Taxing the Random

It is hardly a novel idea, but one that is worthy of at least some discussion: Tax the unhealthy stuff in our food.

Last Thursday night, during my lecture on economic and foreign policies in the American Government course, I proposed the idea of providing health care to everyone in the country -- either by assisting citizens in buying private policies or by providing universal health care, pick your preference -- by taxing food based on the ingredients that are causing the various health complications in this country. This is based on the logic of supply and demand. Currently, in this country, 'junk' food is cheaper than food that is good for our bodies and thus our health.

I'm not suggesting that we only eat tofu for every meal -- I've yet to be convinced that tofu is (a) really food, and (b) entirely good for humans.

What I am suggesting is that if junk food were the same price as or more than the wholesome foods, perhaps the demand for junk food would go down. The supply would never entirely go away, but perhaps it would be naturally curtailed and be considered more of a luxury item rather than a necessity it is currently be perceived as by American society.

How we go about achieving this transformation is through a tax on the harmful ingredients. This has been proposed before, with very little success. The so-called "Twinkie Tax" didn't make it much beyond the press blitz that politicians engage in to make the populace think that something is being done. In 2009, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 67% of Americans were overweight -- half of those, 34% of the total, were obese. An additional 6% were extremely obese, for a total of 73% of Americans having a Body Mass Index of 25 or higher.

It was believed by many, inside and outside of this country, that the reason why Americans are so overweight in comparison to the rest of the world is that we eat too much. Yes, we do -- too much junk food. It is easy to see how the general perception of our overeating was created. Not too long after moving to this country, a friend was treated by La Professora to a dinner at a restaurant. The friend -- I'll call her Miss M -- had been warned by family and friends in France that she should be careful, that living in America would make her fat. So, to prevent this, Miss M ordered a salad. When the salad arrived, her eyes become huge -- to match the size of the plate of greenery. We ate and chatted, and ate some more. It soon become clear that Miss M was no longer enjoying her salad, but was continuing to eat it. I pointed out that if she was full, she could take the rest home in a "doggy bag" -- thus introducing her to yet another Americanism. She wondered at the idea of taking the extra home -- in France, one only orders that which one can eat at the restaurant -- so I explained that Americans like the idea of getting "value" for their money. What that means for the discussion here is that in the mind of American consumers, lots of cheap junk food is better than a little good food at the same price.

Thus the way to get Americans to eat better is to give healthy food more appeal, pocketbook-wise. Even the most liberal of Americans would howl at the idea of more farm subsidies, which totaled $7.5 billion last year -- in 2005, the total was $16.4 billion. If farm subsidies for the producers of healthy food is out, then taxation for the producers of junk food should be considered.

The aforementioned proposed Twinkie Tax was for a 7 to 10 percent tax. The idea was based on the 'sin' tax on cigarettes. Driving up the price, it was believed, would cause people to think twice before purchasing the sugary, fattening food they crave. That low tax might not be enough, but it certainly would be more effective than some sort of subsidy. In a recent edition of Psychological Science, researchers exploring the question of taxation versus subsidy found that women who did the grocery shopping would buy more healthy food, as measure by a calorie-for-nutrient value, when the unhealthy food was taxed at either 12.5% or 25%. On the subsidy side, the researchers found that when the price of the healthy food was lowered and the unhealthy food remained the same, the women would buy some of the healthy food and then 'spurge' on the unhealthy food with the money saved on the healthy -- thus not decreasing the number of overall calories.

The researchers' methodology of measuring the calorie-for-nutrient value seems a bit complicated, but it did show a change in consumer behavior. The proposal I gave my students last week was much more simpler than the CFN calculations: tax by percentage of the Daily Value.

The federal Food and Drug Administration plans to cut down on the amount of salt that the average American consumes by setting limits for the various foods. This is both too complicated and prone to fudging as the various industries lobby to set their own limits. The fact that the trade group representing the soda industry spent $5.4 million in the first three months of this year to keep lawmakers from limiting exposure of sugary drinks to children is evidence that the various food corporations do not have Americans' health in mind.

No, the solution is a tax based on the amount of the Daily Value percentage for sodium, sugar, and fat listed on the Nutrition Fact label on each item. Take the label for a generic bag of barbeque potato chips to the right. The total sodium percentage of the Daily Value is a whopping 62% and the total fat is a mind-blowing 99% -- eating one serving of 7 ounces of these chips means that the rest of the day's food must be truly fat-free and nearly sodium-free. In my proposal, this 99¢ item would be taxed at 161%, raising the price to $2.58, which would give pause to even the most drugged out pothead with the munchies.

Exempt from the tax would be foods that are not processed beyond the necessary sanitation and packaging. Dairy products such as milk, cheese, and yogurt would be exempt; meats that are merely butchered and packaged would be exempt; fruits and vegetables in their natural state, either fresh or frozen, would be exempt.

Now comes the question of how much would such a tax raise to help cover the cost of health care. Colorado is considering ending the 2.9% sales tax-exemption on candy and soda. It is believed that doing so would increase state revenue by $17.9 million next year. That's just for Colorado, imagine how much would be raised across all the states at a much higher rate than a mere 3%. Maybe, once everyone has health coverage, we could start paying down the national debt too.

Of course, when everyone starts to avoid the high priced junk food, there would be less tax revenue for the health care coverage plan. Instead, the increase in better eating would mean that more people would be healthier and thus cutting down on the need for costlier health care coverage. A win-win around the political spectrum.

For those on the right who decry such a taxation policy as an infringement on personal responsibility, I say that this is hardly the case. The government would not be telling people what they can and cannot eat, rather it would be putting a more immediate cost on choosing to eat unhealthily. Further, it would create more jobs. Yes, as demand for the processed food decreases, jobs in the automated food processing plants would go down in number. However, jobs at farmer's markets and industries providing healthier food would increase. Likewise, healthier people are 3 times more productive, taking far fewer sick days, and making significantly fewer errors on the job. More productivity means a better economy, which in turn decreases unemployment.

Everyone wins from a healthier diet. Just don't expect La Professora to eat tofu.

Image credits: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/overweight/overweight_05_06_fig2.GIF
http://fantasyhealthball.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/nutrition_facts_label.jpg

Liquid Randomness, Just Add Water

From the land of that Arch-Environmentalist, Al Gore, comes the $480 bottle of water.

I kid you not -- the Washington Post reported that a company called "BlingH2O" in Tennessee is selling a special edition of its water, which normally sells for the already outrageous price of $40 per wine bottle size, for 12 times as much.

When you consider the price of water coming out of the tap, that exorbitant cost for this bottled water, which I remind you comes from Tennessee -- not Fiji, not the Alps, not some glacier in Antarctica -- seems both ridiculous and sad: ridiculous that someone would even consider paying that much for a bottle of "special edition" water; sad for the same reason.

Now, before you insist that bottled water is better than tap, and thus worth the extra cost, there are a few things to consider.

First is that, for all that people say that they can taste the difference between tap and bottled, blind tasted tests have demonstrated that people can't tell the difference between the two, for all the campaigning that bottled water has a better "mouth feel". An acquaintance of mine runs a tasting room at a winery down in Santa Ynez valley; he once told me that the easiest way to get rid of a poor selling wine is to not put it on sale, but to tell folks in glowing terms that the wine has a unique taste that can't be found in other wines. The various bottled water companies have figured this out: you can have a unique water with a taste that can't be found anywhere else. Which leads me to wonder if water actually has a taste.

Second, there is no government regulation of bottled water. There is, however, several strict regulations on what may come out of the tap in your home. What this means is that you can be sure that the quality of the water coming out of the tap is high enough. High enough, in fact, that bottled water companies such as Aquafina and Dasani are bottling local tap water and selling it for 1,000 times more than the cost of the original tap water. But, you say, the companies are putting the water through more purification and that makes the water better. All those companies are doing is purifying already rather pure enough water. That is, if they are purifying it. The Natural Resources Defense Council reported that while 25% of the bottled water available in this country is basically tap water, a good portion of the time it's not even given further purification.

Third, consider the cost of the bottle. Bottles are made of plastic. Plastic is made from a petrochemical. Petrochemicals are made from petroleum, commonly known as oil. Given that oil is currently selling at about $140 per barrel, and that the supply is rapidly decreasing, if you'd like the price of gas that goes into your car to go down, you need to cut down on the demand for other products which are generated out of petroleum. Worldwide, some 2.7 tons of plastic goes into making those bottles. "Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year," said the spokes person for the Earth Policy Institute.

Then there's the cost of transporting the bottle from there to here. Consider Fiji water: indeed that water is not tap water per se, but there is the environmental cost of producing the bottles and shipping them to "thirsty" Americans thousands of miles away. As of the first of the year, the company has gone "carbon-negative", which means that the company is purchasing environmental offsets. Good for them; still bad for the world -- most of those bottles will end up in landfills.

Fourth, with all the complaining about the cost of gas these days, you'd think people would question the cost of water. Figure an average cost of $2.50 per litre -- more if you're buying the "fancy" stuff -- and that runs roughly $10 per gallon. I don't think I need to write more on that subject.

Fifth, water is a human rights issue, but Americans will only defend the right to waste their money on what is nearly free to them. In many parts of the world, demand for that most basic of human rights -- the right to drinkable water -- is outpacing supply. Currently, over a billion people are living without access to safe water. It is believed that, if current trends continue, by 2025, two out of every three people on the planet will be forced to live on less than 14 gallons of water a day. That's the total for bathing, cooking, cleaning, and drinking. As a comparison, the average American uses 96 gallons a day. Yet, the Earth Policy Institute reports that some 41 billion gallons of water are sold annually in bottles. Of that number, American consumers account for 7 billion gallons, making it the world's biggest consumer of bottled water as it chugs downs 17% of the global market.

Granted, our culture's views on "healthy" water is not new. Back in the days before germs were understood, most northern Europeans viewed bathing as unhealthy. Most people drank wine or beer because water was a disease vector. Today, marketers are telling us that bottled water from glaciers and from some volcanic well on Hawaii are super pure because those waters have been "untouched" by humans. That doesn't make the waters better. If anything, I'd really be concerned about the glacier and iceberg waters -- while the ice may be untouched by humans, that's not to say that it was untouched by anything living. I really don't want to know if the Charmin bears took a pit stop on that glacier.

In Britain, some of the bottled "mineral" waters have so much mineral content added that they are unhealthy for babies and children. Lead's a mineral, right?

Mostly, I'm worried about how much intelligence Americans have. There's a company in Hawaii that is selling desalinated seawater as "concentrated water" for $33.50 per 2 ounce bottle. That makes the product worse than the $480 bottle of water in that not only is it more expensive, ounce for ounce, but in order to get the "full enjoyment" of the water, you must add water to the water.

I don't think it can get any sillier, but I equally sure that with the right marketing campaign, Americans can be made to buy anything.

We're not being sold the Brooklyn Bridge, we're buying the water under it.

Photo Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/16306346.html

Completely Random Thoughts

It has been a while since La Professora has visited the Land-o-Randomness, and, in that time, she has seen and heard quite a bit. So much so that those bits have crowded out the usual higher thoughts. In the interest of clearing the head so that the coming semester could be started with a fresh perspective, here is a random selection of oddities.

1: "Organic Salt"
There are days that I truly do wonder about the American educational system. Usually it's because I'm reading some rather atrociously written student essay, but this time around it is what someone said that has me, and a couple of other folk, alternatively giggling and agast.

For the winter holiday in which gifts are exchanged, I had recommended to the sibling of my romantic partner that she purchase gourmet salt as a gift for said romantic partner. So, off she went to the local gourmet food shop with her mother in tow.

At this point, I should mention that her mother used to be a professor of Chemistry and a former dean of sciences at Ohio State University -- not a dumb woman, that one, and she certainly didn't raise any idiots either.

The selection being made, they placed on the check-out counter a canister of Himalayan Pink Salt. I've seen the salt; it is indeed pink -- the chemistry geeks in the house tell me that has something to do with ferrous oxides, or some such; what do I know, I research military politics.

The sales clerk begins to gush, telling our heroines that she just loves the Himalayan Pink Salt because it is -- and they assure me that she actually said this -- "totally organic".

If you don't understand why the former professor of Chemistry had to bite her tongue to keep from correcting the sales girl, you need to go back to your science instructor and demand either a refund or a refresher course.

Oh, and the way, according to the sales girl, you can tell that it's "totally organic" is that it's pink -- unlike regular table salt, which has been bleached!

One hopes that someday she'll figure out why two women were horrified at her statement, and it's not because she revealed the "secret" that table salt is bleached.

2. "Traveling Sucks"
Well, that one is fairly self-evident.

We were 36 hours late arriving at our holiday destination this year because the first flight of our trip was canceled and the soonest they could get both of us on the same flight was two days later.

While I used the time at home productively -- I graded; the fewer termpapers I had to take with me, the lighter my bags -- the above mentioned romantic partner spent the time on the Internet reading horror stories about the airline that had canceled our flight. Trust me when I say do not try this at home.

The trip back was uneventful -- for everyone else. For me, not so much. Let's just say that a G.I. bug and air travel do not make for a good combination.

3. Unpaid Wiretaps.
While the Bush administration is trying to get amnesty for telecommunications companies for allowing Homeland Security to tap their customers' lines, it seems that those same companies would really like to get paid. Turns out that the FBI is in arrears with its wiretapping bill, and so the companies have been cutting access until the government pays up -- even for the legally obtained taps. Man, I could write gobs on this, but the punchline is so evident, that I couldn't begin to do it justice.

4. Election season.
Seems like the campaigning will never end.

For the first day of the Winter Session course on American Politics, as it was the day before the Iowa caucus, I had the students do a simulated caucus to vote on the best food for studying -- I'm weird, but I'm not crazy enough to actually have the students vote on real political candidates. Today, we covered how the Democratic Party allocates its convention delegates to the states. Then we went on to the far less complicated discussion of special interest groups.

(If you're interested in testing your AmGov knowledge, every day until the 18th, I'll be posting on my "other" blog the daily quizzes)

In the interest to helping out those not in the political know, here are some websites that you may want to visit in order to become a more informed citizen:

CNN has a pretty (and I mean that in both sense of the word) good site for understanding what is going on with the primaries and the caucuses: Who's up, who's down, who's out.

Smart Voter, a site produced by the non-partisan League of Women Voters, gives all sorts of useful information, most important of which is where to vote and what is on the ballot for individual citizens.

Once you know where to vote, you may want to know for whom to vote. Two different sites have popped up to help folks pick the best candidate for themselves. I'm not sure how helpful they really are, as I got two different "matches" from them; so take the suggestions with a large grain of salt, pink or otherwise.

The first is produced by USA Today. This one is interesting because it not only asks questions with slightly more exhaustive answer sets -- sorry, the methodologist in me can't help grooving on that -- it also allows the respondent to "slide" the importance of the answer groups. As an added benefit, you can compare you responses with the "average" American's opinions. Needless to say, I'm nowhere near being "average".

The second is a website created by some group called SpeakOut.com. Never heard of it before, but the candidate match quiz seems decent enough. Given more time, I might go explore a little more the site.

There were more sites that offered to match me to my dream candidate, but first they wanted to get all sorts of personal information about me, such as where I lived and what I would like to buy online. Message to Overstock.com: get stuffed.


And that's the current batch of ideas on which I would have written more, had I really wanted to do so.

Tell you what, if you're in need of more time killers, here is a short list of cartoons I like and thus read often enough:
The dark comic on the life a boy and his squid: Lio.
The twisted comic on the life of a succubus and a fairy: Pibgorn.

Still need something to do rather than what you're supposed to be doing? Suck it up! 'Cause I gotta write tomorrow's quiz.

Naturally Random

Americans are a gullible lot.

"Now 100% Natural" is the 7-Up advertisement. Their claim is that they've removed all 'artificial' ingredients and now the beverage contains only 'all natural' ingredients. The industry based newsgroup tells us that "only five simple, natural ingredients remain: filtered carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, natural citric acid, natural flavors, and natural potassium citrate."

I don't think I look that gullible. At least, not gullible enough to buy that high fructose corn syrup is a naturally occuring substance.

The problem is that most Americans do not question what they hear. 'Natural' is good; 'Artificial' is bad. No one questions why this might be, or if this is even a truism. Give me a handful of bitter almonds and cup of water, and I can make a very 'natural' drink for you. Only if you have a death-wise should you drink this: bitter almonds and water are the basis of cyanide. In this case, 'natural' is very bad indeed.

This is only one small example of what is wrong with American society; if we start buying the argument that high fructose corn syrup is 'all natural', then what's to stop political, religious and business leaders from trying to convince us that their lies are the truth?

Bush told us that Saddam Hussein was helping Al Qaeda. Now he tells us that his administration never made that connection. If that were true, then the 32% of Americans who still believe that the Iraq war is necessary to end terrorism got the idea from their imaginations.

Pope Benedict told us that he's sorry that his use of a quote which painted Islam as a violent faith offended the world's muslims and that he didn't mean to do so, but his spin-doctor tells us "While Benedict's comments on Islam and holy war may not have been 'politically correct, today much of our dialogue is fruitless because we feel constrained from saying what we really think.' "

The oil industry would have us believe that their profits are actually lower than the profits in five other industries, and the increase of the price of gas from 20 years ago is much less than the rising cost of tuition. Yet, Exxon Mobile last year made $9.9 Billion in three months. That's just one company.

Believe what you want, but think carefully before buying what these folks are selling. Else they may hand you a glass of 'All Natural Bitter Almond Juice'....