A Stitch in Haste

A few days ago, in another context, I wrote the following:

Note also the lack of any outer bound for this faux-externality theory of tax-to-control policymaking. If every private transaction, by its impact (however minuscule) on supply and demand constitutes an "externality," then what isn't deserving of punitive taxes?

Here's a magnificently sublime example:

An alliance of more than a dozen New Mexico environmental groups will lobby again for legislative approval of a 1 percent sales tax -- or "sin tax" -- on new televisions and video games to fund outdoor education programs.

Such a tax could raise an estimated $4 million a year, according to a legislative study last year. The money would fund programs aimed at teaching students outdoors.
...
Some studies in the last five years have linked the increasing amount of time children spend watching television or playing video games to lower academic scores, obesity and increased attention-deficit disorder.

Of course, unless children are actually eating their television sets, there is no proximate relation between television and obesity (or ADHD) -- and certainly not a sufficient connection to warrant a warm-fuzzy-feeling tax on those who neither create nor suffer from the faux externality: an individual with no children, or with underweight children, would pay the tax and receive no benefit.

But tax their TVs anyway. Pretend there is an externality where there isn't one so as to legitimize your (self-serving) proposal. (Remember, the activists proposing this insolent tax are precisely the groups that would benefit from the boondoggles the tax would fund. Environmentalists can have conflicts of interest too, after all.)

Bottom line: This proposal is not a "Pigou tax" -- it is rent seeking, pure and simple. And it's bad policy.

Note also that New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the nation and has a far worse "childhood food insecurity problem" than "childhood obesity problem." Just saying.

Via Junkfood Science, who reminds us that

there is no credible evidence for a new "nature deficit disorder" children are claimed to suffer from, or that getting them outside and teaching them about the environment will eradicate childhood obesity or attention deficit disorder.

As if that mattered to those nanny-staters who would save us from ourselves.