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  • Los Angeles Declares War on Colonel Sanders (and Your Portfolio)
    Many people who eat fast food don't do so "once or twice each year". If they did, you wouldn't be writing this article because these companies wouldn't have tickers and no one would ever have heard of them. There are plenty of Americans out there who eat fast food several times a week. Some hardly eat anything else. It's cheap and they've grown up with it and developed a taste for it.

    If this described a mere handful of people with deeply unhealthy habits, it would be no great cause for concern. It's more than a handful. And if everyone were held responsible for his or her own health and medical costs, it would be irrelevant as a matter of public policy. Who am I to tell someone what he may or may not eat, right? Wrong. That happy state of affairs went out the window when taxpayer-funded medicine replaced charity hospitals in the business of caring for the poor (and the not so poor). If you want to take 1.45% of my pay for Medicare - a fraction sure to rise in the future - and use it to pay costs directly associated with the habits of others, you have also given me the right to dictate how those people may live to the extent that their choices affect the cost to me of providing that medicine. Same goes for Medicaid and other similar programs. If you don't like being told what to eat, lose the tax. I surely don't give a flying f**k what some random person in Los Angeles eats for dinner tonight. I'd very much prefer that it be none of my business. For now, however, it very much is my business.

    Everything else you wrote is of course spot on. This is one of the dumbest possible ways to solve the problem. It manages to distort the market in a patently unfair way while also guaranteeing that it will not achieve any useful purpose. Bravo!
    Aug 01 10:51 am |Rating: 0 0 |Link to Comment |View article

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