Caroline Franck's ArticleTaxing Junk Food To Counter Obesity?

In the article “Taxing Junk Food to Counter Obesity” (2013) by Caroline Franck, Sonia Gandhi, and Mark Eisenberg, the authors explains the different proposals that have been made in order to combat obesity and the health epidemic in the United States. Franck discusses the positive and negative aspects of a junk food tax as well as other variations of the tax in different countries. Throughout the article, the authors clearly argue that a junk food tax would have many complications as this is a controversial topic in America. As the obesity epidemic in the US continues to grow, experts have suggested that lawmakers should implement a tax on junk food. Countries such as France and Hungary have tried to implement a tax on items that are deemed as unhealthy but have hit many obstacles along the way. However, there has been a large controversy to this topic as there hasn’t been enough time to study if a tax is sufficient enough to change the behavior of millions of people. Many countries, including parts of the US and Canada, do have taxes on specific food such as soft drinks and sweets in order to create revenue. Some researchers, claim sales taxes are an inefficient way to deal with this problem as they curb supply and demand. A more efficient way would be to include the tax in the retail price, thus encouraging people to buy less of the product. A built in tax would also create more revenue for the government and would allow people to benefit from the extra million dollars