The Fresca Rebellion

theodp writes "They can ban the Marlboros, tax the Cokes, and zone the Whoppers, says Slate's William Saletan on the subject of today's morality cops. But it's time to put the brakes on the paternalistic overreaching of the food police, Saletan argues, when they come after his editor's beloved Fresca ('there are concerns that diet beverages may increase calorie consumption by justifying consumption of other caloric foods'), which will have to be pried from his cold, dead hands. '40 states have enacted special taxes on soda or junk food. And the soda taxers are becoming ever bolder. Their latest manifesto is an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by the health commissioner of New York City, the surgeon general of Arkansas, and several others. It declares soda fair game for government intervention (PDF) on the grounds that "market failures" in this area are causing "less-than-optimal production and consumption."' Where do we draw the line?"

Comments

Re:taxes

[Monsuco]

It's more of a "cost tax" than a "sin tax". The consumption of certain products (most obvious example: tobacco) has costs far beyond that of the production and selling of the item (consumer much more likely to die earlier and require expensive health treatment before he or she dies.

Putting a modest tax on tobacco and using it to cover lung cancer patients makes sense. Putting a 50% tax on tobbacco and using it to fund head start makes no sense whatsoever. The expense has no relation to the tax (if we wish to create a head start program we should do so using the general funds rather than punishing an unrelated group). The same goes with fuel taxes being used to fund roads, liquor taxes being used to fund DUI checks, but soda is different. Diet coke contains essentially no calories. It has slightly negative health effects (it can sap calcium from bones), but not enough to justify singling it out for taxation. Even regular junk food is completely harmless if consumed as an occasional treat and not as a primary source of food. Taxing soda with the hope of changing peoples habits is little more than nannyism.

Being coldly clinical for a moment: death has costs.

Soda != Death.

people who contract expensive to treat diseases are more likely to have their paid-for insurance revoked on technicalities

This is actually quite rare. The majority of non-payment issues are from the uninsured, not the under-insured. They won't let you join if your already sick, in the same way car insurance companies don't let you join to cover an accident you had yesterday. It's just a simple risk pool. The health insurance industry has a decent record of following through. I have personal experience with this, as my insurance company covered an expensive surgery I needed (though I looked it up, it would simply have not been covered in Britain or Canada). They kept their end of the deal and paid for their part of it.

50% of bankruptcies in the US are due to insurance not covering critical healthcare treatments.

This is true in one sense. Though Americans have a culture of carrying large amounts of individual debt. A big expense like an unexpected surgery can tip the balance. Being the most regulated industry in the country doesn't exactly help make things cheaper.

How do you deal with it while maximizing liberties? Answer: you try to have people responsible for the costs of their actions. And that's where cost taxes come in.

At what point does it end. First sodas need more taxes to cover their "health effects", what next? Chips? Beer? Loud headphones? Non-ergonomic keyboards? Computers? Cars?

If you really want to maximize liberty then give people real choice. Allow hospitals to turn down people in non-life threatening situations, ban states from discriminating against out of state insurance (as we do with car insurance and life insurance), get rid of laws requiring all insurance companies to cover specific things promoted by disease activist groups (in the same way you can buy collision only car insurance), and have insurance be something that is purchased by individuals rather than regulating employers into buying it (employers still could, and there are some situations where the employee and employer may prefer to do so, but our employer-purchase driven system drives up cost for small businesses and people paying out of pocket), and expand health savings accounts (or better yet adopt a tax code like FairTax, the negative tax, or the flat tax and keep inflation under control, then we wouldn't be discouraging savings and investment and wouldn't need special accounts, we could save on our own).