Pop Economy!

This Persevering Actress Managed To Overcome An Unfortunate Handicap.

As any schoolboy will tell you, sometimes when you stretch your hand under the blouse you’ve been ogling all night, you find out to your disappointment that it’s been padded.  The same can be said of the “botax” itself: when piloted previously in New Jersey, it delivered a mere A-cup worth of revenue instead of the C-cup which had been projected.

Besides the economic sag, the new law brought controversy: some customers chose to leave New Jersey for their procedures, while others charged discrimination on the basis that middle-class women were being unfairly targeted.  Said Joseph Cryan, the Assemblyman who first proposed the tax and now wants it repealed, “We essentially discouraged the business from happening at all.”  I hate to think this was a revelation: taxing an activity discourages people from engaging in it, and will tend to depress the revenues received from the tax.  Mr. Cryan continued, “It was a real education.”  Not Belmont Abbey College’s finest hour.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 90% of cosmetic surgery recipients are women, but the Senators who dreamt up the “botax” don’t view it as discriminatory.  Even Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office came to its defense, insisting that men chose “more and more” to get cosmetic surgery, while complaining that the comparison to their use [and therefore, a tax] of Viagra was ill-considered and inappropriate.

Since the New Jersey law– as will the proposed federal law– distinguishes between elective (taxed) and medically-necessary (untaxed) procedures, determining which is which can be nettlesome.  Pat McMenamin, a surgeon in Sacramento, said “cosmetic surgery can be as much about mental health as it is about physical well-being” and went on to describe a young patient who was practically suicidal about his nose.  Another surgeon described the minefield of HIPAA privacy violations which might occur in revealing medical decisions and rationale to the IRS.

All things considered, I’m underwhelmed by what we at PopEconomy! are calling the Tit Tax (although my fiancee strongly encourages me to stop using that term).  Ironically, while amendments I thought would surely pass (re-importation of prescription drugs) have failed, and amendments that must die for the greater good (CLASS Act) have survived, this moronic thing seems to have flown under the radar.

I would tax these. Hard.

If you are vain, or know someone who is, then this story might affect you.  Personally, I’m against the latest proposal to tax breast implants, tummy tucks, wrinkle-smoothing injections and other elective cosmetic surgeries if for no other reason than because some smarmy columnist had the bright idea to coin it the “Botax” and now we all have to live with that smug pun.  Second, we seem to have reached a point in society where they’re just making up s*** to tax.  And lest you think I’m being cynical, I quote from Senator Harry Reid’s spokesman, Jim Manley, as to the origins of such a random tax, “We needed money to make the bill work.”

I have to say, the cosmetic surgeons aren’t exactly putting up a compelling fight.  Their argument is basically that the point of the Democratic proposal is to hit ”wealthy, suburban Republican women” the hardest but the Senators misunderstand that those aren’t the surgeons’ primary clientele.  Rather, one should pity the “many newly jobless women [who] look for ways to make themselves more marketable to prospective employers…They’re competing with people 10 to 15 years younger than them and they want to look better.”  So says Dr. Phil Haeck, president-elect of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.  These are, after all, challenging economic times, and “These women come in, they’ve lost their jobs, they don’t have the money for a facelift.”

It makes me sad to think that someone who just lost her job might be able to scrape together $5,000 from her rainy-day fund to afford a facelift ($5,031 average cost: link opens directly to a .pdf) but somehow couldn’t possibly scrounge up another $250 if pressed; but it makes me even sadder that a newly-unemployed individual with $5,000 in his or her pocket would think his or her next best move in life would be to walk past the job re-training office and instead seek out the nearest plastic surgeon.

The good news is that the original plan was for a 10% tax, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief that the measure currently being debated is only 5%.  It would provide an exemption for deformities and injuries, but does include procedures such as face lifts, liposuction, cosmetic implants, and teeth-whitening (from what I can tell, 90% of all internet advertising is for teeth-whitening, so if you wanted to tax something, tax those freaking ads!).  I’m unimpressed with the amount projected to be raised: $6 Billion over 10 years.  At just $600M per year, that barely makes a blip on our Official Ledger here at PopEconomy! but I give them points for trying. 

(I will have to decide whether or not to enter this item into the Ledger, since the “Tit Tax” is specifically proposed to offset the cost of HealthCare Reform, whereas I am attempting to pay down the Federal Deficit.  I am also aware, lest anyone point it out before I do, that you can’t necessarily straight-line these costs over 10 years.  In other words, it’s not particularly accurate to state that the “Tit Tax” will raise exactly $600M each and every year for 10 years.  It may start very small, and accelerate, or vice-versa.  The CBO will have that level of detail, and I haven’t seen it yet for this section of the Bill.  If you want to go that deep, you can find them at www.cbo.gov.  But really, come on.  Relax.  Scroll up and look at those boobs again.  Isn’t that a better use of your time?)

Candy Corn is universally despised, and yet...does anything so singularly symbolize the attraction and revulsion we feel towards the unholy conversion of corn into high fructose corn syrup into food we cannot resist?

They want to tax your soda, dear reader.  (Incidentally, depending on where in the United States you are reading this, you are upset with me for calling your favorite beverage “soda”, since you call it either “pop” if you live in the Northwest, or simply “Coke” [KO] if you live in the Southeast.)  This is a problem for you because you drink so damn much of it, but it’s great for our PopEconomy! because of the money we can raise.

Based upon the expert recommendations of the Arkansas Surgeon General and NY City Health Commissioner, in part, a proposal was released through the New England Journal of Medicine to levy a 1-cent per ounce national tax on sodas and other sweetened beverages.  Their studies demonstrated the benefits of such a tax would include revenue (obviously) while also discouraging people from consuming extra calories; they cited studies which showed that women who drank sugar-sweetened beverages were at greater risk of obesity and diabetes.

Although they’d hoped to slip this tax into the larger healthcare reform Bills floating around, that opportunity slipped through their grasp when the White House rejected a soda tax initiative mid-September.  (33 states individually levy fairly small sales taxes on soft drinks, roughly on the order of 5-cents per $1.  The national proposal above goes beyond that in the range of around 12-cents per $1).

So what are we talking in real numbers, and why am I not giving up so easily?  The authors claim such a national sales tax would reap $15 Billion in its first year, not to mention a yearly 2-pound weight loss for soda drinkers.  They envision plowing the money back into child nutrition and obesity prevention programs, which I find absolutely precious.

The historical footnote to all of this is what’s interesting: unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve heard the reverse-engineering for what seeded our national obesity epidemic in the first place: protectionist trade policies begat the switch from cane and beet sugars to corn (embargos and tariffs + subsidies) begat the rise of high fructose corn syrup begat this.  Although it’s a remarkable story, there may be something apocryphal to it, as this article from Slate debunks the notion that HFCS (as we in the sugar trade call it) is any less natural or unhealthy than glucose or sucrose, or for that matter much less “high” than good ol’ fructose.  The one fallacy they gloss over as it pertains to our purposes is hypothesizing what would happen if there were abundant sugar available everywhere, when in fact we DO still impose a Cuban embargo and DO still subsidize US corn farmers: whether the author believes its cost is trivial to the price of the can of soda, HFCS is still cheaper on a relative basis.

Them Duke Boys Never Paid a Traffic Ticket, Depriving Hazzard County of Desperately Needed Rickety-Bridge and Ramp Repair Funds.

The old saw goes that if we outlaw guns, one day only criminals will own guns, and that’s why this story affects you, dear reader.  According to a recent story in The Washington Examiner, D.C Police Chief Cathy Lanier has denounced those “cowardly” Apple iPhone users for taking advantage of an app which circumvents both speed traps and red-light cameras.

The numbers are a bit sketchy from the article, since it indicates that $1 Billion was generated for DC during fiscal years 2005 to 2008 from photo radar tickets, which is on the order of $250 Million a year if we include all 4 years.  But one sentence later it says that Montgomery County expects to raise just $29 Million from red light and speed cameras this year, which is smaller by nearly 10x an order of magnitude.  Before I can extrapolate this data to the entire USA I’ll need to fact-check this!  Fortunately, I’ve located a useful– if inappropriately named– site devoted almost entirely to photo enforcement: The Newspaper.

Leaving aside for the moment the incontrovertible evidence that these cameras neither reduce accidents nor have an appreciable impact on speeding, most of us realize they are “sin tax” cash cows.  The Newspaper.com hints at some tantalizing revenue figures.  Albuquerque, NM: “All together, the city collected $10,611,397 in revenue and handed over $2,844,920 to Redflex [an Australian vendor who dominates this market]. This left the city with between $5.8 and $7.8 million in net profit. The precise figure is not known as officials charged as photo enforcement expenses a number of part and full-time police officer salaries as well as the entire administrative hearing office budget. The audit report sidestepped the question of whether the ticketing program has had any beneficial effect on traffic accidents.”  Washington, DC: “Since 1999, [photo] cameras have issued 3,732,234 tickets worth $283 million (as of 3/31/09)”.

And for the entire state of AZ: “Governor Janet Napolitano announced on Friday her expectation that the state’s new freeway speed cameras would generate $90 million in net profit for fiscal year 2009, plus $34 million for the private companies selected to operate the program. In the following year, what the state labels “non tax increase revenue generation” will jump to $120 million, plus $45 million more for the ticket vendors, for a total of $165 million. After 2010 revenue is expected to exceed this amount significantly as the program grows beyond 100 fixed and mobile speed cameras and high occupancy vehicle lane (HOV) ticketing cameras are brought online. The state currently faces a $1.3 billion deficit. “This budget shortfall is an opportunity to make government more efficient and effective,” Napolitano said in a statement touting a budget that “does not raise taxes.”

So I think PopEconomy! has enough to work with… Read the rest of this entry »

This product strengthens the father-son bond. Presumably, some people have a problem with this.

Obama signed a new tobacco bill into law this week aimed at keeping kids from taking up the habit (Altria, RAI), and could there be a better posterchild than the President?  But nowhere in the press coverage did I find hard numbers telling me what it would save America economically.  Luckily, the folks at ProtectTheTruth.org have given us a clue: researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (as published in the AJPM, 2/12/09) ran a cost-utility analysis on the national truth® campaign to prevent teen smoking.  They found that the $324M spent on the program between 2000 and 2002 recouped $1.9B in medical costs averted for society.

Bolstered by these findings, the ProtectTheTruth Commission believes that if the truth® campaign were to continue “for another five years (2009-2014) with similar effectiveness, there will be up to 500,000 fewer youth smokers with savings of up to $9.0 billion in future medical costs.”  Good enough for me– it’s going into the ledger!

But it got me thinking, this thing’s a cash cow– the more we put in, the more we recoup!  The only conceivable limit is Read the rest of this entry »