One more thought about sugar taxes

It’s true that a sugar tax would disproportionately hit the consumption of poor people, and a soda tax even more so.  But the point of a sugar tax isn’t to tax sugar, it’s to tax unhealthy foods.  Sugar is an easy proxy for unhealthy food.

Maybe there are better proxies.  If the goal is to cut down on calories, then a tax on calories would make more sense.  I don’t know what the right level would be – maybe 2% per hundred calories – and that can be figured out by doctors and economists.

There are two main advantages a calorie tax.  First, it’s broad based because it includes all food.  And a lot of food loved by the middle and upper classes – red meat, butter, olive oil, cheese, foie gras, etc. – are high in calories, so their foods would be as affected as the the diet of Americans with more sugary diets.  So it has the potential to raise more revenue than a narrow tax on only sugar or soda.

Second, the breadth of the tax means that it is less regressive than a sugar/soda tax.  Since it’s broader, it’s also flatter.  Conservatives like flat taxes, and progressives like taxes on unhealthy foods.  In other words, a tax on calories seems like it would have a better chance of being enacted than a narrower tax.

Then again, there’s this institution called the Senate.