You couldn't come up with any worse analogies? And FWIW energy is taxed and it also has high positive externalities while smoking and drinking high amounts of soft drinks has basically none but instead massive negative ones to oversimplify it. Basic/intermediate microeconomics.
No he couldn't.
And while its basically a Trump thread he of course sucks. Losing trade wars, claiming the economy has been booming when it just have continued the years long trend (actually slowing down) while the same time massively increasing the deficit with basically no benefits. Trickle-down has never and will never work.
Your argument was bloomberg is right, negative behaviour can be influenced/corrected by regressive tax. But you're saying he would only apply this in the sphere of damaging yourself not damaging the planet through pollution/carbon emissions. I am talking fossil fuels, you have generalised it into energy.
And on your logic you'd be in favour of all sorts of nannying interference by the state, a tax to discourage gambling? [it has negative externalities to borrow your phrase] if not why not using bloomberg's and your logic, you have to be consistent surely?
I'm not personally that concerned about a 10-15% tax on sugary soda but I don't think it's going to put an end to obesity, so in effect its pointless other than a revenue earner on people's dietary habits.
We would need to also tax jam doughnuts, coffee, choclate, biscuits, crisps, cakes etc. stop the poor fat people eating these foods and improve their health [orwell covered this by the way in wigan pier] and the tax would need to be higher to correct behaviour otherwise you're just skimming money out of people's pockets and not affecting behaviour, as is your stated desire to 'reduce consumption on products with high negative externalities '
And why wouldn't politicians like bloomberg adopt this 'pigovian tax' approach to fossil fuel based energy on the basis of negative externalities to the planet [if you go along with the science of climate change and carbon emissions etc] that was my point, so politely I disagree that it is a worthless analogy.
I probably agree that the trickle down approach to tax doesn't work and is highly optimistic, for me though the issue is the focus, bloomberg is keen on things like soda tax, but I await to see evidence of his policies for raising the standards of living for average people. If you think of it as the flow of money, it's got to flow back more in the direction of the public not the billionaires and corporations; education in school, cookery lessons etc would have more impact on obesity than soda taxes.