Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Ezra Klein points to an intriguing bit of opinion polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation today: 61% of Americans say that in order to fund healthcare reform they’d support higher taxes on “items that are thought to be unhealthy, such as soda, alcohol, junk food, and cigarettes”:

Problematically, the poll question lumps a lot of different policies together. Paying for health care by taxing cigarettes is actually a common strategy. It’s how we funded S-CHIP, for one. Taxing soda is rather further from the center of the consensus. But there’s no evidence, in this poll at least, that the public instinctually recoils from the idea.

In a sense, I’m not too surprised by this.  I suspect that most people know that soda and junk food really are a scourge and would like to cut back.  So either through guilt, or maybe a sense that they need someone else to prod them into doing the right thing, they support higher taxes on this stuff.

Further down, however, there’s a followup question:

This is a fascinating example of just how thin opinion polling like this is.  The real lesson here is that most people haven’t given this issue even a few seconds thought, and their response to the poll question is practically meaningless.  Faced with even the slightest pushback, large majorities of both supporters and opponents flipped their views almost instantly.

So the real question isn’t how people feel about taxing junk food now, it’s how they’re likely to feel about taxing junk food after hearing both sides screech about it for a few days or weeks or months.  This is true of most other opinion polling too.  Caveat emptor.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate