Sure, but the reverse is also true. If you drink sugary drinks in levels where they're the primary cause of some massive health problem your healthcare costs wi

Sure, but the reverse is also true. If you drink sugary drinks in levels where they're the primary cause of some massive health problem your healthcare costs will far exceed what can be recouped from sugar taxes. I'm not saying it's a dumb tax because a triathlete on a model diet who likes to have a can of coke once a month is going to break the bank. It's a dumb tax because as an instrument of public policy it doesn't begin to do enough to tax preventable diet-caused illnesses. If that's the desired effect we should just operate it like auto-insurance. A health exam will decide your tax rate, have privacy concerns? Don't do the exam and be in the highest bracket. The same is true for your auto insurance and your accident rate. It's doubly dumb because it's also enacted due to concerns over pollution, that's a worthwhile thing to fix, but taxing sugar doesn't help. The pollution needs to be taxed, then whoever's selling polluting drink containers (whether they have sugar in them or not) has an incentive to not pollute. It's also a regressive tax. Someone who's rich pays more towards public health care, and that's generally considered a good idea, but then we're going to say that their efforts to intentionally destroy their health (forcing more expenditures) should be unrelated to income?