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Alcohol and tobacco taxes rarely change the behavior of users. Demand for those products tend to be rather inelastic, meaning users will give up other items before surrendering their habit. Same with food. We must eat, but what is healthy? Is a loaf of bread "healthy"? After all it contains a lot of carbohydrates. If I eat 5000 calories in apples, which most people would consider a healthy food, I still consume the 5000 calories, which is far more than my body will process in a day.

What about eating at Subway versus McDonalds? Clearly Subway sandwiches, even the foot long subs, have less fat and calories than an extra value meal, but would I get taxed for eating at Subway? What about at home? What if I take the bread, bananas, and peanut butter and then deep fry them like Elvis? Are my groceries, which in my state are exempt from sales tax, suddenly going to be taxed because it's food?

Furthermore, what is the money going to be spent on? Oftentimes these taxes are sold to the population on the basis that they are going to go towards some funding. And the funds may do so, but what happens is that these funds are used to offset existing funding from other services. If such a tax adds $100M a year to a state budget for health care, $100M from the general slush fund is shifted to another project. Yes, those revenues went to health care, but it provided no additional funding.

I have seen this with riverboat gaming in my state. The claim was the gaming would provide an extra $300M to eduction. The state was spending $1.5B on education before the added gaming revenue and funding continued to be about $1.5B. The difference is the state took $300M the gaming revenue offset and spent it on other projects. Does on not think the same thing would happen here? Just look at how states spent their tobacco settlement funds.

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