Hands Off My Soda!

Hands Off My Soda!

Here's an article that I couldn't sell to PajamasMedia. Alas, there aren't really any paying conservative magazines anymore.

Hands Off My Soda!

Many years ago, I recall a relatively sympathetic article about Ralph Nader and his then current campaign to get Americans to stop buying soft drinks. They were, Nader insisted, an expensive way to drink water. He even had a policy prohibiting his employees from drinking soft drinks at the office. At the time, H. L. Mencken’s funny, and not terribly accurate definition of a Puritan came to mind: “A person who lives in dread fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.”

No one would ever have accused Bill Clinton of that—but I am beginning to worry about the Democratic Party of Comrade Obama. The May 12, 2009 Wall Street Journal reports that “Senate leaders are considering new federal taxes on soda and other sugary drinks to help pay for an overhaul of the nation's health-care system.” The motivation isn’t just money; the article quotes “Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest” a Ralph Nader affiliate, that, “Soda is clearly one of the most harmful products in the food supply, and it's something government should discourage the consumption of.” Gadzooks! I thought it was beautifully marbled steaks, or Big Macs, or hot fudge sundaes!

Now, if you believe that the job of the government is to help us poor benighted peasants make better choices, then I suppose that this makes a bit of sense. And you don’t have to be a flaming liberal to believe that if there are social costs associated with a product or activity, taxing it to defray some of those costs makes sense. That’s what “sin taxes” have traditionally done. Tobacco taxes recover some of the costs that the government puts out on cancer treatment and oxygen tanks for those with emphysema. Similarly, we use alcohol taxes to cover criminal justice and welfare system costs imposed by drunks and alcoholics. Handguns, for many years, have been subject to a federal excise tax for the same reason—to defray some of the costs of handgun crime.

I can’t complain too strongly about the idea behind this—but I would like to see a bit more consistency in how the government decides which sins are going to get taxed. There are lots of habits out there that contribute to our collective poor health, and thus, that deserve to be taxed or discouraged.

In some cases, the government is already working very hard to discourage those behaviors. Crack, cocaine, heroin, meth: all bad things, all unlawful, and all theoretically taxed. The taxation was part of how Congress found authority to regulate intrastate commerce during the Progressive Era—and they used the same trick for machine guns, starting with the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Part of my concern, however, is that there are some bad habits with enormous health care costs that I have this odd sensation the Democrats aren’t going to do much to tax or otherwise discourage. Unprotected promiscuous sex, especially with prostitutes, increases the risk of transmitting AIDS. Promiscuous unprotected anal sex is even more risky. While it doesn’t get a great deal of attention anymore, the problem is still huge, and costly—perhaps even more so today, now that large numbers of the HIV+ are living longer lives, consuming very expensive multidrug treatments.

Now, I recognize that from a practical standpoint, it’s easier to tax soda than to tax unprotected anonymous anal sex. Can you imagine being the poor GS-9 responsible for pounding on a bathroom stall? “Excuse me, gentlemen, I’m from the Department of Health & Human Services, Health Care Costs Mitigation Division, AIDS Agency, Unprotected Anal Sex Desk. Before you get started, could you let me make sure that you have a condom on?” Long pause. “Don’t mind me, 48 CFR 1289 requires me to verify that it remains on throughout the process, or I have to assess you $4.50 in health care tax.”

Obviously, I don’t want a government that intrusive. A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have. But let’s not pretend, if the government wants to tax our soft drinks in the name of public health, that there’s any principled reason why some unhealthy practices are going to be regulated—and others will not. The worst aspect of sin taxes is that some sinners have more political juice than others—and I rather doubt that us soda drinkers have the power to protect ourselves as well as some of the other sinners do.