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Originally Posted by Bulgaroctonus
I am astounded at all the resistance this idea of tax relief or FDA action has generated. Gentlemen, for now I cannot answer all of your points. For me to truly justify my position, it would take many posts and much time. Time I don't have. I don't like to bow out of an argument, but I guess the sheer volume of points i have to answer has forced me to.
Consider the tax and FDA idea dormant, but not dead. It will only be resuscitated over the weekend, when I don't have five hours of homework to do.
All of my opponents, you may celebrate for now. Bulgaroctonus temporarily resigns.
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I'm not against using taxation to influence behavior. I'm not part of the taxes = tyranny crowd. However, I think of a practical way to tax away habits that contribute to obesity without creating huge inefficiencies in the economy. You can tax certain foods, but then your targeting grocery stores, and typically, it seems that your processed foods that contribute to obesity tend to be your cheaper foods, and so you'll run into hunger issues and families being able to put food on the table. If you do a general food tax, it'll be passed on to consumers, so restaurants generally won't change their portion sizes. Plus, food demand is for the most part inelastic - you have to eat to survive, so even the better designed taxes probably won't have a huge impact. So, from a theoretical perspective, it's a dicey proposition.
Even if you could design a taxation strategy to target obesity, all you'll be doing is increasing bureaucracy to enforce the legislation, and the endstate is that bureaucracy exists to justify itself, and so we'll end up with more inefficient government employees on the rolls. So, in the end, I don't think it's a practical alternative, tyranny aside.