Taxing Soda

57 thoughts on Taxing Soda

1. My concern is that any such policy is going to create odd distortions in the market. While I’m not a hard-core free-marketeer, I think its pretty obvious from an economic perspective that taxes and subsidies can have pretty serious consequences. Pretty much the only reason we use corn syrup in the US at all is because production corn is subsidized while sugar imports are taxed (which has the secondary side effect of screwing over farmers in developing countries). I’d be worried about who decided what healthy food was and how money was distributed. We all know that these kinds of regulations and taxes are going to be written by people with enough money to buy congressional access, and I think we ought to think over what is likely to happen under such a scheme.

   One of the biggest problems I see with any such scheme is how it is enacted and worked. For it to make any sense whatsoever you have to have a situation where the tax generates enough income (after accounting for non-compliance and black market sales) to offset the cost of healthier foods enough that they cost no more than their taxed/unhealthy counterparts (after costs of administering such a program). Say I’m trying to choose between a bottle of Coke and a bottle of orange juice at the local bodega (as I was at lunch on Friday). The bottle of Coke is going to be about $1.20, the bottle of orange juice about $2.60 (assuming they’re the same size). That means that under a perfect system with no accounting costs, waste, or avoidance you’d need a tax on the bottle of Coke equal to more than 50% of the product’s cost to make the bottle of orange juice an equally appealing choice from a price stand point. The rub here is that both products are going to cost $0.70 more. Thats not a huge deal for me right now, but I can remember times in my life when 70 cents here and there added up to a real problem.

2. It seems really backwards to me to make something ridiculously cheap through our agricultural policy, then punish people who consume that ridiculously cheap thing with additional taxes, when all of our taxes already have paid to make it cheap. I’m not holding my breath for wholesale reform of our agricultural policy, but seriously, that’s what needs to happen. If it’s a small tax of a few cents, it won’t generate enough money to fund programs that actually matter. If it’s a large tax, it might actually change people’s consumption habits, which wouldn’t be a terrible thing (you could drink tap water instead of soda or juice), but then you still don’t get very much revenue from it, and you’d be doing it in the least efficient way possible.

3. I think the corn syrup subsidy is critical here. Ideally, we would just stop subsidizing corn syrup and let the chips fall where they may. So long as we insist on subsidizing unhealthy food, though, I have no problem with the state taxing authorities reclaiming some of that money and using it for public health. People who buy soda aren’t being charged more for the benefit of everybody else; they’re simply losing out on their ability to pay less than what it costs and force everybody else to pay for the difference.

4. I think that if the tax money subsidized things like community gardens and getting healthier food to kids in school I would be more for it. If it got fast food to offer better tea that doesn’t taste like crap that would be a bonus.

5. Since it’s unlikely we’ll change out agricultural policy then I’m in favor of it, but only if they leave diet sodas at the regular price 🙂

6. People who buy soda aren’t being charged more for the benefit of everybody else; they’re simply losing out on their ability to pay less than what it costs and force everybody else to pay for the difference.

   Sure, except that we don’t have our corn subsidies because of the powerful influence of the Soda Drinkers Lobby.

7. Ehh, on this one, I think the question isn’t so much if as when. I was rather shocked at my partner’s parent’s house to find that Reader’s Digest was pushing low-meat, low-sugar, and high-vegetable diets really hard. At some point, the industrial corn lobby is going to start facing the same questions that the tobacco lobby did when the health costs of subsidizing that industry became well-known. The same subsidy system that deflates the price of HFCS is also responsible for deflating the price of processed factory meat.

8. Erm… the stuff they put in “diet” sodas really isn’t much better.

9. Recently I heard Michael Pollan advocate for a federal definition of food based on nutritional value and caloric content (so in the end soda would no longer be food). It is really ridiculous that a fatty, salty, chemical product is cheaper than a vegetable. I have no problem with taxing something that is not food, like soda or junk, to make actual food like fruits and veggies cheaper.

   Now, on the subject of using taxes to discourage certain types of behaviors I agree that is seems like a bad idea on the personal level but for some reason I am 100% in favor of it on the corporate level. Like taxing soda seems really jerky but taxing carbon emissions is great. I guess a good question to answer would be: “Would we all be better off if junk food cost 10 times more than it does now?” Oh no! I think the answer might be yes!

10. “the stuff they put in “diet” sodas really isn’t much better”

    Too true. Aspartme is a carcinogen and is banned in other countries. I shudder when I watch my partner and a co-worker slug down bottle after bottle of the stuff every day.

    Since I have a low tolerance for HFCS and am trying to avoid a recurrence of cancer, I’ve sworn off soda. My only exception is the occasional Jones soda, which uses cane sugar as a sweetner, and even that is used only as reward to bribe me to work on our home modeling project. I would be willing to pay tax on it to encourage people, especially kids, to make better food choices. I would also like to see HFCS subsidies phased out. I spend a lot of time at the grocery store reading labels and the damn stuff is in everything.

11. Sales taxes are inherently regressive, in that they place the tax burden of a society on those whose income mostly goes to consumption, rather than investment or savings (ie, the poor).

    Is there a reason we can’t subsidize healthier food with a progressive tax structure that doesn’t treat people on the low end of the economic spectrum as variables that should be manipulated?

12. Hm. I don’t know. I live in a state without sales tax, but regarding the soda marketing and school thing…maybe it’s not common, but between the high school I attended and the college that I attend now, emphasis is placed on more “healthful” drinks, like vitamin water, over sodas. I put healthful in quotations because I am of the belief that vitamin water = glorified sugar water. Anyway, maybe it’s just where I live and how “cool” it is to be health-conscious now and green (which the vitamin water-type drinks typically associate themselves with) now.

13. It seems really backwards to me to make something ridiculously cheap through our agricultural policy, then punish people who consume that ridiculously cheap thing with additional taxes, when all of our taxes already have paid to make it cheap.

    Yeah, no kidding!

    And I have no confidence whatsoever that the money is going to be put towards organic local veggies for the poor, not in any meaningful way. If this is all about “obesity prevention” as Brownell suggests (of course, if he did his homework he’d know that skinny young men, not middle-aged fatties, are the most avid sweetened-beverage consumers by far, but wev), the money’s prolly all gonna go towards “lose 50 pounds NOW fatass or you’ll be dead next year” type billboards. Right, because the only reason any of us are fat, besides glugging toilet bowls filled with Pepsi laced with half a bottle of cherry syrup every half hour, is because we haven’t seen a billboard telling us how OMG SO UNHEALTHY AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE we are yet. Oy, do not get me started.

    My original understanding of Paterson’s proposal is that the tax would apply to packaged single-serving sodas and other sugar-sweetened beverages only. Because if they are going to make restaurants and bars and supermarkets and coffeehouses and fast-food and casual-dining places (the kind with serve-yourself sodas) all do this, it’s going to be a major pain in the badoobies to implement and enforce. If you order a latte made without sweetener, do they charge extra for each sugar packet you add to it yourself? If your establishment has self-serve drink fountains, do you have to put the Mountain Dew and Pepsi into a separate fountain kept behind the counter and only allow diet drinks in the self-serve? Does an Arnold Palmer (half lemonade and half iced tea) get taxed at the same rate as straight lemonade? Does “slightly sweet” Oregon Chai get taxed the same as regular? A Cuba Libre more or less than a Long Island Iced Tea? And how do they propose to nail all these stores for violations? Sugar cops?

    And how the hell is artificial sweetener “healthier” than any form of sugar, unless your pancreas doesn’t work?

14. I just had a breakdown in the store over drinks. Soda was 5$ for a box of twelve. Juice was 5$ for a small carton. Milk was 3$ a gallon, but I’m lactose intolerant. And the local water is farm-water, so people aren’t actually supposed to drink all the pesticides and shit in it.

    I had 30$ for groceries and nothing to drink. I just sat and cried for a few minutes, then sobered up and bought 20$ worth of juice, offbrand peanut butter, and bread.

    Raising taxes on sugary shit just means poor people are going to be drinking more kool-aid and tang and iced tea made with water filled with chemicals and rust and filthy shit. I don’t see how this is helping anyone. Oh, yeah. It helps the people that CAN AFFORD TO DRINK.

15. …the money’s prolly all gonna go towards “lose 50 pounds NOW fatass or you’ll be dead next year” type billboards.

    Haha, seriously. They should put this on a billboard, since this is what they mean anyway (“I gave all my fat clothes to my fat friends!” *eyeroll*)

    I agree, even as a Diet Coke chugger of fifteen-or-so years. I don’t pretend that aspartame is healthy. Not to mention what Diet Coke can do to your teeth.

16. “It seems really backwards to me to make something ridiculously cheap through our agricultural policy, then punish people who consume that ridiculously cheap thing with additional taxes, when all of our taxes already have paid to make it cheap. I’m not holding my breath for wholesale reform of our agricultural policy, but seriously, that’s what needs to happen.”

    Pretty much. Not only would a soda-tax be regressive, but playing whack-a-mole with effects is a stupendously unproductive method of dealing with causes.

17. Karak @14
    I’m sorry, but gimme a break. Poor people do not have to either drink soda or die of thirst. According to federal laws, all water in the US that enters your house must be potable, including from sink taps, showers, toilets, etc. If your water out of the tap is actually dangerous (as opposed to just tasting bad, which is not necessarily bad for your health), you should complain to the state or local water bureau. Cheap filters are available for under $20 (I just bought one that attaches to my faucet for $12), and boiling water is an excellent way of eliminating certain sorts of pathogens from water that is practiced all throughout developing countries. The water can taste a little flat, but it is drinkable, and if you add a little tea it can mask the boiled water flavor.

    If you really prefer not to drink out of the tap, you could by gallons of water from the supermarket, the supermarkets I’ve been to sell gallon jugs of water for MUCH less than the price of soda, juice or milk, or you could set up a water delivery system water drum delivery (like water coolers in offices, except you don’t need the fancy cooling/heating system, just something with a tap). I lived in Australia last year, and each water drum was about $9 USD, and water was relatively expensive there relative to the US, from what I’d gathered. Each drum lasted about a week for a household of 5, which works out to less than $2 a person per week (again, much cheaper than living off of soda, milk, or juice).

    I am not against a soda tax, but I agree that it would make more sense to instead stop subsidizing corn syrup, though I guess if the government actually uses the tax revenues to subsidize healthy food that would be great. Also, I’m not sure why a soda tax is so different from a cigarette tax, but it seems like the people dead set against cigarette taxes are totally for soda taxes. I’m not averse to taxing unhealthy products to alter behavior, especially since both tobacco and HFCS have been made artificially cheap in the past.

18. Using a regressive tax to undo the work of an extensive collection of agricultural subsidies? In other words: continue to “blame the victim”, demonize fat people and punish poor people instead of taking on the powerful interests that are not just making unhealthy food cheap but making healthy food more expensive.
    I know a lot of people who work really hard on the issues of community food security and they are fighting against a huge collection of government policies that have nothing to do with whether or not pop is taxed. Like, how about cheap land subsidies in outlying suburbs that make it so much easier to have good grocery stores in the suburbs or transportation cuts making it harder for the eldery and people with disabilities to get to grocery stores and farmers markets or cuts in the school breakfast program or how about how fatphobic language allows the same tired old racist stereotypes to be subtly repackaged.

    or y’know, just teach those poor people a lesson about nutrition by making pop more expensive.

19. Is soda not taxed at all there or are you talking about an extra tax? Here most things are taxed at 13% but food that isn’t junk food has no tax. Alcohol has more tax. Mostly makes sense to me except I think alcohol’s too expensive (about $9/bottle of wine). The government tries to influence people’s behaviour with taxes on cigarettes and alcohol so I’m a little surprised they haven’t put extra taxes on junk food. Not sure how I’d feel about that.
    $3 for a whole gallon of milk? I thought I was lucky to be able to buy 4 litres of milk (a gallon) for $4. And I’m lucky to be able to buy orange juice for almost as cheap as milk.

20. I have a couple questions. The article mentions $3 in taxes per case. Is a case 12 cans of pop? Also, how much does a case generally cost?
    To answer the question in the article, no, pop is not food. It is not necessary to have. In fact, I’ve found after going a long time without it, the sweetness starts to be too much. But just because it’s not a food, doesn’t mean it should be taxed more than most things are taxed. $3 a case sounds like it’s probably a lot.

21. I actually live somewhere where a fair amount of tap water is not potable. People live in trailer parks on private wells that are contaminated, private wells that serve rural communities run dry, etc. There also is a lot of distrust of the tap water, though it is potable now, because there was major contamination in the 1950s of the municipal water supply from runoff the air force base here.

    Every grocery store and many strip malls and gas stations have “water stations.” They are completely automated and open 24 hours. You can fill up empty gallon containers for 50 cents or a dollar or those five gallon jugs for $2 or $3.

    So no, it would not be accurate to say that all tap water in the U.S. is potable and if it isn’t, a quick call to your local regulatory agency will solve the problem. But neither is it accurate to say that where the water is bad, poor people will die of thirst without cheap soda.

22. Heh, most juice is sweetened with HFCS anyway and is scarcely any better for you than soda.

23. I posted about this issue a little while back, here. The problem with “vice” taxes on food items is that the poorest people have a very strong incentive to consume an unhealthy diet, and that incentive is cost. It costs more, on the whole, to eat “healthily” than to eat “unhealthily”. The issue of having potable tap water is a red herring — the poorest people will have trouble getting *enough* calories per day, not too many. A vice tax focuses on the wrong issues and hurts the wrong people.

    –IP

24. Of course taxing soda is less productive than removing agricultural subsidies. But we’re talking about a city policy vs. a federal one (the soda tax is being proposed in NYC, not nationally). Clearly, the federal government isn’t going to reform our agricultural policies anytime soon, qalthough obviously that’s the ultimate goal. So the question is, in the meantime, what do we do? What do local governments do?

25. Also, a regressive tax is just ugly–it means that Joe Commodities Broker can grab a soda whenever he feels like it, get his kids one at the movies for a treat, etc etc because he doesn’t have to worry about the extra fifty cents, but Mary Hotel Cleaner has to pay a bigger chunk of her income if she wants to get herself a soda on a hot day.

    We shouldn’t be making ordinary (even if unhealthy) things into a big deal financially for the poor while making them of no concern to the rich. If soda is bad, it’s bad for the poor and bad for the rich; the proper intervention is to ban it altogether. (I say this as someone who has tried to quit drinking diet soda so many many times….If you don’t drink it now, for heaven’s sake don’t start.)

    It’s also sort of gross to say “you can buy this horribly unhealthy thing….if you can afford it!”

    And it’s patronizing. “Oooh, poor people are too stupid to know how to take care of themselves, so we’ll use this blunt instrument of regressive taxation to make them do right! After all, rich people have enough sense not to buy such things!”

    And we should never, never be raising revenue through regressive taxes anyway. Them as has more pays more, that’s what I say.

26. But, a growing trend in both America and the developing world is a segment of the poor who are getting enough calories, but not enough essential vitamins and other nutrients. The growing trend that obesity and diabetes is inversely correlated with SES for the first time in history really disturbs advocates of nutritional reform, and keeping the costs HFCS and factory-raised meat products artificially low isn’t in the best interest of the poor.

27. To the people arguing about what counts as food. Food has traditionally been anything we eat or drink. We all know that. Its orwellian to suggest that somehow we should redefine a simple term so that it doesn’t include things we don’t want it to include. The argument that soda isn’t food because it has no nutritional value is flawed. Soda does have nutritional value, even when its just water, carbonation, and HFCS. The water is still absorbed by the body, the calories in the HFCS still produce energy. Its not the healthiest kind of energy, but its still energy.

28. So the question is, in the meantime, what do we do? What do local governments do?

    This might be one of those situations where local governments, even large ones, can’t do anything. A tax like this is going to be regressive right out of the box, and being done on the local level just makes that problem worse. Recently Chicago passed a tax on every bottle of bottled water sold in the city. The end result is that people with cars drive just outside of city limits and buy in bulk from CostCo. We have a pretty high cigarette tax on the state, county, and local level. What happens is that people who have cars, money for gas, an afternoon to spend, and can afford to buy by the carton drive to Indiana and buy cigarettes there for a third or so of what it would cost in the city. The bottom line is that these taxes punish the poor and attempt to coerce them into making healthier choices that are sometimes unavailable or out of reach financially. That idea disturbs me on pretty much every level.

29. I agree that we should ideally end subsidies to the megafarms that help produce HFCS, however taxing sodas seems a bit punitive. We shouldn’t punish people who have to buy soda because it is far cheaper than other options on the market, including juice, or even choose to drink soda because they want to. Instead, as mentioned further up thread, we should focus on making healthier options cheaper and more widely available to all classes. Education plus affordability will go further to improve eating habits than taking a 12-pack.

    Also, it sort of gives me the scratch when people automatically assume that diet soda is the better choice. How can an chemically derived sweetener be good for your body? Just because it’s zero calories and ZOMG CALORIES ARE BAD! I have a severe food intolerance to any artificial, lo-cal/no-cal sweeteners. They make me seriously ill, so when I chose to have a Coke with lunch it’s not because I’m wantonly dancing toward my caloric destruction.

30. Wouldn’t it be better to give grocery stores (especially the ones in cities) tax breaks if they try to stock more “healthy” stuff? That way they can afford to stock the healthy items and the customers can buy ’em.

31. Lyndsay: A case of soda probably means 12 cans. Where I live (Washington, DC), one usually goes for 5 or 6 dollars, but it’ll go on sale for as little as 2-3, so $3/case in taxes would raise the price 50-100%.

    $3/gallon for milk sounds about right to me as well, but prices in the US can vary a *lot* regionally, so there are probably people paying a lot more and people paying less. And orange juice definitely costs a lot more than soda or milk where I am.

    We don’t have any sort of nationwide sales tax or VAT in the US, so what is taxed and how much varies a lot by state. I’d tend to guess, though, that if a tax like this was imposed, it would be the same way we tax tobacco – the tax would be on either the distributor or the seller, not at the cash register. So all we’d notice would be that the price of soda would go up.

32. Whattya mean “no nutritional value”?!? Wh-wh-what about the caffeine?! That’s all the nutrition I need, dad-blast it! 😉

33. I drink soda a *lot* and I don’t have a problem with this, but I want the money going into improving the water supply in the areas where water isn’t potable, and applying subsidies to things like the bottled water industry to get cheaper cold water into people’s hands. If a 20 oz bottle of water cost what a 20 oz soda did, more people would drink water.

    And I’m aware that bottling water is itself problematic because of all the plastic, but it’s not like the soda wasn’t going to come in plastic.

    I would also like to see this hit at the source; I want the subsidies for corn production entirely removed and replaced with incentives for producing corn for fuel (biodiesel rather than ethanol, preferably.) Then apply the former corn subsidies to grains that lend themselves less to being misused as a sweetener in *everything* — for instance, subsidize rice and wheat — and also, more subsidies for vegetable and fruit growing. Change the economics so that just as much *food* is produced but it’s a wider variety of food, pull enough corn out of the food chain that HFCS stops being so super-cheap and sweetener starts being reserved for the stuff that *needs* sweeteners, like desserts, rather than being used to sweeten your canned green beans, pump up American biofuel production to reduce the price of energy and our dependence on foreign oil, and reduce the price of healthier food alternatives.

    But fundamentally I have no problem with sin taxes, in general, on anything that is bad for people in bulk (which does not include frickin’ MP3s or bottled water! Wine, yeah, and how about candy bars and chips?) As long as, and this is a big if, the money is used in part to lower the price of healthier alternatives or help wean people away from problematic substances. (For example, in the cigarette thread… if 90% of schizophrenics smoke, then maybe the tax on cigarettes should go in part to making prescription medications more affordable and covering more mental health medication management visits?)

34. Like chingona’s point: we have not-supposed-ta-drink-it well water and we are in a “good” area.

    Even if pop were to become more expensive than, say, bottled water made by the same company, pop is ubiquitous in a way bottled water isn’t. Availability will win out, in the same way that cigarettes keep getting more expensive but people don’t stop smoking; it is a habit, it is stress-reduction, AND to be honest, it is a way to help oneself function during long shifts. I myself had enough trouble getting work done at my cushy sit-in-front-of-a-computer 7.5 hours job without a sugar/caffeinated beverage, coffee is widespread and was first introduced for a way to get through 12 hour shifts (rather than reducing labor, possibly) and friends working longer hours than I use pop this way.

    I don’t have all the answers, but a regressive tax, even at a city level, surely shouldn’t be one of them.

35. Hm, a penny an ounce would be about 12 cents a can? That would add up to $3 for 24 cans. I wouldn’t be opposed to a tax that would affect those people who drink pop as their main drink every day. The tax should be low enough so that everyone else wouldn’t be affected. 50 cents a can is pretty cheap. They’re a dollar I think from the vending machine.

36. “What do local governments do?”

    Depends on what their commitment to healthier lifestyles is, I suppose. It’s easy to slap a tax on something you don’t like and have been told is bad for people; making actual lifestyle differences available to your citizens is a tougher row to hoe. Depending on what the specific needs of the individual communities are, tax incentives for actual grocery stores to move into underserved communities might help. Codes demanding that big-box grocery stores devote x amount of floor space to fresh produce might help. Encouraging or subsidizing farmers’ markets that are easily accessible to underserved communities might help. Same thing with community/rooftop garden projects or reclaiming derelict lots as community gardens. Free-to-the-public home ec classes with an emphasis on nutrition and meal planning, programs that help get the means to actually cook things into people’s hands, community food pantries set up to distribute staples such as beans, rice, potatoes, etc. in bulk, task forces to address code non-compliance in landlords or utility providers….Once you’re down to the local level like that, it will really vary according to what issues your particular area is facing.

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38. People do not “have to buy” soda because it is cheaper than other options. Water is close to free, and even in places where the water is not of the highest quality, it is nearly always better for an individual than soda. While in an ideal world these corn subsidies would not exist, this is one way of discouraging excessive consumption of an unhealthy good, and promoting better options.

    If we are moving toward a universal healthcare system (which I support) that is paid for partly through my taxes, I wholeheartedly support heavily taxing cigarettes, alcohol, and high calorie foods and beverages with virtually no nutritional value.

    Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any other country. We have a culture that demands quick and cheap food. What we can “afford” when it comes to food needs to be reevaluated, across all socioeconomic levels.

39. I think it makes more sense to do a recycling deposit kind of “tax” on things like soda. It would increase the end price and dissuade some people from buying it but it would also encourage people to recycle the bottles/cans to get the money back.

    In regards to soda and other unhealthy foods, I think it makes much more sense to tax the industry directly than to go after the consumers.

40. Kieth Olberman has great piece on how Obama is supporting the very fascist wiretapping programs implemented by Bush:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jSUHVUgJFc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ronpaulforpresident2008.com%2Fnews%2F&feature=player_embedded

41. We can afford to make good food cheaper without taxing sodas. This is just another way to give the government yet MORE money off corn while making us feel self righteous for punishing the (of course) lazy, poor, fat people.

42. Just to straighten out one point: It’s not “corn syrup” that’s subsidized, it’s CORN. And the reason it’s subsidized is that civilized nations figured out a long time ago that farming should not be left to the vagaries of the free market. Farmers could get wiped out en masse in a market downturn, with potentially disastrous consequences for future supply.

    The reason HFCS is so ubiquitous is partly because, as other commenters have pointed out, the U.S. has a tariff that makes sugar more than twice as expensive than the global market price. (It’s also somewhat easier to transport and process.) There’s no reason for the sugar tariff to exist, other than the oceans of money the sugar lobby has laid out to politicians.

    As for the soda-tax question, I generally look askance at taxes on commodities like food and gasoline, because they’re regressive.

43. Wouldn’t it be better to give grocery stores (especially the ones in cities) tax breaks if they try to stock more “healthy” stuff? That way they can afford to stock the healthy items and the customers can buy ‘em.

    I think you could probably do a lot to drop the price of healthy foods by simply removing taxes from unprocessed foods at all levels. Farmers don’t pay income taxes, wholesalers and grocers don’t pay corporate taxes, and consumers don’t pay sales taxes. Right there you’ve made unprocessed foods (which tend to be healthy) not only cheaper for the consumer but more appealing for producers and distributors. I never did understand why the government needs to get its pound of silver or pound of flesh out of basic necessities. Hell, that would make public aid dollars stretch a longer way as well.

    Given that virtually everything is taxed at numerous levels already, I don’t see why so many non-lobbyists suggest increasing taxes in one area and creating subsidies in another. It seems to me that if we want to influence behavior, and we want to do it with minimal intrusion and little oversight cost, it would be easier to create tax exemptions than to engage in wide-spread redistribution plans. It just feels like you’d get the best qualities of a choice-driven market and a government playing the role of consumer protection.

44. I like how almost everybdy is against this, but wasn’t against taxing cigarettes.
    When do we get to call people who drink soda “lazy and horrible human beings” as a class because we don’t like their vice?
    I’m against higher taxes for both, but the contrasting conversations on the two vice taxes is interesting.

45. …really? When I read the cigarette thread, it looked like a whole lot of people were against cigarette taxes.

    I’m actually more sympathetic to the arguments against cigarette taxes than I am to the arguments against soda taxes. While of course I’m for large-scale agricultural reform, until that happens, I don’t have much of an issue taxing wholly unnecessary, wholly un-nutritious products that barely count as “food.” I would have more of a problem taxing unhealthy and non-nutritious food products like frozen dinners, fast food, etc, because the reality is that for low-income people, that’s what often has to feed a whole family because fresher food isn’t affordable or available. But soda isn’t feeding families. It’s also not hydrating like water. It’s not a matter of “let’s tax fat poor people because they’re lazy;” it’s taxing a particular product that really has no value, and it’s not targeted at any one community (do the poor consume more sugared drinks than the rich and middle-class? I don’t have numbers, but I do doubt that). I do have a problem with taxes on things that disproportionately impact a particular community that happens to rely on them — like taxes on fatty or highly caloric foods — but I think it’s far less troubling when there isn’t any good argument for the necessity of said product. I’m having a hard time conceiving of any reason why soda is a necessity or even anything approaching a good thing, and why a city shouldn’t be able to make tax profits off of it the same way we do cigarettes.

    I agree in principle that it would be better to deal with corn subsidies, although as Bitter Scribe points out, that would have serious economic impacts on farmers. But since that isn’t going to happen, I dunno, I’m not seeing what’s so terrible about a soda tax.

46. The corn subsidies are actually kind of a disaster (yes, let’s subsidize one of the least nutritious, most-wasted crops, and dump the excess in the ocean instead of feeding third-world countries), and ag subsidies in general are not necessarily good for farming. Raising Less Corn, More Hell is a very illuminating book.

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48. although as Bitter Scribe points out, that would have serious economic impacts on farmers.

    You know, maybe its because I’m fourth-generation city-folk, but I never understood the American obsession with the wellbeing of the family farmer. Big Agribusiness owns not only most of the farms in America, but reaps a disproportionately high share of the agricultural subsidies too. Theres a whole cottage industry here in Chicago of developers who buy up land out in the boonies and market it as a place to build a summer home that develops wealth by planting a lawn and applying for farm subsidies. There are parts of southern Illinois that are essentially abandoned because the property taxes for land are lower than the subsidies landowners get for not growing corn. After all of the speculation, tax investment, and conglomerates are taken out of the equation, you’re left with family farmers who have an average post-expense income better than I could hope to have. Yet we still bend over and grab our ankles for any salt-of-the-Earth character in overalls who puts a hand out and mumbles about the dustbowl and America’s Breadbasket. My great-great grandfather was a barrel maker by trade but my great grandfather had to find a different line of work because technology made barrels irrelevant. Why on earth do we tax working people to offer subsidies to well off investors, well off farmers, big Agribusiness, and the handful of people who expect the rest of the country to underwrite their luddism?

    /end rant

49. This is all about trying to stop people from getting fat. If it was just about taxing something useless then why isn’t ipods being taxed? They harm people’s ears, cause people to be rude, and just waste resources. At least soda has SOME nutritional value (water and calories) and is worth more than an ipod. It is solely aimed at harming people who are fat. How about they raise taxes on things that truly are useless like video games before attacking things such as junk food and sodas?

50. Jill said:

    “I don’t have much of an issue taxing wholly unnecessary, wholly un-nutritious products that barely count as “food.” I would have more of a problem taxing unhealthy and non-nutritious food products like frozen dinners, fast food, etc, because the reality is that for low-income people, that’s what often has to feed a whole family because fresher food isn’t affordable or available. But soda isn’t feeding families. It’s also not hydrating like water.”

    For some people, it might be providing the extra few calories they need each day, and what’s wrong with that? Why discourage the poorest people from getting enough calories? For that matter, even if it’s not a nutrition issue, why make food/drink more expensive for the poorest people? How is it justifiable under ANY circumstances to make ANY food less accessible to poor people? And why should poor people pay a regressive tax on the food they eat?

    Scotland has a system for families under a certain income, where you can get vouchers for milk, fresh fruit, and fresh veg. The idea is that poorer people have a harder time affording these items, so they are subsidised. Unfortunately the scheme only exists right now for families with kids under 5, rather than all families in the right income bracket. But that’s the kind of scheme that I think would be far more productive than a regressive tax. Making nutritious food affordable is far more productive than making food (any food) less affordable.

    –IP

51. This is all about trying to stop people from getting fat. If it was just about taxing something useless then why isn’t ipods being taxed? They harm people’s ears, cause people to be rude, and just waste resources.

    And right there is the problem with sin taxes. Right there you’ve made a series of idiosyncratic value judgments and assumed things about others to back up your judgments so that you can justify reducing something you dislike. Perhaps an iPod is useless for you, but its pretty much vital for me. I come from a musical family, I play music as a hobby, I listen to music almost constantly, in order to cope with being non-neurotypical I have had to learn how to think musically and process data through relating and tying it to specific sound patterns, the existence of a piece of tech like the iPod has improved my life immeasurably. Between allowing me to concentrate in public places (the overstimulation of crowds is difficult for me because of my disability) and giving me the music that shapes my life my iPod is a constant presence positive presence. As far as hearing damage goes, between ear infections as a child and ten years in a metal band that ship has already sailed. As a rational individual I have weighed the costs to my health versus the benefits to my quality of life and I take the precautions I have deemed necessary to reduce my risks while maximizing my rewards.

    But none of those possibilities crosses the mind of someone who believes that they know better for others. No, instead you come with judgments and arrogance. You’ve decided that you don’t like how people act with their little ear buds, that those ear buds don’t bring value to you, that they’re useless and a waste of resources. Your next step is to suggest that perhaps those of us who have made a choice with which you disagree ought to be punished so that people who make choices you approve of can be rewarded. But, conscious or unconscious, thats really just feint. Like most of these kinds of schemes it comes down to narcissism and greed. You don’t like iPods (or the people who have them, or whatever the stimulus is in question) and so you want to increase your comfort by removing the offending stimuli, even though it isn’t really any of your damned business and theres no reason your mere opinion should carry the weight of law. At the same time you hope that maybe you’ll get a little freebie. It comes down to greed: “lets rob John and buy ourselves a widget.” The rest just helps you sleep at night.

52. Irrational Point said:
    “For some people, it [soda] might be providing the extra few calories they need each day, and what’s wrong with that? Why discourage the poorest people from getting enough calories? For that matter, even if it’s not a nutrition issue, why make food/drink more expensive for the poorest people? How is it justifiable under ANY circumstances to make ANY food less accessible to poor people? And why should poor people pay a regressive tax on the food they eat?”

    Rational Point responds:
    We are facing a rapidly rising obesity crisis that is costing us dearly as taxpayers (close to $110 billion/year!), mortality (one of the leading causes of death in the U.S.) and quality of life- and there are large disparities that comes along with the crisis:
    Poor people are much more affected by obesity and obesity-related diseases (heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke etc).
    Why is this?
    Is it because poor people decide that they want to be obese and suffer from these diseases? Is it because they have less will power than those who are fortunate to have higher incomes?
    Or is it because we have policies in this country that artificially make junk and soda much cheaper than fresh produce or other healthy foods; and that billions of dollars in advertising that promotes junk, including soda, are targeted at all of us, including billions for children alone, with particular emphasis at poorer demographics; and that poorer neighborhoods have many times the number of stores, restaurants and vending machines that heavily market cheap and highly caloric foods, including sodas, and far fewer stores that promote (or even have available) fresh produce or other healthful options?
    Clearly as a society we create environments that heavily entice all of us, and particularly the poor amongst us, to eat junk and drink soda and make it almost impossibly difficult, particularly for poorer people, to make healthier choices. This is clearly a matter of social injustice.

    So “why discourage the poorest people from getting enough calories?”
    If we want the poorest to continue disproportionately dying younger, suffering from chronic disease and contributing to the unsustainable health care costs we all have to pay for, then lets continue encouraging the poor to consume more calories. A tax on soda distributors- especially if the money will be used to make healthier food more affordable and to help create environments that make it easier for people to make healthier lifestyle choices- is not a regressive tax, it’s a progressive tax!

    Let’s also be clear- The obesity epidemic is due to multiple factors, but sugared soft drinks is the single item that research shows is clearly linked to obesity.

    IR, to your credit you propose making healthier foods less expensive- and I agree that this needs to happen. But where will the money come from to do this? And where should the money come from to fund comprehensive obesity prevention programs? Should we as taxpayers cover all of the expense (afterall, we already cover most of the health costs associated with obesity through medicaid and medicare and we pay for the federal subsidies that allow soda companies to make their products cheap and especially easy to market to the poor)- or- should soda companies pay their fair share too? If they pass on the tax to their consumers and as a result people drink less caloric junk, lose weight and stay healthier- isn’t that good for all of us?
    A soda distribution tax that is used for obesity prevention and increasing access to healthier foods for the poor is a policy that is both progressive and responsible.

53. I think that this whole affair is absurd. Taxing junk food and the like is not going to solve the obesity problem. People have to make a conscious choice to look after their health, the government cannot do it for them.
    With few exceptions it is a personal choice to become seriously overweight. If you don’t consume more calories than you burn you won’t have an issue with your weight, no matter what you eat. You may have a nutrient deficiency, but you won’t be overweight.
    The insurance costs of obesity are the main concern as I understand it. Just charge overweight people more for health insurance, like they already do. There are much more important things for the U.S. government to worry about.

54. The insurance costs of obesity are the main concern as I understand it. Just charge overweight people more for health insurance, like they already do. There are much more important things for the U.S. government to worry about.

    Define overweight and obesity. According to just most of the scales I’ve encountered someone with my build and bone structure would still be considered overweight or obese even with zero body fat.

    The problem with the whole discussion is that we’re attacking an ephemeral and largely subjective idea. Taxing anything to fight something as imaginary as obesity is a joke.

55. to william:

    you’re exactly right, it is all about obesity and new york city is on a crazy kick to tell people what type of foods they can and can’t consume.
    first it was the no trans-fats ban, now the soda tax is on the table and further down the line, theres talk of bloomberg’s new pet project of controlling salt levels in processed food.

    obesity IS a problem but its one that’s much larger than telling people what we can and can’t eat.
    to HONESTLY tackle this, will take more than treating citizens like children, which is where i start getting offended.

56. Sin taxes are imposed by the rich, upon the poor, because they *can*. The rich are offended by the vices of the poor, which, generally, are different from the vices of the rich. Nowadays, cigarettes are more likely to be smoked by people who are not middle-class, upper-middle class, or wealthy. Poor people are often fat. People who have enough money to expend a lot of time and energy staying thin are often *very* offended by the fatness of people poorer than they are. The proposed tax is to punish the poor for being fat, under the guise of “helping” them. It won’t help them. It isn’t necessarily even the cause of their fatness. The thinnest person I know drinks regular soda. I’m not thin, but I drink diet Coke (I like the chemicals). But it’s the approach that will make it possible to punish the poor for being fat.

    This isn’t a new phenomenon. The Gin Craze in the 18th century was a forerunner of this behaviour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze). Jessica Warner’s “Craze: Gin and Debauchery in the Age of Reason” comprehensively discusses this kind of tax, and the reasons behind it. And, of course, taxing the vices of the poor paid for a series of wars that the government needed to finance. But it was the poor, and not the rich, who paid for the wars, and whose vices were taxed.

57. Rational Point: “A soda distribution tax that is used for obesity prevention and increasing access to healthier foods for the poor is a policy that is both progressive and responsible.”

    It’s for your own good.

    Because anybody who buys full-sugar soda is TOO STUPID to make his or her own decisions. Obviously! OMG, especially if they’re POOR! The POOR are TOO STUPID to make the right decisions, so it’s OK to make this [vice of theirs which doesn’t interest or otherwise impact me] TOO EXPENSIVE for them! Then they’ll make BETTER CHOICES! Choices of which I would approve!

    Yeah. Thanks for the thought. No, really.

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