If it affects them personally then they'd jump like a cat on a stove; but if it only affects the budget they aren't going to respond to any incentive.

If the US was being influenced by financial incentives it wouldn't be doing many of the things it does. Like tax cuts or spending more money.

Increasing corn production also does not play to a crucial constituency in the Presidential elections...

This obsession with “rich donors” ignores that voters will also get mad at politicians for the consequences of eliminating those subsidies.

Powerful donors should not exist.

That's only one factor. Another is car dependence and lack of pedestrian-friendly built environments.

There is a lot of research on just how much harm it does us to sit all day, every day. We sit in a car to make a long commute to work. We sit our desks. We sit in the car again.

And hitting the gym occasionally doesn't fully compensate for living like that.

Urban planners used to configure cities to help promote physical health and we don't do enough of that anymore. It's nigh impossible to escape a sick outcome when trapped in a sick system that makes healthy choices largely out of reach for most people.

Every day US citizens waste hours life with transportation. I do believe in cars but I also believe we need to reshape how we live. If the US government allows our time to be wasted repeatedly by a variety of lobbies building infrastructure for a variety of interests it shows how little our leadership values the time of our citizens. I almost find it more egregious that government wants to waste the time of our citizens than wanting to eventually kill ourselves with emissions.

The US currently has an oversupply of labour and I suggest the US does something with it to reshape infrastructure to be less energy reliant.

The world should look into outfit and create houses with manditory natural cooling/heating, increase density in cities and towns to reduce habitat distruction and sprawl, reduce emissions of high GWP chemicals, and create a global political situation to reduce reliance on a failing economic system that incentivizes people to hide pandemics.

You can get that 60 minutes of exercise/physical activity if the transportation to various destinations is changed into a form of exercise for all or some part of it. In the case of a bicycle, it does require that destinations are less than 10 miles (16 kilometers) away, otherwise it would take too much time.

I'm not saying that it is impossible for the US to experience a food shortage or even that smart people in and out of government shouldn't worry about that eventuality. I am saying that current and past US programs to subsidize farmers probably do not do / have not done much to reduce that risk and that most of the group collectively deciding to continue the subsidies probably know or strongly suspect that.

In my experience, the elected representatives and other influencers arguing for the subsidies don't even use food security as an argument. (Again, like others in the thread, I am restricting myself to US food policy.) Instead, they argue that the family farm is a producer of particularly virtuous individuals, and it would be a shame if all the family farms were to be driven out of business by large corporations.

The US Midwest has the largest tract of arable land in the world and twice as large as the second largest. If the people of the world were redistributed among the countries so as to equalize the probability of famine among the countries, the US would probably end up with a population over a billion.

Funny enough, if you chopped off the fattest 5-6 states, the USA would compare more favorably.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...

https://ourworldindata.org/obesity

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/obesity-r...

That is self evident in social behavior. Your theory is just an easily trotted out bogeyman.

The main difference is availability and price, especially the latter. A decent lunch near my office in my home country was 20-30 bucks (converted in USD), and I made X/year. Now I make 3-4+ times X, and you can get more food than I can eat at shit like Panda Express for 6-8 bucks. So vs my income, it's almost 10 times cheaper.

If it wasn't for health concerns, it no longer made sense for me to cook. So I just had delivery/takeout almost every day after I moved (switching country is stressful, so I was happy to get all the time back I could get). Then the health issues cropped up. Now I'm trying to dial it back, but its tough.

I know a _lot_ of people who had similar things happened to them after they moved here, and anecdotally again, one of them moved back and started losing weight super fast, without really trying.

The idea that nationalized healthcare (paid for by the middle class) will encourage politicians to tax the unhealthy food of the lower classes is fantasy - this has not manifest itself in other Western countries which do have nationalized healthcare systems.

People have to realize that the wealth America gained post WW2 was poured into making life comfortable and easy (institutionally and economically).

This had the unintended consequence of making Americans (on average) some of the unhealthiest humans in the world.

Then again just ditching the subsidies would get the same thing done with less paperwork...

The problem is, I think, often one of over-treatment. If hospitals are paid per procedure (as they are in the US) they are encouraged to do procedures that are actually bad for patients. Insurers can try to reign in over-treatment (to the horror of people who think that more healthcare is always a good thing), but regulators and customers (and activists) fear they do so targeting costs, not patient outcomes. It's all just a mess.

Here's a few issues:

* Over-testing is the most innocuous problem, but even tests aren't "free". At best, it's annoying and makes you not want to go back to see the doctor unless you know it's urgent (especially if it's costing you money or time). Tests might also the emphasis away from immediate treatments (both things that the doctor can do, and things the patient needs to do) as it becomes more of a "wait and see" game.

* Drugs. Obviously they cost money, and they can have side effects. Over-prescription is widely recognised as a major issue.

* Cesareans when they're a bad idea.

* Heart surgery when it's a bad idea.

* Aggressive treatment (especially of cancer) that statistically decreases the quality-adjusted life years a patient has, but hey you have to do something right?

I could go on, but there's really a ton of things where a hospital should do nothing, but has a lot of pressure (from patients and profit motives) to act. While insurers can try to control this, I think it goes without saying that they're also not entirely the good guys, and giving them too much power to reject treatments is also a bit worrying. Confrontational systems might work in the legal system, but it's too slow and expensive to work in healthcare.

Let's look at the special interests the US has (it's not just corn syrup!):

* Caps on doctor training spots. Obviously this is not unique to the US, but a free market solution is hardly going to work when you cap supply.

* Existing players (insurers, hospitals) want high overhead (regulations, admin) to create a moat.

* Drug companies in the US want high drug prices. Australia will subsidise drugs, but only if the drugs are priced right (which creates an incentive for companies to offer deep discounts in Australia). In the US, this kind of bargaining doesn't happen to the same degree. People online keep telling me that the spending on drugs is good though, because it's driving research (it's fine with me if Americans want to spend all their money subsidising the rest of the world).

yes. we tax darts and alcohol - the medical cost of sugar probably well exceeds all risky outdoor activities by orders of magnitude. ~200 climbing accidents a year vs https://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2013/10/27/sugar-linke...

If this is unpalatable, we could always just tax Coca Cola directly so they can pay for their sugar-induced health crisis.

Okay I'll bite. Why shouldn't we do that? If you're going to 28x your death risk[1] by participating in a purely non-essential activity, why should you be able to externalize the costs to others?

>Perhaps instead of taxing food, we instead tax obesity. Put the responsibility on the individual.

That's actually not a bad idea. We kinda already have that for smoking, in the form of higher insurance premiums for smokers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety#Crash_rates_...

Rock climbers can fall - they also build physical and mental fitness as well as learn to work together with and trust others in a high pressure environment.

Motorcyclists can crash, but they're choosing a form of transport that is far more efficient than a single passenger vehicle in many ways (fuel consumption, parking requirements, traffic impact).

People are already incentivized by nature to sort out on their own what sorts of activities will allow them and their communities to flourish. Let them. We will all be better for it.

Someone mentioned there are 200 climbing accidents a year. Figure out how much that costs, and bake it into the cost of some climbing specific requirement (climbing permits? equipment? gym memberships?). I doubt the cost will be significant. And if it is, maybe we should rethink climbing as an activity.

Same with sugar. Figure out how much added sugar actually costs in terms of health impacts, and tax sugar appropriately. A key point of this strategy is that if you aren't consuming a large amount of e.g. soda, as a parent post claimed, then the tax is negligible anyways.

> Motorcyclists can crash, but they're choosing a form of transport that is far more efficient than a single passenger vehicle in many ways (fuel consumption, parking requirements, traffic impact).

Motorcycles aren't actually that efficient. A prius gets better gas milage than many (most?) motorcycles: https://www.latimes.com/news/la-hy-throttle2apr02-story.html

At least a prius has a chance of carrying more than one person.

A nonpartisan government panel of scientists. I realize with the current political climate in the us, that might be a tall order, but that doesn't immediately mean the idea should be dismissed.

>How will they go about determining whether there are more benefits or costs associated with a particular activity?

Cost benefit analysis based on empirical evidence?

>People are already incentivized by nature to sort out on their own what sorts of activities will allow them and their communities to flourish. Let them. We will all be better for it.

The examples you've listed lie on a spectrum. Indoor rock climbing probably isn't too negative, all things considered. OTOH motorcycles is much harder to defend. You're really going to risk your life to save a few grand a year on gas and parking?

Like I said before none of this is new. The government has already deemed tobacco to be more harmful than good. As such, it's heavily taxed. I don't find it outrageous to tax things that are similarly obviously more harmful than good.

No one should be arbitrating personal activities unless they directly and immediately impact those around you.

(And for the record, I vehemently disagree with sin taxes such as those for alcohol and tobacco. Legally requiring health warnings on the packaging, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense to me. Also note that alcohol and tobacco have much more consistent and severe health impacts than, say, refined sugar.)

You probably have better genes than my family. Lookup endomorph body type or reasons of reduced metabolism.

Evolution has inversed survival of the fattest, so it seems ;)

Somatypes are an ancient pseudoscience, while caloric intake relative to TDEE doesn't lie.

If obesity were taxed, there would be pressure to put loopholes in those taxes. Somatypes and "thrifty genome" and so on would be perfect hooks to hang those loopholes on. Result? Questioning that science becomes politically untenable, at least in some universities and research labs. After all, "the grants just follow the illiction returns", as the poet once said:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1987/9/29/borking-up-the-...

I lost 25 kg. In 6 months, with counting calories and all. But the amount of effort I had to deliver for a normal weight is almost exponentially more

1 hour strength training per day

1 hour cardio in the morning

No alcohol

6 * eating small portions

8 hours of sleep

1 cheat meal per week

Every day, no exceptions.

Regardless of any minor variability in metabolism, you literally cannot get fat from things you don’t put in. This is like high school or middle school physics. This is by far the biggest factor in obesity (consumption).. such that everything else is essentially irrelevant. People with actual metabolism disorders either die or require replacement of enzymes, whether that’s type 1 diabetes or the rarer metabolism disorders.

If you eat high volume foods with calories at or below what you’re expending, you will not get fat, full stop. Starving people aren’t fat.

There are of course behavioral differences that dictate consumption, some of which are genetically influenced, but metabolism has not much to do with it.