Why snack taxes don't work, Exhibit #2,384

Going into the L'il Peach (now Tedeschi's) to buy a newspaper for the train/bus rides into Watertown, I literally have to go around groups of kids waiting to go into the Rogers. If I'm lucky, I'm able to purchase my paper (and a lottery ticket or two) before they can slam all of their sugar-laden junk onto the counter.

Here is my bit of friendly advice to Ray Considine, who is the head of the Medical Foundation in Boston. A lot of those kids come to Hyde Park from other parts of the city - mainly the inner city, like Roxbury and Dorchester. Their families likely cannot afford organic/vegan/super healthy things to begin with, so the kids don't get a healthy, nourishing breakfast. So they either (a) wait until they get into school, where the breakfast they serve is so bad even the rats refuse to eat it, or (b) they purchase quick cheap energy, like L'il Hugs, Doritos, and Little Debbies. Not many of them would be patient enough to buy a banana or buy a little cup of Milk and Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Unless you want a full-bore black market on junk food - to which many kids will gladly profit from and mark up the price to willing demand - forget the snack tax. It's a tax that will not fund health programs or anything remotely resembling health. (Notice I'm using the word "health" and not the diaphanously ambiguous and Orwellian "wellness.") They will be boomerang taxes, going from the poor to the government to fill their rainy day fund.

"But it will only add up to pennies!" you proclaim.

Horse hockey. For every dollar these kids spend, it's 5 pennies to the state. Five percent sales tax. Add that to a $1.50 bottle of soda, plus a five cent deposit, and it's a sneaky/stealth/backdoor 8% sales tax. A kid with two bottles of soda at $1.50 each, plus two hostess at a dollar, and a bag of Doritos at $0.75, is looking at a 7% tax. (The good thing is that they're not buying cigarettes at a national/state take of 50-60%, which I learned isn't going anywhere near smoking prevention programs, but to...wait for it...the rainy day fund.)

What are the efforts to control our smoking and eating habits anyway? I call these efforts health eugenics - the efforts of a government to conform the citizens into a perfect, docile, asexual, compliant group of Stepford people. Utopia ain't here and never will be. Trying to manipulate life and people for the promotion of utopia has violent, even deadly, results.