Nick Kristof, who's been doing some great work lately on food issues and the production chain, jumps into the public health element with a nice column on soda taxes. Which he supports. "Let’s break for a quiz," he says, midway through the column. "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." Among public health types, that's an uncontroversial conclusion. But in politics, you're not supposed to apply the experience in any broad way. For some reason, it's considered much more dangerous to tax soda than work. But from an economics standpoint, that doesn't make much sense. You don't want to tax things that you want people to do more of. Like, say, work. You do want to tax things that you want to discourage, like emitting lots of carbon. Insofar as our society is going to have taxes, best for them to be of the two birds, one stone variety. If we can save lives while we raise revenue, why not give that a try?
