fat tax

 Image by Jeff Keen. In the past few years several prominent researchers have argued for the adoption of taxes on junk food as a means of reducing their consumption.  Often, as in a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, the argument is made that money collected through the tax could then be used to subsidize healthier foods.  This is an idea that I've found very appealing - we make the bad foods more expensive, the good foods less expensive, and people will probably shift at least some of their purchases to those healthier options.  But a very interesting new study by…