayoral authority, because after his bill failed TWICE in the City Council, he tried to impose it pursuant to emergency health powers, intended to be used during literal epidemics.

In addition, he had no right to regulate the sales in state-regulated grocery stores that sell the same product, to wit, 7-11, and failed to regulate products with just as much sugar content, to wit, fruit juice and milkshakes, therefore in addition to being an excessive application of his authority, his emergency-health law also could not achieve the intended result, and emergency health powers must be applied narrowly to acheive their result in order to be legal.

27

I don’r have any dog in this fight; but I would mention it has never in my life occurred to me to take notice of any Public Information Announcements.

In my country we tend more to mocking them and the idea of such suspect moralising: pointing and laughing if possible.

28

Which is why I’ll watch Bourdain but not Oliver. That bitch is a snark maestro. As for Pink Slime, my people call it bologna. Or good, kosher hot dogs. Or bratwursts. Or mortadella. As John Godfrey Saxe put it, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” If you don’t like to think about how your food is made, don’t look into how your food is made.

29

I don’t care about his healthy eating message, good or bad, but damn, learn to speak in complete sentences!

You know who else talks like this! Donald Freaking Trump! If you read any of his interviews or diatribes it’s the same shite!

I say we start taxing the hell out of people who can’t form complete sentences. Well get rich off these two alone!

30

The pink slime demonstration is what put me off him, but for a different reason: meat processing like that might look gross, but it maximizes the useful material that gets taken off of carcasses, creating edible protein that would have been thrown away otherwise. It might not look pleasant in production but people find it palatable and it increases the affordability of quality protein. Jamie would rather you do a (relatively poor) job picking over a whole carcass. It’s classist, and not processing carcasses that way would ultimately lead to poor people eating poorer diets.

31

Are there any places where taxes on “unhealthy” foods or practices are dedicated solely to health education programs and health care?

In the U.S., massive court settlements with big tobacco companies and tobacco taxes routinely are funneled into general receipts, without being designated specifically for health education and treatment/prevention - even when there was initial intent to do so.

Expect any “sugar taxes” to be treated the same way - as income for the State to spend as the politicians please.

32

I think lottery money is funneled into education. They could direct taxes more precisely if the voters mandated it. I kind of wonder why that is not more of an issue already…

33

Yes I agree with you that everyone should be covered by UHC but I have no problem with people that put themselves at unnecessary risk paying for that privilege in taxes on the unhealthy things they purchase. The Australian government now withholds some welfare payments from parents that refuse to immunise their children. I think this is great. If you want to indulge in selfish behaviour that costs everyone else more money on taxes, you can, but you have to pay for it. As long as its not legally mandated and is just a tax or subsidy for unhealthy / healthy behaviour then I’m fine with it.

True conservatives / republicans should have no problem with this concept, because its basically about making people take responsibility for their own actions. And by the way I nominate this thread for the most pathetic pitting of 2016 since the vast majority of posters agree with a sugar tax, we just disagree with the implementation.

34

Any amount large enough to even notice would be enormous, let alone an amount large enough to actually discourage consumption of sugar-sweetened soft drinks. If you haven’t noticed, sugar is so cheap that it’s practically free, even in the US where the price is artificially inflated by protectionist policies. So an effective sugar tax wouldn’t be a mere fractional percentage – it would have to be many multiples of the market price. At that point it’s not so much a “tax” as a hefty fine.

I agree. The sugar subsidies are ridiculous.

35

Yet somehow, at the same time, Americans mythologize the Native Americans for using “every part of the buffalo” as evidence of their frugal and eco-conscious ways.

36

Okay, let me venture a figure. Let’s stick to soft drinks for the time being to make things easier. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that a bottle of coke and a bottle of diet coke both cost a dollar. If I drink a lot of real coke, and the government suddenly decided to add a 50 cent tax on real coke, while leaving diet coke the same price, there’s no way I’m going to carry on drinking real coke. Why would I? What would be the point? Diet Coke tastes pretty much exactly the same, and I know it’s better for me, and now it’s much cheaper. For me, switching would be an absolute no-brainer. Given that obesity disproportionately affects the poor, and given that soft drinks contribute significantly to this problem, and given that they need to make every dollar count, why wouldn’t such a tax be an effective incentive to switch to diet?

37

It’s hard to track and so accountability is poor. It’s like gasoline taxes which are supposed to pay for roads and related infrastructure but in most cases have been going into general revenue for as along as anyone can remember. Conversely, gasoline and diesel taxes are collected for marine fuel, which only makes sense if you have an amphibious boat-car. No one does, but the government doesn’t care. They love cash grabs.

Lottery sales, at least in my part of the world, are handled through an arms-length government-owned corporation, so it’s distinctly separate from tax revenues. The lottery corporation has a legal obligation to disburse the funds according to its mandate.

38

But now you’re proposing a tax directly on soft drinks, and we were talking about a tax on sugar. So you’ve raised the price of soft drinks with a 50% tax but left sugar untaxed, so that it still lurks in thousands of other products.

Let’s look at what would happen according to the original scheme to tax sugar. A 355 ml can of Coke contains 39 grams of sugar. If one generously assumes that sugar costs the Coca-Cola company 50¢ per kg (it’s probably much less) then there is less than 2¢ worth of sugar in that can. Let’s say in round numbers the average retail price of a can of Coke is 50¢, and to discourage consumption you wanted to tax sugar so that the can would have to sell for 75¢. A tax of 25¢ on something that costs 2¢ is a tax of 1250% – as I said, the tax would have to be many multiples of the market cost of sugar.

39

OK, I see what you did there. :slight_smile:

I hope we can all agree that subsidies to sugar companies (whether big or small) are wrong. Just keep in mind that a lot of sugar is produced in places where working conditions and pay are nut quite up to 1st World standards.

40

Well, as a formerly-obese person, I can tell you that hopeless fat bastards *can *do something about it, without Mummy Jamie Oliver pushing a sugar tax. We choose what to put in our gobs. Yes, dieting can be uncomfortable. You crave things. You survive the craving. You figure out a replacement, maybe. Or maybe you say fuck it, and do something to take your mind off eating junk food.

And yeah, I have an attitude about it. If I can be mid-menopause ***and ***using steroids ***and ***coping with chronic pain, and can lose 50 pounds, then Sally on the scooter in Wal-Mart can, too. Get off the fucking scooter, buy and eat some fresh fruit and veg instead of Twinkies and frozen “meals”, and take a walk every so often. It isn’t THAT hard.

Now, on to children. I feel awful for kids today. We want them to sit down and shut up all the time, for hours. I can’t do that, and I’m over 45.

If we want kids to get healthier, we need to stop making them sit still in school for six hours straight. We need to make them run around several times a day. We need to feed them real food that is also kid-friendly. Stop trying to give them foods most kids hate. You will not win that. You can make real food kid-friendly (I make baked “chicken nuggets” that my nephew, cousin, and friends’ kids scarf down. Panko on the outside makes them crispy, spices make them yummy.).

And we need to show kids, from a young age, what real food is, versus fake food. We also need to show them what 100, 200, and 500 calories look like, in junk food and real food. My nephew only just figured out that a 32-oz Mountain Dew is 500 calories, and is a quarter (or more) of his daily calorie intake. My mother had to show him what that looks like, FFS. (What they are studying in “health” class, beyond “don’t fuck”, I don’t know.)

We also need to study the effect of multiple medications on children. So many more kids are taking medications these days than when I was a sprog. And we don’t know what they do to the metabolism long-term, or when taken together. We just don’t.

It’s not *just *sugar that’s making kids fat.

That said, I would get behind very clear labeling. I agree that sugar is in things you don’t expect (crackers, FFS). So, yes. Label. Taxing, though? No. I don’t care for sin taxes. I don’t believe in treating people like children. Give them information they can’t possibly miss, reinforce that information, and then let them choose.

And of course, no, don’t subsidize the sugar industry, any more than we subsidize the makers of Jack Daniels.