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You know what the govs in my land (belgium) are planning?
TAXES FOR UNHEALTHY FOOD
First, the multinationals are filling their products with way too much sugar and now they want US to pay more for it because it's "unhealthy" and that way people "are motivated to buy healthier products"
WHAT THE FUCK, LIKE IM GOING TO BUY LESS SNACKS BECAUSE IT COSTS 50 CENTS MORE.
Oh, guess what, sugar tax also counts for LIGHT PRODUCTS.
I am really done with those greedy bastards.
Give me one good reason that taxes like that are a good idea compared to the alternatives there are.

Answer me this- is there really an objective difference between taxing things like booze and cigarettes and doing the same for food determined to be shit for you?

They tried to do that in NYC too, but it got shot down.
Your government nanny just making sure you make the choices they prefer.

I though Belgium had no government,last time i heard about it ,they were negotiating for months after the elections.

If they really want to make people buy more healthy food or at least have a more balanced heating habit they should encourage more education on the mater specially for the children .

Yes

Taxing Booze and Cigarettes is taking advantage of people with physical addiction who can't quit and bleeding them of more money knowing they will still buy Booze and Cigarettes.

Taxing Unhealthy Food is taking advantage of people who don't want to change their life style to fit what other people believe it should be and bleeding them of more money knowing that they will still buy unhealthy food.

They know the Tax will not cut back on consumption, they are just using that as an excuse so they seem like they care about people when really, they just want to take in more money.

Also, with what is being considered "Unhealthy Food" changing every few months, it's not really a good criteria for taxes.

If they wanted people to buy healthier food, maybe they aught to create tax breaks to make healthier food more affordable to the average consumer. Having to spend 5 bucks for a pound of spinach, when you could buy 5 boxes of mac and cheese for that money, doesn't create an incentive to buy that spinach.

Subsidies still have to be paid for by someone else.

Spinach/fresh and healthy produce wouldn't be nearly so expensive if we grew it more logically, but what state is the largest US producer of this water-loving crop which completely dies if it gets too hot before it's harvested? California!

It would still be much easier for local foods to compete without the gigantic subsidies for the American corn industry.

I have no idea why people continue to think that healthy food is expensive compared to the alternatives; it certainly is affordable to the average consumer. Take a look for yourself:

Original Kraft dinner from Walmart

Cost: 13.5 c / Oz
Nutritional facts for serving size of 70 g (3 servings per container):
-Vitamin A – 0
-Vitamin C – 0
-Calcium – 10
Protein – 9 g
Carbohydrates – 48 g

Marketside Fresh Spinach

Cost: 25.6 c / Oz
Nutritional facts for serving size of 85 g (3 servings per container):
-Vitamin A – 110
-Vitamin C – 40
-Calcium – 8
Protein – 2 g
Carbohydrates – 3 g

The serving sizes are very close and both have similar calcium content. The only benefit of kraft dinner is it has 5x more protein and about 16x the sugars. The Kraft dinner is half the cost, and the only benefit you get is more sugars which you can get from literally any other food.

Unless you are a moron there is definitely an incentive to buy that spinach because no amount of Kraft dinner will replace the essential vitamins among the numerous unlisted compounds in spinach that we have evolved to depend on for our health. Processed food like Kraft dinner have literally nothing else than whats in the back of the box and if you can look past the initial cost at the counter you are actually saving money in the long run.

@Windy
The argument isn't that it's not affordable for the average consumer, but rather for a very significant portion of below average (wage) consumers. And the whole "saves you money in the long run" thing is great and all- I'm sure there's a lot of truth to it- but even if you sold a boat for a hundred thousand dollars that included a check in the mail for a million dollars, that wouldn't help the people who don't have the hundred thousand in the first place.
By the way, I'd like to make it clear that I'm not necessarily "for" or "against" this kind of taxation. There are some good arguments from both sides that clash at the point of what an individual personally thinks is more important.

Poor people don't generally care about nutrition, they care about convenience and price. To make mac & cheese I need a pot and some water. The fuck do I do with a bag of fresh spinach? I gotta get tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots if I want a salad. Which one does your screaming 4 year old want at the end of the day when you come home from a 12 hour shift? There are a lot more variables here than price and nutrition.

{… more affordable to the average consumer.}

To make something more affordable for the average consumer implies that currently its not very affordable.

Also spinach and Kraft dinner compare costs around $2-5 and I don't know exactly what your boat analogy is about, but the ratio 1,000,000 / 100,000 is a much larger magnitude and not comparable to the ratio of costs in my post, let alone that you are using numbers that exceed most people's income by such a large amount is also not a fair comparison. So what exactly are you saying?

It's an analogy to illustrate how hidden benefits which help "even out" a more expensive purchasing pattern only matter to those who can afford it in the first place. When you're really poor and have to make decisions about food you by, the hard truth is that quantity ends up taking precedent over quality- that is, until the former is high enough for everyone in the family to not go hungry. There's a good reason so-called processed food is so inexpensive- the "process" itself is designed to lower costs. In fact, that leads into one of the best arguments against these proposed taxes: the suggestion that they will ultimately end up adversely affecting the worst-off in society, forcing them to fork over more of their meager finances to pay for food, which could be going to many other important aspects of life, like tools for education and whatnot.
I'm personally very skeptical of the narrative some like to push that eating a lot of fast food or similar stuff is a health "death sentence". It really comes down to getting exercise and making smart decisions about what cheap food you eat, as it's certainly not all created equal.

{ what cheap food you eat, as it’s certainly not all created equal. }

It generally is all fried/greasy/both though, it's really not good for you at all. People need to go into the freezer section at the supermarket and get Tyson chicken nuggets/Ore Ida tator tots instead of McDonald's/etc. For $6 you can get a couple greasy, dripping Big Macs, or you can get a 2lb bag of nuggets which are prebreaded and baked so you just crisp them up in the oven. Just as convenient and even less expensive because you're getting more for your money, but significantly better for your arteries.

If you eat it once or twice a month and you're active it's nbd to your overall health. If you eat it literally every day for lunch because the only fast food place in town is a McD's and nobody is ever home to cook for you (in the case of kids) you could be dead by 40.

{“even out” a more expensive purchasing pattern only matter to those who can afford it in the first place.}

That's so naive and worst you keep adding an extreme twist to your posts. First it was about having $100,000 – $1,000,000 from one sale, which most people don't even make in a year. And now you're doing it again. We're not talking about people that only have $2.50 in their bank account and have to pick either Kraft dinner or a bag of spinach. We are talking about the least expensive food option for an average consumer and the idea that healthier food options are more expensive. I suggest you read my post again carefully because my conclusion was that the spinach does not only "even out", it is cheaper, because of the quantity. Let's take another look:

What's in kraft dinner? Flour, iron, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, milk proteins, salt, phosphates, calcium, and some other glucose precursors. (they also say <2% vitamin C and something else

Now take a look at what you get out of spinach

Calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, sodium, zinc, glucose precursors, vitamin C the list goes on. If you don't plan on getting sick you need to consume things like magnesium (enzyme cofactors, folate required for carbon transferring, etc.) this means you need to buy more food in addition to Kraft dinner to get these essential chemicals. So tell me again what's cheaper in the long run?

"We’re not talking about people that only have $2.50 in their bank account and have to pick either Kraft dinner or a bag of spinach."
Actually, that's exactly what I'm talking about. (Minus the hyperbole, though there are certainly many people who're pretty much that bad off.) Let me remind you how I started off my first reply:
"The argument isn’t that it’s not affordable for the average consumer…"
I understand what you're trying to say, but again, when you get down to brass tax, a person desperate for food is going to be chiefly concerned with getting full, not tallying up all the recommended amounts of nutrients determined by health scientists. These days you can pop a few pills and get at least most of that stuff, but your body would still torture you if you didn't eat anything else. It'd be fucking great if everyone could get a complete meal three times a day with all the vitamins A through Z24 and geology-museum-quality minerals, but that's not the one we live in. This reality has to be acknowledged when considering the kind of legal measures that are the topic of this thread.

If healthy food was less expensive, I would definetaly buy more of it. But when a salad in BK costs me almost 6 dollars (before taxes, with no drink) and a Whopper combo costs around the same price (without taxes) with a drink and it's far more filling (that way, I don't have to buy more food later on and use that money on bills and/or transportation), then there's no contest.

I would also like to add that our tax is 11.5%, so yeaaaaaaaaaaah….

Pffff. Kraft dinner. Big spender are you?

Try great value brand. 50 cents a box.

I get Kraft on final sale + card discount at Walgreens for 78 cents a box. Only time I ever buy it. Wgreens actually has some badass coupons and deals, and if you can get their app it automatically links them to your rewards card so you don't even have to clip actual coupons.

{ I would also like to add that our tax is 11.5%, so yeaaaaaaaaaaah…. }

Is that Puerto Rico, aka the liberal best case scenario? Rough.
You would legitimately be better off primarily raising your own livestock/crops at this point. :/

I'm horrible with plants. I tend to forget about them and let them die. I also have cats which destroy everything and pee eveyrwhere.
And yes, I live in PR.

Is everything you say Lisa a Loaded Language against Libs between ANY issue?

Yep, idk if you've noticed by now but pushing politics is kinda my thing. PR is a product of huge government, nearly 100% social program dependency, and nonsensical taxes gone wild. It's the liberal wet dream, and the Greece of the Americas.

An article on the topic at hand bc I kinda wanted to know more.

I'm against taxes like these. Unhealthy food has some addictive properties to it (you all know you can't just ask for one Pringle Chip from a friend; you'll get seconds then thirds) and the government knows the public's demand for these these kind of goods (as mentioned above, other goods like cigarettes and beer are pretty similar with taxes put on them too,) are inelastic, which is to say if they raise the price, it won't really make people stop buying the products, so tax revenue will roll in effectively. In short the government just wants more money. It creates a deadweight loss for consumers who want to buy cheap and producers that want to sell low.

I'm not really sure how the taxing system works in other countries, but I heard that when taxes are implemented, there should already be a policy or project implemented to be funded by the new tax (an example would be how when government collects car registration fees, they'd use the money for roads and transportation.) I get that the tax is supposed to 'fix' the rising obesity rates of the country (we all know that's not really the case,) but then I'm assuming the tax revenue itself goes into healthcare and fat-related diseases? My country doesn't have a system like this so taxpayer money is just hoarded by the government and a large surplus of the money that was supposed to be used to fixing problems in the country was actually given away to senators as Christmas bonuses. You can imagine how angry that made everybody.

Lastly, I'm a bit going off topic here but there was talk in this thread on poor people and healthy food, which is not far from the topic of an academic paper I read regarding the calorie consumption and nutritional value of low-income people in developing nations. Keep in mind low-income people are usually manual-laborers so they generally consume more calories than a higher earning individual. They get their calories by stuffing themselves with cheap local grains and bread; spinach and carrots are not hefty or filling enough for them to get by in a day, which is a shame because high nutritional values (especially when consumed at a young age) correlate to higher income in the future. There is also a trend where if a low-earning individual does get more income, they spend the money on tastier food but with emptier calories (McDonald's, BK, chicken nuggs, etc.) So essentially if you're poor you're unhealthy and you sort of stay unhealthy.

The people most likely to be effected by taxes like these are the poor, who are also the most likely to be obese, so it's not really off topic.

From your link:

{ it was also levied on everything containing more than 2.3 percent saturated fats -- from raw ingredients like butter, milk, cream, cheese, cooking oil and meat to prepared foods like pizzas. The tax meant, for example, that a 250 gram pack of butter would cost 37 cents more. }

….there's the whole problem perfectly summed up for us right there. At this point you're not doing it "because you want the people of this wonderful nation to be healthy and live forever blah blah", you're doing it because you need money.

{ Is it really up to the state to punish people each time they indulge in fat-consumption habits? Shouldn’t people take responsibility for own their choices? }

Also this, but that's what happens when the government is responsible for paying for everyone's healthcare. Eat shitty foods and you risk costing more money to keep alive after the first heart attack. You also risk waiting three days to get in the ER, so maybe just enjoy the burger and what happens happens?

Given, cigarettes are an unfair comparison. Smoking is an addiction due to the nicotine in cigarettes, which causes an addiction. However we got to remember that starting with smoking still IS a choice. You don't get addicted to smoking by not smoking. Society warns us plenty of times about the dangers of smoking, both in health and costs, so if you still decide to light up your first cigarette at that point then that is a choice you made and not an addiction before you even started.

But booze isn't an addiction like that, and doesn't make advantage of people who "can't stop drinking". Sure, there are cases of people who have become addicted to the bottle. But these are always extreme examples. The majority of society doesn't fall under a case that they can't stop drinking booze, they just like drinking alcohol more than other drinks but it's not like they're mentally unable to no longer touch booze.

Eating is the same in that. You can actually get addicted to eating likewise to getting addicted to drinking. The addiction however is again the extreme examples, aka the beyond morbid obese. To the majority it's a case of you can't resist because you know it tastes good, but it's not like you are mentally unable to stop eating that unhealthy snack. If eating unhealthy couldn't be addiction like booze, every diet in existence would succeed and personal coaches could pack their bags.

Like eating unhealthy food, drinking unhealthy liquor is a similar choice. Likewise to why eat unhealthy when you can eat healthy, why drink booze when you can drink normal drinks or standard plain old water?

The criteria on healthy and unhealthy changing every month is a pretty balony argument imo. Plenty of research has been done on both areas and researchers know which food isn't good for a human being. The "changing criteria" are just trends among society, like that dumb gluten-free trend. Any retard who does some research will quickly find out that half of these trends are bullshit. And if any retard can figure out gluten-free being better for ya is bullshit, then I'm certain researchers and taxes won't be affected by it either.

I agree with many here that people would definitely eat less unhealthy if healthy food was actually priced better.

But that brings you back to alcohol. Booze is the most expensive drinks you can get at any store, bar, or event; and everything without alcohol is often much cheaper. Yet people still choose to buy and drink booze.

If the prize of healthy food was an issue, why are we still buying booze unlike cheaper healthier drinks? People choose to be unhealthy, because that stuff tastes good and you only live once. Even the poor who we say will be affected the most by these taxes are also people who choose to drink liquor.

Those that truly wish to live healthy aren't letting prices stop them, there are always alternatives. It's about determination, not prices.

people seem to be thinking people are choosing to eat unhealthy food because it tastes good, while that is the case most of the time, some people buy it because they can't afford healthy food. Those people are the ones who will get screwed over by this.

Shouldn't this tax be applied to the companies producing sugary and fatty foods? Not the consumers buying them?

^ If they did that I think that either a) that won't work well with the whole "keeping everybody healthy" gig the government has going on or b) since companies don't want their profit margins going down by the slightest, they'll just raise the prices of their products accordingly so in the end it's still the consumers who have to deal with it.

Those people also choose to drink alcohol, which is always more expensive than non-alcoholic drinks. Hell, drink faucet water if you got nothing to spend.

There's plenty to save on if you wish to eat healthy.

Then again, I don't expect these taxes to be too nitpicky. It'll probably be applied to the extreme examples, like those unhealthy energy drinks that are 90% sugar that legit are bad for ya.

I doubt a tiny bit of sugar in your average product is gonna have a nasty effect. Hell, I doubt literally just sugar is gonna be affected.

People aren't generally trying to be healthy or save money when they drink alcohol, especially if they're poor. Faucet water isn't going to get me drunk.

@randomman

That's the problem in my land, they ARE nitpicky. I heard that the taxes would even apply to light products.