American Beat: Let's Hear It For A Fat Tax

Allow me to defend what is apparently the indefensible. Last week, a lawmaker in New York proposed a 1 percent tax on junk food to create a pool of money to fight the epidemic of child obesity.

You will notice the word "tax." That one little word has set off a firestorm. "Now they want to tax your Twinkies," mocked the New York Daily News, in a typical flash of journalistic objectivity.

Clearly, great newspaper minds may differ. To me, this is the greatest idea since sliced bread (better still, considering that sliced bread is most likely laced with hydrogenated oil). As a nation, we have become so fat that we really do deserve to be called ugly Americans. Walking down the street on a dark night, I can't tell if I'm being stalked by two grizzly bears or just my neighbors. We are a nation so fat that Ruben Studdard--the golden-voiced scale-buster from Birmingham--is now considered a model for what pop stars should look like. How fat are we? Well, let's put it this way, most of us squeak when we go through a doorway. Of course SUVs have become the fastest-selling cars; we can't fit into anything else.

According to the Centers for Disease Control--which now considers obesity an epidemic--61 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. (A recent Harris Poll put the figure at 80 percent, up from 58 percent in 1983.) The fastest weight gain is among children. Thirty years ago, only 5 percent of American kids were overweight. Today, it's 15 percent.

Other statistics show that obesity causes 300,000 deaths each year and costs the economy $117 billion per year in additional health-care expenses. New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, the Brooklyn Democrat who floated the tax idea, believes that a tax would create a small disincentive towards the consumption of high-fat, low-nutrition foods and, perhaps, reduce those numbers.

Oh, but there's that word again. Tax. In today's climate, it seems that voters would sooner accept a politician who sleeps with sheep than a politician who would willfully raise taxes or invent new ones.