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How bad can America’s health actually get? And what shall we do?
All kinds of ill health are steadily increasing, from age-adjusted obesity to autism and depression. Anxiety in young adults nearly doubled in the decade pre-pandemic. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes has risen dramatically. Deaths of despair have also risen. There seems to be no actionable plan, ready for implementation, to halt the rising tide of ill health. The numbers are steadily increasing adjusted for age, with some numbers rising faster in the young than in the old.
I find the willpower discussions to be missing the point. Unless there is a plan that we can implement in schools to significantly increase or teach willpower, then it hardly matters whether the will is relevant. The diseased from poor choices and the diseased from poor environment equally hurt the security of the nation, costing trillions from decreased productivity, decreased fertility, and healthcare expenditure. It is curious how much discourse in America is spent quibbling on issues that are so much less important than the health question. Health is something that directly impacts every aspect of the country, not the least of which is the plain happiness and fertility of citizens.
What I would like to see is a harm tax put in place that adds onto every unhealthy item the cost per item of its societal harm: the projected healthcare costs, the loss from intelligent citizens working for corporations that poison us, the projected loss of productivity. Now, this will always be an estimate, but so are many taxes. I think this would largely make sodas prohibitively expensive.
This is just the externality problem writ large, and the usual problem applies: Nobody knows the value of the net externality, not to an order of magnitude and usually not the sign either. Furthermore, externalities are related to transactions, not products, and your "harm tax" can't take that into account. A carb-loaded energy drink being sold to a fitness fanatic to fuel his pastime may have negative harm; the same drink sold to an already-obese couch potato may have positive harm. The same goes for basically everything less bad for you than cigarettes, including soda.
In short, this is just the authoritarian impulse, and whatever the other drawbacks of authoritarianism are, neither you nor Michael Bloomberg nor anyone else is smart and knowledgeable enough to make it work as described.
An “authoritarian” solution by better than no solution, especially when your absence of a solution is annihilation of the population.
I am sure if we can go to the moon that we can establish a useful “harm tax” which, given the usual complexity of tax law, would never be fully justifiable on a web forum. But I’m not at all persuaded by your criticism.
First, one one carb drink is identical to all carb drinks. Carb drinks do not necessarily have to contain HFCS or simple sugars.
Second, there are a number of viable workarounds that can be implemented such as doctor’s permission or write-offs for healthy people.
Do you have another criticism? A trillion dollar problem can have a 20 billion dollar solution and be well worthwhile.
No, that is exactly what it is not.
You have failed to demonstrate this, certainly.
Oh come on, that was a canard before I was born. And we could still go to the moon then.
A most marvelous formulation which, unfortunately, will not fit in the text box of this post, right?
A carb drink for an athlete has to contain "fast carbs", simple sugars and/or short-chain polysaccharides. But the point is more general; there are many common products (including bulk flour and sugar) which are bad for some, good for others, and which therefore cannot be properly handled by any sort of "harm tax" on the product.
These are not viable workarounds. If they were, you wouldn't need your "harm tax", you could just tax unhealthiness directly.
If the solution does not work, that its cost is less than that of the problem it fails to solve does not make it worthwhile.
It is demonstrated (certainly) that our health is ever-worsening with no end in sight. This, plus the fertility consequences of poor health, predicts future annihilation.
It has unique benefits to the athlete, but we do not base the legality of things on what benefits an athlete. Complex carbohydrates are useful for athletes, and athletes can just deal with not having access to simple sugars not in the form of fruit.
There are many medications and so on that are limited to certain groups of individuals. This is just not a strong criticism.
Why are they viable in so many contexts today, whether we’re talking about special allergy medications or special ADHD medicine?
I don't think literally requiring a loicense to buy sugar is where I want society to go.
The loicense would be for non-taxed simple sugars for athletes
I don’t think ‘creating a black market in untaxed Gatorade’ is the best answer to obesity as a social crisis.
Consider (1) prohibitions are meant to reduce, not eliminate, (2) prohibitions have always worked to reduce in America, whether for alcohol or marijuana use (the latter having risen in legalized areas).
Black market would be a non-issue for Gatorade, which is a specially tailored product made by food scientists to cause habitual use. The black market would be for sugar, but since obesity is in part a problem of convenience, it’s still a non-issue. As someone who has smoked, I can assure you that tax-free tobacco is hard to come by.
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