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.

Since when does anyone have the right to tell anyone how wealthy they can be? I could not be more against your assurtion that we should limit success. You do know that the rich tend to create a lot of jobs right?

But I would be willing to go with a tiered flat tax. 5% for the low income, 10% for the middle and 20% for the high income bracket. But like I said before, if the governement was smaller and didn't regulate our lives and waste so much money it could be less. Maybe just 1%, 5% and 10% for the three brackets.

Natural Selection for me. Let them eat what they want and let them pay the medical bills. (Oh wait....)

You know Wal Mart makes more jobs then it takes away? However it makes meaningless minimum wage jobs.

Most people who are rich, are rich because they aren't generous with their money. They find ways to make products or companies which pay employees minimum wage (or less, a lot of stuff is made in China where minimum wage is less) so that they themselves can keep the money.

Are you talking about income tax? How low is income tax in USA? In Canada it starts at 20% for those who make I believe 20-35k a year and goes up to 41/48% for people who make over 100k (41% for the first 100k, 48% for everything after).

This makes sense, I have a friend who works at a poshe golf course where registration is 50k for the first year and 10k every year after. MOST of these people didn't earn their money, they inherited it. What good is money when it stays in the hands of people who didn't work for it? I understand if you worked hard and made a successful company that you deserve a lot of money, but at the same time the employees you hire to make your stuff deserve more then minimum wage too. Rich people are rich because they sell stuff for a lot more then it costs to make, and make jobs which generate little income. If we didn't heavily tax the rich, the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer. Simple.

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.

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.

So why not make a tax on high salt products, force people to make their products less salty (say a hamburger) to avoid this tax, and then we can let people add salt if they want to? Wouldn't this make sense? Why should people be forced to make an effort to avoid salt/fat when it makes more sense to have people make an effort to eat salty/fatty foods instead?

Also I'm not proposing we tax all fatty/salty foods, just the more salty/fatty foods. Like I said before, if you tax chips with 15% or more fat content per 50g serving, there will still be a lot of chip brands avoiding the tax, and it's not hard for doritos to make a low fat version of their chips for the same price. This wouldn't affect peoples wallets at all, that is, unless they specifically want to eat high fat and high salt foods, and don't want to make it themselves.

I asked to be banned for 3 days, I have a lot of assignments to do. Sorry Guys

If junk food got even more expensive honestly I would just turn to pancakes and ramen. I do not buy healthy food because it is just too expensive. I can live off of unhealthy food for much much cheaper then healthy food. If unhealthy food became as expensive as healthy food I would just buy the cheapest of the cheap. If you tax ramen it will not go up in price that much lol.

Disprroportionally taxing the rich doesnt make the poor into middle class. It makes them lazy and st_pid. Trust busting makes the poor into middle class. We have to replace the oncome tax with a flat sales tax. It will be cost neutral. A 20% sales on all purchases. Let big spenders get the burden of funding this wasted govt. Let the poor find a reason to be thrifty and smart.