Wouldn't a calorie tax be much more straightforward? I don't see what good would be done shifting people from Pepsi to Frappachinos.

All the data is already there, implementation would be trivial.

This would fix one of my largest personal gripes: That diet Sprite or Seltzer are never available at restaurants.

Let me get this straight. Obesity is a problem. The use of corn syrup and sugar to sweeten beverages promotes obesity. So rather than taxing the sweeteners, the best solution is to tax a category of products which a) doesn't include many sweetened beverages (e.g., Kool-Aid, frappacinos), and b) does include many artificially sweetened beverages. This is exactly the opposite logic of cap and trade, for what it's worth.

FICA "taxes work" I guess but there's good reasons not to screw with it.

I don't see how you can fund SS on sin taxes.

We should have a small tax on sodas and a substantial tax increase on alcohol. Prohibition didn't work, but if alcohol were more expensive, we'd have much fewer car fatalities, much less wife beating and fewer brawls and less machismo in general. That's how it is in Canada and we could sue the revenue.

Sodas are harmful and it’s more than just obesity. The sugar free ones are harmful- they tend to raise blood pressure and aggravate cardiovascular disease especially if one drinks more than one a day. Why not tax them? Readers who think that diet Coke or diet Sprite are healthy would do much better taking V-8 or any vegetable juice- look at the potassium to sodium ratio.

If we want to discourage empty calories, then it would make far more sense to stop subsidizing industrial food products. The problem with soda isn't the water or the flavor or the bubbles -- it's the artificially cheap "sugar" made from subsidized corn.

TV - remember that there is a difference between who pays the subsidy (Fed) and who collects the tax (state/city). This makes a difference!

What tom veil said. Along those lines, your proposal would mean to say that we would (i) subsidize production of sugar and (ii) tax sugar consumption.

Ah Ezra, always trying to show just how progressive you aren't. He's more interested in telling people what to do than in making a fairer world. Whenever someone asks the difference between a 'progress' and a 'liberal', that's it right there. Progressives care about social justice, egalitarianism, and fair taxation. Liberals care about government spending, free trade, and telling people what to do.

Taxing wealth = bad. Taxing poor people = good.

Ezra can bullshit all he wants, but thats the result of what he's saying. He's decided that it's better to tax the poor than the rich, because the government needs money and taxing rich people is 'taxing work'.

Apparently, those of us who weren't born into his privilege get our money by begging and stealing. We certainly don't 'work'. Hell, most of us don't even have offices!

Let's say that I'm on some kind of tax-supported public insurance plan. It makes sense (maybe) that I should have to pay taxes to consume foods that will increase my burden on that system. But let's say I'm buying private health insurance. Haven't I already paid for the health care I'm going to consume down the line? Why do I also need to pay the government, who will not be responsible for paying for any hypothetical increased health care costs?

Taxes should be designed to raise revenue in a progressive (ie fair) manner. Things like soda taxes are horribly regressive, and in any case any likely tax rate (5 or ten percent) will have no effect on consumption. Look how much taxing is required to lower cigarette smoking. Leave the choice of what to eat to individuals. Ever heard of something called "liberty?" It's in the Declaration of Independence.

Erewon,

I don't think it's a good idea to drink things that are calorie rich(V-8, milk, and orange juice come to mind). People can drink too quickly, and that can cause people to quickly consume a lot of calories before the "Stop eating" impulse kicks in.

And frankly, telling people to "look at
potassium-sodium ratios" is not the right approach. Consumers are not nutritionists, and if they attempt to be, they will be outsmarted by food companies. We should restric our focus
and policy attention to the one metric
that can't be gamed: calories.

soullite & zyxw, if you brush up on your economics, you will discover that Ezra's proposal is an example of pricing an externality, which, in this case, boils down to discouraging poor people from destroying their health (and budgets) in the long term. Liberty entails choice, but that doesn't mean foisting costs onto the others (in the form of higher health care spending, public and private). Furthermore, a fair society is preferable to a strictly "progressive" tax structure; poor people are hurting themselves and society by smoking, drinking, and, yes, drinking soda.

LP, private health plans do not charge you for how much health care you will use; they charge you some estimate of how much health care you're likely to use. If everyone buying that health care is less likely to become obese and/or diabetic because of a soda (or cigarette or alcohol) tax, your rate ought to go down and public health will improve. Government revenue goes up (more services and/or lower taxes) and something bad is discouraged: win-win.

tom veil & ostrap, I agree with your point that industrial food subsidies should be ended, but that doesn't make this a bad proposal. There is no reason why you would not want to tax unsubsidized soda. Moreover, a soda tax is a much more politically possible goal. These aren't mutually exclusive ideas.

Ezra, I recently had the idea of imposing a value-added tax on food for non-end-users, which would very roughly tax food processing. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, or some alternative food tax, including David Shor's calorie idea.

The idea that the government can accurately correctly gauge exactly what is healthy vs non healthy food is ludicrous.
Even science without the politics has a tough time with that, especially once it gets filtered through the pop culture channels. Remember when all fat was bad? Remember when salt was bad? (Oops)

If taxing things that are "bad for us", how about taxing promiscuity? It's in the name of disease prevention, which increases our health care costs. (AIDS drugs are expensive afterall.)

What about taxing rock climbing or other "extreme" sports that are more likely to cause accidents?

We ALL have vices, whether they are alcohol, sex, video games, romance novels, tv, sweets, tobacco, or lawn ornaments.

Thinking that the government can accurately monetize the amount of vice and virtue for each thing or action is ridiculous.

“The world is suffering more today from the good people who want to mind other men’s business than it is from the bad people who are willing to let everybody look after their own individual affairs.” - Clarence Darrow

Food taxes do not need to be regressive. You could, for example, rebate all of the money raised back to consumers. This would be revenue-neutral and easy to sell the public on (most people would actualy get more money back than they would pay in taxes).

Tito,

There are activities that cause harm to society at large. Most of the time, these activities are not bothersome enouh or are too difficult to counter-act, and so there is no policy response(Public displays of affection, annoying cell-phone ringtones, etc).

But other times, the cost to society is huge, and there are clear and transparent policy levers.

Tabacco and alcohol exise taxes are a good example of this. A calorie tax, I think, is another one.

As for sexual promiscuity: That isn't very well targetted. If a couple is having safe sex, no one else is being harmed. It's unsafe sex that you'd want to target. Unfortunately, taxes on unsafe sex are not really feasible. But, that does present a plausible argument for subsidies for condoms and birth control pills.

Instead of a sin tax, why not put an end to corn subsidies and ban the use of high-fructose corn syrup? Market forces will go to work and sodas will naturally become a bit more expensive because the manufacturer will go back to using real sugar. And while too much real sugar is certainly bad for you, back in the day (70's and earlier), when sugar was what companies used to sweeten things like soft drinks and cookies, people's metabolisms and waistlines were in a much better state. Right now, due to corn subsidies, sugar cane growers--the ones that are left in states like mine (Florida) and Hawai'i--cannot compete with the artificially low price of corn-derived sweetener.

Real sugar tastes much, much better--so much so, a small amount once in a while (i.e. Coke in the bottle, from another country where HFCS is not used or is outright banned) winds up being quite satisfying to the sweet tooth, I find. HFCS-sweetened foods and drinks have an intense, rather fake-sweet taste--worse, one finds oneself unsatisfied and wanting more all the time. I wonder if that has something to do with the diabetes/obesity problem.

Frank: Ezra's proposal is an example of pricing an externality, which, in this case, boils down to discouraging poor people from destroying their health (and budgets) in the long term.

First, people harming their own health is not an externality - which by definition is harm caused to others.

Second, as to health care budgets, its very questionable whether obesity or even smoking increase a person's lifetime health care costs. Generally they cause people to die younger, thus reducing their lifetime health care costs. And they're still likely to die after retirement age, when they aren't paying much in taxes anyway. This issue and a study that demonstrates what I'm saying was discussed awhile back (on this blog IIRC).

Bottom line: you soda swilling, chain smoking neighbor isn't costing you money. So if you want to tax them into the picture of health, admit that it isn't because it costs you anything, but because you're out to save people from themselves.

Government revenue goes up (more services and/or lower taxes)

You can always increase government revenue by increasing taxes - any type of taxes. So don't pretend that a soda tax is some special magical way to increase government revenues.

And, if you impose a soda tax, how does that qualify as lowering taxes? Is that Republican logic? What you mean is that it will lower your taxes because you're virtuous enough to want to save your soda swilling neighbor from himself. Not only can you pat yourself on the back for watching out for your neighbor's well being, but you can save a buck in the process (not that that savings is justified by any costs your neighbor was imposing on you).

Subsidize corn syrup and tax a group of products because many of them have corn syrup. Hell of a system.

Nice. Way to almost entirely ignore the fact that some people enjoy drinking pop! And by taxing something that's "bad" instead of something else (like work) some people are made worse off.

Maybe Ezra needs to really push his paternalistic cred and start attacking some really controversial products. Like how about sex shops and bath houses. Or sleazy motels.

If ever these paternalist arguments become popular conservatives will go just as wild. Either way yuppies and middle class white people should be fine (if not better off!).

This is a stupid idea and is about as likely to happen as Matt Yglesias's proposal to let Texas and the rest of the deep south secede. And David Shor's calorie tax is the worst idea I've ever heard.

All calories are not equally bad. You could eat supposed high-calorie fruits and vegetables all day long with no harm to your health, whereas even a small amount of beef or pork fat is incredibly bad for you. Care to argue that I'm wrong? Many people will. But that's exactly my point. Opinions on what foods you should and should not eat and what exactly is "bad for you" vary widely. The government really does not need to be stepping in and deciding who is right and imposing taxes based on these conclusions.

Besides being a dumb idea that won't happen, a soda tax probably wouldn't even work to reduce consumption, and it will have unintended consequences. Here's a discussion of how alcohol taxes can actually lead to an increase in consumption.

And that was a dumb link. Here's the real link.

Whiie taxing sodas or banning HFCS may be helpful at the margins, the real problem is that the public health and obesity community still ignore the preponderance of the evidence and advocate high carb diets over high fat diets, based on....nothing... in the way of definitive studies.

As long as we eat a get a high % of our calories from cakes, cookies, grains -even whole grains- and the like obesity and its associated morbidities will continue unabated.

For a look at some of the arguments supporting the carbs lead to obesity model see today's post from one of the best health related blogs around -

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/a-toxic-environment/

oderb, you're comment leaves out a few important points, most notably that while low-carb/high protein & fat diets afford one a bit more weight loss than do high-carb/low calorie diets at the beginning (specifically, the six-month mark), diets of this nature (i.e. Atkins) have been shown to increase the person's serum levels of C-reactive protein. CRP is a marker for inflammation, and it's associated with infection; if it's chronically elevated, there is surely cell damage going on. Like heart disease. CRP levels above 2.4 mg/l have been associated with a doubled risk of a cardiac event compared to levels below 1 mg/l.

Further, Americans would most likely obtain their high protein and high fat from animal products like meat; organic free-range varieties notwithstanding, meat in this country tends to come from animals that were fed corn laced with antibiotics. People increasingly try to avoid this, as evidenced by the dairies who've stopped treating milk cows with Posilac.

And rounding matters out on a global warming note, let's not forget about the methane--from the cows, I mean.

I also take issue with the lumping-in of "even whole grains" with cakes and cookies. The former, when they're not weighed down with sweet, fatty, or chemical additives, are an excellent and economical part of a healthy diet. The latter--cakes and cookies--are another story, particularly when they're made from bleached white flour and packed with the dread HFCS.

I don't think anyone would disagree that cookies and cakes should be viewed as treats, not items for regular, daily consumption. Also, as with all foods, the portion size of the carbs we eat frequently gets overlooked--commercially-baked white flour cupcakes and muffins are often big enough for two or three people to share, and bagels can dwarf a tea plate.

And I think everyone can agree that eating food in its whole and unprocessed form--whole apples instead of juice, lightly steamed vegetables instead of the mushy, over-buttered, cooked-for-hours kind--staves off hunger, and the fiber you'll get (without even trying) improves digestion and protects against colon disease, too.

Okay, enough food and chemistry lectures from me; it just really bothers me to read such incomplete and misleading statements about nutrition.

my father was diagnosed as "pre-diabetic" and the culprit was rice (which he had a bowl of at every meal regardless of what else he was eating)

Someone is a bit confused between progressives and liberals. Progressives are the technocrats and experts who believe in telling the rabble what to do.* Much like the original Progressives they trust neither the corporate elite nor the masses. Liberals just believe in equality of opportunity in both the social and economic realms.

As long as we going after soda, why not double the amount of the tax and refund half of it if you recycle the container. It would be a nationwide bottle deposit.

*sometimes referred to as leveraging behavioral science to produce positive outcomes

I'm throwing my hat in the ring with people arguing that a pop (yes, pop, not soda) tax is pretty poorly targeted. Much better to end the subsidies for the sweeteners that are a big part of the obesity problem and then, if you want to go further, tax the sweeteners.

I think the calorie tax is interesting, but you'd have to go a bit further to distiguish certain foods that we want to encourage. For instance, maybe you exempt fresh fruits and veggies from the tax. Considering the lobbies, you'd probabaly have to throw a bone to the meat, dairy, and grain lobbies, but maybe you could at least extract a restriction that the exempted foods from their industries would have to be lean, low-fat, and whole grain, respectively.

Frank, this isn't an externality tax. Those are narrowly targeted to compensate for the cost. This is separate from a punitive tax targeted as stuff we don't like. For example, cigarettes - revenue from cigarette taxes in the UK is significantly higher than the government estimates of resulting health costs, and due to earlier mortality cigarettes may not be causing an increase in health spending anyway.

The punitive soda taxes look the same. Moreover, income and property taxes are generally targeted - "work" is set of activities that can include almost anything as long as you get someone to pay for it, including eating unhealthy amounts of food, while something like a soda tax is targeted as a specific activity and such is in a different category. And strikes me as inappropriate meddling.

strech and alex: you're right! a soda tax would be imposed as a sin tax, going beyond any external costs (which, alex, are those not reflected in price; any health care costs due to soda consumption are externalities). Mea culpa.

alex: I imagine those numbers do not account for productivity, happiness, etc. but I'm certainly willing to concede that I'd prefer to save these people from themselves even if it were cost-neutral. My personal gain would be negligible compared to society's gain, which is supposed to play a part in governance, no?

And clearly I was using short hand: OTHER taxes can go down. I said nothing about magic; what I said is that gov. revenue goes up AND something bad is discouraged. Please don't misrepresent my point, which is that two positive things occur. The Republican logic comment was a low blow; forgive me for assuming that you could infer my meaning.

strech: I don't see how it is "inappropropriate meddling" to discourage diabetes or obesity (even assuming that long-term costs cited by alex are correct) when even the ideal rational person envisioned by classical economics is bad at long-term cost-benefit analysis. Taxing work is bad (we want/need work) while taxing soda (which is tasty but not healthy) is good/better.

If they tax soda, I'll just go back to drinking scotch.

Frank: I think government should attempt to influence people as little as it can get away with. Since "Work" is a much more diverse category than "Drinking Soda" it doesn't have a targeted impact on behaviour the same way sin taxes do.

Sure, behaviour can have negative effects that aren't priced in (and should be), but the externality taxes there are (or should be) narrowly targeted towards the actual costs involved.

A sin tax well beyond said costs has little to do with dealing with the impacts of the behaviour. It's just the government trying to change your behaviour because it's decided it doesn't like it; thus the classification as meddling.

As a further note, I am very suspicious of using the expense of government programs as a justification to interfere with behaviour, ala the Medicare/Medicaid costs here.

Some random non-philosophical problem with sin taxes in general:
a) Costs are hard to determine in many cases; c.f. Alex's notes on long-term costs. This is of course a problem with externality taxes too.
b) They're often not actually connected very well to any underlying cost - here, sugar/diabetes is the problem, not soda alone.
c) They're too easy to increase. To get wide support they need to be targeted at unpopular behaviours rather than bad ones. As a result sin tax increases are politically easy and can quickly become burdensome. This is less likely for something like soda than cigarettes, but the ever-spiraling taxes on the latter show the possible costs here.
d) They're non-progressive.

As an expansion on the comments about using government program expenses as a justification for interfering in behaviour -

There's a lot of government out there. And once an activity doesn't just cost you or your insurance company money, but the government, the government gets a much stronger legal basis to deal with it. And, well, power corrupts, etc.

This is especially relevant in healthcare, since:
a) Government involvement in health care is large and likely to (and probably should) expand.
b) Lifestyle is a big factor in healthcare; and the high health care costs give a wide legal space for the government to work with.

strech, there is a difference between banning things and disincentivizing them.

I think society should be allowed to decide things collectively and, since that is the basis for (our) democratic government, I don't think it's oppressive to impose this kind of tax, particularly in light of the disconnect between improving health care and improving health; there is a real fiscal/socio-economic danger to allowing health to go under-regulated. And since a soda tax is probably more politically feasible then adequately reforming agriculture subsidies, I think it would be a good step.
The outcome could be progressive (poor people become less likely to become diabetic/obese), even if the tax is not. And the tax could be used to cut, say, payroll taxes. Thus, this could be analogous to proposed gasoline tax hikes.

I agree with Ezra.

On a related note, the Des Moines Register recently profiled the head of the American Beverage Association, and I wrote up a post about their political strategy for blocking soda taxes and more restrictions on soft drinks in schools:

http://tinyurl.com/dlxlpl

Boston Tea Party Anyone?