An Albany congressman proposes a “fat tax” on junk food, video games, and TV commercials to combat NY’s growing obesity rate. Thinking outside the box, I suppose, but where would this end? There are very few items in American life these days that don’t contribute to obesity, so it seems a bit harsh to pin the blame on Grand Theft Auto.
2 thoughts on “Pac-Man, Lay off the Dots.”
Comments are closed.
Something similar is being considered in Australia right now. Personally I’m against it. There are plenty of folks who can eat junk food and play video games without getting obese. Why penalize them because some people don’t know how to “balance”? (It’s sorta like arguing that P2P filesharing shouldn’t be outlawed because it has legitimate legal uses.) I’m also worried because most of the news outlets here illustrated the story with pictures of nice juicy steaks and fried eggs. I lost forty pounds in the past year eating a high protein diet (with lots of veg too). My cholesterol is better than it was before I started. I’m less obese. With such differing opinions in the scientific community over which foods are actually “bad” for you (and whether dietary fat actually causes you to be come obese), it seems a little preliminary to be slapping taxes on activities/food without having evidence to back it up. Eh, I’m on my Atkins rant again. Apologies. It just makes me see red to think that a misguided government initiative might increase the cost of a good bottle of olive oil while ignoring the low-fat Weight Watchers pumped-full-of-more-sugar-than-a-Big-Mac products on the next shelf.
I with Kris here, to an extent anyway. I agree that some food items should be off-limits to this kind of taxation, simply because they’re “good” for some people and “bad” for others (I lost a good deal of weight on a standard high-carb, low-fat diet, but Kris has shown–quite wonderfully–that it isn’t that way for everyone). Plus, low-income families literally live–for better or worse–off of high-fat or starchy foods like pasta and such, because they’re cheap and easily purchased in bulk. Unless that situation is taken into account, any taxation of “basic foodstuffs” would be unfair. However, I don’t think anyone would argue that things like candy and soda and potato chips and (sniff) ice cream are anything but “junk.” I would definitely support a tax on those items, even though it would reduce the number of times I’d purchase some Edy’s Twix ice cream, a staple of my diet.
As for the tax on video games–oh PLEASE. For every pudding-like gamer out there, we can all produce at least ten rail-skinny nerds glued to their Playstations and Gamecubes.