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"we shouldn’t attempt to use taxes to eliminate vice" Why not? Taxes are usually preferable to outright bans (which, realistically, is how governments elimina

• xboxnolifes 5y ago
  Based on the comment, I'm sure OP is also against banning vice. So I'm not sure that reasoning will convince them.
• sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
  What happens when the government decides to tax a particular vice that seems egregious, like maybe taxing vibrators as sexual deviancy? How much is your vibrator worth to you?
  • skulk 5y ago
    This is not a good argument against vice taxes because there is a clear distinction between activities that are demonstrably self-harming (smoking) and otherwise (using a vibrator). If you want to presuppose a fundamentalist regime, then go ahead, but then are vice taxes really the problem?
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I was under the impression the purpose of vice taxes is due to activities causing societal harm, not self harm. If it was self harm, then seems like we should start with vice taxes for added sugar and not doing cardio workouts.
      • skulk 5y ago
        Sufficient self harm at scale is societal harm. > vice taxes for added sugar At face value, this doesn't seem like a bad idea. I've heard about cities in the US that have a tax on large sugary drinks. > not doing cardio workouts It's probably easier to incentivize the good behavior here than punish the absence of it.
        • lotsofpulp 5y ago
          The government giving money for doing something versus taking money for not doing something is the same thing. Both are incentives for a certain behavior.
    • wayneftw 5y ago
      Clearly "what's bad for you" is subjective given that there was a time when many would have said that masturbation causes self-harm. The other issue is that sin taxes just don't work. They don't stop people from partaking at all. These taxes are just a money grab.
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      Okay. Use of Facebook has been linked to worse mental states, and groups on there have produced negative externalites. So how about a per-byte tax on in transmissions to/from Facebook?
      • skulk 5y ago
        From the self harm angle: if you can provide meaningful evidence that use of [social media] results in negatives that far outweigh the positives in virtually every case (this is true of smoking), then this tax makes sense. This isn't easy, though, as millions of people have benefited massively from social media. As for societal harm, I imagine going forward we'll settle on some countermeasure against entities like Facebook. If that's a per-byte transmission tax, then so be it.
      • xapata 5y ago
        Perhaps a tax that scales with the frequency that someone uses social media? If you rarely use it, the marginal tax is near zero. As your usage increases, the marginal tax applies increasing friction.
  • axlee 5y ago
    Nice slippery slope there. Let's argue about it when the time comes.
  • nostrademons 5y ago
    So I'm thinking precisely of situations like that when I say taxes are better than bans. I have pretty tame vices (I don't really care about vibrators or cigarettes, for example). But take for example suburban single-family homes. We know they are significantly worse for the environment than urban apartment living - they are harder to heat & cool, require more invasive utility work, lead to car-driven transportation instead of mass transit, and destroy natural habitats. Nevertheless, I want to live in a house, not an apartment. And if the government were to tax them according to their true environmental impact and costs, I'd suck it up and pay the tax, getting a more unpleasant but higher-paying job if necessary. (They don't currently, and I'm enjoying the sweet subsidy of our unsustainable lifestyle.) There are other things like say soda that are unhealthy, and a tax has been proposed on them. I cut back my soda consumption because it got expensive, but sometimes I really want to relax with an IBC or Jarrito or Mexican Coke, so I'll suck it up and buy a 12-pack. That's exactly the point of a tax: cut back people's default consumption because it gets expensive, while still giving them the option of purchasing if they really want it.
    • mike00632 5y ago
      You make good points about single family homes. I just want to add that maintaining the roads is also unsustainable financially. Most suburban roads are subsidized by the cities they surround.
  • bearcobra 5y ago
    I believe several states currently try to ban the sale of sex toys so the tax would be an improvement.
  • dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Sex toys are borderline medical devices and probably should go thru some sort of regulation, certification and safety testing already, hence tax would make sense...
• smhenderson 5y ago
  Why not? Taxes are usually preferable to outright bans (which, realistically, is how governments eliminate vice) Governments that attempt to eliminate vice by banning inevitably simply drive it underground where it is then facilitated by dangerous black markets and criminal organizations.
  • sdenton4 5y ago
    And so long as the tax is less than (typically very expensive!) black-market overhead, that's not a problem.
• aeturnum 5y ago
  IMO, it seems like a poor plan to rely on the revenue from excise taxes on particular luxuries (harmful or not). It's not a stable source of revenue, because increasing the tax will decrease use somewhat, and also acts as an indirect subsidy for alternative behaviors and grey markets (that you would also probably like to oppose if you are against the original one). The only scenario that makes sense is to fund programs to help people deal with the negative effects of consumption (as, theoretically, such programs would not need to exist once consumption stops). However, unless you don't believe in addiction at all, it's clearly immoral to tie funding of treatment programs entirely to excise taxes. So you have to weigh a revenue offset against the morality of, again, taxing people who may have compromised agency to one degree or another. I think our system does less ethical things all the time, but it's hard for me to feel these kinds of taxes are "well founded." If we had real universal healthcare (or better cost sharing) then I think a much broader tax on things that have predictable health impacts might be sensible, but for it to work it would need to go far beyond "morally questionable" things and into, say, taxing companies that employ people to do labor that will reliably damage their bodies.
  • xapata 5y ago
    > It's not a stable source of revenue That's fine. Revenue can be routed to externality abatement. When there's no more revenue, there's also less need for the abatement.
• pdpi 5y ago
  The issue is that vice taxes tend to be highly regressive. Spirit duty in the UK is £28.74 per litre of pure alcohol. A ~£20 bottle of Jack Daniels pays a tiny bit over £8 of spirit duty, which is 40% of the sale price. A £250 bottle of 25 year old single cask Glenlivet pays a tiny bit under £8 of spirit duty, around 3% of the sale price. I don't think it's entirely reasonable that the vice tax is a rounding error for fancy drinks, but amount to almost half the price you pay for cheaper booze.
  • EForEndeavour 5y ago
    Maybe the answer to flawed vice taxes is to address those flaws rather than to advocate for an outright ban.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    Seems obvious that it should be percentage with minimum amount. Would treat both sides fairly.
  • dzhiurgis 5y ago
    There are probably 100x more buyers of cheap alco than something that you mentioned
  • tomrod 5y ago
    > The issue is that vice taxes tend to be highly regressive. For a cross-sectional view this is certainly true. At a single point in time, a high tax rate impacts people who are more economically vulnerable more than those that are wealthier. However, does the causality hold if we consider this over time? Addictive substances use -> economically impoverished, or economically impoverished -> addictive substances use? To me it seems many folks use addictive substances to self medicate in absence (or in spite of) a universal healthcare system. And then when economically improving opportunities come may have less capacity to claim them. Do we look at it this way? Does it matter? General open questions.
  • chrismcb 5y ago
    This is the problem I have with the sugar tax. It is typically per ounce. Normally the more sugar something has, the more expensive it is. The more expensive it is, the less the sugar tax effects the price. A bottle of coke goes up like 25 cents, but a gallon of ice tea had is outside doubled.
• zelon88 5y ago
  No, because as you get more wealthy the disincentive from sin tax negated by the fact that it isn't a sliding scale. In reality is it gatekeeping on vices by the wealthy. If you are wealthy, nobody cares about your vices.
• splistud 5y ago
  Because eliminating vice is not a proper role for government? Because choosing among the vices to tax is..I don't know, bad? I prefer legislators having to balance asking for new initiatives with having to pay for them with universal taxes. But hey, let's just take from smokers and billionaires rather than actually have to make the case for our next government boondoogle.
• tomjen3 5y ago
  Because we as a society shouldn't be in the business of telling people how they should live their lives, except to protect other people.
• deleted 5y ago
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