A tax on an item is two-fold though. It not only hurts the pocketbook of the consumer, which forces them to find an alternative.
Exactly, and if food/money is already to the point they almost automatically go to the cheaper option, making it more expensive is not going to do that much, especially if it's still less than, or equal to a healthier alternative. Now let's say you can get a burger for 2 dollars, and an alternative that's healthy for say 3 dollars. These are purely arbitrary figures to show my thought process. If you tax that burger by say 50 percent, it would only increase it to the same amount the alternative is. And if it's a choice between what people have been eating for a while, know, and like to some extent, and both are the same price, which do you think they are going to choose? Even if it was say 3.50 it would likely still go to the burger, in some instances. Now if say the burger was 3 dollars, and the alternative was 2 or less, then that would almost certainly get people to get the healthy alternative.
With that said, you also have to factor in other kinds of cost. Like cost in time to acquire, if different, time to cook/prepare/utensils, etc, etc. If those costs are cheaper, and or more convenient than the bad food alternatives, then we will start to see more of as shift. Simply taxing one, is going to do more harm than good. Taking away the subsidies, and taxing one, and then moving that money over to help subsidize the healthier alternative would do more good than harm.
but it also creates a feeling that the reason this is being taxed more now is because it isn't good for you, which is also beneficial.
Sorry, it just doesn't work that way. I have never run across a smoker who thought more tax = unhealthy. They already knew to some degree it wasn't healthy, but still did it because they felt they needed to keep doing it.
Like cigarettes and alcohol, people will begin to see sugar as a vice, which it is, and not necessary for your health.
Wow... Ok... Sugar in one form or another is in a lot of foods, hell even grains have sugar content, and I am sure you know about fruits right? Sugar is a staple of our diets, and it's not necessarily "bad", it's only "bad" when over used. Cigarettes, are bad no matter what you do, one puff is bad, it probably wont kill you, but it's certainly not good. Alcohol in moderation can be a good thing depending on what you want to accomplish with it. But as with sugar, and hell even water, it can get to an extent to where if you over use it, it's bad, and or deadly.
There would not only be a "how much" component to the tax, but a "why" component as well.
That would mean that "big government" would be all up in your business, to the extent that most people wouldn't like, hell I am sure you wouldn't like it if you knew the full extent they would have to be in your business to create a tax in that way. There are very little ways to regulate it, and or be accurate with it, unless they had say your bank statements, and or purchase history, you would have to have a national ID card and use it every time you try to buy "bad sugars", or junk food, just so they could exert the tax you propose. If you simply only tax a food with an excess of bad sugars in it, it will never be right or fair, as one person could eat that and be skinny as hell, and or as healthy as hell, but just need the quick calorie boost, their system could easily handle it without gaining weight, or hurting them. Or are we to tell cashiers, if the person buying it is skinny, they don't need to apply the taxes? That would never work, but it just shows how bad that idea is. There are so many different buying habits out there, that you can't really look to any one product to treat differently, you have to look at overall buying habits, to determine which ones to tax to dissuade that type of behavior, and that takes a lot of invasive information. Do you want the government looking at your bank account, seeing you bought a burger, or did so daily for a week, and now want to charge you extra taxes for it? No of course not. There are a lot of easier ways to do it. Taking subsidies away from the unhealthy foods for one, and subsidizing the healthier ones. It's fucking simple as hell to understand.
Furthermore, taxes on sugar as an ingredient would work better than taxing products that contain sugar, such as soda taxes.
Sugar as an ingredient doesn't necessarily hurt all people, and or is a detriment for their health. With soda, if you just fucking took the corn subsidies away that subsidizes corn used specifically for the production of HFCS, it would make soda more expensive, without..... taxing it. If you instead took that money and applied it to subsidizing healthier foods, you would do more to change the balance than simply taxing one.
As for the video, I believe I have seen it before, but will watch all of it in full a bit later. Look I am not against taxing bad, or unhealthy foods, but even if you take sugar out of the mix, and tax it to hell and back, you still have unhealthy foods out there, and will do absolute shit to fighting obesity. Are you going to tax and or ban carbohydrates as well? I mean if you overload your system with them, what do they make to burn energy? Glucose. So your body is making sugar even if you don't fucking eat a drop of it. It's still there.
Are you for or against removing subsidies to unhealthy foods? Say not remove the subsidies for corn in full, but if the corn is to be used in the processing of HFCS then remove it? Are you for then taking that money and putting it toward healthier alternatives? If so, then that will do a hell of a lot more than a tax could do. People are already starving as it is, if you make the foods they are able to eat more expensive, it's just going to make them starve even more, it's going to exacerbate a problem, not fix it. People tend to overeat after a time of going without food, well not by choice anyway. If you go a day or two without being able to eat, because you can't afford it, and you get some money, you are a lot more likely to buy more, and or eat more than you normally would have, and could likely bypass the calorie count you would have within those days you missed. The only people that you would "help" with a tax, are those who are not going hungry to begin with, and or have a decent gap from being at that level.
Again what I propose is instead of making all food more expensive, and or keeping it the same price, you change the scales, you tip the now healthy food being too expensive as a whole, to being where unhealthy food is now. If they switched places, that would undoubtedly make our nation healthier overall, and could be done without a tax, hell you could add a tax as well if you wanted, and use that money to help subsidize the healthier foods to make the gap even more than what it would be.
I believe you think the tax is just there to give people a wake up call and they think, well it's being taxed so it must be unhealthy?, people in general do not think that way. Most of the people you want to help would just think it's another government intrusion, and when they go hungry because they can't afford the healthy food, and or the unhealthy food as much to not be hungry, that will get them pretty pissed off.