A Smoker's Tax for Fat People

I used to be fat. Solidly in the CDC's obese category at 255 lbs., I last year embarked on a serious diet and exercise routine to ditch the excess weight, and now I'm down to a very normal and healthy 175-180, depending on the day. I look so different that I have been asked by 4 different people if I have cancer. I don't, but that just kills me (no pun intended) - even if I did, that's just NOT something you come out and ask someone.

In any case, I often get the opportunity to explain to people how I lost so much weight and have been able to keep it off. The whole method is explained in excrutiating detail here, but certainly the most important change for me was a very simple dietary modification - I stopped drinking non-diet soda.

I used to consume a couple cans of soda a day, which apparently isn't that far from normal - the average American drinks 35 gallons of non-diet soda a year (just over 1 can per day). And if some people are drinking no non-diet soda (like the new me), an equal number of people are drinking a lot more than 35 gallons of the stuff.

Let's run through a simple calculation. 35 gallons converts to 4480 fluid ounces, which equals 373.3 twelve-ounce cans of soda. For our purposes, let's assume each of these cans are Moutain Dew (my personal favorite), at 170 calories a piece. Some sodas have more calories per ounce, some slightly less, but we'll use 170 for our example. That comes out to 63467 calories for the year. Now, for every 3500 calories one consumes over the amount your body burns in the same time period, one will gain a pound of body fat. So assuming the soda consumed is in excess of the body's maintenance calorie level, that's 18+ pounds of body fat gained per year. For a beverage. That's pretty disgusting, and I'm 100% certain that soda played a major, starring role in my former self's obesity.

Obesity in America has become a public health crisis. In 1998, the medical costs associated with overweightitude and obesity reached $78.5 billion, or over 9% of total U.S. healthcare expenditures. (I'll provide a 12-pack of the fabulous, zero-calorie Vanilla Coke Zero to the author of the comment featuring the best one-word noun version of "overweight"). Tack on ten years of inflation and ten more years of the horrific American high-fructose-corn-syrup-partially-hydrogenated-soybean-oil diet, and you can see where we are now. Something urgently needs to be done to mitigate a problem that has reached critical mass (pun intended this time).

New York Governor David Paterson has proposed a state budget that includes what is essentially an 18% sin tax on soft drinks and other sugary beverages. Nicholas Kristof writes in today's New York Times:


Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments?

No, it was the cigarette tax. Every 10 percent price increase on cigarettes reduced sales by about 3 percent over all, and 7 percent among teenagers, according to the 2005 book “Prescription for a Healthy Nation.” Just the 1983 increase in the federal tax on cigarettes saved 40,000 lives per year.

In effect, the most promising cure for lung cancer didn’t emerge from a medical research lab but from money-grubbing politicians. Likewise, the best cure for obesity may turn out to be not a pill but a tax.


My first instinct was to think that this tax was a ridiculous money grab by a politician in a time of economic crisis, but the more I think about it, the more I think it is sound public policy. One legitimate role of government in a capitalist society, no matter your ideology, is to mitigate externalities - the costs borne by entities besides those directly involved in a transaction. Excessive consumption of this stuff doesn't just affect the consumer and the producer; we all share in the cost via higher insurance premiums.

Is it perfect? Of course not. For one thing, diet sodas aren't great for you, either, but at least they don't directly contribute to obesity. And why, as Kristof writes, is there no "Twinkie Tax" to go along with it? And I'm sure I'm sure Coke and Pepsi are going to fight this tax tooth and nail. Regardless, I am hopeful that this sort of innovative nutrition legislation (not the first to come out of New York) will at least get substantive conversations going at the national level and have a meaningful, positive impact on our consumption society.

Update!

CNN just posted an editorial piece directly from Governor Paterson regarding his proposed tax. An excerpt:

In June, New York state raised the state cigarette tax an additional $1.25. According to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, this increase alone will prevent more than 243,000 kids from smoking, save more than 37,000 lives and produce more than $5 billion in health care savings.

These taxes may be unpopular, but their benefits are undeniable. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that, for the first time in generations, fewer than 20 percent of Americans smoked. Lung cancer rates have finally begun to decline. As a result, we are all healthier.

Just as the cigarette tax has helped reduce the number of smokers and smoking-related deaths, a tax on highly caloric, non-nutritional beverages can help reduce the prevalence of obesity.