…but not to (try to) save lives by economic coercion.
Here’s the theory: some people eat a lot of crap, partly because farm subsidies and the vagaries of the agricultural market sector make crap a cheap source of calories, and partly because once you’re inculcated to it crap tastes really good. These people eat burgers and fries and pizza and wings and chips (and so on) and drink Coke and beer and those obnoxious whipped-mocha-bull-semen-latte things they sell at Starbucks (and so on)… and, surprisingly enough, they thereby make themselves fat and diabetic and prone to heart disease (and so on).
Well, fine. You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that these people simply do not know that Twinkies are bad for them. We passed the realm of innocent ignorance several decades ago and are now frolicking about in the glucose-sodden fields of the land of reckless self-indulgence.
I don’t have a problem with that. It’s your body, do what thou wilt.
On the other hand, most well-established industrialized nations subsidize their health-care systems (or even fund them entirely publicly). In other words: every taxpayer gets dinged for your Cheetos-induced myocardial infarction. That just isn’t nice.
You can see where I’m going: crap food enables obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and so on — so let’s tax crap food to offset the costs thereof to J. Random Taxpayer. By the time you land yourself in hospital, you’ve probably already paid enough taxes on your Pringles and Pepsi to cover your angioplasty. People who rigorously stick to their complex-carbs-and-lean-protein diets don’t have to pay for your nutritional indiscretions, and those of us who like the occasional bag of chips can probably cope with the extra expense. Everyone wins! Huzzah!
Well, kind of.
First of all, what foods and drinks are we going to tax? We have yet to agree upon what constitutes truly healthy eating — is it low-carb? Is it low-fat? Do we track glycemic index, glycemic load, or what? Saturated fats are bad — no, trans fats are bad — no, not all trans fats are bad. This is a hard problem: do we honestly expect the fucking Government to figure it out? Bitch, please.
Next: fat taxes aren’t exactly precision instruments. They’re better than indiscriminate taxation, sure — but taking someone’s money because they might maybe some day clog up an artery with those chips they’re buying is somewhat less than equitable. Most of us who eat a glancingly healthy diet and get a reasonable amount of exercise can chomp down the occasional bag of chips with no ill effect whatsoever. Why should we be taxed to pay for treatments we’ll never need for conditions we’ll never acquire?
And finally: just think of how much money’s going to be spent on the bureaucratic equivalent of friction. You’ll need at least a few dozen people (salary, benefits, office space, etc) to run the programme, along with procedures for choosing crap foods to tax, processing appeals from food corporations, and so on and so forth. I wouldn’t be particularly surprised to find out that the extra administrative cost incurred by a “fat tax” would overwhelm the supposed tax break those of us who aren’t stuffing our faces with Twinkies would achieve.
In the final analysis, I guess I’m still against the idea — but less so than I was yesterday.
I maintain that a better solution is to provide tax incentives to people who can demonstrate a certain level of fitness or participation in an activity that promotes fitness. This could be as simple as giving taxpayers the option to file a form with their income tax returns asserting that they completed a certain number of classes/session in some activity that promotes physical heath (sports, yoga, pilates, aerobics, martial arts, etc.), so they can get a couple of hundred bucks added onto their return. For those who don’t participate in structured activities but prefer to do stuff on their own, they could have a doctor submit a recommendation based on a physical exam. It might also be a good idea to make at least a cursory check-up mandatory to participate in the program–not only would it help to weed out people who aren’t participating sincerely, but it could help for that many more serious conditions to be caught early and save medical effort in the long run.
RRSPs work well because the gov’t provides tax incentives for people to invest in their own well-being (their future well-being, in particular) and I think that a program to promote physical heath could work the same way. People pay a lot of attention to tax breaks; just imagine how much more fashionable fitness would become to the Patrick Bateman crowd as a result. (Hmmm… that sounds suspiciously like a point against what I’m arguing for. But as long as there will be Bateman-alikes out there, we might as well encourage them not to be a burden on the health-care system.) Bottom line: such a program should cost the gov’t much less than what would be saved in improved healthcare, and taxpayers would get a break too.
One issue that I can see with this system is that it doesn’t address the issue of encouraging people who don’t pay taxes to take better care of their physical fitness. But then, RRSPs don’t help those people with their future well-being either.
Not a bad idea. Granting tax breaks to people in good health (if you can get the government to properly define good health, of course) satisfies my first two objections to “fat taxes”: that the government will probably do no better than most of us at identifying crap food, and that eating the occasional bag of chips will likely not cause a reasonably healthy person to incur any extra medical costs. You still have bureaucratic overhead, but hey, this is government we’re talking about.
My main objection to a fitness tax break is that, like all tax breaks, it’s essentially an interest-free loan from you to the government. I have better things to do with that money than let the government invest it — I could, for example, invest it myself in an RRSP so that I can afford to retire when the CPP shits out its guts (thank you, boomers).