Taxing Booze to Pay for Health Care
USA Today reports that we might see increased taxation on alcoholic beverages as a way to pay for health care:
Consumers in the United States may have to hand over nearly $2 more for a case of beer to help provide health insurance for all. [...] Beer taxes would go up by 48 cents a six-pack, wine taxes would rise by 49 cents per bottle, and the tax on hard liquor would increase by 40 cents per fifth. Proceeds from the new taxes would help cover an estimated 50 million uninsured Americans.
The article is extremely unenlightening on the policy merits. Suffice it to say, however, that the real value of taxes on beer, wine, and liquor has declined substantially over the past fifty years. So an increase of this sort would not be an unprecedented burden on the American consumer, it would be more like a return to the level of taxation that existed a few decades ago. As I’ve said previously, I wouldn’t necessarily be enthusiastic about this sort of thing purely as a public health measure. But when you consider that universal health care is highly desirable and has to be paid for somehow, I think this is a pretty attractive way of going about it. The economic efficiency of this sort of tax is high, the public health benefits would be large. What’s more, the incidence would fall overwhelmingly on a relatively small number of problem drinkers (rather than the broad mass of people who drink moderately on social occasions) and the businessmen who profit off them, while the public health benefits from decreased drunk driving and alcohol-related violence would be broadly shared.
In technical terms, it seems to me that this proposal could be improved. For one thing, there’s no reason to tax beer, wine, and liquor all on separate scales. What we ought to do is tax the alcohol content of beverages. For another thing, it would be useful to take this opportunity to peg the tax level to inflation or take some other related step to avoid its real value from eroding over time.
63 Responses to “Taxing Booze to Pay for Health Care”
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May 20th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
If the tax is a percent of the sales price isn’t it already “pegged to inflation”? Is there some other way to tax liquor?
May 20th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
As the example of California shows, money has to come from somewhere to provide services, and there’s a limit to the public’s tolerance for raising taxes on things like income, sales, and property… so you have to get creative and find other sources of revenue.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Matt,
I think we should tax fast-food and junk food. Fat is in various tasty configuations is a much bigger addiction than booze. Obesity is the #1 health problem in this country. Make people pay the cost of eating badly.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
These taxes are bogus. And they make even less sense on cigarettes. Alcohol and nicotine lower a person’s overall health care costs because they make people die younger and quicker. Tax environmental pollutants instead. Those give you the kind of cancers that make you die slowly in you old age. And that’s what costs a lot. My dad was a hardcore drinker and smoker. He had no real medical expenses until he got esophageal cancer. Then he died six months later with a total cost of about $200K. My mom never smoked and drank very little. She got leukemia and lived for another four years with a total cost of $1.5 Million. So don’t blame us smokers and drinkers for the rising health care costs, we die before we incur huge medical expenses.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I am anticipating the reaction: we shouldn’t use the state to coerce us to make decisions. Sin taxes are paternalistic- i.e. they degrade our dignity as individuals.
Isn’t this the only argument to make? Sin taxes, unless egregious, do effectively lower consumption of the taxed item. The taxed items are a public health issue. The taxes do effectively raise revenue.
In other words, it’s the state’s effectiveness at guiding social outcomes that forms the best critique of a beer, or soda, or cigarette tax.
And the necessary reply to the libertarian critique is this: the conception of individual and society as distinct and self-evident is constructed, not real. And this construct must always pass a utilitarian test.
Does the loss of liberty of being taxed extra for alcohol outweigh the loss of liberty of being more greatly affected by negative social outcomes from alcohol consumption?
The libertarian argument frames this as liberty vs. coercion. My point is, that’s a flawed frame: the choice is between different liberties.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Or: we could drastically lower military spending, say, to the point where we merely outspend Russia and China combined.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Really, all these sort of debates are stupid until we get military spending under control. This is like a family that gets by on $1,500 a month, and suddenly they need a bunch of money to fix the roof. Hmmm, should we pinch a few pennies on groceries? No more sports for the kids? Hold off on replacing the old family car for a few more years? Hey, I know, why don’t we start with getting Dad to stop spending $200 a week on lottery tickets first.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I second Chuck Miller’s comment. The FDA is already calculating the amount of fat and sugar in each grocery item (granted with occasional errors), so adding a sin tax based on the FDA’s calculations would be fairly easy to do. If being tax neutral is a concern, you could just add a subsidy for protein and fiber, thus making food revenue roughly tax neutral.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
What is it with the American apparent preoccupation with taxes at a fixed number of cents, rather than a percentage? The gas tax is the same deal. It seems like a no brainer way to ensure that revenue increases with inflation without having to get a bill through the relevant legislature.
Imagine how much more revenue the government would have raised last year if the gas tax had been a percentage all along!
May 20th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Take it up a notch and refuse medical treatment for anyone ill and the overwhelming evidence is abuse of alcohol, food or cigarettes led to their plight. They can pay for my medical care because I pursue a healthy lifestyle and an illness is an unfortunate event needing addressed. Their illness is deserved punishment for their abusive ways and we all collectively should kick them to the curb. If all the money spent on medical care due to excesses in consumption of these items was broken out and removed from the tally I’m curious about the reduction achieved. What, maybe a third? Trillions of dollars? The obese, wheezing smokers and drunks are running this nation into the gutter. Bar them at the hospital doors.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
The idea that a 40 cent tax on a fifth of hard liquor would have any significant impact on hard liquor consumption is preposterous.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I’m having a hard time seeing the fact that the tax would be concentrated on a few as a feature, except perhaps in the sense that it makes the tax easy to sell to the public.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
fostert
If cigarettes just made you drop dead while you were walking down the street one day, that would be true. Instead, they leave us with costly chronic respiratory and circulatory conditions and, ultimately, higher instances of extremely expensive life-threatening illnesses.
http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/15/6/601
May 20th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
First they tax our cars and now our booze!? Obama! How will I drink and drive???
May 20th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
If you are going to support this proposal could you please look into the possible regressiveness of the tax. I suspect that you would counter that the tax is only substantially regressive if one participates in too much drinking in the first place. As a poor college student though this would hit my wallet unusually hard. I don’t think the people we should design taxes to hit the hardest are 18-25 year olds, even if it is at least a little behavior modifying. Furthermore I am willing to bet that beer and other liquors are inelastic goods for college students and that the price won’t make too much of a difference and would instead lead to more “natty” and keystone being had. I’m positive that has been studied before, its just the kind of thing that makes for a good thesis.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
I think it really is feature, and I would actually go a bit further. It would progressively benefit(health-wise) low-income people by dissenting vices that they can ill afford, while funding the medical benefits that they are disproportionately denied. This is particularly true of tobacco; less so of alcohol, the abuse of which seems to be more evenly distributed. I say all this as a very low-income smoker in a major tobacco producing state(North Carolina).
I also think that Matt is spot on about taxing alcohol content; as well as pegging it to inflation, which should always be done with pigovian taxes.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Also, 24 beers in a case so, $2 on a case of beer adds up to…a whopping 8 cents a beer.
Seriously, if we can pay for healthcare reform by paying 8 cents more a beer, then we’re insane if we don’t do it.
Although for political reasons, I’d suggest we call it the “Chardonnay tax.” Say things like “listen, I know it’s a great difficulty to ask your constituents to pay 8 cents more on their microbrews, or 50 cents more on a bottle of the finest chardonnay.”
May 20th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Fine, tax booze heavily. Just use the money to pay for health care and don’t dump it into some sort of fungible pot to pay for congressional pet projects. That is why I am not a big fan of more taxes.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I’m not a big fan of regressive taxes. I’ll happily pay the extra $.50 on a sixer of craft beer. In my college days, however, that extra tax would have been a huge burden.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
I meant disincentivise, damn spell check didn’t like it and I wasn’t paying attention. Matt, could maybe talk to your IT people about a comment editing function; just a humble suggestion.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Actually, I’d imagine that the hardest hit would be the bars/restaurants that rely on alcohol sales.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
This link seems appropriate.
The real cost of beer has declined 15% since 1978.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Legalize pot and tax it.
May 20th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Maybe it is time to institute a national VAT (except on food and medicine). Also need to cut defense spending. Maybe we can raise/save enough revenue to cut income taxes along the way.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Tax alcohol, but end distributorship laws. Some math folks could figure out the amount of tax so that the price stays the same but that excess goes to the Tres rather than the McCains, everybody wins.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Tax-tini!
I demand a $1 per drink tax on all bars and restaurants that serve flavored vodka with fruit juice and call it a martini. All that you’re doing is making yourself look dumb and making it harder to drink.
It’s not a fucking martini if there’s no fucking vermouth. Don’t like vermouth? Then you don’t fucking like martinis.
I blame the Iraq War on people that drink this bullshit. If we can ban it, then tax the fuck out of it.
May 20th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
“I demand a $1 per drink tax on all bars and restaurants that serve flavored vodka with fruit juice and call it a martini. All that you’re doing is making yourself look dumb and making it harder to drink.”
“I blame the Iraq War on people that drink this bullshit. If we can ban it, then tax the fuck out of it.”
This reminds me of one of the old Pennsylvania “blue laws” my dad is always going on about. An side note: Luke, you’re insane, and hilariously so.
May 20th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Jacqueline:
Thanks for the study. And that study really does apply to Denmark. But Denmark doesn’t spend the kind of money on end of life cancer treatment that we do. And that’s really the real problem with our health care system: we spend lots of money on people with no hope. The Danish do the right thing and just let them die. We’ll spend a million dollars keeping a hopeless person alive for another three months. That’s why our health care costs are absurd. But we smokers tend to die before we get the radical treatments, so we cost less here because we don’t get the treatment that Denmark won’t give anyway. And this is really real. My roommate died a few months ago. He died from the cancer he got while handling nasty chemicals during the Vietnam war. Fortunately, the VA provided excellent treatment. But he needed a bone marrow transplant to give him another six months. He didn’t get it because he was a smoker. That saved the VA a half million dollars. But in Denmark, he wouldn’t have had that option even if he didn’t smoke. What Denmark is doing is chopping off the top. They don’t waste money on treatments that only buy you another few months. We do. The reason us smokers save money is because they don’t let us get those radical treatments that cost $250K a month. And again, I thank you for the link to that study.
May 20th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Why do we need new taxes to pay for health care at all? We spend so much more than every other country per capita on health care already. It’s obvious that we don’t need more money in the health care system, we just need a better system.
Instead of throwing money at the problem, maybe we should just fix the problem, and the problem is having a for-profit health care system.
May 20th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
the tax on hard liquor would increase by 40 cents per fifth.
Liquor hasn’t been sold in fifths in the US for several decades, so designing a tax this way would be really stupid.
May 20th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Islamofasocialist surrender monkey!
Seriously, this makes me crazy too. The refusal of the vast majority of people to even attempt to think rationally about this is as dysfunctional in its own way as the quaint desire of Californians to maintain government services without paying any taxes.
May 20th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Shh, stop bringing common sense into this. We MUST remain slaves of the health care – industrial complex. Anything else would be OMFG SOCIALISM!!!!
May 20th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
I am also havig a hard time seeing how disproportionally burdening a small percentage of citizens is a good thing. If that’s really the goal, I guess we could pick any number of things that fit the bill. Alternative music? Blogging posts? BA viewing? I understand that it makes it an easier sell. Sure. But it kind of, uh, sucks to be the targeted group.
I suppose there are some NBA fans who are not problem gamblers who fritter away their family mortgage money. But similarly, there are people who drink who are not alcoholics.
Look. I get it. You think universal health care will be the cat’s ass. Fine. But what’s so wrong with paying for it with an income tax? As far as I can tell, the rationale used here ca be used for ANY tax. A tax on flushig the toilet. A tax on shitting in the toilet in the first place. A tax on weed. A tax on Twinkies. A tax on Pepsi, but not on Coke, because Pepsi is the choice of a new generation and it makes sense to have younger people pay more for a whole life of swell gummint coverage.
I think sometimes people ovetax things. Just be straight. How many people pay an income tax every year? How much will coverage cost? Do some division and let me know what my new rate is.
To sit around and act like we can make everybody’s boo-boos feel all better, AND make them give up their stinky habits might be true. But it’s creepy.
You are progressives. You aren’t supposed to care about my stinky habits.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Sam M: You really don’t understand the difference between alcohol consumption and alternative music?
“But it’s creepy.”
Okay, here’s the sentiment I anticipated. By creepy you mean unAmuricn. And by that you mean “Don’t tread on me.” And by that you mean, “alcohol consumption is an individual act of liberty devoid entirely of any real context beyond my supposedly autonomous will for it that sprang up out my God-given snowflake’dness.”
May 20th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
The health consequences from watching too much tv and the lack of physical movement and social connection that results is a MUCH bigger health problem than whatever amount of booze consumption you can change with a tax. tax the tv.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Liquor hasn’t been sold in fifths in the US for several decades, so designing a tax this way would be really stupid.
If I’m correct that a fifth is a 750ml bottle, virtually every kind of liquor that’s sold comes in that size.
Which reminds me of one of the more interesting things I notice in package stores: the 1.75L is typically something like 30% more than the 0.75L. I guess they figure habitual drinkers are bad at math.
May 20th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
I just looked up an example: Pinnacle [fruit] Vodka, 750ml -> 14-2 dollars, and 1750ml -> 25-2, monthly special of PA Liquor Control Board (hence, -2). Which makes per 1000ml price: 18.67 for 750ml, and 14.29 for 1750 ml. What makes a habitual drinker bad at math? The fact that he should stick to Crown Russe vodka that is more than twice cheaper?
May 20th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
[...] Taxing Booze to Pay for Health Care: “ [...]
May 20th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Why don’t we sell “sodomy licenses” and then make it illegal to practice anal sex unless both people have a “sodomy license?” Anyone caught having anal sex without the license gets a severe fine. All federal funding of AIDS programs can come from this tax.
Anal sex is probably as big a helath risk as smoking, as practically all sexually-transmitted HIV cases in the U.S. are transmitted anally.
May 20th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
If I’m correct that a fifth is a 750ml bottle
But you are not correct. A “fifth” is a fifth of a gallon, which was a standard size for liquor and wine bottles in the United States until 1979, when for reasons unknown to me the US adopted a (mandatory) metric standard for this very small subset of all possible measures, leaving almost all other measurements non-metric. 75 centilitres is close to a fifth of a gallon, but is not a fifth of a gallon.
May 20th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Ugh. Stupid arguments like this are the reason why Democrats will not enjoy the mythical permanent majority no matter how pathetic the Republican ideology. Not only is this over-reaching, it’s hypocritical because of it’s regressive nature. The point of taxation is to raise revenue, full stop. The idea of taxation as social engineering is fucking creepy. But as long as we’re creating a wish list of things to tax, how about video games, tattoos, coffee, divorce, bottled water, makeup, guns and bullets, anything purchased on the internet, movie and entertainment tickets, books and magazines, stamps, tea….
May 20th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
I would put a tax on all people who stand in water.
May 20th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Unintended consequence of this higher tax will be “more moonshine production” here in North Carolina.
May 20th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Glaveister:
“Anal sex is probably as big a helath risk as smoking”
First of all, granting your entirely unsupported assertion above, it’s not done on the same scale. So it would not be effective at raising revenue. The broader problem, again granting your assertion, is that sodomy is impossible to monitor. Overnight, you’d simply encourage a huge “brown” market.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Just Karl:
“The point of taxation is to raise revenue, full stop. The idea of taxation as social engineering is fucking creepy.”
There’s the “creepy” again. Social engineering is what societies do, to various degrees (un)democratically. Saying it’s creepy is not an argument. Like when people criticize evolution by natural selection by saying, “Darwin thinks humans came monkeys. MONKEYS!”
Whys is it creepy, and -more to the point- your “taxation to raise revenue”- however its done, will be part of social engineering. Markets are social creations. They are engineered. Barter without customs and taboos (i.e. acultural) is the only conceivable and nonexistent alternative.
yoyo:
“tax the tv”
I pay as much for cable if I watch 1 vs. 10 hrs/day. You’d have to change that. TVs themselves are too much 1 time purchases to capture a lot of revenue and certainly ineffective at disincentivising tv watching.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Not to bring numbers into this or anything, but:
- Health spending totals $2.4 trillion and grows much faster than inflation; per capita health spending is around $7,000. In total, health accounts for something like 17% of GDP–and will probably eat up 20% of spending by 2020.
- I have no idea what percentage of the GDP is alcohol spending, but: If you assume Americans drink 10 billion beers every year and tax said beer at eight cents, you get… 800 million. Which is pretty much nothing relative to the size of the problem. If Americans drink 100 billion beers every year–basically about a beer per person per day–you get… 8 billion, which is still pretty much nothing, relative to the size of the problem.
Off to drink beer.
May 20th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Sobering commentary brad.
yeah, how dare you bring quantitative empirical analysis to an exercise of pure reason.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:07 am
I think dedicated taxes on alcohol and tobacco (and other legal drugs) are a good idea if they fund the medical care for the diseases made more likely for those drugs. Let tobacco taxes fund lung cancer treatment, for example. That might make it less likely that puritans such as, for example, Steve Duncan, ban smokers from receiving medical treatment for example. Let people pay for the consequences of their vices as they go.
Though I agree its kind of funny to do this and not tax all the processed food sold in the US that creates even worse health problems. And its funny to be looking at extra taxes to pay for universal health care when our per capita government spending on health care is even hire than per capita government spending that have universal coverage.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:25 am
I agree with JUST KARL . It’s bad enough that the republicans want to control who we fall in love with and who we have sex with.But now we have the democrates trying to control what we eat as well.
Leave my Little Debbie Brownies alone!
May 21st, 2009 at 12:46 am
“Okay, here’s the sentiment I anticipated. By creepy you mean unAmuricn.”
Uh, no. I mean I think it’s creepy for people to care what I drink or smoke.
I hope that clears it up.
As for the difference between alternative music and drinking, yes. I do see differences. But my point was never that there are no differences between these things. I went back and re-read my comment. I never made that claim. So I am unsure what you are getting at.
As for snowflakes, I have no idea.
May 21st, 2009 at 12:52 am
Impoverishing poor alcoholics is a feature? Awesome.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of shifting the cost of public goods onto the weak and powerless, but clearly many disagree. More sins and more sin taxes. Every week it’s something different. (cheap) Fatty foods, (cheap) booze, and easy stress relief favored by low-wage service employees – cigarettes. Does it bother anyone that all these sin taxes are aimed squarely at the poor?
May 21st, 2009 at 7:29 am
The whole idea rests on the “fact” that alcohol adds to health care costs. However, the scientific studies commissioned by Medicare, showed that moderate alcohol consumption decreased health care costs. People that didn’t drink cost $2000/year more, on average, than moderate drinkers.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:15 am
b9n10nt :
Most of the evidence suggests that anal sex is practically the only way that AIDS is transmitted sexually in the United States (there is also some non-sexual transmission, mostly IV drug use with dirty needles). There is practically zero evidence of men getting HIV from women (all or nearly all cases where HIV was officially transmitted from a man to a woman, the official determination was made entirely on the victim’s say-so; in every or nearly every case where there was an investigation by the health department, the HIV patient turned out to be secretly participating in homosexual activity).
In any case, I really don’t want sexual nehavior taxed. I am just fed up with people like Matt who preach sexual liberation and homosexual rights insisting that the government not interfere with any sexual behavior (and indeed that it try to force society to condone sexual behaviors that were previously taboo, largely for health reasons) and then arguing that the government should interfere in any other behavior that has implications for health.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:16 am
(and indeed that it try to force society to condone sexual behaviors that were previously taboo, largely for health reasons)
I meant that the taboos of the sexual behaviors were for health reasons, not that the condonement of them was.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:38 am
[...] Matt Yglesias finds this proposal “pretty attractive,” even while acknowledging that the direct public health benefits from reduced alcohol consumption would be minimal. He notes that this would be a “return to the level of taxation that existed a few decades ago” so it “would not be an unprecedented burden on the American consumer.” [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 8:54 am
I think we should tax restaurants and trendy food emporia favored by 20-something urban bloggers. You guys look a little chubby to me.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:03 am
There already are fairly high cigarette taxes, and they seem to have played a role in reducing smokers to a hard core of about a quarter of the population.
Likewise with alcohol. A majority of the population are already teetolers or very close to being teetolers (claim to have less than a drink a month). Alcohol consumption in this country is increasingly limited to heavy drinkers. Which is ironic, because as someone pointed out there are studies showing moderate drinkers tend to have much better health than people who drink very little or not at all.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:22 am
[...] Matthew Yglesias likes the idea of taxing alcohol to pay for universal health care. I obviously disagree with Yglesias about the merits of a single payer health care system, but even assuming that disagreement away, paying for it with an alcohol tax (a) is regressive, and (b) would seem to be be somewhat counterproductive, given the almost universal consensus now in the scientific community about the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption. [...]
May 21st, 2009 at 9:27 am
pete from baltimore:
“now we have the democrates trying to control what we eat as well”
and controlling how fast we drive, and how late I can get a drink at a bar, and minimally how much I have to pay my workforce, etc… Look, “control” (too strong a word for a sin tax: “influence” would be better) is what societies do. The type of freedom you apparently pine for doesn’t exist: it can’t even be taken away except by some cataclysmic event that reduces us to barter.
Sam M:
“I mean I think it’s creepy for people to care what I drink or smoke.”
It’s not about you and your snowflakedness (uniqueness). We care about the smoking or drinking which curtails our liberties. And we care about funding the government for those functions that expand our liberties.
Glaveister:
“In any case, I really don’t want sexual behavior taxed.”
Good. I rather suspected you were just emoting.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:29 am
Above should read:
The type of freedom you pine for doesn’t exist: it can’t even be taken away unless first created by some cataclysmic event…
May 21st, 2009 at 10:06 am
REGARDING COMMENT # 58 BY B9N10NT
With all due respect your arguement that controlling is what societys do could be used to justify controlling nearly anything.Sexual behavior, eating , religious behavior, you name it.
Yes the government should have laws. I am not in favor of anarchy.But I agree with C.S. LEWIS who said that ,given the choice between living under a dictatorship of good or one of evil, he would choose to live under the dictatorship of evil. His reason was that at least the dictatorship of evil would let up every once in a while.But the dictatorship of good would be relentless because of the belief that it was good and was helping people.
I work a job that involves hard labor. If i stop by a store on the way home and treat myself to a 50 cent Little Debbie Brownie I am not hurting anybody ,including myself.
I do not smoke ,touch alchohol or use drugs.Am i not allowed to have any bad habits no matter how small.Am i allowed to eat what i want or do you and MR YGLESIAS get to set my diet for me.
If you drink alchohol , do i get to tell you that you can not anymore. Or is it all one way.Why does MR YGLESIAS and others here have an obession about people only living their lives to MR YGLESIAS’S standards.
I am sorry that we disagree on this matter but i wish you the best B9N10NT.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:19 am
Tax rate on a bottle of MD 20/20 – 15%.
Tax rate on a bottle of Dom Perignon – 0.25%
You can do your own calculations for Old Rotgut and Glenfiddich.
Makes the FICA tax seem downright progressive, doesn’t it?
Democrats really love the downtrodden. If we could only coerce the ignorant, irresponsible and childlike poor to eat better and exercise more through the tax code …
For their own good, of course.
May 21st, 2009 at 10:59 am
pete from baltimore:
“With all due respect your arguement that controlling is what societys do could be used to justify controlling nearly anything.Sexual behavior, eating , religious behavior, you name it.”
It’s not a justification. It’s a truism. And I specifically said that “control” is too strong a word: influence is more accurate (again, I’m attempting to be descriptive, not normative).
The question is not, “Will society influence the individual?” The questions are, “With what means will society influence the individual, to what degree of coercion, and to what effect intended or otherwise”.
Thus you must argue on pragmatic grounds that the influence created by cheaper candy (and an economically impoverished state) is more conducive of liberty than the influence of expensive candy (and an economically wealthy state, relatively speaking of course).
For instance, you’re certainly aware that a host of laws, regulations, subsidies, and the like are to be found everywhere along the chain of production of your Little Debbie Brownie.
The notion that the economic exchange you speak of is one of two private, autonomous entities matching demand with supply is entirely fictional. It may or may not be useful to think of such things in this way, but it is not a description of reality.
Hence there can be no discussion of my Little Debbie. It’s our Little Debbie that you have our money to pay with.
Again, I attempt merely to describe things as they are so that we can debate on a rational and empirical basis.
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:27 am
Matt Yglesias, and other liberals are always the first to bitch and moan about income inequality, but then are always so keen to impose regressive taxes on them. obviously they only actually care about the poor people who don’t smoke, drink or eat junk food. there seems to be a trend in which some people claim to care about the poor, at the same time wishing to prey on a proportion of them by raising their taxes to pay for their pet projects, funny that.