To the Honorable Mayor Bloomberg:<\/p>\n
Congratulations on your plan to ban Big Gulps.\u00a0 You’ve piggybacked on an issue of minor importance created by the First Lady and already flowing through the public bloodstream.\u00a0 Obesity.<\/p>\n
Banning Big Gulps is a good step toward addressing the issue.\u00a0 Please notice I didn’t say solving it, because it won’t.\u00a0 That’s a good thing.\u00a0 You’ve offered a solution through good intentions that won’t help, which means you can do more of it down the line.\u00a0 The camel’s nose has taken the first step down a slippery slope.\u00a0 Perfect.<\/p>\n
But this brings me to the point of this letter.\u00a0 The news is reporting that the Board of Health says the plan doesn’t go far enough and wants to expand it to milk shakes and popcorn.\u00a0 This is the right idea, but terrible timing.\u00a0 They’re supposed to see the camel’s nose, not the nose, neck, and half a hump.\u00a0 That’s likely to ruin the entire deal!<\/p>\n
The idea is incrementalism.\u00a0 These things need to be done incrementally.\u00a0 If you just ban Big Gulps, a majority of the people won’t care.\u00a0 They’ll either not know about it, not care because they don’t buy drinks that size, or knowingly say that something really does need to be done about obesity because they’ve gotten it from the media for several months and never question such things.\u00a0 That leaves the minority of people who do buy them and libertarians, who can be reliably marginalized as “extremists.”\u00a0 If you do too much at one time, you might impact enough people and risk a political backlash.<\/p>\n
The idea is to wait until enough time has gone by that people forget there ever was such a thing as a Big Gulp, which doesn’t take that long and is dependent upon the intelligence of the citizenry.\u00a0 You’re in office, so that’s already been established.\u00a0 It won’t be more than a couple months before New Yorkers will forget Big Gulps were ever available locally and will think they’re a novelty item native to Hoboken.\u00a0 Patience is the key.<\/p>\n
Once sufficient time has passed and New Yorkers are as fat as ever, if not fatter, you can tout the success of your anti-obesity efforts, but say that more needs to be done.\u00a0 Then you can ban other things.\u00a0 Good luck with your efforts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To the Honorable Mayor Bloomberg: Congratulations on your plan to ban Big Gulps.\u00a0 You’ve piggybacked on an issue of minor importance created by the First Lady and already flowing through the public bloodstream.\u00a0 Obesity. Banning Big Gulps is a good … Continue reading