What someone does in their own house should be up to them, and we shouldn’t attempt to use taxes to eliminate vice (but requiring taxes to cover the negative externalities from vice is fine, e.g. funding DUI checkpoints).

Why not? Taxes are usually preferable to outright bans (which, realistically, is how governments eliminate vice), because they let you decide how much is your vice worth to you and still engage in it, with a revenue benefit to the rest of society, if you really want to.

The only scenario that makes sense is to fund programs to help people deal with the negative effects of consumption (as, theoretically, such programs would not need to exist once consumption stops). However, unless you don't believe in addiction at all, it's clearly immoral to tie funding of treatment programs entirely to excise taxes.

So you have to weigh a revenue offset against the morality of, again, taxing people who may have compromised agency to one degree or another. I think our system does less ethical things all the time, but it's hard for me to feel these kinds of taxes are "well founded."

If we had real universal healthcare (or better cost sharing) then I think a much broader tax on things that have predictable health impacts might be sensible, but for it to work it would need to go far beyond "morally questionable" things and into, say, taxing companies that employ people to do labor that will reliably damage their bodies.

That's fine. Revenue can be routed to externality abatement. When there's no more revenue, there's also less need for the abatement.

Spirit duty in the UK is £28.74 per litre of pure alcohol. A ~£20 bottle of Jack Daniels pays a tiny bit over £8 of spirit duty, which is 40% of the sale price. A £250 bottle of 25 year old single cask Glenlivet pays a tiny bit under £8 of spirit duty, around 3% of the sale price.

I don't think it's entirely reasonable that the vice tax is a rounding error for fancy drinks, but amount to almost half the price you pay for cheaper booze.

For a cross-sectional view this is certainly true. At a single point in time, a high tax rate impacts people who are more economically vulnerable more than those that are wealthier. However, does the causality hold if we consider this over time?

Addictive substances use -> economically impoverished, or economically impoverished -> addictive substances use?

To me it seems many folks use addictive substances to self medicate in absence (or in spite of) a universal healthcare system. And then when economically improving opportunities come may have less capacity to claim them.

Do we look at it this way? Does it matter? General open questions.

Governments that attempt to eliminate vice by banning inevitably simply drive it underground where it is then facilitated by dangerous black markets and criminal organizations.

In reality is it gatekeeping on vices by the wealthy. If you are wealthy, nobody cares about your vices.

How much is your vibrator worth to you?

But take for example suburban single-family homes. We know they are significantly worse for the environment than urban apartment living - they are harder to heat & cool, require more invasive utility work, lead to car-driven transportation instead of mass transit, and destroy natural habitats. Nevertheless, I want to live in a house, not an apartment. And if the government were to tax them according to their true environmental impact and costs, I'd suck it up and pay the tax, getting a more unpleasant but higher-paying job if necessary. (They don't currently, and I'm enjoying the sweet subsidy of our unsustainable lifestyle.)

There are other things like say soda that are unhealthy, and a tax has been proposed on them. I cut back my soda consumption because it got expensive, but sometimes I really want to relax with an IBC or Jarrito or Mexican Coke, so I'll suck it up and buy a 12-pack. That's exactly the point of a tax: cut back people's default consumption because it gets expensive, while still giving them the option of purchasing if they really want it.

If it was self harm, then seems like we should start with vice taxes for added sugar and not doing cardio workouts.

> vice taxes for added sugar

At face value, this doesn't seem like a bad idea. I've heard about cities in the US that have a tax on large sugary drinks.

> not doing cardio workouts

It's probably easier to incentivize the good behavior here than punish the absence of it.

As for societal harm, I imagine going forward we'll settle on some countermeasure against entities like Facebook. If that's a per-byte transmission tax, then so be it.

The other issue is that sin taxes just don't work. They don't stop people from partaking at all. These taxes are just a money grab.

Note that, politically, there is no problem collecting higher premiums for tobacco use. But apparently alcohol was not politically unpopular enough to be a factor allowed when pricing an individual’s insurance premiums. Or vaccination status.

A known cost of socialized medicine.

Unless you want to go down the road of justifying any government coercion or loss of freedom as a taxpayer cost saving measure.

> but requiring taxes to cover the negative externalities from vice is fine, e.g. funding DUI checkpoints).

Is not as simple as it may sound.

It seems prudent to just treat all monies paid to the federal government as taxes, and all services/products received from the federal government as a whole when accounting for it as an individual taxpayer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29005498

Really, anything can be a slippery slope if we want to look at it through that lens, but it's often not appropriate. This is one of those cases.

Some states sort of do this by requiring purchase of personal injury protection (PIP) from the auto insurer.

I agree with this. The problem is that smokers smoke in public spaces. This causes direct problems to me and everyone else who does not smoke. It infringes on my freedom.

Also for whatever reason, cigarette smokers get a pass on littering. It's disgusting. Tax dollars should be raised on cigarettes so we can hire people to clean up after smokers.

I doubt we're spending anywhere near that much money on cleaning up cigarettes.

Note* these numbers are wrong.

The actual taxes on a pack of cigarettes in Texas are 2.42. i grabbed the $5 from a proposal.

So maybe we could consider the tax isn't really about cleaning them up, but compensating the rest of us for having to look at them.

I'd argue that we already all pay for one another's bad habits in a very roundabout way.

>Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.

I provided a link to the article so that interested people could read it. It's all laid out quite nicely: health care costs.

I'll also point out that commercially supplied addictive substances are never only "in their own house", in that the companies engineering and encouraging addiction are going to use profits to go and hook other people. So maybe look at this as a tax on the addictors and a barrier to generating new addicts.

Also, do you have data on this?

> People stopped smoking on planes and bars because of outright bans, not sin taxes.

My dad quit smoking before bans were common, and the (rising) cost was one of his motivations.

My argument wasn’t that people quit smoking all together, but people stopped smoking in public spaces like planes and bars. Sure the occasional person lights up in the airplane bathroom despite the ban, but I think my broader point still stands.

Indeed, I think what made the bans possible was declines in smoking rates. And those declines were partially driven by increasing tax. Look at California for an example:

https://www.cdtfa.ca.gov/DataPortal/charts.htm?url=CigTaxSur...

Note the big jumps in cigarette tax revenue in 1967 and 1988. That 1988 jump is from Prop 99: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_California_Proposition_99

Then look at the bottom graph here, showing how CA smoking rates declined quickly from 1988 to 1995 when the indoor ban was put into place:

https://tobaccofreeca.com/tobacco-industry/2016-california-t...

Of course, a lot was going on there, including social changes and the use of a lot of that revenue to discourage smoking. But it would seem pretty bizarre to me that the lack of smoking in public places had nothing to do with it becoming significantly more expensive over time. Especially given what a sizable portion of the retail cost of cigarettes was taxes: https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0210.pdf

We’re trying to decrease health care expenses we’re paying and the poisoning of children who live in said homes and have no say in the air they breath.

You can make arguments against smoking (it's not good to die prematurely of lung and heart disease) but these financial arguments aren't valid.

[1]https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/smokers-save-govt-cash-says-re...

[2]https://reason.com/2012/11/21/want-to-save-health-care-costs...

The simple proof of this is that insurers have no obligation to charge tobacco users a higher premium, but all of them do (for under age 65 insurance).

If it was true that tobacco users were less costly from age 0 to 65, then insurers would not be charging tobacco users extra since any one could steal customers by offering a lower premium.

Heartily disagree. Pigovian taxes are fantastically persuasive.

Pigovian taxes are an economic solution, as are sin taxes. To the pocketbook there is no difference.

I do not recognize a distinction. I see that you are citing common critiques of the sin tax relative to the Pigovian tax, but they are substantively and consequentially the same. As a consumer I pay $Price + $Tax for the good, be it due to a taboo good or internalization of cost. Perhaps your concern is on the constraint -- Pigovian taxes are intended to encourage socially optimal consumption, whereas sin taxes are to encourage disuse of the good (which, as it stands, a Pigovian tax is also encouraging for some subset of the consumers on the demand curve). Ergo sin taxes are a subset of Pigovian tax where the legislative body has deemed the optimal social consumption of the taxed good to be zero.

Now, _WHY_ the legislative body or society writ large deems said taxed good's total consumption to be zero versus some lower optimal consumption amount the free market cannot attain is a question on where preferences and metapreferences originate, which is a bridge economics is not prepped to cross.

But regardless, it fits squarely in the framework of Pigovian tax policy.

A sin-tax is a subset of pigovian taxes where the social norm for optimal consumption is zero. This is squarely in the realm of economics, your protests aside.

As I stated in the prior comment that I believe you perhaps only skimmed, how the society came to that conclusion that the optimal consumption is zero is beyond economics. If you would like to discuss belief formation and other psychology/sociology discussions, I'm happy to engage but I'm sorry to say it's only an area of interest.

I'm not sure that those outcomes are really related anymore.

Smoking indoors is verboten pretty much everywhere, and has been for quite some time. IMHO, raising or lowering taxes on cigarettes won't change that, nor will it change if more people start smoking.

What makes you think that adjusting cigarette taxes would have an impact on such laws/regulations? I'm not being snarky, I just don't see the connection here.

Anecdotally, as a cigarette smoker myself, I'm glad that smoking indoors (including on transport vehicles like planes, trains and buses) isn't allowed.

If nothing else, I'd tax them for that BS. It's the shopping cart test, at least 90% of smokers are like this, unable to do function in society unless their incentivized not to cause harm, and I disdain them for it.

Still should just throw the damn things away, but changing human behaviour is difficult.

Smoke-free buildings[0][1] are becoming more common. Perhaps you might consider moving to such a building?

[0] https://no-smoke.org/frequently-asked-questions-housing-prov...

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/smoking-s...

Please provide a source of data for this assertion. Thanks!

In this case it seems unlikely that >10% of smokers consistently transport their butts as long as it takes to find a receptacle. Outside of Scouting or military facilities, it's so rare that it commands attention.

Your assertion is a reasonable one, especially as it doesn't claim that specific numbers of people participate in a particular behavior.

However, GP stated unequivocally that "at least 90% of smokers are like this"

That assertion can't be supported by facts/data AFAIK.

I suppose you could argue that GP was being hyperbolic, but as the old saw goes, "claims require evidence and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

Take from that what you will.

This seems like a technical gotcha that has little to do with his overall point. Not all low-hanging fruit is worth picking.

That's as may be. But as a smoker, I took offense to their characterization of me.

Call it whatever you like, but I don't appreciate being berated -- especially when such insults aren't valid.

As I said, take from that what you will.

I hate people who do that.

I wonder if there are any studies about the deterrent effect for adopting smoking / drinking.

If someone is considering taking up smoking and cigarettes cost $1 / pack vs $10 / pack, I would imagine that there would be people that would see the $10 / pack and think, "too expensive a habit, better not start."

Just stayed at a hotel this past weekend. You had to sign a release saying you won't smoke in the room. There was a sign in the room saying if you did, you would be charged an additional $250.

So yeah, its been verboten for a while, but apparently this specific hotel chain had to institute paperwork and additional in-room warnings in order to stop people from smoking in their rooms.

The data on drinking is much fuzzier (because so many people drink in moderation) but my impression is that, as you suggest, it's significantly under-taxed relative to its negative externalities.

Edited to add: For comparison, IIRC a Pigouvian tax on sugary drinks should be something like $3 per 12 oz can. People who drink lots of sugary beverages also tend to die sooner, but they use a ton of medical resources while they're around - the average lifetime treatment cost of Type 2 diabetes is over $100k, and that's just one condition.

Although technically true, if you apply a reasonable discount rate the analysis flips back in favor of smoking cessation [1].

If you ignore the fact that old people aren't just sent out the pasture to die, then sure, maybe you can set gamma to an unreasonable small value, you can decide that more early death is cost-effective.

But such an analysis, which again nets out positive for smoking cessation when applying an appropriate discount factor, ignores the fact that healthy older folks still contribute to society.

The retired population is an enormous social asset. They contribute disproportionately to community volunteer work, play an important role in family formation/childcare, and many also work well past retirement age. The average retired person is still performing an significant amount of socially valuable labor, regardless of whether they're filing a W-2. In many communities/families, Social Security and Medicare are at least in part a significant state-subsidized childcare allowance.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199710093371506

You need to apply a discount rate of 10% (which seems unreasonable for the government which can borrow at incredibly low rates.)

Also this analysis ignores that healthcare costs are accelerating faster than inflation, so treatment for an individual in 20 years will likely be far more expensive than treatment today.

It also doesn't include social security.

I always thought a solution would be to tax beers 1 dollar, and then give it back to the patron in untransferrable rideshare credits.

> We also find that heavy purchasers of one sin good (those in the top decile) are likely to purchase larger amounts of other goods subject to corrective taxation. This phenomenon is particularly strong among households with smokers, who tend to also consume larger amounts of [sugar-sweetened beverages] as well as beer and spirits

There is a fundamental fairness question in play here.

I'm okay with the "individual responsibility but don't except affordable healthcare coverage even from medicare/medicaid" approach. I'm also okay with the "coercive policy to force people to change themselves" approach. And I'm okay with a combination of cost/coercion sharing.

What I'm not okay with is all of society bearing the cost of the 10% of the population that smokes heavily, drinks heavily, and consumers larger amounts of sugary beverages.

Disadvantaged people aren't some romantic struggling hard workers, they have all sorts of vices and emotional/mental health problems leading them voluntarily to those behaviors. Smokers aren't just selfish pleasure-seeking lazys.

obesity has the largest impact on healthcare cost by a large margin. might as well tax the obese now because we will pay them back later by keeping them alive

how about: we don’t need to tax lifestyle choices on anyone. because if you’re serious about increased costs to society you very quickly get to a social credit system. where you can show you don’t drink or smoke, aren’t fat, don’t take part in dangerous activities…

Smokers do have higher healthcare costs when young, and miss more workdays, but in the US where government is paying social security and Medicare, smokers dip into the public coffers much less than their non-smoking peers.

This page helpfully presents enormous per-patient costs of lung and other cancers, estimating ~USD$100k for care in the final year of life alone: https://progressreport.cancer.gov/after/economic_burden

Lung cancer symptoms often appear in late stages, which might explain the "quick" part of your comment, but come on. We aren't exactly talking death by gunshot or asphyxiation here. Symptoms of lung cancer include chest pain, a persistent cough, coughing up blood, and metastatic bone pain or headache, none of which seem quick or pleasant: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lung-cancer/s...

Healthy or unhealthy, everyone dies. Liver cirrhosis or lung cancer is expensive. But getting Alzheimer's in your 70's and living another 10 years is extraordinarily expensive.

I can't see the article, I just get a 404.

If your incentive isn’t pegged to income or wealth, it’s just creating two tiers of society

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/in-finland-speeding-t...

Parking is different enough to not to be comparable. You don't die a horrible death from parking.

> If your incentive isn’t pegged to income or wealth, it’s just creating two tiers of society

I don't agree with this, but it's a longer discussion and mostly off topic. You create more issues by doing this than you fix imo. "Poor" is not a permanent state.

Arguably if what you're suggesting was the case we'd see rich people smoking because the tax doesn't impact them and poor people abstaining due to cost. We don't see that so it suggests something else is going on.

You do die a horrible death from eviction because you had to choose between getting a warrant issued due to unpaid parking tickets, or paying rent. Money is a zero-sum game.

> "Poor" is not a permanent state.

Statistically it basically is, but as you say that's another topic. Either way it doesn't matter, because if I am poor now and you slap me with a parking fine that's 0.4% of my income, I'm going to suffer. While that SAME fine isn't going to have an impact on the quality of life of someone making just 2x what I'm making.

> we'd see rich people smoking because the tax doesn't impact them

Yes. This is why I don't believe that the tax had anything to do with reducing smoking rates. I think people stopped smoking because they realized they were going to die from cancer, not because it got expensive.

Meanwhile, 10% of households are DEEPLY effected by this, some of them to the point of maybe staying in poverty due to smoking.

You DO see very rich people ignoring fines because it doesn't cost them an appreciable amount:

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/jeff-bez...

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-car-apple-ceo-l...

What I meant was fines for parking seem less socially important than fines for smoking.

I think policy that protects the lower bound from getting crippled by cascading fines is probably good - at least it's where I think the focus should be. I think we agree more than disagree on that probably.

It's expanding the cost to be more extreme at all levels that I think is a bad idea.

In your two examples the Steve one doesn't really apply. CA didn't used to require plates on new cars (they do now) and he had cancer.

The Bezos example sounds real, but also not personal? More of an "I'll cover your parking tickets" so the contractors don't get hit with them (which seems if anything like he's helping avoid those that would get hit harder by fines). That doesn't bother me too much - I guess I view a fine as an acceptable trade to discourage behavior, but if you're willing to pay it then you can.

Is that unfair because it's worse if you're poor? Yeah, but a lot of things are worse if you're poor. I don't think being poor should be the same as not being poor, but it should be bounded. I'd argue the lower bound in American society today is too low.

It's hard for me ethically not to fall on the side of treating everyone equally under the law versus trying for specific outcomes. If you wanted to go for outcomes can you help me distinguish why you wouldn't sentence a poor person to lesser jail time or insurance payout (car wreck) or w/e lesser amount than a rich person? Does a wealthy person have more to lose by murdering someone? Less? I just don't think it's clear cut but for my part I'm definitely open minded on it. It's kind of the equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes thing - I'm definitely on the equality of opportunity camp with probably a base versus equality of outcome.

That people view their station in life as fixed and their success outcomes as binary (either poverty or a $150K/year job) indicates that something has gone seriously wrong with capitalism. Which may very well be true - I think a lot of people would say that something has gone seriously wrong with capitalism. But the solution to that is to fix the root cause that divides people into castes, not make things cheaper for the lower caste.

Let me ask you this. What if fines are what dividing people into castes? The fees around court and jail in the US are a great example of this. If you get sent to jail or taken to court for any kind of infraction, the fees around it can cripple you financially for YEARS. Tho if you have a spare 50k laying around you can make them all go away. I think there are many cases outside of the criminal legal system where this is also real.

Ideally, you're supposed to avoid high court fees & fines by not doing criminal things. Avoid the court system and you will never have to pay court fees. And if you do end up with a $50K judgment, you're supposed to go work productively and convince someone to pay you $50K for work that's worth more to them than $50K. Thus you have paid your debt to society - you did something bad, but if you do other good things that people find valuable, that debt is wiped out. In theory at least, someone with $50K in his pocket got it by doing things that a lot of people found valuable, enough that they were willing to pay $50K for it.

Now, I know it doesn't always work that way. Someone could find themselves in the court system not because they did something bad, but because they're black and were standing on the wrong street corner. We shouldn't do that. And sometimes whole behaviors that are normal in one disadvantaged culture (smoking weed, for example) get criminalized precisely because the person in power wants to jail lots of people. The person who did that should've been put in jail himself, but Gerald Ford pardoned him. This is also contingent upon people having money because they did things of value that other people found worthwhile enough to pay them for, which also isn't a given today. We should fix that too, although I think that a lot of people's reaction against wealth is because they can't wrap their heads around how many people a billion users is or how much value they derive from everyday activities provided by a large corporation.

But assuming that things are broken but we're going to slap a band-aid on the one specific instance that's in front of us today risks entrenching the brokenness. Say that you do create lower fees and fines for poorer people. Aren't you now incentivizing criminal behavior, as the costs for it are less? And won't those societal costs be born primarily by the people around them, who are usually other poor people that now have to live with the consequences?

I generally agree that at the lower bound there the cascading effect of penalties can be disproportionate and extreme, things like ending cash bail can be a way to improve this (though I'm not a policy expert). Making it similarly extreme for everyone seems bad? It also creates a disincentive for making money which seems like the opposite of what you want.

1) keep the current system (fixed fines) 2) proportional fines (higher fines for wealthier violators) 3) abandon penalty fines entirely for another system

For most cases I'd like to see #3, since I think fines are basically a bad system of social control. However, there are going to be cases where we want to keep fines there - and for those cases #1 continues to enforce class structures, while #2 applies pressure evenly across class.

Also, sorry, I don't accept that last point. Nobody is going to stop making money because their parking tickets go up in cost. That's not how people work.

I'd be partial to keep fines, but protect the lower bound from cascading failure.

> "Nobody is going to stop making money because their parking tickets go up in cost. That's not how people work."

There is evidence already of incentives changing behavior with the recent stimulus. I think it is how people work.

The reality is, the money collected really isn't spent helping folks change their habits. It goes to some unionized civil servant's pension fund...

Just look at the new "Sin Tax", carbon taxes...

The bans are a huge inconvenience to smokers. That's the point, but it would have been political suicide a few decades prior.

Though all of the above quit before 1990 (US). Anyone who still smokes today, knows it is bad and costs money: they don't care.

Now that I think about it most who quit because it was expensive were probably influenced by the unhealthy part, but it was the cost that finally tipped them over.

I'm confident smokers' opinions didn't reach quitting-stage due to ads.

> Results: On average, smokers were exposed to more than 200 antismoking ads during the 2-year period, as estimated by televised gross ratings points (GRPs). The odds of having quit at follow-up increased by 11% with each 10 additional potential ad exposures (per 1000 points, odds ratio [OR] = 1.11; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.00, 1.23; P < .05). Greater exposure to ads that contained highly emotional elements or personal stories drove this effect (OR = 1.14; 95% CI 1.02, 1.29; P < .05)

Asking because about everyone ex-smoker I know (a LOT) quit after struggling to afford the things.

Honestly, I can't come up with anyone who could be so powerfully swayed by ads that they could quit an addiction.

> Results

>From 2001 through 2015, increases in state-level excise taxes were associated with declines in prevalence of cigarette smoking. The effect was strongest in young adults (age 18–24) and weakest in low-income individuals (<$25,000).

So yes, taxes actually do at least affect smoking rates in the most vulnerable population. If you don't start smoking in your teens, you're much less likely to become a lifelong smoker.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6147505/

Where, exactly, is that the case?

I've traveled all over the US and haven't been in a bar that allowed smoking indoors in at least 15 years. And as a smoker, I would definitely notice.

Edit: As kube-system pointed out[0], there are a bunch of places that don't have indoor smoking bans. Although the Wikipedia[1] link they provided does say that ~80% of American live in a place with some restriction on smoking indoors. I stand corrected. Thanks kube-system!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003693

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...

I always wonder about that. I mean, I understand that there were laws and taxes and reports about smoking. Looking at that chart though it doesn't look like that. It looks like everyone went - "You know, I don't want to smoke anymore and I don't want to be around smokers" - and then just slowly gave it up over 30 or 40 years.

Was it the laws, taxes and reports? Or were all of those things just an expression of desire?

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22lung+cancer...

I just checked and a pack of my old smokes are over £12 a pack ($16 in Monopoly money)!

The only problem i see if that it hasn't already broke £20 a pack.

Travel around the country and you'll see more smoking in places where there's no lack of places you can smoke and where no one will side eye you for smoking.

Drinking alcohol, for the most part (although not entirely), is purely a sin, and does not inherently affect the public. Smoking does, either in a minor and indirect way due to pollutants entering our shared atmosphere or a much more direct effect if someone is smoking in your local vicinity. I'm all for taxing the thing that affects people but isn't so horrible as to ban outright, but not so much the "sin."

Please define "sin" in this context.

According to Merriam-Webster[0], "sin" is:

   an offense against religious or moral law

Shall we implement high taxes on those things too?

Please note that my issue is with the term "sin," as it has strong religious implications which, at least in the US, have no place in the operation of our secular government.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sin