I'd again generally agree, but with some variations on similar ideas. Here for instance instead of trying to tax sugary beverages, I think positive motivators t

I'd again generally agree, but with some variations on similar ideas. Here for instance instead of trying to tax sugary beverages, I think positive motivators tend to work much better. Imagine a sliding incentive scale on caloric content for non-water drinks that do not contain artificial sweeteners. Anything with fewer than perhaps 100 calories liter of liquid would receive a 40% tax deduction. Anything with less than 50 calories per liter of liquid would receive a 60% tax deduction, and anything with fewer than 5 calories per liter would receive an 80% tax deduction. This would not only encourage more competition from new companies, but even incentivize current companies to diversify (and advertise!) their healthier options. By contrast a small tax is mostly just going to be passed onto consumers (and then some, as is often the case) who are already making financially and 'healthfully' dubious decisions. This is also analogous to the situation with the EU trying to force Netflix to have 30% of their catalog in each region come from region-sourced material. Instead of this, which is going to result in the bare minimum adherence, imagine if they instead granted Netflix a sliding tax reduction dependent on what percent of their revenue was generated from local region-sourced material. Now they suddenly have a major incentive for that material to succeed. Make people want to do good, and they will. I'm not so hot on external cost calculations. There are two reasons for this. The first is that if you're going to factor in external costs to something, should you not also factor in external benefits to something? Pollutants have a substantial external cost associated with them. At the same time those very pollutants are arguably the single biggest factor in why we are today a 'modern' society. How much ongoing revenue and productivity can be directly attributed to these very pollutants? The second is because it's difficult to objectively measure external costs. Imagine all of the things that you can show some paper or another (and at times the consensus) attributing directly to video games. The cost could almost certainly be shown to be in the trillions of dollars. I completely agree about trying to increase equality of opportunity, but at the same time I think we're already much closer to that plateau of sharply diminishing returns than our current state of inequality would suggest. I mean in all reality you can go from poverty to not-poverty with little more than doing well in school and choosing a productive major. Bill Clinton became one of the most powerful men in politics and came from what could only be described as white trash beginnings. Obama, a half black middle class man with a Kenyan father who lived in Hawaii, would do the same. I used to always think that a true sign of equality of opportunity would be most of everybody doing well. Spending a while in the workforce destroyed that idealism. On top of making completely illogical decisions, many people just don't seem to have have any ambition or direction whatsoever, and I do not think can be attributed as an effect of the system of work itself.