What Will it Take for You to Start Eating Healthy? How About More Taxes?
America is literally known as the world’s fattest country these days, and we haven’t been doing too much about it on our own. We have known about our country’s status for a while now, and yet we are still eating fast foods, going to the buffets, and buying food that is high in fat and sugar. It almost seems like we have been waiting for an intervention – for someone to step in and make us eat healthy ! Well, it has happened, and you are not going to like the solution that the government has come up with!
They want to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, by making some extra money off of us to cover the deficit and making America a healthier country. You may have heard of the “fat tax” already, but they are closer than ever to passing this type of tax. They were able to do it successfully with tobacco a few years ago, and although people complained about it, we’ve gotten used to the high price of cigarettes, and maybe we’ll eventually get used to a higher price on fatty foods as well. However, they are talking about a tax hike of at least 10 percent, and it could go as high as 30 percent! This will make for some expensive nachos…
One of the things that is holding the government up on the fat tax is the definition of the word “unhealthy.” It will probably take a large team and quite some time debating over which foods are unhealthy and which are healthy. Everyone has a difference of opinion about this debate, and if the tax hike passes, I am sure there will be many complaints that the decisions made were not fair.
Will a fat tax solve the obesity problem in America? Has the smoking tax solved the lung cancer problem? Statistics show that since the tax hike on tobacco, lung cancer is down by 50 percent. That is a big number, and very encouraging for the people who initiated the raise in taxes. However, everyone knows that smoking is bad for you – even the people addicted to it admit that and want to quit. A lot of people who overeat are not ready to admit that they have a problem though, and many don’t see food as an addiction at all, so this may present itself as a difficulty in the fight against obesity.
One of the reasons they want to instill a fat tax is because of the money problems it will help solve. However, the government has been collecting money from tobacco for the last few years, and from the looks of it, that money hasn’t made a dent! How many things will they have to impose a tax hike on before it really helps? There are a lot of things they will be able to justify taxing, and maybe we should make sure that it stops with tobacco! Whatever the outcome is though, hopefully we can start making better eating choices and go down a notch or two in the world’s fattest country rank.
