The problem isn’t what we’re feeding our kids. The problem is what we’re feeding ourselves. Adults are reluctant to make “better, healthy choices” for their kids because they don’t want to make better, healthier choices for themselves. Kids aren’t going to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, and opt for skim milk or water with meals, so long as mom and dad are sitting there scarfing down bags of chips and sucking down Cokes.
And people aren’t going to make better choices so long as we’re subsidizing the production of cheap, sugary, crap snack-and-fast foods. Soda should be taxed like alcohol and snack-and-fast foods should be taxed like cigarettes, i.e. not so heavily taxed that they’re completely out of reach (people still drink, people still smoke), but taxed heavily enough that people can’t afford to live on corn syrup and crap.
Anyway, the White House launched its “fight against childhood obesity” today—and somewhere Sarah Palin is preparing two-pronged attack—a Tweet and a Facebook status update—denouncing the White House’s efforts as a hopey, changey socialist plot to indoctrinate our children and destroy our country by preventing American children from developing adult-onset diabetes in their early teens like God intended. And when the predictable and imbecilic attack comes the Democrats will stand there helplessly with their dicks in their hands.
It’s called ‘keep your laws off my body’ Dan.
If the government doesn’t belong in the bedroom, they don’t belong in the kitchen either.
Yeah, exactly – taxing my food choices based on what you think is best for me sounds more than a little crazy.
Do you realize how silly it is to tax something that we subsidize?
“Here Mr. Farmer, here’s millions of dollars to grow cheap, petroleum fertilized, nutritionally questionable Industrial Corn #2! Oh, and just to make sure there’s a market, we’ve banned the import of real sugar! Now everyone will use corn syrup!
Oh, but wait, Mr. consumer. I didn’t mean for you to actually eat that crap I made so cheap. Whoops. Maybe we’ll make it more expensive – by taxing it!”
That’s the least efficient use of government time and money, ever. Simply remove the government subsidies for industrial farming, and the real price of crap food will reveal itself.
But we’re not talking about what Dan thinks is best for you, it’s whether we should tax things that SCIENCE has proven is bad for you. Cigarettes create a burden on the health system, and therefore should be taxed. Soda and crap food create a similar burden… so why is the idea of taxing them so crazy?
Because it’s about the freedom of the individual to make those decisions, not government busybody control freaks dictating their will.
I should add – enriching themselves at your expense – by dictating their will.
If you think that tax money goes to ‘we the people’ I’ve some some swampland to sell you.
corn = froo-its of the dev-ille
D – how about my freedom to not have to pay overinflated healthcare insurance costs, just to subsidize the people who are too goodamn fat and too goddamn lazy to do anything about it or take personal responsibility for it?
You can’t just penalize (or even judge) people just for being fat, because some of them (maybe 10-20%) are that way through no fault of their own due to their genetics. Taxing unhealthy food is fair, because it will hit the other 80-90%.
@D: When those “freedoms” negatively impact others then the government has a duty to intervene. For instance, while I have a freedom to bare arms, there is no freedom to wildly fire those arms into the air because I might kill someone, (which would be considered a negative impact on them.)
In this case, when the people with unhealthy diets get “sick,” they either have health care on some sort of group rate, (medicare, employer sponsored, etc) so it costs everyone in the group money, or they don’t have health insurance at all which also costs everyone money. (Very few people are actually self insured.) Costing other people money is a negative impact on them.
I don’t think anyone is entitled to a particular price for particular goods (I could be wrong, in which case I assume the subsidy check for my XBox is in the mail).
So long as the cost of living is reasonable, I don’t think it’s all that fundamental what is considered a luxury item (truffles? fancy ice cream?) and what isn’t (Fritos, the inevitable melancholy that comes from eating a whole bag of Fritos).
If the Gov’ment wanted to do something like this equitably, they could have a circularly structured tax, where whatever funds that come from CheezyBlasterz (r) go to, I don’t know, regular cheese or something.
‘When those “freedoms” negatively impact others then the government has a duty to intervene.’
Please point out where it says that in the constitution.
And that sets an undefinable precedent.
‘They ate not enough arugula last night, my costs are going up, you did four too few laps in the pool, my costs … etc. blah blah blah.’
Just take some dang responsibility four yourselves and stop making those of us who do knuckle under forced government coercion.
@rangehunter: Yeah, our system is messed up, we subsidize corn and we subsidize ethanol. Making ethanol takes quite a bit of natural gas or coal. For less natural gas/coal, (and definitely less soil loss, CO2, money, etc,) we could just build a coal to liquids or gas to liquids plant and get the same amount of fuel.
It gets better: the technology to convert coal or natural gas to gasoline/diesel was perfected by the Nazis in WWII (is that Godwins law? It is actually a valid Nazi reference,) and was practiced in South Africa during apartheid. It works, that isn’t the problem, it just tends to be the act of desperation because it isn’t actually a very good idea, a better idea is to convert your industry/local transport to use the natural gas/coal, and save the liquid fuel for aircraft and places with difficult fuel supply situations, (like battlefields.) For instance, quite a few people in Portland heat with fuel oil, which is just low grade diesel; if we converted those people to natural gas, we wouldn’t need to convert natural gas into diesel. Likewise, TriMet buses run on diesel, even though they never go more than 20 miles from the depot. But that conversion takes time, (although it is cheaper in the long run,) something that the Nazis and the South Africans didn’t have. So we are actually doing something that is less efficient than a bad idea.
There should be a tax on the chicks I fuck, because my high fructose cock syrup is taking a serious toll on the governmental vaginoplasty allotment, and y’alls be payin’ the price… and that ain’t right, right? Goddamn right!
D is doing an amazing job channeling Ron Swanson from last week’s episode of Parks and Rec.
And D, you’re only considering your freedom to do something, not the freedom of others to not have what you do affect them. Liberty is a two-way street; why is it so damn hard for libertarians to realize that?
So we raise the prices of the only food that some families can afford to eat?
Instead of taxing crap food – how about making healthy food more accessible and affordable?