Tax on junk food

On here we recently asked the question, "When will there be a tax on junk food?" In an article in today's Sunday Times, Minette Marrin asks the same. Here's an excerpt:

"I am sick of people talking about health education and “lifestyle choices”. What’s clearly needed, contrary to everything I’ve always thought, is a little compulsion. Our NHS and our economy cannot take the consequences of poor lifestyle choices. First, all schools should make healthy meals compulsory and should offer pupils one meal only – no choice – and make them eat it. (Allowances would be made for religious taboos and ill health.)

Second, the polluter must pay, as the Greens always say. The polluters who manufacture junk food of all kinds should be forced to label it, like cigarette packets, with simple information about calories. And the food itself, the pollutant, should be made extremely expensive, by high taxes, so that those who are polluting their own bodies would have a powerful incentive to stop.

Admittedly this is hard on the poorest, who eat the most junk food, but bad diets are not only bad for them. They are also expensive for the NHS and us. Healthier diets will not provide a quick fix, but the taxes from junk food could go straight to the coffers of the local NHS organisations, and that would do something fast to ease the pain of the inevitable cuts to come."

Read the article in full

Comments

[alice]

I find it funny that at my local Safeway store they are heavily promoting prostate awarenes. They are accepting donations verbally and visually. By posters at the checkout stands and threw a prompt on the credit card machine. What i find amusing is there is a little note that states" if your checker does not ask you if you want to donate to the prostate cancer awareness, you get a free 2 liter of soda!"

sad, but true!
alice in seward, alaska

[Shannsu]

Hey, if they start taxing the junk food, then the good healthy food will become proportionately less expensive... So the poor won't be as bad off as first thought. Bring it on! Tax junk and chemical additives! Hurray for that! Wish they did the same here in Canada. Can't believe how hard it is to buy organic produce in remote locations! Pfewie!