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New Zealand scraps world-first smoking ‘generation ban’ to fund tax cuts
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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My intake of sugar has no affect on anyone else.
Food is a necessity: smoking is not
Obesity is also more complicated than just sugar. I can only go by personal anecdote here but I struggle with weight issues despite not eating much junk or overly processed food. A sugar tax would affect actual foods but not be sufficient nor even useful toward improving health
Your intake of sugar absolutely impacts other people when you end up with chronic health issues that other people have to help pay for.
Sugar doesn't just cause obesity, it also causes all kinds of cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9775518/
And sugar is not a necessity. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/added-sugar-in-the-diet/
You will get by just fine without sugar in your diet. I didn't say we should ban food, I said we should ban sugar. You're struggling to show me why it's so different from tobacco.
The only real differences are 1) everyone loves sugar, so they'll make up a reason for the double standard and 2) public consumption doesn't immediately hurt other people. But then I never said I was opposed to banning smoking in public so that's actually irrelevant.
No, I’m clearly stating that taxing sugar is neither clear cut nor is it sufficient to be in any way useful.
-- plenty of beneficial foods have sugar, and plenty of harmful foods do not
-- there’s lots of food with negative nutritional value but it’s not just sugar nor can it be clearly distinguished from other foods
— obesity is more a matter of habits and quantity than one ingredient .
Yeah it’s satisfying to demonize the hypothetical person who drinks two liter bottles of soda every day but that’s like cutting social programs because “welfare queens” or building a wall because “anchor babies”, or police needing military gear because “gangs”, or election results needing to be overturned because “fraud”. What they all have in common is they’re a target for outrage but not real or not significant.
I’d be all for a sugar tax if I thought it could be well defined or make a difference, especially if it could make a difference for me. However of all the people I know or have met struggling with weight issues, I don’t recall any being that hypothetical sugar queen, any with any significant sweets habit that would be affected, any that could in any way be changed with this approach
It's not as if there's some natural law obligating you to pay for anyone else's health issues. Your government is responsible for externalizing that private cost onto you and others, effectively subsidizing risk-taking and irresponsibility. If you don't like it, insist that people pay for their own health care and insurance at market rates, without subsidies.