Nick Kristof makes the case for a soda tax:

Mr. Paterson suggested the tax — an 18 percent sales tax on soft drinks and other nondiet sugary beverages — to help raise $400 million a year to plug a hole in the state budget. But it’s also a landmark effort that, if other states follow, could help make us healthier.

Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments?

No, it was the cigarette tax. Every 10 percent price increase on cigarettes reduced sales by about 3 percent over all, and 7 percent among teenagers, according to the 2005 book “Prescription for a Healthy Nation.” Just the 1983 increase in the federal tax on cigarettes saved 40,000 lives per year.

I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that diet soda shouldn’t be exempt from the tax. I’m a Diet Coke man myself, but my understanding is that the research into how much healthier that really is is somewhat ambiguous, and I think enforcement of a soda tax could be made a lot easier if we didn’t add exemptions. But Kristof is on the right track here. As liberals tend to do, I would like to see the government spend more money on infrastructure and social services. I think it’s important that we pay teachers enough to recruit an adequate number of people into the profession. And beyond teaching, we probably need to spend more on a range of civil service salaries. We need to upgrade our infrastructure and we need to make sure children aren’t going hungry. We need to do a whole lot of stuff, and it would cost a whole lot of money to do everything I’d like to see us do. A lot of money can be found for that stuff, over the long run, by reducing the amount of money we spend on non-productive things like defense and medical waste. But ultimately there’s some need for taxes.

And while tax increases to fund useful services are things worth doing, it is worth considering the economic impact of taxes. Taxing the work people do can have a net beneficial impact on the economy if the tax revenue is spent on something adequately useful. But all else being equal, it does create a drag on the economy. Taxing cigarettes and soda and so forth, by contrast, mostly pushes people toward better healthy outcomes and therefore does something to boost quality of life and economic growth. And on top of that, it creates revenue that can be used for useful things. You wouldn’t want to try to fund the public sector entirely through vice taxes lest you wind up with black markets, perverse incentives, and a highly regressive code. But levied at a moderate rate, vice taxes can raise a lot of funds while having a modest-but-real positive impact on lifestyle choices and health outcomes. It’s something we ought to rely more on.

Writing in Newsweek, Obama education adviser Linda Darling-Hammond talks about lessons from Finland and she wasn’t even on my recent education policy junket to Finland. Dana Goldstein was on said junket and also writes about education policy lessons from Finland for The American Prospect.

For my own part, visiting Finland mostly confirms things that I think we already knew about education. But what’s interesting about visiting a prosperous, egalitarian social democracy with a high level of education is less that it teaches us things we didn’t know, but that it shows that certain kind of theoretical constructs we all understand can be realized in practice. I think if you asked just about anyone “would our school achievement be better if the child poverty rate were dramatically lower?” they would say that it would. Similarly, if you ask if school achievement would be more even if school funding were even, they would say that it would. And if you asked if providing higher-quality early childhood education more broadly would enhance achievement, everyone would say yes. And if you asked what would happen if we drastically increased the number of people who want to be teachers, such that slots in teacher training programs were highly competitive, people would tell you that student achievement would improve. And if you asked people whether higher levels of educational attainment would boost prosperity, people would tell you yes. And if you asked whether more equal education outcomes would lead to a more even distribution of income, they would tell you it would. And if you asked whether a more even distribution of income would lead to more even education outcomes, people would tell you it would.

But even though I don’t think anyone would really dispute any of that, we don’t just do that stuff. Instead, we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems. And when you point out to people that there are countries where the political system has taken decisive action to tackle these challenges, people kind of shrug and observe that the United States is very big. Which is true. But the country was also big years ago when we were building the world’s first mass literacy society. Indeed, it used to be considered advantageous to the United States that we were so big and people used to wonder whether small countries weren’t just inherently stuck in poverty.

The truth of the matter, however, isn’t that our problems couldn’t be solved it’s that we’re not seriously trying. And we’ve developed a political culture in which that’s considered okay.

I’m getting sort of tired of the endless discussion of whether Barack Obama is a wholesome liberal or an evil centrist, but I have to say something about one aspect of this story:

“Barack Obama has never made any bones about it: He is a moderate,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a moderate public policy think tank. “People who ignored that did so at their peril.”

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. There are a variety of issues that they have nothing whatsoever to say on, and what policy ideas they do have are laughable in comparison to the scale of the problems they allegedly address. Which is fine, because Third Way isn’t really a “public policy think tank” at all, it’s a messaging and political tactics outfit. But Barack Obama’s policy proposals aren’t like that. At all. Nor do personnel on his policy teams — including the more ideologically moderate members — stand for anything that’s remotely as weak a brew as the stuff Third Way puts out. And yet, Third Way loves Barack Obama and says he’s a moderate just like them. Which is great. But everyone needs to see that these things are moving in two directions simultaneously. At the very same time Obama is disappointing progressive supporters on a number of fronts, he’s also bringing moderates on board for things that are way more ambitious than anything they were endorsing two or three years ago.

At long last, the world can know how to say “forget about it” in Swedish

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