Taxing Our Way to Virtue

What do liquor, cigarettes, prostitution, and marijuana have in common?

Well, yes, they do each offer profound and unique satisfactions. Or so I’m told. Or read in a book.

What I was going for, however, is that their primary consumers are adults. The former two generate substantial amounts of tax revenue. The latter two would were it not for the successful efforts of priggish, overbearing guardians of public morality and welfare. If morality is defined exclusively by their private concepts of morality. And if welfare is understood as that which they dictate for your own good.

I was stirred to these musings by a television commercial that has been ubiquitous on my cable provider. At least during programs shown on CNN and HGTV. This commercial is sponsored by a group identified as Americans Against Food Taxes and features a tense young woman whining in adenoidal tones about the burden “a few cents” in tax on sugary soft drinks would place on her family and similar Caucasian families across our great land.

I am not sympathetic to her plight.

As I have argued previously, I believe in taxation. I believe taxes are on the whole a good thing. I believe that government at every level provides services that could not be rendered by any other entity. Road and highway construction (Those who whine about taxes can often be heard to advocate for private toll roads. Hello? These will take less money out of your pocket? And what commercial entity is going to build a toll road from your driveway to your church or to the mall?), public safety, national defense, education (even charter schools rely on tax dollars), Medicare, Social Security (How’s your private pension looking? Your 401K? Your investment portfolio?).

Take the socialist jackboot from the neck of private initiative and you get … 44 cent postage stamps and $25 luggage fees. Leave it to the socialists and you get electric power delivered to rural communities and voting rights.

But I digress.

I am not sympathetic to the arguments of Americans Against Food Taxes because they are against taxes.
If their argument was against using taxation as an instrument of social engineering, then I would be enthusiastically in their camp. Soft drinks aren’t really a food in any nutritional sense, but unlike the four pleasures cited above, their primary consumers are children and adolescents.

“Ah ha! Just so!” cry the social engineering crowd. And these sugary poisons contribute to the scourge of childhood and adult obesity and a wide range of resultant conditions. This is true. I am not suggesting that childhood obesity is not a serious problem. I am only objecting to the use of tax policy to effect behavior change.

Research also points quite strongly to lack of exercise as a significant determining factor in childhood and adult obesity. Is the answer to tax video games, romance novels, Fox Sports or sofa manufacturers?

Now, and here I may be accused of sophistry, I do not object to taxing liquor, cigarettes, prostitution, marijuana, soft drinks, ice cream, video games, romance novels, Fox Sports, sofas or any other discretionary consumable. So long as the tax is premised solely upon raising funds to support the functions of government.

Key word for me: discretionary. If it is something that one chooses to purchase rather than needs to purchase it should be fair game for taxation. I would argue that food, clothing and utilities should be exempt from taxation, but that’s a battle I’m willing to lose to allow most goods and services to be taxed.

A commercial which airs as frequently as the grocery shopping mamma features a smarmy attorney in a Stetson looming Godzilla-like before a photo of Bank of America Plaza offering his firm’s services in pursuing Social Security Disability claims.

I will address the scourge of mercenary aged cripples attempting to rip-off the struggling tax payer in a later entry.