The long version:
Two months ago, Greg Mankiw (a top economist, researcher, and textbook author, and a very kind person) wrote a column in the New York Times exploring various arguments for imposing a tax on sugary beverages, which many public health experts advocate to fight the obesity epidemic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/business/06view.html
I like the column and I respect the logic of Mankiw's argument against the soda tax. However, I felt very strongly that there are very solid arguments for a soda tax that Mankiw's column did not discuss.
So I started writing them down. I spent a couple hours re-writing and editing, then I emailed it to the "Letters to the Editor" section of the New York Times.
I knew my letter was well-argued and I thought it had a chance of publication. Yet, the Times gets hundreds of letters every day, many from people much smarter than me, so I didn't have high expectations.
A few days later, one of the editors contacted me. They wanted to publish my letter but needed to shorten it (from 500 to about 150 words! Yikes!). It took about three rounds of emails between us to get the letter down to something that was short enough for them, but acceptable to me.
Here's the version of the letter they published:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13backpage.html
I strongly prefer the original, pre-butchered version:
Greg Mankiw explains that the best argument for the soda tax, from the economist's viewpoint, is that the pull of instant gratification leads people to do things that aren't good for them in the long run, such as overconsuming sugary beverages. But this logic, he argues, suggests the government should tax other unhealthy things, like fast food, and subsidize things that are good for you, like gym memberships. The final question in his column, do you trust government enough to appoint it your guardian, seems to suggest that the government shouldn't be in the business of micro-managing what we eat and how we behave.
Fine. But there are plenty of other arguments for the soda tax. Here are five.
First, soda can do more harm than ice cream and fast food. It's more readily available: most high schools have vending machines, so it's easy to grab a Mountain Dew on the way to class. And people consume soda all day long, whereas people usually have fast food at specific, defined times, and a limited number of times per day.
Second, high fructose corn syrup, a main ingredient in sweetened beverages, is heavily subsidized by the federal government's agriculture program. So, the price of sugared beverages is artificially low, which encourages overconsumption. A tax would counter this effect. (Better would be to eliminate agriculture subsidies, but the food industrial complex would fight that to the death).
Third, soda is more easily defined than fast food. There's a variety of fast food menu items that vary in their nutritional value, so it'd be hard to determine which foods should be taxed. This would be much less a problem, if at all, for sugared sodas.
Fourth, soda and other junk foods are not good substitutes for one another, so taxing soda won't merely have the effect of making people eat more fried chicken. (On the other hand, if sugared sodas are taxed while other sugared beverages are not, then people will substitute toward these other sugared beverages, so the tax should apply to all sugary soft drinks, not just soda.)
Finally, it's better to do something than nothing. Every health expert will tell you the rise in obesity is a major problem, especially among young people (because developing a sugar addiction while young makes it much harder to control one's diet when adult). The soda tax is a huge step in the right direction.
Over the next week, I was surprised that the letter received some attention - I got some interesting emails from people I'd never met who read my letter and wanted to share their comments with me. I'd expect that a column like Mankiw's would generate such attention, but not a mere letter to the editor.
One such email came from the president of the Corn Refiners Association, extolling the virtues of high-fructose corn syrup and denying the receipt of any subsidy. "Corn refiners pay the market price for corn, like anyone else."
Yes, but the market price of corn is artificially low because the subsidies are paid directly to farmers (mostly corporations) who grow the corn.
SCORE CRONOVICH: 1, CORN REFINERS ASSOCIATION: 0.
