Re:Tax Policy Gave Us White Claw
by colechristensen on Friday September 06, 2019 @05:05PM
(#20899895)
But do they?
Is any government calculating the net cost between tax dollars spent because of cigarette smoking and tax dollars gathered from tobacco products and setting the tax in that manner?
Has any government put a lower or higher tax rate on any tobacco product based on risk or cost profile?
It is not that the arguments you are making aren't viable, I'm just not so sure that anyone is actually doing those things.
Re:Tax Policy Gave Us White Claw
by kevin_thibedeau on Friday September 06, 2019 @05:23PM
(#20900042)
We're going to start seeing that with taxes on EVs to make up for lost fuel tax revenue.
But that's not a complete engagement with the argument, right? Fuel taxes pay for more than just the carbon and pollution externalities of driving, but also of the cost of maintaining safe roads.
You can obviously disagree with the argument, but it's not incoherent and is in keeping with the underlying notion of a Pigovian tax.
Sales taxes are in some sense fungible, in that vendors could eat the cost to consumers by reducing their prices, in the same sense as a direct tax on those vendors would also be fungible, in that vendors would raise their prices to account for the taxes. Arguably, consumer-facing sin taxes are cheaper and simpler to administrate, and are the superior solution.