How effective are sin taxes?

This is from a paper by Callison and Kaestner in the journal Economic Inquiry

There is a general consensus among policymakers that raising tobacco taxes reduces cigarette consumption. However, evidence that tobacco taxes reduce adult smoking is relatively sparse. In this paper, we extend the literature in two ways: using data from the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements we focus on recent, large tax changes, which provide the best opportunity to empirically observe a response in cigarette consumption, and employ a novel paired difference-in-differences technique to estimate the association between tax increases and cigarette consumption. Estimates indicate that, for adults, the association between cigarette taxes and either smoking participation or smoking intensity is negative, small, and not usually statistically significant. Our evidence suggests that increases in cigarette taxes are associated with small decreases in cigarette consumption and that it will take sizable tax increases, on the order of 100%, to decrease smoking by as much as 5%.

I'm no fan of smoking, but this evidence seems quite clear that the spike in cigarette taxes have not had the intended effect.  Rather, they seem to have been primarily effective at extracting money from smokers.  What these results imply is that the  reduction in smoking that has occurred over the past 20-30 years is better and more confident information that smoking is unhealthy.   

Assorted Links

Study finds "no meaningful evidence that urban communities with higher minority populations or communities with lower median income face less access to grocery stores."

In a surprising development, the farm bill fails to pass the House. 

The case against socially responsible business (truly being socially responsible isn't always what you think it is)

Even dogs, monkeys, and mice are getting fatter (file this one under - we have no idea what causes obesity) 

My Interview with John Stossel on GMOs

A couple weeks ago I was on the John Stossel Show debating GMOs.  Skip to the 23 minute mark to see the segment on GMOs.

(note: the direct link to the Fox page is here and for some reason it seemed to be down on 6/21 - hopefully they'll have it back up soon (here is a slightly different link that might work)).

An Interview with the National Review

I recently conducted a 10 minute interview with John Miller for the National Review Online on The Food Police.  Check it out here.

How Junk Food Can End Obesity

That's the title of a fantastic article by David Freedman in The Atlantic Magazine.   Freedman picked up on some of the main themes in my book - The Food Police but he approaches them from some different angles and he writes about them in a way that (I hope) will have a substantive influence on the food debates.  

Some excerpts: 

An enormous amount of media space has been dedicated to promoting the notion that all processed food, and only processed food, is making us sickly and overweight. In this narrative, the food-industrial complex—particularly the fast-food industry—has turned all the powers of food-processing science loose on engineering its offerings to addict us to fat, sugar, and salt, causing or at least heavily contributing to the obesity crisis. The wares of these pimps and pushers, we are told, are to be universally shunned.

and

In virtually every realm of human existence, we turn to technology to help us solve our problems. But even in Silicon Valley, when it comes to food and obesity, technology—or at least food-processing technology—is widely treated as if it is the problem. The solution, from this viewpoint, necessarily involves turning our back on it.

and

If the most-influential voices in our food culture today get their way, we will achieve a genuine food revolution. Too bad it would be one tailored to the dubious health fantasies of a small, elite minority. And too bad it would largely exclude the obese masses, who would continue to sicken and die early. Despite the best efforts of a small army of wholesome-food heroes, there is no reasonable scenario under which these foods could become cheap and plentiful enough to serve as the core diet for most of the obese population—even in the unlikely case that your typical junk-food eater would be willing and able to break lifelong habits to embrace kale and yellow beets. And many of the dishes glorified by the wholesome-food movement are, in any case, as caloric and obesogenic as anything served in a Burger King.

Read the whole thing.