Tax tosser of the day
Posted by Christie Malry on August 26, 2011 at 9:08 am
No, it's not Ritchie for once, although his time will surely come.
This morning on Radio 4's Today programme, there was a short piece about obesity during which a representative of the food industry made the following extraordinary claim:
All the evidence shows that a tax on fatty foods would not change consumer behaviour.
When it was pointed out that this is Murphybollocks of the highest order, he 'clarified':
I haven't seen any evidence that shows that a tax would change behaviour.
Which isn't the same thing at all. But even the watered down version is idiotic. For virtually all markets, making something more expensive reduces its demand. The onus on the food industry is to prove that it won't. Intuitively, baked beans aren't like shares or houses: we will buy more when their price falls.
More seriously, why was this idiot allowed to make such a bogus claim in the first place? Is this what public policy in the 21st century has become? A load of lying toerags making a living out of telling complete falsehoods about tax and other economic matters?
To answer your last question: yes
I suppose you could claim that there's no evidence that a fat tax will reduce obesity, on the grounds that such a tax has not been imposed and so there can be no evidence of it's effects. But this is much the same as saying that because I haven't jumped off a tall building, there's no empirical evidence that doing so will kill me.
There is, though, lots of decent theoretical evidence. A search for "fat tax" in econpapers yields these results: http://econpapers.repec.org/scripts/search/search...
So yes, the man's a tosser.
I have a bone to pick with this post.
Each and every day that the sun rises, Murphy is always tax tosser of that day.