Author
|
Topic: Is it the end of fast food as we know it? (Read 2541 times) |
|
Mermaid
Archon
Posts: 770
Reputation: 8.47
Rate Mermaid
Bite me!
|
 |
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #15 on: 2006-11-11 19:28:17 » |
 |
back to the topic and to BASS,
i was thinking...regarding 'restricting' fast food consumption for a day/week scenario...i was thinking.. fast food is generally consumed by that section of the population that cannot afford good food at home. fast food is essentially cheap. fast food is high in fat, sugar and salt. obesity is not occuring because of excesses, but because of malnutrition helped on by cheap food that is not balanced or nutritious. i can make a mac and cheese dish...with aged cheese, cream and milk...preped over two days. it is probably higher in fats and calories. but it is an entirely different animal from the packaged microwaveable mac and cheese boxes that uses flourescent coloured fake cheese and has more preservatives than ingredients. the issue of obesity cannot be divorced from poverty. its a vicious cycle.
|
|
|
|
|
David Lucifer
Archon
Posts: 2642
Reputation: 8.94
Rate David Lucifer
Enlighten me.
 
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #16 on: 2006-11-11 19:45:52 » |
|
Quote from: Mermaid on 2006-11-11 19:28:17
the issue of obesity cannot be divorced from poverty. its a vicious cycle.
|
I recall reading on more than one occasion that it is a myth that healthy eating is more expensive than fast food. What are the facts?
|
|
|
|
|
Mermaid
Archon
Posts: 770
Reputation: 8.47
Rate Mermaid
Bite me!
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #17 on: 2006-11-12 02:02:56 » |
|
Quote from: David Lucifer on 2006-11-11 19:45:52
Quote from: Mermaid on 2006-11-11 19:28:17 the issue of obesity cannot be divorced from poverty. its a vicious cycle.
|
I recall reading on more than one occasion that it is a myth that healthy eating is more expensive than fast food. What are the facts?
|
cost wise, i suppose it isnt expensive. but most junk food comes from cans and subsidied products(hfcs, soy, transfat, gmo foods etc) that the govt keeps pushing towards the poor people..which are nutritionally rather pale. crisco is cheaper than butter or cream. preservatives increase shelf life and given volume of sales, i suppose it makes food cheaper..but then again, as portion control research has shown...the cheaper the food is..people will consume more of it...
take the national school lunch program for example...
usda commodities available for national lunch program: http://dese.mo.gov/divadm/food/PDF/food_dist_list.pdf
for perspective of the 'problem'.. here is a relevant, altho slightly dated article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/07/FDGQ5J5UTJ1.DTL
i am pasting bits of it..
Cooper, all 5-foot-1 of her, is the Iron Chef of Berkeley's school lunch program, and the pizzas are a sign of serious progress in her mission: to wean the Berkeley public schools off their diet of frozen, processed, trans fat- and sugar-filled foods, and onto fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and other nourishing foods.
Other schools in California are making similar changes, hoping to turn back the tide of childhood obesity and diabetes. But none has an Ann Cooper, a professional chef hired by the Chez Panisse Foundation to transform years of talk about healthy food into actual dishes like chicken cacciatore and organic sushi.
Before landing in Berkeley in October, Cooper spent five years running the food program at the exclusive Ross School in East Hampton, N.Y. She's cheffed in hotels and on cruise ships, catered for 20,000 people at the Telluride Film Festival, cooked backstage for the Grateful Dead and helped kids at Harlem's Promise Academy get off what they call "snack crack" -- junk food -- in favor of healthier choices.
Nothing's proven quite as challenging as lunch in Berkeley.
Many people think Berkeley schoolkids already eat as though they're at Chez Panisse, because of highly publicized programs like the Edible Schoolyard kitchen-garden at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, a pet project of organic- and sustainable food guru Alice Waters, as well as Berkeley High's brief experiment with organic lunches a few years ago.
But in reality, when Cooper arrived school lunch on Berkeley's 16 campuses looked a lot like school lunch everywhere. It was chicken nuggets, corn dogs, burgers and Tater Tots, all processed, frozen and packaged in heat-and-serve plastic.
"Cooking" meant counting and defrosting. The central kitchen, which prepares food for 11 elementary schools, had no stove (and still doesn't).
"When I came, they were using Wonder Bread. For real," she says. "I had 50 employees and none of them cooked."
She's still working through the cases of U.S. government commodity food stacked in the school district's storeroom and walk-in freezer in a seismic red-tagged building on Oregon Street in southwest Berkeley.
By law, the commodity food can't be sent back, sold or even given away. The boxes include frozen burritos loaded with salt and saturated fat, and cans of California peaches packed in sugary syrup.
Cooper flips open one box and shows what passed for lunch until recently: a frozen, crust-less, white-bread pocket stuffed with peanut butter and jelly -- an "Uncrustables," made by Smucker's from U.S. school lunch commodity ingredients.
Its label lists at least 25 ingredients, including high-fructose corn syrup and three other sugars, trans fats and enough additives and preservatives that, when thawed and perched on a desk, it survived a week with no visible changes except a little jelly seepage, like any PB&J. A similar processed grilled cheese sandwich has been sitting on the desk of one of Cooper's employees since November; it still looks as if it just rolled off the assembly line.
is it scary enough? and this is the food that the govt feeds children...the citizens of tomorrow. other than the fact that adults do not have a clue about cooking..never mind nutrition. comments?
healthy food isnt expensive...but hey! free is free, huh?
|
|
|
|
|
Mermaid
Archon
Posts: 770
Reputation: 8.47
Rate Mermaid
Bite me!
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #18 on: 2006-11-13 02:12:55 » |
|
lucifer, i found two more links for you.
one is old..
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/02/22/philpott/
I'm Hatin' It
How the feds make bad-for-you food cheaper than healthful fare
By Tom Philpott
22 Feb 2006
If you're going to talk about poverty, food, and the environment in the United States, you might as well start in the Corn Belt.
This fertile area produces most of the country's annual corn harvest of more than 10 billion bushels, far and away the world's largest such haul. Where does it all go? The majority -- after accounting for exports (nearly 20 percent), ethanol (about 10 percent, and climbing), and excess (another 10 percent) -- anchors the world's cheapest food supply in purchasing-power terms.
Our food system is shot through with corn. It feeds the animals that feed us: more than 50 percent of the harvest goes into domestic animal operations. About 5 percent flows into high-fructose corn syrup, adding a sweet jolt to soft drinks, confections, and breakfast cereal. All told, it's a cheap source of calories and taste. Yet all this convenience comes with a price -- and not just an environmental one.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the amount Americans spend on food as a percentage of disposable income has fallen from 15.4 percent in 1980 to 10.8 percent in 2004. But while we've spent less money on food, our waistlines have expanded. The obesity rate, after hovering around 15 percent from 1960 to 1980, surged to 31 percent in the last 25 years, USDA figures show. The percentage of overweight children tripled in the same time period. Meanwhile, incidence of type II diabetes, a diet-related condition with a host of health-related complications, leapt 41 percent from 1997 to 2004.
Attack of the killer corn
Why the heavily subsidized corn harvest amounts to an annual environmental calamity.
This trend has hit low-income groups particularly hard. The obesity rates for "poor" and "near-poor" people stand at 36 percent and 35.4 percent, respectively, against an overall average of 29.2 percent for "non-poor," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. While the CDC doesn't break down diabetes rates by income, a look at the disease through the lens of ethnicity shows that those rates tend to align with economics: African Americans and Mexican Americans, for instance, have higher diabetes rates than whites, and lower median incomes.
Why do low-income people tend to exhibit more diet-related health problems? Adam Drewnowski, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, posits a simple answer: people are gaining weight and getting sick because unhealthy food is cheaper than healthy food -- thanks in large part to federal policies.
Sweetness and Power
If the USDA's food pyramid recommends two to five cups of fruits and vegetables per day, its budget -- mandated by Congress through the Farm Bill -- encourages different behavior altogether.
Under the Farm Bill, the great bulk of USDA largesse flows to five crops: corn, soy, cotton, wheat, and rice. Of the $113.6 billion in commodity subsidy payments doled out by the USDA between 1995 and 2004, corn drew $41.8 billion -- more than cotton, soy, and rice combined. By contrast, apples and sugar beets, the only other fruit or vegetable crops that draw federal subsidies, received $611 million over the same period. (The latter are generally processed into sweeteners.)
The huge corn payouts encourage overproduction, and have helped sustain a long-term trend in falling prices. According to figures from the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, the inflation-adjusted global commodity price for corn plunged 61 percent between 1983 and 2002. Today a bushel, roughly 56 pounds, fetches about $2.
Cheap corn, underwritten by the subsidy program, has changed the diet of every American. It has allowed a few corporations -- including Archer Daniels Midland, the world's largest grain processor -- to create a booming market for high-fructose corn syrup. HFCS now accounts for nearly half of the caloric sweeteners added to processed food, and is the sole caloric sweetener for mass-market soft drinks. Between 1975 and 1997, per-capita consumption jumped from virtually nothing to 60.4 pounds per year -- equal to about 200 calories per person, per day. Consumption has generally hovered around that level since.
According to Drewnowski and his student Pablo Monsivais, cheap and abundant additives such as HFCS allow manufacturers to sweeten food liberally without adding much to their production costs. For people on a tight budget, these additives can also make cheap food the most efficient way to get calories.
To illustrate his point, Drewnowski distinguishes between "energy-dense" and "nutrient-dense" foods. For energy-dense, think of a package of Ding Dongs -- 360 calories, 19 grams of fat, and a liberal dose of high-fructose corn syrup. For nutrient-dense, think of a three-ounce chunk of wild salmon, delivering high-quality protein and essential fatty acids, among other nutrients, in a 185-calorie package. The former will run you about a buck at any convenience store, bodega, or supermarket in the country. For the latter, prepare to sidle up to a pristine Whole Foods fish counter and shell out about $5.
From a short-term economic viewpoint, the Ding Dongs present a better deal: 360 calories per dollar, and no need for the time or skill to cook. "If you're on a limited income trying to feed a family, in a sense you're behaving rationally by choosing heavily sweetened and fat-laden foods," Drewnowski says.
The price gap between these two categories is growing. Drewnowski and Monsivais show that the overall cost of food consumed at home, when adjusted for inflation, has been essentially unchanged since 1980. But over the same time, the price of soft drinks plunged 30 percent, and the price of candy and other sweets fell 20 percent. Meanwhile, the price of fresh fruits and vegetables rose 50 percent.
"Energy-dense foods ... are the cheapest option for the consumer," Drewnowski says. "As long as the healthier lean meats, fish, and fresh produce are more expensive, obesity will continue to be a problem for the working poor."
Thus far, government efforts to address diet-related health problems among low-income Americans have done little to reduce incidence of obesity and diabetes. One reason may be that even when they do account for the economics of different types of foods, such programs often neglect other pressures faced by low-income families.
In 1999, for example, the USDA began promoting a revised "Thrifty Food Plan," designed to help people choose low-cost, healthy foods. But as Diego Rose of Tulane University's Department of Community Health Sciences showed in a 2004 study, the plan failed to account for time stresses on working-class families. Rose calculated that it would take an average of 16 hours per week to prepare the meals outlined in the Thrifty plan, and that working women tended to have only about six hours per week to devote to the kitchen at the time the plan was unveiled.
Changing Diets, and Lives
Grassroots, community-driven efforts may prove more effective in transforming diets than any federal policy. The Los Angeles-based Community Food Security Coalition represents 325 organizations in the U.S. and Canada dedicated to "building strong, sustainable local and regional food systems that ensure access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food to all people at all times."
Courtesy of Added Value.
Unlike the USDA and other pieces of the federal bureaucracy, groups like CFSC tend to view food as part of a broader economic-development effort. "Not only are people in low-income communities getting sick from the food they have access to, but the economies are sick, too," says Hank Herrera, a pioneer in the community food-security movement who has served on CFSC's board. Herrera runs the Rochester, N.Y.-based Center for Popular Research, Education, and Policy and the New York Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. "You can't separate community-level economics from food advocacy."
Herrera became active in food politics in 1993, after the only supermarket in his northeast Rochester neighborhood burned down. Median household income in the neighborhood hovered below the poverty line; its economic profile resembled that of the South Bronx. The chain that owned the store opted not to rebuild, and residents faced two options familiar to people in poor neighborhoods all over the country: travel to a wealthier neighborhood to buy food, or shop at corner stores, where the prices are high and fresh food is scarce.
Herrera helped found North East Neighborhood Alliance. Although the group put the numbers together to convince the Dutch multinational supermarket chain Tops to open an outlet in the area, residents weren't satisfied. "We realized it was great to have a supermarket in the area. But the profits leave the neighborhood, and local farmers and producers are ignored," Herrera says. So NENA kept organizing. Today, the group oversees a 2.7-acre tract that houses a working organic farm and a restaurant. "There was a pent-up demand for consistent access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and we delivered it," Herrera says. "And we created not only jobs, but capital formation. The profits stay here."
Ken Meter has seen the same dangerous patterns in less populous places. "The situations in rural and urban areas aren't that much different," says Meter, of the Minneapolis-based Crossroads Resource Center. "Most farmers in the Midwest are producing for a global commodity market, not for their neighbors or even themselves." Not only has that model helped lead to rising obesity rates -- according to a recent study by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Rural Health Practice, 20 percent of rural seventh-graders qualify as obese, versus 16 percent for their urban peers -- it has also been disastrous for local economies.
In one study in southeastern Minnesota, Meter found that between 1997 and 2003, local farmers sold an annual average of $912 million into the global commodity market. But to do so, they spent a jaw-dropping average of $996 million each year -- meaning an average annual loss of $84 million. Meanwhile, area residents spent $500 million per year buying food from outside the region, and another $500 million purchasing farm fertilizer and other inputs produced outside the region. Combined, that makes an outflow of $1 billion -- or more than the area brings in by selling into the commodity market.
"Essentially, this economy is extractive," Meter says. "Our food system doesn't build wealth in our high-producing areas, it extracts wealth." Meter says the area's economy benefits not local farmers or consumers, but rather the large operations like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, which thrive on low prices for commodity inputs. The federal government picks up the tab for a failing economy; between 1997 and 2003, federal subsidies poured into southeastern Minnesota an average of $98 million per year.
Meter reckons that if the region's consumers were to buy 15 percent of their food from local sources, it would generate as much income for the region as two-thirds of farm subsidies. He says the Southeast Minnesota Food Network, an organization formed in 2001 to refocus area farmers on producing for the local market and encourage consumers to buy local, has been using his data to recruit new members.
As the federal government dithers with its food pyramids and ruinous cheap-corn policy, low-income communities are organizing to gain control over the quality of their food supply. Meter's work in the Midwest and Herrera's in the Northeast represent the rumblings of a growing real-food underground -- an upsurge that challenges not just the hegemony of processed food, but also the social relations that allow it to thrive.
and the other is recent..like today
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/11/12/high_prices_unhealthy_foods/
High prices, unhealthy foods
By Christopher Kimball | November 12, 2006
ONE RECENT Saturday, I played a game, my own supermarket version of "The Price is Right." Quaker Instant Oatmeal with Apple & Cinnamon, $5 per pound; plain rolled oats for 75 cents. Frozen green beans, $2 per pound; fresh for 79 cents. Kellogg's Corn Flakes, $2.50 per pound while Lucky Charms were almost double at $4.40. Higher prices, lower quality.
The benefits of the capitalist marketplace are well understood. Computers, cars, clothing, housing, etc., all become relatively cheaper over time and, for the most part, provide more value as well. Just look at what Martha Stewart did for K-Mart or IKEA for the furniture industry.
This is why capitalism is heralded as such a democratic economic model. The hand at the tiller is consumer demand. For the most part, that means higher quality at a lower price. The constantly reengineered iPod is just one more example of the benefits of the free market. Yet this simple formula, one that has brought so much prosperity to America, can reach a point beyond which the consumer's long-term interests are no longer being served.
The food industry cannot improve on the flavor of a perfect peach or a just-picked Macoun apple. Not all human interventions are bad, though: Early on, cooks had to preserve their foods over the winter, so they came up with smoking, brining, salting, air-drying, and so on . This process produced, as an added benefit, many wonderful foods in and of themselves -- Smithfield ham, corned beef, succotash, dried sausages, salt cod, etc. These were the first "processed foods." But since that time, something perverse has happened to the food industry -- something that, much like a cancer, has subverted the natural economic model.
What happened? Let's consider the story of trans fats. Margarine, invented in France in 1869 as a low-cost alternative to butter ( and made with sheep stomachs, cow udders, lard, heat, and lye) was reengineered in this country through the process of hydrogenating vegetable oils, thus turning polyunsaturated oils into solids, the perfect substitute for butter. The brilliant moment, the point of transformation for the modern food industry, was when this new product was sold as a health food. It turned out, of course, that the hydrogenation process converted these fatty acids into trans fats -- a new shape that was hard for the body to digest. Yet the myth of margarine as healthier than butter continues to this day.
Other less-than-healthy ingredients followed margarine onto store shelves : high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, artificial colors and flavors, and preservatives. While the economics of the computer industry leads to obvious gains for the consumer, the opposite is true in the food industry . The reason is simple: Commodities are a lousy business. The products cannot easily be branded, and the margins are slim. Only 5 percent of the retail price of a pint of strawberries goes to the grower. The rest is marketing, distribution, retailing, and overhead. So a food product that can be patented and branded like Coca-Cola is a vastly preferable economic proposition than selling grapes. Distribution and shelf life are also key economic factors -- hence food companies' preference for products sold in cans, bottles, boxes, and the frozen food section.
But the food industry faces a conundrum -- how to sell a lower-quality product at a higher price? The only solution is marketing. Create the need, and the consumer will come.
The clever advertising folks don't just sell the taste of their products. They sell them as low-fat or as fortified with vitamins (Wonder Bread). Then they perform the ultimate marketing trick , by claiming, as they did with margarine, that processed foods are actually superior to natural foods.
They even have figured out how to sell against themselves. Be healthy! Buy a "sports drink" instead of a soda! Yet these large bottles of "ades" typically contain at least as much high-fructose corn syrup as does the original, smaller can of Coke or Pepsi.
The industry has reached what I would term the "tipping point." It is a perversion of writer Malcolm Gladwell's notion of how products become wildly popular. It is the point after which human interference no longer makes food cheaper, more plentiful, and safer. It is now more dangerous, more expensive, and less in our own interests to consume it. What consumers should want -- good flavor and good health -- has been replaced by what the industry wants -- an addiction to expensive, highly processed trademarked brands that will burden our health system and lead to a much lower quality of life. Proof? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of the children born in 2000 will end up with diabetes as adults. Within two years, more Americans will die from obesity-related disease than smoking. Today, the medical cost of treating obesity related disease is well over $100 billion and climbing.
As an added insult, they have beaten the nutritionists at their own game. They have trained us, like particularly dull-witted monkeys, to believe their health claims by subverting the very system of nutrition facts and figures that were supposed to help consumers make healthy choices. One 1.3-ounce Nutri-Grain bar , for example, does not appear particularly unhealthy. The box states that each bar provides 140 calories, 3 grams of fat, and half a gram of saturated fat. Yet a 12-ounce serving of chicken soup -- a vastly superior food choice -- has roughly the same calories and fat. The lesson? Stop buying food by the numbers.
Many would claim that the food industry is simply giving us what we want: full-flavored, shelf stable, convenient food choices. We could, through different purchasing decisions, change the food industry overnight. But are we up to the task of saving ourselves? I doubt it. Consumers would have to make decisions based on their long-term self-interest -- something that both marketers and politicians have successfully bet against since the beginning of time.
Christopher Kimball is the founder of Cook's Illustrated magazine and host of "America's Test Kitchen."
|
|
|
|
|
Perplextus
Adept
Gender: 
Posts: 55
Reputation: 7.46
Rate Perplextus
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #19 on: 2007-01-03 07:00:58 » |
|
I'll admit I skimmed this post, and I apologize if someone brought this up and I missed it, but wouldn't a better alternative to a governmental "ban" (a delegalization) of unhealthy foods be a tax on the producers of those foods, the proceeds of which would fund public healthcare for diseases related to consumption of those foods, as well as education programs about healthier alternatives? There is a limit to the responsibility consumers can take; if it is not economically feasible to eat healthy, what can people do? Closing fast food chains won't make health food (sufficiently) cheaper or more available. Forcing a discontinuation of sweet breakfast cereals won't put an end to sweet toothes--people will just pour sugar into their cereals. But forcing corporations to pay for the detrimental effects of their products would at least provide them with incentive to produce less harmful and more healthy food.
This topic ties in very much with the war on drugs. People ought to have the right to assume the risk of consuming whatever they wish, and it should fall to the producers of potentially-harmful consumables to take responsibility for the harm their products may cause. That way, if people want to consume those products irresponsibly, the producers will lose money and thereby lose incentive to produce them, limiting availability. As availability decreases, fewer people will have access to the potentially harmful things they desire, such that if they want to maintain their access to those things, they will have to use them more responsibly, or else risk losing them all together. It will also of course be in the interest of the producers to deliver this message directly to the consumers: "if you want to keep us in business, use our products responsibly."
Seems like pretty iron-clad economic logic to me, anyone care to refute it?
At any rate, I simply cannot endorse any government prohibition pertaining to what any person is able to do to their own body (so long as it is to their own body alone). The benefit of capitalism is that market pressures can often take the place of executive force.
|
Praise Bob!
|
|
|
Walter Watts
Archon
Gender:
Posts: 1571
Reputation: 8.90
Rate Walter Watts
Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #20 on: 2007-01-03 15:08:33 » |
|
<snip>
Quote from: Perplextus on 2007-01-03 07:00:58
This topic ties in very much with the war on drugs. People ought to have the right to assume the risk of consuming whatever they wish, and it should fall to the producers of potentially-harmful consumables to take responsibility for the harm their products may cause. That way, if people want to consume those products irresponsibly, the producers will lose money and thereby lose incentive to produce them, limiting availability. As availability decreases, fewer people will have access to the potentially harmful things they desire, such that if they want to maintain their access to those things, they will have to use them more responsibly, or else risk losing them all together. It will also of course be in the interest of the producers to deliver this message directly to the consumers: "if you want to keep us in business, use our products responsibly."
Seems like pretty iron-clad economic logic to me, anyone care to refute it?
At any rate, I simply cannot endorse any government prohibition pertaining to what any person is able to do to their own body (so long as it is to their own body alone). The benefit of capitalism is that market pressures can often take the place of executive force.
|
<snip>
Sounds keenly reasonable to me.
Someone change my (our) minds...... 
Walter
|
Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
|
|
|
Ophis
Magister
Posts: 176
Reputation: 6.24
Rate Ophis
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #21 on: 2007-01-03 15:57:19 » |
|
I'm sorry guys, but I can't follow the logic of Perplextus' post...
Quote:| [Perplextus]: "People ought to have the right to assume the risk of consuming whatever they wish" |
I agree with this statement. To me, this means that individuals need to take responsibility (assuming the risks) for their actions (consuming whatever).
Quote:| [Perplextus]: "it should fall to the producers of potentially-harmful consumables to take responsibility for the harm their products may cause" (...) "if you want to keep us in business, use our products responsibly." |
This seems to contradict the first statement. Anything can be "potentially harmful" and a producer cannot be held responsible for whatever harm their products *may* cause. Alcohol comes to mind as a product that can obviously be "potentially harmful". Should all wine producers go bankrupt because of the enormous liabilities that the abuse of their product can *potentially* generate?
Quote:| [Perplextus]: "I simply cannot endorse any government prohibition pertaining to what any person is able to do to their own body (so long as it is to their own body alone)" |
I totally agree with you on this one. In line with what I was trying to argue earlier in this thread, there can be different degrees of prohibition. Taxation, protectionism, and other forms of government interference can be effective means to make the cost of an item prohibitively expensive. I disagree with Hermit's views that taxes can be arbitrarily imposed to compensate for an incalculable amount of "social costs" that one's private actions allegedly generate.
|
|
|
|
|
Hermit
Archon
Posts: 4287
Reputation: 8.94
Rate Hermit
Prime example of a practically perfect person
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #22 on: 2007-01-03 18:21:48 » |
|
[Ophis] I disagree with Hermit's views that taxes can be arbitrarily imposed to compensate for an incalculable amount of "social costs" that one's private actions allegedly generate.
[Hermit] But I think that this is a complete mischaracterization of what I said. Given that the costs are far from "incalculable" (as that is effectively what actuaries do on a continuous basis, and indeed many non-actuarial, yet valid socioeconomic methods, also exist to perform these calculations which are applied in law on a continuous basis), the taxation is not arbitrary. However, even if it were arbitrary, taxes generally are. For example, consider the cost per ton/mile or tonne/km or passenger mile/km of the different forms of transportation, and you will discover that the train provides the greatest benefit, yet receives the lowest subsidies, the lowly private car pays the most in taxes, yet contributes the smallest cost factor to road-building (one properly loaded truck causes about the same damage to a properly constructed road as does some 3000 to 30,000 properly loaded cars). So cars and drivers pay exponentially more in taxation than the rest of the country, trucks are the principle beneficiary, trains are lamentably unable to compete with trucks, costing society in CO2 handling, surplus deaths due to nasty aerosol particulates, much higher fuel importation levels than would otherwise be required and given that transport costs represented approximately 18% of of the CPI and PPI before they were removed by Bushitter&Co, a much higher CPI & PPI rate than reported - which represents a massive not terribly well hidden, but horribly inequitable tax.
Kind Regards
Hermit
|
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
|
|
|
Perplextus
Adept
Gender:
Posts: 55
Reputation: 7.46
Rate Perplextus
|
|
Re:Is it the end of fast food as we know it?
« Reply #23 on: 2007-01-03 18:37:09 » |
|
Hermit just put it better than I did. I misused the word "potential". Yes, anything can be potentially harmful, but it's the stuff that actually IS harmful that incurs a "social cost". In other words, the taxation ought to be directly proportionate to the amount of harm actually incurred by irresponsible use of the product. For example, if alcohol was taxed to pay for cirrhosis treatments, liver transplants, drunk driving damages/injuries, rehab programs, and other related medical expenses, these taxes would have to be proportionate to the rate these services were actually used. An increase in responsible drinking would decrease the detrimental effects of alcohol, and reduce the amount of taxation necessary. Bottom line is if people are using your product to hurt themselves, that's your responsibility. You can't make potentially harmful products available and then not take responsibility for when people harm themselves (or others) with those products. It should be the government's role to impose responsibility, not to take responsibility. By the same token, an imposed system of taxation proportionate to the amount of harm done through the use of a given product (with the proceeds going to treatment and education) could also do away with the many lawsuits that occur.
And, as Hermit said, it is quite possible to determine the amount of harm (and thus the social cost) done with the use of a given product.
|
Praise Bob!
|
|
|
|
Logged
