Some people will say that there s no slippery slope, that smoking is a special case, that we ll never have a tax on fatty foods. In fact, the history of the CDC itself suggests that your Big Mac isn t safe from taxation. The CDC went on to assist in the battle against polio, but as the communicable diseases of the 1940s and 50s receded, the CDC looked for new missions to justify its larger budgets and increasing staff. By the end of the 1980s, the CDC had strayed from its original mission of responding to communicable disease outbreaks to investigate everything from homicides to child abuse to smoking. All worthy causes, but now we ve gone all the way from saving people from malaria to convincing people not to eat at Burger King.
Obesity is, in general, the result of personal choices and poses zero risk of communication.
We don t need an agency, funded with our money, to save us from ourselves. Congress should immediately cut the CDC s budget in half. This would allow the agency to do the job for which it was created responding to outbreaks of infectious diseases without the time and resources to whine about how much we eat. And they can have my Chalupa when they pry it from my cold, dead, salsa-covered fingers. To talk back to James Freeman, click here .