As America grows fatter and sicker, Washington is using your tax dollars to buy the junk food and drugs driving our quiet national collapse.
This editorial ran in the Tuesday 18 November 2025 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
I still have my old elementary school class photos. My classmates and I went from first through twelfth grade together, and only one kid was obese. By high school, she had joined Weight Watchers, and you’d hardly have known she’d ever been heavy. In the 1960s and 70s, obesity was the rare exception that stuck out; today, half the country would stand out in those photos—for the wrong reasons.
Nearly 70% of American adults, and about 20% of children and teenagers, are obese. Meanwhile, 77% of 17–24-year-olds are ineligible for military service: one-third disqualified by obesity, and another quarter can’t pass basic fitness. A country that can’t field fit 20-year-olds has a problem.
Instead of re-examining its subsidies, D.C. has made obesity both profitable and permanent. Start with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), sold as a lifeline against hunger but now one of the largest junk-food subsidies.
USDA data show that soft drinks are the top SNAP purchase, and another 20 cents of every dollar goes to sweetened drinks, desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar. We ban alcohol and tobacco on EBT cards but still let SNAP buy soda and junk food—the very products that drive obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
And it’s not just unhealthy; it’s sloppy. In data from just 29 mostly red states, USDA found roughly 500,000 people getting two SNAP payments and about 186,000 dead people still on the rolls. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has floated forcing every SNAP recipient to reapply to start cleaning up that mess—and she admits those numbers will grow once the big blue states are included.
If your body mass index hits 30 or higher, Medicare covers “obesity behavioral therapy” — screenings, counseling, and diet-and-exercise sessions. Medicaid picks up much of the obesity-related care. D.C. funds junk food on the front end, then lectures about eating less of it on the back.
Pharmaceutical giants have turned obesity into long-term revenue streams, marketing drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound as miracle fixes for the condition our policies create. Recent deals between D.C. and drugmakers expand Medicare access and fast-track new treatments in exchange for list-price cuts.
Taxpayers subsidize ultra-processed calories through SNAP, the resulting disease through Medicare and Medicaid, and then drugs to treat the obesity those subsidies helped create. Food companies and pharma get paid, bureaucracies grow, and the country gets fatter, sicker, and weaker.
Obesity isn’t about looks or “fat shaming”; it is a disease engine. Overweight and obesity are associated with about 55% of cancers in women and a 24% of cancers in men, and obesity is a major risk factor for diabetes, heart disease, and disability. When we pour SNAP dollars into soda and chips, we are not simply “letting people choose.” We are pre-paying for chemo, insulin, and knee replacements.
Why do we let this continue and call any effort to reform SNAP cruel? Because we’ve confused empathy with sympathy. Sympathy says, “I see your struggle, and I want what’s best for you, even if the truth stings.”
However, modern “empathy” tells us to feel what others feel so deeply we dare not contradict them. A doctor who says, “You need to lose weight,” is called “fatphobic.” That isn’t compassion; it’s cowardice.
For decades, the WIC program took a different path. It served low-income pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and children under five, and it didn’t hand them blank food stamps; it gave them real food: milk, cheese, eggs, beans, formula, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. No soda. No candy. No “energy drinks.”
If we insist on a national food-assistance program, SNAP should be held to that same standard—meat, eggs, dairy, vegetables, fruit, and staple grains only, with states barred from putting junk food back on the taxpayer’s tab. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to buy junk food for the obese.
On the health-care side, we should stop treating expensive weight-loss drugs as something taxpayers must provide. Any public coverage should be tied to real behavior change: verifiable diet improvement, exercise, and ongoing coaching.
Doctors, teachers, coaches, commanders, and parents must be free to tell the truth: obesity is dangerous. It shortens life, burdens taxpayers, and undermines national strength.
A nation that pays to make itself unfit and then funds the cleanup is schizophrenic. We have built a system that fattens corporations, bureaucracies, and bodies, all in the name of “empathy.” If we really care about our neighbors, we’ll stop forcing taxpayers to subsidize self-destruction and start telling the truth about what obesity is doing to this country.