Carnal Reason

In response to proposed laws aimed at (indirectly) curbing obesity, Scrivener.net suggests let’s just tax fat people and be done with it.

So if you don’t want fat people, tax fat people. More precisely, tax the fat on their bodies. Don’t tax fat everywhere you see it but on their bodies, if you want to get it off their bodies.

With this policy the people who are doing the wrong thing visibly pay the price for it, and what they pay might even pay for a small reward for the people doing the right thing. Justice.

Moreover, there actually now is an incentive for lardbutt to get himself up on his feet and off to Jenny Craig’s — he can put dollars in his pocket by doing so — while I keep the few small pleasures remaining in my life, and Hardee’s and the DVD shop maintain full employment. Efficiency!

So if one is serious about this, then the self-evidently logical and effective thing to do is increase everybody’s tax bill by an increasing percentage as their body fat percentage rises above a specified level. (Tax them for their children’s excess body fat too.) And then have the states just get rid of all those other 140 pending laws.

My only reservation is the nagging fear that the fat tax would dissuade only the poor. Rich people can pay any feasible tax without missing the money. For them we need to borrow a page from the sex offenders manual. I suggest online registries of fat people, complete with names, addresses, phone numbers, pictures, and body-fat percentages.

After that, the way stands clear to go after those with high cholesterol, caffeine abusers, candy eaters, and similar parasites on the body public.

As the nanny state expands, we can eventually hope to take advantage of certain economies of scale. For example, the Transportation Security Administration could lend a hand in efforts to combat prostate and cervical cancer. Airport security screeners could administer ‘digital’ exams, killing two birds with one stone.

Posted on April 26th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: law, politics