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I'm not convinced of the strategic importance of ethanol in the grand scheme; the US produces more of it because the subsidy creates that incentive. Incentive structures can change, entrenchment just makes it less politically viable. > You're targeting something that is three levels of abstraction away from what you actually care about. My position is that it makes more sense to target what you're actually after: calories. It's not abstracted away as healthy eating is concerned. Overconsumption is downstream. You haven't elucidated how you'd merely target calories through policy, but leaving that aside, a) by default people do not count calories nor would they as a measure to protect against weight-gain, b) it's redundant given a whole-foods diet, no one becomes obese from too much broccoli, chicken breast and lentils, c) for those looking to lose weight, mere calorie counting absent leveraging satiating foods and eschewing junk is woefully ineffective in practice, because of lack of sustainability. Dieters typically do lose some weight, then gain it back. Not only is it difficult to adhere to, it's difficult to eyeball calories on a plate, particularly when they're processed foods, such that they'd have to weigh everything on a scale indefinitely. Encouraging healthier eating patterns solves several problems at once. It protects against overconsumption, and against disease, which would lessen a burden on the healthcare system. That seems quite pragmatic to me. What's at stake is certain corporations stand to make less money, and corn farmers sell less. Whether through change in diet patterns or "just eating less" as you might posit, if on the national scale people did end up consuming fewer calories and lose weight, then they'd more than likely consume less sugar/HFCS. The end result is still that a healthier populace == selling less corn. We can't discount any and all policy on the conceit that inconveniencing corn farmers is not acceptable. |
Yes, that's the intent. Whenever you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you're looking for strategic rationale, the US relies much more on gasoline than, say, the EU. Couple that with the fact that US strategic oil reserves are at the lowest levels in 40 years, that only leaves about a month of fuel in the reserve at current usage. Meaning, there is a strategic need to have the infrastructure in place to supplement fuel supply if needed. Even if we don't need it now, the lead time for building out infrastructure is long enough that is makes sense to have slack capacity in place now.
>It's not abstracted away as healthy eating is concerned. Overconsumption is downstream.
Corn subsidies are abstracted away. They're related, but not directly considering the other uses of corn. Irrespective of that point, I think we may have lost the thread here. We don't seem to disagree on the central premise that overconsumption of calories is the root issue. The original claim was that a sugar tax would help remedy this issue. The counter-claim was that removing corn subsidies would be a better approach than a sugar tax.
My point is that the counter-claim is lacking nuance, and ignores all the second order effects. I'm not against removing subsidies, but I would want someone to acknowledge how they would mitigate the negative knock-on effects. What you've presented is a bit hand-wavy for my taste, implying we can just swap this crop for that and ignore concerns related to strategic fuel, agricultural stability, and costs. In the context of all those secondary and tertiary impacts, it seems like a direct tax (like a sugar tax) is preferential. I probably wouldn't limit it to just a sugar tax though, and would look to target other food that leads to overconsumption (including those that aren't disproportionately affecting lower socio-economic groups), and ideally making healthier choices less expensive if we're making the others more costly.