The Japanese government has set new national guidelines under which businesses would face massive fines if their employees’ bellies exceed a certain circumference:
Companies and local governments must now measure the waistlines of all employees and family members over the age of 40…(Japanese company) NEC (is) facing 19 million dollars in penalties if it’s employees don’t slim down.
So…who’s hiring?
The Sumo business will be hit hard. Also, Shaidle is right; nuked either too much or not enough.
Another powergrab by the nanny state. Don’t be surprised if we see a fat tax here as it would be justified by the fact that we have socialized medicine.
The most important factor is whether one is in good physical condition; not whether their waistline happens to be greater than a government decreed maximum. With global cooling around the corner, maintaining additional fat stores as insulation and calories for the lean times might not be a bad idea.
That, of course, assumes that one doesn’t have diabetes or sleep apnea. Losing weight is a great way to reduce blood sugars (if the problem is insulin resistance) and for someone with sleep apnea, often as little as 15 lb of weight loss will result in far less severe apnea.
I think that “fat taxes” are just the latest means by which kleptocratic statists living beyond their means justify gouging the population.
Although I do have to admit that the best weight loss programs I’ve encountered owe their successes to ensuring that people who enroll in them have no money left over to buy food after they pay the program fees.
,,,first they came for the tobacco smokers…it isn’t illegal to be fat, is it? Same old game.
I don’t know if it’s a powergrab, in the usual sense of the word, or just more dumb, ill-thought out social planning with the inevitable unintended consequences.
A few years back the the British government (or some local government in Britain, I can’t recall) decided to streamline the backlog in court cases by having a set fine for common assault; instead of going to court you would instead pay a predetermined fine, depending on how serious the injury you caused. There was a fixed penalty for, for example, breaking someone’s nose, and a different fine for other injuries. What happened, though, was that Yobs would save up money during the week for the, erm, right to assault someone – they called it “pay per punch.” Kinda, “hey, Brian, I got enough saved up to break someone’s jaw this weekend.”
The Japanese government fat policy is all but guaranteed to have its own unintended consequence. Realistically speaking, if you owned a company and you had the choice of either a) paying a massive fine for having an overweight employee, or b) firing the fat employee and/or not hiring pudgy-ish employees, you’d almost certainly choose option B.
I know a local business where one of the best employees is – to be polite – seriously not svelte. Said employee woud be considered by some to not be a ‘good’ customer relations person because of weight issues, but is really great with the customers.
I admit that, first time of entering, I did look long and hard at said employee. But, very quickly, I figured that this person was probably really special; that’s true.
Given Japan’s deplorable birth rates, I don’t think they’ll have many employees to hire in the first place.
Now we need to do some googling to find images of the Japanese Royal Family, their Cabinet, their Parliament and other top level bureaucrats … and do a fatty-check. All “winners” so found get one of those fat, smiling Buddha statuettes, but with two faces and the Balzac quote on the base “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”
Francois de la Rochefoucauld, dude.
First thing I thought when I read that was that this is a stealthy way to encourage management to push out the older employees so that younger ones can be hired/promoted. Because of the fact that Japan’s birth rate is so low, all the most senior positions are being choked out by an older and older generation.
Now to see all the unintended consequences, regardless of whether this was about freeing up top positions or actual health.
Fat tax?
With all this CO2/green idiocy we’re swimming in, I’m surprised we haven’t had an earth saving “$hit tax”, dumped on us. Pardon the pun.
Japan is also the country responsible for tentacle porn, so it’s not surprising when they get up to other sorts of craziness.
This law should include a program allowing companies to buy “calorie credits” where, for every inch their employees exceed the maximum waist size, they would have to pay a fee to some poorer, smaller company with skinney employees so that company’s employees can eat more and get fat too. Al Gore could head the “calory credit” UN commission. It’s a no-brainer.
It’s just the Japanese being Japanese. Considering they are in a death spiral and they hold their sumo wrestlers dear, penalising a chubby worker sounds rather bad, actually.
All I’ll say is fat people are gross.
Is there actual hard data to indicate that the obese/smokers/etc. really have significantly higher *lifetime* costs to their healthcare systems?
E.G. Does an obese smoker that gets cancer at 48 and dies of a heart attack at 50 really cost the system more than a slender slender 90 year-old that’s spent the last 20 years in a nursing home because she broke both hips at 70?
“Is there actual hard data to indicate that the obese/smokers/etc. really have significantly higher *lifetime* costs to their healthcare systems?”
Ahhahahahaha! You really ‘need’ hard data to tell you that fat slobs and smokers have higher healthcare costs?! Now there’s a study in the blatantly obvious! What a WASTE of time, energy, and money.
“E.G. Does an obese smoker that gets cancer at 48 and dies of a heart attack at 50 really cost the system more than a slender slender 90 year-old that’s spent the last 20 years in a nursing home because she broke both hips at 70?”
Your example isn’t a fair comparison…you took the opposite absolute extreme situations in both groups.
Once again…fat people are gross…and smoking cigarettes is a disgusting and pointless habit.
“All I’ll say is fat people are gross.”
How I wish that were true.
So, how much do you weigh, BTJ?
“How I wish that were true.”
Huh?
“So, how much do you weigh, BTJ?”
It’s not how much you weigh, it’s how much of you is fat.