In The Blogs

Chart of the Day - 4.30.2009

| Thu Apr. 30, 2009 9:54 AM PDT

Ezra Klein points to an intriguing bit of opinion polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation today: 61% of Americans say that in order to fund healthcare reform they'd support higher taxes on "items that are thought to be unhealthy, such as soda, alcohol, junk food, and cigarettes":

Problematically, the poll question lumps a lot of different policies together. Paying for health care by taxing cigarettes is actually a common strategy. It's how we funded S-CHIP, for one. Taxing soda is rather further from the center of the consensus. But there's no evidence, in this poll at least, that the public instinctually recoils from the idea.

In a sense, I'm not too surprised by this. I suspect that most people know that soda and junk food really are a scourge and would like to cut back. So either through guilt, or maybe a sense that they need someone else to prod them into doing the right thing, they support higher taxes on this stuff.

Further down, however, there's a followup question:

This is a fascinating example of just how thin opinion polling like this is. The real lesson here is that most people haven't given this issue even a few seconds thought, and their response to the poll question is practically meaningless. Faced with even the slightest pushback, large majorities of both supporters and opponents flipped their views almost instantly.

So the real question isn't how people feel about taxing junk food now, it's how they're likely to feel about taxing junk food after hearing both sides screech about it for a few days or weeks or months. This is true of most other opinion polling too. Caveat emptor.

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Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here.

Comments

The outcome is obvious

Submitted by idlemind on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 10:12 AM PDT.

You just know that Coke™ et al will sit on the sidelines and let public opinion take its course...

How many Cokes do

Submitted by rusrus (not verified) on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 10:29 AM PDT.

How many Cokes do billionaires drink?

You can't ask people

Submitted by anon (not verified) on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 10:55 AM PDT.

You can't ask people abstract questions. You have to make them make meaningful tradeoffs. I thought all you pundit/marketeers larned this.

Yay!

Submitted by Art Eclectic on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 11:47 AM PDT.

Tax it all. I'm all for letting people eat whatever crap they want, but if we are going to offer universal health care I'm all for taxing junk. Soda, candy, fast food, anything with corn syrup, chips, sugary cereals, all of it. If it were up to me, people wouldn't be able to buy this junk with food stamps, either.

Before you engage your

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 12:47 PM PDT.

Before you engage your totalitarian impulses, why don't you ask congress to stop actually subsidizing the use of high fructose corn syrup?

My own answer would be based

Submitted by godoggo (not verified) on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 12:03 PM PDT.

My own answer would be based on evidence about how much these sorts of taxes affect behavior...(I have the vague notion that this has been more successful regarding smoking than food, but maybe I'm wrong)...I'm always against regressive taxes by default...and if I could choose between funding by cutting back on subsidies for crap or by taxing it, of course I'd choose the former...Shame they don't give this information or these choices in the survey. I imagine my own answer would depend on what I'd eaten that day. Or smoked.

I'm for taxing items to the

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 12:06 PM PDT.

I'm for taxing items to the degree that they incur costs substantially outside of baseline behavior, but not beyond that. Tax gasoline to pay for roads (because road usage varies widely and there is no baseline). Don't charge, or charge a nominal fee, for access to the national parks (because visiting a park or beach can be considered baseline. Pay for a fishing license to pay for stocking the lakes (fishing not baseline). Etc. Cigarettes are now way overtaxed by that standard because they pay for whatever extra costs they incur* and more. Taxing items beyond their societal costs is nothing more than the totalitarian impulse. Who gets to declare who is reprobate, and then tax them up the wazoo? Can I get to advocate taxing various subgroups in this country (much to my advantage, I'd add) because I don't like them or don't like what they do? I see from the chart that the question was about "unhealthy" behavior. Cute. "unhealthy" shouldn't be the standard, it should be based on costs to the government. Many of those unhealthy habits are actually very pleasurable. Omitting the unhealthy/pleasurable calculus shows where this debate is headed. * by some measures cigarettes actually reduce costs. More health care, but quicker death and smaller Social Security payouts. P.S. I'm definitely looking forward to the day when the comment/account management here at MJ finally works. I cannot login. I cannot get my password emailed to me. It's wild.

"The real lesson here is

Submitted by Mattyoung (not verified) on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 12:12 PM PDT.

"The real lesson here is that most people haven't given this issue even a few seconds thought,.." Now in the real world, we would wait until the people give a shit before embarking on a treacherous journey. On the other hand, ask people what they though of gasoline rising to $4/gal, and they will respond that it happened, they parked their cars and threw the nation into a depression. The difference is what the average consumer wants and what the average politician wants for his/her special interest group.

This taxing of certain foods

Submitted by jonas on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 3:37 PM PDT.

This taxing of certain foods doesn't make much sense policy-wise. How do you define "soda"? Ok, we all agree Coke and Pepsi are sodas. What about Snapple? It has as much sugar/calories per serving as Coke. Are we just going by sugar content? Apple juice has tons of sugar in it. Does that get taxed? Or only things with HFCS? Then manufacturers will just switch to other kinds of sugar, which doesn't help. Do we tax PopTarts? Then what about chocolate croissants at your local cafe? They have a lot more fat and sugar and calories than PopTarts. You get the point. However you define a "junk food", restaurants and manufacturers will just come up with some way of sneaking whatever product they're trying to sell under the threshold. If you're going to tax cigarettes and alcohol, why not also legalize pot and tax that too? Point is, the costs of healthcare are going to have to be borne by society as a whole. The fairest way to do that is institute some kind of VAT or combination of VAT and upper-bracket income tax surcharge to make it less regressive. We can use other policy tools, such as ending the ridiculous subsidies/trade protections on corn and corn products, to correct other problems in the nation's diet.

That was pretty much the

Submitted by Crissa (not verified) on Thu Apr. 30, 2009 9:33 PM PDT.

That was pretty much the point I was going to make. It's very difficult to decide what is an isn't 'junk food'. I'd willingly pay a tax, but I really don't want it messing with the churro vendor or ice cream truck the poor kids depend upon down here.