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Taxing Twenty-First Century Sins

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Abstract

Paternalists have recently turned their attention toward meat, plastic bags, automation, and carbon. Each one allegedly creates tax-justifying externalities: meat harms the environment and health; plastic bags have a negative environmental impact; automation—whether through artificial intelligence or robots—displaces workers; carbon feeds climate change. But time and time again, experts and policymakers appeal to questionable social science to make a case for a tax on these products. For each one, the weight of all the evidence—not just what experts highlight—suggests that no tax is warranted.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Larsen (2012). Data collected by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (“OECD”) reveal that meat consumption is relatively high in the United States, but not necessarily the highest compared to other countries. For example, beef consumption is markedly higher in Argentina, pork consumption is much higher across the European Union, China, Korea, and Vietnam, and Israelis consume far more poultry than others. Across the board, meat consumption is low in countries such as India, Thailand, and Nigeria. See OECD iLibrary, Agricultural Output statistics.

  2. 2.

    Boseley (2015).

  3. 3.

    Moodie (2015).

  4. 4.

    Tilman and Clark (2014).

  5. 5.

    Lomborg (2018).

  6. 6.

    People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (2020).

  7. 7.

    The press release, “Food Policy on Trial: In the Dock—Meat Tax,” was issued on May 28, 2019.

  8. 8.

    Wellesley et al. (2015).

  9. 9.

    Authors (2018).

  10. 10.

    Barclay (2012).

  11. 11.

    The feature is available at https://graphics.latimes.com/food-water-footprint/.

  12. 12.

    Knapton (2016).

  13. 13.

    Howard (2016).

  14. 14.

    LaMotte (2020).

  15. 15.

    Capper (2011).

  16. 16.

    Hallström et al. (2015) state dietary changes “can reduce the diets GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and land use demand by up to 50%,” but as Lomborg (2018) notes, “(f)or the average person in the industrialized world, that means cutting emissions by just 4.3%.” See also Lacroix (2018).

  17. 17.

    Grabs (2015).

  18. 18.

    Zhong et al. (2020).

  19. 19.

    Springmann et al. (2018).

  20. 20.

    Lusk and Norwood (2016).

  21. 21.

    Leroy and Cofnas (2019).

  22. 22.

    Micha et al. (2010).

  23. 23.

    Wang et al. (2016).

  24. 24.

    Chen et al. (2013).

  25. 25.

    Ioannidis (2018).

  26. 26.

    Kruger and Zhou (2018) and Lippi et al. (2015).

  27. 27.

    Burkert et al. (2014).

  28. 28.

    Iguacel et al. (2019).

  29. 29.

    Matta et al. (2018) and Nezlek et al. (2018).

  30. 30.

    Leroy and Cofnas (2019).

  31. 31.

    So-called junk food taxes are popular among some public health groups and professional organizations. For example, in 2003, the British Medical Association proposed a 17.5% value-added tax on fatty foods.

  32. 32.

    Eyles et al. (2012) and Mytton et al. (2007).

  33. 33.

    Epstein et al. (2012).

  34. 34.

    Chouinard et al. (2007).

  35. 35.

    Jensen and Smed (2013).

  36. 36.

    Jensen et al. (2016).

  37. 37.

    Bomsdorf (2012).

  38. 38.

    That concern is misplaced. Most HDPE is sourced from natural gas, not oil. HDPE is used in several other consumer products, including certain types of outdoor furniture, pipes, and beverage containers that have—for now—escaped selective taxation.

  39. 39.

    Freinkel (2011).

  40. 40.

    Homonoff (2018). Like the pattern observed with other sin taxes, initial declines may not persist over time. A study of South Africa’s plastic bag tax found that although the levy initially reduced bag use, demand eventually returned to normal (Dikgang et al. 2012).

  41. 41.

    Morris and Seasholes (2014).

  42. 42.

    Callimachi (2018).

  43. 43.

    Parker (2018).

  44. 44.

    Lebreton et al. (2017).

  45. 45.

    Stein (2013).

  46. 46.

    See “Ocean Conservancy ICC Data—Plastic Grocery Bags in Beach Litter,” a brief issued by Environmental Resources Planning in September 2017. The brief notes that 43.5% of litter is “balloons, rope, food bottles, fishing line, straps, nets, gloves, floats, buoys, tampon applicators, light bulbs, light sticks and syringes.” Perhaps these should be taxed instead.

  47. 47.

    Ward et al. (2019).

  48. 48.

    Homonoff et al. (2020).

  49. 49.

    Taylor (2019a).

  50. 50.

    See “Life Cycle Assessment of Grocery Carrier Bags,” a report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2018 (Environmental Project #1985).

  51. 51.

    See “Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags: A Review of the Bags Available in 2006,” a report issued by the Environment Agency in 2011 (Report SC030148).

  52. 52.

    Kimmel et al. (2014).

  53. 53.

    Williams et al. (2011).

  54. 54.

    Taylor (2019b).

  55. 55.

    Kimmel et al. (2014).

  56. 56.

    Swanson (2019).

  57. 57.

    Ekins (2013).

  58. 58.

    Geiger (2019).

  59. 59.

    Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019a).

  60. 60.

    DeCanio (2016).

  61. 61.

    Berg et al. (2018).

  62. 62.

    Zhang (2019).

  63. 63.

    Oberson (2017).

  64. 64.

    Delaney (2017). As for what to do with robot tax revenue, Gates offered, “you can amp up social services for old people and handicapped people and you can take the education sector and put more labor in there.”

  65. 65.

    Porter (2019).

  66. 66.

    Abbott and Bogenschneider (2017).

  67. 67.

    Anrtz et al. (2016).

  68. 68.

    Rubin (2020).

  69. 69.

    Graetz and Michaels (2018).

  70. 70.

    Doms et al. (1997) and Feenstra and Hanson (1999).

  71. 71.

    Dauth et al. (2018); see also Gregory et al. (2018).

  72. 72.

    Koch et al. (2019).

  73. 73.

    As Gasteiger and Prettner (2017) note, “From a policy perspective, the successful implementation of a robot tax is only feasible if it is introduced by many countries because of the possibility that capital moves to jurisdictions in which there is no robot tax.”

  74. 74.

    Zeira (1998).

  75. 75.

    Autor (2015).

  76. 76.

    Some experts argue governments should oversee the implementation of automation. Acemoglu and Restrepo (2019b) argue that “we should not assume that, left to its own devices, the right types of AI will be developed and implemented” (emphasis added).

  77. 77.

    Mazur (2019).

  78. 78.

    Authors (2019b).

  79. 79.

    Andersson (2019).

  80. 80.

    Yamazaki (2017).

  81. 81.

    Kirchner et al. (2019).

  82. 82.

    Mills (2019).

  83. 83.

    Mathur and Morris (2014).

  84. 84.

    Sarlin (2019).

  85. 85.

    Authors (2019a).

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Thom, M. (2021). Taxing Twenty-First Century Sins. In: Taxing Sin. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49176-5_6

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