Paternalistic Policy and Smoking

Moneybox:

Response to New York City's partial ban on very large sodas has featured a lot of commentary drawing heavily on the "futility" leg of Albert Hirschmann's three-legged stool of the rhetoric of reaction. But if I think back to the evolution of cigarette smoking policy since the late-1980s that you can see the same thing. Relatively few of the measures enacted—a price hike here, a ban on cigarette machines there—seem like public health game-changers on their own terms. But not only is the overall smoking rate steadily falling, but Gallup is out with survey evidence showing that the number of cigarettes smoked by those who do smoke is falling. ...For my part, I'm with Ray Fishman and think that taxing sweetened drinks is the promising policy in this regard. Among other things it would also raise revenue, and let us get by with fewer taxes on work and investment.

The big problem with moving from income taxes to consumption taxes is that these taxes are much more regressive.