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In The New York Times, Mark Bittman offers us this thought: “Bad Food? Tax It and Subsidize Vegetables.” The idea is to link taxes on unhealthy “hyperprocessed” foods like soda, French fries, and doughnuts directly to healthy food subsidies — i.e. one pays for the other. It’s not a bad concept — it’s well-established that Americans tend to prefer “earmarked” taxes that are devoted to particular programs. As Bittman puts it:

 Putting all of those elements together could create a national program that would make progress on a half-dozen problems at once — disease, budget, health care, environment, food access and more — while paying for itself. The benefits are staggering, and though it would take a level of political will that’s rarely seen, it’s hardly a moonshot.

Too true. As I observed in my own piece from a couple of years back, “Tax junk food, but also subsidize veggies”:

 We made junk food cheap but we also made good food expensive. There’s no free market in food. There’s only the stuff we subsidize and the stuff we don’t. And I’m not talking simply about cash subsidies paid to corn growers. I’m talking about a system that drives the wholesale price of corn and soybeans (the raw materials in all processed foods) to well below the cost of production. Meanwhile, fruits and vegetables, don’t get that benefit — they’re expected to sell at a premium (even if in some cases the premium is small). Not that I think the government should start squeezing vegetable farmers the way its policies have allowed the squeezing of corn and soy farmers — Walmart and other grocery chains already do plenty of that.