It would be really interesting to see a sort of sin tax applied to unhealthy foods that contain excess sugar (soda, candy, etc). Not saying I'd be for or against it, but I'd be very interested to see how it'd affect people's habits, if at all.

Not sure how you could try something like that on a small scale with a country with these issues like the US since people could just drive a town over, and a state would probably be too big of a sample size.

It's hard, logistically, to tax consumption at the margin. We can do it with income because it's highly documented. We tax smoking with a flat rate because nobody needs any of them.

It's not exactly a great idea to tax a hungry kid's only meal of the day.

Really, the only way you could logically do this is to track everyone's consumption of food, which is very problematic for various reasons... or by taxing certain types of food, which is more likely to shift the problem rather than solve anything.

It's probably easier to impact health by encouraging movement than decreasing food intake.

Stop subsidizing corn syrup, tax sugar, spend the money on youth fitness and sports programs. Sugar and Corn haven't had their tobacco moment...yet.

I assume this is just because you can stop smoking altogether, but can't stop eating altogether.

Here in Chicago we passed a (poorly implemented) sugary beverage tax. Nonstop political ads followed and it was repealed after less than a year.

Agreed! Sugary drink taxes are really, really unpopular, unfortunately.

Where is the evidence that smoking has been reduced through taxes?

Sugar and other lobbies