Subscribe to the RSS feed.Is a Soda Tax Paternalism? Victim Blaming?
The CHP Twitter feed recently received a message from @erinashmiller, who tweeted that “taxing junk food violates horizontal & vertical equity, also paternalistic.”
The tweet included a link to an article she wrote on agriculture policy wherein she discussed the issue of “fat tax” as violating “horizontal equity.”
Soda and junk food tax proposals, she writes, tax prepackaged junk foods, but not equally unhealthy foods consumed by groups in higher income brackets.”
This, she says, violates “horizontal equity,” which holds that similarly situated taxpayers should be treated similarly. Taxing foods primarily consumed by one group of people while not taxing foods consumed by another group violates horizontal equity. For example, imposing a fat tax on foie gras but not cow livers would violate horizontal equity as would a tax on cheez wiz but not brie, or a tax on Coke but not Martinelli’s non-alcoholic pear cider.
These taxes are also said to violate “vertical equity,” or the extent to which taxes are fairly levied based on the ability of people to pay. Since junk food is consumed more by lower economic groups, people with the least money would bare the brunt of the increased tax.
The tweet and article echo a comment we received from Shane Lorimer on our soda tax poll. Shane wrote that “to artificially increase the price of something we are already artificially reducing the price of, through our farm subsidies for corn crops, is ridiculous. Instead of paying twice for the low cost of soda, why not tax soda companies for purchasing the sugar/corn syrup, or better yet, increase cost of all these nutritionally worthless foods by decreasing the corn subsidies?”
“What are we going to do,” Shane asks, “increase the tax on every unhealthy behavior until only the rich can be unhealthy? We need to stop this waste and focus on issues that will really make a meaningful impact and NOT blame the victim.”
These points are well made, but agricultural policy and tax policy are not mutually exclusive.
Is there anything wrong with ending corn subsidies AND taxing soda AND using the tax money to help reduce obesity in populations most affected by that epidemic?
Want to weigh in on this issue? Leave a comment here, or take our soda tax poll.
Finally, this just in: New research shows a link between soda taxation and better health.
