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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.
You are not the first person to think an excise tax is some galaxy brained proposal. And definitely not the first person to propose it for sugary drinks as the one solution to fix the obesity problem in America once and for all.
Please convince me how this one specific tax will save the trillions you claim are lost to "bad health". With evidence/reasoning, instead of just hand waving at TRILLIONS of dollars. Let's put aside the fact that this nanny state you propose can just about tax anything good/fun ever because anything ever done not in service of the GDP is technically wasting TRILLIONS of dollars.
Poor health costs trillions, not the consumption of sugar. I do not know who believes a sugar tax would solve all of obesity, that seems as unlikely as it solving all literacy issues.
I think a sugar tax would make a dent in the problem by (1) taking the money going to companies that sell harmful foods and using it for the costs associated with the foods, which disincentivizes the sale of healthy items and incentivizes intelligent people to work in a prosocial industry, (2) reducing the number of unhealthy food items purchased by citizens.
Coca Colas profits are 22bil yearly, so they have the funds to give back to society what they take out. If they want to sell things that cost society, they should pay for that cost.
Coca Cola is in the service of GDP. I hate the GDP metric. The difference between sugar and fun activities is that no significant margin of people looking back at their life would ever consider sugar consumption a good lifestyle choice. Fun you can argue is why we live, it is prosocial and even has health benefits and is, well, fun. Sugar transiently satisfies the dumb animal part of humans and in exchange leaves one less likely to experience future fun. So the difference between “fun things” and “bad pleasant things” is stark. We want more fun! Healthy humans with more resources = more fun. Unhealthy humans hooked on superstimuli sugars manufactured by food scientists to hook them is not very fun at all. It is just poison.
I think that is clear as much. Something that can be proven to cost billions can be hand-waved into costing trillions by invoking the n-th order effects. People are unhealthy this actually costs billions in healthcare -> But unhealthy people are less productive -> trillions in unrealized productivity.
Makes sense if you squint hard enough, but isn't convincing even said argumentation can be made for almost any widesweeping policy proposal.
Yeah they "take out" from society just like every other company. I'm a dirty free market capitalist so this line of reasoning isn't all that convincing.
Coke isn't taking anything out of society, coke isn't making "society" drink 6 cans of coke in a day, its societies problem not cokes. Also you are not taking anything from coke, you are taking from "society" with a tax. As with any taxes ever, the cost is passed onto the consumer. If its not a pos tax, it will be passed onto the customers.
What about video games? Or movies? Or spending time in online forums? I am sure if "society" spent 1 more hour at work instead of having fun billions could be realized in GDP.
But that isn't appealing to a lot of people who don't like the government having that much control over what they do.
This tax is unappealing to anyone but the most online of social conservatives who think making enough things illegal will bring forth the utopia.
This is exactly what advertising is; their billion-dollar marketing team would be very disappointed to hear that they're all, what, playing make-believe? The entirety of marketing and advertising is just a big ineffective scam, and no-one has ever noticed?
Coke might not be "making" people do something by putting a gun to their head, but it spends over a billion dollars to get a certain social outcome, and then every year that outcome happens. I don't know what else you'd call that, David Hume
Advertising is to make you drink Coke over Pepsi or {insert soda brand} that X'th time you drink soda, or the more galaxy brained take is that for the reason we are mentioning Coke and not Pepsi [mind share].
It has little to do with making you drink it 6 times or 7 times or 5 times or 0 times.
Choice to drink is decided by you, choice on WHAT to drink is somewhat decided by the advertiser. At least to a much larger degree and is the entire point of advertising.
For sure the main focus in a market as saturated as that for soft drinks in the US is more focused on expanding a slice than growing the pie, but both effects are there.
Coke still spends $x to shift y units of Coke; it's largely immaterial to them whether those concumers would otherwise drink Dr Brown or nothing.
If there were no advertising for soft drinks in the US, what do you think the effect on overall consumption would be?
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