The New Smokers

If the deficit commission is serious, and our political leaders, are serious about structural reform to prevent fiscal catastrophe, we must tax sugared beverages.  As a primary cause of our obesity problems, they are one of the main drivers of our increasing health costs.  As David Leonhardt points out, you know an individual, much less an industry, knows its position is indefensible when it couches its defense in general appeals to abstract concepts and vague arguments.  Leonhardt: “The soda industry, of course, is fighting back with newspaper and radio advertisements, among other things. It says a tax would most hurt “hard-working, low- and middle-income families, elderly residents and those living on fixed incomes” and would destroy jobs. Ellen Valentino, an industry official, recently told The Washington Post that companies would spend “whatever it takes” to make their case.”

The facts against sugared beverages are nearly endless.  As a nation, we have tripled our consumption of these empty calories in three decades.  Soda is roughly 35% less expensive, in real terms, than in 1980.  (So are meat and cheese while fruit and vegetables have increased in price.)  Childbirths to obese women cost 20 times that of normal ones.  Sugared beverage, and processed food in general, is cheap because of subsidized corn.  There are a lot of approaches to solving this complex issue, but the easiest method is to raise a tax on beverages (soda, fake fruit juice, Yoohoo milk, etc.) that roughly accounts for the negative effects of sugared drinks.  As Leonhardt points out, our attitude now towards obesity will one day be viewed like we look at slavery or Prohibition now: “Someday, we will probably look back on our gallon-a-week soda habit the way we now look back on allowing children to ride without seat belts or listening to doctors who endorsed Camel cigarettes. We will wonder what we were thinking.”

Later last year Leonhardt also wrote about a fat tax.  The Cleveland Clinic doesn’t hire smokers, and its chief executive wishes he could not hire obese people as well.  It sounds like a rude position these days, but so would have not supporting smoking 40 years ago.  It’s just not yet realized that sugar is addictive – so we consume more and more just to maintain our pace on the hedonic treadmill – and that the economic costs of someone’s obesity ($1,250 per year per family) negatively affects other people, just like smoking around non-smokers.  Leonhardt again: “The solutions to these problems are beyond the control of any individual. They involve a different sort of responsibility: civic — even political — responsibility. They depend on the kind of collective action that helped cut smoking rates nearly in half. Anyone who smoked in an elementary-school hallway today would be thrown out of the building. But if you served an obesity-inducing, federally financed meal to a kindergartner, you would fit right in.”

Until obesity is stigmatized like smoking, nothing will change.

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