by the Night Writer
Gerald Prante writing at the Tax Policy Blog examines a recent report published in the New England Journal of Medicine calling for a penny-per-ounce soft-drink tax to pay for the long-term health costs of obesity. According to the report’s authors, the soft-drink industry represents “market failures” — in the form of less-than-optimal production and consumption — that justify government intervention.
These failures have to do consumers not appreciating the connection between consuming sugar-sweetened drinks and their long-term health because they have a) imperfect information which leads to poor consumption decisions; b) their decisions are further distorted by advertising; c) consumers, especially children and adolescents, tend to make decisions based on immediate gratification and not on long-term consequences, and d) these consumers don’t pay the full cost of their decisions because it is passed on to the healthcare system, of which half the costs are paid by the public via Medicare and Medicaid.
Prante wonders, if those are compelling reasons to institute a soft-drink tax, why not apply the same logic to out-of-wedlock sex and tax that as well:
Based on these supposed market failures, I’d like to pose this question to the authors: If government had perfect information, would you support a tax on out-of-wedlock sexual behavior? And if we can’t do that for administrative purposes, couldn’t we impose a significant tax on nightclubs and bars as a second best scenario (kind of like how the authors of this report suggest an imperfect soda tax to fight obesity-related market failures)?
…
First, I can think of no other “market” in which imperfect information exists at such a prevalent level than that of sexual interactions. How many men and women have perfect information about their sexual partners, especially those on a random night that they meet at a nightclub or bar?
Second, I can think of no other “market” in which the problem of a person pursuing short-term gratification at the expense of possible long-term harm would exists to such a large degree as that in the area of sexual activity.
Finally, there are substantial medical costs from sexually transmitted diseases, the bulk of which persists in out-of-wedlock/multiple partner/sexually active persons. And many of these are borne by taxpayers via government health care expenditures.
And that doesn’t even take into account the costs to the public in terms of increased poverty and welfare which have been directly linked to out-of-wedlock births.
Of course, few would sit still for such a tax on one’s lifestyle, would they?
You know, we used to talk about the cost of our liberty being paid in the blood of our soldiers and citizens (and especially our citizen-soldiers); we appear to be heading into an era where our liberty will be determined by how much we cost the state.
