The above chart is making the rounds and it says that if we slapped a big tax on sugary, carbonated beverages, our nation's revenues would go way up while a lot of waistlines went down. Sounds like win/win at first glance but it seems to me like Voodoo Economics…to borrow a phrase that George Herbert Walker Bush once correctly applied to the financial theories on which he later based much of his administration. I started to write a post about why this didn't make a lot of sense but I see Kevin Drum has, as usual, beaten me to it. Basically, there's too many theories in this theory, starting with the assumption that if you got fewer calories from Dr. Pepper, you wouldn't feel okay with eating more Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
And even presuming the logic is sound, there is the question of how much government should try to regulate this kind of human behavior. You know, if we slapped a huge tax on the making of Brittney Spears CDs, people might stop making them…and while we all might like that result, is that a legitimate function of our elected officials? Well, okay, maybe that's a bad example. But yes, obesity harms people. So does alcohol and we saw how well it worked to try and force everyone in The Land of the Free to stop consuming that stuff. Those folks are not consuming oceans of calorie-rich cola because there are no other available liquids. It's a choice, arguably a bad choice but not necessarily one Uncle Sam should be trying to stop us from making.
I'm not fighting for my freedom on this issue. I gave up carbonated drinks, with sugar and without, fifty months ago. It just seems like an excessive intervention into our lives. If (major "if") we feel that national obesity is a public concern that needs to be addressed, maybe we oughta address that problem head-on rather than to pin it all on one of the eighty zillion ways people get fat. There are skinny people who drink Pepsi and fat ones who drink Diet Pepsi…so if the idea is to punish people who get fat drinking non-diet Pepsi, the effort is misdirected. And if the idea is to just raise revenues, we oughta look into curtailing into the kind of tax/farm subsidies that brought us those gushers of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the first place.