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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.
Sure. And people might switch to drinking plain water. Or they might spend more of their food budget on sodas and skip buying any vegetables at all. And people who earn enough won't be hurt by a soda tax, just the very poor, who are already eating badly and living in bad conditions.
Cigarettes are one of the "old reliables" in Irish budgets, where the government increases taxes on them every year in order to 'encourage people to stop smoking'. The rules around advertising have been tightened, and cigarette packets have to be in standardised packaging (so no more brand logos, instead health warnings with graphic imagery ).
Has it helped? Yes and no. People moved on to vaping and to roll your own cigarettes, and of course there is always the trade in smuggled cigarettes/selling loose cigarettes. Smoking has declined, but the gap between the better off and the worse off is stark:
So "don't be naughty" taxes may work, but the biggest shift in behaviour is likely to be amongst those who are already trying to make healthy choices, and the effect will simply be punitive but not behaviour-changing on those who are least healthy.
Maybe this time, the carrot (pun intended) is better than the stick. Somebody lecturing and finger-wagging about 'don't drink soda' is going to go in one ear and out the other; getting directly involved with people who, for instance, will give a baby soda in their bottle and teaching them how to live normally will do much more. But that kind of community nurse regular visits programme would cost a lot more than simply slapping on a soda tax, so I don't think it's likely to happen.
Tax soda and people will just make sweet tea(unless you plan on taxing retail sugar as well, in which case, good luck) to drink.
That's work though, so my first guess would be, no they won't.
Making sweet tea is both a trivial amount of work and extremely common among the poor, because it’s a cheap way to make shitty tasting tap water drinkable.
Replacing soda consumption with sweet tea among more working class consumers is probably not a large public health win.
Is that a thing in the South of the US? I never saw it growing up fairly poor in Canada, nor did I see it in when I lived in California.
In the south and culturally similar communities(blacks), yes. And it’s usually far sugary-er than cola.
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Primarily in the American South, yes. Though it is much more widely available now than it used to be; I believe you can get sweet tea at McDonalds considerably outside the South today.
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