Fruit & Veggie Subsidy Instead of Soda Tax?

and here's another sugar related story that also ties into fruits and vegetables we've all heard about taxing soda right s essentially taxing uh... taxing fat taxing the bad behavior taxing the bad foods what about subsidizing the healthy foods or subsidizing then instead of taxing fat sean cash is an associate professor at tufts is also an economist and he's worked on food taxes and how they actually influence consumer choices had a fascinating interview with w_b_u_r_ what do you think of soda taxes and he said listen when prices go up you dubai last spot with soda and food and beverages in general we don't buy a lot less it's what is called an economics inelastic we pay attention to price but not a huge amount so that he's asked what what about the idea of a in subsidy and he says we've modeled this in research and if you lower fruit and vegetable prices in terms of uh... uh... disease outcomes you actually get significantly better result and why is this because again the the economics of it are somewhat in elastic but the positive affect of reducing soda consumption a little bit is not that significant for example drinking five so it is instead of six is not going to make the same difference if you're still doing it on a soda but having one extra serving of vegetables every single day over many years actually will make a huge difference we talk about long-term health outcomes and he's arguing that you actually may get more *** for the buck by subsidizing fruits and vegetables as opposed to taxing soda for example understand that uh... definitely helped health food subsidizing could have a long-term effect on health and health costs and could be very positive member in the short term i don't think you'll ever see that considering that taxing something unhealthy does provide government income people that the other argument he makes right you you get a lot more government income from that and then presumably they say what you could put a portion of that into uh... better the food labeling or education or something like that i was just balance it out mutts tax uh... someone healthy things combination right then and give subsidies to somehow think that the other thing is we were i'd understand that this this is a huge financial thing and people say you're hurting farms and all this other stuff but we really need to look at reducing uh... i wanna say eliminating i guess because people say it's untenable but reducing the subsidy on corn because what is the reason why so many products have corn derivatives in them and that those products have the lowest price per calorie because corner so heavily subsidize the time yet there's no question that uh... there is a number of there are there's a lot of money to be saved in farm subsidies while still maintaining the the safety net that they have in the case of corral and weather managing the crops the other day there was a one of the democratic senators from uh... montana questions still operates his own family farm he actually admitted that yeah you know we need some protections for farmers but there's a lot of waste in the system so if you take that and corporate welfare and you put it into lowering prices for fruits and vegetables and tax in some of these bad foods that items then i think we're on the right track i think cell all right let's take a break coming up next brad friedman from brad blog will talk about republicans reading the twenty sixteen election great interview and then we'll talk about oprah's fore skin cream what does that all about your not gonna line is that lozano year lewis's titillated waiting for that story stay with us david hackman shelves as david happening dot com