Tax on Tanning is Worth It

When I went to college I lived above an indoor tanning salon. My dorm was twenty-six floors high, and I lived at the twenty-sixth floor. For most of the day I was well above the bustle of the street or the ads at the tanning salon, which bared vixens on its glass wals with skin the color of the cache at Fort Knox. There was a twenty-four hour sandwich shop next door to the tanning salon, and when, after hours of cramming for a test, I would wait in the elevator as it slid down those twenty-six flights, then walk through the lobby, down two flights of stairs, into the breeze and around the corner, where I had to pass the store front to the tanning salon. In my two years living next to this salon I saw only one person enter it. From behind she looked like a woman my age, in her early twenties, shapely and attractive. I bought my sandwich. As I left I happened to look through the windows of the salon and see the woman waiting inside, reading a magazine. She looked up just as I was looking at her. I couldn't look away. Not because she was beautiful, although at one point in the past I'm sure she was, but because I had never seen skin so unlike the skin of everyone else I had seen in the university environs. It was not white or pink or black or brown, but a kind of sepia, something like the glittering leggings of a pop idol. I went to a bench and ate my sandwich, wondering why this cute girl felt so compelled to transform her appearance.

I thought about her again when I read that the Senate included in its health care bill a new tax on indoor tanning salons, just like the one I lived next to in those college years. The legislation prompted me to take my curiosity about that woman's habit a step further by doing a bit of research on the health of tanning salons. Turns out, at least according to the most respected experts on ultraviolet radiation and carcinogens, that using tanning bedds before the age of 30--as this woman clearly was--increased the chance of getting cancer by 75%. Why take such a risk? Whatever the reason, it must be very superficial, for why risk your health for a look that will deteriote anyway as you age? There is no good reason.

The indoor tax legislation does what the indoor smoking ban, speed limits, and car safety belt requirmements did: use the law to evoke better decisions from those under its jurisdiction. The tax is minimal--only 10%, whereas in some states the tax on cigarettes is more than 20% of their pre-taxed price--but it will effectively change the minds of those on the fence about tanning. The die hards will continue with nothing more than a grumble. But the ones who are considering tanning but unsure, and the ones who have begun to tan but without enthusiasm, may be dissuaded from beginning and continuing such a harmful and expensive practice. Even better, the earnings of the tax go directly to support paying the new health care bill. Regardless of what you think of the content of the bill itself, it's hard to argue that discouraging unhealthy behavior in the same stroke that you help the ailing and sick is an unwise move on the Senate's part, and on society's.