Borrowing money from yourself at Carl's Jr.

Ezra Klein says an interesting thing:

This gets to an important point about cheap food: It's not necessarily cheap. It's cheap now. But given the health costs associated with obesity and diabetes -- and given their stunning prevalence in low-income communities -- it's really a way of borrowing money from your future self. No one thinks about it that way, but for this family that bought fast food because it was affordable and now spends thousands of dollars out-of-pocket on diabetes medication, that's been the overall impact.

I think there's something deeply screwed up about a country that not only doesn't make any effort to make healthy food affordable, but actively subsidizes unhealthy food as well. And, as Klein points out, in the long run these twisted incentives end up costing us more.

(Photo by ebruli)