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.