[rafaelmn]

Not agreeing/disagreeing with this you but I wonder how you feel about obesity tax ? Low physical fitness tax ? There's plenty of evidence that exercise and diet significantly impact health (especially on population level) - like you said there's an incentive to keep those people healthy contributors instead of chronic burdens on the system. Sounds like a logical extension but doesn't seem popular/implemented widely.

[moomoo3000]

Public transit and walkable streets are also incentivized. People naturally end up walking more outside of US.

[morelisp]

If you take this view, any tax on current state is like a "cancer tax" - you're just doubly punishing the person.

Sugar tax, coal tax, corn syrup tax, worked-your-employees-90h/week tax? Sure.

[pydry]

I feel great about slapping a tax on the profits of companies that sell highly processed, sugary, addictive foods so that the market selects for healthier alternatives.

Maybe subsidies for selling fresh fruit and veg also.

I guess you could tax their victims instead though... they don't have a lobby so theyre probably easier to take advantage of.

[plagiarist]

We are Calvinists down here, so bad people were always predestined to be bad and they deserve to be punished. Corporations making money must have be good because they are succeeding, so why would we hurt them?

I will never be punished for being over- or underweight since I am good. The universe would have to be broken for me to be taxed.

[echelon]

> I guess you could tax their victims instead though... they don't have a lobby so theyre probably easier to take advantage of.

Nobody is the victim of choosing to eat a cake.

[jmvoodoo]

We aren't talking about cake though. We are talking about inexpensive highly processed foods made predominantly from ingredients that are subsidized specifically because of their caloric density. I.e. corn.

High caloric density is what you want if you need to be able to feed your country in war, so we subsidize these foods.

No one wants to eat just plain corn though, so companies process it into other foods that are then sold cheaply because they are receiving these large subsidies.

People end up consuming large quantities of these foods because they are cheap, and our brain reward centers a pre-wired to love lots of cheap easy calories.

Knowing all of this, it makes perfect sense to tax the living crap out of highly processed foods that are made from subsidized ingredients. You're just taking back the subsidy you put there in the first place, and shaping consumer behavior for the greater good (which is a common use case for taxation).

[AnthonyMouse]

> Knowing all of this, it makes perfect sense to tax the living crap out of highly processed foods that are made from subsidized ingredients.

The consequence of this would be that the subsidized food gets exported to a country that doesn't tax it, at which point you're subsidizing some other country's food.

The US is also a large net exporter of food, implying there is more than enough domestic production for wartime needs. Also, the US hasn't been in that kind of a war in almost a hundred years and MAD makes it unlikely that it ever would be again. The obvious conclusion is to eliminate the subsidies.

[pydry]

>The consequence of this would be that the subsidized food gets exported to a country that doesn't tax it, at which point you're subsidizing some other country's food.

If theyre smart they won't take this shit either.

Nice of you to let Americans sacrifice their health on $othercountry's behalf though.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If theyre smart they won't take this shit either.

What do you suppose the chances are of 100% of other countries imposing a similar tax on this type of food?

> Nice of you to let Americans sacrifice their health on $othercountry's behalf though.

Stop subsidizing it and you don't have to tax the subsidy back out.

[jmvoodoo]

Don't disagree, but eliminating the subsidy is much more challenging politically than taxing junk food.

[AnthonyMouse]

Taxing junk food seems pretty challenging politically, considering that businesses hate it as you're taxing their junk food, conservative voters hate it as government nanny state, liberal academics hate it as a regressive tax and a thing that lessens support for actually removing the subsidies, and anyone paying the tax hates it as a tax they have to pay.

At least for removing the subsidies you only have to fight the businesses.

[ImHereToVote]

When you live in poverty and have no prospects for the future. Some mass produced cake from the supermarket might be the only thing keeping you together. As soon as the work of the laptop class is automated by next generation agentic LLM's, you will probably understand.

[filoleg]

> As soon as the work of the laptop class is automated by next generation agentic LLM's, you will probably understand

Coming any second now, right behind robotaxis, with the only difference being that robotaxis will probably actually happen within the lifetimes of the current “laptop class”.

[mitthrowaway2]

Tax on sugar, sure. But having an obesity tax would be like having a silicosis tax.

[rafaelmn]

This is based on the assumption that sugar causes obesity - I don't think there's any strong evidence for that, or that low carb diets work better for fat loss than low fat, from what I've seen both have same effect (calories equated) and both have equally terrible long term adherence/outcomes. Sugar seems like a nice villain but it's more likely that you'd have to tax any high calorie food that tastes good.

And what about physical activity ?

[mitthrowaway2]

If not sugar, then other causes should be taxed if the evidence supports that such taxes would have an impact. I'm not a policy expert myself.

The best public investment to promote physical activity is designing cities to enable "the gym of life"!

https://youtu.be/KPUlgSRn6e0?si=GDmrYq-XQtn9SaKx

[rafaelmn]

Fair enough, guess my problem would be that since these things would be implemented by politicians it would end up being driven by fads/popular opinion, and without strong evidence (of which there's very little) you'd essentially be conducting population level experiments even if you wanted to be scientific (eg. food pyramid to the extreme)

[throwaway8378]

What about all the other harmful activities? Recent studies about alcohol usage shows that even small amounts can be much more harmful than previous estimates. In addition to the health issues, we also need to consider all the accidents and violence that is connected to drunkeness.

[guraf]

Alcohol is not only heavily taxed in Canada, but most provinces also have a monopoly on selling spirits. That's right, the gov is selling the booze, pocketing both the tax and the profits.

[mantas]

Alcohol is usually taxed. Just like tobacco. Although sugar and other harmful substances should join the former.