They have to have some way to make up for the increase in costs of everything due to the $15 minimum wage hike. Might as well hide it as a "sin tax"...
You realize that healthcare cost the US 2.5 TRILLION of which obesity is one of the largest contributing factors. Yes, poor diet does have a cost.
The big thing about smoking, that most bothers me, is that the stats show that most smokers start the habit below the legal age at which they should be allowed to. Not many people take it up after the age of 18. And because it's pretty-much an addiction, in effect the tobacco companies are dependent on minors (was going to say 'children', but its probably a bit tricksy to call 16 year-olds 'children') taking up smoking to maintain their customer base, and they damn well know it.
While it might be hard to know how to deal with that in law, that just doesn't seem right to me, and it's why I can't see being an executive of a tobacco company as a respectable occupation. Your livelihood is dependent on pushing addictive substances to those too young to make an intelligent choice.
Though it's not possible to say the same about sugar, given that it occurs naturally in so many foods. But advertising sweets (er, I mean 'candy') to kids does seem a questionable thing.
As a parent, I'm disgusted by the sheer amount of sugar/candy that kids are showered with. I'm throwing away literal buckets of it multiple times a year. Between Easter, Halloween, Christmas and who knows what other celebrations in between my kids are bringing home candy by the fistful. I come across as a candy nazi in my house since I moderate their access to it so much. But their palates have become so conditioned to sugar laden shit the types of food they will actually eat is atrocious. Their diet has become so terrible that I'm only allowing candy if they actually eat a real fruit or vegetable. But that just drives the fixation on candy that much more. Uhg. Yeah we have some major health issues in this country and it starts early.
And if we want to be in the "everyone gets healthcare" business, all taxpayers should demand accountability in everyone's choices.
I don't think there will be one without the other in the long run. It's like having your cake, and eating it, too. That's the rub with implementing collectivist solutions in a society that still fiercely defends individuality, as I see you doing in this instance. The two are only marginally compatible. We could call this tax a boundary clash.
huh? Are you implying she's obese? Looks pretty normal to me.. Have you not seen real obese people, BMI>30-35..?
tough to tell from the angle, really. i will have to explore google to confirmDefinitely fat. It’s odd and I guess telling of society that people view her size as normal. Not all fatties ride scooters.
I wonder if a more effective method for encouraging healthy habits would be food vouchers for things like vegetables similar to WIC. I think a big part of the reason people eat/drink crap is because it is so cheap.
eating healthy does cost more.Wait...you are saying healthy food is too expensive if so doesn't this tax do the same thing? At first glance your post looks contradictory.
Healthy food is way more expensive than junk. A small thing of blueberries costs more than a 12-pack of pop or a meal at McDonald's. That is one reason why poor people are more likely to be heavy consumers of junk.Wait...you are saying healthy food is too expensive if so doesn't this tax do the same thing? At first glance your post looks contradictory.
Healthy food is way more expensive than junk. A small thing of blueberries costs more than a 12-pack of pop or a meal at McDonald's. That is one reason why poor people are more likely to be heavy consumers of junk.
I appreciate your point of view, but also think it's a bit idealistic. We'll see if the indifferent or hands-off attitude towards poor individual life choices continues as costs rise. Actually, idealistic might not cover my opinion on how you think things should be. It seems that if individuals expect to be taken care of by the collective, they at least owe the collective the due of not making things worse than they have to be. To do otherwise seems rather immoral. Perhaps that is a more Confucian view than I might normally espouse.Yet that's the point I've been trying to make, that the two aren't incompatible. Since most of the savings come from elsewhere, we can have socialized medicine and individual liberty. We just have to tolerate the fact that to some extent, we will be paying for the bad choices of others. We already do so with our welfare payments and it's perfectly tolerable to people on the left. Most people on the left seem to oppose conservative initiatives to drug test welfare recipients in order to weed out undeserving ones. But when it comes to bad health habits in a socialized healthcare system, the logic is different. We don't care if our tax dollars support a heroin addict on welfare but we care that our tax dollars pay for a bypass surgery for someone who ate too much bacon and ice cream.
The two are only "marginally compatible" because of we choose to make it that way. There is no essential incompatibility because we need not make that choice. We don't have to use socialized risk as an excuse for control of the individual. And if we're going to be honest, control is part of the motive here. There are people who just can't stand that others make choices that they don't approve of, and they want to fix that. It's an authoritarian attitude that I feel is illiberal.
Another point I want to address is how we quantify the added costs from high risk behaviors. For smoking, I keep hearing that treatments for smoking related illnesses constitute about 8-9% of our total healthcare costs. Yet that doesn't take into consideration back end savings from early death. If a non-smoking man dies at age 82 after having Parkinson's disease, requiring surgery after falling and breaking his neck, that same man had he smoked might have died 10 years earlier from lung cancer. While there would have been a cost to treat the cancer, the cost of treating the disease he got later would have been avoided. Very few people are healthy their entire lives then suddenly die. Most people get sick first and require healthcare before that happens. So far as I know, not a single study on the costs associated with these behaviors takes this into account.
I think an accurate assessment of true costs is necessary before we implement coercive policies meant to reduce those costs. I'm not satisfied that this has been done.
In theory, yes this tax would do the same thing. I think this type of legislation is much more challenging to get right though compared to simply subsidizing healthy food. There are just so many ways to make cheap, unhealthy foods that trying to get a tax that includes them all would be a real pain in the ass, let alone keeping the codes up to date. Unless you implement a scanner system that directly reads the nutrition information, trying to do a tax like this in any meaningful way isn't going to work. Subsidizing healthy food has its challenges as well, but I don't think they are as significant as trying to tax unhealthy foods. There would be concerns about corruption, with companies trying to get their products paid for by the government, companies trying to get their sugared cereals categorized as a health food so they can get government money, but I'd still say its the easier problem of the two.Wait...you are saying healthy food is too expensive if so doesn't this tax do the same thing? At first glance your post looks contradictory.
huh? Are you implying she's obese? Looks pretty normal to me.. Have you not seen real obese people, BMI>30-35..?
Ok that's pretty big.. But the picture posted she didn't seem that huge at least. No huge belly hanging over hips or stuff like that. Which you see everywhere if you go to walmart..From what I can gather on her stats. She is 5'9" and 200 pounds. That puts her at near obese with a BMI of 29.5
Soda steals from the poor through shortened lifespans, poor health, and very expensive chronic diseases. The upper 10% aren’t the ones downing several Coke's a day, why put the burden on them to pay for it?
If you want to deal with diabetes you are going to need a tax on most carbohydrates, a tax on cubicles, one on businesses for creating stress and not allowing sufficient breaks, and some other things. All of those things are involved in diabetes, heart disease and more. The societal structure we insane Americans see as normal are more likely to be why we are in poor health overall, not insurance issues. We live to kill ourselves and think that we're going to fix that without addressing the fundamental issues, and those are not resolved by a sugar tax.
Ok that's pretty big.. But the picture posted she didn't seem that huge at least. No huge belly hanging over hips or stuff like that. Which you see everywhere if you go to walmart..
In any case, maybe this was a bit much, but I don't think slightly "larger" women in men's magazines contribute to people being fat. Some extreme efforts to "normalize" really huge people is silly, but there's a middle ground between the bone piles on fashion shows and the biggest whales..
I'm not in favor of government trying to control the behavior of the individuals in this manner. A useful function for government regulations in this area is to require manufacturers to put nutrition information on their food so that people can make informed choices. Warning labels are fine too.
I think regulating a corporation by telling it not to dump toxic waste, for example, is a legitimate role of government. I'd rather see them empower individuals to make their own choices, however, instead of trying to coerce them to make the right ones.
They could put a warning on the front of the product that says it will kill you... their still going to drink it he he...
People don’t care about that anymore!
I honestly dont know if special taxes actually solve problems.
Are people smoking less after that cigarette tax?
Yet that's the point I've been trying to make, that the two aren't incompatible. Since most of the savings come from elsewhere, we can have socialized medicine and individual liberty. We just have to tolerate the fact that to some extent, we will be paying for the bad choices of others. We already do so with our welfare payments and it's perfectly tolerable to people on the left. Most people on the left seem to oppose conservative initiatives to drug test welfare recipients in order to weed out undeserving ones. But when it comes to bad health habits in a socialized healthcare system, the logic is different. We don't care if our tax dollars support a heroin addict on welfare but we care that our tax dollars pay for a bypass surgery for someone who ate too much bacon and ice cream.
The two are only "marginally compatible" because of we choose to make it that way. There is no essential incompatibility because we need not make that choice. We don't have to use socialized risk as an excuse for control of the individual. And if we're going to be honest, control is part of the motive here. There are people who just can't stand that others make choices that they don't approve of, and they want to fix that. It's an authoritarian attitude that I feel is illiberal.
Another point I want to address is how we quantify the added costs from high risk behaviors. For smoking, I keep hearing that treatments for smoking related illnesses constitute about 8-9% of our total healthcare costs. Yet that doesn't take into consideration back end savings from early death. If a non-smoking man dies at age 82 after having Parkinson's disease, requiring surgery after falling and breaking his neck, that same man had he smoked might have died 10 years earlier from lung cancer. While there would have been a cost to treat the cancer, the cost of treating the disease he got later would have been avoided. Very few people are healthy their entire lives then suddenly die. Most people get sick first and require healthcare before that happens. So far as I know, not a single study on the costs associated with these behaviors takes this into account.
I think an accurate assessment of true costs is necessary before we implement coercive policies meant to reduce those costs. I'm not satisfied that this has been done.
I honestly dont know if special taxes actually solve problems.
Are people smoking less after that cigarette tax?
I don't think this is accurate. If there was a male athlete that was 5'9" and 200 pounds, would you consider him obese? My understanding is that this model eats healthy and exercises regularly. Most recent research indicates that if this is the case, BMI is pretty much meaningless, and she can expect health outcomes just as good as someone with similar habits that is 140 pounds. Diet and exercise are much better measures of health than BMI, and there are some people that even with a good diet and lots of exercise are still going to be what most consider overweight. Some people, and women in particular, are just not going to achieve the same fit appearance as others even with the same habits. Once we start seeing truly obese women marketed as role models for our physical appearance, then I think you'll have a point. But as a country, there is no way we are even close to normalizing obese as beauty.What those people are at walmart are morbidly obese. We as a nation need to come to terms that being chunky is obese. And obese increases health risks. The fact you thought she looked pretty normal is telling on where we are as a society. Near obese is becoming the norm.
As for a woman who is nearly obese being on the cover of a swimsuit edition? I think it does help normalize obese as beauty. That can cause issues down the road. Remember when everybody complained that the skinny model was a bad image for children? I think it can be argued an obese model is also a bad image for children.