4 ms·
Dumb, just tax fructose in proportion to how much is added. Ths US should do the same thing.
by pengaru 6y ago
Dumb, just tax fructose in proportion to how much is added. Ths US should do the same thing.
- smt88 6y agoFructose is far from the only unhealthy ingredient in junk food.
- pengaru 6y agoFructose is arguably a poison indistinguishable from ethanol in some very consequential ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_disease#Fructose_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_dise...
- seiferteric 6y agoIf we just didn't subsidize its production, that would be a start.
- pengaru 6y agoSure, but if the alternative is banning which is never a good approach, taxing it makes a lot more sense IMHO. I'm no agriculture nerd but isn't much of the US particularly well suited to growing corn, regardless of subsidies?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kube-system 6y agoIt's a tough situation. Much of the idea behind agriculture subsides is to protect against black-swan events.
- seiferteric 6y agoDoesn't crop insurance exist? Why the need to constantly subsidize?
- kube-system 6y agoYou can't eat insurance money. We are lucky to live in a age of a dramatic global decline in famine, but a large scale war or natural disaster could potentially unravel this progress in a devastating way. Subsidies can do preventative tasks that insurance cannot -- like securing additional capacity of food stores and farm land that farmers wouldn't normally do unless they were being paid to do so.
- seiferteric 6y agoTrue, but the US gov't stockpiles grain, oil and other things for those kind of events. I don't see how subsidies help in those scenarios either.
- kube-system 6y agoYes, but much like the PPE stockpile, those are only a stopgap measure and aren't really enough to be a comprehensive solution on their own.
- Dylan16807 6y agoWe could direct the subsidies more toward ethanol or whatever other corn product, and still be able to get to the raw corn in an emergency.
- refurb 6y agoI'm not sure we're solving for much when a bottle of Coke has 100g of cane sugar instead of 100g of high fructose corn syrup. Is it better? Maybe. Is it still too much sugar? Yes.