Posner and the Carb Tax

I read Richard Posner's blog today regarding the calorie or carb tax. He states:

"I am skeptical, because the author ignores the possibility of substituting untaxed sugar-sweetened foods or beverages. People who crave sugar will find no dearth of substitutes for sugar-sweetened sodas. Moreover, most consumers of these sodas are not and never will be obese. They may well be overweight, but all that that means is that they are heavier than the "ideal" weight calculated by physicians....

There are many obese Americans, in the sense of ones who are grossly overweight (with some being morbidly obese), and we should consider whether society should be concerned with obesity if not with mere overweight. Obesity impairs health, and, in most segments of the population it diminishes social and professional success as well, and so it can be regarded as self-destructive behavior. Some of it is involuntary....

As to whether by increasing obesity the sale of sugar-flavored sodas imposes costs on other people besides the buyers, the evidence is mixed. Obese people have more health problems than the non-obese and hence higher annual medical costs; they also lose more time at work because of illness. Their poorer health increases the medical costs of other people in their insurance pools and reduces the productivity of their employers, assuming realistically that employers cannot selectively reduce the wages or health benefits of their obese employees. Cutting the other way, obese people have a reduced life expectancy, and the shorter a person's life, the less an above-average annual cost of medical care translates into an above-average total (lifetime) cost. But assuming nevertheless that the net social costs of obesity are positive, this would be a ground for arguing for taxing obesity, but such a tax would be unacceptable as well as cruel. ..."

Unfortunately, as much as I admire Judge Posner, he should at least deal with facts, and when he opines on something, he should first at least try to deal with facts. We have shown in various writings about Type 2 Diabetes that:

1. It costs over $275 B today of our total $2.5T health care costs. That is 12% of the total costs.

2. It will grow to 25% by 2020.

3. Type 2 Diabetes in 95% of the cases is due solely to obesity. Keep the BMI at 22.5 or lower and you keep the HbA1c at 5.0 or lower and no Diabetes! That means keep the weight down.

4. Diabetes is a carbohydrate disorder. It is not a fat or protein disorder. Thus we want low carbs, and our old friend Pigou had this tax idea, tax things we do not want people to do, like smoking, and it works! Just look a lung cancer in males. It is down 50% from twenty years ago! High taxes on cigarettes. So tax carbs, not just soda. Education may help, but how many physicians have "educated" their patients to lower BMI, less than 0.1%!

Thus if the good Judge had the slighetest chance to examine the facts he would see that taxing is not only a good plan it is the only one we know works!

Robert Solow of MIT wrote a critique of the most recent Posner book in the New York Review of Books. Solow is a Nobel Prize winner and I have come to know and respect him personally. He states:

"Judge Posner evidently writes the way other men breathe. I have to say that the prose in this book often reads as if it were written, or maybe dictated, in a great hurry. There is some unnecessary repetition, and many paragraphs spend more time than they should on digressions that seem to have occurred to the author in mid-thought. If not exactly chiseled, the prose is nevertheless lively, readable, and plainspoken. The haste may have been justified by the pace of the events he aims to describe and explain. Posner has an extraordinarily sharp mind, and what I take to be a lawyerly skill in argument. But I also have to say that, in some respects, his grasp of economic ideas is precarious. In his book on public intellectuals, Posner blames the decline of the species on the universities and their encouragement of specialization. I may be acting out that conflict. Remember that even hairsplitting is not so bad if what is inside the hair turns out to be important."

As Posner's economics grasp may be precarious to Solow, his grasp of medicine is almost totally lacking to me!