Tax Junk Food/Regulate Contents?

[Michael-5]

Kasz216 said:
In general by the way. Taxing junk food, just like taxing cigarettes and alcohol will accomplish one thing.

It will make the poor... Poorer.

Tons of people still smoke, tons of people still drink. ESPECIALLY the poor.

It will be the same with fast food, but worse. Since people need food.

As an example...

Low-income smokers, defined as individuals in households making less than $30,000 a year, spent an average of 23.6 percent of the annual household income on cigarettes. That number is up from 11.6 percent in 2003-2004 and in spite of increasing cigarette taxes imposed by the state and city governments.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/09/22/state-funded-study-cigarette-tax-hurts-new-yorks-poor-most/#ixzz2PVeXyUVD


You really can't stop people from doing what they want. You can only hurt the poor by trying to do so.



If you were going to do anything to stop unhealthy eating i'd suggest three things

1) Drop the Corn Subsidy and the sugar import tax. (probably won't make much of a difference... but some.

2) Restrict Food Stamps to raw foods. Cut out soda, candy, ice cream... hell TV dinners and frozen chicken nuggets. Additionally restrict an upper limit on price paid per unit. Since a big problem is people buying things like expensive steak and lobster and selling them for 1/3rd the price for money.

If you can't do that. Offer a bonus. Like you get 30% more money for buying the above foods. So if you spent 100 on fruits and vegetables, foodstamps pays 100 but only charges you 70.


3) Make restaurants post nutritional facts on the menu. Helps for the rare cases where there is something deceiving.

A Lot less people smoke now, you know that right? Not sure about drinking since it's been taxed for so long, and any studies to the 1900's would be largely irrelevant, but smoking has largely been cut back and lung cancer is no longer the leading cause of death in North Americans (it used to be, i believe).

As for poor people smoking, yes they are spending 10% more of their income on cigarettes, but how many of them are there? I bet you less then 25% of people smoke now compared to 2003.

As for your suggestions, I agree with 1 & 2, but 3 would be hard to impose. Maybe force restaurants to list products as high fat/sugar/salt when above a certain upper limit per weight. They already do this with low fat/salt and vegetarian dishes.

I still think that's not enough, if for example we taxed chips with more then 15% the recommended daily intake per 50g, then there would still be chips, just less variety. I'd probably eat crackers and humus more often if they did that. Plus chip producers will come back with reduced fat formulas, it would only be the less healthy brands of chips that get taxed. I believe this is how alcohol is taxed, harder alcohol (40% stuff) is taxed something like 50% in Canada, but beer is taxed much much less.

Say for example salt. If you tax high salt products, like say salty hamburgers, people can always put salt on their low salt burger. It would mean taking 30s longer to open a packet of salt and putting it on the burger, and most people wouldn't do this, so most people would live healthier.