Tuesday 22 December 2009

Rational taxation

Interesting news from Taiwan that their Bureau of Health Promotion is planning the world's first tax on junk food in a bid to encourage the public to eat healthily and cut obesity.

Makes heaps of sense to me – just like taxing polluters for the real cost of the damage to the environment and to humanity of their production (and profits). While we won’t see a carbon tax here, the government’s ETS was the next best thing.

Given their opposition to an ETS (let alone a pollution tax), I wonder what the attitude of the conservatives would be to the idea of bad health tax designed to reduce the cost to  the public purse of balooning obesity (sorry about the pun)??

Don't bother – I can guess


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