Stuff You Should Know - Do sin taxes work?

Episode Date: November 8, 2016

Taxing things like alcohol, tobacco and gambling is big money and has been for a long time. But are these "sin taxes" keeping people from indulging or are they simply a way to raise revenue? Learn all about sin taxes in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

Jerry's over there too, so this is Stuff You Should Know. How are you doing? I'm fine. How are you doing? Good. You know, this one, we did a podcast in June 2012. Should we have a fat tax? Sure.

I remember. That was, now that I look at the timeline of, I'm sure we'll cover this now, about Mayor Bloomberg in New York in 2012. That was in May 2012 when he wanted to ban the sale of soft drinks over 16 ounces in New York City. And we released in June 2012,

so that had to have been the impetus, right? Maybe. It was probably something to do with it. But the difference with his 2012 push was that he was just trying to ban it. There was no tax. Correct. You can't have this.

Right. Tubbs. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Like you're drinking yourself to an early death. Right. With these sodas.

There was a famous commercial that he had where this very large man is drinking like a big gulp, and Michael Bloomberg steps into the frame, smacks it out of the guy's hand, shoves him, turns the camera, and smiles, and he's missing a front tooth. What? I'm just kidding.

It's pretty believable, though, huh? I was with you until the tooth part. And I was like, what kind of monster would be missing a front tooth? Yeah. So, Bloomberg did try to ban that, which, like you said, is different than a syntax. Yeah.

By the way, we're not saying S-Y-N-T-A-X. No. It's S-I-N-SPACE-T-A-X. That's right. And this article paints one of the broadest political brushes I've seen from our articles in a long time with this sentence. Syntaxes are often considered a favorite tool

of liberals out to impose a nanny state on free-thinking individuals. Conservatives often oppose syntaxes on the grounds that they amount to greater government intervention in people's lives. Now, let's all read some Ayn Rand. It was just a pretty like... It wasn't nuanced.

No, it's pretty un-nuanced. You remember those big plastic bats that you would get with the wiffle ball when you're like two, so you're learning to practice baseball? It's like being hit with one of those. There's no mistaking it. It's just weird in one of our articles

because I think that's sort of the old party line that people believe it's just like, all liberals just want to do is control your life. Well, I think the author very clearly sees it that way and he slipped it in, I guess. But he also slipped in, but not all liberals sink this way because John Stuart thought it was ridiculous.

Take that, liberals. It's kind of funny. I don't remember John Stuart doing that to you. Do you remember him coming out against it? I don't remember, but that doesn't surprise me. He said it was draconian and would not have the proper outcome. And John Stuart's a pretty smart guy.

Well, yeah, if he thinks that, then I do. So he's probably one to... And we'll talk a lot about this, but syntaxes, to me, the proposed outcome isn't necessarily like what ends up happening, A, and maybe not even what they're after in the long run. Jerry's still out on that.

You know, like you talk to some people and say, oh, no, they're effective. Other people say, no, they're not effective. And some people say, sometimes they're effective. I think the third group is probably right. Yeah, sometimes. So we should probably tell people what we're talking about with a syntax.

A syntax is a type of tax that is levied against usually a good of some sort that society in general says, we don't really think you should have too much of that. As a matter of fact, we'd all be happier if you would not use that. Yes. So we're going to have our government,

or go along with our government, levying a tax. An excise tax. Yes, an excise tax, which is a sales tax on one specific type of good. For example, with a syntax, something like tobacco or liquor or gambling, something that society tends to think of as a vice.

Yeah, simple. Yeah, and so they're saying, there's a couple of things that are being said with the syntax. It's saying, we want you to stop. So we're going to hit you in your pocketbook. But do you really want them to stop? Yeah, that's a good argument. You can argue both ways.

And then secondly, and I think this one's a little more legitimate, that is costing the rest of us money in the form of higher insurance rates. Like you're abusing your body. We're having to pay for community hospitals. Like the cost of society. There's a cost of society. So if you want to do this to yourself,

you're going to have to pay more for it so that we can use that money for things like healthcare systems to offset the social cost that you are creating. Yeah, and a lot of times there is something specifically earmarked for a specific syntax. Like we're going to take the money in our state from this new cigarette tax and put it toward this healthcare measure. And I think that they'd like to do that more

because people might get behind it more if they're not. It's like it'll just go in the government coffers and I don't know how much faith there is at the public at large that the government spends the money wisely. Well, that's a big part of it. Like if you are not taking the money from a syntax and directly using it to offset the social cost of whatever that vice is or whatever if there is one, then you're scamming the general populace

and you're using, you're shaming like a segment of your populace for that, to that end, to scam everybody. Which is not cool, government. Let's say you're not one to drink so much, but every once in a while you like to get out there and have a big, tall, giant, big gulp, then you're paying that tax. And some people might say, well, that's not really fair

because you're not contributing to any social epidemics. We're going to get into all this, but we should point out that Bloomberg, he lost that war. The soda industry, they're not just going to say, that sounds like a great idea, Mayor. They fought hard. They mounted a campaign, an ad campaign. They mounted a legal challenge and the Court of Appeals

eventually struck it down in June 2014. So later that year he said, all right, New Yorkers, you don't like to be pushed around. Let's go to Berkeley, California. Yeah, well, okay, so Bloomberg's a billionaire, right? Sure. And he's a billionaire who is exceedingly liberal. He's a very liberal billionaire.

And his foundation in 2010 said, we're going after soda. Not just we, the Bloomberg group, but the World Health Organization said, soda tax is probably the most effective strategy a government can undertake for improving the diet of the general population. There's mounting evidence that what are called SSBs, sugar, sweetened beverages,

they lead to increased weight gain and other comorbid health outcomes like diabetes. And they're becoming the central focus of a lot of negative publicity. A lot of people are saying these things are around the nexus of a lot of really bad chronic health conditions. It's these sodas, right? Yeah.

And so much so that there is this really great guardian article that was written by Tina Rosenberg. And she puts it, sodas on the verge of becoming the liquid cigarette. In part because of Bloomberg and his foundation. What would that make the e-cigarette? That's a liquid cigarette. The e-cigarette is the new cigar. Yeah, soda is one that it's easy to go after

because childhood, obesity, and kids, that you hear about stories about kids like going through like a liter or a two liter of sugary sweet soda a day. And these just ridiculous amounts of sugar intake that any reasonable person would say like, you can't drink that much sugar. And expect to not have huge consequences.

Sure. The UK has a sugar tax on the books that's proposed to take effect next year. And I was reading a BBC article on it and they had this little poll thing, comparison. 35 grams of sugar in a can of Coca-Cola. 30 grams is the maximum that the UK suggests its children or people 11 years or older have a day.

Sure. And so if you drink one can of Coke, you're automatically having more than you're supposed to have in one day as far as like a normal diet's concerned. And who just drinks one can of Coke, you know? Well, me. Do you really? Well, I don't even drink.

I mean, we've talked about this before. I rarely ever drink soda. That's true. You're drinking water right now. Yeah. And that's just, it's not an effort to not drink sugar water. It's just sort of the way I was raised. We didn't have a lot of sodas in the house. Right.

I drank a lot of water. I still love water. It's good stuff. That's right. It is. And as a sweater too, that's what I need. Water. Yeah.

So I can sweat more. Sure. It's just a system. It's called a closed loop. You swallow and it goes. Yeah. So I feel like about eight minutes ago, there was something about going to Berkeley.

So Bloomberg went to Berkeley later in 2014, after he was rebuffed in New York and said, New Yorkers don't like to be shoved around. Let's go out west. They love being shoved around. Where all these Berkeley hippies will surely be down with this kind of thing. And let's, instead of trying to ban it, let's try and get a syntax, an excise tax imposed.

And he was very successful there. Obviously, the soda industry there tried to fight back as well to the tune of about close to two million bucks in a campaign against it. But voters said, yes, we like this syntax to the tune of how much is it a penny? A penny an ounce? Yeah.

That could be substantial. Sure. 20 ounce Coke used to be what, like a dollar. I don't even know. Now it would be a dollar 20. That's right. You know? Yeah, that could be substantial,

if you're talking two liter, three liter. It's getting into the area where you would start to see an impact from it. Yeah. That's the way to do it though, I gotta say. Instead of just like, you know, a flat tax across the board, they're literally saying like, the more you drink of this stuff, the more you will pay. Right.

It's a negative, it's a disincentive to buy that product. Right. Which, again, society or the government or somebody has deemed unhealthy. Right. In the case, in Berkeley at least, you know, what they need to do is look at this stuff long term. But in the short term, over five months after the tax, they saw that this is the American Journal of Public Health.

They found that low income and minority residents of Berkeley drank 21% less soda than before. But in San Francisco, nearby, consumption went up by 4%. That's a pretty significant study. Yeah. Five months though, like. Well, that's the problem. Like, look at it long term, I think is what the, because maybe initially people will stop and then they'll go back to it maybe.

Right. But why did San Francisco's go up for people like leaving Berkeley to go get their soda fix? Maybe. I mean, that's entirely possible. I don't know. I don't think you would, the money you would spend going back and forth to San Francisco is, unless you just went and bought like a truckload of cases of soda. Yeah.

But that's the case and you got, you know, there are other issues in your life. Consider like even just the people who live near the border. Close enough. Yeah. So where on the way home, they're stopping or during their day, they're stopping in San Francisco, just on the border, getting a Coke. That would raise consumption in San Francisco. Coke and the other companies might say,

hey, we need to divert all the stock that was going to go to Berkeley over to San Francisco and maybe spend a little more on advertising there. That could raise consumption. Yeah. I guess so. But you make a very valid point. I'm not disagreeing with you. The jury is very much still out on whether soda taxes actually do work in the long term.

Right. And then even more is we'll see whether they have the impact and effects that are supposedly desired. Yeah. Well, let's take a little breather and we will go huddle. Huddle. Conference. Not puddle. Okay.

Piddle. From all the water we've been drinking. People say that about their dogs, like he piddled. I think that's just a cute way of saying he peed, right? Mm-hmm. Takes a sting out of it a bit. A little. But also I think a piddle.

I think a piddle is... Oh, just a little squirt. Yes, but it's usually also a company with like a, I'm nervous or I'm scared or something, so I'm piddling. Okay. Well, that's a weird segue. So we'll go a piddle and talk about a little history of this when we get back. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Incident? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast,

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we both got excited. We both got a little bit. Jerry, mopped it up. Piddle the ladle. Yeah, she was so, um, scornful, though.

Yeah, that's all right. Uh, all right, so, history-wise, this is nothing new, and this is a stat that I didn't know. For about 50 years in the late 1800s to early 1900s, 90% until 1913, 90% of our revenue in the United States came from taxing booze and beer, smokes, wine. I feel like we talked about that in the customs episode. Tariffs episode?

Did we do a tariff episode? We talked about tariffs in customs. Yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that- That's a large share of your taxes, though, coming from syntax. Right, and as a matter of fact, the first tax on a domestic product levied by the United States was on, was a syntax.

It was a tax on whiskey, or on distilled liquor. The famous whiskey tax that led to the even famous or whiskey rebellion. Yeah, which led even famous or to the whiskey hangover, whiskey rebellion hangover. Sure, right. In 1913, that all changed when the United States said, you know what we should do? People are making money now.

We should tax their income because the more they make, the more successful they are, the more that we can get. Right. So they get to a point where they can get away from paying taxes. Sure. They're so rich. Yeah. And people went, how does that work?

Yeah. And they went, oh, you wait. They said, forget the supply side. We'll go to the demand side to tax. That moment on, the United States never collected a cent in taxes from another company again. The end. So, but the point is,

syntaxes were our most major source of government revenue up until 1913. Right. Which is a little ironic, I guess, considering our history as a country. Yeah, it is. But what's weird is the syntax actually goes back really far. There's a lot of governments throughout history

that have collected syntaxes for all sorts of different reasons. And then they also used to take the form of something called sumptuary laws. Yes. So, sumptuary laws were basically, rather than taxing, kind of like what Bloomberg was trying to do by just outlawing so it all together. Yeah.

But rather than necessarily being a moral thing, usually, sumptuary laws were meant to keep class distinctions intact. Yeah. Like, you know, the word sumptuous, expensive looking, it was a way to restrain extravagance. Right. And like you said, and they use Elizabeth I in this article,

which was a good example because she was big on those. And, you know, it's kind of like, I don't want, how am I going to tell the difference between my subjects if they're dressing all fancy now and thinking they're all that? Yeah, I don't want to accidentally talk to a commoner. Pretty much. Yeah. And I looked into these a little bit.

Apparently, they were not very readily enforced. If they were, it was usually because of a specific complaint that someone would bring against like their neighbor or something. They were in fancy shoes. Yeah, pretty much. It wasn't like super police, but... They made a silk purse out of a sows ear. Hey, that's just good old fashioned ingenuity.

Sure. When you open it, it moves. But apparently, when these young men would enter London, they would sometimes, their swords would be measured. And if their swords were too long, they would break them because that was a sign of extravagance if you had some big flashy sword. Wow.

Yeah. It's not a euphemism, right? It's a sign of a sword. Well, thanks, though. They'd be weird and gross. So, even in this country, the sumtuary laws almost made an appearance. I think in the Puritan codes, there may have been some sumtuary laws, but in the United States itself, George Mason during the

Constitutional Convention said, hey, let's get some sumtuary laws. They've been done for centuries already. They work. Let's just keep it going. But Mason's aim wasn't to keep class distinctions going. Supposedly, yeah. He wanted to basically say, hey, here's how you guys conduct yourselves, the way we say.

Yeah. Don't be so flashy. Don't be so flashy because I don't like it. Don't be flashy. Don't waste your money. Don't drink too much. So, rather than saying like, we're going to tax your whiskey, you who produce whiskey, we'll just go and say, you know,

you member of the public, you can only have like a pine of whiskey a day. And anything beyond that, we'll throw you in jail for. That would be a sumtuary law. But the other guys in the Constitutional Convention said, no, no, no, no. I think one of them very famously said, the law of necessity is the greatest sumtuary law. Right.

Meaning if you tax people, they're not going to be able to afford it anyway. Plus, you, the government, get the money. Yeah. So, why be a jerk and just outlaw it? Just throw a big old tax on it and everybody wins except for the poor loser who's having to cough up this much more stuff to kill himself. Yeah. Forget laws, up with taxes.

Right. Which had been, you know, like we talked about a long history in the 1764, we were subject to a sugar tax, which kind of had a twofold purpose. Hey, anything that we can do to make the king richer, great. Sure. Ka-ching. And B, you know, we know what you're doing with that sugar. They're like, what?

You're making rum and you're getting too drunk. And we don't like that either. So, instead of a sumtuary law there, let me just tax your sugar and... Do you remember we talked about swilling the planters with Bumbo? Yeah. Like that was just election day. Yeah. To drink in the United States.

Yeah, not like now. No, not like now. I know. I was being facetious, but that is true. People like everyone was drunk back then. Yeah. There was no reason not to be. No, it was a hard life for everybody.

Yeah, you weren't driving around. No, you were in like weird pants. Yeah. There's a lot to... You had a lot of reason to drink. Yeah, you could just get on your horse and your horse knows where to go. All right. Just hold on tight.

Take me home. All bets. All bets. Skipper? Skipper knows where to go. That was a weird name for a horse. So, do these syntaxes actually work is the question? Well, yeah, that is the big question.

Yeah. So, we don't know yet. I mean, it can work for sure. We actually... I thought this was a very... This article confused me here, there. Okay. It seemed to be making its own argument rather than reporting the arguments.

Yeah. Which I found like hard to follow. Yeah. And then secondly, it just kind of wove all over the place, right? Yeah. As far as that argument went. But I think what I'm getting is with the soda tax, that specific kind of syntax, which is the syntax du jour of the 21st century right now.

Right. And I've just said the syntax of the day of the 21st century. Yes. Which is a little weird. The jury is very much still out. Like a few countries have taxed soda, but they also taxed mineral water and diet soda. Yeah. So, there's no way to study whether that actually works as far as health outcomes and things.

Yeah. I mean, there's a few different ways to say whether or not it works because there's three fold. It's like, can we improve health outcomes? Okay. Can we raise money? Yes. In that case, it always works.

Right. Almost always. Well, that's true. And C or 3. I don't know what I started with. C3PO. Man, this is falling off the rails. No, it's not.

Okay. And C, does it help the public at large? In the case of Mexico, they, a couple of years ago, imposed the soda tax. Because Bloomberg spending $10 million. Oh, really? That surprised me. But that was a good place to do it because apparently, Mexico is nuts for sugar, sweet and beverages.

Yeah. And sort of junky food and sugary beverages. I think it has a reputation for sure as it being a problem. And I think in 2006, there was like a nationwide health report, basically, like a study of Mexico. And they were finding like, it was on its way to becoming like the fattest country in the world. Wow.

And they were like, well, this is definitely opening our eyes and that kind of planted the seed for Bloomberg's group to come in a few years later and spend $10 million on a campaign against soda. I've seen it. I mean, have you been to Mexico? Mm-hmm. I've seen it. You know, in person.

Like it was, I noticed it was noticeable to me, the amount of people drinking soda. Just right out there in front of people. Oh, they weren't even trying to hide it? I'm kidding, of course. So in 2014 is when, I guess, Bloomberg was successful there. They had a peso per liter tax and an 8% tax on junk food. And apparently, both of those consumption of both went down a lot because of that tax. Yeah.

But like I said... So wait, there's one. There's one thing that they've got. One of the three. Consumption can... Right. ...decrease as a result. Right.

What they don't know is the long-term health outcome because that's just one thing that can lead to poor health in your future is a sugary drink. So that, to me, smacks of soda industry obfuscation. Well, in a way, but it's true. It is true, but apparently in Mexico, the battle that's being fought by the soda industry is... Hey, man, don't tax us. You got it all wrong.

Tax the cheeseburger people. Right. Get them. And the cheeseburger people are like, what? Yeah. We're standing over here being quiet. Yeah, they said, talk to the pork rind people. Right.

No, they were saying, teach kids to get out and exercise more. Right. It's calorie-in, calorie-out. Right? So who cares if our drinks have a high calorie? Tell these little kids to get off their duffs and get out there and start playing hopscotch or something. The thing is, diet is more responsible for obesity than exercises.

You can exercise your heart's content, and if you don't change your diet, you're never going to lose any weight. It's diet that leads to a change in obesity. And again, obesity is kind of the central focus of this whole cluster of comorbid chronic illnesses that include things like insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. And if you can change the diet, then you can conceivably cut down on these chronic illnesses. And again, the World Health Organization said, soda tax is the best way to change a diet. Right.

So that's just being fought in Mexico right now, and it's actually, it's having an effect at least on a reduction in consumption. Now what you're saying is, we have to wait and see whether that reduction in consumption has a reduction in things like obesity and has a positive impact on health outcomes. And if that's the case, then Mexico will probably change, will lead the way for the rest of the world. Because everybody's going to start following with suit after that. Well, here's the thing though.

Let's look at alcohol, for instance. We've long taxed cigarettes and alcohol in this country to great effect or great revenues at least. In 2009, Illinois, the state of Illinois said, all the beer is going to be one cent more per bottle, and each serving of liquor is going to be five cents more, which I don't know what that means, every ounce and a half. I think an ounce and a half is a serving of liquor. So is that just for a drink you get in a bar show, or are you not slapping that on a bottle

that you buy? I don't know. It's going to be a lot of dough. I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know that either. Well, let's think about it. What's a fifth?

A fifth is like 24 ounces. Yeah. So that'd be like a dollar 20 extra for a fifth. Is that what it is? 24 ounces? I think so. I'm terrible. Because it's 750 milliliters, a liter is about 32 ounces, so three quarters of 32 would

be 24. Right? I'm pretty sure it is. All right. So 24 ounces. Maybe it wasn't that much then. But what they found out was that deaths, and this is where the hinky reporting comes in, deaths associated with drunk and driving stopped by 25 percent in the general population

and 37 percent for young people and also went down for people who drink a lot, supposedly. Yeah. Heavy drinkers. Yeah. A population that everyone was like, you can tax it till the cows come home and they're still going to drink. So that was drunk driving accidents, and if you're someone like mathematics professor Rebecca Golden, you will look at that and say, that doesn't prove anything.

That's correlation at best, and you can't prove that that caused the drop in drunk and driving accidents. Well, she actually said also that there was a larger trend of drinking less nationwide. There's nothing to do with that. No, that it had to do with the Great Recession of 2008, that people had less money to spend on drinking, so we're getting drunk less, so we're dying in drunk driving accidents less. She said it didn't have anything to do with this tax. But if you want to support the tax, you can cherry pick a study like this and say, well,

look, people, because this is the third part of that equation, the public at large benefit, which is fewer drunk driving accidents, less domestic abuse, in the case of smoking, less secondhand smoke issues. That's when people are like, well, wait a minute, I'm the one smoking, that'd affect anyone else. Well, yeah, secondhand smoke. Yeah. Or I'm the one drinking.

Plus, let me destroy my own body. Everybody likes a pretty smile. Not meth mouth. That's the number one problem with meth. But the problem with that, I don't know if it's the study or the tax or what, but that Illinois tax on alcohol, leading to fewer drunk driving deaths, that doesn't mean that it couldn't work. I think I saw somewhere that 20% is about the minimum that you want to slap a syntax

on before it starts to have the outcomes that you're looking for. That's just nothing. 5% on a beer. No one's even going to notice that, you know? Yeah. 5 cents on a shot. No one's going to notice that. It just couldn't possibly have the kind of outcomes that that study concluded it had,

right? Yeah. But that's not to say that it couldn't if the tax were raised. Right. And the thing is, there's a sweet spot. There's a window where too low of a tax isn't going to do anything. But too high of a tax can have really negative outcomes, too. And we'll talk about those right after this break.

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Is that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So you tease the fact that there is a, uh, a point in time when you're raising these taxes to try and get more and more people to say, all right, enough's enough. I'm not paying $5.85 in taxes on a pack of smokes.

Yeah. That's, I think how much they pay in New York these days, New York state, if you buy a pack of smokes. Yeah. I'm not sure how updated that is, but it's gotta be around there. Yeah. Cause I mean, cigarettes are like 12 bucks there. Really?

Yeah. They're like $12 a pack. Wow. I know. That's insane. I remember a friend saying like, I'll never, like I'll quit smoking once they hit $5 a pack. Did he?

No. Some people say that and they don't. No. Other people do. Yeah. And like, even if it's a 2% of smokers who say that actually do, 2% reduction in smoking across the country, that's the size of the United States. Sure.

That's significant. No. Agreed. Uh, but like I was saying, the, um, there's that breaking point and, uh, Canada saw it for real, uh, backfire wise in the early nineties, they were, um, increasing the taxes on cigarettes. They finally got to a point where it spawned a black market and all of a sudden people, I think it, in 1987 the black market was 1% of sales and just five years later it jumped up to 31%.

Right. And not only are they, is it defeating itself, but they're not, they're not raising, they're getting less money on taxes than they would have if they would have kept it more reasonable. Right. Like I think Arkansas ran into the exact same problem. They had, um, they upped the tax on cigarettes in 2009. They doubled their tax. Suddenly it was a dollar 15 a pack, which is enough that they were expecting something

like, um, $86 million in revenue from tobacco. Yeah. And they had it earmarked for a specific health, uh, initiative. Right. Which is good, but also bad when you're like, Hey, we're going to project this much money for this thing. Yeah. Not only did they, um, not make the $86 million that they were expecting to, they actually

collected 10 million less than they had the year before. Yeah. It's that trombone. Right. And the reason why is because they jacked the tax up too much and they made it, um, in the interest of the smokers to go elsewhere, like just across state lines to buy their cigarettes in a black market developed. So there is a window where syntax can work, right, but you can't go too low and you can't

go too high or else it's going to not have the intended effects. Yeah. Here's a few stats, um, in the United States, apparently a couple of years ago, uh, Rhode Island, Nevada, West Virginia, New Hampshire and Delaware were, uh, led the nation in syntaxes, um, tobacco at 17 billion for the country, alcohol, six billion casinos, a five and a half billion, uh, Russino's, which I had never heard of, made sense though, Russian Senas, Russian casinos, no, Racinos, I guess it would be called because, uh, you know, horse races or dog races with a casino, right?

Were you, were you betting on them, right? Yeah, but it also has a casino attached. Oh, oh, is that what it is? I guess you're like, we know you like to bet on the ponies, but why not throw some black tech over here? Have you ever tried electronic bingo? Uh, and then video gaming, paramutual betting, uh, 700 million. So, uh, the United States brings in a lot of dough from these taxes.

And one of the big arguments, um, that you're going to hear politically is that, or I guess not even politically, is that, uh, it's a regressive tax, meaning a tax that, uh, infects a proportionally unfair segment of the poor population, right? Which makes total sense because, uh, sin tax is an excise tax, an excise tax is a sales tax and sales taxes almost to a, to a single one affect the poor more than they affect the wealthy. Just because the... It just matters more.

Well, it, it, yeah. It's your share of their income. Exactly. You know? Right. Well, we also should point out too, there are taxes, like luxury taxes, uh, on, it's sort of a sin tax for the rich. A luxury tax?

Yeah. Yeah. Because you're, you know, like you tax yachts at a higher rate or something like that. Sure. Yeah. This is a different type of excise tax. Right. With a sin tax, you're, especially with say like tobacco, uh, studies show that poor people

tend to smoke more cigarettes than the wealthy. So when you have an excise tax, a sin tax on tobacco, yeah, you're definitely instituting a regressive tax because it's being shouldered by, uh, the poor disproportionately in that they have less income, but also because they smoke more. Right. So some people say, ta-da, sin taxes are regressive. Some people would say, well, actually let's take another look at this. You could say that that's a per-progressive tax.

Right. Because it's having exactly the kind of outcome you want to have by basically making it so that the people who smoke the most can afford it the least. So therefore, people are going to stop smoking as much. Yeah. Now, though, we have traipsed very clearly and sin taxes are always in this realm anyway, but now we can't avoid it any longer. What you're talking about is the government deciding what, what is good for you and what

you should or shouldn't do and they're doing it in a sneaky, uh, way. Like we talked about in the PR episode, the one we released from Chicago, um, that kind of, um, paternal liberalism where the government's like, oh, you just listen to us, we'll take care of you. We're not going to tell you what to do. We're just going to make it so that you can't really afford to do what we don't want you to do any longer. Right.

But as this article points out, it's sort of a kind of talking out both sides of their mouth because they bring in, uh, the U.S. government brings in $96 billion. I think that's the, the U.S. and states together. Okay. So federally and statewide is $96 billion from sin taxes each year that they use that money and, uh, kind of need it. Yeah. I almost said need, but it didn't depend on it.

How about that? Sure. Um, and you know, they, they say like, we don't want you to do these things. We want you to smoke and drink less, but well, just not completely though, right? Cause we still want to collect these taxes. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

So that's why like, um, I know the UK had a big, uh, a big issue with some of their proposed, uh, sin taxes on alcohol, they had one that was a syntax and they also had a proposal. I'm not sure where this went yet, but, um, on minimum alcohol pricing and, uh, they flat out said, um, or, you know, most of the public flat out said like, there's no way you can have that minimum pricing because that is clearly going to affect poor people who drink, drink cheap liquor. Right.

So they go to the store and get, you know, Mr. Boston vodka and that Boston vodka didn't cheap anymore because there's a minimum pricing on it and it's not going to affect the fat cat who wants to go in there and get his, uh, what's a nice vodka? Uh, um, uh, hold on. Gray goose. It's not bad. Gray goose. Sure.

Belvedere. Exactly. They're not walking in their sweat and some minimum price on vodka or probably the tax right because they want their martini. Right. Exactly. No, that's exactly right. So I read this article from, uh, it's called the wages of sin taxes from, uh, the Adam

Smith Institute. Oh, wow. Out of all places. I'll bet they love capitalism and they said, you know, they come out very, obviously very much on the side of saying, sin taxes are ineffective. They don't produce the outcome you want. No, they're regressive and, um, anyone who's saying anything else is just fooling themselves. What they're doing is trying to collect revenue.

Yeah, I, where do you fall on this? I'm very curious. Uh, I'm not going to weigh in on it. Oh, okay. I'm just staying neutral. I'm saying some people say this, some people say that. Good for you, Jack. Chuck just stays at home with his Tito's vodka.

Actually, I don't even drink vodka, but I do have Tito's in the house. Sure. Because, you know, you want to offer it to your friends. It's American. That's right. Sure. Oh, bloody Mary every now and then. Oh yeah.

Although you got to drink that with Jen or Tequila. No. It's so much better than a vodka. Have you tried it? Yeah. And you'd prefer vodka still, huh? Absolutely. Really?

Yep. I'm surprised to hear you say that. Yeah. Tito's. Uh, Mr. Boston. Not Mr. Boston. You make a blend of both. Two thirds Tito's, one third Mr. Boston and then spit.

My friend. Well, I do have that famous Bloody Mary recipe from years ago. The Caesar. But I've also been called out for not talking specifically about my redneck crab dip. People are writing in saying, you can't just say that. Oh, they want the recipe? You can't say crack dip and not give us a recipe. So are you going to?

Well, I don't remember. Like, I don't go, I don't do recipes because I like to just cook by the seat of my pants. But I know it's got the Krab chopped up, it's got lemon juice, it's got mayonnaise, it's got Worcestershire, a little salt, pepper and paprika. And that may be it. I just don't remember the exact proportions. And you made, you can monkey with it. Sure.

Like, I like mayo. Yeah, you do. You can go lighter on the mayo if you want. If you want to be a commie. Worcestershire, I don't remember putting a ton in there. Just yeah. Couple of dashes or a teaspoon? Well, I mean, it depends on how much you're making.

You know, if you make a big tub for a party, you're going to want more than a couple of dashes. Probably like, you know, a quarter cup or something. Oh, wow. Yeah, right? Yeah. I'll wake you up. And I think that's everything.

Just, I say monkey around with it. Get creative. Sure. And then next week, maybe I'll talk about my bloody Caesar recipe. I think you should. Which I didn't even know it was called the bloody Caesar until recently. Again, I think it was the bars episode. Yeah.

Because it's got Clamato instead of tomato. Right. It's the difference, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's all the difference. Do you like red beer or Jerry, what's that thing called that you had? New York?

Michelada? Michelada. Love them. We call them red beer and Yuma. Oh, really? Yeah. That's funny because Yuma's closer to Mexico than New York. It is.

You know, you think if anywhere they call them a Michelada. In fact, it's so close to Mexico. You can walk there. Oh, is it that good? I didn't know Yuma was on the border. Oh, yeah. It's right on the border of Arizona and California and Mexico, it's like right in that bottom corner.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the worst is if you ever order a Michelada somewhere and they don't, they have the gall to not bring you the can of beer as well. Like we just made you a Michelada, $8 please. And it's what? There's a shot of beer, not even that because it's still kind of foamy and they just try to pretend like they don't owe you the rest of that beer that didn't get into the glass

at the same time. What kind of weirdness is this? It's not okay. Well, Jerry. So, hold on. I'm not done. Oh, okay. If you order a Michelada and they don't bring you the can, you tell them to bring you the

can. Right. And then you throw that can back in their face. It's a little over the top, I guess you could, especially if you chugged the rest all at once. Yeah. Jerry did not care for her Michelada that she got in New York because it was, we saw the woman make it, it didn't have tomato juice.

It was just made with hot sauce. Yeah, it's not supposed to have tomato juice. All right. So, Jerry just weighed in. We took the tape off her mouth. Right. And she said that in Guatemala, they make the Michelada with Clamato. Well, that's what they did in Yuma.

That was a red beer. It was basically Bloody Mary with beer. So, that is different from a Michelada in my experience. But the, what's the Triple Crown Horse Race in Maryland? I don't know. So there's the Kentucky Derby. The big race. Preakness?

Yes, the Preakness. At the Preakness, they make something like Jerry was just describing, where it's like Bloody Mary with beer. They didn't call it a Michelada. What they call it? I don't remember what they called it. Kevin? Like it is good.

I'll give you that. For my experience, Michelada is lime juice, beer, and hot sauce. Oh, well, that's what she got. And you didn't like it, huh? All right. So, Josh just says Jerry. She liked it. Right.

She said it was awful. Right. The proportions were not correct. And she eats, did we get charged for that? We did get charged for that, even though she didn't drink any of it. So, I'm not going to name the restaurant in New York. You're not going to shame them publicly, huh? I will say the lobster tacos were good.

I'm sorry. The lobster roll was good. Okay. Well, that could be anywhere in New York. That'll be a hint. Was there a cronut there as well on the menu? No. That'll be a slight hint.

Okay. Slight hint. Yeah. So, you narrowed it down to 3,000 places. So, this is the West Village. Okay. All right. So, that narrows it down.

Okay. So, syntax. Did you got anything else? No. You said you didn't want to weigh in on it. I understand. I respect that. No, because, you know, to be honest, not only do I not want to weigh in.

Just because I'm trying not to do that. But oh, really? Are you turning over a new leaf? No. Just for things that I feel really passionately about, I will, but I don't feel super passionately about this. I'm being torn every which way by this one. Well, that's what my deal is.

I can't really speak to it because sometimes it seems like a regressive tax. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it seems like it might work. Sometimes it seemed like it might not. Right. So, I think that's where I lie is ambivalent and confused. Yeah. I'm interested to see how this comes out, you know, with Berkeley, with Mexico, the

Navajo Nation instituted a 2% junk food tax and then simultaneously repeal the 5% tax on fresh fruit and vegetables in their grocery stores. Oh, really? Yeah. So, there's a lot of like natural experiments going on right now that I'm very interested to see what the outcomes are. People are going to be studying the heck out of those places. Well, there's a lot of natural experiments going on in my house too, buddy.

So, if you want to know more about this kind of stuff, go listen to our fat tax episode. We did one on high fructose corn syrup. There's a great article about sin taxes that we use called the wages of sin taxes. It was in the Atlantic by a guy named Van Newkirk. So, go read that too. Brush up on the sin tax tip. And since I said brush up, it's time for Listener Man. I'm going to call this Josh's choice.

Every once in a while. All right. Every once in a while, Josh will send an email and say, hey, I know this is your bag, but would you mind reading this one? That is exactly what I wrote. Yeah. So, this is from Ada, and I don't remember where Ada is from, but Ada's in high school. Oh, from Canada.

Okay. So, that immediately means that Ada is probably smarter than we are. Well, I mean, the course she took in high school is pretty impressive. Yeah, it is. I didn't run into those until well into college. All right. Hey, guys. I'm a 17-year-old from Canada, and something caught my attention in your polar bears episode

when Josh was talking about hunting. He said that people will say, well, the food you're eating came from the store that was killed unethically as a counterargument. And Josh found it kind of fallacious, but didn't know how to describe it. Luckily, I'm taking the English class, and we just finished a unit on fallacies, and I can confirm it is fallacious. So it would be qualified as a straw man argument, because the counterargument isn't really arguing against your point that hunting is wrong, but it's arguing a slightly different and

weaker point that food bought in grocery stores could be unethically killed, which takes your attention away from the point that you're arguing. Nice. It could also be an ad hominem to quok. Sure. Is that right? If my Latin's not as rusty as I thought, too, quok, quok, q-u-o, q-u-e, quok, quok, quikwag. I didn't take Latin.

I didn't either. Or you too, y-o-u-t-o-o, not the ban. Right. If you say that hunting is unethical killing, and then the person is saying, well, you participate in the unethical killing of animals by grocery shopping, another example of this kind of argument would be one person telling another that they shouldn't smoke, but the person says, well, you smoke. Just because the other person doesn't practice what they preach, it doesn't change the fact

that it is wrong. Good stuff. The reason that you might not have been able to identify this is because fallacies like this are used so much in media today, and they're not accepted widely as fair arguments, because they're really not. Hope this helped. Yes. Yes, it did.

Yes. You were delighted. That was one of the fallacious arguments, and that is from Ada. Thank you, Ada. That was just bravo. Although I have to say, we did get some good fallacious arguments in. On the other side, they had nothing to do with what I was saying necessarily, but they did explain hunting a little more, which I thought was pretty great, including one that

you read. We've gotten some other ones since then as well there. I'm just like, wow, I want to go hunting, and I like slap my own face. It was funny, I was at the park yesterday with my daughter, and there were these really cool kids, his brother and sister, that were probably 10 and 8-ish, and they were kind of hanging out. They had a dog that Ruby was playing with, and they were just being nice, I'm talking to them.

Then this other kid came up later, and they were talking to these kids, and you're talking about sports. This kid was saying he played baseball, but the cool kid. Right. I'm not saying that kid wasn't cool. The other kid said, I don't do any sports except for hunting and fishing. This other kid looked at him like he was from Mars. You could just see the difference in their two upbringing.

This kid was just like, what? He was like, what do you hunt for? The kid was like deer, and he was like, you shoot deer? He was still young enough in that environment that his family is raising him in, where he was just like, why would you shoot a deer? They're awesome. Yeah, and this kid's like, yeah, man. That's pretty cool.

It was an interesting interaction to watch as an adult. I would have liked to have seen that, yeah, because when you have that conversation as an adult, it doesn't usually go that way. Yeah, it was pretty interesting. You learn a lot from listening in on kids' conversations. For sure. Just don't do it in a creepy way. You know, they say everything you need to know, you learn in kindergarten.

Yeah, I believe it. Ada, thank you again for that. That was a great email. Thank you too, Chuck, for the additional anecdote. Sure, beautiful. If you want to send in an anecdote or explain something that we put a call out for or whatever, you can tweet to us at JoshUmClark and SYSKpodcast, two different ones. You can hang out with Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook, and or you can go to facebook.com

slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye.

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