It's our God-given right as Americans to be fat! You Libtards need to realize that the Founding Fathers intended for every American to have life, liberty, and a colon full of undigested beef and fat!

Exactly. Any of the Founding Fathers would have seen one of the beautiful, well adjusted teen in trouble on Maury and let a single tear fall in pride at hearing those sweet words of liberty: "Whatever, I do what I want!"

Whatever happened to 'keep your laws off my body?'

Oh and 'predatory marketing' - is also known as 'marketing'

Agribusiness in action! Exciting stuff.

Beck is a lunatic, as usual, creating strawmen socialists.

>'predatory marketing' - is also known as 'marketing'

Marketing:
"Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further enhance sales."

Predatory Marketing:
"The definition of predatory marketing is the practice of targeting potential customers with ads that are geared towards his or her demographic. Often times predatory marketers who are practicing predatory marketing will pray on those who are more susceptible to advertising [children] and play upon fears or concerns."

not exactly mutually inclusive

If your marketing department is not 'targeting potential customers with ads that are geared towards his or her demographic' they're a tad behind the curve.

If you are such a weak failure as a parent that you can't control your childrens' appetites, that's a shame they must suffer, but stop the fascists from telling the rest of us what to do.

Hey, D, assuming you're making the above statement... you have children, right? Because, it's a pretty baseless statement if not.

@D: I wouldn't support any outright bans on the production or ingestion of junk food (neither do either of these bills), but I fully support taxing the shit out of it. It's short sighted to think that we're not paying out the ass in public-health dollars for kids with bad nutrition, especially considering that diabetes is far more common in children from lower-income families.

You're naive if you don't think the kind of marketing that goes on during saturday-morning cartoons is predatory... but I'm not naive enough to think it's going to change. Which, to me, is an argument for why public schools shouldn't be putting the same harmful products in front of kids. You wouldn't (I assume) support selling cigarettes in a high school's senior locker bay to fill a budget gap. What's the philosophical difference?

@D - Unhealthy fat kids are bad for our nation (health care costs, laziness, etc). Unwanted babies are bad for our nation, too.

Also, isn't the "true cost" of a crappy cheeseburger something like $200? Our gov is subsidizing bullcrap. Instead, it should be subsidizing things that are good for us.

@Tony Perez - What's the real difference between banning it and taxing the shit out of it? One of them lets you sleep at night because you don't feel as guilty?

I don't see how a child's lack of cognition comes into play, here - because they ALSO don't have any money. It's the parents that make the purchasing decision, and they've all been shown the food pyramid.

'Unhealthy fat kids' are a symptom, not the root problem. Someone chose to grow them that way - that's the root problem. So this seems like a familar old question - should the government use taxes in order to influence the public's behavior?

I think the answer is 'no.' Taxes are a way to pay for public services, not a social engineering tool. Using them that way seems unethical.

ROM's right that there are some ridiculous farm subsidies that probably need to stop.

@Reymont Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of a sin tax, there is a concrete difference between banning a product and taxing/regulating it...and it has nothing to do with the amount of sleep I get (it has to do with markets, distribution channels, and marketing).
I can honestly sympathize with not wanting to use tax policy for social engineering purposes, but what about externalities that are unaccounted for in the free-market (say, the negative impact of pollution)? So long as health care dollars are coming from the public coffers, the government (and their tax policy) should have vested interest in public health. Adam Smith has my back on this.
And yes, ROM's absolutely right. Continuing to subsidize corn is ridiculous.

Leave the fat kids alone! They're good for the economy.

Kids today are LITERALLY fatter than your mom.

D, seriously? My parents were pretty damned awesome, but that didn't stop me from wanting to scarf Ding Dongs whenever I was away from home. Give me one good reason why Hostess needs to sell products in a public school without using libertarian Jedi mind trick bullshit, especially when the kids can walk out the door, down the street, and buy all the Ho-Ho's they want at Plaid Pantry.

Extending your logic would inevitably lead to the notion that you can sell anything legal in schools, otherwise we're just being controlling, right? So if you live in a state where you can legally smoke at 16, what's the problem with a school cigarette dispenser, amirite?

All that said, the crap most schools dish up through their cafeterias isn't much better than what you'd find in a vending machine. That's where the real fight needs to be.

Maybe nuts like Glen are just trying to slowly thin the herd. We're picking off the weak with Double Cheeseburgers.