Radical Idea: how about a tax break for someone who cuts down body fat by x % ?
Had a random idea in my head: Since America is the fattest nation in the world, how about a tax break for someone who reduces his/her body fat?
In case of children under age of 17 (since theyre not working) their parents get a tax-break.
subsidize gym membership?
Monitoring sodium content in food?
Banning cola, chips, candy from schools?
I know some libertarians may explode sayin, " i dont want govt tellin me how much salt i need in my food".
How about I have ~7% body fat. I wouldn't be in a position to take advantage unless you plan on taxing these fat mofos more to begin with which I am not completely against. Just a thought
How do you accurately measure body-fat?
Heard 10% body fat ratio is for an ultra lean athlete.
Maybe for folks on medicaid and medicare.
great if ur @ 7 %. I used to be a trainer back in college. I see kids nowdays, man ! all they eat is fruit loops and marble cakes.
This lady at work - much much senior than I am - I was working out with her. 9 months ago she was 190 on 5'4 frame, y'day she clocked 130lb. she had tears in her eyes.
Just look around yourself and you'd find plenty of kids and grown up men/women with massive junk around waist. I dont see kids playing in streets / backyard/ playground. All they do is this Call of duty shit.
Its ridiculous. seriously considering going back to school to study it in detail and get to the bottom of this shit.
It wouldn't change a thing. Americans, myself included, want to eat shitty food and skip out on exercise. Why would I care about a small tax credit.
A friend of mine's employer offered a monetary reward program for their employees to quit smoking. He was mad that as a non-smoker, he wasn't eligible, which I agree with. He could have just claimed he was a smoker and quit to claim the reward to illustrate the absurdity of it, but obviously that creates of issues with HR. Cash for clunkers or the housing tax credit pissed me off. I wasn't eligible for either, since 1. I don't have a car, and 2. I'm not in the position to purchase a house (living in NY). Why does middle America get free money, but I don't?
Rewarding anorexia and eating disorders. No Joke.
wait wtf fuck fat people. how about extra taxes for those lazy pieces of shit
i would just get fat and lose the weight to get my tax break.
i think i remember reading an interesting article on a proposed fat tax two years ago in the economist. worth checking out (i'm too lazy)
lol..thanks
you're on the right track but the execution wouldn't work this way. You'd have naturally thin people gain a hundred pounds and then loose it to get a tax break.
what you do is just add taxes to fat people. then they have to pay them or loose weight.
as a republican i can't support adding taxes to anything, so let's say we'll take those revenues back by eliminating the estate tax
My sentiments entirely.
Implausible, and taxing fat people, though funny, would get incredible backlash.
bro, not talking about taxing obese folks. talking about giving them a tax break - an incentive for them to lose fat.
And btw, losing weight doesnt means losing fat. u could be losing muscle ( by not eating). That is even worse cos muscle is what burns calories, more u have, more u burn cals @ rest.
taxing obese is just cruel lol
Let me clarify - I'm saying your suggestion is implausible, and the other posters' suggestions to tax the obese would cause an uproar.
what if you already little body fat. Skiny people cant get the tax break because we kept ourselves healthy to begin with?
^exactly
the tax break wouldn't work. taxing "obese folks" would though, and makes a lot more sense... the only problem with it and one major political hurdle would be that, a lot like the "soda pop tax", which you may have heard of, the tax will hurt lower income people more than wealthy people (not only as a portion of income, but in absolute terms because lower income people have a higher rate of obesity)
Obese citizens should have to pay a large premium for insurance. Its not a tax, but a price that reflects the true risk of their health condition. Of course, this probably won't be allowed based on health care bill.
Self-control isn't the only factor affecting obesity. Government subsidies on agriculture (increased food supply) and food stamp programs (demand side) make food cheap and easy for millions to get (Sounds cruel in theory, but the fact is, higher food prices would lead to more modest consumption).
A fat tax could work and I would only advocate it if it offset another tax- otherwise government would just grow.
I don't agree that it would be a regressive tax because there are plenty of cheap, healthy foods for poorer people to eat. It's not like McDonalds is their only option. Also, there are no income barriers to working out.
how about your federal income tax rate is the same as your body fat percentage?
haha...radical indeed !
in that case, I'd long Kellogs, Pepsi, McDonalds, KFC, Dunkin and short jamba juice. Govt will find a way to get people fat so their tax collection stays high.
amazes me sometimes how shit works. self-interest is a bitch
I'd love to see it, but too hard to implement. Talk about a black market for paying off doctors to submit false records of weight / height. If it were to be implemented, it would have to be positioned as tax breaks for the skinny. Why give a tax break for a derivative (weight lost) rather than just going for the source (actual weight)? As the skinniest guy in my extremely small office, I'd be supportive. Long treadmills, short dumbbells.
Sorry doesn't work because then people would be seen as tax planning investments and probably would be securitized and sold on the market. (People would be short-selling Americans seeing where this nation's obesity rates are heading)
Why not tax people who fuck around in high school? Think of the huge drag on society that morons are. Fat people can be highly productive or well educated. One could probably make the argument that a lot of the obesity in the USA stems from our work a holic lifestyle.
I actually 100% support a child tax. Real simple. $500 per child. No one would ever have to pay to have kids, but the tax would reduce any return they would get.
Logic:
It will stop people from using kids as a way to get money
It will remove a huge budget issue
If you cannot afford $500 per year, per child, you probably have not thought out the huge financial consequences of having children
Thoughts?
Children cost a lot more than $500 per year and it doesn't stop a lot of people from having babies for religious or other reasons.
Ideally these would be good ideas, but in practice, not so much. For the losing of fat, the government would not only have to employ more people (or outsource), but they'd have to pay for it... so they'd be losing tax money and increasing cost. Wouldn't work. :/ For taxing people that do poorly in high school, what're you going to do, make the dumbasses pay more in taxes because they were born morons?
PS- I did shitty/didnt try in high school, and I still think that would be a great idea if there was a way not to penalize people for having below average intelligence, suffering from depression/other mental illnesses, and have shitty home lives which aversely affect their grades.
@Leverage - The tax credit is $1000. Eliminating it and charging a tax of $500 would be a $1500 net effect. That would make some people think twice. Also, religious people can do what they want, but I do not think we should be subsidizing an ever increasing population.
Take this increased tax revenue and provide condoms and birth control for the whole 3rd world.
From Wiki:
In the US, this tax credit saves the population 10 billion dollars per year in taxes if just 10% of households can claim the credit. If they collected the tax, it would be more than the NSF budget for 2009 and more than 3 times the 2009 budget for the National Park Servic
That is a huge revenue source for the government. Eliminate the deductibility of mortgage interest also. Canada seems to be doing just fine without it.
People are not born stupid, they just do not strive to achieve. No one says someone has to get top of their high school class, but an incentive or disincentive related to high school grades is just as effective as taxing fat people.
Something tells me, people that fuck around in high school don't really understand taxes to begin with.
Obese citizens could just forego health insurance altogether (do you know how much twinkies you can buy with that money?!?) and then bankrupt emergency rooms by getting forklifted there with heart attacks and massive strokes.
I propose the "morbidly obese tax". Plenty of fat people are fairly healthy, and some of the poor people kinda have to overeat calories in order to get adequate nutrition because the foods they eat don't have a high nutrient/calorie ratio. And some (very few! like 1-2%) are obese due to other health problems. Also pregnant women might appear to be obese under BMI guidelines. But there's no excuse for THIS: http://citizented.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/morbidly-obese.jpg (click at your own risk, i didn't have the heart to embed)
Moreover, it need to have a tax structure that cannot be escaped by unemployed morbidly obese (which is probably most of them, what the hell can you do in a state like the above?) - an appreciably high flat fee: like $5-10 K coupled with 40% income tax. The penalty should also extend on anyone claiming the MO as dependents, thus encouraging the parents of fat children to stop neglecting the kids' nutrition and to not allow their chubby flowers of life get too close to the MO line. (on another note, CPS needs to investigate parents of obese children for neglect and child abuse; undernourished children are taken away, i don't see why this should be treated differently)
Nonpayment of MO tax would result in jail time (just as nonpayment of any other tax would) and MO would be placed on a diet and an exercise regimen.
PS: To avoid the sprawl of government, revenue from MO tax would be used only to fund the MO tax collection itself and related activities: the MO rehabilitation programs, nutrition education and better nutrition in schools, more funding to activity-based youth programs, etc etc.
Too bad the guy in that picture is mexican...I agree with the rest of your post though
That's a guy? lol
LOL he is/was the fattest guy in the world. He is Mexican also. They had a thing on him on TLC a while back. They took him out on a flat bed and drove him around his town.
How the human heart can support being a baby sperm whale is beyond me.
I think he would be more of a baby blue whale, I don't know that with all that estrogen in his fat he is even able to produce sperm anymore.
You know, the dude is totally disgusting, but if he can't even walk to the fridge, where is he getting food? Someone is bringing it for him, and in quantities sufficient to maintain his massiveness. His BMR at 1300 lbs is like 9000 cal - you can feed 4 adults with that. At 800 lbs his BMR is still 5500. So he's got an enabler that is stuffing him with massive amounts of food daily - now that is probably even more messed up.
Anthony totally agree with you on eliminating the credit, not sure if I can support the tax tho. It would be a very visible cost to having children, but I still think it would have almost zero impact on fertility rates.
Well what I mean is no one would ever have to send in money. The $500 would simply reduce other deductions.
Suppose you were going to get $300 back from the government. The $500 credit would eliminate that, but you wouldn't owe $200 bucks.
Fertility rates in the US are at about replacement rates. We have maybe a little higher because of immigration and immigrant families tend to have more children for at least one generation or so.
Maybe I am evil or something, but I think if the world population was decreasing it would actually be a good thing.
Anthony, I would rather have people like Duggards (16 or 17 kids) procreating as much as they can, than have some America-hating-and-disrespecting illegals come here, breed with no penalty (because they don't pay taxes in the first place) and teach their children the only thing they know - how to be a drain on taxpayers' money.
Some other problems you run into with the obesity tax:
1) over 25% of the population is obese, and believe me, they'll be out voting in force if this is on the agenda :-p
2) A majority of doctors call obesity an illness. You try and raise taxes on obese people, it opens the gates for taxes on people with STDs (hey, they should have worn a condom, right?), malaria (why didn't you use bug repellent?), and other diseases.
3) How do you judge who is obese? Collect the medical records of every American? Yea, I think not. Just ask for height/weight of every American? Still no.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Uribe
He is married lol
this is his second wife: http://channels.isp.netscape.com/whatsnew/gallery.jsp?floc=g-wnew_manue…
she looks deliriously happy. Drugs?
A drag on the increase in our population is the last thing we need.
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