http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2009/09/time_for_a_sugar_tax_to_fight.html
This idea is wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with personal responsibility, which is the cornerstone of sustainable weight loss. Personal responsibility is literally your individual duty to control yourself. As a human being you are gifted with free will. You can choose to do what you want. Certainly civilization requires certain guidelines as to what is acceptable and tolerable, but for the most part you can roam free. In the sense of weight control, you can choose what to put in your mouth for sustenance. There is no higher power forcing you to consume. It is only you. If you don’t stop yourself from chowing down on two dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts for breakfast, well my friend, you’re out of luck. When you become a parent, your personal responsibility extends to your offspring. Part of the wonderful evolution of humans includes the need to nurture and protect our young. That protection encompasses not only immediate outside threats (a rabid aardvark, for instance) but also hidden threats such as gallons of soda which will turn your child into Jabba the Hutt. The idea that a parent cannot control what a child eats is ludicrous. Does the kid bring home a paycheck? Can he drive to McDonald’s? Does he even know how to reach into the top cupboards? Parents that allow their children to eat junk food are solely responsible for the children getting fat. Period. Yes, I’m well aware that there are parents out there with children older than mine saying “Well, just wait until he goes to school and sees all the kids eating junk. He’s going to want it then!” To that I say: tough. If I don’t want Keegan to have something, he’s not going to have it. He can cry and scream all he wants. It’s never worked for him so far, so I’m guessing he won’t keep it up for very long. When I was growing up I didn’t have free reign of food. We always had desserts, but we also ate plenty of lean meats, vegetables, and low fat dairy. It wasn’t until I could buy my own food that I really started to eat unhealthy. It’s all about personal responsibility.
The other main issue I have with taxes is that they do nothing to modify behavior. Oh yes, I realize that the proponents of any kind of tax says it will. Let’s go look at the Michigan cigarette tax, shall we? Remember how everyone said that it would help control smoking in Michigan? Remember how they promised it would make the whole population healthier and it would turn Michigan into some kind of Shangri-La? Maybe it didn’t go that far, but it was close. The basic premise is that if you increase the cost of cigarettes, more people will quit. Well guess what? Michigan still has a higher smoking rate per capita than the national average. Sure there have been declines, but there have been declines nation-wide. It has nothing to do with taxes. It has to do with the national assault on cigarettes in general. If Michigan wanted people to quit smoking, it’d tax cigarettes at $50 a pack. That would get people to change their behavior. Incrementally increasing the costs only serves one purpose: it adds revenue without making the consumer so angry they actually quit. The same thing would happen with a tax on sugar. It would not stop people from eating sugar. It would simply add a new revenue stream that people would mildly complain about, but wouldn’t actually fight against. You might have a couple advocacy groups join the fray (I would guess the National Sugar Association would have a problem with it), but for the most part political figures would go along with it to appear concerned about the children. No one is going to strongly stand up to the Man about a tax on sugar.
If people can’t be held accountable for what they eat, then you are effectively saying that we need someone to control every aspect of our lives. If you can’t handle the most basic of human instincts, then you certainly can’t handle more complex interactions (like choosing what clothes to wear). I know there’s a problem, but what does Big Brother have to do with it? Government intervention is hardly the right remedy for the obesity epidemic. The answer is simple: stop eating so much and stop letting your kids eat so much!
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