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In most of the developed world, where we have universal health care, a tax makes sense. Don't think of it as the state telling you what to eat, think of it as the state recovering the real cost to society of eating unhealthy food. The hidden cost of bad food shows up in health care expenditures which we all pay for whether we eat poorly or not.

We all pay for your diabetes and heart disease, just like we all pay for a smoker's lung cancer, so it's fair to try to recover those costs through a tax targeting the source of those costs. Nobody's saying you can't wreck your body, but you should be the one paying the price, not everybody else.

Things are murkier in the US, where the increased health costs of bad eating get passed to hospitals which have to treat people whether they're insured or not, who then pass those costs along to patients who do have insurance, some of which is state-provided and some private. Since the costs are hitting both private and public budgets, a tax to recover the costs to the state is only a partial solution.



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