The Downsides of a Tax on Junk Food

Your eyes open, you yawn, you stretch, and then you crawl out from under the covers and wait for the day to tell you what to do. You don’t like cooking early in the morning so you decide to just grab a bite to eat on your way to work. You climb into your car and set off down the road. Your stomach starts churning during the ride telling you that it needs nourishment. So you stop at the local fast food restaurant hoping to get a nice warm meal for a nice low price. You order your food, and wait for the cashier to tell you the total. She reads the $6.52 bill off, and you can’t help but ask if there was a mistake. She puts your order in once again and the same total comes across the screen. Then she tells you about the new “fat tax” that the government had just passed. You turn around and get into your car, mad at the world and go to work hungry, because the five dollar bill in your pocket just won’t cover your breakfast.

Your everyday life could change forever with a tax that can make you not only less happy but less healthy feeling. According to Lori Lipinski, “Fat actually sends a signal to your brain to tell you when to stop eating.” (Lipinski) This fat tax is the government’s way of getting Americans to eat healthier, lose weight, and overall decrease the population’s net weight. However would this tax really change the way that you eat? Or would it just increase the rate at which our economy is dropping? If you tax the food that people eat everyday wouldn’t it just take more money out of every citizen’s pocket? Or could this tax just become a huge mistake and a complete nightmare for everyone who is involved? Dr. W. Gifford Jones believes so, “It would be a taxation nightmare. There’s fat in so many food products. Where would you draw the line?” (Gifford Jones)

This brings me to a good point. Where would the government draw the line? What products would be considered taxable under this new tax? There is fat in almost everything that I personally consume on a daily basis. Is a little fat ok? Or does every product with fat in it receive a tax on it? The government would have a hard time justifying what exactly they could classify as a “fatty food.” This would mean that more of our money would be used to pay not only the workers who are putting in the time on this project but also to pay for the notifications for every

American and store that yields these products. Also how high would this tax be? A little tax would have absolutely no affect on anything because everyone would continue to buy what they normally do. A high tax could prevent them from buying as much of the products as they normally would. Low fat and all around every healthy food item is more expensive than a “fatty food.” This in itself would be a huge mistake. People might lose weight but they would be malnourished by not having the essential amount of vitamins, fat, or generally anything healthy that would be in the products that they can no longer afford to purchase enough of.

Low income people have to eat just as much as a higher income family. This tax would take food out of lower income family’s homes. Which as an end result make these families less healthy. You have to wean yourself off of addictive products and eating fatty foods that taste good is addictive. A sudden tax on these products and people having to eat less of them to get by would make some families very unhealthy by changing their eating habits so suddenly.

More than anything this tax would take away the freedoms that this country was originally founded on. You don’t need someone to tell you what and how much to eat. It is your choice completely! It is your body and the government does not own your body. You have the right to enjoy your life and enjoy what you want to eat. You have a choice whether you want to indulge yourself in every kind of food that you want to, be happy, and become overweight. Or to eat what the government tells you that you can eat and be unhappy, and skinny. I would much rather be happy, eat what I want, and die early. Than eat minimally and not what I want and live a little longer. Your life is your life and no one should be able to take your life and make it their own.

The government has been spending our tax dollars greedily and for themselves, not to help out the people of this great country. This tax just proves this point because they don’t have enough money to advertise or to make food providers use less fat in their products. Instead they are trying to make up this tax to give themselves more money to help cover the growing health care costs in our country. What they really need to be doing is stop spending so much money on everything else and stop trying to tell us what we can and cannot eat. We need to lower the cost of healthy foods so that they are comparable to that of the price of unhealthy foods,

and if this was done more people would buy healthy food, make themselves healthier, and eventually cut down on the cost of health care our nation has accumulated.

My boss is a heavy smoker and he eats out at least once every day. He has had two heart attacks and has had several blocked arteries. He still continues to smoke and eat out as much as he ever did. I asked him if he was planning on stopping at any point and he said he wouldn’t stop doing the things that he loves for anything. He said that he would rather enjoy himself while he is on this world than to live a longer and meaningless life. Some people love to eat healthy, live a straight edge life, do nothing controversial, and they should continue to do so. Other people love to indulge in activities that some people consider unhealthy, dangerous to our health, or generally just stupid, but these people are happy with the way that their life is going and who’s to tell them that they cannot do what they like to. I don’t think that anyone but god has the right to tell people how they should live their lives. Especially not the government.

A “fat tax” is a generally all around bad idea, it would have so many side effects that people would lose site of the original idea in the first place. There would be so many unhappy people about this tax it would only cause problems; therefore I believe that we should just be left alone to live and eat the way that we want to. No one is able to change our lives without us letting them.