Waist banned - Does a tax on junk food make sense?

Economist ^ | July 30 2009

[Billthedrill]

I'm thinking what we need is just to cut to the chase - a government board made up of representatives from Greenpeace, PETA, Ceasefire, all those wonderful NGO's who are the real experts, and have them make out a list of how everyone should live. Tax everything else.

Yeah, sure, we'd all be lying in the dark in a government barracks chewing on celery, but dammit, we'd be Saving The Planet. What's important here?

[Nervous Tick]

>> I guess you found that out the hard way.

I was shocked, I tell ya. SHOCKED.

[DJ MacWoW]

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat in our drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labors and in our amusements, for our callings and our creeds...our people.. must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live.. We have not time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow suffers. Our landholders, too...retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must...be contented with penury, obscurity and exile.. private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.

This is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering... And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." Thomas Jefferson

[Nervous Tick]

>> there is no consensus on what is junk food.

Not to worry — Bambi will appoint a high-ranking PETA director to be “Junk Food Czar” and figure all that out in short order.

Speaking of short order, where’s my burger & fries? I’m in a hurry.

[DJ MacWoW]

I read on FR yesterday that there are no grocery stores left in Detroit. Just small corner stores. They are tending gardens in empty lots for food.

[himno hero]

more beer tax is next....

[swarthyguy]

>>They do not (or at least should not) exist to allow the control-freaks of society to try to punish those behaviors they happen to dislike.

How quaint. So Twentieth Century.

When pieces like this start appearing in the Economist, along with another piece about mileage fees for all cars, methinks total control of our lives is preordained, not to mention SmartGrid Thermostats and Implanted Chips too.

[swarthyguy]

Speaking of which, using crispy wide bacon strips to scoop up slightly softened and melted ice cream has met with great approval from boys in the under 10 range.

[swarthyguy]

Well, they’ll start with McD’s and the like and then, after a few years, PETA’s food with faces will be junk food, or “corpse” food, as Arthur C. Clarke speculated in one of his books.

[dangerdoc]

I thinked I am being punked.

[swarthyguy]

>>dammit, we’d be Saving The Planet. What’s important here?

That is the proper way to be thinking, CitizenSubject.

[Judith Anne]

If they raise the price of the dollar burgers, what will I give my mastiff for a treat? I mean, I buy a bag of 10, three days later they’re gone, and I have NOT HAD EVEN ONE!!!!

Sheesh! You’d think they’d at least have compassion on Tink.

[Buckeye McFrog]

if they won’t cut the subsidies for ethanol I’d like to see them try and tell that constituency that they are going to slam a tax on the consumption of corn syrup...

[Kenny Bunk]

......crispy wide bacon strips to scoop up slightly softened and melted ice cream......

You, my right-wing friend, are not going to have an easy time of it at the Jane Fonda Hanoi Hilton Political Attitude Re-Adjustment Camp .... especially in the Mess Hall.

Go in peace. Have some celery. And think this over!

[swarthyguy]

>Pigoutian

That’s a clever turn of phrase.

Perhaps you should send it to PETA, they can add it to their Florida whales and makes a nice pejorative description of anyone entering a Wendy’s or gasp, even worse, sitting in the drive thru, wasting precious hydrocarbons.

You may have started something here.

[OpeEdMunkey]

This is my preference. Fat people make seats wear out faster, take up more space, and simply use more resources in their arc upon this mortal coil.

I'll pay my fat tax when you pay your idiot tax.

[swarthyguy]

>>Jane Fonda Hanoi Hilton Political Attitude Re-Adjustment Camp .

You’re stuck in the Sixties.

This time the camps will be modelled upon Kellogg’s Fat Farms of the early 20th Century.

The OprahDeepakChopra Centers for Voluntary Wellness and Nutritional Awareness.

[swarthyguy]

I paid the idiot tax for you too, so don’t bother.

[swarthyguy]

In MA they’re talking about a soda tax. That’s close, isn’t it.

[KYGrandma]

I agree. I don’t eat junk food but I am overweight. I take medications that make losing it impossible. I guess o will want me to die so I will be thin.