I’ve never understood the idea of saving money by eating/living healthy. We are all going to get sick and die someday. Let’s say that everyone lived to be 100. We would still be paying for nursing home care from age 93-100 while you have strokes, dementia, etc. If you are 200lbs overweight and drop dead at age 48 of a massive heart attack you are saving the taxpayers.
How can you “prevent” the inevitable?
This statement is idiotic but, unfortunately, this is becoming our way of life as we let government dictate EVERYTHING in our lives. We are creating a nanny state where Big Brother tells us what we can and cannot consume.
Sure, health care is expensive and there is nothing that government can do about it. Maybe government should just stay out of it entirely and let the states try different approaches to lowering the costs. For those of you who think a fat tax is a good idea now…just wait until the feds take over health care. I predict you will see rationing in care and allowable drugs on the order of Britain in short order.
This is a fundamental disagreement between liberals and everybody else.
Because, assuming that this is a workable idea, and further assuming that it is a good idea, and even further assuming that it is not an unwarrantable intrusion on the private lives of citizens, you are going about it in an inefficient way.
Instead, merely tax individuals a given amount for every index point by which they exceed their government-dictated BMI. It will be an extremely regressive tax, but that cannot be avoided - poor people are more likely to be obese than rich ones in the US, and they also consume more government-funded health care.
This does not address the question of where poor people will get the money to pay either a fat tax, or a food tax, but if you really want to accomplish something, you will have to tax those who are causing the problem.
Regards,
Shodan
No, I don’t think most people would disagree that the government’s job is indeed to fix problems that affect all of us. The disagreement arises over which of those problems it should be the government’s job to fix.
As for the first sentence, I think conservatives would be more likely to maintain that the undesirable aspect of human nature that the government is required to counteract and correct is wickedness and/or laziness, not stupidity. Still, ISTM we all pretty much agree that the primary function of government is to protect people from people.
People from other people? Maybe. People from themselves? Not so much.
The statement - “The government, by most reasonable people’s standards, exists to counteract and correct mass stupidity” - makes the common liberal assumption that the solution of first resort to any large problem is the government. And it further assumes that the government can fix whatever it is, and that the costs of doing so will be less than any other course of action.
And the paragraph immediately before that made the final liberal assumption - people are too stupid to manage their own lives, and the wise and enlightened philosopher-kings need to step in and overrule them, for their own good.
People are not fit to govern themselves, in other words.
Goo luck getting conservatives to agree to that.
Regards,
Shodan
I can have twice the calories buying two big cheesburgers at Carl’s Jr. for $3. And a hypothetical poor person can eat there inbetween his two jobs. And he doesn’t have to make time for catching the bus to the supermarket and back and cooking.
Perhaps you have the superstition?
I think the solution is education. Taxing calories is impossible to do with any kind of fairness. By nature it’s regressive and will hit the poor the hardest, the ones it would supposedly benefit.
Poor people are fatter because they have less time, less travel options and less education and less money for more expensive healthy foods. Reduce poverty and you’ll reduce obesity.
As for the rolly polly middle class, get them to live in real walkable communities. Suburbs are designed to build fat people. If it’s too far to walk, people will take a car.
Or hope for science to invent a fat loss pill. 
A few questions, if you don’t mind.
Who made you the spokesman for all reasonable people? If nobody did, then on what grounds do you claim to declare that they all hold the position you describe?
If “people are stupid” are the government is made up of people, then why should we entrust power to the stupid people who make up the government? In other words, how do you reply to Thomas Jefferson’s famous question: “If men cannot be trusted with the government of themselves, how can they be trusted with the government of others?”
If the government exists to counteract and correct mass stupidity, why is this not mentioned in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution? Indeed, why do both those documents say that the government exists to do the will of the people, which is the opposite of what you claim to be its purpose?
How does your statement that people don’t get insurance or plan for the future unless they’re forced to account for the fact that I’ve done both things, despite never being forced to?
And to repeat the question from my first post which you failed to answer, why should we believe that government action now will reduce obesity when government action in the past has only increased obesity?
The first grabs money for the sake of spending the money on something, while the second only grabs money for the sake of grabbing money.
First, this is a vacuous statement, like saying, “If I could get a free Ferrari, then getting a Ferrari would be a good idea.” You can’t force people to eat the portions that you want, so there’s no point in discussing what would happen if you could.
Second, it’s only “free” if you place no value on freedom. For those of us who do value freedom, it’s expensive.
You mean, as opposed to now where 50 million Americans don’t have access to care outside of life-or-death emergencies because they aren’t insured, and only access to those drugs they can pay full, upfront cash prices for?
If you’re uninsured your care isn’t “rationed” it’s nonexistant, you’re a non-person with almost no access to the system. If you don’t have money for the drugs you need you may very well die. That’s one in six people in this country. No insurance and your waiting time for anything short of immediate emergent care is infinity.
If you’re one of the 50 million Britain’s healthcare system doesn’t look bad at all.
Suppose that, for the sake of argument, we grant the following. Ordinary people are not fit to make their own decisions, the government is fit to make decisions for them, and that the right way to make decisions about food is with a tax like the one that Sage Rat describes. Consider the following scenario.
Joe Schmoe, who is poor and therefore unfit to make decisions, has a daily good budget of eight dollars. He currently spends four dollars a day on a cheeseburger and four dollars a day on a bottle of V8 juice.
The enlightened government comes along and passes a tax, which raises the cost of the cheeseburger to eight dollars. How will Joe respond, since he can no longer afford both the cheeseburger and the bottle of V8?
He may respond by replacing the cheeseburger with something that costs less. On the other hand, he may respond by eliminating the V8 and eating only the cheeseburger, in which case the tax has made his diet less healthy. You have no way of knowing which option he would take, so there’s no reason to believe that the tax would make his diet healthier.
There’s also the obvious fact that Joe’s food budget is not fixed. When the price of the cheeseburger goes up, he may continue buying the cheeseburger, and reduce money he spends on other things or puts in savings. Thus the food tax could have consequences far beyond just food.
I’m assuming you’re being serious. So I’ll bite.
Presumably a person who dies early is robbing society of their productivity. We have tax-funded education because we believe that the children we teach will grow up to get good jobs and be good tax-payers…so that then the teachers can take their social security when they reach 65 and retire. A guy who dies at 30 from a Big Mac-induced heart attack represents a loss to the “cycle”. And if his weight kept him from working so that he could get his own insurance, he represents a burden via Medicaid or indigent emergency room visits.
And it’s not inevitable that an elderly person has to go into a nursing home. I know a woman who’s in her 70s who you’d swear was in her 50s, and it’s because she’s diligent about exercising and eating right. I have no doubt that she’ll still be doing yoga when she’s in her 90s. Meanwhile, I know a woman barely in her 60s who gimps along like she’s in her 80s. She’s obese, eats too much and doesn’t get any exercise. These two women are not on the same trajectory. I’m worried because the second woman is my mother.
If we could get everyone on a life-long health kick, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to worry about the demise of social security.
I make good money and have no one to feed except myself, and I find $6 per person to be pricey. Yeah, I’ll pay that much at a restaurant. But not for something I have to make at home (unless there are leftovers for at least two nights).
Yes, exactly. You can have Huevos Rancheros for breakfast at around $ 1.25 per person as well. I guess it’s kind of fattening too though. 
Yeah, ok if you want to having to actually prepare your own food, sure you can do that. But more calories =/= more value. The point of that was that it was an expensive stir fry because it contained shrimp. The shrimp are the bulk of your price in that meal. Take the shrimp out and it goes down to $ 1 or 2 as **Dangerosa **pointed out.
Monstro Then it’s a problem of perception. Very few people are so poor that they are spending all of their discretionary income on food. An unsatisfying TV dinner is going to be around 4.00 per person. Yes, it's a little more expensive to get better ingredients but not by much. Swap that shrimp out and put chicken or ground beef in there instead and the price drops to about 4.00 per person. If spending $ 15 a day on food is considered too much to spend, then you probably are extremely poor. The reality is though, that eating healthy just isn’t expensive, not unless you are trying to do it in a restaurant.
Rice and Beans you can do for about $ .50 per person.
I don’t think most poor people are pigging out on TV dinners. Rather, they are pigging out on fast foods and snack foods. For $4.00, you can buy a liter of soda, a big bag of potato chips, and a whole box of Little Debbies. Or you can get the double cheese burger combo at McDonalds. Your stir fry is healthier, but per calorie, the junk food route is more economical. Add in the fact that the junk food is designed to be tastier and more addictive, it’s on every billboard you see, and sold on every block and it really isn’t that hard to see why the stir fry loses out.
Yes, but you must add lard for it to be delicious.
Back when I was eating fast unhealthy processed foods, I was paying less than a buck for a TV dinner. Are yours gold plated or something?
Cooking in is cheaper and healthier than eating out at fast food and other restraunts. But based on your arguments, cheap processed (and barely cooked) food is clearly the way to go. Chips and soda 4 teh w1n!
Income rises as IQ rises.
Obesity rises as IQ decreases.
The bottom 50% of US taxpayers earn 13% of the income and pay 3% of income taxes.
Taxing food taxes the poor and stupid and there isn’t much money there to get at. Although this administration is likely to look favorably on any possible new tax, I don’t think this one is gonna fly.
Also, doesn’t Nauru kick our (already fat) ass for percentage of tubbies? World's Fattest Countries
That is a faulty assumption. Not everyone is productive.
The unemployment rate is 8%. If a 30 year old guy dies, someone else takes the job he had. Or if he has no job, he is no longer a burden to the taxpayer. All told, it is a net loss of one unemployed person. His family will be sad, but it is no real net loss to society. You and I are replaceable.
If no more 30 year olds get sick, and all live to be 100, they will be using more resources at the end of their lives then at a younger age. There is no net gain in that equation, and there is no shortage of people who can fill the workforce. If we were at 100% full employment and the constraint in the economy was available bodies to fill the jobs, then you could possibly have a point.
Sorry about your mother.
That woman doing yoga in her 90s will be getting sick and needing care when she is 105. There is no stopping sickness and death.
Just Googling things related to this: Fat Tax | HowStuffWorks
This article describes a tax on unhealthy foods where the proceeds are used to subsidize healthy foods. That makes a lot more sense to me than any other use for a food tax. There’s an obvious reason it will never happen - because of the economic (and therefore political) power of producers and sellers of unhealthy foods, but I think it’s a better idea than the tax presented in the OP.
Most of her recipes are prepared rather quickly - 20 minutes getting home from work or less. You do have to menu plan and grocery shop. And you do have to learn to like your veggies.
But I think there are HUGE education components that need to happen.
Many people have no idea how to cook. “What’s a soup bone” was a question on a frugal board. When you get into some of the more complex details of frugal living - people are lost. Like baking bread. It isn’t hard to bake bread. You have to hang around the house for a few hours (or mix ‘no knead bread’ and come back to the house ten hours later for a few hours). But people have no idea where to start. If you can’t cook, then you need to eat out - or eat dinners out of boxes. Dinners out of boxes don’t tend to be healthy (and the healthy ones are expensive) - dinners out are expensive unless you are going for the McDonald’s value meal. I have a weakness (that I can no longer indulge) for McDonalds hamburgers (gluten intolerance) and I recognize that you are getting a lot of calories for the money. But they aren’t the best calories - or even really good calories.
Many people have little idea of what is good for them. Diet soda may (or may not be) better for you than regular soda - but it isn’t exactly a health food.
When they know what’s good for them, they still behave like petulant children. I have spinach up the yango from the farmer’s market for $1. But few people want to eat spinach when you can get a bag of cheezypoofs. And I suppose its their choice to each cheezypoofs instead of spinach (sometimes I do, too). This one really isn’t education.
Menu planning - from deciding what to eat to grocery shopping for it - is a lost art. And the learning hump to get it from “painful” to “a good use of time” is pretty steep. And few people have the gifts of being able to go into the store and throw together meals on the fly based off what they see on sale.
The problem with a food tax is that it would not be based on the best information about nutrition, but rather would be rigged to benefit those companies with the most effective lobbyists. The problem with education campaigns is exactly the same thing.
Take the USDA’s original nutritional guidelines. Many people believe that they’re based on some nutrition science, but they were actually heavily affected by lobbying. The original draft of the guidelines called on people to reduce meat and dairy. As you would expect, the meat and dairy industries weren’t happy, and they made their displeasure known by railroading several Congressmen on the relevant committee. After that, the guidelines were revised in a way more favorable to meat and dairy. The famous old food pyramid called for 1-3 servings of meat, eggs, and beans per day, ignoring the sound research showing that the healthiest diets have no meat. They also called for 2-3 servings of dairy, when 1 serving is more than sufficient. The most recent guidelines have upped the dairy requirement to 3 cups per day; once again, it’s based on lobbying rather than research.
Or to take another example, the “bread, cereal, rice, and pasta group” is the biggest chunk of the food pyramid, but it makes no mention of all the artificial sugar and processed starch that gets thrown into most bread, cereal, and pasta. Why not? Because the big food companies don’t want people to know about those things.
The bottom line is that there can’t be any successful government campaign for healthy eating as long as big companies have a financial interest in unhealthy eating and the form of bribery called lobbying is still legal.
The bottom line beneath that other bottom line is that Sage Rat appears to be at the naive and idealistic stage in life where he believes that government action can actually solve problems. Unfortunately, centuries have experience have shown that it’s impossible to cure such an attitude by providing information. The only cure is for the idealistic individual to watch a few dozen government failures take place, after which they’ll be as cynical as anyone else.