Do you support any type of fat tax?

[Human]

In 1990, obese adults made up less than 15% of the population. Today they make up 36% of the population. 69 percent (!!) of adults are overweight or obese. $190 billion -- That's the amount of added medical costs every year that are estimated to stem from obesity-related problems. It's nearly 21% of total U.S. health care costs. 1/5 deaths in this country are obesity related, etc, etc.

Please post what you think we should do to combat the obesity epidemic on thread: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=240981.0

Would you support taxing fattening food/beverages and/or overweight/obese individuals in order to combat the obesity epidemic?

I voted yes. From a fiscally conservative perspective, obesity is a huge problem. It's costing us so much in health-related costs. We need to do everything we can in order to combat the obesity epidemic. We should tax obese people to incentivize them to start eating healthy and exercising.

[White Trash]

Yeah. Helps discourage usage and provides a good bit of revenue. Better than outright banning it.

[Santander]

Taxing obese people is better than taxing certain foods, because it would have fewer market implications, but obviously it is politically unpalatable to tax fat people in any country, let alone a fat country. Then you get to people like professional athletes, some of whom are not highly paid, who may have abnormal BMIs because of their profession. I don't think it's right to penalize such people, and to create standards to exclude them would be another nightmare.

Anyone who's been poor knows that eating healthy foods is hard when you are poor, because cheap food is mostly bad for you. Subsidized crop insurance for corn and soybeans contributes to the problem, particularly when you consider that fruits and vegetables are considered "specialty crops" by the USDA. I love American ag, but we have to do the painful thing and reduce, or at least redirect government interference in the market and give healthier foods a chance to compete.

This is a case where less government is the answer, not more government.

[Kingpoleon]

Only if there was proof it would help immensely. Definitely not if people are losing weight using programs suggested by the government.

This is definitely something that should be done at the local level, where more knowledge of obesity and the problems thereof exist.

[ElectionsGuy]

lmao. I think approximately 7 Americans will eat healthier because they have to pay 30 cents extra for a product. Its also regressive, and we know poorer people are more likely to be obese, but I'm sure the liberals who love the poor so much would support this. Not to mention you're hurting millions of skinny and healthy people who eat these products.

There's nothing fiscally conservative about this proposal.

[Human]

Anyone who's been poor knows that eating healthy foods is hard when you are poor, because cheap food is mostly bad for you. Subsidized crop insurance for corn and soybeans contributes to the problem, particularly when you consider that fruits and vegetables are considered "specialty crops" by the USDA. I love American ag, but we have to do the painful thing and reduce, or at least redirect government interference in the market and give healthier foods a chance to compete.

^^

I agree with this too. We need to reform these subsidies to give healthier foods a chance to compete.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Taxing fat people is stupid from a health perspective, because it just encourages people to change the cosmetic appearance of themselves and refuse to work on their actual health. hAES is mostly a crock of crap, but they are right in that far too many people think they are healthy because the media focuses on fatness rather than actual health. As a skinny individual with a healthy BMI and body fat ratio level, I am painfully aware that my own health is much less great than many people of weights under or over the acceptable ratio.

Most ways people try and lose weight (crash diets, Weightwatchers, the professional exercise regimes, diet pills) are at best spurious and at worst outright harmful from a public health perspective. Therefore any anti-obesity campaign must focus on prevention (especially amongst children) rather than focusing on fatties themselves (who need their own targeted health campaigns which should be health focused with weight loss as a secondary objective). Therefore any tax must be focused on fattening foods (rather than "fat" in foods, because lol) rather than on fat people, which would end up as nonsensical and overly bureaucratic feelgood tax that doesn't help anything.

I also find this pretty unacceptable on a personal liberty level as well to have taxes focused on a narrow band of society. People with a high blood cholesterol have a much higher correlation with cardiovascular diseSe than weight. Should we create a punitive tax on having high cholesterol? I think not.

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

As Trump pointed out about my baser nanny statist liberal instinct, a tax on soda is highly regressive. The poor should not be paying more, and it would be pushed entirely to them literally. I've already stoped buying soda (when I'm paying), but I don't think thats most people's reaction. Whatever we do should not be a revenue-generating tax.

I believe Huckabee advocated private subsides from health insurance companies to those who lose weight, but that's not a really a valid proposal either. Someone is covering a very large distribution.

[heatcharger]

As Trump pointed out about my baser nanny statist liberal instinct, a tax on soda is highly regressive. The poor should not be paying more, and it would be pushed entirely to them literally. I've already stoped buying soda (when I'm paying), but I don't think thats most people's reaction. Whatever we do should not be a revenue-generating tax.

I believe Huckabee advocated private subsides from health insurance companies to those who lose weight, but that's not a really a valid proposal either. Someone is covering a very large distribution.

I think the fact that the soda tax disproportionately affects poor people is intentional. The whole point of it is to price people out of drinking unhealthy sodas.

[Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God]

Depends.  A flat tax on consumption could potentially be regressive, but if it-

Oh, you mean a fat tax.  Haha.  No.  As others have said, aside from being a barely enforceable bureaucratic mess, it would disproportionately affect the poor and fail to address the recurring problem that exists with fatty foods being much cheaper than healthy ones.  I wouldn't even call it a "feelgood tax" given it would only promote shame among those who are overweight, many of whom struggle with their weight for factors not necessarily in their control.  I favor "sin taxes" on unhealthy foods mainly because they are non-essentials and because the revenue can be used to fund hospitals and other health services.

I'll note that I'm not necessarily against regressive taxes in principle because the United States already has the most progressive tax system in the world.  The problem is that the revenue is not redistributed in a progressive fashion, hence the high income inequality.

Yeah. Helps discourage usage and provides a good bit of revenue. Better than outright banning it.

...Banning fat people?

[Santander]

Yeah. Helps discourage usage and provides a good bit of revenue. Better than outright banning it.

...Banning fat people?

Now this, I could get behind.

[RaphaelDLG]

Don't support bloombergian-style bans, STRONGLY support tobacco and alcohol style item taxes on soda and junk food. 

Tobacco, alcohol taxes are regressive taxes as well, but who cares, because they all tax things that

1) literally kill people and (MUCH more importantly)
2) have consequences for people other than the user - i.e., your insurance premiums go up when I load up on sodas and fried chicken and get a boatload of concomitant health problems, despite you not doing anything wrong, just like you being a drunk asshole or a public smoker is bad for everybody else's health.

We don't live in this phony libertarian vaccuum where our personal choices have no effect on other people, unfortunately, as much as I would hate to be people's mommy.

Maybe couple taxes with initiatives to get fresh vegetables and fruits to urban food deserts.

[IceSpear]

Yeah. Helps discourage usage and provides a good bit of revenue. Better than outright banning it.

...Banning fat people?

Now this, I could get behind.

I'd hate to break the bad news about Kentucky...

[VPH]

Only paired with considerable efforts to subsidize healthy foods. Unhealthy foods are much cheaper than healthy ones. Depending on how the tax is structured, it could end up really harming poorer Americans. Therefore if we seek to make nutritious food cheaper, health can be more easily encouraged.

[Mr. Smith]

Only paired with considerable efforts to subsidize healthy foods. Unhealthy foods are much cheaper than healthy ones. Depending on how the tax is structured, it could end up really harming poorer Americans. Therefore if we seek to make nutritious food cheaper, health can be more easily encouraged.

[freedomburns]

Tax sugar.

[NeverAgain]

Only paired with considerable efforts to subsidize healthy foods. Unhealthy foods are much cheaper than healthy ones. Depending on how the tax is structured, it could end up really harming poorer Americans. Therefore if we seek to make nutritious food cheaper, health can be more easily encouraged.

[Shameless Lefty Hack]

Things I don't approve of the government doing:

1) taxing the poor

2) dictating individual's lives, or using subtler methods to 'incentivize' approved conduct.

3) technocracy

A fat tax seems to fail all of these

[RaphaelDLG]

Have any of you actually experienced poverty to a point where it is literally impossible to sustain yourself and your family on a strictly healthy diet? Have any of you tried programs/methods that were simply unhealthy just so you could be less fat and therefore face less shame for a situation that is apparently 100% entirely your fault? Have any of you had to work multiple jobs to a point where you had no extra free time to stay active, and your only meal choices were what you could quickly scarf down in between places you had to be?

That's kind of a straw man.  The proposal wouldn't be to tax stuff like wonder bread or peanut butter or ramen or froot loops or other cheap foods that are nutritionally sub optimal compared to some snobby sh**t that's more expensive that you can get at whole foods.  Just stuff like soda that there is literally no reason for anyone to ever drink that kills millions are year and maybe similar totally devoid of nutritional value stuff like candy.  I don't think people in poverty are surviving on that type of stuff alone. 

Now, if we started taxing mcdonalds or forcing people to eat whatever Gwyneth Paltrow just posted on her blog, maybe you'd have an argument.

[dead0man]

I don't like taxes used to try and alter our lives.  It's disgusting that we've accepted that as a way to do things.  The fact that it hurts poor people the most just makes it that much more disgusting.  Adding a tax to rich guy's toys is bad, but doing it to regular working Americans is so much worse, but few seem to see it.

Easy no vote.

[Mr. Jew]

Not a disturbed eugenist,  so no.

[Mr. Jew]

I don't like taxes used to try and alter our lives.  It's disgusting that we've accepted that as a way to do things.  The fact that it hurts poor people the most just makes it that much more disgusting.  Adding a tax to rich guy's toys is bad, but doing it to regular working Americans is so much worse, but few seem to see it.

Easy no vote.

Yeah, by the admission of many in this thread the main cause for why people purchase bad foods to begin with is that they don't earn enough money to get healthier foods.  The problem is that the poor are sh**t poor and the rich are megarich and can sell extremely unhealthy sh**t to the poor to eat thanks to blatant governnment favoritism (see crop subsidies).  The root of the issue, like pretty much everything else in this country, is economic in nature.

A tax on being fat makes little sense.  If you want to lower healthcare premiums in this nation you would instead fight for legislation that raises the real income (in contrast to absolute, given cost of living differences between states and localities), forces unhealthy foods to compete with healthy foods in the market (I'm saying this as someone who is far from a Free Market Zealot), makes our public education much better than it currently is, cheaper college for those who can't afford it, and of course a universal healthcare system that is not a slave to Big Insurance.

But of course so long as rich white "Social Liberals" dominate the Democratic Party you can continue to expect a lot of people to be  more obsessed with how ugly fat people look and the Confederate flag than real issues like the mentioned above.

[This account no longer in use.]

Wait wtf