Do taxes influence your behavior?
If not, maybe it's because
you just don't have the tax gene.
Jason M. Fletcher, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health, examined
data from a national survey on smoking habits. He also collected
biological specimens from the study participants for genotyping.
Fletcher found that around half of the folks studied had a variation in a gene
in a brain receptor thought to control the amount of pleasure derived from nicotine
consumption.
He then tracked the statistical relationship between taxation, smoking and
the nicotine gene.
And he found that a 100 percent increase in taxes had a significant effect
only on people with this particular genetic variation in DNA sequence. The
other half of the population was immune to the higher taxes when it came to changing their habit.
OK. So it's not technically a tax gene.
But Fletcher says in his paper about the study, Why Have Tobacco Control Policies
Stalled? Using Genetic Moderation to Examine Policy Impacts (published in PLOS ONE), that "there
is emerging evidence that tax responses may be related to self control and
other characteristics."
Of course, there's much work left to do.
"The large differentials in responses have not been fully
examined or elucidated in order to predict individual differences and discover
why taxation does not seem to work for everyone," he writes.
But if Fletcher is correct, his admittedly novel evidence of gene-policy
interaction could mean that when it comes to curbing tobacco use, lawmakers
might want to consider alternative methods.
And
once the tobacco use problem is solved, what undesirable activity might be the
next genetic tax target?
We could be on the verge of a brave new world of
taxation and public policy.
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