Big Mac Subsidy?

I do not think this is entirely accurate. Lung cancer in smokers hits unusually young people because, well, they are smokers. Heart disease is a disease of old age and accelerating it somewhat through an unhealthy diet would have complex effects. However, making matters even more complicated, ultraprocessed foods also promote cancers and obesity -- the latter is definitely a huge healthcare burden which does not kill people immediately.

This is hard to model since there can be a shift from a disease that kills slowly to one that kills quickly and early (dementia to lung cancer), but you can have also the opposite shift (e.g. from a non-disease state to chronic COPD and frailty preceding death).

All we can say for sure is that the harmful effects of smoking and junk food diets may be offset to some extent. More so for smoking than junk food.

Either way, it would appear the consensus is that "in high-income countries, lifetime health care costs are greater for smokers than for non-smokers, even after accounting for the shorter lives of smokers"

https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-17-economics/17-2-the-costs-of-smoking

Unclear. The overwhelming majority of healthcare costs for the median American come in the last 6 months of life. The "least costly" method of dying is usually passing away in your sleep out of the blue. 

The types of diseases correlated with Big Mac consumption or smoking are not usually "pass away in your sleep without much medical intervention." They are more likely to be the types of diseases that carry with them long-term, relatively high cost interventions (dialysis, heart surgery, gastric bypass, and other obesity-related interventions.) Same with smoking-- significant levels of medical care are allocated to treating people with lung cancer. 

While its possible some of those savings are recouped by moneys otherwise sent as social security payments or whatever, it seems unlikely they are a net savings. 

This is to say nothing about people who might retire early because of preventable disease (shortened health spans where they provide society with useful work) and other reasons obese people might not produce as much net output that they otherwise would in the alternative where they did not consume so many Big Macs. 

I do think that's better, but my guess is if one of us got the book and looked at how they calculated their totals we'd be pretty unimpressed and not see them as worth building on.

Big Macs are 0.4% of beef consumption specifically, rather than:

• All animal farming, weighted by cruelty
• All animal food production, weighted by environmental impact
• The meat and dairy industries, weighted by amount of government subsidy
• Red meat, weighted by health impact

...respectively.

The health impact of red meat is certainly dominated by beef, and the environmental impact of all animal food might be as well, but my impression is that beef accounts for a small fraction of the cruelty of animal farming (of course, this is subjective) and probably not a majority of meat and dairy government subsidies.

Doesn't make sense to use the particular consumer's preferencces to estimate the cruelty cost. If that's how we define the cruelty cost it then the buyer should already be taking it into account when making their purchasing decision, so it's not an exernality.

The externality comes from the animals themselves having interests which the consumers aren't considering

We should definitely not expect the "true fraction of beef consumption" to be proportional to impact. Steaks are consumed basically the same way as they were before subsidies (though in much larger quantity); they don't respond much to the subsidy to take advantage of it. Fast food isn't restricted to being prepared or sourced in a particular traditional way and therefore will change itself to best exploit subsidy. Estimating that effect as a 2.5x multiplier seems like a perfectly good conservative approximation, so you should just stick with 1%.

Beef is far from the only meat or dairy food consumed by Americans.

I think you're misusing this meme. You've watched the American Psycho scene about comparing business card typography and him being one-upped repeatedly, right? I don't see how that fits here.

Looking at the negative karma and positive agreevotes: