New Jersey wants to enact a new "sin tax" on fast food. Presumably, this is another effort to get people to make healthier eating choices, but if you ask me, anyone considering this as a good idea needs to think about what this means.
If the plan works, less people will eat fast food. People eating less fast food means fast food establishments will earn less revenue. Employees of fast food establishments will make less money, and some will lose their jobs. Those restaurants won't be able to afford as much staff as they have now.
But wait a second. Didn't the federal government recently raise minimum wage? Furthermore, the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development explicitly says food service employees are protected by minimum wage laws.
Somebody needs to get their head out of the sand. What kind of message are they sending? First, we need to make sure that those poor souls flipping Mickey D's burgers have enough to live on (never mind that fast food is not a job meant to completely support an individual). Now that we've done that, we'll put the squeeze on those same fast food restaurants again by targeting them with a sin tax. Add to this the already-occurring rampant inflation in food prices.
Never mind that fast food happens to be more affordable than healthy food. As long as we're messing with the market, why not just force health-food companies to lower their prices? That's a tactic people want to see in the oil industry, so let's bring it into the health-food industry, too.
I've got three words for New Jersey, if they go through with this:
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Face it, Governor Corzine, you can't have your cake (paying fast food employees more), and eat it, too (by raising the taxes on the work of those same fast food employees).
On a related note, I was going to call this post "Having Their Taco, and Eating It, Too," but I realized that might get some people unnecessarily excited.
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