Some people in New Mexico are skeptical of the Sierra Club's proposal to tax people who make decisions with which they disagree:
Dave Gilligan remembers being pushed outside to play baseball and other sports, but feeling it just wasn't for him.[...]
"If you take a kid that's just playing his X-Box or whatever and you take him outside and you make him play baseball, he's going to hate it," said Gilligan, co-owner of Gamers Anonymous, an Albuquerque video game store. "There's nothing wrong with sitting at home playing games. Everybody's doing it now."
But a coalition of groups, led by the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club, is sold on the idea that outdoor education programs can inspire children in a way that video games and television cannot.
The coalition wants state lawmakers to create a No Child Left Inside Fund with a 1 percent tax on TVs, video games and video game equipment. The fund would help pay for outdoor education throughout the state.
Supporters of the tax—which would be the first of its kind in the nation—say outdoor programs have been shown to improve students' abilities in the classroom, boost their self-confidence and teach them stewardship and discipline.
The fundamental purpose of taxes is to raise revenue necessary for programs, not micromanage people's decisions with subsidies and penalties. If a tax targeting video games is justified, it should be on the basis of actual negative externalities, not the whims of social engineers picking things they don't like at random.
We discussed a similar video game tax proposed by a Wisconsin state senator:
Why not put taxes on certain types of music, clothes, or entertainment? Or why not go directly at the source and put a special tax within the income tax system on people who work at ages 16 or 17, or raise the drivers license fees on people those ages? This may sound stupid and discriminatory, but that's exactly what this proposal is.
The Senate will likely cave to the demands of AARP and others to expand the stimulus to include rebates to elderly Americans who pay little or no taxes (and the rebates dropping from $600 to $500 to keep the cost the same). As we noted:
When dealing with a policy that is designed primarily to stimulate the economy, any arbitrary policy can almost be justified to some degree. But what this shows is that there is a problem in trying to use the tax code as the main vehicle for fiscal stimulus and/or social policy. Everyone is always going to complain that they are being shortchanged, despite the fact that getting money to everyone is difficult.
On second thought... maybe we should just send helicopters over every major city in the country and drop out $20 bills. And we can even make AARP happy by putting double the money in the helicopters that fly over golf courses in Florida and Arizona.
Because the stimulus bill enjoys such broad congressional support, it's a magnet for all sorts of silliness to be attached to it (the term is a "Christmas tree" bill). The Senate may seek to add additional unemployment benefits. A provision has been added to prevent a Child Death Tax. Some are now insisting on an amendment to prevent illegal immigrants from getting rebate checks. Mike Huckabee and Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA) think we should spend the money on infrastructure. The REALTORS® are happy with the stimulus bill, though. Contrast that with the Coalition [of Economists] Against Fiscal Stimulus, and those normally anti-tax congressmen who voted against it in the House.
AARP's success at amending the bill makes this Canadian cartoon from 1985 seem apt:
No comments:
Post a Comment