BAM! Yay for Judges!
Good. So ridiculous that it even got to this point.
Agreed.
I am 100% on board with the ban on smoking in bars and clubs - employees and nonsmoking patrons can’t help but inhale the same air the smokers have fouled; and I can get behind posting nutritional info about the items on the restaurant’s menu - because I can then make an informed choice which to eat and which not to.
But as things are right now, I already can* choose *not to suck down a quart-sized cola or a molto grandissimo doubleshot mocaccino with four lumps of unrefined brown. And that “convenience stores” would be exempt from the rule yet coffee joints[li] would be subjected to it is to laugh; if anything the convenience-store clientele is the one less likely to be well informed of nutritional choices. [/li]
If the issue is that the standard serving has grown too large then why not a rule requiring that you must offer a 16-oz-or-less size, heck, that could even turn into a potential profit center for the businesses (charge yet more for the ludicrous-sized ones).
[*nevermind that I can’t figure out who wants a quart of coffee at one sitting, but it’s their problem finding a restroom by midmorning, not mine]
I think a more reasonable law would be something like a consumption tax on items that are more than X grams of sugar per serving. An 50 percent tax sounds about right to me, but I’m sure this is only because I’ve just recently jumped on the anti-sugar bandwagon and I’m a bit enthused. Proceeds from the tax go directly to fund your friendly neighborhood city/county hospitals.
You want to wash your quarter-pounder oatmeal creme pie down with a Big Gulp every single day for breakfast? Fine with me. Pig out to your poor heart’s content. But I don’t want to pay for your medical treatments unless I really have to…and sadly it seems like people who live to eat stuff like this are often the main ones who can’t pay their medical bills. When one’s sugar addiction starts to burden everyone else, that’s when we have a problem that needs societal-level intervention. It’s clear the free market has no intention of doing it.
The sugary drink restriction is well-intentioned, targeting the biggest source of empty calories and excess sugar in our collective diet, but all the inconsistency makes it a hot mess. A junk food tax is a bit easier to defend and enforce. And yeah, they’ll be people who will say it doesn’t make sense to tax this item in this aisle and not that item over in that aisle. And we can waste some time going back and forth over those niggling kind of details for awhile. But most of us know junk food when we see it. Maybe we define it to include breakfast cereal, or maybe we decide that breakfast cereal’s nutrient-enriched enough so that it doesn’t count. At the end of the day, though, reasonable people can figure it out. It ain’t THAT hard.
A law doesn’t have to be perfect for it to result in positive results.
Part of the reason the judge overturned the ban was because he didn’t think the health department had the power to make the ban in the first place. I had been under the impression that the ban had gone through the legislative process of NYC. Nope. It was just pushed through a committee that the mayor of NY controlled.
ddddd
Whew, that was too close. Stopped just in time. I was concerned that this could have lead to all sorts of intrusive actions. The Nanny state mentality can easily get out of hand.
They’ve already cost businesses money buying glassware and training employees. Sure glad the judge did what was right.
Or, ya know, we could get the government out of providing health care and let people take care of themselves. I know, I know, that freedom thing is pesky and annoying, especially because the proles are too dumb to decide for themselves. So we should just provide the health care and tell them what to eat. And how much. Oh, and how much to exercise. Next up gym tax. If you don’t attend a government approved workout session three times a week you get taxed. Think of all the revenue that would generate.
Slee
How is a junk food tax any different from a tax on tobacco or a gas tax?
Sez you. Not everyone has the same level of appetite as you. If I’m eating out it’s probably my only big meal that day, and excuuuuuuuse me if I’d like my big meal of the day to actually be a big enough portion to make that viable.
It’s not, but I also strongly disagree with any sin tax
then they also need to ban nutrasweet and sucralose and other chemical crap along with high fructose corn syrup.
if the government really gave a shit about health cigerettes would be outlawed, a lot of the expensive psych meds which have side effects of making you gain weight would never have been approved and pot would be a legal treatment instead. instead monsanto, the agri industry, and pharm companies put money into pockets and we continue to be poisoned i’d be willing to bet whoever is behind this has been in bed with monsanto at some point.
this idiocy ranks up there with limiting pain meds for chronic or terminal health conditions because other people illegally acquire the drugs and OD.
[quote=“JRDelirious, post:44, topic:652560”]
I am 100% on board with the ban on smoking in bars and clubs - employees and nonsmoking patrons can’t help but inhale the same air the smokers have fouled; and I can get behind posting nutritional info about the items on the restaurant’s menu - because I can then make an informed choice which to eat and which not to.
But as things are right now, I already can* choose *not to suck down a quart-sized cola or a molto grandissimo doubleshot mocaccino with four lumps of unrefined brown. And that “convenience stores” would be exempt from the rule yet coffee joints[li] would be subjected to it is to laugh; if anything the convenience-store clientele is the one less likely to be well informed of nutritional choices. [/li][/QUOTE]
Right. It’s all about personal choice. Second hand smoke laws are Good as they prevent others from making the 'smoking" choice for me.
This is stupid.
hey how about if they delivered a 44oz unsweetened ice tea- would they have to make sure the customer doesn’t add sugar to it?:rolleyes:
None of them are instituted because of bigots who think they have the right to control someone else’s health. Tobacco taxes are to protect me from the damage your smoking causes other–it’s punitive, and rightfully so because of that damage. Gas taxes are to pay for roads–not punitive at all. The purpose of your tax is to punish people, when they are not hurting others.
You labor under the obvious falsehood that the medical sector of our economy needs more money. No, it’s already extremely overinflated. We have more than enough money to handle everyone if only the costs were driven down to what they are in other countries.
And, of course, not even Bloomberg is that stupid to bring up money. His primary argument is about the people dying. And the primary response to that is to say that it’s not his job to prevent people from dying from their own vices.
And let’s not kid ourselves. There’s pretty much no chance of people voting for your plan. Everyone consumes sugar. Not everyone consumes sugary drinks. In fact, they are most common in the very groups that happen to be least represented in government: poor people. The reason why this ban can be passed is that the people passing it are the among the least to be affected by it. (The mayor with authoritarian tendencies being on a health kick doesn’t help, of course.)
I mean, if this ban were put up for a vote today, most New York citizens would be against it. They’d be against your plan by double or triple, at least. Your tax is something the people don’t want, and that makes it very different from those other taxes you mention.
Today, my pessimism for the future of humanity is slightly (but only slightly) diminished. This ruling is tiny breath of fresh air in the usual fetid avalanche of nanny-state totalitarianism.
I pray that it will lead to a total reversal of the calamitous loss of liberty we have been experiencing over the last few decades. But I remain, for the most part, pessimistic.
When tobacco taxes kept getting raised there were a lot of folks who said “if they can tax tobacco this way why not food that’s bad for you?” One of the most common replies to this was that soda pop, cheese or whatever “bad” food we were talking about wasn’t inherently harmful in the way tobacco was. You can drink a healthy amount of soda pop or eat a healthy amount of cheese but there was no healthy amount of tobacco you could consume.
No. If the law had passed, I imagine the restaurant couldn’t add sugar to it, but you could add as much sugar to it as you want on your own. It would have been the same as with coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s.
I’d be ok with the administration mounting a publicity campaign aimed at reducing consumption of sugary soft drinks (though perhaps not the one they did). With urging businesses to choose not to carry such products, or offer them; even with creating incentives. With taking soft drinks out of schools. With not making them available at city-owned or city-run facilities (though Danny Meyer might object). A blanket ban is overreaching.
What a pathetic, degraded idea you have of the word “liberty.” So, no one enjoyed liberty before the invention of the Big Gulp in 1980 or whenever it was.