While new tobacco taxes keep getting passed on a smaller and smaller base of smokers (due to people quitting and dying), smokers bring up a good point: why aren't we taxing other health hazards like fatty foods?

I decided to do some math on how much a french fry tax might raise. For a back-of-envelope calculation, I found an article from 2002 that put annual per-capita consumption of french fries in the United States at 28 pounds, with 90% of that being at fast food restaurants.

So that makes 25.2 pounds of french fries eaten at fast food restaurants per person per year. A large fries at McDonalds is approximately 1/3 of a pound. So that makes 75.6 orders of fries per person per year, or a little less than 1.5 per week. At a "quarter per order," that means $18.90 per person in taxes.

Now, that's a "per capita" figure which is an average among all people, from babies to senior citizens. So if the average person ate 75.6 orders of fries and paid $18.90 in "quarter per order" taxes on them, a population of 300 million would generate $5,670,000,000 in new taxes.

Now, $5.6 billion is just a drop in the bucket considering our national debt and all the other things we're facing, but it's a start. Consider California's budget crisis. They have 10% of the population. If they did "quarter an order" on french fries, they could conceivably generate over a half-billion in new tax revenues, and in a state that has been so welcoming of sin taxes on tobacco, when heart disease and obesity related illnesses are such huge health issues, why wouldn't the taxpayers welcome a sin tax on french fries?

I eat fries, though not nearly as much as I used to. But I'd welcome a quarter per order tax in Washington rather than a gasoline tax or a sales tax increase. If I don't want to pay the tax, I can have a salad or some fruit or sliced veggies.

'Course, if they try to tax bacon, there's gona be a revolt up in this motherf... but I digress. If we're going to tax cigarettes, we might as well tax french fries. It's only fair, and right now state governments need to find revenues where they can. "Quarter per order." It's an idea whose time has come.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Society, Stupid Thoughts, Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.