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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.
I suspect the purpose of a tax on unhealthy food is not to defray the harm unhealthy food causes but instead to stop people consuming that food. I believe this because that's exactly what has happened with the similar cigarette taxes. They have escalated constantly and are now being replaced with bans on cigarettes in some countries.
I believe once the hard work of getting this tax in place has been done, it will be raised until it achieves the goal of reducing or eliminating consumption of unhealthy food.
I am against banning or restricting unhealthy food and your post does little to convince me that this is not the end point of the suggested tax. Until you have a concrete amount for these taxes and until you can signal credibly that the tax will remain at that level, I am against taxing unhealthy foods to pay for health costs.
Why are you against banning or restricting unhealthy food?
Idealistic reason:
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/a0/a0278d6ebd9591c39e398b65ed9c5dd9d7d6ea7686578f1088d41908c6b92ca4.jpg
Pragmatic reson: Who gets to decide what food is "unhealthy"? You can bet it will not be you.
Once the mechanism for restricting and banning "for your good" starts rolling, it will not stop at foods you do not like. I am sure there are many scientific studies that prove your favorite food causes cancer, impotence and baldness.
Remember when deplatforming happened only to few terrorist, nazis, and other bad hombres?
Junk food already exists on the spectrum of enjoyable, but harmful substances together with tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and other drugs (and non-substances like gambling), a lot of which are restricted or banned "for our good". So I can agree with the idealistic reasoning if it also extends to fentanyl and meth.
And speaking pragmatically, I am quite sure that the US has learned enough from its war on drugs and prohibition to not go full retard. After all, food is one of the normiest things in existence, so when the BATFE&JF starts enforcing the regulations against southern tea and kids' lemonade stands I expect to see strong bipartisan pushback.
I dunno, I could totally see the transplant contingent of Seattle or San Francisco mocking and sneering at southerners getting fined or imprisoned for bootlegging sweet tea. Culture War schadenfreude runs deep.
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