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Comment by ink_13 | Hacker News Reader

Pigouvian taxes are the best taxes. Externalities? Those cost money now! Want less of a behaviour? Put a tax on it! Want to reduce your tax burden? Do less of the bad thing!

"But I don't want to stop doing the bad thing!" That's fine! You can keep doing it. It just costs money now.

"But that's unfair!" Is it? The societal goal is to reduce the bad thing. We don't want to ban it outright, and some kind of regulatory framework sounds complicated and expensive. This is the easiest and cheapest (from the government's perspective) way of reducing the bad thing.

"People are going to just keep doing the bad thing anyway!" What an opportunity to raise the price! Sounds like extra money for roads, schools, and parks. Or maybe a chance to reduce reliance on other taxes.

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I think there are at least two problems with this argument.

The first is a classic —- if your tax base requires money made from a vice, you’ve got a stream of money which either requires that the vice continues to exist, or else a stream of money which you hope to lose in the in future.

The second is a bit more basic. Who gets to decide what he vices are?

"You vill eat ze bugs and you vill like zem!"

I'm all for a sugar tax, but I am fully aware that drawing lines is going to be difficult, you should be too, and it seems like a weird problem to gloss over because it's clearly the big problem here. What do we do with artificial sweeteners? I'm sure there will be vocal contingents saying we obviously should/shouldn't sin tax them. What about LaCroix? Same. I think the answer is obviously shouldn't/shouldn't, but I know people who get shouty because their fad micronutrient of the month isn't aggressively marketed by the FDA. It is possible to go too far: I grew up in a house that omitted salt from its cooking to a degree that I would now say constitutes a food crime, even though I'd fully agree that most prepared food errs on the side of too much salt. In any case, I fully expect that unless we exercise extreme restraint on this road, it won't be very long at all before someone will try to twist my arm into a dietary choice that I consider gross, insane, and completely detached from evidence-based reality.

Sounds like a good way for me to never vote for you and your nanny party, and to become more likely to support extremist parties if you end up getting enough votes anyway.

And examples of a sugar tax working as intended exist today. The beverage choices available at a convenience store in London are drastically different than what is available at my local store here in the states. The majority of space is given to lightly flavored waters. Some of the difference is potentially a difference in preference, but even the US style sodas contain far less sugar (and in my opinion taste better).

An example of a sugar tax working would be if obesity and cavity rates went down.

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