During WW II, rationing of calorie-dense foods resulted in a decrease in all kinds of "diseases of affluence". This has been well-documented. There's no question that de facto rationing of unhealthful foods via high taxes would result in improved general health, as long as there was also easy access to healthier, natural foods at affordable prices: vegetables, fresh fruit, sufficiently high-quality protein, etc.
If an inner-city family could get two pints of fresh blueberries for $3 while a container of full-fat "berry" ice cream cost $15.00, which would they buy? Doh. Which is healthier? Double doh.
The problem is that blueberries (where I live, in Seattle) are $4.00 for only eight ounces while at the same time you can buy two 1.5 quart containers of full-fat, full-sugar, artificially-flavored ice cream for $6. Which is a poor family more likely to purchase for dessert? A few tablespoons each of healthful blueberries? Or a heaping bowl each of fatty, sugary ice cream?
Why is the ice cream so much less expensive? CHEAP ingredients, the economy of scale inherent in large-scale manufacturing and the most important factor: government subsidies.
Even so, you will note that we are already starting to see a kind of "rationing" via deceptive food packaging. Those 1.5 quart and 1.75 quart containers used to be full half-gallons. The manufacturers are stealthily gouging us by charging the same while they shrink the containers. Maybe they're inadvertently doing us a favor?
If you think that Medicare is worse than what preceded it -- or what will happen to seniors without it -- then I'll ask you to please explain. I don't know a single senior in the U.S. that would be better off without it.
The U.S.P.S. has done an admirable job on a shoe-string budget. Do you know how much it costs to send the equivalent of a first-class letter (same ounces, same distance, same delivery time) via FedEx or UPS? Look it up. It will make your hair curl.
I am not saying that there should be nothing. What I am saying is that the government consistently proves itself to be a horribly inept business manager. How much better could these things be without the bearucratic waste, fraud and abuse? The ONLY thing that keeps these things going is the constant throwing at it of you money instead of finding realistic efficiencies like a real business would have to do. And, the answer to your question about what it would be like if these programs were not in place is something you and I will live to see if we don't find the guts to fix them soon. This may sound like current news, but I have been asking this question since civics class.
As a note; I did not ask which programs or enterprises had merrit. I asked for which one if any were better than disfuntional at best. Merrit is another question all together.
Thanks for your replies, Randy. I think it's more of a question of "organizing principles" than waste or efficiency.
To me, the organizing principle of healthcare is doing our level best to provide high-quality, affordable health care to all people, regardless of their ability (in that moment of need) to pay. Because we're all human and we will all need healthcare, either for ourselves, our children or our parents. It's a universal, inescapable human need.
To others, the organizing principle of healthcare is to maximize profit while providing an acceptable level of healthcare to the people who can afford to pay for it in their moment of need.
Depending on one's organizing principles, having millions of uninsured folks with zero access to quality healthcare is acceptable (via cherry picking, rescission, pricing people out, forcing them to rely on the E.R., etc.) For example, plenty of people turn a blind eye to the agony of the poor who cannot afford any dental care until they show up in the E.R. with a life-threatening abscessed tooth. As long as dentists make high-six-figure salaries and dental insurance companies are profitable, they don't really care if someone is in white-hot agony due to lack of funds for dental care. Other folks believe that universal dental care is a better, more humane choice.
We don't need to have a perfectly run, perfectly efficient fire department to know that when the fire breaks out, it's in everyone's interest that they show up and start putting out the fire.
LOL -- yes, there have been lots of very successful war-time projects, eh? Perhaps they cost a bit more than we planned, though?
Admiral Grace Hopper did some ground-breaking work on computers during WW II -- private businesses have profited mightily from her gubmint research, (Hint: She invented the first compiler.)
I think that just supplying people with correct nutritional information would be a good start. Right now diabetics can't even get that from the ADA. It's no more clear right now that sugar and overprocessed foods can kill you than it was that cigarettes would do that when I was a kid. I don't care if other people eat wrong, but I hate it that their crap takes up so much space in the grocery store. I don't know, put a skull and crossbones on the cookie aisle? Just stop letting that stuff seem like it's harmless.
Just what we need is to get the government involved in controlling sugar. I'm sure it would do great. They can use the Prohibition model from years past or the current war on drugs as a model. If the government gets into regulating sugar will we see sugar speak easies where sugar flows more freely than before sugar Prohibition. Or maybe there will be sugar dealers on every corner willing to sell untaxed sugar and the sugar trade will become so lucrative that people will be willing to kill for it as it now happens with drugs.
The government needs to stay the hell out of deciding what someone can and can eat.
I live in a sugar producing area. Currently, the Cooperative that contracts with the farmer-growers are in a bitter labor dispute and lock-out with the union processing workers that actually make a high quality useable sugar product from the beets of which tit originates.
The current U.S. farm bill, that makes possible the SNAP food stamp program, school lunch programs and inexpensive food for all contains a sugar subsidy. This subsidy is in jeopardy, due to the current spending slash cry from the right aisle of Congress. This subsidy is paid for though tariffs on imported sugar, and other costs assessed in the Farm Bill. It costs the American tax payers next to nothing.
Adding a tax on sugar, for whatever reason, legitimate or lame, will open the door to cheaper, lower quality and less sweet cane sugar from foreign sources, thus killing one more American industry and sending jobs somewhere other than here. I find it interesting that this report comes out just as the Government wants to undermine one more American industry and takes away the very jobs that they are begging the private sector to create. In doing so, the same Government proposes to make the sugar industry a giant cash cow, just as they have with tobacco.
So let me see if I understand this correctly. The study says that Sugar is Bad. So, to combat its evil existence by taxing it; rather than banning it. That will accomplish several things. It will end the sugar subsidy so that the government doesn't support what is bad for you. It will add to the tax revenues by charging for what is bad for you. Therefore, if it is really bad for you, ban it. If it isn't that bad for you, tax it. But whatever you do, make sure you get into our faces so that we cannot make our own decision.
I have heard of a cause of death from alcohol poisoning. I have heard of a cause of death from overuse of tobacco. I have heard of death due to diabetes. I have never heard of a cause of death from sugar poisoning.
I don't get this. When is enough regulation enough?
Here in MS there are some taxes on food. When we lived in NC there was taxes on all food. O don't think the taxes they are proposing on sugar will help any at all. I do believe the corn sugar contributes to diabetes because its in everything. Sodas and condiments like ketchup are two I can think of. It was probably causing less problems when companies used cane sugar and I know there are studies going on that are looking at corn sugar because its used in so many things. They could make it so people couldn't buy soda with food stamps, maybe that could be helpfull. People have gotten so they drink soda and ice tea sweetened with sugar instead of milk and water at meals. I think thats something to be looked at. The "diabetic epidemic" seems to me to have increased when people were able to buy soda at the grocery store and learned to like having it at every meal instead of just when you ate out at restaurants and fast food. There are too many kids who have grown up with having soda and fast food now then the way it was when I was a kid. Soda used to be a treat when I was a kid. It became available in the school cafeteria in my later yrs in high school. The kids drank it instead of milk with their lunch. The soft drink companies are to blame for a lot of the problems....
I'm sure the purveyors of patent medicines and toxic lotions and potions in the 19th and early 20th centuries felt the same way:
"New and improved Lead Powder makes your skin so pretty!"
But seriously, the FDA and the Department of Agriculture are already deciding what we can and cannot eat (well, what can or cannot be marketed to us as "food".)
I don't think that prohibition works, but taxes work great. When I was a girl, 85% of people smoked. Now, 85% of people in my area do NOT smoke. All kinds of government regulations, policies and programs went into effecting that change. Most of us are very happy to not be gassed all the time everywhere we go, even ex-smokers like me. Some current smokers don't like it very much, but I think overall it was a success and it made it easier for me to quit.
If they'd just remove the price supports for HFCS, that would be a great start.
I was once a smoker and I quit twenty something years ago. I didn't quit because of the taxes I quit due to the education. As an addicted smoker I would have bought the cigarettes no matter what the cost. I quit for my health. Thats the same reason I now avoid sugar.
Maybe I'm of a different mind set. Taxes would not curb me but knowledge does. It would be wrong to punish everyone with taxes for the sake of those that have a problem.
I don't think the sugar lovers of this world have a real worry. There are way to many special interest involved here for any such proposal to have much of a chance. There's the farm industry, the restaurant industry, the packaged food industry , the refreshment industry and who knows what others that make their living off of peoples sweet toothes. I'm sure all will scream bloody murder if their livelyhood is threatened.
That's true, Gary. There are a lot of special interests who would scream bloody murder.
I can't say that I quit smoking "because" of the taxes, but the cost of smoking did help me quit. I had a teacher that made the smokers in class total up how much we spent on tobacco per day, per week, per month, quarter and per year. Then we discussed how we could spend that money instead. When I saw the eye-popping totals, this knowledge started tickling the back of my brain: "I could go on an European vacation, in just a few years, I could have a down-payment on a house..." etc.
In today's dollars and prices, my former habit would add up to almost $11,000 per year. That's nothing to sniff at. ;0\
The laws that had the biggest impact on my habit were the indoor smoking bans, first in the workplace and then in restaurants, bars, etc. Not being around it all the time made it so much easier to quit and stay quit.
In my twenties, I was a graphic artist in a work-studio with seven women. Five of us smoked, two didn't. To this day I feel terribly guilty about the two who didn't smoke, because the other five of us smoked like chimneys -- even in a closed room, in winter, with two non-smokers. That was normal back then, but now it seems positively evil.
I too feel guilty about what I was doing to those around me. My dad smoked and I never thought anything about it but my youngest son had asthma when he was young and spent several nights in the hospital with asthma attacks. After I quit he never had another attack period.
I wish it were the same with sugar. If one person reducing consumption would help others I would be all for any kind of drastic measure to curb its use. Sugar consumption is a personal decision one needs to make for themselves.
I would be all for an education program about the dangers of high sugar consumption but not one quite as graphic as the stop smoking campaign. Pointing out the sugars in our diet and it's effect on ones health might be a good idea. A warning label on products containing high levels of sugar might not be a bad thing.
Unlike alcohol and tobacco, sugar is consumed by at least 98% of the population of the US. For the gov't to tax products with sugar, and sugar itself would effect millions of people. I think additional education regarding the negative affects of sugar would be much better than a tax on sugar. I, too used to smoke, I gave it up over 30 years ago. I did this not because of the price of cigarettes but because it was something I could do to stop the pollution of the air for my kids. I have not picked up a cigarette since. The gov't taxing another consumer item is definitely a "big brother" mentality, which I am against.
If they are going to tax sugar to stop diabetes they are going to have to tax all carbs even the healthy ones like whole wheat bread, oatmeal, brown rice and fruit. All of those contributed to my diabetes. I never ate sugar or drank any sweetened sodas or cookies or anything. But I did eat lots of whole grains, quinoa, brown rice and fruit.
Here's a video already posted by Emily Coles elsewhere on tuD. These are the authors of the study talking about their proposal. To me the most significant thing is not the tax proposal, but their idea that sugar is a major contributor to the diabetes epidemic.
Thanks BadMoonT2. Dr. Lustig makes an excellent point in this video: We as a nation are spending (estimated) $147 BILLION with a B on chronic metabolic diseases -- meanwhile, the substances and lifestyles that promote this are huge sources of profit for private companies. We're paying twice: once when we buy the sodas, french fries and candy, then again when we pay for Medicare, private health insurance premiums, public health departments, and subsidies to the corn growers, source of the HUGE glut of HFCS in our food system.
I'd like to see the price supports for HFCS go away (make it cost more "naturally" by phasing out subsidies) and I'd also like to see something like an "empty calorie tax" where foods that are simply NOT nutritious (Coke, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Red Bull, etc. as well as "cereals" that are really candy in a bowl and all those scary sugar + chemicals in the candy aisle) would be taxed to fund public education and metabolic disease research/treatment. If a 12-oz. can of Coke cost triple or four times what it costs today, fewer people would buy them and consume them -- and "Big Gulps" would go the way of the dinosaurs.
When I lived in France, a tiny 225 ml Coke cost EU 6.50 (approx. $7.00 U.S. for seven ounces) in my local cafe. Do you think I bought any after the sticker shock of the first one? No, I did not.
I understand that it sounds invasive and big-brother-ish and scary, at first. But when you dig in to the science of HFCS and the statistics, it makes sense to me. Don't prohibit (that never works) but make it pay for itself via including the true social cost of the substance in the price at the cash register.
I am generally not in favor of any of these tax schemes to make us do something, but in light of the statistics you mention, as well as the evidence cited in the journal article, some response seems necessary and desirable.
In light of the fact that sweeteners are cheap and addictive, they are a profitable product to sell. With the resistance that any attempt to curb production would generate, perhaps the only hope is education by third parties.
