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Comment by throwaway4666 | Hacker News Reader

My (admittedly anecdotal) experience with taxing an addictive/harmful thing "for people's own good" is that it just results in said people cutting their budget to afford the tax, making their life worse overall. This ranges from heroin addicts somehow always finding the daily $$$ to fund their dose, to people mildly grumbling about the price of cigarettes yet buying them anyway.

On the other hand, forbidding a thing altogether seems to have disastrously ineffective results too (see: the prohibition, war on drugs, etc.).

Maybe a better solution is to simply forbid companies from putting addictive things in their products to sell them, but keep the addictive thing legal, e.g. don't put too much sugar in the soda you make (so people won't expect too much sugar as a matter of course) but let people add sugar to the soda if they really want to. In other words, regulate companies' practices but not individuals'.

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Tax policies to reduce smoking rates seem to show reasonable effectiveness:

"the rule of thumb in the United States is that a 10 percent price increase on a pack of cigarettes results in anywhere from a 2.5 percent to a 5.0 percent overall decline in smoking, with most studies showing an average 4.0 percent drop" from https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20160919.471471/...

Data and analytics for this are worth reading about - I find geographic issues (low-tax areas across state lines, total numbers of retail locations selling tobacco products, etc) along with concepts of price elasticity to be interesting modeling problems.

You might want to check out:

https://publications.iarc.fr/Book-And-Report-Series/Iarc-Han...

It has a bunch of freely-available chapters talking about this area of research.

To maximize tax collected on cigarettes prices rise every year with a few percent which compounds to doubling the price in 10 years. If you want people to stop smoking a government would double the price over night, but that would hurt their ability to collect tax and we can't have that happening can we?

This argument does not fly IMO for sugary drinks, for two reasons:

First, there are healthier alternatives. Sugar-free sodas are probably not ideal but they can't be worse than sugary drinks.

Second, while sugar may be addictive, it is not that addictive. Some people would murder to fuel an heroin addiction, but no sugar addict would walk a mile to get their fix instead of drinking water. And if they did the exercise would burn some of the calories :)

> Sugar-free sodas are probably not ideal but they can't be worse than sugary drinks.

They are very much, comprehensively, most certainly, for sure far better than sugary drinks.

Aspartame is safe. The acidity remains an issue for dentition. But the sugar is the real killer.

Is aspartame really that safe? I thought it altered the intestinal bacteria?

It is probably the most tested food additive that exists. Anything you eat will modify your microbiome.

Doesn't all nutrition change alter the gut microme somehow?

When I was a teenager I had a lot more sugar in my diet, and I'd get strong cravings when doing extended physical activity. One time when I was backpack camping I walked from our camp for a couple of kilometres (so over a mile) to a village just to get a couple of cans of soda. This was on top of the 15kms I'd already walked that day.

Not to say this is in any way comparable to a heroin addiction, but sugar urges can be strong and compelling.

Probably not for no good reason though.

If you're physically active sugar isn't that bad for you. Your muscles are hungry and the quickly digested sugars entering your bloodstream have somewhere useful to go.

Eating sugar and other processed, simple carbohydrates such as french fries, chips, and soda while sedentary is a great way to become obese and diabetic.

>> Sugar-free sodas are probably not ideal but they can't be worse than sugary drinks.

At least in Chicago, they included diet drinks in their tax.

This was my huge complaint with it. Leaving aside for a moment the morality of vice taxes, raking zero calorie soda into the policy makes it very obviously just a cash grab.

> raking zero calorie soda into the policy makes it very obviously just a cash grab.

Not necessarily. Maybe the goal was to discourage people from the habit of drinking sweetened drinks in general, instead of just encouraging them to drink Diet Coke instead. It would probably be better for everyone except the drink manufactures if everyone just switched to plain water.

This is like when the food vendor at my old work raised the prices on soda. They claimed it was a health initiative, but they also increased the prices on diet soda and even bottled water.

> no sugar addict would walk a mile to get their fix

I don't think you have experience with a sugar addiction. I've done this more times than I can count and hate myself for it every time.

I dealt with this for a while too. My solution was coffee (double double) so kept the sugar, but slowly went to black. I won't even go into a convenience store when I pump gas anymore, the cravings have stayed and its a battle everyday.

Thanks for the tips!

> Sugar-free sodas are probably not ideal but they can't be worse than sugary drinks.

Well, that is not clear:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321244

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6471792/

> This ranges from heroin addicts somehow always finding the daily $$$ to fund their dose, to people mildly grumbling about the price of cigarettes yet buying them anyway.

You should disavow yourself of this notion. Taxation on cigarettes is highly effective at reducing the rate of tobacco consumption [1]. Increasing prices of heroin is less so, because heroin is extremely addictive and therefore price inelastic. This is a very thoroughly studied area in economics, typically referred to as a Pigouvian or "sin" tax [2].

Sugar is not going to be anywhere near as price inelastic as heroin so it is likely that there will be a strong decrease in sugar consumption if such a tax was introduced. The issue at hand is whether this is _fair_. Sugar consumption is only a problem if there is misuse, not if it is consumed per se. This is fundamentally different to tobacco consumption (every ciggy you smoke is bad for you + others + healthcare system).

[1]: https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-13-taxation/13...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

>is that it just results in said people cutting their budget to afford the tax, making their life worse overall.

This is a general problem with regressive taxes (eg. sales taxes). The way to mitigate this is to give some fixed amount back to everyone. It can even be made fully revenue neutral (ie. all collected revenues are returned as a tax credit). That way, people are still incentivized to stop consuming sugary products, people aren't left with a hole in their wallets if they don't change their habits.

>Maybe a better solution is to simply forbid companies from putting addictive things in their products to sell them, but keep the addictive thing legal

I'm not sure how this would work. Maybe they will stop adding sugar directly, but they might something that's 90% sugar (eg. apple juice concentrate). We already see this play out in nitrite-containing foods. Basically what happened was that nitrites in food was found to be bad for your health, so food companies switched from adding nitrites directly to adding "celery juice extract", which is a natural source of nitrites. Nothing really changed, except now there's no "nitrites" in the label, and the company can call it "all-natural".

Forbidding is conflicting with principles of liberty. Besides, there are things that are addictive but are fine (even good, useful) in moderation (I don't think cigarettes are one, but sugar should be).

I would be surprised if taxing had this effect (see research cited by others claiming otherwise), I think in particular low income people respond a lot to price incentives[0]. They are the most at risk from obesity. Moreover, you can redirect those taxes without much controversy into other efforts, like educational material, or just public healthcare (which is a "victim" of obesity epidemics).

[0] I highly recommend the book from recent Nobel Prize winners, 'Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty', there are several experiments showing how extremely poor people respond to incentives (much more rationally than it appears), though I'm not sure how this generalizes to low-income americans.

People will pay higher prices for cigarettes up to a point - and somebody has had to calculate what that level is, because the current government here in Denmark was talking about trying to prevent young people from smoking, but didn't want to increase the prices too much, as that would overall cost tax money.

I think unlike heroin, smoking is probably easier to quit, and (because you know the size of the dosage for certain) easier to decrease your consumption.

I don't know the answer, maybe accept that some people are going to be unhealthy and, when you create public health systems some of those who have healthy habits are going to pay for those who have unhealthy habits and, while not fair, that is the price to pay.

Otherwise the question quickly becomes where do you draw the line? Mandatory weight control and mandatory calorie restrictions if found overweight?

It seems counterproductive to me that they don't want to tax cigarettes enough to cut into tax revenue. In that case, it gives the appearance that rather than trying to benefit the public, they just picked something unpopular enough where they can dishonestly squeeze extra money out of some people.

I never thought about it, but now that I do, vice taxes shouldn't go into the public coffers to prevent a conflict of interest. It should have a mandatory use in reducing the vice, or directly paying for economic externalities caused by the vice, and if not possible, should get donated to charity.

I think an important difference between sugary drinks and heroin is that there is an easy sugar-free alternative that people might swap to more often if it was cheaper.

There are 'heroin alternatives' that people switch to in order to treat their addiction - mostly substances that act on the same receptors but aren't as addictive. Whether they are all cheap, legal, well-known and/or easily accessible is an entire story altogether.

Methadone is also not euphoric at the doses used in treatment of addiction.

I think another difference between heroin and sugar might be how the addiction sets in.

Sugar seems to me more insidious, in that at first it doesn't really make you feel all that great. But there's a convenience factor. Sugary foods are usually "easy to eat", they're "right there". In this, I would argue this addiction gets built up over time.

Now I've never tried heroin, but from what I understand the effects are much more pleasant in and of themselves. Addiction sets in much more quickly.

All this is to say that maybe banning sugar would work. If the convenience factor goes out, and if there's no "wow factor" to trying it, there's much less potential for abuse and for addiction.

You run into a regulatory capture problem in any capitalist democracy.

Companies squabble over nuances that less impact them, and more greatly their competitors, implemented through their political pressure on representatives.

Which is why historically most democracies have trended laissez faire on directly compelling specific supplier behavior. Demand-side modification has the same dangers, but to a lesser degree.

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