For those who need a seat per cheek

29th Jan 2010

The low-cost air­line Ryanair have recently pro­posed a con­tro­ver­sial new tax for pas­sen­gers of a cer­tain weight on their flights. Yas­mine Armes looks at the pros and cons of such a risky pro­posal and won­ders what dif­fer­ence it will really make.

Con­tro­ver­sial travel providers Ryanair are cur­rently con­sid­er­ing mak­ing pas­sen­gers buy another ticket based on their BMI. This deci­sion was heav­ily backed by cus­tomers in an online poll and is intended to make pas­sen­gers more com­fort­able and work as an ‘incen­tive’ for peo­ple to lose weight.

If you have an ideal/underweight BMI (and to be hon­est, are a lit­tle bit self­ish) then it’s easy to say ‘yes this is a great idea, tax the fat­ties, I’ll have a cheaper ticket’. With this in mind, I will tell you why this idea is just great.

Firstly, who cares if it’s dis­crim­i­na­tory and slightly demor­al­is­ing? At the end of the day if it makes my ticket cheaper, I’m happy.

On the prac­ti­cal side, it would increase wait­ing time at air­ports. I actu­ally feel we don’t spend enough time in air­ports. For most of us poor stu­dents we only get to endure these won­der­ful places a few times a year. Max­i­mum. Why not bring back the air­port magic? We only have to get there around three hours before our flight, why not make it four?

BMI is a pretty poor way of mea­sur­ing if somebody’s obese; how about peo­ple who play sport? But if you think about it, they must be wealthy if they have enough extra time on their hands to build so much mus­cle it makes them ‘clin­i­cally obese’ in terms of BMI, there­fore they can afford to pay a lit­tle bit extra.

Think of the BMI cal­cu­la­tion as a Weight Watch­ers weigh-in. It’s a great idea to weigh some­one before they’re off. Rather than encour­age hol­i­day goers to try exotic food and enjoy them­selves, it might pro­mote diet­ing and stop more peo­ple becom­ing obese. Being told how much you weigh, espe­cially if you’re one pound into the ‘obese’ cat­e­gory won’t make you feel dis­ap­pointed but motivated!

Speak­ing of moti­va­tion, sav­ing a whole 60 pounds or so when you reach the ‘ideal’ BMI cat­e­gory is clearly a mas­sive moti­va­tional fac­tor. I’m sure that some obese peo­ple are quite happy being obese but could sav­ing that amount of money be the num­ber one rea­son in their deci­sion to embark on a new diet plan. Imple­ment­ing a ‘fat tax’ does not take into account the rea­son behind people’s obe­sity which could include med­ical rea­sons, such as an under­ac­tive thy­roid, which can’t be helped.

After putting for­ward my case, I hope you can agree that a ‘fat tax’ is the way for­ward. Well, if you don’t take into account 1) BMI cat­e­gories can be highly inac­cu­rate, 2) it’s demor­al­iz­ing and dis­crim­i­na­tory, 3) even more time wait­ing at the air­port (as if there’s not enough already), 4) the cause of obe­sity includ­ing med­ical rea­sons, 5) most impor­tantly, most obese peo­ple don’t actu­ally want to be obese and the thought of sav­ing a bit of money will never be a major moti­vat­ing fac­tor. Ah well, none of these triv­ial issues mat­ter… bring on the ‘fat tax’!