Unless you have a functional health care system, in which case increased costs are passed on to everyone's taxes. It would be appropriate to dedicate revenues from tobacco and alcohol taxes to medical care.
Sin taxes are taxes that fall only on the users of the products or services in question, and rarely have knock-on effects like fuel taxes (which then raise the cost of transporting everything else, but promote more efficient transportation).
Adding recycling deposits, for example, vastly increases the rate of recycling, reduces litter, provides a minor source of income for the homeless, and provides a very small tax revenue.
Medical care for these patients is extremely expensive. Each surgery costs around 50 to 60 thousand euro and it's not uncommon to get 2 or 3 of those before dying. Add to that the frequent visits to the doctor's office, the oxygen tanks if needed, the medications, etc. The other option would be to just "let them die" but that's not what we decided to do as a society.
The trend is that we are now able to keep them alive slightly longer, ( at a higher cost) and that they start developing symptoms slightly later thus reducing the potential "benefit" for society.
Not sure it’s cheaper than lung cancer.
The typically don't start to die in significant numbers until they're getting up to retirement age, they're an economic burden by that point.
Is that really a good bargain?
I can simultaneously want to make sure that nobody goes hungry or homeless, and still recognize that we aren't doing that today, so in the meantime having that recycling income available is better than not having it.
The inverse is more true: people will continue not serving others by better programs if they can have them work for them for pennies...
This is a right-wing, Milton Friedman worldview. The left (pretty much by definition as "the left") emphatically rejects these arguments with respect to flipping burgers, running a cash register, or delivering groceries. What's special about picking up glass bottles?
And I will not vote to remove recycling deposits because you think that it's somehow exploiting poor people to let them get a little money.
It seems like more of a side effect that low income workers use it as an income stream more than anything. It's like a metaphorical form of picking up loose change that others have dropped and deemed not worth their time to pick up.
It saves taxpayers and sellers a boatload of money compared to paying for proper employees with health insurance, mileage reimbursement, etc. to clean up their streets / source their raw material / deal with their waste.
Parks and community centers aren't designed for the purpose of making money, either, but we generally expect the people cleaning their toilets to have solid benefits.
>It's like a metaphorical form of picking up loose change that others have dropped and deemed not worth their time to pick up.
How is that different from the gig economy?
It's different because the purpose of the deposit isn't to crowdsource people to exploit via underpaying them to recycle, whereas that is exactly the case for the gig economy. Uber, Airbnb, etc. rely on individual contractors being cheaper than their regulated equivalent (Taxis, hotels) while also putting the risk on them. The purpose of the deposit is harm reduction - incentivize people to stop littering their recyclables by charging them money for the bottles/cans.
If we were to remove the deposit system and instead replace it with paid workers, why would any particular individual care about not littering? After all, our taxes pay for workers to clean it up. I'm not saying I espouse that belief, but when you increase the convenience factor of something like littering, people will do it more often. When it hurts people's pocketbooks to litter, they do it less. Take, for example, plastic grocery bags. Everyone knows plastic grocery bags create a huge waste problem and a little bit of thoughtfulness (bringing reusable bags with you) can mitigate the amount of bags used. However, it wasn't until we started charging a fee for grocery bags that usage numbers dropped significantly.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland do not have minimum wages.
Yet none of them were overwhelmed by the abuse of homeless labor.
Plus, as societies they have a basic decency, absent from other more exploitative societies.
> Further, if alcohol taxes bring in 1% of the state budget it means everyone's income is that much lower because of taxing alcohol.
Maybe you mean "that much higher" there?
Also, just FYI, in 1923 "[s]ome 30 percent to 40 percent of the government’s income came from the tax on alcohol."[0] So Prohibition was funded by the federal income tax. But now we have both :(
0) https://taxfoundation.org/how-taxes-enabled-alcohol-prohibit...
People that work in pubs and clubs after a smoking ban must see a big benefit.
Everyone old enough to have gone out in the UK in the early 2000s can tell you that pubs and clubs were totally full of smoke and you would come home smelling like an ashtray.
Bit of a weak argument the article makes.
Do they really, or is that an old wives tale from non-reproducible research, the way the anti-fat scare was?
"The largest and longest study (Enstrom & Kabat) followed more than 35,000 subjects for almost 40 years and found no significant risk associated with second-hand smoke. Similarly, the World Health Organization spent seven years at a dozen research centers in seven countries and came to the same conclusion".
> Since the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, 2.5 million adults who were nonsmokers died because they breathed secondhand smoke [1]
> While the tobacco industry continues to claim that the evidence that passive smoking causes disease – particularly lung cancer – is controversial, every independent authoritative scientific body that has examined the evidence has concluded that passive smoking causes many diseases. [2]
Also, the Enstrom & Kabat study is widely criticised [3] + [4]:
> incorrect definition of passive smoking exposure as a “nonsmokerʼs marriage to a smoker” [3]
> A severe error in the study was the failure to establish a control group of nonsmokers who were unexposed to secondhand smoke. [4]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...
[2] http://www.who.int/tobacco/research/secondhand_smoke/about/e...
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236833718_Critique_...
[4] [PPT] www.econ.wayne.edu/agoodman/7550/week14/Second-hand_Smoke.ppt
Less drunk driving + less bad decisions?
The cost of alcohol makes it so when I drink, I drink.
When I started out in IT (early '90s), it was not something you generally mentioned at a party.
But surely the alcoholics are taxed way more than people who have an occasional drink because of the sheer volume? If you drink or smoke a lot, the taxes do accumulate into significant amounts annually.
Policymakers should still consider implementing sin taxes if they intend to intervene to change individuals’ behaviour. But they should be aware that the bulk of the damage that smokers, drinkers and the obese do is to themselves, and not to others.
It might be blunt in the economic sense if the taxed behaviour doesn't exhibit clear external costs but in a social context the scheme works great. Using taxation to discourage behaviour is a better way to collect taxes than taxing everyone.
Taxing goods or behaviour that is deemed harmful both brings in the money and also makes a statement. Further, if alcohol taxes bring in 1% of the state budget it means everyone's income is that much lower because of taxing alcohol.
"Sin taxes" are also economically unpredictable because when the collected amounts begin to drop the tax is working as intended. But socially this is exactly why they were used in the first place.