Big Dogs Weblog

We’re Gonna Get Your Mind Right (and tax you, too)

by Blake on Jul 29, 2009 at 09:07 Political

Because we have, in this country, a little thing called Freedom of Choice, some people make bad choices. That’s okay, they have the freedom to be less than smart- at least for now. But if Hussein and his bevy of Czars have their way, we will have so much less in the way of freedoms and choices.
Like cattle in the chute, our path is narrowing, and soon we will have nowhere else to go but in the direction they are herding us. All in the name of control and taxes.

First up on the tax agenda was cigarettes, in the name of “sin” taxes- I mean, those bad old cigarettes, who could possibly object to the persecution of those misguided sinners? I am sure that beer and liquor are coming up fast, but since sodas and fattening foods are more prevalent, there is more to be made from taxing these, and the body police can make the case that this will help the healthcare costs. I am dubious, since, if one wants, most of these things can be made at home.

Still, here come the food taxes, like it or not, as these people “nudge” our behavior ( “Nudge” is a behavioral theory propounded by one of Hussein’s Czars, Cass Sunstein) towards what they perceive to be the “ideal” way to live, which they will dictate.

If you happen to be the 1-in-3 Americans who is neither obese nor overweight (and, thus, considered at risk of becoming obese), you might well conclude that the habits of the remaining two-thirds of Americans are costing you, big time. U.S. life expectancies are expected to slide backward, after years of marching upward. (But that’s their statistical problem: Yours is how to make them stop costing you all that extra money because they are presumably making poor choices in their food consumption.)

“Facing the serious consequences of an uncontrolled obesity epidemic, America’s state and federal  policy makers may need to consider interventions every bit as forceful as those that succeeded in cutting adult tobacco use by more than 50%,” the Urban Institute report says. It took awhile — almost 50 years from the first surgeon general’s report on tobacco in 1964 — to drive smoking down. But in many ways, the drumbeat of scientific evidence and the growing cultural stigma against obesity already are well underway — as any parent who has tried to bring birthday cupcakes into her child’s classroom certainly knows.

latimes.com

Perhaps instead of banning the cupcakes, people might consider the choice of healthy foods at home, but to disappoint children by not having cupcakes on a special occasion is a fairly mean- spirited thing to do, all in the name of fitness. But indeed, fitness is but a strawman argument for these “Czars” and their policies.

It is really all about raising money for their repressive policies and behavioral theories.

Key among the “interventions” the report weighs is that of imposing an excise or sales tax on fattening foods. That, says the report, could be expected to lower consumption of those foods. But it would also generate revenues that could be used to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured and under-insured, and perhaps to fund campaigns intended to make healthy foods more widely available to, say, low-income Americans and to encourage exercise and healthy eating habits.

If anti-tobacco campaigns are to be the model, those sales taxes could be hefty:  The World Health Organization has recommended that tobacco taxes should represent between two-thirds and three-quarters of the cost of, say, a package of cigarettes;  a 2004 report prepared for the Department of Agriculture suggested that, for “sinful-food” taxes to change the way people eat, they may need to equal at least 10% to 30% of the cost of the food.

And although 40 U.S. states now impose modest extra sales taxes on soft drinks and a few snack items, the Urban Institute report suggests that a truly forceful “intervention” — one that would drive down the consumption of fattening foods and, presumably, prevent or reverse obesity — would have to target pretty much all the fattening and nutritionally empty stuff we eat: “With a more narrowly targeted tax, consumers could simply substitute one fattening food or beverage for another,” the reports says.

latimes.com

Yes, these Socialists are making a list and checking it twice. They are going to make you skinny by taxing you so much that you have no money left to make a bad choice with.

Except the bad choice that was made with the last election.

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Tags: fascism, fast food, freedom of choice, taxes