Tax Junk Food/Regulate Contents?

[famousringo]

dsgrue3 said:

famousringo said:

dsgrue3 said:

I don't understand why anyone is PRO-Tax anything. Just boggles the mind. 

Besides the fact that the state is better positioned to provide certain services to society and those services need funding, taxes are a useful tool for pricing in externalities: Costs of producing or consuming certain goods which are not reflected in the market price.

Examples of externalities include things like pollution, bacteria which are increasingly resistant to antibiotics, depletion of common resources, and the long-term health impact of certain activities.

Ideally, you can measure the financial cost of such externalities, divide that cost by the units of a good responsible for them, and apply a tax that perfectly balances those costs. Reality, of course, is harder than that.

You know how a common complaint of the financial industry post-bailouts is that the rewards are privatized while the costs are socialized? A well-implemented tax can be a way to de-socialize the cost. Instead of the cost for a problem being shared by all, the cost is born by the manufacturers or consumers of the good which creates it. 

Thanks for this englightening, off-topic reply. None of this is relatable to a food tax unless you're advocating that there's a reason a government should be interfering in one's consumption of food?

If I want to eat nothing but Snickers, that's my prerogative. 

See my previous post in this thread. About half of American health expenditure is paid by government, which means taxpayers have a stake in the health of many millions of Americans. The stake is even greater in the rest of the developed world where health care is universal. The case for taxing unhealthy foods is fundamentally the same as the case for taxing cigarettes or mandating seatbelts. Your bad health decisions cost everybody else money.