Fat tax

[StraightShooter2]

This is a thought about taxing people based on their BMI (body mass index). People with higher BMI (e.x. Jack Scalfani) would pay more in taxes to help offset the medical costs of the obesity epidemic. Discuss.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Why stop there? Go for smoking tax, alcohol tax, painkiller tax, coffee tax, bacon tax, sedentary-lifestyle tax...

Besides, BMI is a bullshit metric.

 

[Fomo Hoire]

I don't think we could pull off getting everyone to report their BMIs, or even just their weights. The two main places I can think of that would collect them are the doctor and the DMV. Not everyone visits the doctor regularly, and they're bound by HIPAA anyways. I wouldn't trust the DMV to do a sanity check on the value I give them, plus as the Democrats say, the kind of people who have to eat fatty junk foods are too dumb to find the DMV.

I wouldn't be surprised if deathfats are so deathfat that they're legally disabled and a fat tax would run afoul of the ADA either.

You could try a sin tax, but that usually fails as a fundraiser, I doubt it would be any more reliable here.

I've heard of Japan having a fat tax, but they're much more homogenous than us and their idea of sweets include beans and sugar, or sweet potatoes. Their gluttony has vegetables, they're not a very good model for how we could handle things.

This seems about as reasonable as taxing people who coom too much. You can probably argue for why we should, but it makes no sense to consider until you can argue for how we would.

 

[StraightShooter2]

Why stop there? Go for smoking tax, alcohol tax, painkiller tax, coffee tax, bacon tax, sedentary-lifestyle tax...

Besides, BMI is a bullshit metric.

BMI does account for muscle mass - I don't remember the formula, but if it's muscle instead of fat, they use a different calculation.

 

[Exigent Circumcisions]

What if we just all get to push a fatty off of a scooter once a month?

 

[byuu]

Why stop there? Go for smoking tax, alcohol tax,

We already tax those.

 

[L50LasPak]

This has been proposed before, but there's a very logical arguement standing in the way of it: fat fuckers do already pay twice as much, or more, on food for themselves. An extra tax on top of that expense would do nothing to convince them to stop eating and lose weight, since they're already burning money.

 

[Ita Mori]

Can't we just burn fatties for fuel instead?

 

[DumbDude42]

We already tax those.

not quite the same
we tax alcohol and tobacco sales, not alcoholism and smoking habits
its like the difference between taxing sugar for everybody, or taxing fat people specifically for being fat

@StraightShooter2 it's a nice idea in theory, but completely impractical. like, do you wanna have the IRS call in every taxpayer for a monitored body fat measuring session in order to determine their individual tax rates? shit's unworkable.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Can't we just burn fatties for fuel instead?

You first, fatty.

 

[Godbert Manderville]

If only 5% of people are obese one can say it's a personal problem. When 50% are obese it's a systemic problem. Until the underlying causes are addressed, obesity will remain and possibly grow further. One of these problems is the types of food we have made cheap and readily available (packed with sugars), the other is the working lifestyle the economy demands (where people only have leisure time for eating and long stretches of sitting), and urbanisation also factors into it (the outdoors is not somewhere you want to frequently be).

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

If only 5% of people are obese one can say it's a personal problem. When 50% are obese it's a systemic problem. Until the underlying causes are addressed, obesity will remain and possibly grow further. One of these problems is the types of food we have made cheap and readily available (packed with sugars), the other is the working lifestyle the economy demands (where people only have leisure time for eating and long stretches of sitting), and urbanisation also factors into it (the outdoors is not somewhere you want to frequently be).

I fucking hate bugs.

 

[Godbert Manderville]

I fucking hate bugs.

But at least they won't randomly rob, rape, and kill you. Unless you live in Australia.

 

[Billy Beer]

In supermarket, put all of the sugary drinks, sweets and unhealthy food behind narrow doors that fat people can't fit through.

Ban all fast food and take-aways from people who require medical assistance for being a fatty.

 

[Considered HARMful]

We already tax those.

not quite the same
we tax alcohol and tobacco sales, not alcoholism and smoking habits
its like the difference between taxing sugar for everybody, or taxing fat people specifically for being fat

Exactly my point. The food is already taxed, so what meaning has a "smoking tax"? Is it a tax on the outcome of smoking, just as the supposed BMI tax would be a tax on the outcome?

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

not quite the same
we tax alcohol and tobacco sales, not alcoholism and smoking habits

That's because it's impossible to monitor people's consumption of vice without, for instance, a large system of cameras and microphones connected to the internet and constantly dialing out every second of every da-

Oh.

 

[Bonesjones]

Just remove sugar tarriffs and cut tax subsidies for corn.

 

[Slap47]

First issue is the food itself. Stop subsidizing corn, sugar, and soybeans. You can tax people forever, but making the food cheap in the first place doesn't help. The "Veggies are too expensive" thing needs to die since its not true, but raising the cost of junk food by simply not subsidizing it actually does encourage people to make prepared healthy meals.

Next issue is how people eat. I don't know how you actually correct for this. Three squared meals is dying off, but we still eat giant portion sizes. Its just normal. Americans eat really fast and eat alot before their brain recognizes that they've had enough. A nebulous tax on being a fatass doesn't solve this since people don't factor that in when they're actually eating. I see this as more of a question of self-discipline and mindfulness that needs to be encouraged more in general.

Third issue is justification for govt intervention. Sure alot of American healthcare is paid for by the taxpayer, but thats not the perception. Even New York tells pop/soda taxes to "fuck off". People just see this as the government bossing them around, and frankly it is because they aren't really getting anything out of it. "You don't pay for my healthcare, this is an issue of personal responsibility", etc, etc. America needs a universal public system that is singlepayer to justify what you're proposing.

 

[Cum Laudely]

BMI does account for muscle mass - I don't remember the formula, but if it's muscle instead of fat, they use a different calculation.

No it doesn't Brian Shaw is one of many examples bmi is trash he's 6 ft 8 in/203 cm and hovers between 385–440 lb/175–200 kg. Also a quick search proves bmi is nonsense.

"For a bodybuilder, BMI results are often inaccurate. However, you can use other tools to measure your body composition and health. ... Although BMI can be accurate for a large portion of the population, it often miscategorizes bodybuilders, who have an abundance of muscle, as overweight or obese.

You can't do anything about bone density. The more massive ones skeletal system is the more mass that will be around it (healthy or not) and their bmi will be off the charts. This looks obese to you?

 

[DumbDude42]

Just remove sugar tarriffs and cut tax subsidies for corn.

this would change very little
instead of dumping corn syrup into everything, manufacturers will just switch to dumping imported sugarcane syrup into everything, or start even growing sugar beets locally and make sugar syrup from those

No it doesn't Brian Shaw is one of many examples bmi is trash he's 6 ft 8 in/203 cm and hovers between 385–440 lb/175–200 kg. Also a quick search proves bmi is nonsense.

"For a bodybuilder, BMI results are often inaccurate. However, you can use other tools to measure your body composition and health. ... Although BMI can be accurate for a large portion of the population, it often miscategorizes bodybuilders, who have an abundance of muscle, as overweight or obese.

You can't do anything about bone density. The more massive ones skeletal system is the more mass that will be around it (healthy or not) and their bmi will be off the charts. This looks obese to you?
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hardcore weightlifters like that are extreme outliers. for the general population BMI works just fine.
of all the people who are 'obese' according to BMI, less than 1% are ripped chads, 99% are just fatties. that's as good as it gets for a metric that anybody can calculate at home.

for really good and detailed individual results you'll want to measure body fat percentage directly instead of just relying on BMI, but the tools needed to accurately measure that are pretty specialized, you'll probably have to go to a hospital or doctor to get that done.