John Banzhaf, Do You Know Where Your Children Are?
Obesity, thy name is Graco! More than 250,000 Americans under the age of 6 are now so fat they can't even fit into age-appropriate car seats.
Car seat manufacturers have already weighed in: Cosco last year introduced a harness for 65-pounders last year, while Britax has introduced a much larger and wider "Husky" seat.
This is the kind of accomodation Nick Gillespie foresaw in an article that remains a must-read even after nearly a decade:
This is all about rising standards of corpulence, of defining fatness upwards. While our society seems content to lower expectations with regard to general civility, the SAT, and the behavior of the Kennedy clan, it has continued to raise the bar, to push the envelope, to bust the britches of what we consider fat. Indeed, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which publishes standard weight-and-height charts, has over the years simply upped the allowable poundage to accommodate a fatter America.
As the U.S. government resorts to huggin' and chalkin' its relentlessly expanding population, Reason has been plumping for an accomodation with the fact that we are, in fact, getting fatter. Jacob Sullum a few years ago imagined an absurd, impossible, Soylent Green scenario in which fattening foods would be regulated like tobacco. More recently, he took a bite out of fat lawsuits. A.S. Hamrah explained why skinny celebrities must take extreme measures to look like their audiences.
