From the article: Sin taxes are blunt policy instruments. People who only have the occasional drink are not taking on any great health risks, yet they are taxed no differently than serious alcoholics.
But surely the alcoholics are taxed way more than people who have an occasional drink because of the sheer volume? If you drink or smoke a lot, the taxes do accumulate into significant amounts annually.
Policymakers should still consider implementing sin taxes if they intend to intervene to change individuals’ behaviour. But they should be aware that the bulk of the damage that smokers, drinkers and the obese do is to themselves, and not to others.
It might be blunt in the economic sense if the taxed behaviour doesn't exhibit clear external costs but in a social context the scheme works great. Using taxation to discourage behaviour is a better way to collect taxes than taxing everyone.
Taxing goods or behaviour that is deemed harmful both brings in the money and also makes a statement. Further, if alcohol taxes bring in 1% of the state budget it means everyone's income is that much lower because of taxing alcohol.
"Sin taxes" are also economically unpredictable because when the collected amounts begin to drop the tax is working as intended. But socially this is exactly why they were used in the first place.
But they should be aware that the bulk of the damage that smokers, drinkers and the obese do is to themselves, and not to others
Unless you have a functional health care system, in which case increased costs are passed on to everyone's taxes. It would be appropriate to dedicate revenues from tobacco and alcohol taxes to medical care.
Sin taxes are taxes that fall only on the users of the products or services in question, and rarely have knock-on effects like fuel taxes (which then raise the cost of transporting everything else, but promote more efficient transportation).
Adding recycling deposits, for example, vastly increases the rate of recycling, reduces litter, provides a minor source of income for the homeless, and provides a very small tax revenue.
They cost more money per year to keep alive while they're dying, and they contribute less to the economy (because they die early). The indirect costs of their mortality are far greater than the direct savings.
Speaking from europe where healthcare is basically free.
Medical care for these patients is extremely expensive. Each surgery costs around 50 to 60 thousand euro and it's not uncommon to get 2 or 3 of those before dying. Add to that the frequent visits to the doctor's office, the oxygen tanks if needed, the medications, etc. The other option would be to just "let them die" but that's not what we decided to do as a society.
The trend is that we are now able to keep them alive slightly longer, ( at a higher cost) and that they start developing symptoms slightly later thus reducing the potential "benefit" for society.
But, per that same study, "society" would net — inclusive, among other things, of pension funds not disbursed — lose ~€70k per individual, while saving less than €5k on medical expenses.
This is true, and I once quoted sources like it as a smoker that thought sin taxes were too high, but the larger truth is that smoking should be discouraged because we should make it socially unacceptable to stop our children from getting hooked like we did. I quit. It's good that I did for its own sake. We're not just numbers on a policy planner's spreadsheet.
Providing a minor source of income is usually considered unethical and illegal. Minimum wages were adopted explicitly to curtail piecework that paid only a few pennies per item. Recycling programs knowingly target the most vulnerable in society to work without protections like minimum wage, overtime, and health insurance. Yet it seems they have political support from many of of the same people who advocate labor protections. How does that work?
Only people who are not served by better programs will spend time picking up cans for recycling value.
I can simultaneously want to make sure that nobody goes hungry or homeless, and still recognize that we aren't doing that today, so in the meantime having that recycling income available is better than not having it.
This is exactly the neoliberal argument against labor protections in general. People would obtain jobs with dignified pay & benefits if they could. Having an option that seems exploitative is better than having no options. Thus, imposing minimum standards on the work that can be offered is harmful. Pursue other, better mechanisms to boost and lower-bound standards of living (economic growth, negative income tax). In the meantime, don't stand in the way of mutually beneficial transactions.
This is a right-wing, Milton Friedman worldview. The left (pretty much by definition as "the left") emphatically rejects these arguments with respect to flipping burgers, running a cash register, or delivering groceries. What's special about picking up glass bottles?
I will vote for a minimum wage. I will vote for a minimum wage with an automatic update based on any reasonable measure of inflation. I will vote for a basic income. I will vote for much higher and much more progressive income taxes. I will vote for a wealth tax. I will vote for stronger unions. I will vote for better anti-corruption measures across the board, for companies and unions and governments.
And I will not vote to remove recycling deposits because you think that it's somehow exploiting poor people to let them get a little money.
Does that frame of reference make sense for a recycling program though? The deposit system is a zero sum system that isn't designed for the purpose of making money - the deposit is to discourage consumers from throwing recyclables away and instead get their money back.
It seems like more of a side effect that low income workers use it as an income stream more than anything. It's like a metaphorical form of picking up loose change that others have dropped and deemed not worth their time to pick up.
It saves taxpayers and sellers a boatload of money compared to paying for proper employees with health insurance, mileage reimbursement, etc. to clean up their streets / source their raw material / deal with their waste.
Parks and community centers aren't designed for the purpose of making money, either, but we generally expect the people cleaning their toilets to have solid benefits.
>It's like a metaphorical form of picking up loose change that others have dropped and deemed not worth their time to pick up.
It's different because the purpose of the deposit isn't to crowdsource people to exploit via underpaying them to recycle, whereas that is exactly the case for the gig economy. Uber, Airbnb, etc. rely on individual contractors being cheaper than their regulated equivalent (Taxis, hotels) while also putting the risk on them. The purpose of the deposit is harm reduction - incentivize people to stop littering their recyclables by charging them money for the bottles/cans.
If we were to remove the deposit system and instead replace it with paid workers, why would any particular individual care about not littering? After all, our taxes pay for workers to clean it up. I'm not saying I espouse that belief, but when you increase the convenience factor of something like littering, people will do it more often. When it hurts people's pocketbooks to litter, they do it less. Take, for example, plastic grocery bags. Everyone knows plastic grocery bags create a huge waste problem and a little bit of thoughtfulness (bringing reusable bags with you) can mitigate the amount of bags used. However, it wasn't until we started charging a fee for grocery bags that usage numbers dropped significantly.
No, but they have union agreements for minimum wages (enforced across sectors) and they have excellent welfare for those without a job (to the point that being a bastard boss and merely giving people scraps wont going to land you many workers).
Plus, as societies they have a basic decency, absent from other more exploitative societies.
> Further, if alcohol taxes bring in 1% of the state budget it means everyone's income is that much lower because of taxing alcohol.
Maybe you mean "that much higher" there?
Also, just FYI, in 1923 "[s]ome 30 percent to 40 percent of the government’s income came from the tax on alcohol."[0] So Prohibition was funded by the federal income tax. But now we have both :(
Indeed, thanks for spotting the thinko. Everyone's income is that much higher (or everyone's taxes are that much lower which I think what I was thinking when writing the sentence).
People that work in pubs and clubs after a smoking ban must see a big benefit.
Everyone old enough to have gone out in the UK in the early 2000s can tell you that pubs and clubs were totally full of smoke and you would come home smelling like an ashtray.
Do they really, or is that an old wives tale from non-reproducible research, the way the anti-fat scare was?
"The largest and longest study (Enstrom & Kabat) followed more than 35,000 subjects for almost 40 years and found no significant risk associated with second-hand smoke. Similarly, the World Health Organization spent seven years at a dozen research centers in seven countries and came to the same conclusion".
Both the CDC[1] and the WHO[2] disagree with what you just wrote.
> Since the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, 2.5 million adults who were nonsmokers died because they breathed secondhand smoke [1]
> While the tobacco industry continues to claim that the evidence that passive smoking causes disease – particularly lung cancer – is controversial, every independent authoritative scientific body that has examined the evidence has concluded that passive smoking causes many diseases. [2]
Also, the Enstrom & Kabat study is widely criticised [3] + [4]:
> incorrect definition of passive smoking exposure as a “nonsmokerʼs marriage to a smoker” [3]
> A severe error in the study was the failure to establish a control group of nonsmokers who were unexposed to secondhand smoke. [4]
If current social trends continue, working in Tech is going to be considered a sin. Get ready to pay extra taxes for your choice to work in such an abhorrent industry.
“smokers tend to die earlier, meaning that they probably save governments money since they draw less from state pensions.”
Wow, that’s some furious hand-waving assumption if I’ve ever seen any. Smokers die of cancer, which costs a boatload, and smoking removes people prematurely from the workforce.
Took less than two seconds to find well studied contrary evidence:
> “smokers tend to die earlier, meaning that they probably save governments money since they draw less from state pensions.”
OK, let's call the above sentence "the claim". Looking at the nine "Main Results" of your first link, the authors do not directly address the claim, they just choose to focus on something different (all emphasis mine):
> We conclude that the direct costs and externalities to society of smoking far outweigh any benefits that might be accruable at least when considered from the perspective of socially desirable outcomes (ie, in terms of a healthy population and a productive workforce)...
> Apart from the income benefits of tobacco smoking, another source of benefit, especially to the government, of smoking is the substantial cost savings in pension payments from premature death of smokers. This is a highly debated issue in the literature, because it is premised on the thinking that a shorter life expectancy implies a reduced expenditure on pensions. Thus, attempts to promote this will be deemed socially undesirable and hence cannot be incorporated into social policy design.
Note that they don't give a figure for the total savings on pensions, which suggests to me that they know it's very large. They only number they give is
> Manning et al. have estimated that every pack of cigarettes smoked reduces the life expectancy by 137 minutes and pension costs by $1.82.
If we go to Manning et al, we find
> Although nonsmokers subsidize smokers' medical care and group life insurance, smokers subsidize nonsmokers' pensions and nursing home payments. On balance, smokers probably pay their way at the current level of excise taxes on cigarettes...In contrast, drinkers do not pay their way...
Of course, as far as governments are concerned whether such taxes reduce "sinful" activities is irrelevant, so long as they increase tax revenue and allow politicians a way to improve their public images.
Well, for those of us who attempts participate in democracy, by writing/calling politicians, supporting NGOs, voting and so forth, YES, it actually matters whether it works.
I'm sure it's not a solution for all problems. As the article says it's a blunt tool. But given that they do work, I'll keep encouraging my politicians to not let our alcohol and tobacco taxes slip below that of neighboring countries.
Given that we're already paying the overhead, we might as well get some effect by cranking up the taxes :) hehe
(well, maybe there's other downsides, but it's thought worth considering)
Before the federal income tax was instituted, the alcohol tax was the U.S. government’s single largest source of tax revenue.
The imposition of a federal income tax was the single most necessary goal for prohibitionists to push for the constitutional amendment for alcohol prohibition.
It’s also worth mentioning that during the time that the federal alcohol tax was active (created under the Lincoln Administration to help pay for the Civil War), Americans drank twice per capita the amount we drink today, so it didn’t even dissuade drinking all that much.
Americans were ferociously drunk in the 19th and early 20th century. Some historians argue that prohibition ended the era of the largely men-only saloons, and when women and men drank together in speakeasies, men tended to drink less, thus reducing overall alcohol consumption in the post-prohibition era.
Not saying you are totally wrong but the federal income tax has been already existing for decades at this time and the max and min rates actually went down during the prohibition era (per wikipedia). It only went up in 1932 a year before its repeal following the start of the Great depression. If it was a goal of the prohibitionists to hike up that tax it was largely unsuccessful.
Of course, all politicians are the same. Of course, taxes go directly to them so they have a motive to increase tax revenues more than would be otherwise sensible.
I feel the article was really complaining about the tax being inefficient than ineffective. The article answers with: yes, they are effective but inefficient because it's a blunt policy that impacts everyone including people that occasionally travel and drink alcohol.
Often, economic policies don't take into consideration the complexity in a patchwork approach in implementation. Yes, it's more efficient result wise, but it carries over a lot of overhead. An across the board implementation is easier to carry out.
And the claim of low efficiency also seemed to lack some numbers. While an alcohol tax certain hits the occasional drinker, it hits the alcoholic far harder because the alcoholic buys and consumers far more alcohol.
That's said, probably still an inefficient and blunt instrument. And yeah, it carries a lot of overhead.
> Seattle the sugar tax doesn't apply to Starbucks hilariously.
Wow, to exclude an organization which sells 1000+ cal. drinks (vast majority/all from sugars) to millions of people a day, is hilarious indeed. And sad.
It's milk-based drinks that are excluded, not Starbucks specifically. So it doesn't apply to things like chocolate milk, milkshakes, or milkshakes with a small amount of coffee in them.
What's so better about a drink with milk with tons of sugar than a drink without milk with tons of sugar? The drink without milk probably has fewer calories.
This is just an example of a corporation buying out a local government.
> This is just an example of a corporation buying out a local government.
I gotta question whether it's realistic to say that Starbucks bought out local government with it's infinite resources but McDonalds couldn't afford to?
I'd love to see the actual/official reasoning behind the exclusion though
It's bizarre reading comments on this from people in countries where these taxes do little or nothing to rectify the issue that's being taxed in the first place.
The UK is far from perfect but at least revenue raised from smoking is invested into both preventative care (ie cessation programmes) and actual treatment.
Arguments that the tax should be even higher, or substances banned, obviously come from people who have no understanding of how black markets work. Vast networks of tobacco smuggling already exist. You have to pick a balance.
What has always bothered me about "sin taxes" is that it's been a way to divide and conquer the populace.
Most of the people in my city and state I've called home for a couple decades have been vocal about and voted consistently to not enact new taxes and higher taxes, even when people say "its for the children" (eg we need money for schools, need to raise property taxes)
However politicians can cut that group being vocal into pieces by coming out with alternatives like liqour taxes.
We recently enacted a new stripper tax, adding to the door fees of establishments that provide "adult entertainment".
People can debate if it's trying to reduce consumption for public health and all that, they say the money it going towards trafficking victims. I had never known there was a shortage of money there.
I don't think there is a shortage of money there, in fact our state has had a surplus of money for some time. But it makes for a nice boogey man to drum up emotions and try to make someone look like a golden knight fighting for what's right.
Sadly, the extra few bucks you take from someone at the door of these places is just reducing the discretionary spending of the patrons and therefor most likely just taking money away from the strippers (those extra few dollars would of likely ended up as tips on the stage).
Of course who is going to stand up and be vocal about not extra taxing strippers, or those self medicating with nicotine or alcohol? NOt enough of a crowd, they are easily divided and conquered.
It's often the minority that bears the burden of things like this from what I have seen, and not enough of the majority thinks about it.
Let the tourists suffer the outrageous hotel tax,
let the gamblers pay for the colleges,
the drinkers pay for whatever.
Divide and conquer.
It's minority bashing usually.
Taxing pollution would be very easy to implement by taxing oil and coal extraction and would help realign ecology and economy but it's not going to happen in the current political climate.
>Some policymakers argue that people who engage in unhealthy habits also impose negative externalities, since they tend to present taxpayers with bigger medical bills. In practice, however, these costs tend to be overstated.
I'm okay with "sin" taxes if the taxes goes directly to fixing the problem. Like the additional taxes for Tobacco goes to finance former smokers diseases; or that of sugar to fight obesity.
It's like "Here you pay medication/trouble while you consume".
In the UK, to avoid the sugar levy, soft drinks manufacturers have added sweeteners to their recipes to reduce the sugar content. Lose-lose for all of us – wouldn't mind paying more for sugary drinks but instead we get the yuckier sweetener versions.
No, sugar is not physically addictive, unlike nicotine. There is a clear difference. Now, sure, people with certain mental or psychological issues can become addicted to sugar, but the same could be said about pretty much anything, its not the sugar that is the problem.
I prefer sin taxes to income taxes. I'd rather be taxed for vice (gambling, prostitution, smoking, what-have-you (not that I do any of those things)) then virtue (getting up and working hard to earn a living and be a positive, value-added member of society).
Well, as the cost can dissuade people from doing virtuous things, as we programmers well know, it should follow that such costs would be partly effective to dissuade people from doing bad things.
Particularly if they're not so high as to effect a "ban", the effect is a ban on people less affluent than some mark making "sinful" purchases in a particular jurisdiction. Sin taxes are particularly regressive, since they tend to be higher than typical sales taxes (which are already regressive in some sense).
If policy makers are concerned about potential regressive effects, they could take the revenue earned and apply it towards helping the poor. One "easy" method is lowering the bottom tax bracket - in the US they could cut the explicitly regressive payroll tax.
This isn't a critique of social security payouts -- other than political expediency, there is no particular need to couple the payments with the current payroll tax source.
The end result is still a policy which oppresses the people who can not afford the tax more severely than it oppresses those who can. If the desired effect is a reduction in smoking, for example, the appropriate approach is to track and limit sales on a per-person basis. This, of course, is less attractive to the state, and more cumbersome to administer and specify, but it doesn't suffer from the obvious moral wrong: artificially pricing people out of perceived vice on the basis of class.
What if there was solid data decisively showing that there were substantial externalities effectively being paid for by the public? The answer to that, is that the power to determine this is too dangerous.
There do have to be rules and conventions, or there would be chaos. Since such power is dangerous, the exercise of it should be kept to a minimum. Then the question arises as to what that minimum is.
>What if there was solid data decisively showing that there were substantial externalities effectively being paid for by the public?
That's always a risky argument to engage in. Everything has externalities, whether it's "sinful" or not. For example, there are a lot of externalities that the public pays for in order to allow everyone to drive a car. Probably round 30% of the driving public should not be driving a car. In western countries, drivers licence programs are much more about babying idiots through the basics of car driving than they are separating the incapable and denying them access. I don't know anyone who has wanted a drivers licence and been refused one. I do know multiple people in multiple countries who have taken the test more than 3 times to get it.
For the moment, we still value granting people freedom of movement. A society where there are two classes, those who can move themselves and those who cannot, would be deeply undesirable to most of us.
I for one value the right of people to make their own life decisions. The notion that my tax money might be used to treat lung cancer or buy sturdier surgery tables for obese patients doesn't bother me. What the hell is the point of a health care system if not to isolate ourselves from the harsh realities of life that prevent us from enjoying ourselves?
I don't want to live in a society where there are two classes, those who can pay for private health cover and therefore drink as much as they want, and those who cannot and thus may not party too hard. That might sound a bit weird, but would you want to live in a society where if you can't afford private health care you're not allowed to cycle on public roads?
I'm always in favor of letting people making their own decisions and then supporting them no matter the consequences. When that cost is spread across an entire society, it's a pretty light burden. Could be lighter if we stop letting companies dodge taxes tho.
One person's "consequences" have minimal impact when spread across society--but when we talk about society-level action, we're never just talking about "one" person, but are instead talking about ratios.
Sure, it doesn't impact us much if one person drinks themselves to liver failure. But if we're talking about 0.1% or 1% or 10% of people drinking themselves to liver failure by 50, we eventually have to start making hard tradeoffs.
It might seem ideal from a maximal-freedom perspective to let anyone who wants to drink themselves to liver failure do so, but it's worth thinking ahead to whether those tradeoffs increase or reduce the maximal-freedom-per-capita.
Really? I asked in good faith for you to better articulate your position, not to be condescendingly told to read it again.
Your post consists of a paragraph about externalities, some lovely-sounding "I believe that..." positions, and a couple example axes on which a society might bifurcate. I don't see a logical connection between them, and I think a leap like that warrants articulation.
So, one more time for the folks who don't share your implicit premises: how do sin taxes result in a structurally bifurcated society?
>I don't see a logical connection between them, and I think a leap like that warrants articulation.
I do see a connection, and moreover that connection is obvious to me. I genuinely see your statement as a low quality argumentative technique to ask me to repeat a very clear statement in different phrasing in the hope that you will find some triviality that is easier to attack than my core premise.
If you'd really like an answer, please articulate the nature of the logical disconnect you see.
> ... in the hope that you will find some triviality that is easier to attack than my core premise.
That "core premise" is the very thing I want to see articulated here. What you've offered is your conclusion: that sin taxes somehow entail a structurally divided society.
> If you'd really like an answer, please articulate the nature of the logical disconnect you see.
That's literally not how argument works. The burden of proof lies with the party making the positive assertion — in this case, something about societal bifurcation and sin taxes and their causal relationship. I suppose you could say that means I somehow need to "prove" that I don't follow you, or amn't merely trolling you into tripping up as you assert, but that's a reductio and then some.
If the connection is "obvious" to you, but you are unwilling or unable to articulate it, it isn't implausible for me to surmise that we're talking around unexamined axioms (or, as I often call them, "articles of faith") of yours. Which is fine; I have my own such.
But what you're doing here isn't argument, and I have now spent more time explaining that than I think hearing whatever argument you might have to articulate is likely to be worth, in terms of the amount of my life spent.
EDIT: Not trying to be mean. Just, with this dialogue as my sample, I'm not inclined to anticipate an argument that will enlighten me, or change (or even challenge) my perspective. I'd be delighted to have been mistaken, though.
It wasn't obvious to me either. It sounded like you made an argument that at least 30% of people shouldn't be allowed to drive, and then leaping to that leading to some sort of societal bifurcation? Your argument or point isn't obvious or clear at all.
>It sounded like you made an argument that at least 30% of people shouldn't be allowed to drive, and then leaping to that leading to some sort of societal bifurcation?
Aha, a tangible argument. You don't see the possibility of social bifurcation from 30% of the population not being allowed to drive?
Most tradie jobs require a car. It's very hard to be an electrician, plumber, chippie etc. that services homes as if you don't have a car. It might be possible to do commercial work in those fields without a car but every apprentice I've ever known has needed one to carry around the huge pile of tools they're expected to bring on site themselves.
There are also a lot of entry level unskilled jobs that require a drivers licence (assuming you consider a drivers licence "unskilled", which it sort of is but wouldn't be of 30% of current drivers had their licence revoked overnight), like delivering pizza or doing private courier work.
So yeah, changing driving laws to make it a requirement that drivers be consistently safe, courteous and predictable and refusing to give licences to people who can't meet that criteria would definitely be a social bifurcation because it would all but eliminate whole categories of otherwise relatively accessible industrial for the people that cannot get the licence, and in so doing widen the already increasingly wide (lower/middle)/high income divides that most western nations are seeing.
However, that was not my point. My point was that the argument "we shouldn't let people do this because it has costs to society" doesn't really go anywhere as an argument. That's true for pretty much everything we do in society, it's a nothing argument.
> Most tradie jobs require a car. It's very hard to be an electrician, plumber, chippie etc. that services homes as if you don't have a car.
Then how do people do those jobs in countries that do meaningfully select for good drivers, instead of dispensing licenses to all comers? Last I checked, continental Europe hasn't entirely descended into disrepair, because not everyone can drive.
If your position is that overnight switching to a tough drivers licensure regime would be disruptive, I can only say, "Of course it would". Literally no-one is advocating that, either in this thread, or in The Fine Article, however, so I'm vague on its relevance.
> My point was that the argument "we shouldn't let people do this because it has costs to society" doesn't really go anywhere as an argument.
Which would be an interesting discussion if that was the argument being made. Sin taxes aren't "We shouldn't let people do this", and it's a fundamental mischaracterization of them to say they are. They discourage it, sure. They can also be used to mitigate the cost of the "sin" in question.
But it is fundamentally incompatible with most of the goals of a sin tax, to be used to outright prevent the thing being taxed.
No, I don't see "social bifurcation" (which I think needs to be defined) happening over drivers licensing requirements. Over race? Sure. Over systemic income/opportunity inequalities? You bet. But over driving? I just don't see it.
First, how is this 30% cut going to be enforced? At the licensing test? Is it that if you get a single ticket or report for unsafe driving, your license is revoked? You are going to look at existing drivers license holders and determine their fitness to be operating a vehicle, how exactly? Is it a lifetime ban from driving? How many times can I take the test of it just didn't come naturally to me?
Second, there's already a portion of the population that for whatever reason (DWI is a common one) aren't allowed to drive, and I don't see them rising up in the streets.
I don't think anyone is arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to do things that have costs to society, they are discussing whether or not taxation of the behaviors is effective.
That's a different story. Externalities should be taxed to the extent of the cost of the externality to society (if not outright banned, which is not practical for most common externalities like running a combustion engine, breathing, etc.).
But pure sin taxes like soda/gambling/recreational drug taxes, where an individual is only affecting themselves, are effectively the government and busybody supporters of the policy playing god of morality. I've actually heard people suggest that drinking soda or using pot is an indirect externality as a result of the potential to 'change' users, and that its indirect effect on society via people's free association with such things is a justifiable externality. That implies that society is entitled to aspects of a person actions and characteristics outside of their lawfulness. It's a very socialist and anti-individualist argument, which I disagree with on a fundamental level.
Now for cigarettes, on the other hand, there are two potential externalities to tax. 1. The smoke that affects anyone near the user. 2. The addictive factor (nicotines), which is an externality against its users created by (and the tax should be applied to) the manufacturer.
Not to mention all the environmental externalities that should be applied at each stage of the supply and manufacturing chain due to fuel/processing/chemical effects on the environment/energy used/etc. However, these are common to all externalities, and if I had my way I would tax externalities in a direct and systematic way like this across the board, such that the tax is sufficient for the government to "undo" the externality. If there is no feasible way to undo it, it should be illegal.
> where an individual is only affecting themselves
This depends on political context. In much of the western world outside the US (and partially in the US) healthcare is a publicly funded service. If you pay for your neighbors healthcare, then your neighbors obesity is an externality.
> or cigarettes, on the other hand, there are two potential externalities to tax.
And again here: my neighbors lung cancer is on my taxes, so effectively the only fair cost of cigarettes includes all treatment from all smoking and of course all lost tax revenues from the sick smokers who couldn't work etc. That's a lot more money needed than to cover just second hand smoke as an externality.
And even if you don't factor in public healthcare, an unhealthy population is an externality although not as immediately obvious.
It seems you either missed the point of my comment or disagree with me on the fundamental level (to which degree an individual owns himself in a society). Society has absolutely no right to you working a certain amount in my opinion. The healthcare argument I also see very often, which I see quite differently. It begs the question "Why should you pay your neighbor's healthcare?". Instead of adding all these layers of socialization and externalities to address the unfairness inherent in the socialization, why not skip both? Hence why private health insurance is an effective form of measuring that externality in non socialized medicinal systems, and asking whether you are a smoker or non-smoker is the first question in the sign up process, drastically affecting your rates.
This is getting off topic, and say what you will about America's atrocious healthcare system, but the fact that it is not fully socialized is NOT the problem. Real problems: artificial non-market based demand created by partial socialization (medicare and medicaid buying programs) raising prices for the non-socialized group, oppressive FDA (costs 1 billion usd on average to push a drug through), oppressive occupational licensing (very high barrier to entry to becoming a doctor), imbalanced IP system (especially for chemical/drug patents), and plenty more. Eliminating these problems would go a long way to making America the world's best healthcare system (it already is in some regards -- do some research on where all the prime ministers of social medicine countries go for their important surgeries since their systems haven't incorporated the American medical tech yet).
There are still issues to consider with emergency care (where there is typically not market-based selection of your healthcare) but I think government incentives aiding a market based system (similar to the incentives created by Singapore, arguably the best current system) would create a system so superior to any other country's medical system, that it wouldn't be such a central political issue.
No, no I agree completely that things should be taxed to cover externalities. My point was merely that those externalities aren’t inherent to the products but vary between societies due to - for example - what laws, taxes, social safety nets etc exist. Smoking has enormous externalities together with tax funded healthcare. The same can argusbly be said for other things too (e.g sugar).
Universal healthcare itself is a huge discussion but seems off topic here.
It may take quite a bit for people's decision to trickle up to the government...if it ever reaches there. They vote on 12000 things a year (made up the number, OK) and very few issues are so important to warrant not voting them /rising up.
A relatively small group of people, governing a huge group of people. The granularity gap is crazy. It's very hard for me to get exact numbers, but it seems[1] that the US federal government employs around 2 million people, and the US population is ~328 million. That's 164 people to be governed per employee, and most of those employees are not involved in establishing sets of rules.
It is quite beyond the governments capacity to adjust it's rules to handle an individuals personal circumstances or the changing nature of society, which is why there are so many unjust judicial rulings and so many outdated laws still on the books.
Governments should stick to making only the rules which _cannot_ be handled at any scale below the millions. Power lines need to be a matched voltage nation-wide. Railway gauges must be the same nation-wide. Petrol from any petrol station should work in any car, and burning it should not be poisonous at any density of cars found anywhere in the nation. These are the things a government is for. Tie-breaking multiple valid solution arguments on an epic scale. It doesn't matter that much what voltage we pick, just that we pick _a_ voltage, singular.
Governments are quite incapable of managing smaller-scale decisions. For example, it turns out the cannabis oil is pretty amazing at suppressing fits in people with epilepsy, and MDMA might turn out to be the solution tens of thousands of PTSD sufferers have needed for decades. We've at least suspected both of these things for around half a century. Unfortunately, both substances are regulated by a government so large it is literally not capable of making criminal possession exceptions for universities so that these effects can be studied. Lives have been lost due to this scaling problem.
Governments are a great tool for certain problems. For other problems, they are like trying to scrub food off a porcelain bowl with a jackhammer.
Well that's really just about the balance of liberal vs not. Given a certain overall tax level (which level is acceptable depends on your political worldview), one might argue that it's better to tax things that cause unwanted externalities such as environmental problems, or health issues. The latter is especially important in cases where healthcare is publicly funded. It might feel like government is micromanaging me if they tax my soda, but I really don't see how it's so much worse than taxing my paycheck. Given a certain fixed amount of taxes, I'm more than happy to see as much as possible of it be "sin" taxes to be honest.
Modern sin taxes tend to be about maximizing tax revenue and not reducing harmful acts. When sin taxes are enacted, they tend to be relatively reasonable. I've heard as high as 20% for marijuana legislation, however I can promise you that 20-30 years after legalization, that tax will have crept slowly, higher and higher.
But surely the alcoholics are taxed way more than people who have an occasional drink because of the sheer volume? If you drink or smoke a lot, the taxes do accumulate into significant amounts annually.
Policymakers should still consider implementing sin taxes if they intend to intervene to change individuals’ behaviour. But they should be aware that the bulk of the damage that smokers, drinkers and the obese do is to themselves, and not to others.
It might be blunt in the economic sense if the taxed behaviour doesn't exhibit clear external costs but in a social context the scheme works great. Using taxation to discourage behaviour is a better way to collect taxes than taxing everyone.
Taxing goods or behaviour that is deemed harmful both brings in the money and also makes a statement. Further, if alcohol taxes bring in 1% of the state budget it means everyone's income is that much lower because of taxing alcohol.
"Sin taxes" are also economically unpredictable because when the collected amounts begin to drop the tax is working as intended. But socially this is exactly why they were used in the first place.