Pro-tax

Fat Tax? I Doubt It.

Quite frankly, I agree in part with Shepard Smith in the news clip below. If we tax something so loved and consumed as the American's soda, we're ensure ourselves it will be "with us till the end of the world." We will become dependent on that tax, unable to operate without it. I think the beautiful revenue that fat tax promises us is the sole reason this solution has even been suggested. If obesity is the problem, those risky foods should be controlled and not taxed, right?

After all, if fat (or health in general) was the true concern, the real question would be how we can make something so available become suddenly restricted. And even more: will setting laws limiting Americans' soda intake even made a difference? A recent study on that exact topic answered "not likely." There's simply no way, especially when such products are available all over the world, to keep soda from its cravers. Thus, soda is with us "till the end of the world" whether we tax it or not.

If it's true that the tax is implemented with the hope of reducing obesity, it is a false hope. One newspaper article stated, "Gentlemanly behavior [once] protected women from coarse behavior. Today, we expect sexual harassment laws to restrain coarse behavior." So what is to be done when human appetite supersedes the existing laws? The answer to obesity is not in this tax. This tax answers another question.

As stated in this article from the New England Journal of Medicine, "A penny-per-ounce excise tax would raise an estimated $1.2 billion in New York State alone." Even if public obesity does not decrease through this tax, public debt can. And public debt is something worth addressing:

I doubt the effectiveness of fat tax as a tax to reduce obesity, but why provoke our financial state when the means to revise this crisis are so readily available?