A quite common preservative is sodium benzoate. Sounds pretty nasty, huh? Well, it's a natural constituent of cranberries, prunes, and apples. It also is useful against schizophrenia and urea cycle disorders.
Then there's ascorbic acid used as a preservative. It's an essential nutrient.
HFCS is widely used because U.S. cane sugar lobbyists successfully pushed for high duties on imported sugar: this allowed U.S. producers to push up the price of cane sugar. Big users of sugar in processed foods then looked for cheaper ways to get the same sweetness, and HFCS became a practical substitute. If common sugars are all made more expensive, the search for practical alternatives will intensify. Perhaps someone will find a way to make the sugar alcohols like xylitol or other chemicals tasting very much like sugar such as inositol, cheap enough.
Actually, cane sugar (or the equivalent beet sugar) is quite cheap, and the price would probably have to more than double to cut down much on most people's intake.
Any high level of taxation is stupid; the higher the stupider. High levels of taxation mean that people will act in ways that minimize the tax they pay; instead of producing or enjoying themselves, they are living their lives to avoid government burdens. High taxes of any form distort the economy. Short term, high taxes make most people worse off, long term everybody is worse off (because of the loss of technological advances.)
If the tax burden is low, it's not worth the effort to avoid it, and most people can't be bothered when they have something better to do.
Wolff and Gittleman also find that because wealth transfers generally make up a bigger portion of the wealth of poor and middle-class people, they actually reduce wealth inequality, in aggregate. “Our simulations show that eliminating inheritances either in full or in part actually increases overall wealth inequality and, in particular, sharply reduces the share of the bottom 40 percent of the wealth distribution,” they write. So while there’s no doubting that the rich are inheriting a lot of money — 14.7 percent of the wealth of the top 1 percent isn’t nothing, after all — it remains the case that inheritance does not increase wealth inequality.
Think about it: if you're poor and inherit a tiny slum house, it's proportionally a greater portion of your wealth (which might previously have been negative) than a million dollar estate to someone who has already accumulated, e.g., $300,000.
A: the purpose of the zoning code is to keep the poor and minorities out of middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods,
B: and that in turn restricts economic mobility,
C: keeping the poor dependent on social programs for their livelihood.
It is completely absurd to claim that A implies either B or C.
Where I live, the zones are 1. Village 2. Rural 3. Industrial 4. Recreational (a ski center)
The divisions are based on existing business (no housing allowed in the industrial zone) and the necessity for a water and sewage system in the more densely populated village zone.
Would you like to explain how those zones "keep the poor and minorities out of middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods"?
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire