Should government use tax policy to improve eating habits?

A better idea is to stop subsidizing unhealthy food.

Short answer: No.

Slightly longer answer: As others have noted, the government should stop subsidizing unhealthy foods and food-like products.

Though Webgoddess makes a valid point, I think the focus of additional taxes would have to be more than just sugar content. A lot of fruit is very high in sugar, but discouraging the consumption of fruit is absurd (and kind of silly, since it’s not on the top of anyone’s shopping list these days)*. Perhaps all processed foods would be subject to the tax, or, following Michael Pollan’s suggestion, all foods and food-like products with more than 5 ingredients.

*hyperbole used for rhetorical purposes; not intended to suggest nobody buys fruit, or that people don’t organize their shopping lists with fruit at the top, since produce is typically the first department you walk into in the grocery store.

Yes

This is why the constitutionality of the healthcare law is so relevant. If the federal government can use the tax code to tell you to buy a specific product (such as healthcare) for the “greater good” why would we expect the federal government to stop there? After all once the federal government controls healthcare they can mandate exercise and healthy foods since it is for the “greater good” and we are all paying for healthcare through the tax code. This will be the road we will go down if the healthcare law is constitutional; I hope many of you Obamacare supporters remember that the rest of us tried to warn you before this bill was passed.

I like the tax on unhealthy foods to subsidize healthy ones but like other commenters where does this sort of social change by taxes end.

Why doesn’t government subsidize healthy food and stop subsidizing large businesses with tax breaks?

@ GaryF: No, government isn’t the answer to everything, and nobody’s arguing that. But it is the answer to some things, and I haven’t heard any suggestions from conservatives to reduce rates of obesity and make our country healthier. A healthier country is good for all kinds of reasons, but I suspect the best argument to conservatives is that it saves money and reduces our exploding health care costs. Rather than rail on government and how bad it is, why not come up with some solutions to problems for once? Or better yet, have a nuanced, thoughtful response to one of these questions that doesn’t center on how bad government is?

@Jefferson: I don’t see that kind of slippery slope. Everyone needs health care at some point. And if an equitable system is going to work where everyone is covered, everyone must be covered. Exercise and healthy eating is a bonus and should be done by everyone to further reduce costs, but the system would not break if everyone had unhealthy habits, so no mandate would ever be necessary, even to the most die-hard liberal. It would break if everyone did not have health insurance. That’s why there’s a mandate, not because “those durn libruls” are taking away freedom.

I am so confused by this idea. Did anyone else find MPR’s so-called discussion of the idea on Midmorning disingenuous? For example, MPR, how much of our tax dollars are already given to companies to grow the main/number one ingredient in processed foods? Hint: It is way more than we spend on Foodstamps. Wouldn’t it be a bit insightful to bring that up and have it be a main component of the conversation vs. a 30 sec comment from a caller? We have this current crisis of obesity because of a massive lack of information!

Is it really a “great idea” for the government to give billions to support the main producers of junk food and then tax the low income people who buy it?

I’m not a Harvard girl (M-State Fergus Falls, MN) but it seems fiscally irresponsible to give our hard earned tax dollars to a few companies to produce the number one ingredients in junk food/pop, and give more money to oil companies to fund the tractors and trucks that ship it to us, and then turn around and disproportionately punish the poor, working poor, low income and middle class who give those companies their business. Why would we do this? So we might throw some chump change at the actual food growers in this country without hurting the profits of corn syrup companies? It’s a shell game, so where is the insight, MPR?

How was your Midmorning conversation “informative”? How were half of the uneducated callers not used as tools to perpetuate this as a “great idea” while being robbed of the information they needed to consider how assinine it is? How is this regressive “sin” tax good policy? Why would we want yet another entity in our government working in direct opposition of the other in order to punish the middle class while creating billions for the richest companies in the world?

There is definitely some sinning going on here!

I would like some answers. Thanks ~ One of your most active participants in Insight Now network ~ Jessica English (formerly Jessica Sundheim)

@ B’cuda

I think the webgoddess was refering to processed sugar and products that contain them rather than foods that are naturally sweet

We can level the dietary playing field by ending farm bill subsidies for unhealthy proceed foods made from corn and soybeans. If we subsidize production of healthy foods instead, those foods could compete on price.

Imagine if we paid farmers to grow actual, real, edible food rather than virtually inedible field corn used for cows, cars and candy?

However, the agribusiness industry will continue to produce highly profitable corn and soybeans either way, and something tells me ye olde Congress isn’t going risk upsetting the agribusiness campaign contribution apple cart.

So yes, lets address the public health issue in Minnesota with a statewide “health impact fee” (sounds familiar) and invest that money in feeding healthy foods to our kids – perhaps through improved school lunch programs.

No, I think this sort of tax puts an unfair burden on the working poor of this country. Furthermore, who gives anyone the right to tell someone else what they can and cannot consume through tax increases. It’s always easy for a highly paid intellectual to tell the rest of us what is good and bad for us with little cost to themselves.

I believe there should be a tax or ban placed on producers that use corn syrup in their products. It has now become a game at the grocery store to try and buy foods without it. Doctors and dietitians claim it is a useless product for the body, food manufactures love to use it because it is cheap and generally easier to add to foods than real sugar.

Why do I want corn syrup in my ground meats??? Raw chicken pumped with sodium products was bad enough, now corn syrup as well???

Ban corn syrup!!! You’ll find it in every single item you’re likely to tax with the “Twinkie Tax”.

Add a “sin” tax to everything harmful. Grow hemp as Mom says and make this world a better place!

No not unless the higher taxes are levied on the corporations that produce unhealthy food not on the consumer. Take that higher tax and use it to educate people on healthy eating and subsudise real food, like fruits and vegetables. Many people can’t afford fresh produce so they are forced to eat processed food.

Here’s something I find interesting about this issue (and not entirely off topic). I remember two or three decades ago when the top nutritional taboo was refined sugar. Health-conscious people looked for sugar on ingredients lists, and tried to avoid it. Then one day I started to notice lots of products proudly advertized as having “less” or “no” refined sugar. It turns out they had found a substance that was just as sweet, and even cheaper, that enabled them to list “sugar” further down the list of ingredients, or even omit it altogether. That substance was high-fructose corn syrup. After a while, though, nutritionists started to raise alarm bells about HFCS, and people wanted to avoid it as well. Now we’re seeing products proudly advertized as having no HFCS, but guess what they’re using instead: refined sugar! The two substances are equally bad, nutritionally speaking, but you wouldn’t know that from the advertizing messages. This is just one example illustrating the fact that you can’t trust anything big corporations tell you. They’re only in it to make money, and the truth is irrelevant to them.

NO. Taxation on these products is placed on the wrong audience. Consider eliminating the subsidies on the farm products that produce the “fast food” items in question. When the subsidies are eliminated the large corporations will have to decide whether to increase prices or absorb the loss.

If you tax the products you need adminstrative effots to oversee the taxes — resulting in increase government. If you eliminate the subsidies, you can eliminate some oversight and regulators — resulting indecreased government.

its like this : People should/must start living healthy and simple-Vegan also, but a processed foods vegan, support local organic veggie farmers, shop at coops and farmers markets and if u can not afford join food not bombs who serves free vegan meals, eat more lentills, beans, and potatoes (not fired ones, just steamed potatoes) eat organic apples from local fruit orchards, and most of all GROW UR OWN if u can in any way, in buckets, on the windowsill, on the roof -wherever, but do it, even in ur apprtm. -there are ways, even if u only sprout some sprouts -u need those vitamins, eat a as much as vitamon c from fresh fruits as you can get………stop sugar, HFC, cofee, soy and most of all meat and dairy, or we will all die, bc mother earth can simply not make it

I MEANT TO SAY NOT A PROCESSED FOODS VEGAN (those are allmost just as bad)