How would you separate costs of food growing, food
processing, food packaging, storage, delivery and sale for the purposes of
value added taxation? Value added taxes
like they do in the EU are getting some lift from folks who don't like income
taxes and see a VA tax as a replacement.
A simple VAT on all food could follow the traditional model based on
monetary value of each step in the process that carries an actual commercial
price and contractual exchange of money for product. But suppose we want to tax only those steps that cause harm?
At this same time we are in a debate about whether the nanny
state ought to control what we eat.
Research is beginning to show that heavily processed foods are less
healthful than unprocessed foods and tend to add to various health problems and
their associated costs.
Corn syrup is the latest "whipping boy" although proving and
actually quantifying a direct link to, say diabetes, is a daunting challenge.
Food tends to be one of the last things we would consider
taxing, However, if we are convinced, even without definitive
research, that certain components of our food have a link to our health care
costs, part of which are inevitably paid for by everybody via government expenditures,
then a case can be made for an apportioned tax. Such a tax would be expected to create a bias pushing consumption
toward less harmful foods while covering direct societal costs of the more
harmful types.
As I suggested above it is hard to make definitive
connections between agent and health cost.
But in a stable society legal and regulation structures improve with
time by a cut and try process ever improving the whole. The same can be said for science as well.
So my purpose here is to ask how could we begin to fine tune
such a taxation process to satisfy ourselves that the right things were
taxed? How do we do it without taking
20 years to build an impossible code of regulations for each and every
food? Can we find the measurable categories
or characteristics that are worthy of taxation rather than deal with a million
individual items?
A bit of a disclaimer here……….This topic can easily devolve
into "I don't want to be taxed or told what and how much I can eat" rants that
are pretty much unproductive and will only get people here into spitting
matches. So let's stick to science such
as it is, whatever logic derives from it and suggestions that have some
practicality of implementation. ……..OK?
Ed Weldon
Assigning Costs to Food Production for VA Taxation
Re: Assigning costs to food production for VA taxation
