A fat tax is a tax on foods deemed to be containing high levels of salt, sugar or fat.

What are the ethics of a government imposing a fat tax?

Do you think it is the right way to deal with the obesity problem in Australia? If not, what would be a better way?

This is a pickle, and I think that there are cultural issues as well.
Fat, salt and sugar are popular, people like that kind of thing. Indeed most things are made out of some combination of fat/salt/sugar/water/protein.

I don't think salt is that evil; I hardly think of vegemite or soy sauce as "dangerous". And a tax on these particular ingredients would have to be very high to work because these things are extremely cheap.

There has also been talk of "subsidies" for fresh food like apples. OK, so the economics behind this might be sound (price reduction increases demand), but the reason why people are not eating so called "healthy" foods isn't because they are mired in poverty and cannot afford it (apples are $2.80 per kilo!) but because they value convenience, the processing that went into the product and have the money to buy such things. That and some people find "healthy" foods yucky- you could offer to pay people to eat parsnips, turnips and brussel sprouts and most people would go green with disgust.

I have a personal ban on fast food outlets (you know who I am talking about, yes those fast food chains). I like subway and sushi places. I think the trick is to diversify the type of food that one can get and come up with new products that have more healthy things in them; I'm a bit sick of eating the same subway sub all the time but everything else seems unhealthy.

Taxing chocolate, potato chips, and soft drinks should not be a problem as they provide no nutrition. Health warnings could also be given on the packets with gruesome illustrations of diseases suffered by the obese as is done with cigarettes.
Lifestyle also plays a part in obesity with low income earners having fewer options for sport and healthy recreation so the food taxes would hit them hard.

Taxes should be to finance the government and not to coerce certain behaviors the government deems beneficial.

arry



I don't think it proper for the government to stoop to this form of coercion.

A better way? Make people assume personal responsibility for their actions.

But Taxes do make people personally responsible for their actions.
Want to eat trash? You pay!

I just think such measures would be unwieldly, mired in definitional debates that are as dry as "what is a soft drink, when is chocolate not a chocolate", be vulnerable to all sorts of exemptions and subjective reasoning. In short- a mess.

Then there is the purpose of the thing. Would a bag of sugar and olive oil be taxed to the max? Or would they be exempt because nobody drinks oil or eats out of a bag of sugar directly.

It is possible- the GST sets the precedent, but it could be a nightmare.

What are the alternatives, would they work?
Voluntary "personal responsibility" is the status quo, and I don't think it is working...

You're right, TOP. Plus we can relieve some of the unemployment with a whole new agency to crack down on Twinkie and potato chip smuggling. FWIW, if I put a gun to your head and force you to stop robbing a bank, you are not acting responsibly. You are submitting to force.

Another example. Assume one citizen contributes a lot of money to a politician's charity so he can get a tax break. Another citizen helps three young people go to college but he doesn't get a tax break. Who is acting more responsibly?

Why does the government 'need' to fight the obesity 'epidemic' anyway? Like others have said - personal responsibility needs to play a greater role. By constantly deferring to government, you end up sending the message that every problem is someone else's.

If some people are perfectly happy being fat, unhealthy and obese - that's their choice. That everyone else should be punished with extra taxes because of their idiocy is ridiculous.

Well, it is someone else's problem when a fat person consumes a large proportion of the health budget because of his/her obesity- related diseases. It is someone else's problem when parents have bad eating habits that they pass onto their children... as I have said, I am not saying fat tax is the only solution, what is your solution harry? It is very simplistic to think that a person being fat will not affect anyone else. In a society, each individual is inter- connected and inter- dependent, as I have explained above, these are a few examples of how one person's choice to be obese effects others.

"Personal responsibility needs to play a role"
-Well, that's the point of the tax actually, it's saying to people who make these choices, "you are costing our health system- our society- more by eating the way you do, so now you need to pay for those choices".

"...that everyone else should be punished with extra taxes because of their idiocy is ridiculous".
-The fat tax is what we could call a 'targeted tax'. It only taxes those who make unhealthy choices. Therefore, only those who have poor eating habits- such as the obese- will be taxed. Further, it works on a continuum, those who make very unhealthy choices pay a lot more, those who make a few unhealthy choices pay a little. So, as you can see, a fat tax actually encourages personal responsibility for one's decisions...

Fine. Why not tax fat people directly? You're overweight, you pay. I wouldn't agree with this, either, but it would be more reasonable and more easily enforced than what's being proposed.

While we're at it, I'd like to tax people who drop out of high school, people who refuse to work, people who have children they can't possibly support, people who engage in risky sports or leisure activities, and people who choose to live in high-risk cities. All of these people cost us money.

Some people have high metabolism, so they don't eat very well but are still thin, but still have high sugar diet related diseases etc. so that is an advantage of a fat tax- it taxes the point of sale, at the time of consumption.

Arry, it also taxes people who have no issues with obesity or unhealthiness. I can just imagine fat/unhealthy people not accepting any responsibility for their actions on the basis that they paid the tax, and as such are allowed to be as unhealthy as they want and shuffle most of the costs onto everyone else.

If you really want personal responsibility - make people pay for their own healthcare and/or health insurance. Or as a concession, just remove Medicare coverage for lifestyle-induced illness/disease.

Isn't this America, right now? Most inefficient healthcare system in the world (apart from places where there is none at all) and nation with the most obese population (by weight?), land of the diet pills and celebrity diet gimmicks? Not to mention that everyone has to sue everyone else because nobody will pick up their health bills (so much for defending your rights via the courts system). And it defeats the purpose of having a health system if you are only going to treat accident victims or make value judgements at point of admission to screen patients.

Life expectancy might actually go down for the population over there. That impacts everybody through the economy. Employers must be paying through the nose and if workers are having all these health problems, then the economy is making a loss too.

Personal responsibility is useless for many people. These people are so fat that they have passed the point of easy return (losing weight via exercise, eating less), and need surgery.

If people don't like a tax because they have tax-phobia then what are the alternatives? Personal responsibility has been tried and tested. It does not always work, and it is not working here.

Health insurance still does not ensure the same level of personal responsibility as a fat tax. Say 100 people are part of an insurance scheme, and 10 of them are overweight (would probably be closer to 50 now-days but anyway). They all put in the same amount of money, but the 10 unhealthy ones are more likely to be 'dipping in' than the healthy members because obesity increases your risk of disease etc, so once again, the healthy people are covering the unhealthy people's habits and personal responsibility is 'distributed' among all the members. In contrast, with the fat tax, the individual pays there and then for their food choices.

We've done it with cigarettes. Perhaps it could play one part in a national campaign to 'get active, get healthy' or something.

arry

If you want a "Fat Tax" then base it on Body Mass Index. if you exceed a certain BMI You pay a tax. then you and only you are responsible, and you and only you feel the coercive nature of the tax.

Eating too many carrots makes your skin orange. That's not good. Should we tax carrots? Driving red cars has been shown to increase the driver of getting speeding tickets? Increase the tax only on red cars? Do we tax gum,pepper,sugar free substitute? There is no nutritional benefits there.

We don't live in a vaccum.


I agree. But how? taxes are one option, but are there others. This mythical "personal responsibility" seems to be code for "who cares, just let them die". Which might be fine for many judging by the responses, but the thing is I will pay more tax and society will make a loss if that happens (less workers, money wasted on disease expenses etc).


There is no law against being fat (no "state force" here!) or eating whatever you want. This is where "personal responsibility" has got us to.


This is even worse than a tax. Why is this even being suggested? It is humiliating and unethical. Excessive carrot consumption and harm that results hardly has the impact on the budget that obesity does.

The reasoning behind a fat tax is to cover the extra cost of treating obese patients, for example new ambulances, doorways, beds, and trolleys.

The article below describes some of the difficulties very weighty patients cause.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... ion=justin

Thanks for that Christine. Just another example of how we are all inter-connected and of how one person's choices affect many.

Quite absurd though isn't it?! "We can't fit them through the ambulance... doors.... what should we do?! Strap them to the roof racks? Will the roof hold?"

But in all seriousness, this is a significant problem, which is why we must be looking for ways to fix it. How ironic that we have become so technologically advanced that everyone (in our nation at least) has access to all the food they can need so they will never go hungry and as a result some people are eating so much that they are causing themselves harm. Never underestimate the stupidity of the human race.

In America they have special ambulances that have extra resilient suspension. Usually people have to be put in some form of harness (or a skip?) and a crane is used to lift them out of their house (sometimes this requires fire and rescue if there are internal stairs or demolition of parts of the building) to get them out. Pretty sad.

And all of that is billed to me, the taxpayer.

Perhaps there may have to be specialist hospitals for treating such patients if our society gets more girthier. And I think it is abhorrent that people in places like Africa are dying of starvation, while over here people are dying because they ate too much. Sick world...