It's not an extreme case; it only seems so because this person is disabled and it's surprising to discover that this superficially adult person has the mind of a 9-year old. I'm using that to draw attention to the fact that kids often make terrible decisions, and there are a lot of 9-year olds buying a lot of soda whose future negative health outcomes are easy to overlook because marketing has trained people to associate soda with healthy people having fun.
I would say the same thing about children: they are the parents responsibility.
I know you would, and I think your reasoning is foolish. Many parents are clearly not responsible, either from indifference or ignorance. I am fine with government acting in loco parentis in a very narrow way (even for adults) because the negative health outcomes and their associated costs are predictable and lowering those costs has demonstrable overall utility. Available information shows this policy to function better than waiting for people to get a responsibility transplant and just shrugging our shoulders about kids who end up suffering because of their parents' poor guardianship.
How are you being 'punished' if your soda costs $0.50 more? When I smoked cigarettes I didn't feel punished by their continually-rising cost. I'd rather pay for something with a large negative externality at the point of purchase than in the form of income tax, since it's likely to be more efficient. The Coase theorem tells us that aside from transactional friction, it is no more expensive to pay up front than later, and in its role of insurer of last resort the public interest is best served by minimizing the predictable scope of the problem.
The fact that revenue ends up in the general fund is irrelevant; the objective is to reduce consumption, and soda taxes have been demonstrated to be effective in that goal. In case you're not familiar with the geography, Berkeley and San Francisco are only about 20 minutes apart by subway and travel between them for work or leisure is very common.
I would say the same thing about children: they are the parents responsibility.
I know you would, and I think your reasoning is foolish. Many parents are clearly not responsible, either from indifference or ignorance. I am fine with government acting in loco parentis in a very narrow way (even for adults) because the negative health outcomes and their associated costs are predictable and lowering those costs has demonstrable overall utility. Available information shows this policy to function better than waiting for people to get a responsibility transplant and just shrugging our shoulders about kids who end up suffering because of their parents' poor guardianship.
How are you being 'punished' if your soda costs $0.50 more? When I smoked cigarettes I didn't feel punished by their continually-rising cost. I'd rather pay for something with a large negative externality at the point of purchase than in the form of income tax, since it's likely to be more efficient. The Coase theorem tells us that aside from transactional friction, it is no more expensive to pay up front than later, and in its role of insurer of last resort the public interest is best served by minimizing the predictable scope of the problem.
The fact that revenue ends up in the general fund is irrelevant; the objective is to reduce consumption, and soda taxes have been demonstrated to be effective in that goal. In case you're not familiar with the geography, Berkeley and San Francisco are only about 20 minutes apart by subway and travel between them for work or leisure is very common.
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2016.3...