Obesity and Taxation

Stephen Kershnar
Learn to Love the Obese
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
December 1, 2009

Our society is considering a tax on fat-causing food and, perhaps, even on fat people. Daniel Engber writing in www.slate.com summarizes some of the recent movement on this issue. 80% of the states in the U.S. currently tax junk food or soda. In an interview in Men’s Health, President Obama was sympathetic to a federal soda tax. The New York Times and New England Journal of Medicine have recently called for a significant tax on soda. The former calls for a staggering $1.28 per gallon tax in New York. Other writers go further. In the New York Times, David Leonhardt writes sympathetically on the idea of discrimination against the obese. Writing in the Huffington Post, John Ridley calls for a tax on the obese.

The idea behind the soak-the-fat-people campaign is that they are imposing costs on the rest of us. According to New York Times writer Michael Pollan, the U.S. spends $147 billion to treat obesity. 30% of the increase in health-care spending over the past ten years comes from obesity and that it now amounts to roughly a tenth of all health-care spending. According to Ridley, this results in a cost of $1,250 per American household, mostly in taxes and insurance premiums. Obese people shoulder some of these costs. According to a Center for Disease Control study, in 2006 obese people spent 42% more than normal-weight people on medical costs.

Before the U.S. decides to slam fat people, it is worth noting that they already pay a significant price for their weight. Piling on taxes that are aimed directly and indirectly at them adds salt to their wounds.

Consider the economic price they pay. According to a recent paper in the Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, one study found that obese white women (64 lbs. overweight or two standard deviations) suffer a 9% decrease in wages. This is equivalent to the difference of 1.5 years or education or three years of work experience. A second study found that severely obese white women suffer a decrease in wages of 24% when compared to their normal-weight counterparts. Severely obese black women suffered a 14.6% decrease and severely obese white and black men suffered 19.6% and 3.5% respectively.

Consider the social price they pay. According to Engber, obese women are half as likely to attend college as their peers and 20% less likely to get married. Because marriage helps to eliminate poverty, this makes obese women more likely to be poor. Writing in www.slate.com, Steven Landsburg points out that ugly women tend to attract husbands who have less educational achievement and earnings potential than do other women. If ugliness correlates with obesity, and this is not clear, then even when they do get married their choices are worse. Epidemiologist Peter Muennig reports that obese persons report being badly stigmatized. He reports that when one group of formerly obese persons was asked to choose between blindness and obesity, 89% chose blindness. He notes discrimination against them is rampant. There is evidence that parents discriminate against their obese children, doctors against their obese patients, and husbands against their obese wives.

Consider the health price they pay. Engber, citing Muennig, points out the obese are up to twice as likely to die as a normal-weight person. Also, obese women are seven times more likely to suffer significant illness or death and are especially vulnerable to clinical depression.

As a society, the U.S. not only has laws banning discrimination against minorities and women, but also has laws favoring them. Affirmative action laws often result in their being given preferential treatment even when they are less qualified than their competitors. In contrast to women and minorities, fat people get little protection. Only a few cities (for example, San Francisco and Santa Cruz, CA, and Washington, D.C.) and only one state (Michigan) prohibit weight-discrimination. The American Disabilities Act doesn’t protect them because being obese is rarely a disability from a physiological cause.

One response is that being obese is a choice and that being a minority or woman is not. The problem is that genetics plays a significant role in determining someone’s weight. One study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that weight (specifically, body-mass index) is 77% heritable. This is a little misleading, however, because this measures weight relative to same-generation peers and thus includes some environmental factors. Still, it does indicate that weight is significantly heritable and the magnitude of this effect lessens the degree to which someone’s weight is under his control.

A second response is that obese people are discriminated against because consumers, daters, and spouse-seekers prefer thinner people and society should not try to counteract the preferences of a free people. There is evidence for the former claim. Economist Steven Landsburg points out that beautiful people are more likely to be found in occupations where consumer preference plays a larger role, specifically, retail sales, waitressing, etc. However, the same might be true with regard to consumers and race or gender and if consumer preference does not warrant discrimination against women and minorities than neither does it do so for fat people.

What’s more, Engber and epidemiologist Muennig argue that anti-obesity campaigns increase anti-fat bias and that this bias exacerbates the health and discrimination problems obese people face. If this is correct, then the various taxes and insurance and employment penalties will cause fat people increased discrimination, isolation, illness, and death.

On the other hand, subsidizing something produces more of it, taxing it less. If the U.S. subsidizes food production (see the many agricultural subsidies) or prevents employers and insurers from shifting the costs of fat people onto them, then it subsidizes obesity. This will produce more obesity and spread its costs.

The obese already shoulder significant burdens. Piling on seems mean-spirited. On the other hand, failing to tax them in conjunction with other policies (for example, agricultural subsidies) threatens to subsidize obesity, thereby increasing the problem. Balancing these costs and benefits is a Herculean task. A free society doesn’t concern itself with whom employers hire, what people pay for insurance, and what attitudes people have toward their neighbors. However, because we are well on our way to socialized medicine (nearly half of health spending is done by the government) and have become a country of busybodies, the Herculean task is exactly what we’ll need to do.

Rape and Evolution V: Another response to faculty and staff

Colleagues:

Thank you for your notes. I said the previous note was my last. I lied.

I thought I’d defend this sentence.

“Whether the most effective way to stop men from acting out on these desires is to strengthen criminal penalties, educational programs that focus on making men aware of these desires and the need to control them, discouraging women from dressing in provocative ways, or other means is in part an empirical question and not one that can be answered by common sense.”

First, what this sentence says and was meant to say is that the best way to discover which ways of combating rape are most effective, or effective at all, is by empirical investigation not by common sense. From this sentence, it does not follow that changing people’s attire affects the frequency of rape. I take no position on this issue. Because I think empirical investigation is the best way to discover the best teaching methods, traffic rules, baseball strategies, and lots of other things, I didn’t think the sentence was controversial. After I wrote it, I thought that one of my philosophy department colleagues might respond by busting my chops for making such a minimal claim.

This just repeats the very helpful comments of my colleague, Leonard Jacuzzo.

Second, even if something were an effective means to prevent rape from happening, it does not follow that it is morally required or permitted. For example, it might be that one way to reduce murder and rape is to increase the frequency of abortion. It does not follow from this claim, and this claim alone, that abortion is morally required or permitted. Here I take no position on the moral or legal status of abortion or whether abortion reduces violent crime.

Third, even if an act were an effective means to prevent a result, it does not follow that a person who omits to do it is blameworthy for the result. Here it is helpful to distinguish who is to blame for a result and what is a prudentially wise thing to do. An act might be prudentially unwise without making the agent responsible for the result. To see the distinction, imagine that a professor, Jones, runs in the middle of the night in downtown Detroit. His colleagues tell him that this is not safe. He responds that if bad guys beat him up, then they are to blame for his injuries. His colleagues would likely agree with him and still tell him that it is not a wise decision to go running in the middle of the night in Detroit. I take no position on whether changing one’s attire is prudentially wise.

In summary, the sentence does not entail that (1) attire affects the frequency of rape, (2) modest attire is morally required or permitted, or (3) victims are in any way to blame for an attack.

Thanks and I hope your semester is finishing well,
Steve K

Rape and Evolution IV: A response to a different history professor

Thank you for your thoughtful note.

Here is the Thornhill and Palmer assertion. “The most convincing study of pregnancy and rape in peacetime settings (Holmes et al., 1996) involved a three-year longitudinal study of a representative sample of several thousand American women. Among victims of reproductive age (12-45), the rape-related pregnancy rate was 5% per rape, or 6 percent per victim. … [T]he figures reported by Holmes et al. probably should be corrected to about 2 percent. At this time it is not known whether false rape allegations influence this percentage.”

Thornhill and Palmer (2000), 100 citing M.H. Holmes et al., “Rape-related pregnancy: Estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 175 (1996): 320-325. Note Holmes et al. (1996) apparently state that the probability of conception following rape is 5.3% for women 12-17 and 4.7% for those ages 18-45.

You asked about the conception rates for consensual sex. It is 3.1%. A. J. Wilcox et al., “Likelihood of conception with a single act of intercourse: providing benchmark rapes for assessment of post-coital contraceptives,” Contraception 63 (2001): 211-215 cited in Fessler. Note that age differences make the comparison to rape-related frequency tricky.

You asked about the comparative rate of conception. “Moreover, analysis of conception rates reveals that the probability of conception following rape does not differ from that following consensual coitus.” Daniel Fessler, “Rape is not less frequent during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle,” Sexualities, Evolution, & Gender 5.3 (2003): 127-147.

Note that the percentages need not be that high for natural selection to operate. “Natural selection can operate effectively with small reproductive advantages, as little as 1 percent.” Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (2002): 368.

You ask where Thornhill and Palmer (2000) got their data. They went to the Holmes et al. 1996 study. Where did Holmes et al. go to get their data? I don’t know the answer to this. I am assuming that the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology is a peer-reviewed journal that would have been sensitive to this issue, but this is just an assumption.

You point out that conception is not the same as the production of offspring who will themselves reproduce. This is correct, but all the conception-data was used is to show that there is evidence that some of the known effects of rape are consistent with evolutionary theory. Compare this to predictions made by the feminist theory (rape-is-not-about-sex) and the anti-evolution theory (rape is not an evolution-based adaptation or effect of such an adaptation or adaptations). Is there any evidence for these theories?

I’m curious as to whether you found Johnston-Robledo and McVicker’s arguments #1 through #7 (my numbering) to be weak.

1. If so, I’m not sure why a curiosity about one piece of data would have led you to sign a letter containing such arguments.

2. If not, I’m wondering why neither you nor anyone else has presented a plausible defense of any of these arguments.

Thanks again for the note. I hope your semester is finishing well,
Steve K