You'll find few people more supportive than me of health insurance reform with a public option. Hell, I'd prefer we nix the public option and go straight to single-payer. It would be very hard to come up with a public health care proposal that I couldn't support. Amazingly, Congress and the President may have found a way based on Obama's mindless support for expanding the already morally obscene pyramid scheme of "sin taxes" to even more "naughty products" consumed by poor people. Any health care plan that expands "sin taxes" is an instant dealbreaker for me and should be for anyone else with a conscience and a brain.
The Democratic Party brands itself as "the party of the working person" and the "party of economic fairness". So why is it that the first, second, third, and fourth places they go for a path-of-least-resistance revenue windfall is the most regressive taxes in existence? Whether it be cigarettes, beer, or, on the near-term horizon, soda pop, cookies, ice cream, bacon cheeseburgers, and God only knows what other "naughty" consumer product they will deem worthy of taxing, we are talking about hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of additional tax burden on the very people suffering the most. "Sin taxes" are an act of warfare against the lower and working classes, and the Democratic Party is forfeiting its claim to being their protector by constantly singling them out to pay the nation's bills.
The ethics of "sin taxes" would be dubious enough if the premise they were based on was honest, but the reality is diametrically opposed to the rhetoric. Smokers run up LOWER lifetime health care bills than nonsmokers. The obese run up LOWER lifetime health care bills than those of healthy weight. And most of the policy wonks pushing for them know it too, perfectly willing to force the poor and young to subsidize the wealthy and old with these monstrously regressive and dishonest taxes.
A soda tax, like all sin taxes, meets the definition of a "pyramid scheme" perfectly. Looking only at the short-term dollars a soda tax would produce, they ignore that long-term health care costs will go up if less soda is consumed and people live longer. This dichotomy is even more rigidly defined as it pertains to cigarettes, the most highly taxed product in America that has become the only thing keeping our federal government and most of our 50 state governments from spiraling into budgetary ruin.
America's poor and working class would be better off with the existing trainwreck of a health care system than they would by letting the preferred tax policy of pseudo-progressives become even more entrenched. We can even expect to see an all-out epidemic of smuggling occur if every product Uncle Sam attempts to brand as "naughty" start collectively costing low-income consumers thousands of dollars per year in additional "sin taxes". I know I for one would go to whatever extreme necessary to buy my 7UP from an internet vendor in Mexico or from the back of a truck with an "I Love Hezbollah" bumper sticker before I would give the government the satisfaction of indulging their legalized three-card monte game of "sin taxes".
Everybody who honestly gives a damn about working people in this country should respond with a collective "Fuck you!" to Obama or any other would-be "liberal" proposing a further expansion of "sin taxes" even if it's for the most noble of causes. If this epidemic continues its current spiral, working people from across the country will be longing for the good old days of George W. Bush-era "tax fairness". Even in Karl Rove and Grover Norquist's wildest dreams could they devise a more regressive tax system than what the party of "economic fairness" has us on the path towards.