In his column today  ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20friedman.html?hp ) he made reference to “cheese eating surrender monkeys” as part of an arguement for a tax he proposes of a gas $1 per gallon.  I agree him for all the reasons he puts forth, such as national security, deficit reduction, the environment, and on and on.  But that’s not the point.  He says his buck/gallon tax would generate $140 billion a year.  That’s the point.

Think about all the gas you buy each year and then think about it costing you another dollar a gallon.  That’s about how much you’re already paying for the lardbutt at the next pump (and the next one, since two out of three people in this country are overweight) to cover HIS cost of additonal health care each year due to his lardbuttness!   And are we doing anything about it?  Not that I can see.

And another thing.  If there were a Fat Tax our dependence on foreign oil would be much reduced (which is largely the benefit Friedman champions).  How can a Fat Tax do the same thing?  Well, if a third of the population lost say 30 pounds, that would mean that as a nation we’d haul around about 2.2 TRILLION less pounds (a million tons+) each year.  I don’t know what that translates into as to gas savings, but it’s got to be a bunch!

So now we get to add national security to the list of Fat Tax benefits.  I’m sure there are many many more — some real, some imagined — but if you’ve got one, please let us know.

1.) Because they will be a burden on the tax paying thin of America for a long long time.  Not as long as their thiner contemporaries, but quite some time nonetheless.  The older Fattys won’t last all that much longer so should be taxed at the base rate.

2.) The tax payer responsible for an an obese child should be punished severely.  Throwing him or her  into a deep dank dungeon for allowing their child to become obese would be appropriate, but since we don’t do the deep dank dungeon thing here in America, what do we do?  We hit ‘em in the pocketbook which they fear much more than the deep dank dungeon anyway.

This will get results, believe me.  It very simple.

The Prez (Mr. Obama) has a so-called  “solution” for the healthcare crisis in America.  The crisis is in the rising cost of health care, but his solution has nothing to do with this.  His solution is about who pays.  Nothing about how to reduce the cost.   Read on: I have a way to reduce the cost  –  SIGNIFICANTLY!

First of all, I want to make an obvious point.  We are in America; the good ol’ US of A.  In America, everything revolves around the almighty dollar.   The doctor in America is more interested in his next Porsche payment than he is about the patient’s next rent payment, so a new hip here and a full body MRI scan there are a good thing.  For the doc.  Everyone works the system to generate the maximum number of dollars for their own wallet.  End of story.  I don’t know how we’re gonna fix that.  That just seems to be the system we’re using, and will be using, until we become the US of Europe or something.

So, why don’t we use that approach to deal with one giant part of the problem?    And which part is that?

Fat.

Just the other day I heard on the evening news that the annual healthcare cost for an obese person is $1400 more than for a non-obese person.   So I’m thinking, “Hey, there’s a lot of fat people in this country, and that’s gotta be a lot of money.  I wonder how much it really adds up to?”

According to latest National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey there are 72 million obese people in the US.  That’s in line with estimates of 34% of the adult population of 225 million.  And these are not people that are just overweight (another 33%).  These are the way, way, WAY overweight folks.

Here’s the math.  It’s real simple:
72,000,000  fattys
$1,400  extra cost of health care PER YEAR each!
$100,800,000,000.   Medical cost PER YEAR of obesity in the US.

That number is One Hundred BILLION, eight hundred million dollars.  $100 Billion every year.

That’s the additional ANNUAL cost of health care in the US for fat people.

In a quick search of the internet I found a CDC publication of July 24, 2009 with the title, Recommended Community Strategies and Measurements to Prevent Obesity in the United States.  It is 43 pages long with 24 recommendations.  Who’s gonna read all that, and it’s all a bunch of policy wonk mumbo jumbo about land use, breastfeeding (I’m not making this up), and walking to school.

I think we can eliminate 99.5% of the obesity surcharge to healthcare with one EASY TO ADMINISTER program.  The Fat Tax.  It’s real simple.  If you’re obese, you pay an extra $1,400 in tax to the Feds.  If you’re not, you don’t.

If we kicked in the Fat Tax tomorrow, the Feds would get an extra $100 billion per year to pay the cost.  Pretty soon, there’d be less obese people and the revenues would go down, but guess what?  So do the costs!  We’re already paying the Fat Tax in MEDICARE, insurance premiums, hospital visits, you name it.  This would reduce the cost (not shift it to someone else, a la the Prez), buy hitting fat people in the wallet which I guarantee will reduce their number (remember, this is America), and for those that wanna stay fat, they, not everyone else, will bear the cost.

How do we do this you ask?  As I keep saying, “It’s real simple”.   Make it a part of the IRS job.  Right there on the 1040 would be line 8c. “Height:____ft.____in. “ and 8b. “Wt. _______”.  They already know if you’re male or female.  They already know everything else about you (who you work for, how much you make, who you make donations to, and on and on) so it won’t be any more of an invasion of privacy.  And verifications (after all the IRS can’t just take our word for it) could be by drug stores that could set a little photo booth with a scale underneath that takes your picture, stamps it with date and weight (height would be shown in the photo by a yard stick glued to the back wall) and voilà, everybody’s official.  Of course, you’d have to include on line 8c. “BMI _______” (taken from Appendix RU2F), and if it’s too high, WHAM, line 8d. “Add $1400 if filing single, or $1400 for each Fatty (see glossary of terms) if filing jointly.”  And we’re done.  $100 BILLION sucked out of the healthcare deficit.  Is this great or what??!

Some of you may think I’m just kidding – having a little fun.  But I’m not — I’m serious.  This establishing government policy is kind of fun (I guess that’s why so many people want to be elected to Congress and spend millions and millions of dollars to do it), but what’s the part of my plan that doesn’t work?
1.    It reduces COST.  It does not simply shift the cost from the have-nots to the haves.
2.    It reduces cost SIGNIFICANTLY at virtually no cost to the government.
3.    It will result in a SIGNIFICANTLY healthier population.  And when the simply overweight folks see how well the obese are doing, they might get on the bandwagon and loose some of those unnecessary pounds too.

By way of example, look how wildly successful the Cash for Clunkers program has been.  You give people money to do something and by golly, they do it.   THIS IS AMERICA!  And don’t you forget it!

Congress is gearing up to do something.  Don’t let this historic moment pass you by without sending a link to this blog to your Congressmen and Senators, and to everyone else you know.

And make a comment so that those folks in Washington can come here for some common sense solutions to a pretty simple issue.