Soda Tax Will Not Reduce Obesity or Pay For Healthcare Reform

The president is now considering a tax on sugary soft drinks (a “soda tax”), ostensibly to improve U.S. healthcare by focusing on “preventive care,” in this case, by mitigating obesity, a leading global healthcare concern. The real motive behind the tax is to partially offset the cost of the president’s healthcare reform plan. Ironically, Americans have gotten fatter over the decades by disregarding their expanding waistlines and the government’s soda tax idea is borne out of a necessity to reign in its steadily expanding fiscal waistline. However, much like curbing obesity itself, the government’s fiscal problem will not be quickly and magically fixed, especially with the imposition of one seemingly innocuous tax. Preliminary estimates are that a soda tax will raise a very small fraction of the billions of dollars that the president’s healthcare reform plan will cost.

The soda tax also lacks the fizz to address the obesity problem. Although high caloric intake is probably a major cause, soda is hardly obesity’s biggest culprit. Why single out sugary soft drinks? What about all those salty snacks and sugary junk food that all that soda washes down? Why not tax them all?

What about taxing our sedentary lifestyle? Lack of physical activity also contributes to obesity. These days most of us work with our heads, not our hands, and rely exclusively on motorized transportation even for our most trivial trips. Maybe we should consider taxing white collar jobs and local transportation.

Why not tax leisure activities that encourage us to become TV couch potatoes and provide the venue for consuming all of the aforementioned soda and junk food? What about taxing fast food vendors whose TV commercials encourage us to eat junk food? Or TV commercials generally, which cause us to eat out of boredom? What about taxing the video games or the Internet that keep us from physical exertion on weeknights, weekends and days off? Furthermore, the combination of no physical exercise, passive pastime activities and all those snacks before bed undoubtedly keep us from a good night’s sleep, which also promotes obesity. And, thanks to modern air conditioning, we don’t sweat or shiver nearly as much as we used to, which keeps us fat and happy. Does anyone want to tax air conditioners?

Smokers who quit smoking have been known to gain considerable weight, yet we continue to tax tobacco products heavily to discourage their use. Is getting sick from obesity, say diabetes or heart disease, preferable to getting lung cancer?

Discouraging the consumption of sugary soft drinks through taxation is obviously a political expedient for raising money for the president’s healthcare plan, and is hardly a credible starting point for fighting the ubiquitous, seemingly inexorable, yet theoretically preventable, obesity problem we face. If the Obama administration is serious about discouraging obesity-prone behavior through taxation, it should at least present a more consistent, if not comprehensive, approach by considering taxing some other behavior contributing to the global obesity pandemic.

But, not so fast! Before we go too far down that road (or on that slippery slope) we should consider whether mitigating obesity by taxing bad behavior is worth having the government micro-manage every aspect of our lives. For example, do you want our government to have the right to discourage our American idles from watching “American Idol”?