Comments | nekrenas: "It isn't God who hates fags. It's Michael Bloomberg."

nekrenas

"It isn't God who hates fags. It's Michael Bloomberg."

Oct 05, 2009 21:49

The normally liberal writers of Slate have gotten themselves worked up over the ascendant liberal enthusiasm for food policing and other paternalisms. The article is primarily about taxing sugary soda. As a raging Tenther of a libertarian I find this idea ... mostly unobjectionable. I more or less agree with Matt Yglesias on this: you have to raise ( Read more... )

wonkage, libertarianism

Comments 4

marymcglo October 6 2009, 19:50:48 UTC

I think that a tax on soda would be pretty much entirely driven by the "War on Obesity", which to me is problematic to me. If it were part of a general health campaign I'd probably be fine with it, but I'd expect them to also tax "diet" sodas ( ... )

nekrenas October 6 2009, 20:07:51 UTC

Why do you put "diet" in quotes? I don't really like soda, so I never bothered to pay attention to the differences between all the sweeteners and blah blih blablah. I look at a can of Diet Coke and it says it has zero calories. And I tend to be skeptical that artificial sweeteners cause cancer next week or something.

marymcglo October 6 2009, 21:34:31 UTC

Oh. There are studies being thrown around that artificial sweeteners don't actually fool the body into thinking it's had sugar, so don't tend to reduce calories consumed. That's why I put "diet" in quotes.

Artificial sweeteners aside, I'm not convinced that diet soda is any less detrimental to health than regular soda. I'm less concerned about HFCS/aspartame/whatever than the other junk they put in there (there seem to be some plausible studies on phosphoric acid, for instance).

gybefan2000 October 7 2009, 15:45:30 UTC

I went through a pretty heavy patch of smoking a little while ago, and I know taxes helped a ton, looking at my receipt and thinking how much I was being gouged and that it could easily get worse in the future. But yeah, I think I'm similarly unconvinced about soda taxes because of the "slippery slope" you mention w/ the claptrap about noncaloric sweeteners increasing caloric consumption. It's probably true overall, but certainly not in every case, and it seems pretty tenuous to assume taxation is the best means of controlling that.