The Candy Tax: A lesson in civics for US students (book excerpt) ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

The Candy Tax: A lesson in civics for US students (book excerpt)

Most schools don't teach civics anymore. The reasons are mundane: schools teach to standardized tests. But this is a mistake. Citizenship includes obligations, and obligations mean understanding and participating in the important questions of the day.

This is an excerpt from my book Reclaiming the Covenant: America's Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring it Continues. It describes a fun way to teach how bills work in Congress, where the students affect the decisions by writing letters to their representatives and Ai ensures that even the teachers don't know what will happen.

Real civic education is active, and the difference between active and passive is the difference between a citizen and a consumer.

A student who writes to their representative about a real issue — not a form letter but a considered argument with a specific ask — learns something no textbook can convey: they are a principal in this system, not a spectator. The representative works for them. A thoughtful letter gets read by a staffer and sometimes changes a position; a form letter goes in a pile. The marketplace of ideas at its most basic civic level is a market, and better arguments have more traction than worse ones.

A student who visits Washington or a state capital and asks hard questions — what tradeoffs did you make? who bears the cost? why did you vote against that amendment? — learns that governance is the management of genuine competing interests within a framework of constraint, not a morality play between heroes and villains. Physical presence dissolves the abstraction that allows both cynicism and naivety to persist.

A student who follows a specific bill from introduction to enactment — tracking it through committee, watching the amendments that change its scope, noticing the provisions inserted as the price of someone's vote, reading the lobbying language that shifts enormous practical consequence — understands more about how American governance actually functions than most adults who have lived under it for decades.

And a student who learns to think honestly about lobbying — not the cartoon version in which all lobbyists are villains, but the real version in which every organized interest from teachers' unions to the NRA to environmental groups is engaged in the First Amendment-protected petition of government that lobbying actually is — learns to ask the right question: not "is this lobbying?" but "is this distorting the information environment in ways that prevent my representative from making an honest judgment?" Teaching students to distinguish between competing values and organized incentives is teaching them the most important epistemic skill available for democratic citizenship.

Here is a thought experiment that should exist as an actual educational tool.

A fictional bill — the Candy Tax Act — proposes a 15% tax on candy, with proceeds funding a free bicycle for every child in the country, ostensibly for exercise and health. A website simulates the bill's progress through committee to a floor vote. Students write to fictional representatives with distinct personalities and constituencies: one represents a district with a major candy manufacturer as its largest employer; another represents an urban district with documented childhood obesity rates; a third is a fiscal conservative genuinely interested in the healthcare cost data. A well-argued letter moves the needle; a form letter does not. When a representative's office sends a dismissive form response — because the student is twelve and doesn't vote — the student can file a scoop with the fictional media outlet on the website and watch it generate coverage that changes the representative's and their colleagues’ calculations. Even the teachers wouldn’t know where the lesson will go because student input would affect the legislation.

The op-eds the students evaluate argue from genuinely different and coherent positions. The libertarian asks who pays for bike repairs, tune-ups, and replacements when bikes are stolen, and whether the government has any business taxing one legal product to subsidize another. The progressive argues that childhood obesity falls disproportionately on low-income communities and that this is precisely what government is for. The fiscal conservative supports the bill because the healthcare cost data shows prevention is cheaper than treatment. Another progressive opposes it because a flat consumption tax on candy is regressive — it takes a larger share of income from poor families than rich ones. The disability advocate writes one devastating paragraph: before we vote, I want an amendment — what exactly are we providing for children who cannot ride a bike? The seventh-grader's op-ed lands differently than all the others: I cannot vote, but I will live with whatever you decide longer than any of you will. Economists ask about unintended consequences — a new secondary market in bikes, helmet sales, what an influx of bikes would do to urban traffic, the effect on the price of raw materials like rubber. Others raise a question nobody in the legislative debate thought to ask: there are no major American bicycle manufacturers anymore — should we be subsidizing Chinese factories?

The complexity of a seemingly simple bill, and the debates it can generate in the classroom, is the lesson.

The candy company sends students branded tote bags — school-appropriate, with a QR code linking to their position on the bill. The pro-bike response arrives as a photocopied flyer from a health nonprofit with a fraction of the budget. The gap between the two communications is another lesson. Some students receive the tote bag and write in support of the candy company's position. Some receive it and write in opposition anyway. Some refuse it on principle. All of them have just encountered, in miniature and with low stakes, the central epistemic challenge of democratic citizenship: how do you know when your judgment is your own?

And then, somewhere in the middle of the semester, a student proposes an amendment: instead of bikes, give every child a jump rope. A jump rope costs three dollars at government procurement prices. It requires no infrastructure — no bike lanes, no safe streets, no helmets — and can be used in a gymnasium, a hallway, a living room, or a 400-square-foot apartment. Ten minutes of jump rope provides cardiovascular benefit equivalent to thirty minutes of jogging. The secondary market problem disappears — nobody resells a used jump rope. The manufacturing problem disappears — jump ropes can be made domestically. The disability question becomes different rather than harder.

The student who proposes the jump rope amendment and can explain why the bike was chosen instead — who can trace the logic from organized industry interest to legislative proposal and articulate why democracy systematically produces the expensive visible program over the cheap effective one — has learned to see the difference between what a policy says it is doing and what it is actually doing. That capacity is the epistemic obligation made practical — what the covenant's demands look like when someone is actually meeting them.

The Candy Tax does not exist. The 250th anniversary of the American covenant is the right moment to build it as the kind of national civic infrastructure investment the rededication actually requires: covenant apprenticeship at scale, free and available to every classroom, updated each legislative cycle with a new bill — the seder America never had.

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