fast food, we’re talking about tasty delicious addictive products that have terrible nutritional value and is making people sick. there is an obesity epidemic in america, obesity is linked to so many medical problems as i’m sure you all know.
i’m saying treat it as a public health issue the same way cigarettes were handled many years ago. get a half trillion dollar fine to pay for diabetes care for the victims and tax individual fast food items like cigarettes, replacing the dollar menu with the $10 menu, for example, for the same amount of food. little ceasars $5 hot and ready? it’s gonna have to be $50 hot and ready. (bag of carrots is still like 50c btw.)
somehow in all the politics i’ve read i’ve never seen anyone take this position. wtf? this is a great fuckin idea. who loses? the multi billion dollar companies that have been getting rich by exploiting minimum wage workers and making communities sick? they might have to close some of their stores, omg, the horror. it’d be like tearing down smokestacks, these places are fuckin evil.
read my lips: no. food. taxes.
gvt should tax fast food a little bit but not as much as i’m suggesting
really go with my idea because it’s a great idea and thank you for saying it
I’m curious about the fast food world. I used to work for Pizza Hut back in the 90’s. I graduated HS in 1994 so I started working there in the summer. I made minimum wage. I think $5.05? Worked my way up to assistant manager and was making $25K a year in 1997. Was AM for 3 years. Left in Oct of 1999. But I worked crazy hours like 50-70 hours depending on what was going on. I don’t know the prices now but I do know when I see a commercial I always think it’s cheap. I think a medium supreme was $11.99 when I worked there? I know I’ve seen ads for 3 toppings for $7.99 lately. That’s crazy to me. I remember arguing w/ customers that were pissed a pizza was like $13 or whatever. And this was 20 years ago.
From a pure policy standpoint, this would be effective and has been talked about in some narrow examples (sodas in NYC)… From a political standpoint this is like going to the nearest subway station, dousing yourself in gasoline, waiting for an approaching express train that does not stop at your station, lighting yourself on fire and lunging for the third rail as the train arrives.
Like if the Dem candidate proposed this in 2020, Trump’s o/u would be like 42.5 states.
Look how nuts people go over paying 10 cents for plastic bags, having to opt-in for straws or the aforementioned soda tax or size limit, whatever it was. Combine and multiply by an order of magnitude.
Also it would be detrimental to a lot of poor people, at least during the transition period. People who live on the dollar menu or dollar stores as their grocery stores often do not have access to supermarkets with produce sections and affordable, healthy food.
All that said, a version of this could be viable in like 20 years.
It wouldn’t be a regressive tax. If McDonalds wants to sell a salad or an impossible burger, it wouldn’t be taxed. But any addictive harmful faux food substitute on the menu is going to be taxed the fuck because it’s legit worse than cigarettes
Both of those could be chock-a-block full of “empty” “unhealthy” calories. And as long as you add fast casual and other sit down restaurants to the list you might be able to avoid making it regressive and just making it totally nanny-state garbage instead…
This could work - but you just tax HFCS, MSG, etc… So it’s targeted at the specific ingredients. Of course, taxing HFCS = taxing corn, so nobody who wants to be POTUS will ever support it because of Iowa.