Sugar Tax
Eating excess sugar causes obesity. Obesity costs the community money through increased healthcare costs and reduced productivity. The community has the right to try to prevent those costs by preventing obesity. A good way to prevent costly behaviour is to raise its price. Taxes do that.
That’s my argument for sugar taxes. It is the same argument we use to justify alcohol taxes, pollution taxes, nicotine taxes, and so on. (And yes, even modest drinkers pay alcohol taxes, and we don’t blink an eye at it.)
Most New Zealanders, however, currently don’t buy this argument:
“Few Kiwis want to see sugar taxed despite most seeing it as a health vice, a survey shows.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents in the Southern Cross Health Society’s annual health survey believed they should consume less sugar and 73 percent believed it was a contributing factor to the country’s obesity problems.
Only a third supported government regulation of sugary food and drinks.”
Of most interest to me here is the trajectory. A decade ago, we would have been astounded if a third of people wanted to tax very sugary foods. Now we have it. Come back in another decade, with more obesity and more debate, and the support for price signals will go up again.
The right should actually agree with this tax, as they believe taxing costly behavior is better than taxing earnings.