taxing sodas and our "morbidly obese" federal budget

From Veronique de Rugy at Reason...

She starts with the claims and then the policies on the books, before turning to the literature:

Charging a few more cents for a soft drink, legislators claim, will not only refresh exhausted state and federal revenues; it will make us thinner....President Barack Obama called it ‘‘an idea that we should be exploring” because “our kids drink way too much soda.”...

Thirty-three states tax the sale of soft drinks, at an average rate of 5.2 percent....New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched his own campaign to tax sugary drinks. “All the studies show that young kids drink an enormous amount of soda, and if they drink the sodas with all the sugar in it, it adds a great deal of weight to them,” Bloomberg said in April.

The story sounds plausible. The trouble is that sin taxers don’t appreciate human creativity: Consumers have a knack for replacing one sin with another. When the price of a “sinful” good increases, people often substitute an equally “bad” good in its place.

...smokers in high-tax states tend to consume cigarettes that are longer and higher in tar and nicotine than smokers in low-tax states. This effect is especially pronounced among 18-to- 24-year-olds because they are more responsive to tax changes than older smokers.

...when states raised beer taxes or increased the minimum drinking age, teen marijuana consumption increased....

Are soda lovers likely to do something similar? Richard Williams and Katelyn Christ, two economists at the Mercatus Center (where I work), argue that soda drinkers would....

In a 2008 working paper, Emory University economists Jason Fletcher, David Frisvold, and Nathan Tefft examined the impact that changes in states’ taxation rates from 1990 to 2006 had on body mass index and obesity....a vanishingly small impact on weight...only 7 percent of the average soda drinker’s total calorie intake....

Last July the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a federal three-cent-per-12-ounce soft drink tax would generate $24 billion over the next four years....

Americans may be fat, but the federal budget is morbidly obese; our hunger for chips and soda is nothing compared to the feds’ hunger for our money. If I had to choose between putting the average citizen or the government on a diet, I know which would be better for our fiscal health.