Do higher taxes change behavior?
Generally speaking, yes. The laws of economics are pretty strict about this stuff: raise the price of booze, butts or junk food, and without even thinking about, we–that is, homo oeconomicus–cut back. But for public health law, the research question has to be: do we really get any healthier?
Alex C. Wagenaar, associate director of Public Health Law Research, just published a paper that found “significant reductions in mortality related to chronic heavy alcohol consumption following legislatively induced increases in alcohol taxes in Florida.” Raise alcohol taxes. Fewer drunks die.
This kind of research must be painstaking and methodical. Isn’t it odd: to support the obvious truth, you need to take special care. Wagenaar at al. needed data from 1969 through 2004, and “a time-series quasi-experimental research design…” “including nonalcohol deaths within Florida and other states’ rates of alcohol-related mortality for comparison. A total of 432 monthly observations of mortality in Florida were examined over the 36-year period. Analyses included ARIMA, fixed-effects, and random-effects models, including a noise model, tax independent variables, and structural covariates.”
It’s heavy. This is the kind of research that should be driving public policy,
Maldonado-Molina, M., & Wagenaar, A. (2010). Effects of Alcohol Taxes on Alcohol-Related Mortality in Florida: Time-Series Analyses From 1969 to 2004 Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01280.x
Paul Statt Communications 