Just another charity. Not (a charity).

Got a call today from someone on behalf of Bowel Cancer Australia. Now I am a great fan of charitable donations, but I have recently become more aware of the sorts of things that go on in the world, so I approached this with some skepticism. Firstly I suspect that "on behalf of" means he doesn't actually work or volunteer for BCA, but I forgot to ask. At least he did say that it was not a solicited call and they were calling everyone in my area, so I decided to hear him out. Got the usual spiel that you get from all of these charity calls. The good work they do, the terrible nature of the things they're working against, and then please select which amount you would like to contribute. Ah. So no question about whether I'd like to contribute, only options that involve me giving them money.

I ignored the question and asked if they have some sort of income statement so I can inspect their finances and so on. Meanwhile I navigated to their website to see if I could find such a document. My search came up empty. He said they used to send that stuff out but not any more, to save money. He again gave me all the different donation options, none of which were "$0". They receive no ongoing government funding. OK so, apparently they have received some money from the government. And they lobby the government to send out more free bowel cancer testing kits to everyone over 50. At this time I again asked about the finances so I was bounced up to the supervisor, because the guy I'd been talking to was on his first day.

The supervisor informed me that they fund research into bowel cancer, lobby the government for more free testing kits to be sent out, and provide support services for people with bowel cancer. How much do these testing kits cost, which are available in pharmacies? $36. Now the question on my mind was, why not simply get GPs to get their patients to buy these kits if they are over 50? $36 really isn't a huge expense, and it's only once a year. I didn't voice that particular opinion, though. I next asked where the government gets these kits they say should be distributed free. He didn't know. I was suspecting that they might be the manufacturer and so getting the government to send out more kits would make them money. Cynical, I know, but you have to be sure. "Don't they just get them from the manufacturer?" Again, he didn't know, but he did offer to send the information out to me.

That was the most I could get from them at that time. I look forward to reading the email to find out if they would be a worthy recipient of my money, but given that they are lobbying the government to spend tax money providing free kits, I strongly suspect I will not be moved by their cause. Perhaps if they instead used their income to buy kits and send them free of charge to people over 50 who are on very low incomes or in some other way would not be able to buy the kits themselves, and sending letters to GPs informing them of the benefits to their patients and getting the patients to buy the kits themselves, then I might consider sending them a few bucks. But the fact that they consider it a good use of their donors' money to lobby the government to spend other people's money makes me ... er ... not like them very much. At all. Sort of the opposite, really.

The answer is more tax. What was the question again?

Two recent stories reported through various media no doubt, but read by me on the Conversation's website, have made me near apoplectic. The first is a report on the recent tax forum and the second concerns some ideas on a junk food tax for Australia. The latter is of course at least partly catalysed by Denmark's new "fat tax".

Let me deal with the fat tax first. The suggestion he makes is for a rather broader junk food tax:

If we want a tax that’s going to be effective in reducing obesity in the longer term, we need a broader approach to taxing unhealthy foods rather than just measuring the fat content.

We need to consider the salt, sugar and fat content, along with an assessment of the benefits of nutrients such as fibre, and fruit and vegetable content.

Put all of this information together and you’ll get an assessment of the overall healthiness of the food. A tax should be applied on this basis, not just the saturated fat content.

In other words, Denmark's tax does not go far enough. Well I'm glad we sorted that out. I was beginning to think you might only say that it was going too far by also taxing butter and oil. Silly me.

As usual no one is asking whether it is wise to give the government more central control of the food supply, or whether it is democratic to interfere in the market, or whether it is the government's responsibility to change people's lifestyles. In other words, no one is even considering whether liberty might be more important than the obesity epidemic. It's not even on their minds. A poll from two years ago showed that 64% or so of Australians would support such a tax, while apparently only 16% would strongly oppose it. At root this seems to be at least in part due to the transfer of responsibility away from the individual. By extension the responsibility is transferred to society, especially the government. Thus if there is a problem in society, it is because the government is not doing enough. No one ever considers whether the government should do anything at all, or whether it is doing too much.

So you tax the foods that are high in sugar, fat and salt, and you use the revenue that’s generated to subsidise fruit and vegetables and some other healthy foods.

This would create more of an incentive for people to not only stop eating the unhealthy food but also choose the healthier foods.

You only incentivise the poor, because the middle class and above have so much money that only rediculous tax hikes will deter them from buying anything they really want and could otherwise afford. Unfortunately, junk foods are not as elastic as they think because they are highly preferred, so people will give up other things in order to buy them, rather than decreasing consumption to save money. The nett effect of such a scheme, then, as I see it, would be to siphon money from the poor, who may have few pleasures in life apart from food, and give it to the rich - who could have afforded the vegetables anyway and would buy them anyway because they can compensate for a boring diet (not that they necessarily have one) by buying more expensive things that give them pleasure instead. So once again the star economists have proven that they have no idea how people work. They think you just have to nudge them in the right direction by giving them a little hit to the wallet, but this will have no effect if people value the item more than you're taxing it. People drink coke because it is nice, not because it is cheap. The fact that it's cheap just means that the marginal fans might buy it. The hard-core fans will still buy it in nearly the same quantities if you treble the price. Everyone else will switch to an alternative they prefer, but that alternative will still be a sweet cold drink.

There is also a lot of evidence from other public health measures, such as tobacco and alcohol, which shows when you increase the price of goods through a tax, consumption clearly decreases.

As I was saying, the hard-core don't stop buying it, only people who could take it or leave it.

We also need to consider other interventions such as restricting the marketing of unhealthy foods, improving food labelling (with a simple traffic light labelling system), and implementing public education campaigns, among other things.

Tobacco, 40 years ago. We need to restrict advertising, especially to children. We need health warnings. We need education campaigns. Well actually due to the "education" campaign that has already been waged for so long, everyone already knows junk foods are bad for you and contribute to obesity. Some people haven't responded by stopping consumption of them, so instead of telling them how bad it is we now have to coerce them to stop consumption. The assumption here is that the poor bastards still eating this stuff are so stupid, ignorant or hedonistic that the only thing they'll respond to is a price signal. The sheer paternalistic, condescending smugness of it makes me sick.

Won’t consumers always buy junk food, even if it’s more costly and clearly unhealthy?

The focus of all of these measures is to make it easier for people to make healthy choices.

These interventions aren’t about saying to people, “you can’t eat this and you have to eat that”. They’re about creating incentives and making the environment just that little bit easier for people to make the healthier choices.

Our modelling clearly shows that putting a tax on unhealthy foods and subsidising fruit and vegetables would end up making the population a lot healthier in the long term.

Importantly, it would have higher benefits for people in lower socioeconomic groups who are disproportionately affected by obesity and many other health issues.

Or conversely, to make it harder for them to make unhealthy choices, right? Unless all the tax revenue is spent making healthier food cheaper, all this will do is raise the general price level of food and make life for the poor just that little bit worse. And we know from experience that governments are incapable of earmarking funds. All your taxes just go into a general pool of money whose sole purpose is to buy more low income voters (because they're the most common type, thanks to the huge tax burden) by increasing welfare payments or other subsidies. GST is not earmarked for economic incentives, income tax is not earmarked for income protection, petroleum excise is not earmarked for transport infrastructure. Junk food tax would not be spent only on making healthy food cheaper, it would give the government an excuse to increase their anti-junk food education campaigns in order to enable them to raise the tax some more, and the rest would just go to the treasury.

He admits that poor people buy this stuff more. Isn't anyone but me going to join the dots and see that this tax is logically going to be mostly on poor people? Is it going to make the population healthier in the long term by enabling more rich people to eat veggies for cheap and forcing the poor to eat rice instead? How can you increase someone's quality of life by taking more of their money? How about if we acknowledge that poor people buy this stuff because they don't have money for more genteel pleasures? How about if we increased the tax free threshold so they could afford some more harmless fun?

The commenters are no more enlightened than this egregious proponent of misappropriation.
Says Yolanda Newman:

Personally I want a government which has an interest in me as a whole person. I don't want the government to do everything for me but I do want it to provide things I can't do for myself - like roads and hospitals and then I also want it to be creative about helping me to manage difficult situations - like dealing with food choices.

I really don't think she knows what it means for a government to "take an interest" in a person. Hint: it starts with an arrest.
Damien Gildea has never heard of mission creep:

If government is to have a role in guiding personal nutrition, I would prefer it to be in the form of better education in the basics (calories, additives, basic physiology) so that people are better informed and can indeed make 'healthy choices' rather than having choice diminished through pricing.

Once you start making it the government's responsibility to tell people about a hazard, they will eventually attempt more authoritarian controls of the perceived hazard, including taxing it or banning it. Examples abound.


This is turning out to be one long post. We now turn to the second story: that of the tax forum.

Fortunately I have a lot less to say about this one. Some suggested actions were:

• Increased capital gains tax
• Broad land tax
• More wealth redistribution
• Eliminating GST exemptions
• Financial transactions tax (global)
• No tax exemption for rich women who employ nannies
  

In other words, we need more of what the government is already doing. Is anyone suggesting that some taxes should be lowered? That maybe the way to help the poor is to tax them less? That maybe we could have more employment if we decreased business income tax? That maybe we'd have more businesses if we didn't punish entrepreneurs for making money? Anyone? It seems all of these academics are just liberal mouthpieces, toeing the government line because that's all they know or because they want more university grants. What about wide ranging debate? What about academic creativity? What about variety of opinion? Can none of these intellectuals outhink me? I seriously doubt that last one. So what does that say about the freedom of thought in academic circles?