After a snowbound weekend in the Upper Midwest finally started to improve a little bit early this afternoon, I decided to make a junk food run to the corner store. As I paid my $15 for the assortment of useless sugary and salty entreees and beverages, I wondered what kind of sticker price I'll be looking forward to 20 years from now for the same bag full of junk food. As the cost of government explodes in the decades to come due to demographic shifts, the need for further revenue streams will parallel said trend. But if recent history is any indication, the politically connected affluent will continue to see a decline in the tax burdens that fall upon them. Politicians can be expected to pick up the slack from path-of-least-resistance revenue sources, and right at the top of that list will be the regressive and inanely puritanical "sin tax" on every consumer good that elected officials deem "naughty". Most troubling is that self-identified "progressives" are likely to be the loudest cheerleaders in favor of this madness.
The slippery divide-and-conquer method used to fuel public support in favor of endless supersized taxes against the disproportionately working-class demographic of smokers is where growing government dependence on the "sin tax" originated, and will serve as the model for which the "sin tax" model will be expanded. The minute it becomes politically doable (and we're getting closer by the day), politicians will come out en masse endorsing large new sin taxes against food and beverage products that they deem contribute to obesity, increase the nation's collective health care bill, or other such nonsense. And since this scheme will be framed within the pseudo-populist drivel of "making 'Big Fast Food', 'Big Soda Pop', 'Big Ice Cream', and 'Big Girl Scout Cookies' pay for their sins", the usual suspects of the nanny-state left will get behind the idea as a way of "increasing funding for education or health care". But of course, the group that really pays is the disproportionately working-class consumer group who buys these items.
Most ironic is the budgetary ticking time bomb these microregulating sin taxes present. While it's convenient for short-sighted politicians to plug budget holes and expand programs by levying proportionately huge sin taxes on a powerless peasantry rather than income, dividend, property, or estate taxes on politically connected campaign contributors, this proposed solution only creates longer-term problems. For one thing, selling any consumer goods significantly higher than their market value invites a distribution takeover by organized crime, with smugglers happily willing to play middleman between a naughty consumer population and a greedy, clueless government. The inevitable consequence will be a criminal justice system that can't grow fast enough to accommodate all the new felons we'll be creating. This is already happening with cigarettes, as insanely high taxes have presented Hezbollah and other terrorist groups with their primary source of fundraising. Will Doritos and Snickers bars soon follow? Probably.
Then there's the ghoulish reality that healthy lifestyles leading to longer life expectancies. The very demographic trend (a growing population of geriatrics) that will necessitate the need for new revenue sources will only become that much more chasmic if nanny-state government policy succeeds in forcing healthier lifestyles upon the population. If government wanted to avoid a huge financial shortfall of Social Security and Medicare, it would promote, rather than attempt to deter the consumption, of cigarettes and junk food. Given the political incorrectness of this reality, it is rarely stated aloud by anyone in authority, so the public will remain gleefully ignorant that the magnitude of our long-term revenue shortfalls will become even less manageable with government-mandated "healthier lifestyles".
Most concerning in the present is the distasteful culture war that is inadvertantly being foisted on the working-class with the shifting tax policy that rewards wealth and further penalizes bad habits. It's getting harder and harder to convince working-class friends of mine who smoke that the Democratic Party is the party of the working guy. My state's governor just got elected on the backs of working people, but has now made a $1-per-pack cigarette tax his top legislative priority in the session. Scarcely a word was mentioned of this priority during the campaign, but now alot of low-income people who voted for this guy are likely to have a new tax levied exclusively to them to the tune of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year, while the other 80% of the population who voted for this Governor in proportionately smaller numbers get to be held harmless from additional taxes and play the role of sanctimonious scolds. This is monstrously unethical now and will be with every subsequent "sin tax" that is imposed or raised by politicians who barely or never mention such an intention when campaigning.
Anybody who follows current trendlines should be able to see that the tax burden is shifting towards regressivism. It's thus no coincidence that the sin tax is both the most regressive tax of all....and the largest source of new revenue for state and local governments. If we in this community are truly advocates for the "common man/woman" as we claim, we will fight to stop this trend rather than be its top promoters. Sadly, it appears as though shifting tax burden to the poor is one of the few things political leaders of the left and right agree on these days...and I don't expect that to change anytime soon.