Tax on Violent Videos Likely Source of Funding

The long lines at the voting booths on Nov. 2 were dwarfed by the hoards of gamers who lined up a week later in cities around the country, anxiously awaiting an inaugural copy of the most hotly anticipated video game in American entertainment history. With more than $80 million in expected profits, this shoot-em-up sensation may not change the world, but it could help put the compassion back into conservatism by providing a much-needed financial boost for key domestic programs.

From mentoring programs to faith-based initiatives, the Bush administration has introduced a series of well-intentioned social programs designed to keep kids safe from gun violence, abuse and neglect, drugs, and crime. With a war to fight and an economy to revive, however, investing in America's children has taken a predictable backseat to other front-page issues, allowing the administration to sidestep a crucial postelection question: How are they going to pay for all this stuff?

By proposing a modest excise tax on the sale of violent video games, President Bush and his congressional colleagues could back up their social agenda with the requisite funding and, better yet, jump-start existing programs, such as restructuring the child-welfare system or fully funding stalled educational initiatives. This certainly wouldn't be the first time politicians have used so-called "sin taxes" to fill budget gaps, especially in rough economic times. Such taxes already generate millions of dollars a year by targeting such all-American vices as cigarettes, liquor, and guns. Despite the occasional grumble, the public generally tolerates these taxes as the price to be paid for using potentially harmful products, and targeted industries have come to regard them as an inevitable cost of doing business.

With so much violent media fare, why single out violent video games? Despite growing evidence of these games' psychological harm, few would argue that they are the sole cause of family or community violence. But in a country in which 92 percent of children grow up playing them regularly, violent video games aid and abet a popular culture that champions even the most extreme brutality through games like the Grand Theft Auto series, a self-described "study in hedonism and violence" that encourages players to kill prostitutes and hijack cars.

Recent events have pointed to a compelling link between the virtual world and real-life violence. Last year in Ohio, a teenager obsessed with Grand Theft Auto stole his friend's car and then bludgeoned her to death with a bedpost. Teenaged sniper Lee Malvo and the Columbine High School killers used highly realistic first-person shooter games as virtual training grounds for their murder sprees. And Japan is still reeling from an 11-year-old's murder by her best friend, a frequent player of Battle Royale, an Internet game in which classmates plot to kill each other.

Most video game makers already comply with a voluntary ratings system that includes descriptors for violence. The federal government could make these ratings mandatory and impose a 3 percent federal tax on every violent video game sold. Such a proposal would not eliminate violence by any means, but three cents on each of the $10 billion in annual domestic video games sales could provide $300 million a year for programs for American children and families.

Some critics will argue that a sin tax on video games impedes freedom of speech. But a modest tax would not dictate the content of video games or ban -- even significantly deter -- their sales. And while free-market enthusiasts will excoriate this proposal as an improper use of economic coercion, sin taxes have never claimed to be the brainchild of high-minded economic theory. They are the imprecise, but nonetheless lucrative, tools of political expedience. And they have an undeniably bipartisan utility.

The Bush administration may be reluctant to impose its moral values on the entertainment industry, but it's past time for at-risk children to share in the profits as well as the pitfalls of a boundless imagination.