Just the normal kind of Nazi, then?
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The problem with adding “sin taxes” to harmful or recreational products like sugar or cigarettes is that it disproportionately impacts poor people. Not that we shouldn’t do things that increase the health of poor people, but it’s the equivalent of saying “rich white guys can still eat pounds of sugar and smoke all day long, but you can’t.”
Let’s find a way to do it without discrimination or unfairness.
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Ok, that is a valid and powerful objection. At least as applied to something like sugar which may not be worse than the alternatives. I find it less objectionable if applied to say smoking which is proven with a high degree of assuredness is bad for you, and does not appear to have substitute activities that are worse (at least as far as I know the result of cigarette taxes isn’t an increase in meth use).
On the other hand if we say had a “I’m poor” card issued to people who made under some amount in the prior tax year (say $39k? $27k? $60k?) and anyone with one of those cards can get tax free cigs and sugar are we sending a better message: “poor people can smoke all they want and eat pounds of sugar, hopefully they will off themselves that way and it’ll reduce the social welfare costs!!!”?
So I’m not sure what a great answer there is. Even if we use a less humiliating mechanic then a “poor card” (say a tax credit for sin taxed goods if you are blow an income threshold , and if the credit exceeds your tax burden it isn’t lost or a rolling credit, but you get a check…). It is still the implicit message that we don’t care if those people smoke/eat themselves to death, even if what we are really trying to do is preserve their options while still collecting money for the public good…
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I went around with the same sorts of thoughts about ways to fix it fairly, but as usual, “rich people” can bypass any restrictions, either outright or by the inevitable black markets that pop up around any/every form of rationing.
So we’d either have to fix the problem that rich people pose, or get everyone to accept that no solution exists that is both fair and can’t be bypassed. The first would be great, but it won’t be popular to implement a “5 year felony for buying cigarettes or sugar on the black market”. Especially since black markets usually offer some financial benefits to the poor people who are willing to sell their ration coupons. The second approach truly sucks, but it’s where we are now – “sorry, poor people, it ain’t fair.”
The third approach is to convince people to voluntarily choose to avoid sugar, cigarettes, etc. Warnings on tobacco packaging, anti smoking campaigns, education; they have all provided some statistical successes. There’s been a steep decline in the percentage of smokers since the anti-smoking campaigns began in the 1960s and 70s. And maybe that’s all we’re going to get.
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Well if you make it explicitly legal to sell them you do at least provide an additional avenue to poor people to generate income.
Which I guess also works in the “poor people card” case, if they can buy sin tax items without the sin tax and immediately resell them then you just gave them a way to stop being poor. So now rather then RJR’s rich shareholders getting richer off of selling cigarettes to poor people at least the poor people get to become rich selling cigarettes to rich people? (yeah the economics probably don’t work out, and if they did you still get back to my prior objection of that particular system saying “don’t care about your health poors!”, but with a little side of “why don’t you sell cancer to some rich people!”)
Ask Eric Garner how that works out…
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That’s not how poverty works… Working class people re-sell shit ALL the time, and it doesn’t pull them out of poverty…
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A-hem. It’s THE Ohio State Buckwhatevers! /s
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Yeah, I guess I should have been more clear here:
I understand that in theory say a $1 or $2 tax on a product of $1 or $2 is huge to poor people, but not really big enough for rich people to want to bother finding a poor person to buy that product for say 1.5x the base cost…and if it was these products are not really bought in enough quantity that a poor person could use that to launch themselves into the middle class (“yes I’ll sell you discount ho-hos, but you need to buy them in ten ton lots, I need to put a downpayment on a new house! Can I interest you in death sticks? I’ll sell them in shipping container loads…”)
When cannabis became legal here in Illinois, there were complaints that a lucrative, if illegal, market had been taken from the Black community and was now going to be held by white people with the money to deal with the bureaucracy of the state.
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So “some people were saying” some things?
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African-Americans largely left out of WA legal cannabis business – KIRO 7 News Seattle.
Yeah, a few people were “saying some things”.
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And that’s turned out to be largely true - white, middle class entrepreneurs with capital benefiting from legalization more so than the people who had been selling drugs illegal at the street level. But while some money ended up circulating in the local communities, working class communities, much like any other capitalist scheme, the money ended up concentrated at the top. For the most part, people selling drugs, especially people of color, kept some of the money local, but were more likely to end up jailed, further impoverishing themselves, their families, and their communities. They were not the ones to really end up rolling wealth.
So, once again, the illegal drug trade (or selling goods subject to a excise tax illegally) is not a particularly great way to increase wealth among the working classes. The way to do that is to ensure that all jobs have living wages and the rich are taxed and help to support everyone rather than hoarding their wealth.
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Okay, thanks for providing some context.
Of course, and as the first article points out, the Illinois legalization rollout includes efforts to address racist, drug-related disparities.
Just recently (as opposed to that 2021 article), the guv was touting the success of such efforts.
I’d like to see a recent, informed and fair-minded assessment of just what’s been extracted from victimized communities and then (partially?) replaced by the state program’s equity provisions.
When Illinois became the 11th state to fully legalize marijuana, it also included provisions to bolster social equity and address past convictions. Since the law was passed, more than 80,000 low-level pot convictions were pardoned, Pritzker said.
Illinois has also rolled out pot business licenses to “social equity candidates,” or people who had been affected by the war on drugs and harsh pot law sentencing. Nearly 50 social equity licensees have opened businesses in the state, Pritzker said
Addressing criticism that Illinois hasn’t issued enough pot business licenses, Pritzker said that was done on purpose to keep the market profitable for new social equity license holders.
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So we’re saying that a measure designed to improve the health of individuals is more likely to have a positive impact on the health of the poor than on the health of the rich. I think I can live with that.
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The UK introduced a quite successful levy on sugar drinks (Coke, etc.) a few years ago. The way it works is that sugar drinks with over X% sugar content have a levy. The reuslt of this was that manufacturers of sugar drinks reduced the amount of sugar in them, without substituting Aspartame, etc. and without affecting sales. Thus, though people are still buying sugar drinks, they are consuming quite a lot less sugar anyway.
This is about the only successful thing the Consrevative government has done in the past 13 years. (It wasn’t their idea, of course.)
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IIRC, that was also part of the legalization programs in Oregon, Washington, and Colorado: prioritizing minority-owned businesses for licensing.
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New York has also done this. The state has also been sued by a group of veterans who say the state “improperly limited the initial round of licenses to people with prior marijuana convictions, rather than a wider group of so-called social equity applicants included in the original law”.
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